On Becoming a Debut Novelist

John Gardner, in his classic On Becoming a Novelist, said, “Practical sciences, including the verbal engineering of commercial fiction, can be taught and learned. The arts too can be taught, up to a point; but except for certain matters of technique, one does not learn the arts, one simply catches on.”

Gardner seems to imply that pretty much anyone can write a book that sells (pshaw!), but to produce a real work of art — well, as Louis Armstrong said,

“If you’ve got to ask, you’ll never know.”

I don’t know if my debut novel, Hot Season, is a real work of art. (I’d certainly like to think so.) But I do know that the publishing landscape looks different now than when Gardner wrote those words.

In 1983, when On Becoming a Novelist was published, there were more than three times the number of major publishers in the US than there are now, and as far as I can tell, a debut author who didn’t expect to have a blockbuster could hope to land a deal with one.

But as the industry consolidated, with smaller publishers swallowed up by large houses that are, in fact, smaller pieces of big media conglomerates themselves, the expectations for a title’s sales and revenue rose, and “the big players,” as Rachel Deahl at Publishers Weekly put it, “began swinging for the fences, focusing on acquiring big bestsellers (or at least books they thought they could turn into big bestsellers), abandoning a model in which they could make small amounts of money on books for audiences of varying sizes.”

That part about audiences of varying sizes is important, because it translates into varying tastes and aesthetics — in a word, diversity. When you aim for the lowest common denominator, you lose the stories that are a little less common.

I graduated with my MFA in 2011, the year Deahl’s article was written, with a freshly minted novel in hand, as did many of my peers. As far as I could tell, the majority of them were unaware of these changes in the industry.

My fellow graduates seemed to believe, the way I once had, that if a book was good — that is, if it was a real work of art — all you had to do was send it to an agent, and that agent would get you a good old-fashioned New York book deal with a hefty advance.

As a freelance editor, I was already working in the publishing industry, so I knew this wasn’t necessarily true. I’d seen great books — books some of my most talented clients had worked hard on, with an editor and on their own — rack up one rejection after another.

Those rejections letters all seemed to say either

“This is great, but I’m just not in love with it” or “I love it, but I don’t think I can sell it.”

Clearly, agents and acquisitions editors were very choosy about which books they fell for these days, and even so, sometimes love was not enough.

At the same time, publishing a book had never been easier, thanks to Amazon and the Kindle marketplace for self-published fiction, which provided plenty in the way of diversity. Historical thrillers? Check. Lesbian cozies? Check. Dinosaur erotica? Uh, check. (Self-publishing also tends to provide a lot of diversity in terms of spelling and grammar, which is why the world needs editors.)

Amazon is a consumer-oriented company that endeavors to exceed expectations, and part of its strategy with publishing has been to drive book prices down, as evidenced by its widely publicized dispute with the Hachette Book Group. We’re now at a point where people who signed up for Amazon Prime, say, in order to get their groceries delivered (which, FYI, is a thing) wind up having access to vast numbers of books for free — or, for what feels like free — which puts books priced at $15.99, or even $.99, at a distinct disadvantage.

I saw big things for my big debut, the way every author does, but I was also realistic enough to realize that Hot Season is about things like art and activism, and just how sketchy your college dating scene can become when there are undercover FBI agents enrolled in your classes — less of a blockbuster than a cult classic, if I was lucky.

For that reason, New York didn’t seem like an option. But after all those years I’d spent in school, I was reluctant to self-publish my first book. Being traditionally published, to me, meant that someone, somewhere, who cared very much about books cared very much about my book, enough to dedicate real resources to bringing it into the world, and that’s what I wanted.

Should I pitch this book to New York anyway? Or scrap it and focus on writing a bigger, more commercially viable novel first, in the hopes that I could get Hot Season published later?

Nobody could tell me the right way to enter the commercial marketplace because no one knew what the right way was — the landscape was changing too quickly.

In this regard, it seemed like the basics of the “practical science,” as Gardner put it, were more of a mystery than actually creating the work of art.

In the end, I decided to pitch my book to the small presses. I knew that this would likely mean a low (or no) book advance, but I figured that in other regards, publishing a book with a small press would be like a scaled-down version of publishing with the Big Five.

So I sent my MS out to twenty or so such presses, got bites from three of them, and went with the one I liked best. We went back and forth on edits (which took longer than you might expect), and then — tada! — the manuscript was accepted for publication.

And yet, as much as I thought I knew about the industry, it was only after I signed the contract that I began to understand that publishing with a small press would not just be a smaller version of publishing with a big press. Publishing with a small press would mean that I would have to pay for my own publicist, my own book tour, and many, many copies of my book to give away to potential reviewers.

I want to make it clear here that I’m saying all of this in no way to disparage my publisher. Small press publishers are heroes in my book, as they are the creative entrepreneurs, the passionate readers — many of them writers themselves — who have stepped up to make sure uncommon stories still get professionally published. Their work is almost always a labor of love rather than a profit-motivated endeavor.

These are simply the realities of publishing at this time: As book prices slide and free becomes the norm, selling books has become an increasingly difficult way to make money, which is part of why New York banks so hard on those blockbusters.

Even so, I knew that there were people out there who wanted to read my work, people who would connect with my fiction. How could I begin building relationships with those readers before my book was out, even as I raised the funds to promote it?

I discovered Patreon last year thanks to a sci fi writer named Cat Rambo, whose (excellent) short stories I signed on to sponsor. Patreon is different from most crowdfunding platforms in that it’s designed to provide ongoing support for artists, and the cost of entry ($1/month, or “thing,” as Patreon puts it) is so low that it’s practically pocket change.

The company launched in 2013 with a goal to

“help every creator in the world achieve sustainable income.”

A year later, according to CrowdCrux, it received $15 million in Series A funding, and has since proven to be a popular choice “with YouTube creators, podcasters, content creators and artists of all kinds,” including writers like Rambo.

As I opened up her latest post one day, it occurred to me that I had a number of short stories on my hard drive that had never been published. Why not use them to build a platform for my novel, while at the same time raising some cash?

I launched my Patreon campaign a little over a week ago now, and the response has been amazing. Currently, I’m nearly halfway to reaching my first goal, which is to pay for my book tour without going into debt.

And in the midst of this, I’ve found, my anxiety over my my novel has lifted. It’s an extraordinary thing to know that I have readers invested enough in me as an artist to pay, however small an amount, to read my work each month. Readers who, as patrons, have stepped up to help an emerging writer launch her career.

There’s a lot of chatter these days about how writers need to build a platform, but whatever that word may mean to different people, it’s seldom something as quantifiable as a personal subscriber base. To me, that kind of support feels like a sturdy foundation, the big picture component of launching a career with a small press.

I’m often struck by how many of the dreams we had about the Internet in the early aughts didn’t quite come true. But crowdfunding, I think, embodies some of the very best ideas we’ve had about what the Internet is and can do.

One dollar a month is a small enough expense as to be nearly invisible the patron. But to an emerging author, it can make the difference between a book that goes nowhere and one that hits the ground running.

In one post on CrowdCrux addressing what it takes to be successful on Patreon, Dyson Logos, who makes fantasy maps for RPG enthusiasts, said, “The product that Patreon works for is one with low to no overhead and upfront costs and is a product you would be producing regardless of whether or not you had any patrons.”

That sounds a lot like writing, doesn’t it?

I think I might be catching on.