Hi friends,
Almost five months ago, I declared in this newsletter that I was going to put my entire focus on books and let the chips fall where they may. I knew where my future was and I knew I needed to shift my focus in the present in order to make that happen.
A week later, I started querying agents and now, here we are.
In the days and weeks since, I’ve taken to researching well-known and successful writers and their book deals, as well as talking to writer and agent friends about what really happens behind the scenes.
It’s fascinating to me how many stories of success that we’re told and sold are incomplete at best, and deliberately unfocused at best.
Take JK Rowling, for example. A broke single mum who was on benefits and living in council housing as she wrote the first Harry Potter book.
True. But incomplete.
In a documentary about her life, JK Rowling clarifies that yes, while she was a broke single mum, she was only unemployed for a nine-month period during the six years it took her to write that first book. For more than five years, she was employed, chugging away, and balancing her life and her writing, as most of us do.
Then there’s the fact that every major publisher rejected Harry Potter. True, but there were only about four or five major publishers to begin with, so that’s not saying much. In the end, she had 12 rejections for the book before Bloomsbury picked it up, and if you’ve been in the publishing world for any length of time, you know that 12 rejections is nothing. It’s common. Absolutely normal. Of course, no one mentions that she got an agent on her first try.
The narrative, of course, is that no one believed in Harry Potter or saw its commercial potential. This isn’t true. She got an agent on her first try. She sold UK rights for £2,500 after 12 rejections and once the positive reviews started coming in and momentum built up, the US rights sold for six figures.
A six-figure book deal for a first book. Not bad.
Yet, we’re told no one believed in her or the book.
A narrative like that is, of course, easier to sell because it’s sexier than the truth. By portraying JK Rowling as a broke single mum who had no idea what she was doing and had no one believing in her and supporting her, instead of the badass writer she was and the many decisions she (and her agent and publisher) made in order to facilitate that success, we’re conveniently able to put it all down to luck.
It creates the narrative of all the power being out of a writer’s hands.
Of course, Rowling’s success is completely off the charts and that couldn’t have been predicted, but it didn’t just happen out of nowhere. A lot of talented people did a lot of smart things in order to give it the momentum it needed.
Let’s take Elizabeth Gilbert, who shot to fame with her book Eat, Pray Love. A surprising success. Entirely driven by word of mouth.
Yes. And no.
When the book was first published in hardcover, it did well enough, but it wasn’t the bestseller we know it to be today. Sales were fine, nothing to get too excited about. Someone at Gilbert’s publishing house noticed, however, that the book seemed to be appealing to a certain segment of middle-class women and so, when the paperback edition was released they targeted their marketing and publicity efforts massively towards book clubs.
They started getting traction in those book clubs and once momentum hit, the word of mouth effect started kicking in. The book hit the #1 spot on the NY Times paperback nonfiction bestseller list, and well, we all know the rest.
The stories around both these authors are those of “it just happened.”
It didn’t. They didn’t just get lucky. Both women worked exceptionally hard, wrote fantastic books that resonated with their audiences (and were of the moment), and then had the support of people who knew what they were doing in order to bring them to market.
When we talk about six and seven-figure book deals, New York Times bestsellers, and awards won, we congratulate the author, assume it was a singular effort, that a good book makes all the difference.
An exceptional book is a given, it’s the prerequisite for everything else that follows.
But it’s not the only factor. It’s the agent’s networks and ability to sell that gets the book deal, it’s the publisher’s ability to create buzz that gets media, and it’s the publicity department’s ability to create or catch on to memorable lines that generates interest. (“… as poor as it’s possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless.”)
An agent who only has relationships with junior editors at publishing houses will bring in smaller deals, whereas an agent who refuses to take the book to anyone who isn’t a senior editor plays the all-or-nothing game, that is, she’ll either bring in a big book deal or sometimes, none at all.
As writers, we often fail to take all this into consideration. Because if we did, we’d spend about as much time focusing on finding the right agents, editors, and building the right team, as we do writing the book.
Your book can be brilliant. But if it’s not landing in the hands of an editor who has the authority and budget to pay big money for it, you’re not getting six-figure deals.
If you don’t have a smart publicity team (either through the publisher or independently) spotting how your book is connecting with the things people care about right now, you’re not getting the media interest that lands you on radio and TV shows and creates buzz around it.
Having those people on your team, and knowing how to find and work with them, is one of the most crucial aspects of a writer’s career.
Art and business, as I like to say.
Make sure you’re taking care of both.
Cheers,
Natasha