How I Got Over Being Jealous of Other Writers

I was reared to be competitive.

From the moment I was born, I was taught to compete with my brother, who was 2.5 years older—that is, someone with not only a head start but also a gender advantage, especially by 70s standards.

I was also told I could never measure up to him (see: age and gender advantage; also being the Black Sheep to his Golden Child).

I was taught to ski by being dragged to the top of black diamond runs and then having to listen to my dad cackle when I would instead throw my poles down and cry.

I did not, to put it mildly, develop a healthy form of competitiveness—if such a thing even exists.

When I first became a professional writer…

I had insane success right out of the gate. Of course, it didn’t seem insane at the time. It just seemed like I could finally declare my family wrong and relish in the fact that the world now saw my greatness.

I was wooed by multiple agents.

My first book, Party Girl, sold in a bidding war.

My agent submitted an essay I’d dashed off in a half hour to the New York Times and it was accepted as a “Modern Love.” I didn’t even know what the column was at the time.

But, rather suddenly, everyone seemed to catch up—and veer ahead.

A year before Party Girl came out, a friend of a friend asked me if I wanted to join a group blog. It was called The Debutante Ball1 and it was written by women who were all releasing their first books that year.

In my delusion, I felt massively superior to the rest of the Debs. Their books weren’t being released by famed publisher Judith Regan or already getting press or attracting movie offers, like mine.

Then the Deb dynamic started to shift.

One of them would email the group that Barnes & Noble had just placed a massive order for her book and another would reply that B&N had just placed an order that size for her book, too!

I reached out to my publisher to ask about book orders but never heard back.

In their emails, the Debs talked about a woman named Sessalee Hensley2 as if she were God. A former Barnes & Noble clerk who had worked her way up to being the person who decided which novels B&N would order (and how many), she had the sort of power I could barely comprehend at the time.

And apparently Sessalee loved a few of the books in our Debutante group.

Mine was not one of them. I didn’t think? I seemed to be having trouble reaching anyone at Regan Books.

I imagined Sessalee as a stern woman in a pinafore who would most definitely not be drawn to a book that featured a threesome as an opening scene. I assumed that because my fellow Debs were attracting her attention and I was not, my book was DOA.

As it turned out, I was right—Party Girl was DOA but for reasons that had nothing to do with Sessalee. I hadn’t been able to find out about book orders or anything else because a few months before my launch date, my famous publisher Judith Regan was fired in the biggest scandal to hit publishing and her entire imprint dissolved in a day. My book that had all the hype in the world was launched under a fake imprint HarperCollins made up a few months later. How could I ask anyone if Sessalee liked my book when there was no one to ask?

My fellow Debs, meanwhile, all seemed giddy about their launches.

We stayed on a group email chain post-release and when one would share about the multi-thousand order a bookstore had placed for her book, the others would chime in about how happy they were for her.

Whoever she was, I was not happy for her. Were the other Debs better people or just better at pretending? I don’t know. I don’t even remember the names of any of those women or their books.

But my experience with them was definitely a precursor to the sort of jealousy I’d experience the whole time I was in the traditional publishing world.

To be fair, traditional publishing is a breeding ground for jealousy.

The pie is so very small, the pieces even smaller and the successes so rare that one person’s book getting a New York Times feature or a big order from a bookstore means there isn’t room for that to happen to you.

I didn’t care that the odds of success were bad. I thought I should defy the odds. Unfortunately, every traditionally published author feels the same, or else they’d never sell a book to a traditional publisher.

My jealousy grew with each book deal I got.

The main reason for this was basic math: as a published author, I met more published authors.

If you buy into Freud’s theory about the narcissism of small differences, we are only jealous of people who achieve something we feel we could. So as my world of colleagues grew beyond my fellow debs, the more women I had to be jealous of.

And then my jealousy abated.

It happened when I created and then began producing a live storytelling show called True Tales of Lust and Love3. I started the show because I thought it would be a good opportunity for me to promote my second book, Bought. But when it became surprisingly popular, I had to start inviting other authors to read from their books and tell their stories.

I had to, in other words, invite women I’d been jealous of to walk onto a stage—and then watch them shine.

In the act of doing that, I saw that they weren’t glittery lottery winners who were joyous all the time because of their great luck but real, complicated and talented women who were, like me, trying to carve out creative careers.

But then that show ended and a few years passed. My jealousy kicked in again when, out of nowhere, recovering from addiction became trendy and a few women who’d never written anything other than Instagram captions started releasing memoirs about their recovery from addiction.

They were heralded for launching the “Quit Lit” movement.

Um? Hadn’t my book come out more than a decade earlier? And hadn’t I waited until I was over five years sober to write it, while these women seemed to be about 30 seconds sober but were somehow being considered recovery role models? Also, hadn’t I been a professional writer since college while these were just people who were good at coming up with Instagram captions?

Yes, yes and yes. See, these women had understood early on how important Instagram was while I had dismissed it as something for shallow people. It somehow hadn’t occurred to me when Instagram popped up in 2010 that followers could turn into readers.

I’d love to say that it was amazing spiritual growth that led to me getting over my jealousy.

But that would be a lie. I got over my jealousy by exiting the traditional publishing game.

Chasing sales metrics as a writer, no matter who you are or how successful your first book, is a battle you’ll lose. If your first book sells a boatload of copies, your second book will look like a failure in comparison. So you do a third and a fourth or maybe you don’t but you are still caught on a treadmill that seems to go in a circle.

There is no winning.

There is only stepping off.

Or becoming so spiritually healthy that you don’t care about playing a game you can’t win.

Instead of going the spiritual route, I stepped off the traditional publishing merry-go-round.

I decided to approach book publishing differently.

I realized that if I sold a book to a traditional publisher, I would lose all control. I saw that I could do everything they could—and do it better because I’d seen the business from the other side.

I started looking at publishing strategically: I decided that I’d write some books for authority-building (showcasing all that I know about book publishing and thus inspiring readers to want to work with my company) and others for fun. If I did the authority-building books effectively, I’d be more than able to support my habit of writing books for fun.

Is that selling out?

It doesn’t feel like it to me. I love writing books about book publishing—shattering delusions so that others don’t have to get on that circular treadmill and wonder why they feel like a failure.

And I love to write for sheer love of the sport, which is why I’ve been working on a novel over the past year.

When I’m done with the novel, I won’t need to have my agent submit it to a bunch of publishing houses in the hopes that someone who can’t do what I can will deem it worthy. I can publish it myself and not care about how it does, instead focusing on who it pleases.

Honestly, this approach has been a game changer. Aside from the Glennon-sized thorn in my side, I almost never feel jealous of other writers these days.

Usually I just hope that they can learn what I have without needing to go through all those crushing years of trying and resenting. I hope that I can save them from wanting to create voodoo dolls of a woman named Sessalee who they don’t even know.

And OMG guess what I learned just now when I Googled her?

Good old Sessalee was ultimately fired. Even Gods have to learn, I guess, that publishing is a fickle mistress.