Some of you know I’ve been struggling with the next steps in my writing journey. The joy is gone, mostly due to—well, a lot of stuff that would bore everyone to tears if I detailed it here. I’ve been debating the actual problem in my head for a long time, but I ran across a blog post the other day that really hit to the heart of the issue—sort of. I don’t really want to give it traffic because it’s dismissive of me as a reader, but one paragraph goes like this:
For example, here’s a comment I saw recently on Facebook: What if my book gets bombarded with bad reviews? What if I never make my money back? What if I’m doing everything wrong? What if I embarrass myself? What if I’m just not good enough?
Whoa, I said. This is exactly me.
Then the author continues.
These are not isolated concerns: If you’re determined to write and publish a book, you’re going to be doing lots of new things for the first time. You will make mistakes. Something I learned from the business world and apply to my writing, is to produce quickly so you can fail more: because only by trying and failing a lot can you figure out what actually works.
But the conclusion that anxiety and fear is a normative and unavoidable experience, and the advice to just push through it anyway, is dangerous for two reasons. FIRST, it creates a cult of failure, which leads failed authors to take their poor sales or negative reviews and – instead of getting better – makes them tone-deaf to the market; so they just keep on creating more books that don’t sell, sinking thousands of hours (and dollars) into an expensive and frustrating writing hobby.
Huh. So this is my issue entirely. Ok, fine. There’s a solution to this whole thing. His solution is write fast and write to market, which isn’t a new philosophy for anyone who’s written for a few years or tried to query.
The problem?
So many people are doing this that I can’t find enough to read.
But wait, you say. There are more books being published now than ever before—1.68 million of them were self-published alone in 2018. Then you have traditionally published books on top of that. How can I not find anything to read?
Well, because most of them just aren’t my thing. Most are poorly written (come on, you know I’m right), some aren’t my genre, some aren’t available in ebook, some are priced too high, and the list goes on. But what about the ones that sound perfect to everyone else? Most are a resounding meh to me.
(First, lest you think I just don’t try enough books, I’ve always been an avid reader—just ask my parents! I took a long break after grad school to rest my poor brain, but when my son was born, I started reading 2-3 books a day while on maternity leave. Kindle was my saving grace while he nursed for hours a day. I’ve been reading indie books since 2013, and though I slowed down a bit once I started writing, I’ve got 35+ years of reading behind me. I’ve read classics, bestsellers, self-published novellas with twenty typos on every page, and everything in between. I’m a reader. Only I’ve loved very few books.)
And yeah, I have narrow tastes in plots and characters—which is the root of the issue when we strip all the other confusion away, I think. I realized, at some point in my son’s earliest months, that 95% of historical romances have the same plot. They began to bore me, but I kept reading them even knowing how each one was going to end, because what else was there to buy?
Same with the YA books I picked up. I couldn’t relate to protagonists, not only because I was 34 years old, but because they weren’t me as teenager. Not just one or two. Not just half. Every single one. The protagonists were the kids I couldn’t stand growing up, either wild punks who drank and had sex or perfect Christians who looked down at you for reading the wrong translation.
And scifi? Give me pulp. I’m into fun books and stories that could very well take place today—just put them on a spaceship, please. Keep the physics, too. If I’m being taught quantum mechanics again, I want college credit for it. I’m not into aliens or sentient spaceships or modern day politics wrapped up in in a thin veneer of futuristic space travel or near-future dystopia or whatever else is bestselling these days.
You’re probably starting to see the problem here. It’s not that these books are bad. It’s that I never saw myself in a book. I never saw the stories and characters I wanted and could relate to. Worse than that, I began to feel invisible, neglected, ignored by the people in charge who dictated what words were adequate enough to make their way onto paper.
Make no mistake—books like this are written because they appeal to a majority of readers, and publishing is a business. Everyone’s in it to make money. It’s not about art, and it’s not about taking chances on new authors and new, gritty stories that don’t fit neatly into a genre.
But that was the glory of indie publishing, I’d thought at first. I could write what I wanted, and no one could stop me. Arrogant and self-serving, like this article says? I would disagree. Since the day I started writing Asrian Skies, I’ve been trying desperately to find books I needed, to stumble across characters who make decisions like I would. Writing it was validating in a way—the way you do things and the things you believe are ok, and here’s a person in a book to prove it’s so.
And now I run across an article that implies indie authors shouldn’t complain about low sales and bad reviews. After all, we can just write to market, write what readers want, and everything will be perfect. That’s easy enough to figure out, after all. Indie authors have the tools to write what sells—we just don’t always have the drive, because we’re prissy frustrated artists who think we transcend such things as money. And, the author says, we need to figure out how to to be a business or cease complaining.
The problem is, when we write to market, we’re not hitting all readers.
We’re silencing people who just want their existence validated by seeing themselves in a book.
We’re ignoring readers who want more and different, and “like that book, but gritty.”
We’re telling them their desires don’t matter.
We’re treating writers who try to fill that gap as frustrated hobbyists who need to learn to become real authors—or shut up.
It’s discouraging. Not for Anne the writer, but for Anne the reader, who for twenty years has been desperate for stories no one’s telling.
And I don’t know what to do about that.
One thought on “Some brutal honesty”