{"id":40160,"date":"2021-10-28T09:03:10","date_gmt":"2021-10-28T13:03:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/?p=40160"},"modified":"2022-01-08T16:01:42","modified_gmt":"2022-01-08T21:01:42","slug":"emmie-mears-five-things-ive-learned-building-a-writing-career-the-wrong-way","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/2021\/10\/28\/emmie-mears-five-things-ive-learned-building-a-writing-career-the-wrong-way\/","title":{"rendered":"Emmie Mears: Five Things I\u2019ve Learned Building a Writing Career the Wrong Way"},"content":{"rendered":"

Have you ever wanted to write a novel? How about twenty-two of them? Do you like being told no hundreds of times for a living? Great, me too!<\/em><\/p>\n

What a rubbish sales pitch that would be.<\/p>\n

I used to talk about writing a lot. For a while, I literally blogged every day. A lot of that was about writing. About writing books, trying to find an agent for those books, writing about other people\u2019s advice about writing books, and eventually about signing contracts for books I wrote. And then everything went to hell, and I slipped back into the bushes like that Homer Simpson GIF.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve tried to write this post about five times and have scrapped about two thousand words of it. I am leading with that, because it feels relevant.<\/p>\n

I even hyperbolically labeled the document \u201cattempt a billion\u201d because I feel like I have been staring at it since the Cretaceous Period.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve hit some strange milestones this year in my writing career, and while I had a lot to say about it, I didn\u2019t know how<\/em> to say it. So instead, I\u2019m going to give it a go in five chunks. Five things I\u2019ve learned, five wheels you shouldn\u2019t have to reinvent, five lessons, five shouts into the windy void.<\/p>\n

This Isn\u2019t Over<\/h2>\n

Maybe it\u2019s weird to start out by saying something isn\u2019t over, but I feel like it\u2019s worth hammering into place with very large nails.<\/p>\n

There was a not-insignificant amount of time where I believed my publishing career was dead before it had even begun. For those of you who don\u2019t know me, my debut was put up for sale in a box set with three other authors\u2019 books, released as a solo just in time to get orphaned, and removed from sale within six months of publication. Without going too in-depth into the other exciting points of that sob story (three orphaned books and an untenable contract and<\/em> Agent Hunt the Third within three months of each other), when your debut barely sells three hundred copies, let\u2019s just say acquisitions teams are not so keen on taking a risk on your next one.<\/p>\n

From that point on, I spent a couple years self-publishing to a decent amount of success with my Ayala Storme series. But I had always wanted to sell traditionally, and it increasingly looked like it wasn\u2019t going to happen.<\/p>\n

My books started failing\u2014and I do mean failing. The Storme sales dried up, partly because I took a sharp turn genre-wise, none of my novels was selling in the traditional world, and I was floundering<\/em>.<\/p>\n

But I held onto one thing. I told myself that everything I was doing was fertiliser. That I was sowing seeds in the earth below my feet, and that if I kept tending them, maybe they would grow.<\/p>\n

I wrote new categories and subgenres. I started freelancing as an editor. I read craft books and style guides and kept writing new things. I tried short stories for the first time. I started a Patreon. I learned Gaelic to fluency. I started singing again. A brand new publisher decided to acquire my backlist and my shelved epic fantasy, and I decided to go for it.<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t over then, and it isn\u2019t over now.<\/p>\n

Seeds Take A While to Sprout<\/span><\/h2>\n

In 2018, one of my musical heroes disappeared and was found later, having died by suicide. I wanted to write something to honour Frightened Rabbit\u2019s Scott Hutchison, to process his death and the connections I\u2019d had to his music and his mental illnesses\u2014his words resonated with many people who shared his depression. But nothing I wrote seemed right.<\/p>\n

Then, after a week-long Gaelic immersion course at Ce\u00f2las in South Uist, something clicked. I came home and wrote \u201cSeonag and the Sea-wolves\u201d in pretty much one sitting and fired it off to Jen Gunnels at Tor who also reads for Tor.com<\/a>. She bought the story within a month, with me writing as M. Evan MacGriogair. It ended up making the Hugo longlist and has been reprinted now twice, with a third contracted.<\/p>\n

In 2017, I\u2019d written a YA. It came close to selling many times, but it didn\u2019t. Like many of my novels, it seemed promising when it went on sub only to fizzle out after a year or so, I suspect because according to BookScan, I\u2019m a big, juicy trombone womp on the loss side of \u201cprofit and loss.\u201d This was the twelfth or thirteenth novel-length work I\u2019d written. We were about to shelve it when my former agent got in contact, as she was acquiring YA after a spell of only doing younger categories.<\/p>\n

In 2019, I sold that YA as Maya MacGregor. It comes out next year from Astra Books for Young Readers, and it\u2019s called THE MANY HALF-LIVED LIVES OF SAM SYLVESTER. My acquiring editor told me over a plate of chimichangas that when she\u2019d brought the book to the team, they\u2019d asked her how the hell I hadn\u2019t been snapped up yet. I may have cried into my margarita.<\/p>\n

And as a final example, way back in 2016 (remember when we thought that year was the Worst? Bless), I had the absolutely, lolsob-worthy timing of releasing a book about a city slipping into the pit of fascism the very week the US elected Trump. It wasn\u2019t a coincidence that I wrote that book\u2014my degree is in history, and a big part of that was spent studying the reemerging extremist cells in Europe and the US. But despite its painful topicality, the book sank. Hard.<\/p>\n

A few weeks ago, that book\u2014which I am writing this post to promote\u2014earned me my first ever starred review for its new hardcover edition. Five years after it \u201cfailed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Publishing is a Luck Game<\/span><\/h2>\n

I think we can all recognise that publishing is far from a meritocracy. It doesn\u2019t diminish the power or impact of wonderful work to say that getting a book on a shelf is a concoction of timing, the nebulous markets, what an editor just bought, whether an editor is vibing with something in particular, and a million other factors.<\/p>\n

You can write an amazing book and not sell it. You can write a book people hate and sell millions of copies. (Not here for bashing Twilight\u2014like it or not, Meyer did something very right.) You can yeet a book onto Amazon and do absolutely nothing and have it somehow sell a thousand copies in its first few weeks and then go on to sell almost twenty thousand more. You can pour your soul into a book and have it sink like a lead-covered stone dropped over the Mariana Trench.<\/p>\n

There is relatively little in our control, and before I get a pitchfork to the gut, \u201clittle\u201d is not nothing. It\u2019s just possible to do everything \u201cright\u201d and not have a breakthrough book. But that also means that sometimes, just sometimes, lightning strikes.<\/p>\n

Publishing is a Long Con<\/span><\/h2>\n

As I went through Point Two on this list, you probably can already guess the gist of this one, because they\u2019re closely related.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s one thing to look back in hindsight and say wow, all those things I did five years ago ended up doing stuff! But it\u2019s even more powerful to look around right now and say that what you\u2019re doing today could bear fruit in five years.<\/p>\n

One of the things I\u2019ve been mulling over in the past couple years is the difference between recognition and intentionality. I can recognise good writing when I see it but not be aware of the techniques and specific devices used and how I can also utilise them in my own writing. The same is true for general effort\u2014it\u2019s easy to get into autopilot mode and forget that we have agency and<\/em> that our agency can alter future outcomes.<\/p>\n

t(w + c) = l<\/em><\/h2>\n

No, I\u2019m not saying that luck is the product of Terribleminds and Chuck Wendig, but it would be handy if it did. (And just in case, Chuck, may I have your blessing?) [edit — YOU MAY — cw]<\/p>\n

At the end of all this, the most important lesson I\u2019ve learned has to do with those letters standing for different variables where t=time spent, w=work, c=craft, <\/em>and l=luck.<\/em><\/p>\n

Am I mathematician? No.<\/p>\n

Is this any more scientific than saying luck is the product of Chuck Wendig and Terribleminds? Also no.<\/p>\n

But it is something that helps me feel a little bit more in control when so many things are outside my control.<\/p>\n

I cannot control geopolitics and global pandemics. I cannot control whether the editor who\u2019s had my novel on their desk for nine months will happen to pick it up on a day they ate some bad charcuterie and can\u2019t focus because they need to run to the loo every ten minutes. I can\u2019t control markets, reviewers, who else publishes the day my book comes out, or even (very frequently on the trad side of publishing) my covers and titles.<\/p>\n

But I can control other things. I control the effort I put into my craft. I\u2019ve now written twenty-two novels, and by the time you read this, it might be twenty-three. LOOK TO THE SUN was my tenth.<\/p>\n

I can control whether I keep going or take a break, whether I give up altogether or come running back to the game. I am responsible for whatever ends up on my pages.<\/p>\n

And if there\u2019s anything you learn after seeing a few rounds of the \u201cten year overnight success\u201d in this business, it really is that luck is very frequently the product of work and craft over time. It\u2019s not as simple as that, of course, but you have a much better chance of getting struck by lightning if you are in the plains of Kansas in tornado season than on a sunny day in a redwood forest. Don\u2019t go get struck by lightning, but do work smart and sow your seeds in fertile ground.<\/p>\n

Not all of us luck into the easier (note I didn\u2019t say easy)<\/em> route of writing one book, getting one agent, getting one book deal, and then getting successive book deals forever from there that allow us to live comfortably on our writing income until we retire. Most of us don\u2019t, overwhelmingly. I certainly didn\u2019t. Maybe I never will.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re like me\u2014the me of five years ago or the me of now\u2014wondering if it\u2019s worth it, I can\u2019t answer that for you. I frequently avoid talking about my publishing experience because no one really wants to hear \u201con top of the gruelling process of writing one (1) book and finding one (1) agent, you might have to do it multiple times and might end up writing a fifteen books before getting one advance,\u201d but I can tell you that it isn\u2019t over until you decide it is.<\/p>\n

(My stubbornness comes in handy sometimes.)<\/p>\n

I can\u2019t say what\u2019s going to happen next. LOOK TO THE SUN\u2019s grand re-opening might coincide with any number of catastrophes. Murder hornet-sharknado, who knows? What I can say is that none of us at all have that kind of predictive power, and whatever happens could be terrible! But it could also be something wonderful.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m a writer because I have a very active imagination. If you\u2019re also a writer, it\u2019s likely because you do too. I know how easy it is to imagine the worst possible outcomes or to imagine that the troubles of the past will also be the troubles of our future. So my challenge to myself and also to you is to apply that imagination to exploring new futures. New ideas, new good things, new solutions to old problems. Good things can still happen, even in the godforsaken hellscape of 2021.<\/p>\n

I believe that for me, and I believe that for you too.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve got this.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Emmie Mears is the author of over fifteen novels for adults and young adults, also writing as M. Evan MacGriogair, Maya MacGregor, and Sylvie Greenhart. Their English short fiction has appeared on Tor.com and in Uncanny Magazine, and their Gaelic poetry and short fiction is in the Poet\u2019s Republic and in Steall magazine. As a Gaelic singer, they have won awards as both a solo singer and as part of the Alba choir and the Glasgow Gaelic Musical Association. They live in Glasgow, Scotland with their two cats and dreams gu le\u00f2r.<\/p>\n

Emmie Mears<\/strong>: Website<\/a> | Twitter<\/a><\/p>\n

Look to the Sun<\/strong>: BHC Press<\/a><\/p>\n

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