My Five Cents Worth on Rowling’s Secret Publication
A lot has been written and said the past few days on the topic of JK Rowling publishing a crime novel under the pseudonym of Robert Galbraith.
This whole story has equally frustrated and delighted me.
The book didn’t sell so well when nobody knew who Robert Galbraith was. It didn’t sell well despite a big publishing house and an agent behind her/him. It sold 1400 print and 800 eBook copies in the UK since its release in April. No author can live on such sales.
The story proves how ridiculously difficult it is to “break in” and to “get noticed”, even if you have a big publisher behind you.
The quality of your writing has absolutely nothing to do with whether you get noticed or not either. Some described Galbraith’s crime novel as astonishingly “mature” for a “debut” writer, or as “well written but quiet”.
It is enormously frustrating that there is so much luck involved in this business which is beyond the author’s control.
There are tens of thousands of authors out there who write good books but who never get noticed – in the sense of being able to make a living on writing nothing but fiction.
It drives me up the wall when “lay people” who have no clue about the business of writing and publishing tell me, oh, so cool that you write books, oh, fantasy – like JK Rowling.
NO, not like her!
It is sort of an insult for an aspiring author to have lay-people compare him or her to Rowling. She was and is one in a billion who won the jackpot of a lottery, period. Her writing may be good but there are tens of thousands of authors whose writing is equally good and sometimes even better and they still have dayjobs because they didn’t have the luck to win the darn jackpot.
The personal lesson I am taking away from this Robert Galbraith stunt is that we can’t all be so lucky. The delightful part of the Galbraith story is that nobody can be so lucky twice, it’s not the magic quality of her writing which made her famous but simple luck.
Considering such odds, the most important thing an author has to ask him/herself is whether writing gives you something or not. It does in my case. It’s the one thing I love best in the whole bloody world and there is nothing like being able to hold that stack of paper in your hand that has sprung from your imagination and that makes you laugh and cry. I intend to continue writing until I’m 80 or 90 no matter what.
