Dear Author, Please Stop

Dear Author,

You wrote the thing! Good for you! Now, you're going to fling that thing into the bright sky and see if it will fly.

I want you to stop.

No, no. By all means, hit publish or accept that contract - whatever is going to get your book out into the world, do it. What I want to do is tell you what I wish someone had told me.

Stop being a people pleaser if you are one.

Remember why you started writing in the first place. Whether it was to entertain yourself, or keep yourself company, or to right a wrong done in another story - no matter the reason, at some point, writing became your own little act of rebellion. Maybe sedition. It's a portion of yourself that refuses to bend to the dictates of your society and your culture. It's the part of you that you reserve for you. Keep that firmly in mind and in your heart.

Once you hit publish, your story may grow wings. Or it may crash and burn. Or it may flounder in obscurity. You have no control over how your thing is received. But if you're a people pleaser, you'll spend too much time and energy obsessing over why someone liked it/didn't like it/failed to notice it. And that will warp your relationship with your stories. Eventually, it will warp your relationship with yourself.

So stop being a people pleaser. Only one person needs to love your stories. You. If you do, then and only then is it possible for anyone else to love them, too. It isn't a guarantee that everything you produce will meet with unconditional love. It likely won't. What is guaranteed is that if you allow people pleasing to drive your writing, no one will be happy. Least of all you.

Love,
Me

PS. Debut year? WTH? Every single book you release is a debut. It's all new. It's all fun. It's all scary and overwhelming and guaranteed something will go sideways because of all the moving parts. But if you keep writing, you have infinite chances to roll out the perfect debut. Even if it's of your 67th book.

Letter to my pre-debut self

Dear Me on April 3, 2017,

Tomorrow your first book will be available for sale. Go you, kiddo. You'll get flowers from Christa, and Sloane will drive you all over town from B&N to B&N so you can sign all the paperbacks in Austin. Your writer friends will text and tweet congratulations. Your family will take you out for dinner and pretend you're famous. The whole experience will be a blur of wonder, a party, the sweet fruit of years of hope and work and passion.

Don't look at rankings. Don't look at reviews. Don't think about the next day or the next book or the next anything. Just enjoy the moment. Enjoy the people who make the moment happen.

And when you wake up Wednesday morning, keep on not looking, not at any of it. Because guess what? Nothing will have changed. You'll still be a nobody in the giant soup of writerly folk. You'll still have to work, to struggle, to hope, to fail. You will still have exactly what you had going into this: some amazing and supportive friends and family and a spark that makes you want to tell stories.

Basically what I'm saying is that the debut changes nothing. It's neither an ending nor a beginning -- you've been writing a long time, and it's not like you're going to stop anytime soon. The debut -- the day, the year, the book -- is a nice marker on a longer, bigger, more complicated path.

Enjoy what you can, and keep your expectations to a minimum.

And most of all, just write the next damn book.

So much love,
Me of 2018

p.s. -- Did you guys see that Jeffe Kennedy has a new book out this week? And Marshall Ryan Maresca had one come out last week. SFF Seven is killing it, people. Both are fantasy writers, and I think we could all use a bit of escape from the real world right now.

The Myth of the Debut Year

Our topic at the SFF Seven this week is "If I could go back to my Debut Year..." You can tell I didn't suggest this one because I don't believe in the "Debut Year."

See, the "Debut Year" is a bit of magical, sparkle-pony mythology of Author Land.

This is how the myth goes:

One day a writer receives "The Call" where an editor offers the Big Book Deal. The writer's First Book comes out - their Debut Book - and they have their Debut Year. It's a time of glory and terror and dancing sparkle ponies. The writer is hopefully toasted as the New Big Thing. Reviews always discuss the book in terms of it being the author's First Book. And every mention of the author after that will note their First Book.

All of this is a fictionalization. We're novelists, after all! But I think it's also a damaging bit of mythology, so I'd like to discuss why.

First, let me break this down in reality.

1. All of this is cast in traditional publishing terms. Not only that, it's pretty much only for deals with the Big Five. So, only authors who publish their first book (see caveats to this) with the Big Five get an experience anything close to the Debut Year.

2. Almost nobody gets "The Call," even though you still hear people talk about it. If you're working with traditional publishing, you'll almost certainly be working with an agent. Those exchanges happen first via email. Your agent may call with exciting news, but very rarely - even vanishingly rarely - is there a single phone call with the final deal news. This is a fictionalization that makes it sound good.

3. Not many authors get a Big Book Deal. You just hear about the ones who do. And, because it's a Big Book Deal, the publisher puts a lot of marketing behind the book, so you hear about that, too. But hey - it's a book deal and that's fabulous!

4. But, you know what? It's one book deal. If you plan to make a career as an author, there will be more book deals. Lots of them. You might also self-publish or do that instead. We tend to celebrate "Firsts" of all kinds, but there's no particular magic to them. (Besides that you're a newbie, which is likely the point of this topic, but I'm ignoring that. You'll find out why. Stick with me.)

5. There is a lot of terror. Moments of glory. Mostly a lot of work. Spoiler alert: No sparkle ponies.

6. Some writers get to be the Big New Thing, which is super cool. Most don't. Even those that do? Well, like prom queens and MVPs, there's a finite shelf life to being one, and there's a replacement coming the following year, if not sooner.

7. The "First Book" is a myth I'd really like to see die.

• Most writers have written many books before their first published one.
• Most writers have written and published extensively before their first published novel - poems, essays, other nonfiction, short stories, novellas, etc. By making a big deal about the first novel, we're elevating it above all other forms.
• Because they understand the "magic" of the debut, very often publishers will ask an author to adopt a pseudonym and present the initial book under that name as a first book by a debut author. All smoke and mirrors.
• In new publishing landscape, an author's first book is much more likely to be self-published or published by a small/digital-first publisher. These don't get the same splash.

The reason I think this mythology of the Debut Year is damaging is that any author who doesn't get this particular brass ring ends up feeling less than. Because this is most authors - I want to say 95% or more - that makes a lot of people laboring under a false perception of being lesser.

For myself, my "First Book" was WYOMING TRUCKS, TRUE LOVE, AND THE WEATHER CHANNEL, an essay collection published by a university press back in 2004. A lot of those essays had been published in literary journals and magazines - including Redbook, my big score - so the collection wasn't even my first publication. 

After that...

[insert montage of time passing here]

...when I transitioned into fiction, my "first book" was a digitally published novella. My first novel-length work was published by Carina, an imprint of Harlequin, also a digital-first publisher.

My first print deal was with Kensington, for The Twelve Kingdoms trilogy. The first book, THE MARK OF THE TALA, was my 4th novel-length publication, my 2nd print book, my 13th fiction publication, and I have no idea what number it would be in overall number of creative works.

The first book in my first Big Five book deal, THE ORCHID THRONE, comes out next summer. It will be something like my 30th novel-length publication.

The point is, I never had a Debut Year.

Okay, yeah - maybe we could say it was 2004, when Wyoming Trucks came out. That's why I put that photo at the top, because that's at my signing and launch party, where I'm clearly bright-eyed, cheeks flushed with excitement.

It was a great night.

And good things came of that book.

But I was never the New Big Thing. I didn't get rich or famous. The only sparkle pony I have is a plastic one that an author friend gave me.

What's most important is that this is just fine! My career has grown slowly and steadily, which I will absolutely take over what some of my friends have gone through - a Debut Year that burns fast and hot, but ends in ashes and reinvention. Building a career through small presses and thoughtful self-publishing is a viable path - often a far better one - than shooting for the moon and the Big Book Deal. Even if you *do* get the Big Book Deal, that's no guarantee of the future.

So, the others of the SFF Seven might have more to offer on the actual topic. But when I consider going back to my Debut Year, I don't know when that was.

Even if I did know, and could go back - I wouldn't change a thing.