. . .or you'll plummet straight down and smash hard against the unforgiving ground.

When I wrote my first novel, Rusty, I was forced by the pulbishing market to create my own publishing company. A kind literary agent told me a hard truth: Trying to sell a publisher non-genre fiction was a no-go. Either my book had to be in a defined category -- romance, Western, mystery -- or as the author I had to be a celebrity or at least know a celebrity. Alternately, I had to have a remarkable and compelling life story which involved, oh, falling out of an airplane and living to tell about it or something like that. 

Speaking of falling from great heights, the quote from Norman Vincent Peale about landing among the stars just drives me crazy. It does. I think it's cruel to encourage people to take big risks without considering the tremendous smash-up that might follow. A few foolhardy. . . well, fools -- somehow do risk everything on a whim and succeed brilliantly, but most just don't. 

I opened this post by saying that I'd had to start a publishing company because I had a novel that didn't fit into a marketable category. I didn't try to push my way through a system that didn't support me. I'd heard horror stories about people sinking ten thousand bucks or more into vanity-press books which ended up stored, carton on top of carton, in a garage. Each box scrawled with Sharpie messages like "No vacations for the fmaily, I guess. . ." Or "I wonder if we put wheels on this carton we could ride on it since the car needs a transmission."

Okay, nobody's family mrmbers actually wrote those things in permanent marker, but they were thinking it, you know they were. Having heard about these failure-to-launch faux-pulbishing blunders, I was not going to fall down that particular open manhole. 

Thus, back in 1991, I had only five hundred copies of my novel printed, so I could see what the world thought of the book I'd spent six years working on. The fact that I had to pay the printer up front and scrounge up nine hundred bucks in real money might have also been a consideration, ha ha. 

Happily, those first few hundred books sold pretty quickly and I had a second, larger printing done. Those also sold. But within another couple months, as I got down to the last two or three cartons of books, demand dwindled. I decided against a third printing, which was wise of me. 

It was hard to think that my race was run on that particular book. Back before I put the book online for free, sometimes someone would ask me where they could get a copy, and I would direct them to the (now defunct) website half.com, where a few used copies popped up from time to time. But since I was willing to be honest with myself, it was clear that some other newer, fresher work of fiction had zipped in out of nowhere to soak up the brief bit of attention and favor that Rusty enjoyed. It was like dating someone for four months and then when you are out to dinner, you realize that your special someone is eyeing up a face across the room. You can keep eating your spaghetti and smiling, but in your heart you know it's over. It's been fun, but now it's time to throw the plate of spaghetti in their face and -- whoops, I meant it's time to pay our half of the check and say you've really got to get going because you have this thing you said you'd finish and you'll call but of course you aren't going to call. Because you'll delete their number and put the phone on the street and run over it both ways with your car, and -- I mean, you'll move on and know that there are many fish in the sea. 

So I wrote more books and stories and sometimes people cared and sometimes they didn't. Building a readership takes a long time. A long, long time. And it's so easy to be fooled by would-be marketing geniuses and expensive web developers into believing that we and the work we do are so fascinating that the world just can't get enough of us. Um, no. They can. 

Because it's not that what we are doing isn't important and valuable. It's that people are at the vet right now discussing the cost of gum surgery for their eleven-year-old dog. Someone's rude son has just farted in his mother's car again and he thinks it's the funniest thing ever and Family Fight #17 of just this week is about to begin. And someone else is their former dining room, now turned into a studio -- and by that I mean they have a four-year-old laptop and a rather creaky laminate bookshelf and the newest version of Writer's Market on their desk next to three half-finished cups of cold coffee. This person is writing their own book -- a memoir, something on Civil War history, perhaps a novel with a plot line not dissimilar to your own. 

Are any of these people interested in buying and reading our special books we worked so hard on, at least right now? No, they are not. But if the work we've written is funny and comforting, like something by Fannie Flagg, the person with the dog worries may get our book later to read when they can't sleep. And if the book we've got is called Disrespectful Sons and Is It Lawful To Bungee Them to the Roof Rack? there must just be a sale there next week. And if you know how you can get people to pay attention to what you write -- well I don't believe you personally, but others will and you can unload a few copies on them. 

In the meantime, I keep my goals and dreams down close to this Earth I'm standing on. Once in a while, I get a little handwritten note from a reader. More than a few people have said somwething like "I hate to read but I started your book and I read the whole thing." And once, at a state fair, someone called out "Hey, I know her, she's an author!" and I got my photo taken with someone's slightly-bewildered mother, with a Ferris wheel turning behind us. Big-time enough for me, honestly. 

Garbo

Go to next C7 post