How hard is it to be a novelist in Taiwan?Taiwan has a small reading population and modest advances for a first print run. It often takes six months to a year or more from acceptance to getting paid, and publishing one book doesn’t guarantee readers will buy the next. An early benefactor, an editor, helped Utsudo see these realities and left her with a motto: “write more, read more, submit more, publish more.”

Translated from Utsudo’s original Chinese column.

Meeting the benefactor who influenced me most

　　Aboutbenefactors: for someone like me who started from nothing, every editor and reader who has appreciated my work is a benefactor. But the one I want to talk about today influenced me most in the early days — the one who opened the eyes of my starry-eyed younger self to the harsh side of commercial publishing.

　　If he hadn’t given me that wake-up call first, I probably would have taken many more wrong turns before learning what he taught me.

　　I met this benefactor at the publisher I mentioned before — the one that signed my book but never published it.

　　As I recall, about three months after I signed, the editor-in-chief handed me over to a freelance editor. Let’s call him Editor 77-Nougat-Chocolate (um, that’s long).

　　This editor was incredibly enthusiastic and passionate about light novels — you could feel it in the way he talked, and I respected his professionalism from the bottom of my heart.

　　He mentored the rookie me with great care. Every time the month the editor-in-chief had promised for my book came and went, I’d go ask him what was going on (to vent?), because I didn’t dare bother the big boss XD

　　He’d say helplessly that he was only a freelancer without much say in decisions. Even so, he’d chat with me and encourage me — often until past midnight.

　　I usually went to bed around 10:30, but talking with him made me forget my fatigue. And it often happened that when you scrolled through the chat window, it was almost all him talking, with me chiming in now and then to show I was still there XD

　　I had no choice — replying just “mm” or “oh” felt dismissive… but I was frantically taking notes the whole time. I’m not sure those notes survived; I didn’t know to back things up back then, and they may have been wiped when I reinstalled my computer QQ

　　If I find them, I’ll write a few more posts. I don’t remember much and I’m not even sure of the details, but I recall he had a friend drawing manga in Japan who was serialized in a major magazine, that he was one of the early pioneers who brought light novels to Taiwan, and that he had cats (this is the important part!

The harsh realities of being a novelist in Taiwan

　　Back then I was full of myself (fools rush in, as they say), and I once told him confidently: “I want my work to be adapted into an anime” — that was my dream. He told me bluntly that it was extremely difficult, and that I’d have a better chance in mainland China.

　　But mainland animation back then was still mostly the kind toddlers watch… Of course I wasn’t convinced. It never occurred to me that I was just a newbie with nothing — even a toddler cartoon adaptation wouldn’t have come my way XD

　　Then he asked how far I could go for my novels. In mainland China, writing ten thousand characters a day is routine. Forget ten thousand a day — could I publish a book a month in Taiwan? He mentioned how a certain famous author writes five thousand characters every day and kept it up for over a decade to get where he is.

　　And because Taiwan’s reading population is small, advances for a first printing are low. Setting aside writing time, it usually takes six months to a year or more from acceptance to publication to getting paid — how do you live in the meantime? Not to mention if the book isn’t accepted, and all that work earns nothing.

　　For me — still thinking writing was easy, fun and lucrative — this was a heavy blow. I loved writing, but I never counted how many words I wrote a day. I just wanted to enjoy it, sell to a big publisher effortlessly, and let the publisher make me famous.

　　I’d been naive all along. So what if you publish a book, or even have a hit? Readers won’t necessarily buy the next one… And publishers restructure and change strategies — a line might be shut down or scaled back, affecting your future publishing plans.

　　The hardest part is probably staying in the market against all odds. So many people become popular for a moment and then quietly disappear — a brief firework, its trace easily erased by time.

　　Next: how will you keep going at a job of constant output, get through the tedium of writing and revising — work that demands huge passion for very little pay? And how long will you write?

　　Or rather — how long can you write?

　　Some might say you can write while working a day job (publishing, or posting online regularly under pressure). But burning the candle at both ends isn’t something everyone can bear. Passion may carry you at first, but for how long?

　　I know an author with a fairly popular book who is considering quitting because the return on writing is too low, and who has been gradually stepping away from print publishing.

Deciding to keep writing: five thousand characters a day

　　I remember the night after that talk with Editor 77-Nougat-Chocolate (so long!), I couldn’t sleep.

　　For the first time I realized that the world I’d stumbled into out of sheer interest was this harsh.

　　Because breaking in had been too easy — I wrote my first novel, sent it to a publisher I’d admired for years, heard back in a week that it was accepted, and even signed another series after that… it all went so smoothly that I had a completely wrong idea of this line of work.

　　I took some time to settle down and figure out what I really wanted.

　　Ah — I still wanted to keep writing. This world is just too interesting. I can’t understand how anyone gets tired of it, or what “running out of ideas” even means. All I see are countless stories waiting for me to finish them, and characters clamoring for me to hurry up and write their stories!

　　In that case,there’s only one road ahead — what is there to hesitate about?

　　I want to give it everything. I’d rather try and fail than give up without doing anything.

　　From that day on, I wrote five thousand characters a day and kept it up for quite a while — and sure enough, I produced a huge pile of work (though plenty of it was never published XD 

　　Later my creative output slowed, and my eyesight was affected too, but I’ve kept writing.

　　These days nearly every new manuscript I write finds a publisher, so I don’t have to push as hard as before, and I’ve shifted my focus from quantity to quality.

A four-part motto for newcomers

　　I remember that editor once gave me some advice, which I now want to pass on to newcomers: “write more, read more, submit more, publish more.” Following it doesn’t mean everything will go smoothly from then on, nor that it will make you hugely popular.

　　But at least it keeps you moving forward on this rough, dark road with no end in sight. If you truly want to do this for a living, you have to be prepared to endure — with no guarantee you’ll make it.

　　So ask yourself:how much are you willing to pay for your dream? 

　　My answer today is the same as it was ten years ago: a lifetime. The future is full of unknowns, and I can’t be sure I’ll feel as certain in another ten years. But I believe the world will always need storytellers, and my wish to be one of them will never change.

　　Publishing a book a month also depends on publishers’ schedules and other factors, but in 2017 I managed to have a new book every month for over half a year — and I think there were even a month or two with two books.

　　I actually met this editor a few more times later — I’ll tell you about that another time XD

FAQ

Further reading (in Chinese)

• Previous: #01 (in Chinese)
• Next: #03 (in Chinese)
• Column introduction
• Utsudo’s books

About the author

Utsudo is a Taiwanese light novelist and novelist VTuber with more than ten years in the industry and 40 commercially published print books. Her novel 《遺失的情書》 received a 2022 Ministry of Culture youth creative award. The 《嘿！聽說妳在鬼島當作家》 series records her experiences as a novelist in Taiwan.

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