People tend to use the term “opinion piece” to mean anything from one of those frivolous blog posts that tell us we should just “f*cking” do this or that, to pieces that are more informed in nature. I’d like to believe that what I present you with this week is the latter. I will attempt to not sound like a conceited or pompous ass, either. And even if I do come off that way, oh well. Someone, somewhere will read this and be the better for having done so.
As a person who has crashed the gate and gotten past the gatekeepers in the publishing industry, I can say, without exaggeration, it was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done. Unless a person has some kind of celebrity status, it takes the kind of perseverance most people don’t come equipped with. You have to have heart like “Rocky” in the first movie, because you’re going to get knocked down just as much. But there are a few other elements beyond perseverance and I will get to that a little later.
There’s only one thing worse than getting a shit ton of rejections right out of the gate–and that is to be courted by an agent like the one who answered my query in March of 2018. She told me that she “might” work with me but I would need to add two more sample chapters to my book proposal. So, of course, I worked like a madman and got the two chapters done in record time. She told me to sit on my hands and wait. She’d be attending the book convention in NYC and she would see if she could garner some interest.
As an inexperienced first timer, you have to imagine that I thought I was as good as represented. But far too much time had gone by since I heard anything, so I decided to inquire. Almost as an afterthought, she shot off three lines to me in an email that essentially said, “I showed it to everyone in the publishing industry and no one wants it. People aren’t interested in the memoirs of virtual nobodies.”
I’m not sure what got me more angry, the fact that my query letter AND my book proposal made it abundantly clear that my book was not a memoir; or being led on and teased for six weeks, or that she was an opportunistic agent that snapped up everything she could to see what she could sell with the least amount of effort; or that she felt like she could speak for the entire publishing industry.
I settled on the fact that it was a tie. All of those things made me very angry. There was only one thing I could do. Keep trying. I knew that my book was going to help a lot of people someday and I was on a mission to get it published traditionally.
About a month after the bullshit agent tried to tell me that I just wasted an entire year of my life, I received an email from another agent who explained that his roster was full but he thought I had something “publishable.” That email is still hanging above my desk five years later. Think about it: it was an email from a real literary agent in Manhattan, telling me that I might be able to find a deal. “Keep trying.”
Now the whole time I was going through this experience, I don’t think I used Twitter once. This, I consider to be a godsend. The other day I opened Twitter out of boredom and I had a bunch of notifications from “the writing community.” One was a post from a guy who just paid to go to some convention and then paid again to pitch his book to a group of industry people. While he was there spending all of his money, some agent told him that no publisher would even take him seriously unless he had 50K followers on Twitter. The other was from a woman who asked if she should just give up because she wasn’t getting any positive responses.
I mean, first off, one should never, ever pay to pitch their novel to anyone. There are a couple of legitimate agents that do this, but they are few and far between. Usually this is done by bottom feeders who are trading on their reputations and have no intention of representing anyone. Second, 50,000 followers? Are you f*cking kidding me?
Jean Kyoung Frazier, who wrote an incredible debut novel called “Pizza Girl,” doesn’t even have 1000. This book received favorable reviews from Harper’s Bazaar, Esquire, The New York Times Book Review, People magazine and on and on and on.
Anyhoo, between those two Tweets, I felt like all the wind had been taken out of my sails. I woke up this morning to write and I hated everything I was reading. I started deleting large swaths of my new manuscript because I was convinced that it just wasn’t good enough. Now, as night is descending upon the Hudson Valley Region of New York, I’m beginning to see the error of my ways.
The two things that were going for me when I got my first book deal, in addition to mad perseverance, was naivete and delusion. The problem with spending time on Twitter with the #writingcommunity is that you lose both of those elements.
Five years later, I can see how futile it must’ve looked to people with experience and cynicism to think that anyone was going to sign me. It was a ridiculous idea. The thing is, it worked. I have a book with a Library of Congress number, I received a $10,000 advance, and I am a published author.
I hate to sound like an old curmudgeon, but online “writing communities” are more of a hindrance than a help. I kind of feel like, if you’re going to write, write. If you’re going to post pictures of your cleavage, then by all means have at it. But make no mistake, never shall the twain meet.
Looking forward to reading your first novel! I enjoy your writing about the trials of getting published by a company as opposed to independently doing so. It is realistic. My first piece was a case study to a medical journal that was asking sonographers to write and that they had mentors. I submitted, after a period of time got a rejection letter. I wrote back for details, and she said their reviewers and those comments are private! I persisted and got handwritten reviews with the names covered, I asked for my originals sonograms and finally they sent them to me. A year or so later I meant a sonographer who has been in the field since the mid-sixties, well known and published. I told her what happened, and she offered to read it, co-author with with me and get it in a journal she was currently chief editor of- it worked, and it was my start. It took a few years, a chance meeting at a conference and the rest is history...