Happy 2nd birthday, Neon Literary!
Our agency is finally old enough to start toilet training! Here's a look back at what we accomplished this year--and some of the lessons we learned along the way.
Happy end of 2021, everyone. Hope you have peaceful, fun, omicron-safe activities and rest planned in the next two weeks. We ourselves will be taking a bye week next week and sending out a rerun newsletter; the funky fresh content will return the week of the 27th.
Onto the post!
Neon Literary is now 2 years old, which is about as mind-boggling to think about as my own human children’s ages.
We celebrated our 2nd birthday on December 1.
Anyone with small children will be familiar with the contradicting consternations one feels as one’s children snuff out their birthday candles: What do you mean, they’re already this old? And what do you mean, they’re ONLY this old?
I refuse to believe that Neon, this bedrock of my life, ever wasn’t here. It feels absurd that this business has changed me so much in such a short amount of time after so many years of existential thumb-twiddling. It also feels absurd that something so all-consuming, wondrous, dramatic, and exhausting has only been around for two in every eighteen randomized days of my life.
I love Neon so much. I love it with a mass and velocity that feels impossible considering that we’re talking about a company here, not a sentient being. But I do. I love and am so, so proud of this team: Kent, Gabe, me, our clients and industry colleagues. I love what this company has already brought into the world.
I do not love the context in which we’re all working.
So many awful things have happened in the world this year. I’ve spent much of 2021 feeling profoundly overwhelmed and stuck, as I imagine have you. There is no “bright side” to this pandemic or this rage-filled, stupidity-festooned, grief-rent moment in world history. It is 100% dark out there.
Rather, what I’ve witnessed in my work life this year—among authors and artists lucky enough to be alive, working, and relatively healthy—is more of an acclimatization to night vision. Many who spent the first months of this horror in rudderless despair now find themselves spotting movement in the dark. They’re finding new ideas and allies rustling in parts of the forest no one ever thought to look for them. They’re spotting long-forgotten paths forward as they emerge in moonlight.
This is what I’ve been admiring with such wonder: not a cultural landscape in which storytellers are “finding the bright side,” but one in which they’re disproving the premise that there were ever sides at all.
Here are a few of the things our clients and their observational powers achieved this this year.
Neon clients sold a total of twenty-two new books to major US publishers in 2021 as well as dozens and dozens of subrights: translation, World English, film/TV, serial, podcast, etc.
Sierra Crane Murdoch’s YELLOW BIRD was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction. I am so excited to watch this book’s Native-led TV adaptation come together at Paramount.
With her DETRANSITION, BABY, Torrey Peters became the first trans woman in history long-listed for the UK’s Women’s Prize (nee the Orange Prize), one of the world’s most prestigious fiction awards. This book was also on just about every “best of” list imaginable.
Neon books took home dozens of other honors besides. They were on Best of the Year lists in the NYT, NPR, Time, Autostraddle, the Financial Times, the New Scientist, and more; they were named among the “best nonfiction books of the decade” by BookRiot; they won the Rathbones Folio Prize in the UK and were nominated for the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s book awards; and they received rave reviews in major newspapers from the Wall Street Journal to the New York Times (among countless others).
I was delighted to make home-ironed “I’m a Neon neonate” onesies for the first few clients’ babies born in the Neon Age. (I also fell down on the job making them for all of your babies; if you’re a client who had a baby but received no Neon neonate onesie, it is coming soon, aaah.)
This was a thrilling year in many respects, but it was also a hard one.
Alongside the wonderful things, there were losses: countless little deaths-in-life like medical scares, career transitions, undeserved disappointments and rejections, stress, struggle.
We also lost one of our beloved clients suddenly in the middle of his book submission. Mike Rose was a titan in the field of education scholarship and a kind, thoughtful friend besides. (Mike, if you are reading this in the aether: I love you, I hope I did you proud, I’m making a silly face at you, and I will continue to stand up for your work until I drop dead, too. I would say “rest easy,” but I know you’re not really a rest guy, so instead I’ll say this: play hard and happily, and although I hope one’s party energy is limitless in the afterlife, if it is not, please conserve at least some of it until I’m there.)
Above all else, here’s what we learned this year: when we came up with our company motto, we ourselves didn’t understand what it meant.
Kent and I settled on “time for a new story” as our motto pretty much instantaneously after we started Neon. Literally the only debate involved me asking, “should it be ‘IT’S time for a new story’?” and Kent answering—correctly—“no.”
At the time, we were drawn to that motto because it encapsulated our mission: draw eyeballs, dollars, and book deals away from authors of received wisdom and entitled thought “leaders” who phoned in lazy Big Ideas, thence redirecting those spoils to more observant, nimble, and historically underestimated talent. Which is still our mission, by the way! Hasn’t changed.
It’s just: at the time, I for one was envisioning “time for a new story” as a one and done thing, kind of, or maybe more of a one-every-few-years-and-done. Too many people seemed to be getting book deals on the power of fedoras and charisma alone; I was in a position of privilege to do what I could to enact the opposite.
What the hard years have taught me is that it’s always time for a new story: moment to moment, hour to hour. Life is motion and calculus; it is not matter or arithmetic. It’s just an unfortunate part of being human that most of us have to process it in terms of the latter.
The sands are never not shifting. This is as true in book publishing as it is in life. It is also something that pretty much every major religion has been aware of for literally ever.
They tried to teach me! Really, they did. I guess I just needed 34 years, a seismic leap in my career, and then a global pandemic to get the memo.
As an author and a person, you have got to stop trying to force your life to unfold on absolute and Newtonian terms.
This process was called “acceptance” or “recovery” or “self-actualization” before the pandemic. I’m pretty sure it’s now referred to as “YOU WILL 1000% HAVE A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN IF YOU DON’T DO THIS, DENISE, OH MY GOD, SAVE YOURSELF BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE.”
Accept that the story you’ve been telling yourself about how your career “must” or “should” unfold probably isn’t how it will, and that’s okay: you were probably wrong anyway.
Accept that comparing your trajectory to other people’s and trying to fit your whole life into paradigms of “better than” and “worse than” is and always will be a colossal, pointless, tragic waste of your time. Whatever time you have spent in comparisons is time you have wasted: time that deserves to be mourned, tenderly so, before you put the past down and begin for real.
Accept that you’re never going to get the things you’ve been seeking from other people or accomplishments—belief, validation, purpose, security—because those things do not reside in the external. Ever. You have to grow them for yourself.
Accept that your plans are probably going to fall apart more than they hold together, starting with next week’s, if you have any, because FUCKING THANK YOU, OMICRON. You’re never going to get your wheels fully in traction, regardless of what’s going on with COVID. You’re never going to feel like you’ve Made It, and your timing will never be perfect—at least not on purpose. Not with your book deal, not with your platform or market, not with your friends or family or anything.
Real life isn’t like that; it is so, so much more complicated and beautiful and worthwhile. It’s uncontrollable because it never stops; it’s motion, not matter. Which means that our new story isn’t something out there, something we might someday grasp and hold forever. It’s already here: an ever-renewing thing that is holding us.