who cares what the gatekeepers think?

It’s NaNoWriMo, which means a lot of new writers will finish their new books. Many will self-publish them, but some will get on the Agent/Publisher Submission Treadmill, despite the fact that, in my opinion, self-publishing is better in every way.

One of the many advantages of self-publishing is that you don’t have to deal with the random Submission Guidelines of various publishers.

Recently, I saw a small publisher on Twitter touting its Submission Guidelines and demanding that would-be writers follow them. I won’t link to it, because I don’t want to start a fight with strangers, but I have to admit the submission guidelines annoyed me. Specifically, it included a long list of what the publisher doesn’t want to see. Some of it was reasonable – no hate speech, no explicit scenes of a certain nature, etc, – but the first four items on the list reminded me of the bad old days:

-Urban fantasy or anything with a modern-day setting.

-Tolkien-style epic/high fantasy.

-Stories that read like a D&D session. No LitRPG, either.

-Anything with orcs in it. If your story has orcs, it will automatically be rejected.

Now, I should point out that objectively, there is nothing wrong with this. If you’re running a small publisher and you want a specific kind of book or story, then you want that specific kind of book. If you’re publishing, for example, urban fantasy, it’s a waste of everyone’s time if you send in your LitRPG epic.

What annoyed me about it was the reminder of the Bad Old Days before self-publishing, and having to deal with whatever random nonsense the publishers and the agents put in their submission guidelines. I’ve had many people tell me that they stopped reading in the 90s, the 2000s, or the early 2010s until they discovered indie books, and the reason for that was the publishers stopped publishing the sort of books they wanted to read. Traditional publishing was never great for writers, but it used to be much wider open until a bunch of corporation consolidation in the 90s really squeezed down the available markets. Because of that, a comparatively small number of people decided what could be published, and not to paint with too broad of a brush, what they wanted to publish was boring stuff that would get awards.

Because of that, back in the 2000s and early 2010s when I was submitting to traditional publishers, all the submission guidelines for the publishers and the agents all said “no orcs, no elves, no Tolkien style fantasy”. Which was annoying, because that was (and is) what I really wanted to write. That’s why when I wrote the Caina books, there are no orcs or elves or anything of that nature.

Granted, that worked out for the Caina books, but only once I started self-publishing.

And once I started self-publishing, I was free to start writing fantasy with orcs and elves and wizards and all that in the form of the FROSTBORN series, which has sold better than anything else I’ve written.

I suppose that was what annoyed me about those submission guidelines – a throwback to the days when the gatekeepers ruled the roost. The gatekeepers of publishing are still in business, but the wall’s gone, and you can just walk past them to write and sell what you want.

Now I’m going to be petty.

The small publisher I mentioned above offers $0.01 per word payment. Their guidelines explicitly refused anything with orcs, but as it happens, I very recently published a short story with a LOT of orcs in it. Specifically, THE FIRST BARGAIN, in which every speaking part in the story, save for the narrator, is an orc. That is a lot of orcs! Granted, the reason I wrote THE FIRST BARGAIN was to give it away for free with my newsletter, because that increases the number of clicks in my newsletter and makes it less likely to get sent to a spam folder. But I also publish the short story to all the usual platforms, since nice people sometimes buy it.

I went back and checked the figures, and in October 2022, THE FIRST BARGAIN made $0.028 cents per word, which almost 150% more than I would have made selling an orc-free short story of comparative length to the small publisher above. Not bad for a short story that I gave away for free to my newsletter subscribers! (And thanks for reading, everyone!)

I’ve been thinking about trying something new in 2023. Since those submission guidelines seem to be like an anti-chrism of success, maybe I should try a LitRPG. 🙂

-JM