There’s No One Right (or Write) Way

By Lois Winston

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Lately, I’ve wanted to crawl into bed, pull the quilt over my head, and not emerge until we return to a time before the pervasive “My Way or the Highway” mentality that has taken us to the edge of a cliff. Remember when people could agree to disagree and still be friends? Remember when we didn’t cringe whenever we attended family dinners that included certain relatives who hold opposing views and who take every opportunity to try to convince us that they’re right, and we’re wrong? Hold the roast beef and mashed potatoes. Pass the Tums and Xanax.

This “My Way or the Highway” attitude has seeped into nearly every aspect of our lives, even our writing lives. Internet articles and various “experts” (who may or may not actually be experts) tout the best way to write a novel, how to get an agent, how to market your books. They’ll tell you agents and editors only want A, B, and C. Or if you don’t do X, Y, and Z, you’ll never sell a book. Some of this information is only a click away, but others first want your credit card number before imparting their knowledge.

I’m on quite a few listservs with both published and unpublished authors. Every day an unpublished author will either post about great information she found online or ask whether such-and-such service is worth the money.

Writing scams are a topic for another day. Today I want to discuss information posted online or provided in other ways. Writers should never believe everything they read and hear. For one thing, much of it is often contradictory:

• Always plot out your novel.

• Plotting stifles creativity. Just write. 

• You must produce at least 1,500 words a day.

• Don’t worry about word count. Just write. 

• You must write every day.

• Don’t stress about writing every day. It’s counterproductive.

• Always write forward. Never go back to reread/tweak what you wrote the day before. 

• Always go back to reread/tweak what you wrote the day before.

• Never edit while you write your drafts.

• Whenever you change something, always go back and edit your other pages.

• There’s no such thing as writer’s block. 

• Writer’s block is real.

I have heard well-known authors state all the above. However, the statements were made in the context of what works best for them. Their process. Not as “rules” that must be adhered to if you want to get published.

I recently saw an interview with Ken Follett. He spends a year writing the outline for each of his books. He then sends successive drafts to family, friends, editors, and even historians he pays as consultants for their input. That’s the process that works for him. He wasn’t suggesting that his way is the only way to write. He wasn’t even suggesting that anyone should mimic his process. Yet, there are probably some who will come away from watching that interview thinking that Ken has the secret to success, and if they do as he does, they’ll get published.

I find it disheartening that so many writers are so desperate to get published that they spend too much time searching for a secret sauce that has never existed. They constantly fall into the trap of believing they should follow every piece of advice they come across. Their self-confidence continually takes a hit when what they believe to be the secret sauce doesn’t work for them.

But who are the experts doling out this advice they cling to? Sometimes, they’re not experts at all. In my writing infancy, I entered many contests for unpublished romance authors. When the contest was over, most supplied entrants with the judges’ scoresheets and comments. The draw of these contests was that the finalists were judged by editors and agents, and there was always the hope that these professionals would like what they read enough to request the full manuscript.

I finaled or won many of the contests I entered, but I also received some very questionable advice from some of the anonymous first-round judges. One wrote, “I don’t really understand point of view, but I’m marking you down because I don’t think you do, either.” There was nothing wrong with my point of view according to the two other judges who gave me top scores on point of view.

Another wrote, “Editors want the hero and heroine to meet within the first three pages. Yours don’t meet until the end of the first chapter.” That might be the case for a 45,000-word Harlequin short contemporary romance, but I had entered the mainstream category where manuscript lengths were a minimum of 85,000 words.

Advice is only as good as the expertise of the person giving it. However, even when the advice comes from an expert, that advice is always based on that person’s experiences. What has worked for them. It may be the best advice you ever receive. Or it may not work at all for you.

Process is individual and develops over time. No two writers approach their writing the same way. The trick is to keep learning and keep writing, but don’t ever believe everything about your writing sucks based on one rejection, one how-to book, one article, one author talk, or one conference. Or even multiple rejections and more than one person’s advice. After all, Stephen King had decided to give up after thirty publishers rejected Carrie. Luckily, his wife convinced him otherwise.

Yes, there will be aspects of your work that need improving. Every author I know wishes she could go back and rewrite her earliest books. Some have. We all continue to grow in our writing. As you work at your writing, you’ll hone your skills. You’ll develop confidence and hopefully learn to view “My Way or the Highway” advice through a more discerning lens.

Constructive criticism and advice should never be discounted. It very well may be exactly what your manuscript needs. However, that’s not the same as someone insisting that their way is the only way to success. Think twice about that kind of advice and always check the credentials of the person dishing it out.

Meanwhile, my only advice for dealing with family dinners that include a “My Way or the Highway” relative is to take a book with you and hide in an empty room if the conversation gets too heated.

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USA Today and Amazon bestselling and award-winning author Lois Winston writes mystery, romance, romantic suspense, chick lit, women’s fiction, children’s chapter books, and nonfiction. Kirkus Reviews dubbed her critically acclaimed Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mystery series, “North Jersey’s more mature answer to Stephanie Plum.” In addition, Lois is a former literary agent and an award-winning craft and needlework designer who often draws much of her source material for both her characters and plots from her experiences in the crafts industry. A Crafty Collage of Crime, the twelfth book in her series, was the recipient of the 2024 Killer Nashville Silver Falchion Award for Best Comedy, and Sorry, Knot Sorry, the thirteenth book in the series, recently won the 2025 Silver Falchion Award for Best Comedy. Embroidered Lies and Alibis, the fifteenth book in the series, releases February 10th. Learn more about Lois and her books at www.loiswinston.com. Sign up for her newsletter to receive an Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mini-Mystery.

This Crazy Writing Life: Requiescat in pace—In Memory Of The Mass-Market Paperback

By Steven Womack

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Jim Milliot and Sophia Stewart’s December 12th article in Publisher’s Weekly isn’t actually an article.

It’s an obituary.

ReaderLink—the largest distributor of books to non-trade channel booksellers in North America—just announced that they would stop distributing mass-market paperbacks at the end of 2025. The mass-market paperback—once the single most popular reading format in the world—has been dying for over a quarter-century. ReaderLink’s decision is, to fall back on a perfectly valid cliché, the final nail in the coffin.

An eighty-six-year long ride is over.

The mass-market paperback had its roots in the Great Depression, when a huge demographic could barely afford food and rent, let alone luxuries like books. Publishers would do anything to sell more books, so in 1935 a British publisher named Allen Lane created Penguin Books in the U.K. and with it, the universal format (4.25” x 6.87”) that could be mass produced cheaply and distributed across a wide variety of markets and outlets. The first American paperback book publisher—Pocket Books—released its first book, Wuthering Heights, in 1939.

Not only were mass-market paperbacks affordable, they weren’t limited to sales in bookstores. In time, newsstands, drug stores, grocery stores, gift shops, airports, Big Box stores like Walmart, gas stations—anywhere you could put a cheap wire rack—became outlets.

The mass-market paperback also created what became known in publishing as the “midlist,” which enabled authors who probably wouldn’t make it in hardcover to gain an audience and earn a living. Several generations of writers thrived and became famous thanks to the mass-market paperback. Louis L’Amour wrote more than 130 books in his long career; all but four of them were mass-market paperbacks. Someone once told me that John D. MacDonald calculated the size of his advances for the Travis McGee novels on the first print run of his mass-market paperback.

Is that a true story? Who knows, but it’s a great story.

Mass-market paperbacks also outsold the hell out of hardcovers. In the PW article, Milliot and Stewart cited the figures for Jacqueline Susann’s 1966 blockbuster hit, Valley of the Dolls. Upon its release, Susann’s potboiler sold 300,000 hardcovers that year, which is certainly nothing to be ashamed of.

Then Bantam released the paperback in 1967 and it sold 4,000,000 copies in the first week. It went on to double that number in its first year. The mass-market paperback lifted the fortunes of publishers beyond the Big Five. The mass-market paperback played a huge role in making independent powerhouse Kensington Publishing as successful as it’s been. Milliot and Stewart cited Kensington CEO Steve Zacharius’s statement that the mass-market paperback was the foundation of Kensington’s success. Kensington’s best-selling author of all time is Fern Michaels; the bulk of her 42 million sales were mass-market paperbacks.

All genres benefited from the format, especially the most popular commercial genres like romance, mystery and crime fiction, and science fiction. In my own career, the mass-market paperback made me a nice living for nearly a decade. My first three book deals with St. Martin’s Press were hardcover and the sales were never that impressive. But once I launched my Music City Murders series, featuring private detective Harry James Denton, with Ballantine Books, my mass-market numbers built what career I had. I published six books in that series and every one of them was either nominated or won a major mystery award (including both an Edgar and Shamus Award). It all worked beautifully…

Until it didn’t anymore.

What happened?

I can only relate a personal experience here. In 1996, I signed a two-book contract with Ballantine Books (I had only taken single contracts before because, candidly, the money was pretty terrible and I didn’t want to get locked in). I’d been nominated for an Edgar twice, won it once, and had also been multiply nominated for the Shamus and short-listed for the Anthony. My editor at Ballantine said if I’d take a two-book deal, he'd move me into lead title and the second book in the contract would go hard/soft.

I took the offer. The first book in the deal was Murder Manual, published in 1998. After several Shamus nominations, I was thrilled to finally win one with that book. I began working on the second book in the deal when suddenly my editor seemed to go into an extended period of radio silence.

Finally, I reached out to him and told him how excited I was to finally see Harry James Denton in hardcover. When would I see a cover comp?

Long, awkward, silence…

“About that, Steve,” he said. “We’ve done an extensive audit on the sales of Murder Manual, and we thought the numbers were going to be impressive. Then, out of nowhere, we started getting a ton of returns. Your sell-through ultimately was so low we’ve cancelled the hardcover.”

He explained to me that through the late 90s, there were roughly 1100 companies across the country that were independent distributors; that is, they were small, often family-owned companies that served a specific local market. Most books were sold through those companies.

In the last few years, though, there had been a wave of acquisitions (with Nashville’s own Ingram Books being one of the most active at gobbling up smaller companies), changes in tax laws, and especially bankruptcies, which decimated that market. And while companies were either being acquired or working their way through bankruptcy courts, hundreds of thousands of mass-market paperbacks sat gathering dust, cheap paper fading to yellow, in hundreds of warehouses across the country.

When the companies were acquired or released from bankruptcy, hundreds of thousands of mass-market paperbacks—their covers ripped off and sent back to the publisher as returns—were shredded and pulped.

Milliot and Stewart backed up what my editor told me over twenty-five years ago. They quoted a study done by the Book Industry Study Group that revealed mass market sales in 1996 fell 3.3% from the previous year. The downward slope continued through the early 2000s, through the introduction of the eBook in 2006, until 2011, when eBook sales and mass market sales were roughly equal. Unfortunately, that parity of numbers disguised the fact that mass-market paperback sales were down by $500 million that year, while eBook sales had grown by $1 billion.

To deploy another effective cliché, it was death by a thousand cuts.

And now it’s dead. They’ll surely be a few mass-market paperbacks around for a few more years, but as a cultural force in society, as a huge segment of the publishing industry, it’s over.

The mass-market paperback democratized literature in America; it turned us into a nation of readers. When America went to war in December 1941, publishers stepped up with special format mass-market paperbacks in what were known as the “Armed Services Edition.” I have several of those in my collection, including Graham Greene’s The Confidential Agent and several GI paperbacks my uncle carried across Europe and through the Battle of the Bulge. These old treasures are frail now, their cheap, high-acid content paper yellowed and brittle, their bindings cracked and flaking.

But they were carried by hundreds of thousands of soldiers through a world war and all those GIs found escape and comfort in them. And hopefully, they developed a love of reading that they carried with them through the rest of their lives.

It’s sad to see the mass-market paperback sunset. But as I’ve learned the hard way over many orbits around the sun, all good things must come to an end.

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Another valuable life lesson is that when one door closes, another opens. Over the next few months, we’re going to go on an adventure together by way of this column.

I have a writing partner in New York City, Wayne McDaniel. He’s a fabulous screenwriter, novelist, documentarian, with an MFA in Film from Columbia University, as well as a helluva great guy. In 2014, we published a novel called Resurrection Bay.

Several years after that, we wrote a novel together called Pearson Place. This project is literally one of the best books I’ve ever been involved in. I’ll have more to say on the book itself next month.

Wayne and I have spent the last few years trying to find a publisher for this novel. We gave it everything we had. We set up a Query Tracker account and queried dozens of agents. Zilch. Nada. As many of you know, getting trad publishing’s attention these days is harder than ever.

Finally, through a connection (which is really how almost everything is done in publishing), we got an editor at a medium-sized-but-prestigious-publisher to take a look at the manuscript.

We were gobsmacked and thrilled when she loved the book. Literally, that’s what she told us. She loved the freakin’ thing. As in many corporate entities, though, all decisions are made by consensus and there was one person on the acquisitions committee who had problems with the book and vetoed it.

Then this editor did something I have literally never seen before in my forty years in publishing; she said if Wayne and I would do a rewrite and address the issues her colleague had, she’d take the book back and try again.

Without hesitation, we did a rewrite.

The editor loved what we did and took it back to committee. Six months and more went by and finally she called us, nearly in tears, and said her colleague wouldn’t budge. We were all heartbroken, but I think she took it harder than we did.

So Wayne and I decided to go a different route. We’re going to serialize the book on Substack. We’ve broken the book out into individual Substack posts/chapters and are writing supplemental material to go with it and just learning how this is done.

It’s a revolutionary way to get books out there, digitized and delivered via the Internet. Nothing like this has ever been done before.

Oh, wait. There was that Dickens fellow who did it with David Copperfield, The Pickwick Papers, and The Mystery of Edwin Drood—among others—over 160 years ago. I guess everything old is new again.

Thanks for playing along. See you next month.