How to Deal with Dead Birds

In certain genres, you can measure the success of your book by the number of readers who dump their trauma on you. Here's how to handle the dumpers diplomatically.

If you’ve read more than, oh, two of my newsletters in the past five years, you’re already familiar with my core writing advice: write to meet your readers’ needs, not your own.

In order for your book to have any chance at success, by any definition of the word—popular, remunerative, acclaimed, published—you must know your target audience and lard every sentence you write with value recognizable to them.¹

You’ve got to exhibit empathy for your readers. This is true for literally every kind of book, although it gets harder with each additional bit of ego you mix into whatever you’re writing. As such, it’s generally hardest with memoirs, autofiction, and family histories.

Put more succinctly:

You can’t just come up to readers like a cat with a dead bird.

…Like I said, though, I’ve told you that before. Many times.

What I’ve forgotten to do thus far is warn you about the opposite side of this dynamic:

Whenever you do manage to publish an empathic, riveting, valuable book, readers can and absolutely will dump their dead birds on you.

And I’m afraid you’re going to have to find a way to be okay with their doing so.

As an author, you must think always of your readers’ needs. However, readers need not return the favor—and they won’t. Why would they?! That’s just not the nature of the transaction.

If you’re lucky enough to have fans at all, the vast majority of them will enjoy your work in total silence, never making themselves known to you outside of their purchases and library checkouts. A few might write you complimentary emails and/or leave nice Goodreads reviews, but that is seriously going to be just a few—like, less than one percent of your total readership.

In addition to those two groups, however, there’s going to be a not-insignificant minority who expect (or at least want) you to meet their needs even more than you already have. These are what we call the cats with dead birds.

At events, in your email, and maybe even on the street, these people will approach you with random anecdotes, overlapping traumatic experiences, and the like. They’re going to drop those stories at your feet and then just stand there, expecting validation. You’re going to need to have a plan for handling it when they do.

You might feel any number of ways about this behavior: interested, nonplussed, touched, flattered, amused, annoyed, exhausted, enraged, awkward, traumatized.

We’ll talk more in a moment about how to deal with those feelings. In the meantime, however, please understand that from a business perspective, dead birds are not a bad sign. Au contraire. As a literary agent, I know they augur good fortune, starting from the moment we hit “send” on a submission.

If editors drop a bunch of dead birds at my clients’ feet during author meetings, for example, I know from experience that the book is almost certainly going to go to auction.

Why?!

I’ll explain shortly. But first, for those of you who might be confused about the nature of the phenomenon I’m talking about here:

Some examples of what I mean by “dead birds:”