Yes

Last week’s email was entitled, No – a reference to Jack Reacher’s norm-breaking plain-speaking under pressure.

Today, we’re on an Easter-y Yes.

The fact is that writing is a tremendously hard activity. Just off the top of my head, if you’re a pro author (with an agent and a publisher), then:

You write alone.

You have to put a vast amount of work in before you can sensibly even get feedback on your work. Indeed, while some agents or publishers may be helpful in looking at early drafts, it’s one hell of a coin-toss. I once showed an early draft of a book to a publisher (a draft that I was writing under contract, with the subject matter of that book already fully agreed) and the publisher had a total meltdown and ended up asking for a completely different book. Yes, it so happened that my editor was leaving the firm, and she had probably not ‘sold’ our jointly conceived project adequately in house – but the one losing out was me, not her and not the publisher.

The quality of feedback you get is desperately variable. (Something we are keenly aware of when we recruit editors for our feedback services, and something we’re keenly aware of when we monitor all our editorial output.)

Being a writer means living from hit to hit. A writer can literally go from selling 250,000 copies of one book to maybe 10% that figure with the next one. And of course, most writers never even get close to selling quarter of a million books .

Writing pay isn’t just unpredictable; it’s low. The various surveys that purport to estimate writing income are so poorly put together that their various conclusions are basically junk. But is writing badly paid? Yes, of course. It always has been.

You can be excellent at your job and still struggle to put together work of dependably high quality. The reason is simply that some ideas turn out to work really well; others not so well. You don’t really know until the work is so close to complete that you might as well complete it anyway. And, of course, since it probably takes you a year to write a book, you can’t really junk that work, even if you’re tempted to do so. A painter, by contrast, might work for a day or two on a painting, then think, ‘Nah, this isn’t working,” and just scrap it. We don’t have that ability.

Agents are generally pretty steady (once you have them and are making an income for them), but publishers come and go like migratory waterfowl. You may well have had your book acquired by one editor who absolutely loved it, darling – but then find yourself being published by someone who, though perfectly professional, isn’t really the person you’d have picked to do this with.

On which topic – you have vastly little power, insight or control. Let’s say you don’t love a cover. Your editor tells you that it’s great; that it’s just the kind of thing the supermarkets love; that the sales team is massively supportive. Well you still don’t like the cover, but what do you know? You’ve never sold books to supermarkets. So you say yes, please, and thank you very much, and do please go ahead, and then the book doesn’t get bought up in volume by the supermarkets, and you’re left wondering whether you were right all along. Multiply that little eddy of activity by about 20 or 30 times and that’s what it’s like being published by a big (and capable) company.

And, of course, most books fail. That’s not me being snarky: it’s industry economics. Most books underperform the publishers’ budgetary forecasts. But, of the ones that out-perform the forecasts, enough will do so well that they repair the losses of the others, and then some.

Communications are often patchy. Publishers are often – almost always – nice, but they’re not necessarily honest. Far too often, a publisher will avoid conveying a hard truth that the author really needs to know, because the publisher is worried (correctly) that the author will be upset by it. So they don’t say the thing that they ought to say. So the author is 5x more upset down the road, when they do eventually learn the thing.

Professional standards are patchy, on Planet Agent especially. Yes, most agents are dedicated and superb at what they do, but agents generally don’t think of themselves as having any deep obligation to non-clients (which means they often fail in basic comms and courtesies.) Additionally, and in smaller agencies especially, pressures of time and work can mean that even clients get treated poorly (and often abruptly, and often after an extended period of more comms).

That’s hardly an exhaustive list, of course, and the pressures on the not-yet-published writer are in many ways greater – especially if you are having to explain to your partner quite why you are spending so much time on this not-yet-money-earning activity. And if it comes to that, you are also having to explain to yourself why you are spending so much time on this activity, where prospects of success can seem so itsy-bitsy, eeny-weeny, wrong-end-of-a-telescope small.

But all that is really by way of intro to my Easter-y Yes.

Because writing is hard –

And because it’s really hard to write creatively and well if you are feeling under pressure or stressed or conflicted or anxious –

Then give yourself permission to do whatever you need to do about those feelings.

That could be:

• Putting the writing aside for a while, as you turn your attention to the real-world issues that are causing stress.
• Putting down Project A so you can turn to Project B.
• Accepting that you are primarily writing for yourself and your own joy, with publication as a desired, but not essential, outcome.
• Turning to the Townhouse community to seek help and advice.
• Or something else.

The point really is that self-forgiveness is essential. Life is hard. Writing is hard. Sometimes, you just need to let something drop, even if that means your Publication Plan has to have a few extra weeks or months inserted into it somewhere.

Just give yourself that big fat YES of permission to do what you need, for now.

And – use Townhouse. A community of writers completely understands whatever pressures or doubts you may have. It’s utterly friendly and full of wisdom. It’s like a hot sausage roll on a cold night, only one with much more knowledge of the publishing industry.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / Elderflower mousse

In an Easter-y yes mood, just show us a passage that pleases you to a ridiculous extent. Something which you read, then feel all pink & giggly afterwards.

As always, we need title, genre, any context, and 250-300 words of your most delicious text. Like an elderflower mousse, eaten with a spoonful of gooseberry.

Please title your post in this format: title / genre / [anything else we need to know]. That will help others navigate a big old forum with speed. When you’re ready, you can post your work here.

Til soon.

Harry