How to maximize your chances of long-term success, financial sustainability, and spiritual fulfillment in your writing career
Before you set sail on this Professional Writer Journey, I beg you to familiarize yourself with a couple of tools on your sailboat--and for God's sake, if the boat didn't come with these, GO BUY THEM.
Publishing a book is like going on an old-timey sailboat journey.
Apologies in advance for knowing nothing about old-timey boats per se. Accurate maritime facts are not the point of today’s newsletter, STEVE. This is a metaphor!
Hear me out.
Old-timey sailboat journeys are largely outside of one’s control.
If you’re captaining a sailboat, relevant education, practice, and talent will all be helpful. They’ll maximize your chances of a safe, successful, pleasant journey.
No matter how prepared and talented one is, however, one is never going to have control over the vagaries of weather and world geopolitics; the temperament of one’s shipmates; the whims of that one white whale who threatens to ram one’s boat and and maroon one for months, starving in the South Pacific, gnawing feebly on the femurs of one’s deceased friends; etc.
The same is true for publishing a book. Whole lot of unknown unknowns out there. Whole lot out of your control.
All one can know for sure in advance about any old-timey boat journey or book publication experience is the following:
It will take an excruciatingly long time.
It will sound very exciting and glamorous to inexperienced landlubbers. The day-to-day reality, however, will prove less glamorous, involving monotony, isolation, uncertainty, upheaval, and intermittent vomiting.
It will probably end in safe harbor at more or less the destination you hoped. However, it might also end up going adrift, landing you somewhere interesting but hundreds of miles from where you meant to be, and you might or might not like this.
There’s a slight chance you won’t end up anywhere at all, unless you count the ocean, into which you would sink in this scenario, screaming and screaming amidst the flotsam until oblivion at last overtakes you.
Despite the terror of this, and even if you have a mediocre-to-terrifying experience, you will likely finish your boat journey…..in love with boat journeys and desperate to take another? Like so much that it’s a little uncomfortable to be around? We’ve all known a perfectly normal guy who jumps onto a boat one day and then reappears months later to break up with his harbor town girlfriend, like: “Brandy, you’re a fine girl, what a good wife you would be, but I’m oceansexual now, which means I only have sex with the ocean.”
WELL, THAT’S GOING TO BE YOU WITH PUBLISHING BOOKS. Metaphorically. Probably.
Publishing many books over many years is like being an old-timey boat captain.
Lead enough successful old-timey boat journeys and you might become a brand-name boat captain sought after by shipping concerns the world over. Publish enough books, and you might become a Brand Name Author in similarly high demand.
Both careers come with a lot of cultural cachet, too. Who isn’t fascinated by an old-timey boat captain? They’re main characters of history, heroes of our songs and stories. We admire their bravery, their willingness to put themselves at risk for the rest of us, their devotion to exploring our strange and teeming world. Ditto authors.
Many real-life old-timey boat captains were indeed heroes. Many were in fact terrible, terrible, terrible people who did not deserve one ounce of the praise they got (cough Columbus cough). Nevertheless, we held them up as heroes anyway. Doing so met a cultural need we had at the time: emotional, aesthetic, self-justifying, and/or propagandistic. Ditto authors.
It’s harder than you think to be “cancelled” from the high seas—and from a publishing career.
One little disaster is hardly enough to sink the career of an old-timey boat captain (unless he dies along with the ship). Ditto authors’.
Do you know what happened to George Pollard, captain of the whaleship Essex? After his boat sank, and he and his crew endured an agonizing seven-month lifeboat ordeal involving starvation, cannibalism, homicide, stranding, and many of their deaths?
GEORGE POLLARD IMMEDIATELY GOT HIRED TO CAPTAIN ANOTHER WHALE BOAT, THAT’S WHAT. AND HE SANK THAT ONE TOO.
Three months—three months—after making it home to Nantucket, Pollard was appointed captain of Two Brothers, a whaling boat just like the Essex. He went right on back to the South Pacific and—surprise!—immediately crashed it into some coral.
STILL, STILL, AFTER ALL OF THIS, NOBODY FIRED OR “CANCELLED” GEORGE POLLARD FROM HIS WHALING CAREER. HE DID THAT TO HIMSELF, RETURNING HIS TRAUMATIZED ASS TO NANTUCKET FOREVER.
Which—fair enough. Probably the right call, George. But one he made himself.
The same is true for authors: if one is “canceled,” it is generally by one’s own hand.
One disaster of a book publication does not end a career; if anything, it’s interesting narrative grist for your long-term hero’s journey. (Chomping on my agent cigar here: nothing helps with author marketing like a Messiah vs. the Philistines struggle narrative, baby.)
Two back-to-back disasters? That begins look less like misfortune and more like carelessness. Even then, though, no one’s going to force you out of the industry, provided you’re not publishing books that embarrass Dear Leader in an autocratic country. Strategizing around your career setbacks might require some reinvention after a pause, sure, but nothing’s going to be Dead with a capital D until you are.
The publishing industry doesn’t cancel authors, although individual publishers do occasionally cancel individual book contracts. Social media mobs, supply-chain breakdowns, corporate mergers, even publisher bankruptcy — none of these things have the power to Cancel Authors. They just have the power to traumatize them.
Many authors opt to leave this industry for the same reason George Pollard left whaling: trauma-induced burnout. They decide they just can’t take it anymore: the financial precariousness and unpredictability; the emotional whiplash;the crazymaking slowness; the isolation; the professional jealousy; the criticism; the self-exposure.
I am not mocking anyone at all for quitting, mind you. Nor am I trying to play like the traumas I’ve just listed aren’t in fact real or traumatizing. They are. All I’m saying is that the publishing journey is not easy for the vast majority of us—and the choice of whether to quit or keep at it is generally ours alone to make.
For everything about a publishing career that is out of an author’s control, a lot remains witin it—and it is therefore an author’s responsibility to handle.
This career path is fraught for almost everyone, but it favors the prepared—which is why wise authors, like wise captains, know their way around two key navigational tools.
Here we are at last at my main point: why it’s useful to understand the similarities between book publishing and old-timey boat travel.
Given the similarities I’ve just outlined, it is perhaps not surprising that the tools one needs to maximize one’s chances of success and “luck” over the course of a publishing career are weirdly similar to those one needs to maximize one’s chances of not dying at sea on a 19th-century whaling voyage.
Here’s what they are: