Writing: The Amateur vs the Professional Path

When new writers come to me for advice, I make a point of asking them one question:

Why are you writing?

That question catches most people off guard. The number of would-be authors who’ve never stopped to consider why they want to write is surprising.

Because writing as a side hustle for supplemental income is one thing. Earning a living from your writing is a related, but different ballgame. Writing purely to express yourself is a whole other sport—an amateur sport, to be exact.

If you want to write a novel as a personal challenge or an essay in the craft, that’s great. Get that story that’s been bursting to get out of your head on paper. Savor the pleasure of typing “The End” on the last page. Then place the manuscript in your closet, or send some copies to friends and family.

That’s not a putdown. Achieving what 80 percent of people say they want to do but few ever manage is a laudable accomplishment.

It is to point out that having the inspiration and determination to commit your personal artistic vision to writing is a different matter altogether than having the drive to write to market and sell what you write.

That’s why it’s incumbent upon authors to decide if they want to take the amateur or the professional path. Because each requires different skills.

Do the two paths have to be mutually exclusive? Literary history says no. There are indeed examples of authors’ passion projects breaking out as mainstream hits.

But publishing history is even more rife with data points showing that your written expression of deep personal significance has much less chance of resonating with the general audiences than you do of winning the Powerball.

It’s only logical when you think about it. If you are a genuinely special artist with a truly original vision, then by definition most people don’t share that vision.

So again, by all means, make your literary statement. Just don’t take it too hard if you only sell a handful of copies.

Even in the newpub age, a lot of people are still conditioned to think that writing the Great American Novel™ about neurotic urbanites coming to terms with things and getting a NY house to publish it is the road to authorial success.

The old saying goes “Never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel.” The same applies to not believing their PR. That litfic stardom canard is a zombie meme started by deadpub to inflate their perceived importance.

A recent example concerns pretentious Jazz Age melodrama The Great Gatsby.

“But Gatsby is a classic!” some, even in newpub, say. “It was a massive hit!”

Not when it first came out, it wasn’t.

The book that’s now hailed as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece initially sold around 20,000 copies, which was underwhelming in a time when everyone read. Fitzgerald died believing the book was a failure.

How did Gatsby acquire its classic status? Weird but true: The US government put it on a reading list for soldier’s on the front lines of WWII as war propaganda.

Esteemed critic Pulp Archivist has more on X:

It should go without saying that hoping for the Pentagon to make the military—and then high schools—assign your book after you’re dead is not a sound marketing strategy.

If you want your writing to reach as wide an audience as possible, you need to learn sales. It serves no one to be good at the art and bad at the business.

And I get it. I used to hate sales, too. Toiling in the retail mines trying to make people buy useless product they didn’t need was no fun.

But then I sold my first short story. Suddenly I learned that people wanted to read my writing, and what’s more, they’d pay me for it.

Since then I’ve learned to appreciate, and even love, sales. It’s how the people who want to read my writing find out that my writing exists.

Besides, everybody uses sales strategies in every walk of life. Chances are you use salesmanship in your day job. Even if you don’t, your job relies on someone who does.

So taking the professional author path isn’t a matter of suffering sales as a necessary evil. It’s about channeling some of your passion for writing your stories into sharing your stories.

Another old saw goes that if you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life. Maybe that’s a Boomer cliché, but I know that employing sales skills to market my books doesn’t feel like work.

And what everybody misses is that your preparations for selling your book start before you write your book. That means researching, and writing to, your chosen market.

Now, that doesn’t mean you have to chase the puck by letting current fads dictate your subject matter. Unless your tastes are super niche, it’s a good bet there are enough people interested in reading your preferred genre to carve out a place for your work.

What it does mean is learning the genre conventions that your target audience expects and using them to signal that your book is for them. That goes for more than just your prose style. It includes the cover design, right down to the color palette, the product description, front cover blurb, and even the title.

Even if you just pour your heart and soul onto the page for pure self-satisfaction, then decide to put it on KDP for fun, it’s just plain lazy not to at least take a quick look at similar successful books. You owe it to your story and your readers to do the bare minimum research.

My new book made it into the top 200 in a couple of categories, despite scheduling conflicts and a hurricane interfering with the launch.

You can get it here:

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