April Experiment: Infinite Well-Meaning Golden Retrievers with Infinite Keyboards (Patreon)

Infinite Well-Meaning Golden Retrievers with Infinite Keyboards: A Guide to Publishing

Greeting, Mad Fictioneers! It is that season known as What the Fuck Is Happening Up in This Here New England Situation. A week ago, it snowed; today it is eighty degrees and everything in the garden is screaming: I CAN’T TAKE THIS KIND OF PRESSURE I NEED STABILITY! It is also the month of my birthday, which makes me always well-disposed toward May, even though May in Maine just can’t decide whether it wants to be an astronaut when it grows up or a frigid resurgence of winter. I accept May for who they are, no matter their lifestyle choices. 

And because May does find me so tenderhearted and generous toward everything, and it is so nice and warm outside for once, I have decided to let you in on a Real Secret. An honest-to-Aslan eldritch wisdom from beyond the dawn of time. It’s the biggest secret in publishing, one nearly impossible to guess from the outside, and even more impossible to believe when all you want is to be a part of this mad, misshapen world. You might even say it’s the secre. It’s definitely what all those infinite articles and essays and books on How to Write a Successful Novel and Achieve All Your Dreams Immediately and Without Fail are trying to obfuscate. Including mine. Are you ready? Are you firmly braced somewhere solid? Have you meditated at the cleric’s hut sufficiently to receive this ancient and hidden knowledge?

Very well. I entrust it to you. Tell no one.

Nobody involved in this industry, including and especially me, has any idea what we’re doing.

Oh, we are all pretty smart and capable people, and we really, really want to get it right every single time, we really mean very well from the first minute of the day to the last, but mostly, we spend those days groping in the dark for one solitary pink neon-filled rave baton to light the way, which baton may or may not actually be there. No one knows exactly how to make a book successful. No one. If anyone did, all published books would sell like Snickers in Lothlorien and we wouldn’t all be going prematurely grey hoping that this time, God, please let it happen this time, a novel hits.

The entire process is a series of gambles, not unlike the stock market, except perhaps more risk-averse. You can make educated bets, you can guess at what will resonate with the public, and the people who are best at guessing tend to be the editors who get promoted. But you can’t ever know. Almost everything you think of as a cultural staple right now—Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, The Hunger Games, The Handmaid’s Tale, Lord of the Rings, you name it—was not an obvious smash when the author sold it to them. Do you have any idea how many wizard boarding school books came out before Harry Potter and didn’t become billion-dollar industries in and of themselves? Because it’s a lot, and some of them were written by authors you know and love. The idea that American audiences would become completely obsessed with a bunch of British kids wasn’t a safe bet, either. YA and Middle Grade as the thriving genres we know were in many ways created by the success of Harry Potter. When I was a kid, you pretty much went straight from The Hobbit to The Stand. The gap between was filled with a few books, but nothing like the vast array that exists now.

Publishers can, to a certain extent, choose winners. Every author knows the frustration of seeing resources poured into a book that is patently Not Your Book while Your Book gets crumbs. But even those resources don’t necessarily guarantee anything. Authors you know and love also fail. George R. R. Martin had a long career before Game of Thrones, and he went to Hollywood and wrote television for fifteen years because he was given a HUGE advance for a horror novel that flopped so completely neither you nor I has ever heard of it. Someone gambled on that book, on the hot horror trend of the 80s, on Martin’s obvious gifts as a writer, on his past success, on his bankable name, all ingredients that on paper added up to a win, and a lot of people lost. Robin Hobb used to be a writer named Megan Lindholm, and had to change her name because she couldn’t sell books anymore, and that’s just the first person to come into my head who had to do that. It’s happens so frequently that every working writer has a pseudonym or two in their back pocket for a rainy day. In the late 90s, when almost all fantasy modeled itself lovingly on Lord of the Rings and Terry Brooks was the biggest thing going, an extremely adult, ultraviolent doorstopper fantasy series full of profanity, misery, death, incest, and very, very few heroes, written by a guy who had already had some huge flops, was a colossal risk. It could have gone the other way very, very easily. Lord of the Rings itself came out when fantasy was barely a genre of its own and the world still thought anything with elves was utterly and completely for children—and it was not a hit for many years. 

As of this writing, the #1 bestselling fiction book in America is a retelling of the ancient Greek myth of Circe, and it’s not even modernized or anything. Who fucking knew.

There are enough stories like this to keep aspiring writers up at night with the sweats for the rest of their lives. And none of them happened because anybody wrote a bad book or because an editor wasn’t trying their hardest to find and promote the best. We all mean well, but most things that light up the reading world are not terribly predictable, and trends can be very seductive and very dangerous. Yes, in the 80s, if you had a horror novel, you could sell it. And if you had a YA dystopia in the 2010s that was an easy pitch. But publishing is slow. It’s much faster than it’s ever been, and it’s still slow as Heinz. You have to be in the right place at the right time with a finished book in hand. Otherwise, by the time you finish writing your steampunk masterpiece, sell it, edit it, and release it, two years will have gone by and no one gives a shit about cogs and brass goggles anymore. And sometimes, your passions will flow with the zeitgeist, and sometimes they will not. Both or neither can make a bestseller. IT’S FUCKING MADNESS. It’s hard to remember now that no one really thought the MCU was going to work with all those C-List heroes, turning movies into episodes in a franchise, which no one was doing, which DC has continually failed at repeating, and it became the most profitable series of films of all time, with no sign of slowing down.

Whether or not a book sells is only tangentially related to whether or not it is any good. Bad books break records. Good books sink unnoticed. And you simply cannot tell which is going to happen until it’s already happening oh god.

And look, cats and kittens, I know this through bitter, bitter, torch-song experience. My most successful books are so unlikely as to beggar the mind and convulse it with giggles until it dies. I wrote Fairyland because I couldn’t sell a book in 2008 to save my life or anyone else’s and we couldn’t pay our rent. Literally zero people would have said “Oh, you know what America really wants in 2011 is a neo-Victorian fairy tale set during WWII with GIANT FUCK-OFF BIG WORD NO KID KNOWS right there in the title, which everyone could have read for free on the internet any time in the last two years.” My editor got phone calls from people saying she had made a terrible decision. And despite it becoming and international goddamned bestseller, not one single foreign market would buy it until it was already on the NYT list. I wrote than fricking book by the seat of my sparkly pants, in less than two months, barely thinking about it, playing around with what I felt was nothing much because no one would ever really publish it for realsies in print, and it made my entire career. Yet by the end of the series, sales had dwindled, which happens more often than you think. Series can mean many chances to win. They also mean many chances to outlive the zeitgeist and lose out to the next big thing. 

Spend five years painstakingly researching and writing and re-writing a book about the Brontes, which everyone was super excited about when the proposal went out? Tepid sales as three different editors phase in and out of the company over two years. These things cannot be predicted. 

And lo and knock-me-down behold, seven years later, what is my next big bestseller? Is it the one about superheroes’ girlfriends? Or the western Snow White? Or the sprawling multigenerational actual space opera? Or a YA dystopia or fat profane fantasy or anything remotely related to other books that are doing well right now? Nope. It’s a science fiction comedy about bloody Eurovision with a cover straight out of the 80s vinyl section. A genre which has been considered untouchable basically since the death of Douglas Adams and/or Terry Pratchett and an inspiration nobody in America has heard of or cares about. Which book involves a bunch of promiscuous genderfluid British people written by an American woman who has never, as far as the booksellers and sorters of the world are concerned, written anything but elegant fancy froo-froo shit in her life, let alone comedy with swears in. Which book was published during one of the most depressing eras of recent history, when everyone is reading political nonfiction for fun. 

OH YEAH SOUNDS LIKE A REAL WINNER. 

And yet. 

And yet. 

All of this sounds terrifying, I know. From the outside, it seems like everyone has their shit together, and if someone would just give you a chance, would just really look at your manuscript, you could get safely inside that circle of skyscrapers and lists and acclaim and everything would be okay. But in here, there are dragons, and the dragons are named Uncertainty, and there are more of them than there are of us, by far. THERE IS NO SAFETY IT IS THE WORST *laughter, leading into uncontrollable weeping*

So here’s the actual secret at the bottom of this nasty Pandora’s horrorshow. Since nobody knows what they’re doing, you can do anything. 

Do not worry about writing “what sells.” Do not concern yourself with what’s so hot right now, with trends, with vampires or steampunk or dystopia or mermaids or grimdark space marines or whatever hit the charts last week. Unless you really and truly from the bottom of your soul feel a fire to write about a steampunk vampire-mermaid fighting against the forces of a militaristic space-dystopia, then by all means, have at it. You might as well write what you want, what burns you up from head to toe, because by the time you finish it, that may be the next hot trend—or it might not be, it might just be the weird thing out of left field that starts a trend. You cannot possibly know. Almost any author will tell you that their most successful book wasn’t the one they thought it would be, and neither was their least successful. We all wrote every single one hoping and believing this one would be the big one, and whether we were right or wrong made no difference to how hard we believed at the time. 

To me, this relieves the pressure. When I think about how I’ve done best when I didn’t really care, I just wanted to write what I wanted to write, and I made choices that I couldn’t even tell whether they were dumb or brilliant, choices that scared and surprised me, books which had no reason for existing except that they were joyful and strange. If I had a wish for all of you, it would be to have the courage to take your dumbest, most unsellable idea and run with it, run hard and long and fast, and see what’s waiting there at the end. There are no guarantees. Brave books can die as easily as paycheck books. And in the end, the ulcers from each burn just the same. But since there are no guarantees that something will take off, there are no guarantees that something with crash down either, and it just might be that the weird thing in the back of your head is the next juggernaut waiting for the littlest sip of fuel.