(obligatory dog tax of our newly adopted fur baby to entice you to keep reading this very long post)
Long post ahead…
Traditional publishing is a strange business, and that’s okay. A lot of us like to pretend it’s not all about competition, that we’re artists and we love each other, and then…
Royalty statements hit.
List season comes around.
And suddenly we’re all back in high school again, vying for “Most Likely to Succeed,” or “Most Talented,” or “Best All Around.” Look, you can be the gothiest little East Texas book nerd you can be, hiding out all the time in the newspaper room or the library or the photo darkroom (as my middle schoolers refer to it, “Way back in the 1900s”) and still pout when not only is there no category titled, “Most Library Books Read, 1999-2000” but also you don’t get “Most Likely to Succeed,” and have to settle for “Who’s Who.”
To be fair, in many ways I mentally checked out on my debut at least a good ten months before it launched. Am I sad I’m not on any lists? Well, a little (see above). Did I expect to be? No, not really.
But in the spirit of lists (of which I’m not on), here’s what I would do differently if I could teleport way back—perhaps not to Way Back in the 1900s, but merely back to 2022.
(Of course, my customary disclaimer: I dislike prescriptive writing/publishing advice because circumstances can often vary wildly, so your mileage may vary)
Write the wait but maybe wait to write
Remember what I said about prescriptive writing advice?
This is what EVERYONE gets told, from the time you are querying to the time you’re on sub. Don’t waste time, write the wait, so if that project doesn’t sell, you’ll have something else to pivot to.
I mean, technically, it’s great advice. There is nothing to soothe all the angst from rejection letters like falling in love with new characters—until you realize that the feedback from those rejection letters is either creeping into the new book or maybe they have a point and you should STOP with the new book until you assess. Or maybe you have a growing concern that you’re not getting the right feedback (I know, at various points in our writing careers all writers will fall victim to the classic blunder of assuming ALL FEEDBACK IS GOOD, no it is not).
So I think instead of trying to write the NEXT BIG THING while I was on sub, I would have focused on either not writing or writing something to make me happy.
Because by the time I got an offer, yes, I did have a next book written.
Only my agent didn’t want it.
Trust your gut
That I spent three months while on sub pounding out a draft on a concept and outline my agent approved, only for them to say (without reading pages) that they didn’t think they could sell it should have been a giant red flag.
Even if they were in the middle of negotiating the contract for my debut.
But I assumed they knew best, swallowed my pride, shelved the draft, and sent them a pitch/synopsis/outline for another book—this one a rewrite of a book I had pitched during that all-important call that they gushed over, then came back once I had signed with the agency to say they didn’t think they wanted but maybe if I did x, y, and z. So, as you can imagine, I did do x, y, and z (because I was going to be that agent’s gold star super A+++ client) and…well, they would try to sell it, but would need fifty pages, so I should start writing.
In the middle of all this, a fiasco arises around my dev edits that results in me getting a three-page edit letter with a turn time of two weeks. I email my agent, panicked, because like most writers, I have a family and a day job, but received no response.
I felt like I was on an island, floating out in the middle of publishing land, yelling for help with no response. This, I was sure, wasn’t how things were supposed to be, but none of my critique partners had book deals, so outside of a whisper network, there was no one to tell us any differently.
I sent the edits in and received word that the agent had pitched the second book to the publisher as an option based on a long blurb, but they weren’t interested—and after a two-week turn time for dev edits, I wasn’t sure I wanted to do a second book there anyway. But my agent also wasn’t interested in taking that book out on sub.
So I sent in a third idea, which my agent liked, until they saw pages and shredded the concept. The email arrived while my family was in the middle of moving and I was recovering from COVID, and, frankly, I didn’t have the emotional/mental energy to even read their comments on the doc.
I started wondering if maybe that one book I managed to query and my agent had sold was a fluke. Perhaps I’d never write again.
Thankfully, I connected with local writers who had significantly more experience writing and publishing than I had. My critique partners also wouldn’t tolerate me just giving up. It still, though, took another nine months—NINE MONTHS—and another finished draft of a new novel for me to finally work up the nerve to leave.
The power imbalance of traditional publishing means we spend months (years? decades?) searching for an agent so when we finally get one, we’re hesitant to question them or walk away. But if you’re starting to wonder in your gut that things aren’t right…
Well, you’re probably not wrong.
Who’s in your corner matters, but don’t let everyone into your corner
(and its corollary, people in your corner may—and likely do—have motives of their own)
Again, with a classic blunder: writers are solitary creatures who in a contradictory turn of events crave community, so we fling open the door and exchange critiques with ANYONE. The truth is, though, that your critique group will likely never be static. People and their availability will ebb and flow. How you manage that is up to you.
If you are lucky, you will have found a critique group where you’re all more or less on the same level and that group will go through querying, becoming agented, going on sub, and selling books together. If you are very lucky, you’ll all be in the same genre.
(Maybe later I can discuss the pros/cons of this; let me know if this is something you’d be interested in!)
If you’re incredibly lucky, this will all work out and you’ll have lifelong book besties to go to each other’s signings, promote each other’s stuff on social media and just generally mutually adore, but here’s the truth of the matter: sometimes, through no fault of your own, some or all of these relationships shift and/or fail.
I have some critique partners who I work with on every project. I have some that we talk every day and we know where our projects stand, but we may not have time to read words (or we have to schedule it out around day job, kids, coaching, blurbing, reviews, etc.). And I have some that just due to life or circumstances we’re not in close contact but I still smile when I see their names in my social media feeds. Then there are a few that we haven’t spoken in quite a while, either because our critique styles didn’t mesh or boundaries weren’t respected.
The good news? Every see you around is an opportunity for a new hello.
No one else will look out for your career like you will
My first royalty statement hit and I was shocked that items were missing. Surely my (now prior) agent should have caught them. As a habit from my day job, I save every email, so I did have the original notification to say that, yes, I was entitled to the money. Perhaps because I’m not so worried about being a bother anymore, I emailed the agency and asked—and, yes, now I have a revised royalty statement in hand.
But a year ago, I might not have done so, and I can honestly say that there are a lot of writers I know who would rather suffer quietly than feel like they’re nagging or pestering. Let go of this mentality and guard the fruits of your writing labor as fiercely as you guard your work and family.
(because my children will inherit any literary rights one day, I now justify it to myself as looking out for them, so it helps me mama bear a little better, but you do you!)
Swag for swag’s sake
Maybe swag DOES move the needle on pre-order campaigns. Maybe it doesn’t. But if it makes you happy, why not? I regret I didn’t do any cute stickers like Katherine Olson did for CLOSE ENOUGH TO HURT, adorable enamel pins, or even earrings I won’t wear (sorry, I hate earrings). I wish I’d had the mental energy in the January-March timeframe but…I didn’t. I did absolutely adore the art I commissioned and I’m still pondering whether I want to blow it up side-by-side with the cover and frame it for my office and maybe I still will.
But the next book is definitely getting stickers.
Almost done, I promise…
Whew, this is a lot, but hey—I haven’t written anything other than fiction drafts in FOREVER and this is my way of stalling on revisions for the FOUR separate books I now have to work through with my new agent.
Here are some recent favorite reads:
NONE OF THIS IS TRUE - Lisa Jewell - at no point in this book did I have any idea what was going to happen or who was telling the truth and I adored it
STARLING HOUSE - Alix E. Harrow - beautifully done Southern Gothic that’s somehow gritty and lush at the same time…and that ending!
I did recently also polish off THE ONLY ONE LEFT by Riley Sager; I want to like his work so much, but I have feelings about his usage of a gender-neutral pen name and then always writing 1POV from a woman’s perspective. It’s almost…exploitative? I’m sure he’s a very nice person and this one has some great twists. It’s set in the early 1980s in Maine and I’m honestly still sorting out my thoughts. Maybe more to come later.
If you’re a romance reader, NOT YOU AGAIN by Ingrid Pierce comes out next summer. Full disclosure, Ingrid is one of my writing besties and I think I have read every draft of this book except the one turned in for copy edits, but I still think everyone should read Kit and Andie!
I hope to get into a more regular posting schedule, even if it’s another way to procrastinate on edits and revisions now that my critique partners have informed me NO NEW DRAFTS until these are done. Please let me know in the comments if there are questions or things you’d like to see more writing on; I always feel like I know nothing about anything until a specific question is asked and I begin to blurt out information.
Until next time :)