I posted this to my original blog, in January of last year. After seeing someone on Twitter saying the same thing as the original writer, I thought it was appropriate to bring it up again for today’s Wayback Wednesday.
A couple of days ago, “Harsh Writing Advice” started trending on Twitter. Apparently stemming from a single tweet in which some writer stated “Your writer friends are not your friends, they’re your competition.”
Whoever it was (I never found the original tweet, just people talking about it), they are completely wrong.
So I thought it would be a good time to finish this blog entry I’ve had stuck in my “to finish someday” folder for a couple of years now.
This is certainly not the first time someone made this sort of claim. A few years ago,when the notes for this entry first showed up in my “future blog posts” folder, some other blogger called upon J.K. Rowling to “step aside to make space on the shelves for newer writers.”
The thing is, writing, and reading, doesn’t work that way. It’s not a zero-sum game. Like many other fields, success by one author doesn’t come at the expense of success by another. We’re not stock brokers, who scramble to compete with each other to siphon money out of the market. We’re at the other end of that, adding things to the market. The stuff we sell doesn’t exist before we create it.
And there isn’t really a practical limit to how much there can be.
There are already more books in any average bookstore than any one person is going to be able to read in a lifetime. Even if you assume everyone will read only one specific genre, they’re not going to be able to get through all the books that are already available in that genre. If the limit is what someone can read, that ship sailed before Dickens first picked up his quill.
Here’s the secret, though: good writers not only create new books, they also create new readers. And new readers will buy new books.
Huge writers, like J.K. Rowling or Stephenie Meyer or even Dan Brown, whatever you think of any of them, are good for the whole field. There are a lot of people who started really enjoying reading because of Harry Potter. Those people went on to read a whole slew of other books. Some of them discovered urban fantasy, some science fiction, some got into historical biographies. It doesn’t matter what else they found. They went out and found other books because they discovered a love of reading, and they discovered that because of Harry Potter. Rowling didn’t shut out other authors by being so popular, she generated additional sales for them.
Also, which publisher do you think is going to take a bigger risk on a new author? The one who’s struggling to make ends meet, or the one who’s sitting on a giant wad of cash from some other author’s latest best seller?
That’s all well and good, you say, but does it scale? What about those writers whose sales aren’t currently anywhere near those of Rowling’s or Meyer’s?
Absolutely it scales. Among lesser-known authors, it’s probably even more important. I know of one person who discovered McKenzie Austin’s The Tree That Grew Through Iron only because after enjoying Michele Quirke’s The Fires of Treason she searched for more and found a Twitter thread between those two authors. The one sale didn’t come at the expense of others – it led to it.
So, if you’re a writer, make friends with other writers. They are not your competition. This isn’t a zero-sum game. It’s not just mercenary too, by the way. There are a thousand reasons to have other writer friends beyond just sales, but that’ll have to be the subject for another blog.