Warren Jamison

Here's How to Nail Down Your First Assignment as a Collaborator

If you lack substantial published writing credits, you'll have to pay your dues to get your first assignment. This means you'll need to do the first one for no money upfront and a 50/50 split of future royalties with your expert.

You may feel like screaming, “Hey, wait a minute. This isn't the speedy trip to big money that your title promised.”

Ah, but it is.

Consider the alternative. You don't have any credits for published writing. Unless you do something drastically different from what you have been doing, in five—even twenty-five—years, the odds say you still won't have any. Compared to that, writing one book for no money upfront and seeing it on bookstore shelves a year or two from now is rapid entry into paid publication. It's not a tortoise and hare race; the race is between fiction's comatose turtle and nonfiction's healthy jackrabbit.

The Nonfiction Hit

Much of the above realities hit me full force while reading Publishers Weekly late in the 1970s. The article contained a chart comparing the number of titles published in several categories, along with sales figures. The totals shocked me. By switching to nonfiction, I saw that two factors would give my chances of getting published a huge boost:

(a) Nonfiction accounts for ten times as many titles as fiction. Multiply my pub chances by ten.

(b) The number of unpublished writers trying to break into fiction is at least ten times the number aiming at nonfiction. (This is a conservative estimate. Check it out at any writer’s conference or club meeting. Chances are you won’t find many people working on a nonfiction book.) Multiply my pub chances by ten one more time.

Let’s do the math (really a mind strainer) 10 x 10 = 100. Your chances of getting published are multiplied by at least 100 simply by deciding to switch from fiction to nonfiction.

Scoffers will say, “OK, but my pub chance was zero to begin with, so 100 times zero is still diddly-squat.

It didn’t zero out for me. The more I studied breaking into nonfiction, the harder the reality hit me: I didn’t have enough expertise or credibility in any publishable subject to write a book a trade publisher would take on. So I thought, “OK, I’ll just pick a topic and research and study it until I do have the necessary expertise.”

However, it soon dawned on me that expertise alone wouldn’t necessarily be enough; successful books are written (supposedly) by experts in their niche who also promote the book effectively.

Question: Who cares whether someone else did the actual writing?

Answer: Nobody.

Final Words about Fiction

A few more words and we’ll be done with fiction. Then we’ll get back to how you can race down the rapid road to publication and the financial and emotional satisfactions it brings.

Short stories. The publication of short stores by major magazines has been declining for years and by 2007 had come to almost a complete stop. So had most of what used to be major magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s Weekly. They were laid low by changing tastes and increased competition on every side. Specialty magazines aimed at specific groups of people who shared a certain interest—Surfing, Powder Skiing, Wooden Boat and thousands of others niches—each took a bite out of the general interest, fiction-publishing magazines.

The newer breed of specialty magazines rarely publish fiction; instead they are are filled with nonfiction articles that offer information the editors believe their readers will find interesting.

Novels. You’d think that going to all the trouble of writing a full-length novel would earn you some respect, some consideration. Forget it. Did any agent or publisher ask you to write your novel?

Keep in mind that the publishing industry is a collection of businesses as profit-hungry as giant corporations or the corner Mom and Pop shop are in any industry. It’s all about money; about feeding their bottom line. Nothing wrong with that; I state it not as a criticism but as a hard fact that aspiring writer should have no illusions about. Never forget that publishing, magazines or books, is a business—and a tough one. Publishing companies as well as magazines, particularly start-ups, often close their doors and disappear—frequently owing writers money.

If a publishing company can’t see profit in bringing your book out, they’ll pass on investing in publishing it. They have to invest several thousand dollars—some trade editors claim their cost of putting a book into the marketplace is about $25,000. Since your previous work, if any, hasn’t created an audience for your book, how will they be able to sell enough copies to break even, much less make a profit? You must have a good answer for that question or your book—no matter how well written—won’t get published.

And Do It Right Now In Less Than Two Minutes

Only about a tenth of the new titles published today are fiction if we exclude just one genre, romance, mostly written by and for women. This category is sometimes looked down on, which makes no sense. When westerns were selling strongly, they were just as formulaic in their own way as romance is today; yet western writers enjoyed considerable status. If you’re interested in writing romance, make no mistake about it: it’s a difficult and highly competitive discipline. Breaking into this market requires talent, commitment and persistence of the highest order.

In the middle of the last century the ratio between fiction and nonfiction was about fifty-fifty as to the number of new titles published. However, fiction accounted for considerably more than half of the book industry’s dollar volume. In the following decades, competition from television and other forms of entertainment has greatly reduced fiction’s importance to the book industry.

Most new fiction published today is written by established writers. Only about 500 debut novels (first novels) are now being published in this country each year. That’s barely more than one a day. Sound good? Keep on reading.

At least 200,000 Americans aspire to be writers. There’s some reason to believe the real number runs as high as twenty percent of the population—in other words many, many millions of people. More are based in Australia, Canada and the UK, not to mention India, where English is a second language to the most influential three percent of India’s billion-plus population. Most aspirants everywhere are intent on writing novels. Few of these hopefuls realize they are competing to be one of the annual crop of just 500 debut novelists. OK, multiply that number by 10. Say there are 5,000 debut novels printed in the USA each year (don’t quote me on that number; it’s wildly exaggerated). The odds against success are still hugely discouraging.

So how do you multiply your chances by 100 in two minutes? By deciding to switch to nonfiction. (Actually, you can do that in two seconds, but that sounds like an extreme claim.) If you don’t have enough credibility and expertise in a saleable topic, collaborate with an expert who does. Future posts will tell you exactly how to become a highly successful collaborative writer. <>

Until you publish something, nobody wants to let you write their book. Nevertheless, collaboration is your best chance to get published. I’ll tell you how to do that.

1. Somehow you just can’t seem to break through and see your stuff published by the trade and you aren’t interested in self-pubbing on the Net because you want the prestige that having your book sold in bookstores all over the nation.

2. You are talented, you are determined—all you lack is writing credibility. That’s what it takes to convince any expert who has enough expertise to fill a book that you have what it takes to write their manuscript (MS)1 better than they can. So the first thing they ask is that same old weasel question, “What have you published?”

3. My first published book was a joint venture (JV) with no money upfront; nevertheless, it has been one of my most lucrative books. My share of its earnings run well into six figures so far. Yes, it’s still selling, still earning royalties more than twenty years after publication.

4. What had I published before? Nothing. Literally, not a word other than a handful of letters to the editor of local papers and national magazines—which added up to nothing when you’re talking to someone who might pay you money to work on their book.

5. OK, so what was my writing credibility back then? Let’s examine the concept of writing credibility. First of all, it walks on two legs:

6. (a) Your credibility to yourself. If you aren’t convinced that you have what it takes to complete a powerful MS, how can you expect to convince someone else? How you will overcome this vital challenge? If you don’t know instantly, think this one through. Here are three questions to help you decide what it will take to convince yourself that you are capable of writing a book about an expert’s niche in collaboration with this expert.

7. 1. Do you have the following ready to go?

8. a writing space in your home

9. a computer and printer.

10. Internet access, preferably high speed

11. 2. Have you completed at least one MS? Could be fiction. The important thing is to have finished it, whether or not you were able to sell it.

12. 3. Do you tell people you are a writer? Sure, you’ll get smirked at when they ask what you’ve published, but that just helps you develop the tough hide a pro writer must have. The vital thing is to internalize the concept that you are a professional writer.

13. (b) Your credibility to experts so you can convince them to become your clients.

14. The first expert I worked with was carefully chosen. And, though we didn’t know it then, our timing was right on. I say “we” because choosing this particular expert was my wife’s idea.

15. Here’s how it worked. I knew I could write and complete a long MS because I had already written several novels, none of which were ever in any danger of being published. The important thing was that I had completed them. The first was 682 MS pages or about 170,000 words. The others were shorter. Counting all the rewrites, my first novel probably involved writing half a million words. Add in the other half-dozen novels and several abandoned projects, I must have written at least a million words during what turned out to be my writing apprenticeship.

16. However, writing a large number of words is the least significant aspect of your all-important self-training apprenticeship. Improvement comes from constant study as you write. When you are uncertain about some detail of grammar, punc­tuation, spelling or formatting, research that item until you know how to handle it.

17. My recommendations of the best five books for writers are listed in the Appendix. They will answer most questions so keep them handy. You can also search the Internet. Try both ways, print or Web, and use what’s quickest for you.

18. Also, as you write your apprenticeship half million words, study the trade magazines and sign up on the Web for helpful newsletters. Several that I’ve found helpful are listed in—yep, you guessed it—in the Appendix. If you’ve already written some novels, you will already have gained confidence in your writing skills. Your challenge now is to convert confidence into cash.

1All the acronyms, abbreviations and trade jargon used in this book are explained in the Appendix.