What it's really like to be a writer
What happens when your book doesn't sell
Hi!
Before we get into What it’s really like to be a writer, I have a quick news flash. My short thriller, Meat, will be published on 12 June by Comma Press in the anthology, The Monster, Capital. It’s available to pre-order here; members of
can read it for free (it’s in the Bonus Stories section you receive when you pay for a subscription).Members can also see the 7 stages I took to writing this story here, journeying from blank page to finished story, which will hopefully be helpful, whatever you’re writing (and includes tips and suggested exercises).
I’m going to be talking about my story at the Cymera Festival if anyone is around and can come along? If not, you can watch it online from the comfort of your own home. I’ll be there with my editor, Ra Page, at 7pm Friday 6 June in bonny Edinburgh. Tickets available here. Hope to see you!
‘The night I watch Athena Liu die, we’re celebrating her TV deal with Netflix…Athena has everything: at twenty-seven, she’s published three novels, each one a successively bigger hit. That night it’s only Athena and me at a loud, overpriced rooftop bar in Georgetown. She’s flinging back cocktails like she has a duty to prove she’s having a good time, and I’m drinking to dull the bitch in me that wishes she were dead.’
Yellowface by
Recently ‘Author Down’ wrote to ‘Dear Polly’ a.k.a
. Author Down had published a novel with a big publishing house, but it had not sold many copies. Author Down had tried to hustle, emailed book stores, reached out to influencers, and checked in with the publicity team, but the numbers had remained low.In a letter to
she said, ‘I am scared that with these low numbers, I will never be able to publish a book again…I feel humiliated. I feel isolated.’Everyone she spoke to said she should stop complaining because she was lucky to be published at all.
The sad truth is that the dream of getting a publishing deal doesn’t guarantee sales. Neither does getting a publishing deal with a major publishing house, even if they have a dedicated sales and marketing team. Every author has a story like the one I’m going to tell you, a story of The Dream Book and The One that Got Away.
Mine was The Naked Name of Love, later republished with my original title, The Priest and the Lily. It was about a Jesuit priest and plant hunter, who travels to Outer Mongolia in search of a rare white lily. There he meets a beautiful tribeswoman, but he’s made a vow to God… It was set in 1859 when The Origin of Species, the seminal work on evolution by Charles Darwin, had just been published.
This book took me a decade to research, write and find an agent and a publisher for. When I finally succeeded it was with John Murray, the publisher who published Lord Byron, Jane Austen—and Charles Darwin. During my first meeting with my new editor, the frontispiece for The Origin of Species was framed and hanging in the corridor. It seemed auspicious.
More than that, it was a dream come true. I’d been dumped by two agents who didn’t ‘get’ the book yet now I was with a publisher who had given me a five-figure advance, I had an insightful editor who loved my novel, a dedicated marketing budget and publicist—even more exciting, the book was due to be published in March 2009, the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth.
So what happened?
Well, in 2008, some of you may remember, there was a terrible recession. My freelance writing work vanished overnight. Hundreds of journalists were made redundant. Newspapers shrank. Book reviewers and book review pages were axed. There was industry-wide despair. And by March 2009, anyone who still had a job in the newspaper world—and was not suicidal—was so over Darwin, that no one wanted to write about him.
The result? Zero reviews.
Not a single mention of my book, not even linked to any Darwin publicity. No book awards. No radio or TV.
And the result of that? Poor sales.
The wider result was that there was virtually no interest in or money put into marketing the second book in my two-book deal. I did get onto a couple of major radio shows and had a stellar review in The Times, but it wasn’t enough to salvage sales or have a hope of another book deal with John Murray,
I had wholeheartedly believed in my book. I’d kept going for years. I’d survived the bruising rejection of two agents. When I’d finally found a publishing deal, my agent, publicist and editor had also wholeheartedly believed in The Priest and the Lily.
But none of that saved me from ‘humiliation and isolation’ or feeling like a total failure.
As
said to Author Down, people who write books often feel like failures:‘If we want to create, to soar, to reach for greatness, to touch the sublime, we are also going to crawl, and suffer, and to feel pure despair.’
The truth is that there’s very little one can count on in book publishing. Some mediocre books do brilliantly. Some great ones do badly. Hard work and talent are involved, but so is a huge, enormous mountain of luck.
Everyone and everything has to align to make a book a success. People have to believe in you, from your mum to your agent, publisher, editorial team, sales team and marketing team. Your story has to hit the zeitgeist at exactly the right time—even if you’ve been working on this story for many years before the opportune publishing moment you just happen to catch. And, once published, the odds of reaching the right reviewers, bloggers, influencers, media personalities, and getting into prime position in enough bookstores and then being read by thousands or even millions of readers are…slim.
As Heather says, ‘Blaming yourself for not selling books…is irrational. You’re calling yourself a failure for things that are out of your control.’
We only ever hear of the success stories. Have you heard of Sophia Bennett? She’s a friend of mine. She published acclaimed YA fiction and had moderate sales, which in the real world translates to—she was so poor she didn’t know if she could afford a new winter coat.
But maybe you’ve heard of SJ Bennett? Writer of Her Majesty The Queen Investigates series? She had an idea for a cosy crime book, featuring Her Majesty, during lockdown—just as the zeitgeist in the UK shifted from dark to comforting and escapist, propelling Richard Osman and his Thursday Murder Club series to super stardom, and enabling my friend Sophia, and her wonderfully genteel idea for a cosy crime series, to buy a new coat with her million dollar deal.
The sad truth is that if luck is not on your side, you may well not be able to sell another book to a major publisher.
At least, not for a while.
But this does not mean that you, Author Down, or any of us writers, whether struggling or successful, don’t have options.
At the end of the day, the only thing we do have control over is our words.
Putting words on the page.
One word.
And then another.
Something I've really noticed in recent years is how, when friends become published authors, their online persona changes markedly because (I can only assume) their publishers are forcing them to promote, promote, promote, promote, promote.
Just today, I glimpsed a headline which implied that one of the things behind the Unbound liquidation clusterfuck was that the company had invested £1 million in software that would prophesy how good prospective authors might be at attracting supporters to crowdfund their books. Strikes me that a big part of "what it's really like to be a writer" these days is that it's really like being a marketer. Part of me just wants to shrug and go "pfft! Late-stage Capitalism", but... jeez, how depressing.
(Most of my own self-created job nowadays also seems to be marketing, which is equally depressing, though at least I've the option of blaming myself).
This resonates so strongly with me, Sanjida! (Especially as I too am a friend of the lovely Sophia and remember her telling me about her quirky new idea — which turned into the phenomenal The Queen Investigates series. I’ve had a steady career with ups and downs— the ups in terms of awards not sales — and like many writers I thought everything would change when I got a deal with a Big 5. It didn’t for exactly the reasons you outline here: “disappointing” sales. Most readers loved the book — but there weren’t enough of them. I’m self publishing the sequel and that will be a new adventure. It’s so true that we can’t measure our worth as writers by our sales. Thanks for this very honest and illuminating post.