I’ve watched as “debut authors” have become more and more hyped over the twenty years I’ve been involved in publishing. When I started out, being a debut author seemed a lot more like being a beginner—people didn’t expect as much of you as when you were more experienced at this. Authors who had been in the business a long time seemed to be the ones who were honored and who got the bigger advances and more marketing promised to them.
But somehow that changed and now, it seems that being an old pro is often the same as being a has-been. You had your chance and it’s time for you to step aside, especially if you’ve never broken out of mid-list author status. If you’re a bestseller, this is less true in part, but there’s a ton of pressure on bestsellers to continue to produce bestsellers. If ever once you produce a “dud,” then you’re back to the list of mid-list authors or potential has-beens. Former bestsellers often end up feeling obliged to change their names if they want to continue publishing. More often, they move on to another phase in their careers. Some become freelance editors. Others move out of publishing entirely.
There are a lot of really great debut books out there. There are plenty of authors who only produce one book in their careers. But I’m not sure this is something to be proud of as an industry. If a musician only ever produced one piece of good music, would that be great? If a teacher only taught one class and then retired, wouldn’t we think there was something wrong with the district she taught in? Maybe. Or maybe we’d just think the teacher wasn’t suited for the job.
The likelihood of an author only ever writing one book is directly related, in my opinion, to the problem of the sophomore “slump,” a second novel which does not live up to the first one. All authors are aware of this problem. All authors are terrified of their second book not being as good as their first one. And we also know why this problem happens: pressure to produce a second book in a much shorter time frame than it took us to produce the first one. But there are many other problems that contribute to the sophomore slump. The bigger the first book is, the more marketing commitments take time away from producing a second book. The bigger the first book is, the more the psychological pressure makes it impossible to figure out what your vision for a new book is. The bigger the first book is, the more other people are eager to tell you what to write next, and how to write it. It has to be like the first book in certain ways, so you can be seen as a “brand” to readers, and yet not derivative. Writing a trilogy is especially fraught for first-time authors because readers are eager to read the next book, and also eager to tell you what it should be about.
As a reader, before I became a writer, I noticed what I thought was a sad trend. Many big-name authors produced works I considered less than great later on in their careers. This was far more likely when the author was a bestseller. I thought that I knew what caused this, laziness and complacency on the part of the big-name author. Once they were secure in their place in the publishing world, they didn’t bother to edit things and they were given permission to publish any old trash they wanted.
Now that I’m an author myself, I see this in a slightly more nuanced way. Yes, sometimes it happens that a big-name author is allowed to publish a book that is seen as lesser because they have clout, and the publishing house is willing to take a risk or simply assumes it will lose money on this one book, but keep in good with the author so they’re loyal for the rest of their career. And yes, sometimes authors get so big-headed that they stop listening to editorial advice. Yes, publishers sometimes decide their editors’ time is better served dealing with authors who will take advice more readily and who need more of a boost.
But there is also a reality that there is no such thing as a universal good taste for books. I’ve found that my own tastes for books has changed, and that books I once set aside I like, that books I once loved I no longer have any interest in. I’ve become more skeptical of my own instincts, because I can see more clearly that my tastes vary widely depending on my mood, my health, and my education and training. I grew into specific ideas of what “good writing” was that turn out to be based on a model created by and defended by white men. This limits my view of “good literature” and I’m trying to change that, but it’s not just a button to be pressed.
So when I see an established author write a book that I don’t like, I’m much less likely now to simply dismiss it as a bad book someone made a deal to publish to earn loyalty. I’m not saying this never happens. But I’ve definitely talked to authors whose books I’ve sometimes loved and sometimes hated and discovered that there is a fan base for the books I don’t have a taste for. Sometimes the books I hate are the very books others love and want more of. And simply dismissing those readers is not very helpful. In addition, sometimes there are books that authors want to publish that will have a smaller reading audience. That doesn’t mean those books are useless. Authors, I have found in myself and in others, need sometimes to write for themselves and to feed their own internal sense of what is good writing rather than always looking for external success in the form of reviews or sales figures.
As a writer, I feel I’ve come into my own only in the last few years, after banging my head against the wall of the publishing world for a long time and then nearly giving up. I gave myself “one last chance” with a book that I wrote entirely for myself and was convinced by my agent that “no one will ever buy this.” Those words actually gave me the sense of security I needed to write a dangerous book. But more importantly, I found within myself as a creator a delicious sense of deviance.
I no longer write books waiting for external approval. I write the books I want to write and if other people want to read them, wonderful. If they don’t, I don’t worry about that. I don’t spend my precious and limited writing time worrying over what I’m writing is any good since I no longer believe there is any useful way of determining what that standard of “good” might be. Am I just using my writing for therapy, then? Is it just self-indulgence? I don’t think so. I think that more than ever, I’ve found an inner sense of quality. I am more confident in my own sense of whether a book is good or bad and when I get editorial revisions, I am less concerned about pleasing my editor and more about pleasing myself and making sure that this book says what I want it to say, on second (or hundredth) look.
However, I’m well aware that because my writing strategy has changed so drastically, earlier readers of my books are not necessarily interested in my current writing. In fact, if anyone actually likes all of my published books (now spread across various genres from YA contemporary to YA fantasy, adult mystery, adult religious—which don’t even begin to encompass the number of genres in which I’ve got manuscripts waiting to be appreciated), I’m surprised. My tastes are eclectic and changeable. I write when the mood is upon me. I often finish books in a couple of weeks, set them aside for a critical eye later to decide what to do with them. And then spend many weeks, months, and years in revision to try to get my original idea absolutely right on the page.
Sometimes I think about an author friend of mine, who far ahead of me in her career, once told me that the scariest thing that had happened to her was the sense that a particular one of her books was her “best,” and that nothing she ever wrote after that was going to be any better. This book had some of the best reviews she’d ever received and was a true “book of the heart.” I don’t know if she still thinks it is her best book, but she might. And it was midway through her career. What about authors who end up realizing that the best thing they’ve ever written (at least in the eyes of the reviewers and readers) is the first book they published? Should they simply move out of the way to create more shelf space for the next great debut author?
I don’t think so. Maybe this is a problem with capitalism sticking its peanut butter in the chocolate of art. With my PhD in literature from Princeton, you’d think I’d be more interested in talking about “true literature” and how in the old days it was much better. But the reality is that I don’t see much difference from our current time and centuries past, except that more writers are being published than ever before, and more people are reading than ever before. I’m neither particularly sentimental nor particularly elitist. I have rejected almost all of the ivory-tower ideals of “litt-rachur.” I write genre fiction most of the time and have no interest in making fine distinctions between literary or other kinds of fiction except in the ways in which I can use those categories to find books that interest me. That is to say, I think I use the same general eye as most readers do. I read past genre barriers when it suits me, and within them when I want to do that, too.
I guess in the end I’d say that I think it’s fine if debut authors aren’t interested in writing a second book—though I suspect almost none of the debut authors who don’t publish a second book have done so because they wanted to. Most of them have probably written several books and may continue to write for the rest of their lives. I wish we stopped using authors up and spitting them out. I wish we stopped using rubrics for deciding who was worth spending a lot of marketing dollars on. Only what system do I think should replace this one? I don’t know. I’m not a marketing professional and those I’ve talked to who are really smart are as interested as anyone in figuring out a better system.
If you’re an author and you’ve been chewed up by the system, maybe go back to what brought you to writing in the first place? Maybe this is a chance for you to figure out what you really want to do with your life. I thought when I started out that if I worked harder than everyone else, I’d be a best seller. And I am, but it’s not the money maker I thought it would be. There are plenty of years when I need helping paying the bills from my partner, and other years where it’s worse than that. But I hold onto the belief that my writing matters, and that the most important thing for me to do as a writer is not to be a shiny debut writing new kinds of the old kinds of books, but to be the kind of writer who looks inward for direction and who tries new things. And yes, the kind of author who writes a book certain readers will think is “bad” because it isn’t a variation they recognize of the kind of book they expect from my “brand” which earlier books told them to expect from me.
Bless you, Mette! This is so wonderful. Thank you. Right where I’m at.