Y’all!
My book has been out with publishers for a couple of weeks now, and I’m starting to get the feeling it’s going to be a tough sell.
Everyone loves my writing!
Everyone simultaneously finds my story alienating!
How on earth can I continue to write a newsletter about my 20 years of experience in the publishing industry if I can’t sell my book?
How on earth can I continue to work as a book developer if I can’t sell my book?
How on earth will I continue to provide for myself if I can’t sell my book?
!!!
These are some of the thoughts that have been running through my head this week and have had me weeping through my high intensity interval training classes.
It hasn’t been fun. I mean, burpies are bad enough when it’s just sweat rolling down your face.
But still, I get up each morning, make pancakes, play a video game or two, and do my best to show up for my clients. As I immerse myself in their projects, I remember I do know a thing or two about bookmaking even if the industry time and again likes to remind me that, like hot boi Jon Snow,
I know nothing.
Which reminds me: have you seen that pic of Kit Harrington in THOSE JEANS?
You’re welcome.
But I digress.
I am trying to focus on the bright side. Earlier this month, one of my nonfiction clients sold a book I developed to a major house. Another client sent me a glowing letter about how much I transformed her novel. And not too long ago, I received a thoughtful note from an editor about how beautiful a book I ghostwrote is.
In a delightfully ironic twist, that same house that so loved the book I wrote for someone else rejected the one I wrote under my own name!
It’s pointless to try to make sense of an industry whose members claim that their tastes are subjective when, in fact, what is often stopping them from buying books has little to do with personal preference and everything to do with financial pressure. I know this well because I was an acquiring editor for eight years. I’ve been there.
Editors can take a chance or two a year, of course, but for the most part they need to publish sure-bet books that will sell.
And I’ve known for some time now that nothing I write is gonna be a sure bet. I’m too weird for the normies and too normie for the weirds. I’ve spent way more time helping other people develop their brands and way too little time developing my own. I’m not a book club pick kind of writer but neither am I redefining the rules of postmodernism or whatever.
That said, I do know how to write commercially-viable books that will appeal to a wide audience. I write them all day long for my clients.
Perhaps that’s why when I do have the time time write for myself, I want to do something a little different. I want to go deep, take chances, and let my mind go where it wants to go.
My friend Brooke once told me I like to follow the cerebral thread of stories, and she was absolutely right. If I were a man and interested in behavioral economics and game theory and chess, publishers would call me a “polymath.” But since I’m a woman* interested in tarot and Ayurvedic medicine and the aesthetics of horror movies, no one seems to know what to do with me.
I’m not for everyone.
But I know I’m not the only reader who craves the kind of stories I tell.
And so I keep going.
When I was in college I remember someone asked my friend Dan where we were going that evening. Dan had been bestowed with the nickname “Salty Dan” because he was essentially a 78-year-old curmudgeon in the body of an 18-year-old man.
He sighed, as if to say, “Does it matter?”
Then he answered with the weariness of someone who’d just come home from a particularly long stretch at sea.
“Who cares?” he said. “Everywhere I go I just sit.”
When he said that, we all died, it was so funny.
But Salty Dan was dead-on serious. What I took him to mean was that it didn’t really matter where we went—we were just going to hang with the people we always did. We were a tight-knit little group of stoners who didn’t fit so easily into any of the other categories our college—and our world—seemed so hellbent on stuffing us into.
We hung out in different bars, dorm rooms, and musty old attics but still, every night was us, more or less, sitting around.
On the surface anyway.
What was really happening was much more complicated. We were falling in love without talking about it. We were having our hearts shattered by an offhand comment or a withering glance. We were learning the rules of adulthood and wondering if we had any power to alter them.
When it comes to the books I like to read, and the ones I want to write, they’re books by people who are fascinated by what’s happening underneath the surface.
And I’ll be perfectly frank. Nothing puts me to sleep faster than a book about a travel to the top of the mountain or a journey around the world. (There are, of course, many exceptions—my point is, I want books of ideas, not simply movement.)
This is why I will often skip by descriptions of people, places, and things—I trained myself early on to speed-read through the geographical or spatial or physical details I consider non-essential. I’m the kind of reader who cares more about the ideas and memories a meadow evokes than the actual meadow.
I know what a meadow looks and smells like. I don’t need you to tell me.
“What were you thinking?” Is what I want to know.
“How did you feel?”
What I’m reading/want to read
As I contemplated the future of my second book, I took solace in Jeanna Kadlec’s great piece at Electric Literature about the pressure to publish young.
As someone who views the creative life as a marathon not a sprint (when I’m not freaking out about my book not selling, that is!), I am also looking forward to checking out Late Bloomers by Rich Karlgaard.
[*a note on gender: I call myself a “woman” because up until four years ago I didn’t realize I had the choice to call myself anything but. But since we’ve entered an era where we do have that choice, it’s worth mentioning that, in my heart, I identify as androgynous.
That said, I’ve spent enough time in a culture that loves a good old-fashioned binary that I feel equally comfortable calling myself a woman and using the pronouns “she/her.”
I’ve always felt like I hovered somewhere between girl and boy—close to girl, often very close, but never quite that, never only that—but that’s not something most people were talking about when I was coming of age, at least not in the way we talk about it today. I’m grateful that we’re having conversations about gender fluidity today but I think there are a lot of Gen-X’ers who, like me, are still getting comfortable with what exactly it means to be genderqueer. Moreover, because I am a white person who presents femme, I am acutely aware that I am not dealing with the same challenges as so many of my peers, so I want to be careful not to let my voice drown out the voices of those whose gender identification puts them in much greater danger.
I do often wonder if it’s my complex relationship to my gender that makes me the kind of writer I am. If I became interested in what’s going on underneath the surface precisely because I have always understood that the images we present to the world are often at odds with what we feel inside.
This is something I’ll continue to explore in my work, as I do not want my complicated relationship with gender to exist solely as a footnote.]