Agent to the Stars

Dr. Impatient, or, How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Publishing My Novel Online

In April of 1997, I started work on my first novel, a science fiction story called Agent to the Stars, about (naturally enough) a Hollywood agent who finds himself representing the first alien race to contact humanity. I picked the subject because I found it amusing, and it was something I had some experience with — the movie part at least: I had been a movie critic for five years before starting the novel. I picked that time to start work in part because my 10th year high school reunion was coming up that October, and I wanted to be able to say that, yes, I had written my first novel, thank you very much (ego is such a compelling motivator). I worked on the novel mostly on weekends, and in July 1997, I had 96,000 words strung together in such a way that they told a story — a pretty decent story, if you ask me. I had managed to write my first novel. I was as proud as any poppa could be.

Needless to say, that was the easy part.

If writing a science fiction novel is like giving birth to a child, getting the thing published is like trying to get the child into college. First, you dream of the Ivy Leagues (or Del Rey or Bantam Spectra), then you notch down to the good-but-not great schools (your Tors and DAWs), and then you finally start grazing through the community colleges — small presses and such. Eventually you acclimate yourself to the fact that your child cannot get in anywhere, and will in fact be hanging around the house, staring sullenly at you from the corner, for the rest of your life. Depressing.

But does your "child" need to go to "college"? Perhaps technology can make an end run around predestined failure. I know at least a couple of folks who have played with computers instead of going to college, and are now being rewarded with millions in stock options. Can the metaphor be extended? Can my novel, which did not get accepted by the publishing houses I sent it to, make it to popularity and success through the magic of the World Wide Web?

Probably not. But I'm going to give you some reasons why I think it is worth the try.

For what it's worth, I'll flash my credentials here, so I won't come off entirely as a disgruntled and embittered writer (merely mostly embittered). I'm actually a pretty happy writer. It's what I've been all my professional life; I've never had to do anything else. I primarily write criticism and humor columns, with reasonable success in both fields; currently I'm a critic and columnist for MediaOne Express, an online publication, and I occasionally will place a piece with the Washington Post, my hometown paper. I've been an editor as well, most notably for a humor area on America Online. I even have an agent — for non-fiction.

And here's the final nail in my coffin: My writing has landed me on Oprah. Stand back, y'all.

What I haven't had as a writer is to have a novel published. Since I've only written one at this point, that would specifically mean I have not had a science fiction novel published. There are reasons for this. Full and complete honesty requires me to admit that one of these reasons may simply be that the novel I've written isn't much good. It kills me to say it, of course. But there it is.

Having now admitted it to be a possibility, however, I feel comfortable in dismissing it. Two reasons for this. The first is that the novel passes my own Crap Detector; having been a editor as well as a writer, I have a pretty good feel for when I'm writing well, and when I'm just spouting off. Agent to the Stars, in terms of pure writing, gets a "B" grade from me; there are ups, there are downs, but it's mostly consistent. It's not the best thing I've ever written, but for a first shot at the novel form, I'm pretty pleased.

Second, it passed muster with a phalanx of friends whose motto may well be "If you can't criticize your friends, you can you criticize?" None of them has ever been shy about criticizing anything I've ever done before; this is not where they were going to start. Whatever flaws Agent has a piece of salable work, being flat-out God-Awful writing isn't one of them.

It's primary flaw, as far as I can tell, lies in the fact that a) it's humorous, b) it takes place in contemporary time, c) whole stretches of it concern Hollywood and not aliens, and d) no one's ever heard of me before. Any one of these might be able to be gotten away with, but the whole package presents a pretty problem for publishers.

Why? Well, I've just come back from the bookstore (to buy the new Anne Rice for my wife — she's popping them out once every three months these days), and while I was there, I eyeballed the science fiction shelves. Based on my observations, here's what you need to be published in science fiction these days.

1. To have been published before.

2. To write military science fiction.

If you haven't been the first, and haven't written the second, you're pretty well screwed. For verification of this, go to your own local bookstore (which, at this late date, is almost certainly not "local," but is part of a massive national chain) and check out the shelves devoted to science fiction. By my eyeball estimate, eight out of the ten books you'll see are from veterans, many of them dead: Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, Niven; a step down in quality but not quantity you'll find the likes of Alan Dean Foster and Piers Anthony (though the latter is primarily fantasy; for the purposes of this discussion, I'll be parting out fantasy entirely and largely ignoring it). These folks have been at it (to put it delicately) for a while.

The two books remaining from the ten are from "new" authors, meaning authors published in the last decade or so; of these, eight out of ten have "hard SF"markings, meaning more often than not that they deal with military futures: David Feintuch is a fine example of an author of these sorts of books. This leaves four science fiction books out of a hundred that feature new authors not writing about space navies and powered war suits. Not a lot. There's nothing inherently wrong with space navies, of course (nor are the people who write them bad writers). But is that all we get?

This is, of course, is not even mentioning the ever-increasing space on the science fiction shelves taken up by media tie-ins, everything from the venerable Star Wars and Star Trek tomes to books based on videogames, nearly all of them, natch, military in nature: Descent, Wing Commander and Unreal are the ones I recall seeing. And then there's the half of the science fiction racks that are actually stocked with fantasy instead of science fiction.

Basically, if you're a fan of new SF not involving tie-ins or raging space battles, you're just plain out of luck. You're not going to find much to buy. And you're not finding much to buy, that means that those of us who are trying to sell are having that much harder a time of it.

Understand this is not entirely sour grapes. Here's a headline that should chill the heart of every science fiction reader, from the March 15, 1999 edition of the New York Times:

"Publishers of Paperbacks Are Facing Sliding Sales"

Guess what: The science fiction genre was built on paperback novels. And science fiction is getting especially squeezed — science fiction sections in bookstores are shrinking (or have been near me — since it's all national chains where I live, I'm assuming this trend is not isolated), and it's become substantially harder for non "name-brand" authors of all stripes to get their works in non-bookstore settings: Supermarkets, pharmacies, Wal-Marts and Targets. Even when the books make it into the stores, it's do or die: Any title that doesn't fly off the shelf gets sent back to the publisher to make room for newer, fresher product.

Never forget that publishing is a business: Science fiction editors do what they have to do — get out the titles that fly off the shelf. And what flies off the shelf? Media tie-ins, classics, and military science fiction (probably in that order). The current book-selling atmosphere is not one that is conducive to being able to nurse along a title that has the potential to become a cult classic, or support an author whose output would make him or her a citizen of the authorial middle class known as the "mid-list." Books have to come out swinging (maybe there are non-military, non-media-tie-in SF books by new authors being published. They just don't stay on the shelves for long).

Is this a good state of affairs? Of course not, especially if you're a new author with an offbeat idea. But it's not entirely in the hands of the editors. Before editors can buy what they think people should read or ought to read, they need to buy what they know people will read — their bosses in the massive media conglomerate expect shareholder return, and the bookstores expect product that puts money in the till. Editors shouldn't have to apologize for doing the business of business, and most of them don't. For better or worse, this is the media world we live in at the moment.

I personally find it depressing, however. Not just as an author, but as a reader. I long ago read all the classic authors I wanted to read, I haven't the slightest interest in the latest quickie featuring Captain Picard, and most military science fiction bores me. I want SF that's fun, that has attitude, that's not afraid to have a sense of humor, or to not rely on techno-porn to engage the reader. I want characters, not guns (or, at least, character first, guns second). I'm not finding it, and as a result, I'm not buying much science fiction these days. Science fiction publishers, I should note, have returned the favor by not buying my work.

Obviously, their decision hurts me more than my decision hurts them. but I can't help but wonder if there's entire chunks of people like me that feel alienated right now from the genre they love.

But let's posit for a moment that there is an audience for the science fiction that isn't selling in the bookstores. After all, editors have been known to be wrong, from time to time (I've been one. I know).

Ah, but there's the catch: In order to develop that audience, you have to be published, but in order to get published, you have to write what the editor thinks will sell. SF editors are the gatekeepers to your audience. Or have been — until the last few years, when it suddenly became possible to publish online, without the intermediary step of convincing an editor (or an agent, who will then convince an editor). Now anyone can publish anything they want — including the "unsalable" science fiction.

However, there's now a new catch: When everyone can publish, most of what is published is crap. After all, most of what was published before the Web was crap — just try to imagine what it's like now that anyone can get past the gatekeepers (there, there. You can stop shivering now). The best way to prove the quality of your material is to have it bought and published by a reputable source — say, an SF book publisher. And the only way to do that, of course, is to write what the editor thinks will sell. We're back where we started.

I'll be dead honest — I'd much rather have sold this book to a science fiction publishing house than to publish it here. Nothing confers legitimacy better than the fact that someone else is willing to risk their own capital on it. Be that as it may, I couldn't sell it, for whatever reason. The biggest challenge now lies in convincing people that just because it's on my Web site, it doesn't mean it's bad.

I'll confess something else here: I didn't really make that much of an effort to sell the book. I sent the book (or at the very least, three chapters and a synopsis) to three agents and to three publishers. In terms of publishing attempts, this is pretty pathetic — everyone knows how Dune, one of the great science fiction novels of all time, was rejected 18 times (or more, depending on who's doing the telling) before someone finally relented and published the damned thing. If Dune needed 18 tries, surely my little book (which is certainly no Dune) should be hard-pressed to get through the door after just three tries at the agents, and three tries at the publishers.

Fair enough. But you know what? If Frank Herbert wanted to get published, he didn't have much of a choice: He could publish it himself, at great cost (and likely with the end result being thousands of copies moldering in his wood shed), or he could keep submitting the work to publishers until someone took a nibble. It's good that Herbert was used to dealing with spans of thousands of years through his writing — when you're waiting to hear back from a publisher, that's how much time seems to pass.

I, on the other hand, have another option. The reach of this Web site is theoretically limited only by the number of computer users on the 'Net (as a practical matter, of course, it's further limited by the number of people who know the site exists, a rather smaller number). The cost of "publishing" here is nil — it costs me nothing to upload these pages; it costs nothing for people to access them. I've paid for the domain name and the Web hosting, but I paid for that anyway, prior to the appearance of this novel; its cost is not directly related to "publishing" this. But, if I wanted to, I could get a Web site on something like Geocities or Xoom, suffer their ads, and pay nothing. So, it's possible to have a (theoretical) worldwide reach without killing myself financially. And the publishing of the book can be damn near instantaneous.

Which is the other thing. I'm really just too damned impatient to wait for a science fiction house to decide whether or not they want to take a chance on this book. It simply takes too much time.

How much time? Well, Baen Books asks for nine to twelve months; if you send your book in there, it could conceivably take an entire year to learn your manuscript has been rejected. That's just a ridiculous amount of time. I'm not going to say that the folks of Baen don't legitimately need all that time to wade through the slush pile, but come on. Other publishers require lesser but still weighty ping times: Two to six months, typically. And since many publishers request sample chapters and a synopsis, even if you pass the first cut, there's an additional wait as they read through the whole manuscript.

That is, if they bother to accept unagented manuscripts; many science fiction houses do not. You'll need an agent to present your book. Agents take as much time to read and evaluate as publishers do — and then there's still the process of getting the book read at publishers. Shipping the book to three agents and three publishers took the better part of those two years. If I were on Herbert's timetable in terms of acceptance of the novel, my newborn daughter would be well into elementary school before this book got bought — after which it's an additional one or two years before the book actually hits the stores.

Where, of course, it will have a month (if that) to sell or be wiped off the shelves forever.

Ridiculous.

The bad news for me in publishing the book this way, is that I pretty much guarantee that I forgo any economic benefit from the book: No advance — what am I going to do, pay mayself? — and no royalties. This is, alas and alack, true enough. I'm positioning this book as "shareware" and encouraging folks to send me a dollar if they read it and enjoy it (they can send more if they really enjoy it, of course), but I'm really not holding my breath, waiting for a parade of George Washingtons to tromp into my mailbox. This resignation shouldn't stop you, the reader, from sending me that dollar. Rather the opposite, in fact. Please, prove me wrong. Baby needs shoes.

But here's the question. If I make nothing from this novel, how much worse off am I than the typical first-time author? What does a first-time author get for his or her pains, once the book is accepted? Well, let's see.

First-time authors generally get the double thrill of low advances and low royalty rates. But let's assume a $5000 advance (hey, why not?) and a royalty rate of nine percent (in the middle of the 7-to-12 per cent range listed for paperbacks in my Writer's Market). If the writer has an agent, typically 15% is lopped off the top — the writer is down to $4250. Subtract taxes (don't forget the additional 15.7% for self-employment tax!) and he's down to $2400 or so, depending on his bracket, before state and local tax bites.

At a royalty rate of 9% on a $6 paperback (that comes to 54 cents), our new author will have to sell 9,260 copies of his book before he earns out his advance. After which his 54 cents gets lopped once again by agents and taxes to about a quarter per book. However, most first-time writers, I'm told, are lucky to earn out their advance (which means that have work just as hard at being second-time writers. And they thought the hard part was over).

Figure that it takes four years from completion of writing this first novel to its arrival in the stores, and amortize for his time and trouble. In terms of real money, our first-time author is raking in $600 a year; $50 a month. $1.67 a day. You can make more recycling newspapers. Hell, you can make more going to people's houses and sucking coins out from behind their couch cushions. You could make more, of course (from the book, not the seat cushions). But most don't.

So I don't feel too bad about throwing out the money-earning potential. What I want is people to read the novel. So, here it is. Anyone who wants it can find it and read it. And they'll always be able to find it — it doesn't have to compete for shelf space with other novels. It won't be shipped back en masse, if it doesn't sell like hot cakes in the first month. It will never go out of print or be remaindered. People won't feel like they're gambling with their money on a book they may or may not like.

If they don't like it, they won't be out six bucks. They won't hate me for ripping them off. If they do like it, who knows? Maybe the next book will be in the stores. And maybe they'll come in and buy that one, knowing that a John Scalzi novel is something they'll probably enjoy — it'll be worth the $6. If offering this one on the Web builds an audience, which helps me build a career as a novelist, it's well worth foregoing the advance and royalties. I mean, I'm not that starved for cash. Keep the money, Monty, I want to see what's behind Door Number 2.

So, for the reason of market incompatability, for the reason of impatience, and for reason of shocking lack of monetary concern, Agent to the Stars debuts online, a shareware novel. I'm content with the decision — it's an experiment, a sounding out to see if something like this can actually work. I think it can, and I think this is the novel that makes that point. I hope if you read it and like it, you will actually send me a dollar. That'd be nice. But I'll also like it just fine if you read it, like it, and tell your friends about it. It's a good story. It deserves to be read and enjoyed. I hope you do both.