On the way home from RWA10, I saw that an Ask Agent twitter chat was going on.  (It’s exactly like it sounds-agents volunteer to answer industry questions-industry Qs, not related to query or proposal stuff).

One of the questions was along the lines of:

Do you think publishers will continue to buy from first time authors…

Okay, I’m going to try not to be sarcastic or rude here, really.  But my instinctive response, any time I see this sort of question?

Oh, puh-leeze…

People.  Yes, publishers are going to be first time authors.  They have to.

Reason Number One-Tomorrow’s Big Voices

Big sellers don’t crop up overnight-with the exception of people like Stephanie Meyers, most of the mega-sellers were authors that publishers invested a lot of time in.  They helped the authors build their career.

They won’t have the mega-sellers or even the pretty big sellers of tomorrow if they aren’t looking for the new voices today-because it’s the new voices of today that they are looking to make into the big voices of tomorrow.

Reason Number Two-Readers Want New Voices

If you write, you probably read.  And if you read, you probably want choice.  We get tired of we see the same choices, even if we like the current choices., even if we love the current choices.  As long as readers are looking for new voices, publishers are going to provide them.  And readers are always going to be looking for new voices, so publishers are also going to be looking for them.

Now are publishers going to take as many risks?  I don’t know.  People like to say ‘the economy is tough’.  Yes.  It is.

But it’s been tough before, and actually, from what I’ve seen and heard, book sales are actually doing pretty okay, so why wouldn’t publishers be willing to buy?  Reading is still a relatively cheap form of entertainment and thanks to voices like Stephanie Meyer, to choices like manga, devices like the Nook, we actually have more people interested in reading now than we previously had.  People who didn’t read as much are now slowly becoming voracious readers.

All this doomsday crap some people like to throw out about the ‘death of publishing…’ um…well, to quote a line from Nora Roberts during her talk at the RWA luncheon?  Bullshit.  Publishing is changing, but it’s never not been changing.  It will change, it will evolve, because that’s just how this business is.

But this isn’t an easy business.  Regardless of the economy.  Never has been, never will be.  If you’re looking for easy, look somewhere else.

Focus on your craft, focus on writing the best book you can-if you think it’s worth trying to sell, by all means, try to sell it.  But don’t spend five years just trying to sell that one book.  Write other books.  Try to sell them.  But while you’re trying to sell whichever book, make sure you’re working on another one.  If you focus all your energy on trying to sell one book and never working on another, well… you’re aren’t writing the next book, and that next book might have been the one that lands you a contract.