Creating & Compromise (pt 1)

I don’t think the frustrations I’m about to share are unique to writers. I suspect anyone with any creative talent/ambitions/hobbies likely feels the same as I do in one way or another. But I’ve been thinking a lot about what I want from my writing, probably because I’m in the process of querying my recently finished novel with literary agents, so I’m naturally thinking about publishing as an industry, as a process.

Also, I’ve mentioned this before: I am terminally online, and especially in recent months/years I’ve been following along closely with various situations that impact publishing and could therefore feasibly, possibly, maybe, one day… also impact me.

It doesn’t really help that anything to do with publishing can feel like a cryptic maze only very people have a map for. There are hoops to jump through, arcane spells to cast on a full moon (well, possibly not that, although honestly I don’t think it would hurt).

There is also, undeniably, the fact that the chances of getting published as an unknown, non-celebrity debut author in the year of 2022 are vanishingly small.

I’m not saying that in a bitter kind of “they’re out to get us!!!!!!!” kind of way. Promise.

I actually think you’d be hard-pressed to find a publishing professional who’d disagree. And it’s not because they don’t want to publish, obviously. It’s just… there are so many fucking books. Humans are an almost endless outpouring of creativity and innovation in one form or another, and writing is a well-established medium that’s familiar and comfortable enough for a significant minority of the population to think “huh, I could give that a bash I reckon.”

I saw a statistic once that was like, annually in the UK, there is 1 book published per 400 people. That’s like… 175,000 books a year. Obviously I don’t know how accurate that frankly staggering figure is, but when you look at publishing it probably isn’t actually that unbelievable. There’s traditional publishing, which may have a Big Four in terms of well-known publishers, but it also has tens if not hundreds of other publishers too, including imprints and mid-size indies still moving in a traditional market. All of those publish multiple titles a year; the business model now seems to be less “let’s get everyone to read this book” to “let’s put out enough books that there’s something for everyone.”

Now, as a reader this is glorious. I have so much choice every time I go into a bookshop. It’s magic. Surely, as a reader, this is what Heaven looks like.

But as a would-be published author, it’s pretty daunting - and I haven’t even mentioned the teeny-weeny indie publishers, or, (phew) self-published books coming onto the market. Lots of self-published authors put out a book every four or five months!

So, there’s a heck load of competition. That’s an absolute given. We know that these days most publishers won’t spend that much on your marketing, either. If you’re lucky, you might get to work with an in-house publicist who can give you a list of things you might be able to do as an author to hype up your own book. Maybe you’ll get some help with your website? Social media? But unless you’re a superstar author guaranteed to make a metric shitload of cash for the publisher, they might be too risk-averse to put too much marketing budget your way.

Hold on a sec.

Rewind.

All of this, by the way, assumes you even get a publishing deal. Before then, you have to get an agent - and the chances of that are low anyway. There are competitions you can enter, and sometimes lovely publishers like Gollancz will temporarily open their slush pile to unagented writers. But all of this is so much work. You have to (obviously) polish your first three chapters to the very best they can be. Write individual, tailored letters to each agent, following the specific guidelines set out on their websites and having done some research into authors they already represent and things they might be looking for specifically. Different letters and rules for the competitions. I’m not actually complaining about this, because it’s not that different to what my students go through when looking for a graduate job… it’s just that the odds are worse, but that’s just the way it is.

Oh, oh, and before all that! You have to write the book.

I know, that’s obvious, right? Well… it wasn’t always that way.

Regular readers of this blog (all two of you) will know that I am a huge Marian Keyes fan. I’ll basically read anything she’s waved a pen over. So will a lot of other people, which is probably why she’s one of those superstar authors I mentioned earlier who is more or less guaranteed to make bank for her publishers. As she bloody should, she’s excellent!

There was recently an Imagine documentary with Marian, which was of course a joy to watch because she’s a joy. However. In that documentary, Marian Keyes admitted that she got her agent (or publisher, I can’t remember) after submitting some short stories, having never written anything before. The agent asked if she was writing a novel (she wasn’t), but she lied, said yes, wrote four chapters of what would become her debut novel Watermelon and got a book deal.

It. Doesn’t. Work. Like. That. Anymore.

It’s not Marian’s fault; at the time she got her agent it did work like that. But now it doesn’t. Now, we’re told in no uncertain terms on writing courses, at conferences, on agent websites and on Twitter that you must have a finished book. Not only that, but it must be essentially edited. Sure, some agents will work with some developmental stuff with you, but you need to show them something generally polished.

I’m not mad that agents have this preference. They receive so many queries that don’t meet even basic grammatical standards or follow general plot structures that they have to be clear about their standards. I get that, and I also know (again, because there are SO MANY BOOKS) that they work damn hard sifting through what they do get. They have to fall in love with something to take it anywhere, and that’s completely fair, right?

But as the creative on the other end of that…

If I were to go into work tomorrow and my boss said, “hey Jess, I’ve got this work I need doing. Now, you won’t get paid until you’ve done all of it and it’s going to take you well over a year to complete. Oh, also, I need you to write different versions of it to suit several different style guides. You might even want to pay someone out of your own money, either to do some additional training or to read what you’ve done and edit it before you bring it back. Then, I’m going to need you to send it out to between twenty and a hundred colleagues of mine to see if any of us like it enough to take it forward. Oh, and if they do, they’ll need to send it out to even more senior colleagues to see if they would be willing to pay you for it. If they do want it, you’ll get paid in three, four, or five installments over multiple years.”

Do you know what I’d say to my boss in that scenario?

Obviously, it’s different with writing, because I do it for pleasure most of the time. I get a personal sense of reward from watching a draft I’m working on get better over time. I like doing writing courses - and I’m in a well enough paid day job now that I can afford them.

But still, it is work, especially if you want to do it properly. Work for which there is no guarantee you will ever, ever get paid.

This blog post is super long already and I haven’t even touched on half of where my brain is with it so I’ll stop on that cheerful note…