What do you want? I mean, really?

I know an author – she works for Jericho Writers – who always wanted a two-book deal with a commercially ambitious Big 5 publisher. So she wrote a book and got an agent and the two of them got themselves in front of an outstanding imprint at a Big 5 publisher. The publisher said yes, please, they wanted the book.

I know an author – me – who had a perfectly successful career as a trad and self-pub author. Now admittedly life got a bit over-complex (kids, a business, disability in the family), but he’s still writing. The logical book would be #7 in the successful Fiona Griffiths series. It’s already mostly written.

I know a highly successful self-pub author – Debbie Young, who runs our brand-new self-publishing course – who has a very popular crime series. That series was badly in need of a next instalment and she felt perfectly able to write it.

But, but, but …

Last year was pretty damn grim. It was all about lockdown and anxiety and rampaging sickness statistics.

This year’s hardly been merry either. More lockdowns and more conflict over lockdowns. Some brilliant vaccine news (yay!) but also a succession of new variants. Here in the UK, the news cycle is, once again, crammed with a particularly grey shade of pre-Christmas gloom.

Which is why I ask: what do you want? What do you really, really want?

My colleague, the one with the two-book offer from the fancy publisher, said no.

The publisher in question wanted to dumb down her book, to strip it of personality. It was clear they wanted someone to deliver a commodity product which they would package up and sell as a commodity online. So she said no. Instead, she’s signed up with a smaller (but very able and ambitious) indie publisher instead, because they wanted the book she had actually written just as she had always envisaged it.

It’s a better solution for her.

And me? Well, that #7 Fiona Griffiths book just feels too large and complicated for where my life has been this year. So I’ve almost completed a literary book so barmy I don’t even quite know how to tell you about it. (Hmm: “It’s a literary novelty book about story-making, polar adventure and cannibalism.” Something like that.) I can’t tell you if the book will ever be published or not, but I can tell you that I’ve loved every minute I’ve had while writing it.

And Debbie? She confessed the following:

In the last few months, more and more indie authors have been telling me they are weary of the pay-to-play rollercoaster of certain publishing platforms. I know quite a few who are recalibrating to focus on quality rather than quantity. Particularly after the battering our mental well-being has taken from the Covid pandemic, stepping back from marketing pressures, while maintaining an effective author platform (website, social media, etc), can feel like a much-needed healing process.

… As to myself, I made a conscious decision this summer that whenever I start a new project, I’ll write whatever is in my heart, rather than necessarily what makes the most commercial sense. I took time out to write a standalone novella when I was overdue to write the third in a series of mystery novels. But I’m really glad I did it, and I will continue to take this approach for the foreseeable future. It feels controversial or even heretical as a successful indie author to be saying this, but I have a feeling that a significant number of authors out there when they read this will be thinking, “Oh please, yes, let me just write for a while! In 2022, I just want to write!”

I think it’s great to be commercial about what you write. Books are better for having readers. It’s hard enough getting published, let alone making any money. Manuscripts that start out without any feel for the market normally end up essentially unread.

But there’s a balance to be struck. Not one of us thought, “Gosh, I’d really like to be stupidly rich, so I’ll just write some books.” On the contrary, the passion came first. Thoughts about publication came second. Thoughts about making money from publication came a snail-like third.

So here’s the question: are you getting joy from your writing? Do you love the project you are currently working on?

And I don’t mean “love” as in “right now this minute”. Even with projects of passion there are dark passages that just need to be muscled through. I mean love, more like marital love: with its ups and downs, but still most definitely love.

Do you love your writing? I hope you do.

Have a very merry Christmas. I shan’t email next week or the week after. Normal service will resume in January.