The most important thing to keep in mind as you navigate the publishing industry is that you're going to die and are in fact sweeping closer to the moment of your death with every passing nanosecond
The uplifting reminder I'm sure you need on top of everything else you had to deal with today.
This week’s post is about holding onto what matters in a publishing career. Before I get there, though, I want to talk about some things that do not matter.
Read: the comments. The comments do not matter. Rationally, I know this. I do.
Last year, I accidentally discovered that there is an area of Substack onto which one may log if one wishes to read parting comments left behind by people who have unsubscribed from one’s newsletter. As you can imagine, many of these comments are critical.
Ever since, I have tried to forget this area exists. Never read the comments, amirite? I spend all day telling my clients to stop grabbing onto the electric fence of their own self-loathing by poring through their Amazon and Goodreads reviews, ignoring the good ones to white-knuckle the bad.
If I did the equivalent of that in my own life, what would that make me? A hypocrite? A big, fat hypocrite? IT SURE WOULD. Because I am.
I am also a human being, though, which means I care about what other people think of me. It’s embarrassing, isn’t it? Caring? But all of us do. Or at least the 99% of us who aren’t sociopaths.
Of course I now check that stupid comments section all the time. Of course the one commenter who left me several hundred words of personalized fury on the matter of my Reverse Racism in 2020 still lives rent-free in my head. I was a people-pleaser with self-esteem issues before society collapsed! And now it’s impossible to please anyone!
Most of us are psychologically and emotionally roached beyond belief right now, which means we are especially vulnerable to both hurting each other and being hurt. When hurt by other people’s criticism in a time like this — not if, when — the smartest thing to do in response is pat one’s exhausted, achy, whimpering ego on the head, hand it a glass of warm milk, and put it bed. (Also: maybe don’t proactively seek out criticism in the first place.)
Alas, however, the smartest thing to do is also the hardest and least instinctive. That’s especially true if you’re a self-critical, validation-starved neurotic like me — NOT THAT THIS DESCRIPTION APPLIES TO ANYONE ELSE IN BOOK PUBLISHING OR ANYTHING.
Right now, when criticism lands in our inbox, it feels much easier and more natural to “quiet” our egos mid-tantrum by screaming “what is the matter with you” at them over and over until both we and our egos are weeping and wired and nobody’s going to go to bed at all. Which, spoiler alert, is a complete waste of everyone’s time.
Screaming becalms nobody. Ask any parent who has ever in a weak moment tried to convince a toddler to go to sleep this way, and they will vouch: it backfires. Plus, it’s mean to the kid. And that is essentially what your ego is: just a kid, a tender little baby in your care.
Don’t scream at your ego. Don’t wheedle, cling, and whine at it like it’s the parent and you’re the helpless child. Tuck your ego in, soothe it with a lullaby, and then tiptoe out of its bedroom, whispering “I love you” as you turn out the light.
This is exactly how I for one treat my ego all of the time.
LOL. JK.
Are you kidding?! I’m a mess. Currently, I parent my ego like Ned Flanders’ beatnik parents parented him, letting it do whatever kooky shit it wants while I sigh and play the bongos.
Which is why I’m about to wax defensive, unsolicited, about one more tiny not-even-really-critical-but-sort-of comment I recently found in that Unsubscribes log. It’s relevant! Relevant to bringing all of this together into my Main Point. I SWEAR.
Here’s the gist of the comment. A dude wrote: I signed up for this newsletter thinking it would teach me how to navigate the publishing industry, not how to become a better writer/person. What I’ve read is more the latter. Not that there’s anything wrong with becoming a better writer and person! I just don’t need that information. I want to actually learn about an actual industry.
Well, SIR, here is what I would say to that, and what the rest of this newsletter will address: the best way for writers to navigate this industry IS by becoming a better writer and person.
This is not a joke. I am serious. I know I write this whole newsletter in a joking tone, but it’s, like, “make the medicine go down” humor. Emotional intelligence and solid craft are 99% of all any successful author needs in terms of acquired skillsets. Seriously.
The remaining 1% is all stuff I’ve either written about already or plan to write about v. soon: how to put a book proposal together, if you’re writing nonfiction; how to describe your book or book idea, fiction or non, in 1-2 highly pitchy sentences, with contemporary bestselling comps; who your audience is; what your platform is, why it matters, and how you plan to fill in any relevant gaps; why you shouldn’t sign a contract without having it thoroughly vetted by a lawyer or agent; and what the hell you’re doing with your freelance income and taxes.
Your agent can tell you the rest. You will eventually find that agent by combining an amazing manuscript (craft) with the kind of emotional intelligence necessary to think like the person on the other end of the submissions inbox.
Finely-attuned, well-boundaried empathy will allow you to compose personalized and empathic pitches that are observant of both the wider marketplace for books right now (that is, what is selling) and the desires of the specific agent you’re contacting.
Everything else, EVERYTHING ELSE, I can and have or will ever be able to tell you about book publishing is just going to be info clutter for you. (That is, unless you plan to self-publish and handle production logistics yourselves. If that’s the case, you really do need to learn about that, and this really is the wrong newsletter for you, because I have no idea.)
Why would you want to take on a burden of pointless info clutter? It will be useless dead weight in your head — that, or a distraction from what you should be concentrating on. All of it falls into one of three categories:
information that is not knowable (much of a book’s chances depend on luck)
information that is not important (do you really need to worry about industry profit margins in 2022?)
information that is important but needs to be at least primarily your teammates’ job to gather, show you, and caddy around on your behalf— agent, editor, publicist, etc.
information that is going to be important, only I can’t tell you from this impersonal vantage point what it’s going to be or look like, because publishing a book is an exercise in rando one-off challenges and reactive decisionmaking
“Handling” the above as a writer does not equal literally handling it. It equals learning how to identify trustworthy teammates; how to be OK accepting real, heavy-lifting help from other people; and how to live peacefully within uncertainty.
These are learned emotional skills. Not information. Not “hacks.” Emotional skills. And they are everything.
If you’re an author, this thought — “I need to know all of the information about everything I might or might not encounter in this industry so I can be strategic about all of it and therefore maintain my sense of control!!” — is a self-soothing fiction, a distraction, and a gateway to waste.
Wasted time, wasted bandwidth, wasted energy, wasted brain meats, wasted genius. That’s what you’ll get if you run through the doorway of this fiction. Because this is the industry where control comes to die. And anyone not seriously committed to emotional growth here will find themselves swiftly backsliding into emotional infancy.
If emotional regression, anxiety, and distraction are what make you feel most alive, then cool. No, seriously. I don’t believe any human being needs to achieve commercial success or a capitalist milestone like a book deal to be a worthwhile person. I believe we all have the right and duty to conduct the grand one-off experiment of our lives, as Glennon Doyle would call it, however we feel we are called to do.
But I think you signed up for this newsletter because you want a book deal. And you want lots of people to buy and read your book when it comes out. Right?
If that’s true: please, please listen to me — the person whose job it is to caddy stuff like your contract boilerplate around so you, the writer, can focus on the work of writing amazing books that sell and bringing new beauty and expansion and hope into the world. Listen to me. This is the one thing you need to remember:
[Paywall time. I’m the worst.]
