Getting a Major Book Deal Won't Solve Your Problems
I'm writing thirty posts in thirty days again, this is number six.
Since I published my book, many colleagues, wondering whether they should try for a major publishing deal or go another route, have asked me whether I had any problems with Doubleday, or whether there were any major issues with the process. To this point, I've always lied, basically.
I've said various careful things about how, although the process was mostly to my liking, I should've advocated for myself more strongly here, or provided some new ideas there. But whatever, it was all basically fine, no major issues, you should probably get a a book deal if you can. Sure, you get higher profit margins going indie on Kindle, but that assumes that you can market your work yourself, and I certainly cannot. Either be a relentlessly entrepreneurial self-starter, or try to get someone else to do the hard stuff.
Don’t get me wrong, none of these statements are incorrect. I still endorse this perspective. But none of this speaks to the real issue with getting a publishing contract, which is that it will not cure your soul. It will do nothing to address your spiritual health. All of your predictable wounded inner child stuff that you’ve put off dealing with for ~15 years will still have its quiet, poisoned hooks in you. Essentially, you will be the same person.
Other people don’t treat you like you’re the same person, for awhile, though. Which confuses things. When you get a lot of affirmation, it can suddenly seem like you don’t need affirmation anymore.
But this is a dangerous illusion. You haven’t cured your addiction. What’s happening is just that you’ve just had a megadose of this lovely drug and your tolerance hasn’t been dialed in yet. You don’t know it yet, because prestige offers a smooth, uncomplicated high, at least in the short run. It’s not like being on meth. It doesn’t disturb your sleep much, it doesn’t give you facial sores, you just feel nicer, for awhile. And, suddenly, you have some prestige! Not a lot, but enough that you feel the effects on your social life immediately. Authors receive such disproportionate reverence, in a certain demographic, that even a Canadian book deal is regarded as a notable accolade.
It feels so, so good. Better than it should, maybe.
See, when you were a lonely kid, to survive, you had a beautiful vision, a recurring dream. It usually took place in an undersea kingdom, for some reason. In the chambers of the ocean, the popular kids all decide, at once, that you are, in fact, the coolest. They hand you a scepter, and, dressed in sapphire-studded armor, you humbly accept their accolades, along with, perhaps, a gentle kiss on the cheek from Julia, who to this point has neglected to tell you how amazing you are.
And then this actually happens to you! Sort of.
People around you, to that point uncomplicated colleagues, start regarding you as either a commodity to extract or a rival to undermine. Someone tells you that you’re a “topic of conversation.” To your face, everyone is your friend, except occasionally when you meet with outright hostility. An old writing acquaintance, to whom you break the news of your deal, says, with a smile, “you fucking douchebag,” and you admire her transparency. Assuming that you’re a heterosexual male, the change in how women look at you is astounding—it feels hallucinatory. For the first time, you experience what it’s like when you’re regarded as a valuable object.
This constancy of this infusion obscures the withdrawal symptoms for a long, long time. Occasionally there are flare-ups that hint at the future to come. At the 7-11, the chili cheese machine is broken, so you can’t put queso on your hot dog. The bun is stale, too, and the guy behind the counter doesn’t seem to know that you’re a Literary Genius. Somehow this is not the life you’d been promised. It’s the life you’d been living, but your standards were adjusted by the word ‘Penguin’ and its appearance on your resume. There is this tiny gap you glimpse, like the first protestation of impending hunger.
But in the light of day, as you stroll magnanimously between coffee shops, where your acquaintances continue to tell you that they’re excited about the book, it feels as if your life is absolutely complete. If you have an easygoing temperament and a tendency towards laziness, you might start to feel like your future will be completely untroubled. You are Done, you can Clock Out, you’ll never have to really work again, just scale Literature Mountain.
And this vision of the future is all the more plausible when you get your American deal! America! Finally, a real country has noticed you! God bless the United States of America, and God bless the check you get, which isn’t massive, but is a generous sum considering that your book is completely unmarketable. (You do not dwell on this latter fact.) Truthfully, you’re still writing the book for around minimum wage, if you add up all the hours. But you’re an Author now, your future is sculpted of marble, gold, and applause. It’s all going to be okay.
You do start to go a little nutty before the book comes out, though. Not fully, but it takes a long time for a book to come out. The waiting is insane. That’s the other thing about publishing. Unless you have a juicy story about the president to tell, the pace is sluggish by the standards of the post-Twitter world. And, specifically, there’s this time period that every editor warns you about, between when the copy edit is done and when the thing actually ships. It’s the Bermuda Triangle of author sanity. The book exists, but it’s not corporeal yet. You can’t do anything and nothing happens.
And then it comes out. The wave breaks! The congratulations are endless! The reviews are in, and they’re all raves! You get notice that the Times isn’t reviewing you—even though you wrote a bunch of pieces for the Times—but, who cares, fuck ‘em, they sold the war on Iraq, you don’t need them.
And then the pace slows. It’s been a week since you’ve heard any press. Then, weeks. You have one book event, but the attendance is laughable. Two people you don’t know show up. Unless you’re already a media darling, people don’t really leave their houses for books anymore. Speaking of which, while your sales figures are about average, the average is pretty grim these days. Your publisher doesn’t immediately commit suicide, but there is a certain sense of melancholy that starts to creep into your emails.
The desperation is making you petty. You are becoming so, so petty. Relatedly, you notice that friends read it, but not everyone does. People you expect to message you don’t. That’s fine, everyone has their own life—you know this in principle, but haven’t they noticed your largeness? Your magnificence? I guess they have their own lives. If you could call a life without a book deal a life! This is real life, isn’t it?
You basically fall apart for six months. You don’t notice it at first. Certain signs just pop up. It’s hard to work or make decisions. You thought all the decisions were going to be made clear to you, that you would be placed on the ‘fast track’. But there is no mechanical rabbit.
You lurk in the liquor store down the street, taking a half an hour to choose between various cans of rosé. The wonderful fiancee you managed to meet before the book’s release, whom you now live with, is somehow tolerating this. She does make repeated, gentle suggestions—very good suggestions—about how to break out of this inertia. But you don’t listen. You’re the Author. You know best.
But, finally, what does that mean? Now that the dream has been achieved, you have no excuse for being the person you are. You’ve exhausted all the goals you once had, you’ve done the one thing that you were sure could make you happy. Your flaws aren’t the peccadilloes of a precocious writer, eccentricities of the kind of unbalanced person who dares to disturb the universe. They’re just you. That’s you in there, biting your nails, smelling bad in the morning, interrupting people, hiding your anxiety behind recycled anecdotes and superficial merriment. (Oh yeah, and now you’ve suddenly turned 30, which means that discussions of your precociousness are long over.)
That is the major downside of working with a major publisher. They don’t take care of your emotional growth for you. This, I feel, is a major problem with the publishing industry, which should be resolved. But in the meantime, you might want to grow the fuck up before your book comes out. Because, if you haven’t, you will be forced out of your prolonged infancy, violently. And being ejected from the womb the first time wasn’t fun, but you don’t remember that too clearly. Whereas this, you will remember, probably for a very long time.