Writers on Life After the Book Deal
The best part of getting a traditional book deal is hearing you that you got the book deal.
That’s when hope springs eternal.
Your future as the next Mel Robbins or James Clear—your appearances on TV and in the New York Times and signing at sold-out events—awaits.
You allow yourself to daydream about potential outcomes. Visiting Italy would be nice in the summer and surely the country will want you there when the Italian translation takes off?
You may envision yourself on set when the inevitable movie is made from your book. Will you ask for a director’s chair?
You try to temper all of these thoughts. You know they’re long shots. But getting a book deal in the first place was a long shot—you’ve heard that something like one in 10,000 proposals sell to Big Five publishers. You defied the odds once. Why not again?
Inevitably, you don’t. Unless Mel Robbins or James Clear or Glennon D. is reading this, in which case I say hi and btw I don’t think you’ll relate to this post.
I recently stumbled across a post by an author named Charlotte Shane who spoke to 10 tradionally published authors about their experience and it’s such a service that they all shared the raw, unfiltered truth. Because your book publisher won’t! You can see the post here but I’ll summarize below with some thoughts about how I believe you can avoid this fate.
Case Study 1: Charlotte herself first confessed that she like "a flop for months" after her book came out, despite the fact that her book sold nearly 13,000 copies. 13,000 copies—as in, 43 times more than the average book sells! She explained that she kept waiting for some undefined validation that never materialized.
She writes about her feelings with such nuance and brilliance that it would be a disservice to her if I tried to summarize them. But the truth is that even selling 43 times the average isn’t enough to get validation from your publisher. That’s reserved for that rarefied community of authors whose books break through to non-readers (something I described in this video that I never link to despite its massive number of views because I hate how I look in it and vanity trumps all I guess).
When 85% of authors don’t earn out their advances and 58% of publisher revenue comes from backlist titles1, you have to sell a lot better than 43 times the average to be treated like a success by your publisher.
Which leads me to…
Prescription 1: Tell yourself throughout the writing and launch that just doing the book at all is making it. Create a book that showcases your expertise (this is much easier when your book is non-fiction but I accidentally did it with my first novel). Your external validation can come from the steady stream of clients you attract because of your authority.2
Case Study 2: Lydia Kiesling described being in a "horrible state" after her first book—anxious, agitated and desperate to sell her next book too quickly.
That’s something I’ve seen probably hundreds of first-time authors go through, since you’re only as good as your last book, which means your success is fading with every day that passes.
Prescription 2: Make that first book do so much for you that you can approach the second one, if there is a second one, with excitement and not fear.
Case Study 3: Mattie Lubchansky called herself "sort of a wreck" and "completely bugnuts insane" around her latest release. She noted it's simultaneously the same stressful experience and somehow worse each release.
This was 100% my experience doing my six books for HarperCollins. Each launch extracted a bit more of my soul and when I got to the sixth, that soul seemed long gone and I decided I hated writing.
It took me years to discover that I didn’t hate writing at all. I just hated the writing business.
Prescription 3: Set yourself up for success by only hinging your hopes on things you can control—like doing the best book you can to attract clients and asking for Amazon reviews and having a super fun party that you know won’t help with book sales but will for sure help you make the launch into the sort of celebration you deserve.
Case Study 4: Daniel Lavery described feeling disappointed when his expectations weren’t met.
Oh, do I get this one. As the saying goes, expectations are resentments under construction and I may as well have been wearing a brick layer’s uniform for the decade I was being published traditionally.
The antidote is to keep the expectations to those things you can control (see Prescription 3) but also to take the wide view. The life of a book is long; it’s just that traditional publishers don’t see it that way. They focus on the book’s launch week because that’s how they can decide which authors to support. This means that if you don’t have success right out of the gate, you’re on your way to being ghosted by them.
When Party Girl came out in the aftermath of the Judith Regan debacle, my expectations were, to put it mildly, not met.
But the truth is that first book of mine is the gift that keeps on giving.
When I released the audiobook a decade after the print book came out, an incredibly successful musician listened to it and then reached out to me and asked if I’d be his sober coach. I explained that I wasn’t a sober coach. He told me he’d been to every sober coach, every MD, every PhD, and none of them could help him with his addiction. He wanted the author of Party Girl to be his coach. Would I consider doing it for $1000 an hour?
I ended up working with him for years, though I talked him down from $1000 an hour. I think I really helped him.
Just yesterday, I talked to the producer who most recently optioned the rights to Party Girl about another producer he wants to attach to the movie based on it.
Earlier this year, the Wall Street Journal wrote a story about me releasing a PG version of the book.
And that’s certainly not the end of the Party Girl story. I have every belief the movie will get made. In other words, thanks to direct actions I have taken, my expectations have more than been met; it just took a lot longer than I expected.
Prescription 4: Remind yourself that you deserve to have more than a week to benefit from something you put your heart and soul and time into. Your heart and soul deserve some time before you get out the calculator and start assessing. Remain open to the fact that your expectations just haven’t been met…yet.
Case Study 5: Jaya Saxena felt "screwed over" by her December 2020 release date and spent time "stewing in misfortune."
One of the more frustrating aspects of traditional publishing is the fact that you often don’t have control over your writing, title, cover or release date. But I’m of the firm belief that there’s no such thing as a bad release date—provided you approach it correctly.
The problem is that traditional publishers don’t think that way. They’re thinking about setting up their “sure thing” authors for success with certain release dates and then dumping the other ones other days. What if, instead, they brainstormed with their non sure thing authors about how to make any launch date a great one?
I released my book, Make Your Mess Your Memoir, in July of 2020—that is, a few months into lockdown and one month into Black Lives Matter protests. I think it’s safe to say that the last thing anyone cared about right then was a book on writing. This bad timing was at least in part intentional: I wanted to put my “there’s no such thing as a bad release date” philosophy to the test (most of the publishing I do for myself is experimental so I can test out what could work for clients).
I decided to pitch Good Morning America a story on how writing could be used a tool to help with pandemic-related depression. Was there anything in my book about using writing as a tool for depression? Not a thing. But because I framed the book around what was going on at the moment, rather than just trying to get publicity for my book, I scored a five-minute segment on the biggest morning show in the world. It brought in hundreds of thousands of dollars in new business and I think helped a lot of people who were dealing with pandemic-related depression.
That’s not to say that a writer who feels screwed over by their publisher’s release date is wrong. They are being screwed over. It’s just not the date that’s the problem; it’s that their publisher isn’t effectively strategizing with them about how to make their release date work for them.
Prescription 5: There are 365 potential days to release your book. If you can control your release date, pick the one you want. If you have no say over your launch date, find a way to make it work for you. Get creative. Strategize. And then remember your launch isn’t the end but the beginning (see Prescription 4).
Again, you can see the amazing post all these anecdotes came from here.
Oh and please remember when I paint publishers as ogres who don’t care about anyone but Glennon, I’m not saying they’re bad people—just business people. In other words, I may be making it sound like I hate the player but really I only hate the game.
Which is why I started a new one. If you want to know more about it, you can always click here.
