How Not to be Unhinged

at all stages of your career

Hi friends!

I had coffee with Emma Gannon, author of the fabulous The Hyphen newsletter and several books, and we had a great time talking shop, of the newsletter and publishing variety.

Full shout out to her for the topic of today’s newsletter, though of course now I don’t even remember how we got on this topic. Probably because we were talking about how hard and bonkers publishing is right now. Are we all one wayward email away from losing it, or is that just me?

I know I’ve given out plenty of advice in this newsletter, about what to do and how to respond and when to do nothing and a lot of that is based in bettering your chances at getting an agent and a book deal. You want to put your best foot forward, no? I’ve also written a lot about how to weather the emotional ups and downs of publishing (and there will be a lot more about that in my book!) and not letting the vagaries of this industry get you down.

But this is a post to help you keep both feet on the ground at any point in your writing life. This is a post to help you not fall down a rabbit hole of publishing conspiracies and gossip and this is how it REALLY works theories. You know what is actually pretty boring? The business of selling books. We get bumps of excitement when an offer is made or when a big publicity hit comes through, but otherwise, it’s a lot of answering email, reading contracts, and saying the same things over and over again. It was great to meet you! What kind of books are you working on? No, I haven’t had a chance to read that yet. I hear it’s great! I know it looks like we’re all doing the secret handshake and gatekeeping everything, but honestly, it’s hardly more interesting than your cousin who works in real estate or your friend who works at a law firm (except those friends make more money than most editors lol/sob).

So when I say here’s how not to be unhinged what I mean is here’s how not to fall prey to publishing lore that’s whole goal is to keep you scared and searching for someone to give money to for all the answers. Yes, I know, I am part of the problem, but there’s also a reason why this kind of post is free. Anyway, here’s my advice for maintaining your hinges.

If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Oh, did they get a deal in six seconds for seven figures? Surely not. Did that publisher send that author on a 27 city tour, first class all the way? If so, the publisher didn’t pay for it. I know you swear the person who told you heard it straight from a person who heard it from another person who heard it from the source. Was it also a thing at your college that the architect forgot to account for the weight of the books and the library is sinking into the ground? Yeah, mine too.

If one thing is clearly the reason, there’s really probably 7 or 8 reasons. If a book didn’t sell or something didn’t hit the list or someone’s agent dropped them, it’s probably not because of the reason everyone says it is. It’s rarely because no one wants vampire books anymore, because someone will turn around and sell a vampire book tomorrow. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Books aren’t successful because of just one thing. Books don’t tank because of just one thing. If we only had to get ONE THING right to find success, wouldn’t we all be more successful? That’s what makes writing and publishing so hard—you have to do many things well at the same time. This includes me, too! As an agent I have to always be selling, reading, networking, and taking care of my clients and if one of those things slips too much, I could be in trouble. So when I don’t sell a book for a client, I rarely say it’s because of one, single reason. I might be able to come up with a few contributing factors, and still, that’s not the whole of it.

Remember, there are no emergencies in publishing. I know it feels very SOMEONE IS WRONG ON THE INTERNET when, say there’s a typo in your book or Amazon displayed the cover before the official cover reveal or something like that. But it’s not an emergency. These things do not cause bodily harm to anyone. Very, very few things like this will even impact sales. They just feel like it because we put so much time, effort, and thought into our books (agents and editors included!) and it sucks when things don’t go to plan. But it’ll get fixed. It’ll be fine. A very long time ago, someone leaked one of my proposals for a very big client to Gawker (lol) and I was incensed!!! How dare they?????? I emailed Nick Denton directly and demanded he take it down. (I just found the email and <cringe.> No, he did not write back or take it down.) But guess what? That didn’t matter. All press is good press. God, that was 16 years ago. It was fine.

You regret the things you don’t do more than the things you do. You might write a book and get an agent and send it out and not sell it. You might do that several times like I did as a writer. You might sell three books, fail to sell the next two, and finally sell another five years later. All that is fine. All that is normal. You won’t regret writing the books that didn’t sell. (I don’t.) You’ll regret stopping after that first hurdle. You don’t have to publish anything. No one’s making you. You can stop anytime you want. But no one’s going to ask you to do it either, so if you’re looking for that, you’re not going to get it. None of this is fair, easy, or straightforward. But what is? Not trying is the surest way to fail.

I have been in publishing a long time now. I’ve gotten worked up about this and that and swore up and down that I’d never do X and then find my self X-ing about 18 months later. If I’ve learned anything at all it’s that the inner workings of publishing are deeply boring to everyone except us nerds on the inside. Rarely are the stories that percolate up to the general populace very accurate or interesting. This isn’t a deflection technique so people stop scrutinizing publishing and taking us all to task for fuck ups. Keep doing that! But the fuck ups are rarely as juicy as you want them to be. And if focusing on the juicy, inaccurate publishing things is getting in the way of your writing, it’s time to put the hinges back on.

OXOXOXOX,

Kate