Like most writers, I have a day job, but I’m able to get so much more done when I can take time off and focus on a project. I have a novel that I’m working on that’s very weird and very queer, but progress was stalling because of life.
Enter a grant for queer writers writing queer books. I’d never applied for a grant before, so I didn’t have any of the materials, such as the CV. Unlike a regular resume, a CV is supposed to be everything, including all of your publications. I wanted to include the pieces that I wrote in college for The Reporter. At one point, I did have physical copies of each of the issues, but no longer do, and I hadn’t bothered to keep a record of what I’d written, so I needed to look up all my old articles.
Wouldn’t you know it, the website wasn’t the same one over a decade later? At some point, it got remade/rebooted, so all the old pieces weren’t accessible (or straight-up gone). I was able to find them in the school’s library’s database, where it listed the names of the writers for each piece within it. But, since I wasn’t a student, I couldn’t access them.
I was able to get in touch with a librarian, who sent me some PDFs of the issues. “Some,” not “all,” because even she wasn’t able to access every issue of The Reporter. So there’s some work of mine that I straight-up cannot access in any way, which sucks! If only I’d been smarter and planned for this!
The data lifecycle (again)
We talked about this a bit in the [previous post], but here’s a (slightly complicated, but CC licensed) diagram on the data life cycle.
As writers, most of our time is spent in the data gathering (or generation) phase (i.e. we’re writing), then we’re working on said data (revising) with the ultimate goal of sharing the data (publishing).
(Like the previous post, I’m using the word “data” to mean all of our work, as well as notes, research materials, or other things that’s important to us. Data can be both physical or digital.)
Once something is published, it’s exceedingly difficult to change…but also, once something is published, it’s no longer fully in your hands. The magazine is selling the epub or physical issues, Ingram is printing your POD books, someone has your poem on their website. But what happens if the magazine goes out of business? What happens if a website goes dark? Where do your stories go?
What’s archiving, anyways?
You can think of archiving as making a historical record. This is data that we’re not going to be actively working on or changing, and it’s not data we’re going to need at hand to do our day-to-day work. This is data we want to keep, just in case we might need it later. Or if the other versions no longer exist, which is the worst-case scenario.
Here are some things you’ll probably want to archive, and why:
- Contracts (in case problems arise, you want to resell a work, comparing historical contracts to modern ones)
- Podcast episodes (in case the podcast disappears)
- Webpages (in case the website disappears)
- Physical magazine issues, books, zines, etc (in case you can’t buy new copies anymore, like if it’s a limited-run or the publisher implodes)
- Writing notebooks, handwritten pages, and other stuff from the generative stage (who knows, you might want those notes!)
- Info about you: press releases, glowing reviews, award shortlists (very nice to look at when you’re feeling down!)
- Your cringe writing from high school (who knows, there might be a good idea in there)
Since data storage is so cheap now (both physical media in your home and cloud storage), you should store digital copies of anything and everything. But first, we gotta make those copies.
This is the part where I give you homework
The issue with The Reporter really scared me into developing a process so that this never happens to me again, and I don’t want you to go through the same thing!
When I get an acceptance for a piece, I store a copy of the contract in an archive folder just for contracts, as well as make a new entry into a spreadsheet that tracks all of my publications. Once the piece comes out, I:
- Record the date, publisher, and “type” (webpage, podcast, issue, etc)
- Save a URL to the piece (or where to buy the book etc.)
- Mark that I archived the piece
What that archival looks like is slightly different based on the formats of the piece
- A video is pulled using a tool and saved (.mp4)
- A podcast is pulled (usually just by inspecting the HTML) and saved (.mp3)
- A webpage is saved as a PDF (and/or complete HTML, if it’s not static) AND I print it out with my printer
- A digital issue’s file is saved (PDF)
- An ebook’s file is saved (epub)
- A physical book/issue is put on a specific shelf in my aparatment
I then also record the basics of the piece in a specific binder, which is also where the print-outs go. So I now have 1-3 copies of a story saved in a combination of digital and physical locations, as well as the contract, so if something ever disappears, I’ll know exactly when it came out and what it looked like.
This homework has two parts, and it might suck a lot! The best time to archive something was the day it came out. The second best time is now.
- Determine what information for each publication you want to keep a copy of. At a minimum, you’ll want the market name, date, and a copy of the contract (if you don’t care if the content is gone forever), but you should probably have at least a digital copy (like a PDF).
- Go and get all the info/copies of all of your previous publications!
Depending on how long your career is, this might take a really long time and a lot of hunting people down. You might find that some of your work is already gone. It might exist on [the Internet Archive], and you can try asking your TOC-mates or other writers if they have their own copies of issues or books (and would be ever so kind to send you a copy/scans of your work). You might have to get creative, including pirated copies, if the official channels no longer exist.
This will be much easier to do the day a story is published. You can always ask the editor for official files, like podcast episodes or ebooks, and they’ll likely be more than happy to help you out. They don’t want to see your work disappear, either!
What to do with all that stuff (digitally)
Now you have a big stack of files, how can we store them?
If you’ve already did the steps in the [backups post], you already have multiple copies of your data, including in different locations. You can simply make an “archives” folder and everything will be snuggled safe and sound in the cloud. If storage size is a concern, you can compress files if needed.
If you want to be super-duper sure, you can make a true offsite/physical backup by making copies of your archives onto a separate hard drive that you’ll store with your physical items. Just make sure you have a regularly-scheduled process where you add new files (backups aren’t worth much if you never back up!)
What to do with all that stuff (analog-ally)
You probably also now have a pile of books, mags, and papers, too. What can we do with those?
For things like contracts sent in the mail, you can scan the pages and then save the resulting PDF with your other digital files. If you have a smart phone, you have a scanner. Just make sure you use a real app and not something you randomly downloaded (since those tend to be malware). Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive have document scanners built-in, as do many native camera apps.
You might also have access to a Xerox machine at your place of employment, or the library, but it carries a non-0 risk that someone might see what you’ve scanned. Which may be a big deal, for contracts that include personally identifiable information, including tax info. A lot of home printers have scanners, so ask your friends if you don’t have one yourself.
You can scan only the relevant parts of magazine issues and anthologies, since scanning the whole would be quite tedious.
Since physical media takes up more space, where you put it has to be carefully considered. Temperature and humidity can easily damage books and papers. [The Library of Congress] has additional info on book storage, including what materials you should use for containers.
If you’re okay with having all your eggs in a singular (but easily accessible) basket, you can store your physical data in your own home (such as a bookshelf or file cabinet). If you live in a part of the world that’s at high risk for natural disasters (especially ones with lots of water), you might want to consider keeping your archives elsewhere. This can be a trusted family member, friend, or a self-storage unit.
Remember, the purpose of an archive isn’t for something you’ll want to access anytime soon. You want to store things in case you’ll need it years into the future and your normal records/backups fail.
Closing
Archiving, like backups, hold true the adage “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” You take a moment to lock your front door before you leave, just in case a bad guy tries something. The risk may be small, but it’s not 0, but the action to protect yourself is so minor, you don’t think of it. You should take those moments to save your publications in case of the small, but not 0, chance your work is no longer accessible.
New publications pop up and fade out all the time, and any writer who publishes widely is going to experience this at some point or another. While less common now, certain formats are inherently ephemeral, like physical-only magazines and those little story dispensers at train stations.
It’s easy to think that someone else will do the work for you. After all, isn’t that why The Internet Archive exists? But it’s not perfect; it doesn’t capture every web page every moment of every day. It might not capture multimedia, like podcasts and videos. Yes, you should assume anything posted on the Internet will be there for forever, but you cannot rely on this fact to handle archival for you.
Next up: uh oh! You accidentally used your first rights! Let’s talk about how to not do that.
Caveats
This might not work on all forms of “work” you might have. For example, if you’re a writer for a TV show, there’s…a lot more legal issues with acquiring copies of published work. Especially streaming-only shows. Legally, I cannot tell you you might need to pirate your own work in order to have a digital copy, because streaming sites cannot be trusted to keep your work accessible (as we’ve all so clearly seen).
You should also think about what forms of storage/access will be available in the future. Saving a story as a Scrivener project won’t be very useful if Scrivener goes out of business (and you no longer have a copy of the software).
Legally, I cannot tell you that you might need to pirate a cracked version of Scrivener in the future if you don’t keep the installer/product key in your archives, and, even then, you might run into compatibility issues with your modern OS. You could put Scrivener into, say, a Windows 10 VM, but then you’d need to run irm https://get.activated.win | iex in PowerShell to activate Windows without a product key, which utilizes a built-in tool of Windows, so you’re not doing anything wrong, but I’m not a lawyer, so don’t listen to me. Of course, if Scrivener went out of business, the ability to validate a license would be gone, too, so what other options do you even have?
Since Scrivener keeps things as RTF files, you could rebuild your project into something else…but have you ever actually looked into your Scrivener folders? Nothing is labeled in a human-readable manner. It’s a god damn nightmare. It’ll take you hours per project to turn it into something else, and you’ll still be missing tags/keywords/labels.
(This is why you’ll never catch me using crap like Reedsy, because I have 0 faith it’ll exist in 5 years, let alone 10, 20, 30. At least Scrivener is an installer I can “own” and use “forever,” even if I’ll have to re-set the trial every 30 days.)
Since writing is such a long-term process, I strongly recommend writers be really intentional in what tools they choose, with an eye for long-term usability. Platform/company-agnostic file types will serve you the best if and when you need to pack up and move. Who remembers when .x Office files were unusable by anyone not using the latest version of Office? Same with ports: don’t use digital storage that can only be accessed with an Apple lightning cable or some other silly, non-standard thing only one company owns/uses. You don’t want to be paying $50 for a cable on eBay down the line because your cat ate yours.
Like your backups, make sure to check up on your archives time to time, to ensure they’re not damaged, destroyed, or otherwise inaccessible. You could have multiple copies of your archive in different places, but that is probably overkill for most people. Everyone can tolerate different levels of risk, and if you don’t want to risk your backups and archives being destroyed in quick succession, then a second (or third…or fourth…) copy of your archive might be worth the extra time/money/logistics.
