Guest Contributor: Great Expectations
What to Do When Dreams and Reality Collide
Editor’s Note: New York Times bestseller M.J. Rose (www.mjrose.com) has written more than a dozen novels. She is also the founder of the first marketing company for writers, Author Buzz (authorbuzz.com), which makes her an ideal guest for this book. M.J. has witnessed firsthand the collision of many an author’s dream with reality and learned how best to cope with the aftermath.
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I think one of the real problems we authors face is that in order to write a book—to do all the research, to juggle day jobs and family and make sacrifices to find time to write, to sweat over words and paragraphs and characters, to sometimes bleed on the page—we have to believe what we are creating is not only wonderful and amazing and worth what we are giving it but that there is no other book like it.
We have to be huge optimists. We have to believe in the impossible.
Certainly we each think our books are good. But in reality, there are hundreds of good books published every month and thousands and thousands every year. And no matter what we tell ourselves to stay motivated, we know the truth.
We don’t write miracles. We just tell stories.
Yes, they are often fine stories. But are they wake-up-in-the-morning-and-shout-from-the-rooftops-no-one-has-ever-written-a-book-like-this-before-oh-my-god-stop-the-world stories? No, they’re usually not. And that’s where the problem lies.
HOPE FOR THE BEST, BUT BE REASONABLE
The contracts we are offered and the reception our books receive, no matter how good, almost never ever match our expectations. That’s because what we had to believe in order to write the book involved putting it on a tall pedestal—where it almost never belongs.
Simon Lipskar, president of Writers House, has this to say on the topic:
There is a difference between hopes and expectations. Hopes are naturally, fundamentally irrational, and we are irrational creatures who always hope for wonderful things. And we should always embrace and cherish our hopes. But expectations are different; they need to be rational and rigorously grounded in reality. Once identified, we should never, ever accept anything but the most vigorous effort from ourselves or our business partners to meet those expectations, as long as we’ve set reasonable ones. We should also, however, never, ever see failing to meet hopes as ‘failure.’ One can hope to win the lottery, but one can’t expect to; you can hope that your fifth novel will be your first New York Times bestseller, but all you can fairly and reasonably expect is that you and your publisher will make the efforts necessary to deliver on shared expectations, which may or may not include hitting the list.
Having reasonable expectations make sense. But still, most authors I know are disappointed, including many who make seven figures per book and/or are on the New York Times bestseller list and/or get wildly positive reviews. There’s always something you aren’t getting.
Who is satisfied? Those few authors a year for whom true lightning has struck, for whom the lottery has been won and who hit Water for Elephants or Gone Girl level. The rest of us? We moan and try to drown our great expectations in chocolate or wine—pick your poison—and curse the writing gods and feel sorry for ourselves.
Those runaway successes can happen, but how often? How realistic are they? Why hold up those exceptions as plausible outcomes and set yourself up for failure?
ACKNOWLEDGE ONE THOUSAND SHADES OF SUCCESS
New York Times bestseller Christopher Rice offers this advice:
Get honest about how you define success. Separate your definition of success from your parents’ definition of success. Or your sixth-grade English teacher’s definition of success. If you’d like to sell a million copies of every book, set that as your definition of success, but learn to accept the sacrifices that come with that path; writing to market as opposed to your heart’s desire, putting out at least one, possibly two or more books a year. Or accept that for you success means forming a deep and lasting connection with a small but dedicated group of readers regardless of whether or not the resulting sales will give you the kind of picture-perfect suburban lifestyle you saw idolized on television growing up. Success for an artist has a thousand different definitions; find yours, and commit to it.
The fact is that writing is an art and publishing is a business, and if you tie your happiness to the business instead of the craft, you are bound to be disappointed. That’s because no business is kind. It’s a corporation that needs product and profit to keep itself going. And as much as we like to think we are making art, once that book is delivered to a publishing house, it’s a product. And the score in that game is mostly kept in dollar bills.
Randy Susan Meyers, author of Accidents of Marriage, suggests that it helps if you become knowledgeable about the business:
You can become more realistic if you know the average sales of novels. Online you get answers like this: ‘The average book in America sells about 500 copies’ (Publishers Weekly, July 17, 2006). And average sales have since fallen much more. According to BookScan, which tracks most bookstore, online, and other retail sales of books, only 299 million books were sold in 2008 in the United States in all adult nonfiction categories combined. The average U.S. book is now selling less than 250 copies per year and less than 3,000 copies over its lifetime.
To stay sane in this business, Meyers also suggests “becoming enmeshed with a group of writers who are honest, funny, and are the best of cynicism and art.”
MARRY YOUR HAPPINESS TO YOUR CRAFT
There is hope.
Tie your happiness and expectations to the writing—the one thing you actually do control. Be thankful for a talent that takes you on great escapes, that gives you pleasure and makes you feel more alive than almost anything (except maybe sex). Crafting that story is accomplishment, one that should not be ruined by what others may or may not do with that story.
What to do when you get overwhelmed by the biz, the hopes, and the dreams? Here’s what three authors had to say about it.
Alyson Richman, author of The Lost Wife, says:
I force myself to take a step back and say, “Why are you doing this?” The answer always saves me. I’m writing books because I have a story to tell. It has to be the intellectual curiosity and the creative impulse that propels me. Not the financial rewards, as grateful as I would be to have them! We’ll never be able to control the publishing success of a book, so it's important to reinforce the positive—the fulfillment of creating the novel from the first sentence to the last. I also feel very grateful for having a creative life. It is not always easy. But I can't imagine doing anything else.
Steve Berry, the New York Times bestseller of more than a dozen books, adds this:
It’s amazing to me how people all over the world can sit down and read your story, becoming enthralled and entertained, losing themselves in your imagination. That’s something that definitely keeps me going. And just to be able to do it again. That, to me, should be the real goal of every published writer.
New York Times bestseller Lexi Blake shares this insight:
I came into this business as a people-pleasing-want-everyone-to-love-me Southern girl, and now I’m pretty thick-skinned and can take a punch. Why? Why put up with bad reviews? Why put up with people yelling at you that you don’t write fast enough? That what you write isn’t good enough? Or worse [receive] no reviews at all because no one read the damn thing? Because this is the best job in the world. Because I get to feed my family while I feed my soul. Because I spend the majority of my day creating worlds and going on journeys most people only dream of—or read about.
As for me, I live for the writing. I get intense pleasure from the stories I create. And I love coming to the end: writing that last word, knowing I’ve finally completed the creation. Expecting to write is totally within the writer’s realm. It’s precious and wonderful and can only belong to us.
When you tie your happiness and expectations to the writing, you can revel in it. And if you can do that, it becomes much easier to let the business just happen, even if it never matches up to those great expectations.
How to Get in Your Own Way, Method 34: Believe You’ve Got It All Figured Out
Every book is different. Like a video game in which bad guys get progressively harder, each new book you write will humiliate and drive you crazy in its own infuriating way.
—Bill Ferris