Failing — and Then Succeeding — in Plain Sight

For an editor-turned-first-time-author, the second time was the charm

If you doubt that the human smile originated as fear response, tell a book editor you’re writing a novel.

Watch how her head bobs, teeth clench, eyes scan the room for exits. If you happen to be a book editor yourself, expect this reaction to be compounded.

“Oh no!” said one editor when I told her exactly this.

Publishing may be an industry of some fascination, but it remains mysterious to people outside of it. Even avid readers have only a vague sense of a book’s journey from a writer’s laptop to bookstore shelves, and initiates to publishing find themselves at the base of a precipitous learning curve. The lexicon is a polyglot of corporatese, byzantine acronyms, and terms that date to the advent of movable type.

The business is perched on a tripod of personal relationships, profit-seeking, and prayers for prestige.

It is populated both by people working for a fraction of what they’d earn elsewhere and by personalities that, born in another time and place, would be successful warlords right up to the point where they’re defenestrated by their own minions.

And it’s no secret: publishing a first novel is a tricky endeavor. Even the most seasoned industry veterans will tell you that an auspicious author launch is an alchemy of talent, timing, and luck. Every remainder bin is littered with debuts from unique storytellers with beautiful voices.

Given this, a publishing professional who spends his free time trying to hack it as a writer is, within the editorial ecosystem, a pitiable genus. Implicit in your industry friends’ lukewarm declarations of support and panicked grins are a dozen sentiments that can be distilled into a single question:

Have you not been paying attention?

But this is where they’re wrong, you think. You have been paying attention. Few people on the planet read so many and such varied books as you. You’ve peered behind the curtains of some of today’s best-selling writers. You understand how to write a pitch letter. You know which agents are in ascent and looking for new clients. You have a sense of where the market’s moving.

Knowing how the sausage is made isn’t a deterrent — not for you.
For you, it’s an asset.

The art of writing fiction hinges on such self-delusion. How else to explain why a person sits in front of a blank page with 100,000 words and thousands of hours of work ahead of him convinced that someone other than his mother will read whatever the thing is when it’s finished?

It’s a kind of insanity, especially when you know the long odds of success. The ordeal of the submission process alone should deter you: the editorial boards, the acquisitions meetings, the cold shower of sales and marketing reads.

But you’re not worried. Your manuscript has slick action scenes, a timely subject, cliffhanger chapter endings, and series potential. You know no book is a sure thing, but if a bestselling thriller had a checklist of qualities, you’ve ticked every one of them. Publishers are crazy for this kind of thing right now. That objectively terrible submission you passed on last month went for almost seven figures. A seven-figure deal would be awesome, but even six figures is nothing to sneeze at. It might be enough for a down payment on an apartment. Film rights are sure to be scooped up. Blaze of glory job-quitting scenarios flit through your head.

At first it seems like working in the industry will make things easier for you, but in a way, it’s worse. When your book is sent out on wide submission, it isn’t being evaluated by clinical strangers behind closed doors in Manhattan skyscrapers. It’s being discussed and dissected by peers and acquaintances in open-plan offices where everyone you’ve ever professionally encountered overhears everything anyone else says.

The first rejection comes in, but that’s okay. Carrie was rejected, like, 30 times. There’s an old saw that you’re not a real editor until you pass on a book that becomes a runaway bestseller. You tell yourself this as exquisitely polite rejections stack up.

Then the rejections stop, not because you finally have a bidder, but because there are no more to receive. Every publisher rejects it. All of them. Even those in the second round of submission. Even the imprints of last resort. Everyone.

“Oh, no,” indeed.

It feels like walking away from a car accident. You’re okay. Everyone’s okay, because you didn’t careen into another car, just reality itself. So no one’s dead. But there’s wreckage everywhere and smoke in the air. You’re okay, you reassure yourself. No cuts, not even a scratch, though this doesn’t make sense. Because whether or not it’s left an exit wound, you’re certain a fistful of something critical has been torn from you.

Walk it off, the coach in your head tells you. You do. Because maybe pretending everything’s fine is the first step to making it so. You go to meetings and agent lunches. The routine is supposed to be a solace, but instead it reminds you that this car crash of a failed novel didn’t happen on some stretch of desolate highway, but in the industry equivalent of a Thanksgiving Day parade that everyone you know was watching from the sidelines.

This analogy isn’t perfect, because of course it isn’t: you suck at analogies.
Every publisher in town thinks so.

It’s a humiliation, but you do actually walk it off, even if you can still only talk about it in the second person. When you get far enough from the wreck, you’re surprised to find that you’re the same person you were when you first sat in front of that blinking cursor 100,000 words ago. You still want to tell stories. Actually, you’ve got an even better one in mind.

This time you’ve learned something. You dig into writing the new book without an eye to landing an agent or winning a book contract. You realize after a few chapters that this is exactly the kind of book you love to read. One of those tricky stories that plays with structure and balances unreliable narratives. One of those category-straddlers that flirts with horror, winks at genre conventions, and has characters whom you want to both hug and slap.

Maybe you’ll find a publisher, and maybe you won’t. First, you need to get the story and its characters and pacing right. This seems like the most obvious of things, but you somehow lost sight of it the last time. It’s a lesson you don’t intend to forget. Fantasies are good, but don’t waste them thinking of film deals and bestseller lists. Save them for the page.

But on those days when the words are working for you, you’re allowed to feel satisfied. You have a good feeling about this one. Even knowing what you know and failing as you’ve failed, you can’t help it. Is this optimism, or more delusion? You’re not sure, but you’re not afraid to find out.

You get a new agent, who loves the same things about the book that you do. She sends it into the gauntlet of the submissions process. Some of the editors on the list are among those who rejected your first book, but you’re no longer gun-shy about such things. This is what you do. This is who you are.

There are rejections, but you’re prepared for them. Other editors want to talk to you to find out what kind of person you are. Will you be easy to deal with? Are you the kind of writer who responds well to notes and is willing to put the work necessary into making the book the best it can be? Publishing is a partnership, and not everyone can transition from I to we. Some of the editors want significant revisions, and you’ve been around the block enough to know that this is a good thing.

Editing is work, work is time, and in a profession where time is short, editing equals enthusiasm.

You might actually tear up at one point.

An auction is scheduled. This is the point when you realize that the book is going to sell. You’re going to be published. This is happening.

The day of the auction, you keep yourself busy. Laundry, errands, housekeeping. There’s a rubber band wrapped around your brain that you snap whenever you feel yourself fall into fantasy. You remember a bird’s nest 20 feet up a weeping cherry tree in your parents’ backyard that you’ve been meaning to investigate. Robin’s eggs, you decide by their cyan shells. Three of them. Yes, you are literally climbing trees.

You get a two-book deal with an imprint of Penguin Random House.

You talk with your agent and editor, your parents and friends. People send you champagne and treat you to celebratory lunches, and it still doesn’t feel real. You hadn’t let yourself imagine this moment this time around, and now it’s here.

It’s the most astonishing thing. Can you even remember how you thought this would feel? Happiness, relief, shock, and gratitude churn inside you.

A thousand things can still go wrong: you know this better than most. But then you agree with all of your editor’s notes. You go through two revisions, and the results are surprising and wondrous. Characters unfurl and developments deepen. The art department exceeds your every hope with a beautiful and arresting cover. Sales reps get excited. Reviewers like the book, and so do booksellers. It makes several best-of-the-month lists, which is amazing, because it means that we did it. We wrote and edited and packaged and publicized and marketed and sold a book that we can be — that we are — proud of.

After years of work by dozens of people, it’s finally ready to be sent into the world.

Brendan Duffy is the author of House of Echos, which will be published by Ballantine Books on April 14, 2015.

Available for purchase from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and your local independent.