Selling your literary work

Hello! You’re probably a decent writer, or maybe even a great one. But you’ve been finding it very difficult to pay your bills. You tell your friends that you’re a starving artist, but you and I know that the business side of things just doesn’t seem to click.

Well, welcome to Artwork. My name is Toba. Today on the show, we have Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, an award-winning speculative fiction writer from Nigeria. He co-edited the groundbreaking Dominion Anthology and has had fiction and nonfiction published in NBC, TOR, Strange Horizons, and many others.

He’ll speak to us about how to build your writing career and give us some tips on how to fund our writing projects.

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome again, Oghenechovwe.

Let’s start with your belief when it comes to the business of being a writer. In our previous conversations, you seemed to have principles that guide the business of writing. Would you mind sharing that with us?

The first thing is understanding that your art is not just art, it’s a business. You’re trying to survive off it, you’re trying to get paid. And when you’re getting paid, it means that you’re selling.

So the first thing is, you have to think about what you’re doing as a business and try to understand or find out the principles and the steps that guide that selling process.

Interesting. So what are, say, four or five things that a struggling writer needs to know to get noticed by more people?

The first thing is adopting a mindset, understanding that you’re getting involved in a commercial endeavour. For example, the painter might only want to paint, the writer might only want to write stories, and the sportsman might only want to run or play football. But it doesn’t work like that.

The second is trying to determine what that endeavour, that profession, or craft demands of you. Then the third would be finding out the model or the path that takes you to success, whatever it may mean in your career.

And this means looking at the industry holistically. You have to look at the people involved who have been successful and try to draw a line from when they started out to when they eventually became successful, and note the specific steps they took.

So, as someone who has gone through the trenches and has come out the other side with all the scars of war, what does someone who is a struggling writer need to know to build out their career?

If you’re trying to get a traditional publishing deal, you’re trying to get the attention of the editor or the big agents in the game. If you’re trying to self-publish, you’re trying to get the attention of the general public. But it’s all the same thing, you’re sort of selling yourself and your work. It’s who you’re selling to that makes the difference.

You’ll find that they require broadly similar skills. You need to show that you’re good at what you do. When you’re self-publishing, people are not just going to buy your books, they’re going to judge based on reviews, recommendations, or your cover, for some people. Because people do judge a book by its cover.

There’s a juvenile form of it that everybody can do. Everybody can write. But the art of writing and the business of writing are quite different. Unfortunately, there are millions of people that want to write or think they can write.

That’s where having a literary CV comes in. It shows that you have a track record, shows that you’re good at what you say you’re good at, and that you’ve had some experience, and even better, some success, doing it.

So, you’ve spoken about building out a CV. How exactly does a writer do that?

For a writer, especially one that is aiming at the traditional publishing industry, there are literary journals and magazines, contests and competitions, workshops and residencies, scholarships, and MFAs.

If you look at all the favourite Nigerian creative writers, you’ll see that they have a track record. They have a CV. They’ve been published in journals or magazines. They’ve had work that people enjoyed and connected with. There exists some form of evidence that they can write before they got major publishing deals with big companies.

For example, in Nigeria, there’s Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus Trust Creative Writing Workshop. A lot of the top writers that you’re seeing today have been through those workshops.

I’m curious about something, are there, in your experience, traits, habits, or behavioural tendencies that are beneficial for a writer to have?

I would say yes, and it’s ironic because those very traits are the traits that most writers are not likely to have. You have to be two people at the same time. You have to be both an introvert and an extrovert. You have to be able to connect with yourself very deeply when you want to create, and you have to be able to connect with others when you want to sell the work that you’ve created.

Most writers tend to be solitary people, and they don’t feel that they need to interact, or that they need to be outgoing, but it’s a requirement of every trade.

As you said, writers are solitary creatures, introverts by nature. How do you build the muscle that enables you to become the extroverted person who can build social credit?

Writing, as an industry, has a lot of social activities beyond just the solitary aspects of writing. You have to make a conscious effort to interact, to be in the industry that you’re trying to be part of. Try to be at these events, conventions, and book readings, to connect and interact with editors, agents, publishers, and even fellow creatives like yourself.

But even before that, there’s your work itself. You have to make a conscious effort to put your work out there, that’s where social media comes in. It’s something you should do, either as a young writer for whom nothing is happening or as someone who is winning.

You have to be able to talk about your work, connect with people, and be able to share your wins when you have them. You know, build some sort of social credit which you can then leverage. It’s like someone said, you don’t just have to do the work, you also need to let people know you can do the work.

Recently, you edited a speculative fiction anthology for Tor Books, which is one of the leading publishers in the world. How did that come about?

It actually started two anthologies before. There’s the Dominion Anthology, which I crowdfunded for and raised about $10,000 to fund. There’s The Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction Anthology. There’s the Bridging Worlds Non-fiction Anthology. All of these happened before the Tor anthology.

The point is that I had a track record as an anthologist. Tor is an imprint of one of the big $5 billion publishing companies, and I would say, I’m the only Tor editor on the continent. So they’re definitely not handing out deals to everybody that asks.

This brings me back to what I said initially. Getting what you want is going to involve a whole lot of other things, which is why most people end up being both self-published and traditionally published, because the two intersect in a lot of ways.

On one hand, you have the Tor anthology, which is traditional. But it’s also connected to the self-published anthology that I did before, which was highly successful.

For the Dominion anthology, we were selling directly to the public. It was crowdfunded from the start, and we got people to invest in us. It takes essentially the same skill set as getting a traditional publisher to notice you.

Still on the subject of your many accolades, you were able to raise almost $10,000 from a Kickstarter. Would you mind sharing what the process was like for setting that up?

Yeah, the Kickstarter wasn’t my first involvement in the speculative fiction industry. Before that anthology, I’d won the Nommo Award for Best Speculative Story by an African. So I had built what you would call some form of goodwill. I had some clout, or social credit, if you will, so I was able to leverage some of that.

At that point, I was definitely an expert, or qualified in African speculative fiction. So it made a lot of sense to say I was building a Black and African speculative fiction anthology.

Gotcha. So where can people find you?

You can find me on Twitter @penprince_, I'm also on Instagram as penprince. My website is odekpeki.com.

Alrighty. Thank you so much. That’s all folks, thank you very much for joining us today on the show. If you have any questions, comments, or even things you disagree with, discuss them with us in the comments section.

Please subscribe to our channel for more of the great content we know you love. Remember to hit the thumbs-up button if you enjoyed this episode.

Until I come your way next time, take care and bye-bye.