Getting Published Is Hell

I just read this post by Susan O'Neil over at Justine Musk's blog, which is the sad story of a woman who wrote a novel that she thinks is pretty good but couldn't get it published.

I feel for her, I really do, but I wanted to take a look at it from the other side.

O'Neil's novel American Family is, in her words, "about death, birth, life, love, infidelity, alternative lifestyles. It's about middle-aged characters with declining parents and screwed-up children, in addition to their own demons." To be blunt, it's a literary novel by a middle-aged unknown. As such, it's competing in a fairly small but ferociously tough segment of the market against all of the best writers the world has to offer, and is additionally handicapped by the fact that O'Neil doesn't have an audience yet. (She had a thematically-linked short story collection published -- which is no small feat, as Musk points out in her follow-up -- but it bombed in the marketplace. O'Neil points to external factors that she thinks caused the bombing; I think it tends to be the other way around -- most books don't hit big, and the ones that do had serendipitous, uncontrollable, unexpected events help them out.)

The cliche is that to get published you have to be better than the people already getting published. That's not always true (especially in a growing sub-genre), but it is definitely true for literary fiction. If you're a reader of big family novels, you only read five or six of them a year, at most. Are you going to read the new Anita Shreve, or pick up something unknown at random? Is the next thing on your list by Toni Morrison, or by someone you've never heard of? Writers don't usually want to think about that, but that's the way readers look at it -- every book by a new writer is a gamble with limited reading time (and, for many, limited money).

This is why editors say "I didn't love it." Editors want to do books that are successful, because there's no point in publishing a book (no matter how good it is) if no one reads it. So when they see something that all of their publishing instincts scream is virtually guaranteed to be a failure, they have to absolutely adore it to be willing to take that huge long-shot chance. They have to be willing to spend all of that time -- and know that it's probably all wasted effort -- and still think it's worth it, because the book is that good.

(And you know what? In the real world, million-to-one chances only come out precisely one time in a million. The rest of the time the book flops anyway.)

My advice to aspiring writers is in two parts, depending on what they're aspiring to. If what you want is to be a writer, and that goal is more important than the specifics, then find something popular that you like to read and think you might like to write, and write that. There are a lot of professional writers in this world, many of them making a nice living writing words they enjoy -- but hardly any of them have any chance to ever be on the front page of the New York Times Book Review.

But if what you want is to write something specific (whether that may be the Great American Novel, nonfiction books about transportation history, romantic suspense, family sagas or westerns), then you'll have to temper your ambitions to that market. If the market is big, it will be somewhat easier to enter it, and your chances of success somewhat larger. But if your chosen market isn't all that big, and already has Jonathan Franzen, John Updike, Zadie Smith, Philip Roth and a couple of dozen others of similar caliber already in it, then you will need to be better than them just to get in the door. You don't need a good novel -- you need a great one, a novel that will send the first reader running into the Editor-in-Chief's office screaming "You've got to read this!" The only consolation I can offer is that those writers, too, needed to be better than the established literary authors just to get in that door -- and they did it.