When Your Book Doesn’t Sell
There’s no easy answer to the question: why isn’t my book selling?
And there’s no easy way to overcome the depression.
So much of so-called “writing” advice is really sales advice: how to sell books, and who to sell them to, and what to do if your books aren’t selling. But there’s almost no advice on how to cope with the psychological aspects of rejection. The truth is, there’s no way to predict sales–and no way to hedge your bets, either. Lots of terrible books sell. Or, rather, “terrible” by some lights. And lots of wonderful books don’t sell. Some books become overnight bestsellers; some, like The Da Vinci Code, wait on the shelves for years before they’re discovered. It’s a strange alchemy.
All you can do is write a good book. Write a good book, and hope that it sells. But the hard truth is that you may write a wonderful book and it may never sell. It may never be discovered. The advice I give in (the forthcoming) Self Publishing Is For Losers: The Evil Toad Press Guide to Self Publishing is to keep writing. This book might not be “the book,” but your next one might be. Even so, there’s another side to this advice–which is that you need to reevaluate why you’re writing in the first place. Are you doing this specifically to make money, or are you doing this to tell a story? There are lots of (entirely legitimate) ways to make a living writing or, alternately, in a writing-related field. Everything from freelance journalism to editing. But novels are a different beast entirely. You’re putting yourself out there in a very literal way, letting people look inside your head as you furnish, for their consumption, a totally unsolicited (and possibly unwanted) story.
Which is part of what makes rejection so hurtful. Listen, I’ve gotten plenty of bad reviews and they’re not fun. These people aren’t trying to attack me. They don’t know me; they don’t care about me. I’m someone who, if I exist for them at all, exist as a theoretical construct. Surely, there must be someone behind the computer. Yeah. But what they’re rejecting, even if they don’t mean it to be me, is me. This story is me. It’s me, my story, and they hate it! The Price of Desire got terrible reviews, and considering that it’s–in the abstract sense, at least–largely autobiographical that was tough to take. It’s no fun, having a heroine based on yourself derided as stupid, vapid and useless.
Some days I sell five hundred books; some days I sell two. The easy answer is “write for yourself, not other people” or “just write another book,” but it’s hard to “write for yourself” when you have a family to support and “just write another book” becomes almost impossible when you’re too depressed over your own failure to function. And yes, publishing a book and then selling five copies over three months is a failure.
No one wants to hear that. No one wants to use the word “failure,” except in reference to other people. Or they take the easy way out and say candy ass things like, “success is in the definition.” As though there’s a writer in the world who’d legitimately be proud of selling no books. Or, somehow even worse, one book–to their grandmother. And yes, it’s all very warm and comforting to say, “success is having published a book!” And that’s true, certainly. But when you feel like you’re staring down your lifelong dream, and watching it slowly evaporate, it’s also not enough.
“Oh, I published a book, that should be my success” is really just another way of saying, “I’m going to reframe my failure so it doesn’t bother me.”
It’s okay to be discouraged. Yes, sometimes people fail. I’ve failed. I’ve been fired from jobs, I’ve had friends turn on me. Sometimes because I picked the wrong friend and sometimes because they did. I’ve let people down. There’s nothing shameful about failure. Failure is a part of life. But as Zig Ziglar said, failure is an event, not a person. So when you fail, you have a choice: to become comfortable with your failure, defining and redefining it until you can live with it, or to chose not to live with it. To acknowledge that you’ve failed and move on.
So what if you haven’t written a bestseller? Keep writing. Your book may find its audience two years from now, like Dan Brown’s did. Or it may never find its audience. Your success with this book is not the measure of your success with all books. J.K. Rowling has written a couple of busters, too. Most authors have. Um, Duma Key wasn’t Stephen King’s best work–and his first novel wasn’t that successful, either.
There’s no courage in hindsight. King’s struggles, alone in his trailer with the power turned off, or Rowling’s, writing while on the dole, seem courageous now. Because, you know, millions. But reimagining their histories into such sunny fantasies overlooks the fact that they despaired. That people made fun of them. Called them stupid, useless and lazy. That they came close to giving up, many times.
The courage comes in keeping going when you can’t see the end of the road.
Each book, each day at the office, isn’t the end of the road. As, say, an IT professional you know this. But if you’re an author, you’ve probably spent your whole life dreaming of the day you finally got published. A day that seemed as unimaginable as the world on the other side of the wardrobe while you were submitting to agents, wrangling with editors, and making corrections by the light of your computer screen after everyone else in the house had gone to bed. So yeah, when you finally reach that point of finally publishing and fireworks don’t go off, it’s bound to be disappointing.
But the fact that your first day at the office sucked doesn’t mean that now, therefore, your dream is dead.
In a sense, even when your first book does sell well, you’re still in for a letdown. My books did fairly okay right off the bat, although it took them awhile to really catch on (and they’ve had their ups and downs since then), but I was still depressed. I’ve heard other women talk about similar feelings post-wedding, or post-baby. This sense of…now what? The dream has been achieved, the goal has been met, and yet nobody cares. The attendant at the gas station is still rude. The electric bill is still due. The earth is still turning. Now what?
That “now what” turns out to be, go live the rest of your life can be incredibly discouraging–and also, quite frankly, impossible to handle. Because for writers in particular there’s really no guidance about “now what.” There are no websites like “The Nest” for post-debut writers, no guides for what to do after you get published. There’s just…now go be a writer, and figure out how. On your own. While simultaneously juggling all your own shit and all your relatives’ expectations. And all those intrusive comments from friends about, hey, what is your financial situation exactly?
The first step to overcoming this problem is recognizing that it is a problem. There simply aren’t enough writers who stick with it for there to be much in the way of mentorship. Most of us fail to be bestsellers within our first week of publication and give up. Or our publishers drop us. Or we realize that we only had one book in us to begin with. Or, quite frankly, there wasn’t enough help available–no one to go to for advice, and no safety net.
The second step is to reach out. Ask for help. Tell people how you’re feeling. They don’t have to be fellow writers. Getting up every morning and being a pediatric oncologist is no joke. And neither, quite frankly, is digging a ditch. One of my siblings works in retail and one is a chef, and they both have really soul-sucking stories of torment, as far as how other people treat them. Think writing is hard? Try waiting on people who think you’re less than human. People don’t have to share your job, or specific life experience, to share your struggle. Or to listen, or to help you when you need help.
And yes–for me, at least–the final step is to keep writing. Tell the stories you need to tell. Recognize that your first book isn’t your only book and that that sense of wonder you felt when you dreamed of finally being a published author hasn’t really gone anywhere. It’s still there, buried down deep beneath layers of expectation. About how things are “supposed” to be. You can recapture that magic again. By writing.
And remember: your attitude, not your aptitude, will determine your altitude.
