Why Books Make It
And Why Books Don’t
I feel like today’s Shelf Life is going to be a lot of repeating things I have said to people and that people have said to me, so, sorry in advance. It’s just a topic I’ve been talking about lately. Which is how topics get selected for Shelf Life anyway. If I’ve talked or thought about something enough lately to generate an essay’s worth of material then that topic becomes an article. I think anyone who enjoys the type of work they do as much as me and has done that type of work for twenty years could generate this much commentary on it. I spent like six months in college working at a movie rental shop and I still have a huge amount of material left over from that endeavor.
Today someone asked me why I don’t struggle with writing these essays but I do struggle with writing other stuff and I said, “Well, writing the essays is easy because I have an infinite amount of expertise in an undrainable well to draw from” and she nodded, but also she was being paid to listen.
Perhaps you have said this to yourself, as plenty of people have told me they have: “My manuscript is just as good as any of the published books I’ve read.” Or, put another way, a friend of mine once eloquently said to me: “I sometimes feel like nothing I write is good enough for publication, but then I open a book or turn on the TV to remind myself that people are out there publishing all kinds of garbage.”
Many of us make that statement at some point, usually as part of the following construct: “My book is just as good as any of these published books, so why isn’t it selling?”
Why isn’t my synopsis convincing agents to request the full?
Why aren’t the agents who read my full offering me representation?
Why isn’t my agent able to sell the book to an editor?
My book was traditionally published, why isn’t it selling to readers? Or,
I’ve self-published my book, why isn’t it selling to readers?
If your manuscript or book is not getting uptake in any of these scenarios, does that mean that your assessment was wrong? That it was not, in fact, as good as you thought—and that’s why no one is biting?
The answer is, sometimes.
I think when writers evaluate our own writing, we have a hard time knowing how good it is without outside assistance—just as the best psychiatrist in the world cannot diagnose their own mental illness. Writers who have been at it a long time, particularly those who have received a lot of feedback on their writing from knowledgeable sources, get to a place where they have a good sense whether something they’ve written is likely to be well-received. But when you are starting out writing, and before you have received that type of feedback, it’s really very hard to know if you’re assessing your own work accurately.
Further complicating matters is the fact that when you compare your own writing to something you’ve read in the wild, you’re comparing your draft with someone else’s final product and if a book was traditionally published you can expect that it had development and polishing from an agent, an editor, a copyeditor, and a proofreader at the very least. If you compare your own work with the published work of a high-profile author and you say, “I think my story is at least this interesting, my plot is at least this complex, and my characters are at least this engaging,” there is a fair chance you are making an accurate assessment. If you compare your rough draft manuscript to the published work of a high-profile author and you say, “I think my draft matches this published work in terms of overall quality” then that’s a sign that your ability to assess the quality of your own work is off.
If you measure the quality of a finished book in the number of typos you can find, and “once found a typo in a Stephen King book which indicates that he might as well have self-published for all the good the publisher did in that case!” then definitely your assessment metric ought to be recalibrated.
To begin with, anyway, sometimes the reason your book isn’t selling is because it’s just not as “good” as you think—meaning it in some aspect it does not meet the level of quality that readers of that type of material expect. I won’t dissemble. Sometimes “it’s not very good” is the reason a book doesn’t make it.
But lots of books that “aren’t very good” make it big, and I’m throwing around scare quotes like t shirts at a wrestling match because “good” is a completely subjective qualification. There’s no “universally bad” book. People love to throw around Twilight as a book that is “objectively terrible” but honestly what’s objectively terrible about it? You thought the plot was stupid? Millions of people felt otherwise. “The writing wasn’t good”—I have news for you, writing styles are as many and various as hairstyles and though one might not be to your taste, that doesn’t mean it’s objectively bad. Sometimes people say mullets are objectively bad but the mullet is perennially fashionable and that’s a reality we all just have to live with.
“Oh, it isn’t very good because it’s derivative and unoriginal”—people actually love stuff that’s derivative and unoriginal. That’s why we, as a society, are in a constant state of making new movies, video games, and TV series based on The Lord of the Rings.
But sometimes the reason something doesn’t sell is that the market it was intended for—the readers who are ideally suited to pick it up and read it and love it and recommend it—don’t like it. Like if I offered Twilight to a 45-year-old man who likes professional football, the Call of Duty series of games, and Tom Clancy thrillers, and he doesn’t like it, that doesn’t mean the book is bad. He’s not the intended audience. If I offered it to a 14-year-old girl who likes YA fantasy romance novels and she didn’t like it—well that still doesn’t mean it’s bad. But if I offered it to many or most teen girls who generally enjoy YA fantasy romance novels and none of them liked it—them being the intended audience—then we have a problem. Then maybe it really “isn’t very good.”
“It wasn’t very good” isn’t the only reason books don’t sell, though. Sometimes books are amazing and they don’t sell. Some of the reasons amazing books don’t sell (or don’t get signed, et cetera) include:
The market is saturated with this (or, the agent or editor just signed something very similar).
You buy more food if you go to the grocery store hungry. For a book to become a surprise hit (or a hit of any kind) there has to be market appetite for whatever that book is. Say what you will about Twilight and its sequels (I myself am not a huge fan), but they arrived to market at a time when the intended audience was starving for them. The audience that embraced the Twilight series had not been fed in a long time or maybe ever.
This is America and it’s our way to keep eating after we’re not hungry anymore if there’s still food available, I get that. We will try to keep shoveling the same thing at the market until the market turns its face away and refuses anymore. You might say to yourself, “But people love vampire-n-werewolf romantic adventures! Look at Twilight! Look at the Southern Vampire Mysteries! Look at Anita Blake! Why wouldn’t they love mine, too?” But at some point the market is saturated to the point that even the fondest reader can’t stomach one more bite of vamp-mortal-werewolf love triangle.
It’s worth considering that trad publishing is working a few years ahead, by the way. You may have a completed manuscript that you’re shopping today and you know there’s nothing like it on the market right now, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t ten more just like it in production as we speak and coming out between this summer and Christmas 2023.
Sometimes it’s the agent or the editor who is saturated: Maybe the market is hungry for what you have but the agent you queried recently signed something similar. That agent has a rolodex of contacts at publishing companies to try to sell that book to, but it’s unlikely she’d be able to sell two very similar manuscripts right in a row using the same set of contacts.
A saturated market isn’t the only reason a manuscript or a book doesn’t make it. Another big reason books don’t sell:
The people who would buy it don’t know about it.
By this I largely mean, what’s going on with the marketing? If your book is at market, is it being marketed appropriately and to the right people? If you self-published, are you marketing it yourself? And if you’re on your own—do you have the skillset to market your book? I see so many self-publishing authors on book Twitter and writing Twitter putting a lot of time and energy into marketing their books but the community of other self-publishing authors are not the book-purchasing public. Twitter is not the marketing tool people think it is if the people reading their tweets are their colleagues instead of their customers.
A book being “good”—well-written, with an engaging plot and compelling characters, surprises for the reader, a satisfying ending—is the bare minimum a book must have to “make it.” Whether the plot is engaging or the characters compelling, et cetera, is subjective—not everyone is going to think every character is compelling. Some people love Bella Swan. Some people love Harry Dresden. But the audience it’s intended for needs to feel that way about it—that it has all or most of those things—for it to have a chance.
By this I mean, the book being “good” by that standard is not the finish line. It’s the starting line. You don’t even get a chance at “making it” if you don’t have a good product. Having that rock-solid product is just the first thing. Getting it in front of the people who will give you cash money in exchange for it is at least as much work again as coming up with the product in the first place.
This means you have to pitch it to the right agent. Determining who is the right agent is already a a grueling process filled with question marks and leaps of faith, a process wherein you could have every logical reason to believe an agent would love your book, only for them to toss your query in the trash because your synopsis doesn’t have right vibes. What even are vibes? And then when you get an agent representing you, they have to essentially repeat that process with editors and there’s a whole other set of question marks and leaps of faith—as I said above, an editor who might have been gung-ho to buy it last month might have signed something similar between then and now and won’t consider another book like that for three years.
That means you have to market it to the right readers if you’re self-publishing. You have to know about their reading habits, their buying habits, their disposable income for spending on books, their, like, preferred moon phase for buying books during? An author might say to herself, The Lord of the Rings has an incredible sales track record with tons of fans, and my book that I just self-published is very similar to The Lord of the Rings, so all I have to do is market to those fans and I’ll sell books.
She may think the plot is similar, or the vibes are similar—I honestly don’t know what vibes are?—or they’re alike because they fall into the same high-fantasy adventure genre, but I can buy an omnibus trilogy of one of them in Costco while I’m getting my groceries and the other one I can only find if I’m doing a colonoscopy on the bowels of Amazon dot com. To the average consumer of books in the United States, these two things could not be more different.
At the end of the day, you the author can’t control most of these factors. You can’t control market saturation, for example. Even if you do your best to write something that the market isn’t saturated with right now, traditional publishing is signing manuscripts today that won’t hit shelves for three years and who knows what market will be saturated with by the time you’re done writing.
You the author can’t control marketing in a meaningful way, either. If you’re publishing traditionally, you’ll have marketing support from the publisher and very little control over what they do or don’t do. If you’re self-publishing—unless you already have a large platform of fans or customers waiting for your stuff or you have an unusual amount of marketing expertise—you can market all you want but your efforts are unlikely to make a difference in the hundreds or thousands of units.
All you can control is whether you turn out a product that’s good, or not.
Look, I don’t know why any of us do this. I’m tired, I’m going to bed, but I’ll get up and do it again tomorrow anyway.
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