Second Verse
Same (or Not) as the First
Today I’m going to write a bit about subsequent work. That is, after you put some work out there, and it is done, and it has found its audience—where do you go from there?
Speaking of where do you go, I do not know where I’m going with this. You and I will both just have to read on and find out.
I’m glad that when I began writing Shelf Life in a far distant past time, a previous life barely remembered, I promised myself no profanity and no memes or gifs. I’m glad I took a hard line on this because otherwise by now Shelf Life would probably be a large collection of funny memes interlaced with profanity, but also I might have by now forgotten how to communicate in any way besides texting memes and screenshots from Twitter to my friends. It’s been a strange two years.
Not to bring memes into this sacred space but if you have ever seen the meme of the golden retriever sitting at a computer who has no idea what he’s doing, that’s me writing Shelf Life every time.
This is not a how-to on writing or even a glimpse into the innards of publishing so much as a meditation on how authors build and sustain careers after a success. I say “after a success” because I don’t usually know much about the authors who never have a success. Most of us don’t. Many or most books don’t make back the money we put into them, whether they’re traditionally published—by a house big or small, corporate or indie—or self-published.
When you go into a brick-and-mortar bookstore the first thing you probably see is the frontlist titles (recently published books). Some of these will become bestsellers and big hits (and some already are) and some of them won’t. When you get past the big displays and into the shelves of backlist titles (titles published more than a year or a couple years ago) you’re seeing pretty much all successes. They wouldn’t still be on store shelves if they weren’t—and often they won’t still be on store shelves after all that time even if they were a success when they were the frontlist.
I looked up A Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier, a favorite book of mine that published in 2007. The cover says it was a national bestseller (whatever “bestseller” means in this context) and it was nominated for major awards like the Locus. I can order it online but nary a Barnes & Noble in 100 miles has a single copy in stock. Can we offer you A Brief History of Time instead? There are plenty of those on the shelves—in fact, every Barnes & Noble in 100 miles of me (except one, what’s your deal Downtown Philadelphia Rittenhouse Square location?) has it.
What I’m saying is, publishing a book—even through a major trad publisher—doesn’t guarantee that book will be a success (far from) and, further, publishing a book that becomes an initial success does not mean that the book will remain successful and become a bookstore backlist staple or that you, the author, will go on to be “a success” as an author. Kevin Brockmeier has gone on to publish much more and he is a successful author. His newest book, The Ghost Variations: One Hundred Stories, is in fact in stock at my Barnes & Noble. Tomorrow perhaps I might go to a physical store and lay hands on a physical book and purchase it. How quaint.
I’ll let you know how it is, the outside world and the book.
Okay anyway what I have been thinking about is when a book comes out—or any media really—and it’s a success for the creator they find themself before a terrible decision which is, what do you make next? Will it be:
More of the same thing people liked the first time? Or
Something completely different from what I just did?
The questions pops up on Twitter fairly regularly: “Can you write something completely different than you’ve written before without alienating your fans who want more of the same?” You totally can and there are lots of ways to do it. The inverse is also true—you can write more of the same and still alienate a bunch of your fans even if they desperately wanted more of the same.
I’ll tell you right up front that I’m thinking about this because I am about halfway through Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir (I know I am late to the bone party), which is the sequel to Gideon the Ninth. I really enjoyed Gideon the Ninth and when I picked up Harrow the Ninth, the direct sequel, I had a reasonable expectation that it would pick up where the first book left off but from the point of view of a different character who had been an instrumental supporting character in the first book. Then I started reading and was delighted to learn that this new installment was nothing like that.
It has been a very long time since I had this experience of picking up a book—a sequel—and having my expectations for it completely subverted. I can actually tell you how long its been because I distinctly recall the last time this happened is when I started reading The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman, sequel to Northern Lights (or The Golden Compass as it is titled in the US). I read those in 2007 so it’s been 15 years.
Those who played video games back in the day may recall a similar experience picking up Metal Gear Solid 2 after the hit success that was Metal Gear Solid. I won’t go into too much analysis of that here but I will simply explain that the fans said to Hideo Kojima, “We love Metal Gear Solid so much that we want exactly that again” and Hideo Kojima made an entire video game to ask those fans the philosophical question, “Do you, though?”
I actually love to have my expectations spectacularly demolished in this way but not everybody does. Your mileage may vary. I love to be wrong-footed.
True story: Back when such a thing existed, I used to work at a video rental store. The name of the store was Video Warehouse and it was like a store-brand Blockbuster. We received a reel (by reel I mean VHS tape) of trailers every couple of weeks that we had to play on the big screens from noon till 10pm (from 10 to noon and from 10 to midnight, we were allowed to show movies). My colleagues and I used to play a fun game where we would watch a movie trailer for something I had not seen and I would tell them the ending and then we would watch the movie to see if I was correct. I’m not going to spoil a bunch of 20-year-old movies for you here but suffice to say, knowing how a story will end is my superpower; so I love it when something surprises.
This is a huge gamble for an author, though (and their publisher). When something is the first in a planned series and a runaway popular phenomenon like Northern Lights (which won both the Carnegie Medal and the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize) or Gideon the Ninth (shortlisted for the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy awards and won the Locus), you have to know that the people who loved it want more of exactly that—or at least, that’s what we assume they want, and probably what they say and believe they want, too.
But that’s how you get a book like Armada by Ernest Cline. Cline’s debut, Ready Player One—whether you love it or hate it, and I’m acknowledging that a lot of people do hate it—was a fast-paced adventure in the then-obscure LitRPG genre studded with pop-culture references from the 1980s and 1990s. Everybody who liked it wanted more of that book. Then Armada came out and it was . . . too much more of that book. It reads like a poor attempt to recapture the magic of the RPO, full of pop-culture references that feel forced the second time around, the action is closely tied to a video game that the protagonist spends all his time playing—blech. Lots of people (including me) thought we wanted Ready Player One a second time and Ernest Cline and his publishers dutifully tried to give us that and it fell flat.
I want to drop in a brief anecdote here about The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins. In addition to his fantasy novel, Mr Hawkins has written several technical books including The Linux Desk Reference and Essential Apache. If you go to his website there’s not much there but a big button in the middle of the page that says “Where’s The Next Book?” (See Scott Hawkins’s web page for yourself.) I can’t overstate how much I admire that everyone’s been pushing this guy for a sequel to Mount Char and his response is, “I don’t have more to say about that, so, no.”
Back to the matter at hand, that’s one scenario: Your fans want more of the same and you try to give them that and you disappoint them because the new was too much like the old. They wanted more of the same, but not that much the same.
There are a lot of authors who do one thing and do it really well and their fans keep coming back for more of that. I’m trying to give contemporary examples as much as possible but a great example of this is Anne McCaffrey. She wrote dozens of books split among a handful of series (and maybe a few standalones?) between 1968 and 2002 and they’re all pretty similar in tone and type. You might be reading about a far-off planet inhabited by a dragon-like species or you might be reading about federated telepaths and telekinetics or you might be reading about sentient crystal mining but when you pick up an Anne McCaffrey book you know pretty much what you’re going to get. Each series is different enough to give you something new to enjoy but these books are never going to shock or surprise you.
A think a good contemporary example is probably Sarah J. Maas, whose books I’m afraid I have not been able to get into (I am still trying), but her Throne of Glass and A Court of Thorns and Roses series have delivered over and over for her fans. She hands off more and more and more of what they’re asking for but without retreading old material to the point that the fans are bored or feel that she’s phoning in the plots.
The far end of the spectrum, opposite “many books that are similar enough to appeal to readers who want more of the same thing again,” has branches. You’ve got the Pullman and Muir examples I described above where you get a sequel that delivers more of “the same” but in a shocking way that makes you examine what your understanding of “the same” is—it’s in the same series and has the same characters and themes but it’s not actually the same at all.
Then you have someone like Sarah Gailey, whose publishing trajectory I also terribly admire, who has published a number of standalone speculative fiction titles, each different from the last. For example, Magic for Liars is about a PI investigating a murder at a magical academy; Upright Women Wanted is about sapphic librarian revolutionaries in a Wild West–themed future; and The Echo Wife is about, uh, award-winning cloning research, I guess.
There are also authors like Seanan McGuire, author of urban fantasy (who is also Mira Grant, author of science fiction/horror) or Iain Banks, author of mainstream fiction (who is also Iain M Banks, author of science fiction). Or like J.K. Rowling, author of nothing we would pay money for, who also writes completely other stuff under the name Robert Galbraith, to whom we also don’t give our money. These are authors who build multiple “brands” for themselves and use a pen name to distinguish between those brands (although it’s no secret who they are).
Stephen King did something similar in the late 1970s/early 1980s when he wanted to try writing something outside of horror and released a series of novels and novellas under the name Richard Bachman. Interestingly, I feel like a number of “the Bachman Books” feel more like traditional Stephen King content than some of Stephen King’s own name-branded stuff like The Eyes of the Dragon (1984), a high-fantasy standalone or the non–genre-leaning novellas collected in Different Seasons (1982), Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption among them.
All of the authors I’ve talked about here are successful authors whose body of work has endured (excepting Tamsyn Muir, who only first published in 2019 and is still in the initial bloom of popularity, but I’d bet on her to go the distance). There are a lot of good ways to build a writing career. There are a lot of ways to grow and if you want to write all kinds of different stuff, you should. You don’t need to constrain yourself to one thing, or one type of thing, if that’s not the way you want to go—and in fact, trying to force a repeat of a prior success can backfire spectacularly. I haven’t read Ready Player Two yet but I hope I can enjoy it and use it to supplant the memory of Armada.
Just, if you can help it, don’t get everybody hooked on your series and then give up on it to play fantasy football instead.
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