Sometimes, The Writing Just Sucks

Preface

If you are interested in actually becoming a professionally accredited author or writer, with a peerless portfolio of paid works, eligible to submit for the highest paying freelance gigs -  and if you want to learn how to apply for those gigs and how to pitch and query the highest paying mass-market periodicals, literary agents and book publishers - you are going to want to read every word of this article, as well as the others in this series which are linked herein.

I promise that the aggregate $.20 I earn from you reading them all will not in any way significantly improve my quality of life. However, if it is your intention to someday earn a living through your use of written or spoken words, this series might very well improve yours. So buckle up…here goes nothin'.

Sometimes the writing just sucks

It's really past time that someone was honest about this. No, it's really not so objective - writing that either sucks or doesn't suck that is. Sometimes…in fact, most of the time, when we can't find ways to market the pieces we create, whether they are articles, short stories, books, or any other created content, it's for one reason and one reason only.

I have seen countless articles written on every crowdsourced publishing platform (Medium, Vocal, Simily, Substack, etc.) that caters to independent creators offering myriad explanations for why created works don't sell. 

They then offer a myriad of 'tools', 'newsletters', 'lessons', 'workshops', or 'boot camps', that you can buy from them that should all help boost your sales - implying that if their 'tools' don't work, its because you didn't use them properly.

Unless, of course, your book just sucks

There I said it. Let's just get that big old elephant out in the open and face facts. But, in order to face those facts, we really need to know what the facts are. They sure aren't the points those sellers of 'marketing tools' are going to make.

Why do you think that is?

I'll tell you why. Because the people trying desperately to sell you their 'sure fire', 'tried and proven' marketing success tips don't want you to realize you're not a good writer. They tell you things like: "Of course, you're a great writer!" "Who is anyone else to say you're not a good writer?" and "What makes good or bad writing is totally personal choice", "It's totally subjective!"

That's because these people have recognized a marketing niche, and they are diligently exploiting that niche to the max. As long as there are people who are convinced that they are bonafide, legitimate 'good writers' but can't manage to sell their wares to the general public, these crafty marketers will have a revenue stream.

This is why they will never remotely suggest that your book or your poetry, or your short story just wasn't well written -  even if they've read it and know that it wasn't. That's because as long as you feel that you're a good writer, you'll keep paying people like them to sell you more tools to help make your words.

 If they have read your work and recognized it as subpar, rather than admit this to you, they'll often use that truth to offer you their 'expert' editorial and proofreading services! How fortunate for you that you ran into such a consummate professional!

There's also another reason why these 'amazing professional writers' won't suggest that the piece or pieces you wrote weren't written well - it's because if they do, you might just ask them for advice on how to fix it. 

And herein lies the thing -  they don't know how to fix it. That's because they're not good writers either! They're marketers and salespeople, but not writers.

Why not? How do I know?

Because they've never written anything of substantive value themselves. They've only ever authored worthless 'advice' articles or videos that are geared toward getting their hooks into the mouths of aspiring writers who don't want to take the time to learn how to be professional writers.

That's right, I'm telling you without reservation or any doubt whatsoever, what determines good or bad writing is absolutely not subjective. 

This is not to be confused with people disliking a particular writer's genre or style, that is absolutely not the same as being able to recognize a bad writer when we see one. However, unscrupulous marketers will intentionally and continuously blur the lines between these two types of critiques.

For the most part, I don't like Stephen King's books. I've read many because he's such a prolific and popular author that I almost feel like something must be wrong with me for not liking his work. But no matter how much I try, he's only written about 4 that I really liked. Most I felt were mediocre at best and about 6 were so bad I didn't read another thing by him for several years before sampling another one by him.

This is an example of personal taste. It does not in any way mean that Stephen King is not a good writer. He is. There is no question of that. We simply have drastically different perspectives on a lot of elements of writing that I find distasteful, particularly when I find them smack dab in the middle of a 900-page thriller.

That is a subjective critique. I can recognize him as a great writer while simultaneously declaring that he has many books I can't stomach.

But you will never open one of his books and find egregious grammatical errors. You will never get to the end and find that he accidentally failed to answer questions that arose as the plot progressed. You will never find instances of failed verb tense agreements in his writing. These are all marks of poorly trained writers, and when I encounter them, the entire book is complete garbage to me. That's because a professional writer would never allow their name to be affixed to anything like that as long as they breathed.

As writers, our reputations as perfectionists are quite literally, worth their weight in gold, silver, and platinum

What's more, it doesn't take a great writer or an English professor to instantly recognize bad writing when we see it. And novice writers don't seem to understand that all the Grammarly and Hemmingway apps in the universe don't fix all of the problems of poorly written words.

Advice article after advice article I read yells for aspiring writers to rush and download 'these free tools that no writer can live without.' Don't get me wrong, these tools are great for making suggestions regarding the tone of our words and catching typos, but they will not and do not take poorly written sentences and make them professional quality.

There are countless times when I have to override these programs and 'dismiss' their advice because it's just plain wrong. Even as I'm writing this article, Grammarly is insisting that I change the word them in the last paragraph - and make them professional quality - to their, making that sentence say - and make their professional quality - which is completely nonsensical, yet Grammarly is repeatedly telling me I should make this edit.

I have to constantly correct Grammarly

As I said, it is still a great tool for catching superficial typos that I might miss while typing quickly or particularly when I'm using my talk-to-text dictation programs. Those programs are also good, but far from perfect. Why? Because when it's dictating your sentence - Mary took a long brake before returning to work - not even Grammarly picked up on the fact that the correct word in that sentence should have been break, and not brake.

Quick English lesson, these words are called Homophones. That is, words that sound the same but have different meanings and which are often spelled differently. To my point, if we encountered that while reading a book, an article, a poem, or a short story, we immediately know several important facts (not assumptions) about the author…

1. The author is not well educated in English
2. The author didn't think enough of their project to pay an editor who is well educated in English
3. Nobody that read early copies of this book knew enough about grammar to inform the author of their mistakes, of which, I can now be confident I will find more
4. Without regard to looking professional, the author is trying to convince me that I should pay them for what they created and give them a good review

All this, and authors want to know why so many consumers on Amazon are returning e-books they purchased and demanding refunds. Quite honestly, If I encountered this after I paid $7, $8, $10, or $15 for a book, I would demand a refund too. If an author is this irresponsible and amateurish, you don't deserve my hard-earned money. And how long it took you to write that drivel is completely irrelevant to me. 

In short, there is no replacement for a quality education in any field, if you want to be respected as a professional in that field. Writing, like being a doctor, is no exception. If you don't get educated, do the work, learn the craft, and get tested and accredited by masters in that field, you just aren't a professional, no matter how much you try to make yourself appear to be one.

I have written several other articles in this series to help writers understand the business and professionalism of writing better. Below are the links to those articles. If you are serious about being able to someday make a living from your words, I sincerely suggest you read them all. 

Yes, I will appreciate the $.07 that I receive from the reading time you rack up in the process but rest assured that time spent reading those articles and this one might just someday make all the difference in your writing career.

The Terms 'Blogger' And 'Writer' Are NOT Synonymous

Writers Are In High Demand — But You Won't Get There With Crowdsourced Publishing Advice

Write Often - Write A Lot - Then, Write Some More

How To Write For Big Perioodicals

It can be subjective to try to appraise books before we read them--

--either in your hand, or online, and see warning signs or indicators which might signify the quality of a book. However, as avid readers, we have all had so many good and bad experiences with books, that our conscious minds learn to identify similarities - characteristics and attributes that most good books share, as well as which ones bad books share.

First, if an author has a really small online footprint, that is a clear warning sign that they are not very expereinced. That's because success breeds popularity. It might not breed financial excess, or even stability, especially in the early going, but it absolutely does breed popularity. 

If you are successful, people want to be around you 

They gravitate to you. They want to observe your aura, touch you, smell you, interact with you, and just bask in your effervescence - hoping some of it just might rub off. This is particularly true for successful authors and writers who often even establish a cult-like following of 'groupies'.

The quality of an e-book's cover is also an extremely strong indicator of an author's legitimacy. If you really spent the better part of a year of your life writing that 400-page psychological thriller, you better believe that in all that time you budgeted $200 or $300 to pay for a top-flight cover design or took the extra time to learn how to make them yourself and purchased the software to do so.

Authors that try to peddle their tomes with amateurish clip-art style covers only tell the rest of us how psychologically uninvested they are in the book.

No ISBN Number

This is actually a huge indicator of professionalism in self-publishing and it is a HUGE red flag for me if I'm considering buying a book online. E-book publishing doesn't require that certain titles have ISBN (International Standard Book Number) numbers. However, what uneducated authors do not realize is that libraries cannot and will not buy your book if it doesn't have an ISBN. No, it's not discretionary. Public libraries are government agencies and they are expressly prohibited from buying books that don't have ISBNs. The same is also true for national and international book clubs.

Sure, you can donate your book to them, (not the book clubs) but they can't buy them, and they won't keep them long without an ISBN either, that's because shelf space in libraries is at a premium and they can only afford to keep books that get traction. 

Further, almost all libraries now in 2022 use computerized check-ins and check-outs. No ISBN means no bar code, no bar code means no computer scanner can scan the book to check it in or out. You can rest assured that the Librarian isn't going to pay out of the library's coffers to get your book a bar code and an ISBN from Bowkers.

The bottom line here is that authors who decide to save the purchase price of an ISBN are automatically eliminating the largest population of book buyers in the world from purchasing their books - libraries and book clubs.

These are only some of the flags--

--that online book buyers see that immediately turn them off from buying works by amateur writers - there are others. The point is that harping 'professionalism' all the time might sound like an 'elitist' tactic, but it isn't at all. In fact, it's exactly the opposite. 

Showing you how and why professionalism in the writing industry is so crucial proves conclusively that the people screaming all of that 'elitist' crap are the ones who are actually being elitists, by trying to establish that they are above the rest of us who put in the time and hard work to master our craft before having the brass stones to expect total strangers to pay us for our time and effort.

Misinformation and Disinformation

Yes, there is a growing 'movement' of authors who decide to self-publish their books. If you ask any number of them why they decided to self-publish, you'll get a pretty diverse stream of answers. That is except for one. Without exception, every single one will include that they wanted to have more control and keep 'the rights' to what they wrote.

To anyone who has any experience in the book industry or is familiar with the business of book publishing, this is an instant red flag. Why? Because people who understand what publishing is knows this is just not the case in reality. 

In truth, only people who have never actually dealt with real literary agents or real publishing houses say this and it is entirely based on the conjecture that they've parroted from others - those proverbial 'nightmare' publishing stories we've all heard - but which in reality almost never occur.

The next articles in this series will address this in much greater detail. I will also be addressing Querying, Acquiring a Literary Agent, Publishing Contracts, and The Business of Writing.

All of these articles will be completely free (other than the $.03 to $.05 I'll get out of your membership fee for reading them), so I sincerely suggest you sign up for my newsletter so you'll receive a notification when I publish each one. I can assure you the wealth of information I provide in these articles for free is worth a lot more than the 'courses' most people on these platforms are trying desperately to sell to you.

I will now reiterate and embellish on what I said in the preface

If you are interested in actually becoming a professionally accredited author or writer, with a peerless portfolio of paid works, eligible to submit for the highest paying freelance gigs - and if you want to learn how to apply for those gigs and how to pitch and query the highest paying mass-market periodicals, literary agents and book publishers - you are going to want to read every word of the other articles in this series which are linked above.

Now for the sales pitch

I will soon be calling for applicants to submit work demonstrating their writing abilities - writers who wish to be personally tutored by me (an Ivy League-educated 30-year professional writer and former Associate Professor of English). The students I select will be taught not only how to write better, but how to sell what they write. yes, I said the students who are interested which I select. that's because it will be a waste of my time and your money if you don't at least have some rudimentary writing ability.

"I can remove rust and shine brushed nickel, but not even I can polish a turd." ~ Kurt Dillon

If this sounds like the focus you were thinking of for your writing career, I can teach you how to master your craft and sell your work to the big boys for up to $2.00 per word instead of on crowdsourced publishing platforms like Medium or Upwork for pennies per thousand clicks or $10 per gig.

The tuition for this MasterClass will be relatively inexpensive compared to what some of these 'professionals' charge, and like all legitimate schools, you won't have to pay for it all at once as a way to help truly struggling writers add it into an already tight budget.

So if you are interested, please be sure to follow me and subscribe to my newsletter - which is free, it's funny, and it doesn't suck. Then just look for the rest of the articles in this series and the announcement and guidelines for submitting your practice work for consideration.