Getting Published: Fiction vs Non-Fiction
You’re a writer. When you sit down to write, do you write fiction or non-fiction?
This might seem like an odd question. After all, in the classic romantic conception of writing, the writer is moved to write by strange and mysterious forces. His/her muse visits and the pen is carried across the page on a wave of inspiration. A novelist is destined to write novels. A memoirist is destined to write memoirs. A travel writer is destined to write travelogues. And so on.
If you want to get published this mentality will ruin you.
If there was one insider’s perspective on publishing that I could share with you that would meaningfully impact your capacity to get a book deal it would be this: fiction and non-fiction are utterly different propositions.
Fiction is hard. It’s really, really hard. I don’t mean hard in the sense of difficult to produce (although that is of course true) but hard in the sense of hard to make work. Non-fiction is also hard (all publishing is hard) but is an easier proposition for an agent to sell to an editor, and editor to sell internally to their colleagues at a publishing house, and for the publisher to sell to the market.
This is one of those dirty industry secrets that everyone knows and nobody talks about publicly. Every agent and editor I know admits this in private. Many of them got into publishing because they love fiction and after learning how the business work devoted themselves to publishing non-fiction. Even those editors and agents who just do fiction lament how crazy a business model it is. I remember sitting next to the editor of one of the most successful literary novelists in the world and listening to him despair at the equilibrium state of fiction publishing. Even though he was at the very top of his profession, he found the difficulty of publishing fiction profoundly dispiriting. There were authors he published who he loved, whose work moved him, and who’s books sold in the low three figures. An agent once told me that her latest debut novelist’s book had sold six copies in the first two weeks — and she had brought three of them. Before Anna Burns was long-listed for the Booker Prize for Milkman, she had sold fewer than 200 copies of the book in the United Kingdom. The stories are endless. There is no lower limit on how few copies a book can sell.
Part of the problem with fiction is that is undifferentiated. Think of a bookshop. When you walk in, what do you see? The History section. The Philosophy section. The Self-Help section. The Music section. The Gardening section. In other words, all the non-fiction. And then there’s Fiction, organized A to Z. Sometimes there’s separate area for Classics and another for Crime. But normally, it’s just one big section, Fiction, A to Z. As a customer you are just confronted with a wall of books to choose from. There’s very little (apart from perhaps a staff recommendation) to guide your decision.
The other problem is one of motivation. Why should anyone care about what this unknown writer has to say about the world? The sad truth is there are far more competent writers with well-written novels than there are paying customers to read them. Publishers know this. Consequently, the only way that publishers think they can make a novel work is to generate a ‘buzz’ around it. In other words, to bombard the media/influencers/booksellers with press-releases, ARCs, and freebies in order to convince them that this is the book of the season. (Parenthetically, this is why debut novelists have it slightly easier than second- and third-time novelists — being a debut is interesting in and of itself hence it is (theoretically) easier to generate buzz) Clearly publishers can’t do this for all the books on the roster. So they have to pick the novels they are willing to commit resources to. Once you’ve picked your winners, it is hard to explain why you would buy a load of books that you don’t have the money, manpower, or interest to promote. So they just don’t buy them. The reality is most modern publishers have highly concentrated lists. It’s great if you’re on them. But the likelihood is you’re not and never will be.
Taken together, these two facts explains why non-fiction is relatively easier. I wrote a facetious article about how all that publishers care about is audience. If you have an audience then you will get a book deal. A corollary to that is if your book’s subject has an audience then, all things being equal, you will get a book deal. For instance, if you are pitching a non-fiction proposal for a book about the Los Angeles Lakers then the publisher can try and quantify the market for that subject. Is this going to be an inexact science? No. On the other hand, there is never a guaranteed market for a novel. I remember watching a video with UCLA screenwriting professor where he joked that expecting someone to read your screenplay is like running up to a random person in the street and asking them to listen to your two hour-long story. This is true. Put simply, outside of curiosity nobody has a reason to read a novel. A lot of people have hobbies and interests they want to develop by reading. Those people might be motivated to buy your non-fiction book.
Publishing is about getting your foot in the door. It’s always going to be hard. It’s going to be a lot harder if you are a completely unknown quantity. If your dream is to write fiction it might well be easier to get your work in front of agents and editors by starting with writing non-fiction. You can always try and get your fiction published further down the line. It worked for Olivia Laing. It might work for you.
