In which planning your writing career is like planting a wildflower garden where you always thought you'd put a sandbox
obviously this one is going to go off the rails immediately
After my realtor and I came through my house for the first time, we stood in the backyard and looked at the sandbox. Basically, the previous owners had built an enclosure around one of the trees and filled it with sand. The kids, I assume, sat on the logs that ringed everything together to play. I thought “well, it would be nice when my nieces and nephews came over, I guess?”, and we did sort of try. We got sand. I got sandbox toys. But it never really came together (not the least in part because we’d basically be building a giant litter box, and while A doesn’t mind the local cats, I don’t like any of them, especially not in the yard). So instead this spring A poured all the sand in for drainage, topped it with soil, and dumped some wildflower seeds into it.
I had some time to mess around this summer. I wasn’t on deadline for a draft, so I got to write new stuff and think about what I wanted the next few years to look like. Obviously, as a freelancer, this is abjectly terrifying because not having contracts means not having a source of income. I very, very much prefer to sell books on proposal and not write the full manuscript until I am getting paid, but the market is so competitive right now that even an author like Victoria Aveyard didn’t just waltz into a new book contract (she also made a bunch of posts about it, which you can check out on her Instagram). But I did my best. I went out with five pitches in May and then settled in to see what happened.
I am not a gardener. Part of this is that if I was a gardener, my spine would file for divorce, but the main reason is that I’d rather do other things. I have a lot of plant friends, because I am Gen Y, but I feel the same way about plants that I feel about pets: I get it, I just don’t want any of that. And also I have allergies. Anyway, my point is that my house has really excellent gardens, and that is absolutely because A takes care of them. She actually likes it as a hobby where I only like it as a result, and that means that in addition to three raised beds of veggies, we also have a lot of flowers.
(I didn’t really understand why “found the baby in the cabbage patch” was a thing until this year. Look at the SIZE of those things!)
The first three pitches were all IP (ie for a franchise), and I wasn’t really expecting any of them to pan out quickly. That was good, because all three of them immediately went into the sort of holding pattern I’ve come to expect from active properties. My approach to IP has always been to throw my hat in the ring and see what happens, and now my hat is in three rings. The upside is that IP is reliable once you have a contract. The downside is all the waiting, knowing that there are like nine other moving parts you can’t control.
The garden did pretty well last summer, but this summer was even better. For starters, A put cages around the veggies so we lost fewer of them (the squirrels can still parkour in from the fence, but at least now it’s a war of attrition). We also had WAY fewer walnuts (like, I can’t even BEGIN to explain how many walnuts we had last year, but our neighbours let is trim the part of the tree that was over our yard, and also the tree just didn’t have as many this year), which was nice. Our brand new blackberry bushes produced like 12 blackberries, which was about 12 more than I was expecting. The flowers were gorgeous and bloomed forever, except in the wildflower garden, where all we got was green shoots.
I had a phone call for the adult pitch in late May and then we never heard anything. The other people we sent it to have yet to respond. The YA pitch got half a dozen rejections: because it was sci-fi, because the editors didn’t feel capable of editing time travel, and, most baffling, because it didn’t feel like a break out book (like, my break out book was in 2014? what I need now is someone who wants to maintain my trajectory?? right???). At first I told myself that the lack of response was because it was summer. As I head into my sixth month on sub, I feel like there are two options. It’s either just going to take a long time or no one wants them. The fun part is that there isn’t really any way to know, so I just have to keep waiting.
Now that it’s fall, A is concentrating on pruning things back and preparing for next year. It’s all stuff I understand in theory but I lack practical knowledge. There are still a good number of flowers hanging on, which is nice. Someone came yesterday and took out all the gross cedars along the back fence, which is even nicer. We’re going to replace them with blue spruce, which repel mosquitoes instead of attracting them. I’m not sure if the fence will stay standing, but we were going to get rid of that anyway, so at least if it falls over we don’t have to worry about knocking it down. One of the things that got pruned was the mystery lily, which grew next to our front step in spite of A not planting it and no one in the neighbourhood having any. The squirrels are adventurous, apparently.
I had a backup plan. Because publishing is wildly unpredictable, it’s always a good idea. My secret 6th pitch was successful! I can’t tell you about it yet, but it relieves my financial concerns for about 18 months, so that gives me room to breathe. I can keep working on the new stuff (though I am currently in copy edits for two other things at the same time). If you’re like “Kate, why didn’t you do that in the first place?”, it’s because I was hoping (however irrationally), that I would get a flashy deal that would give me a few years of stability. It’s been 10 years since the last time that happened, and as I have said before, there’s a big difference between the books I wrote when I didn’t have to worry about money and the books I wrote when I was stressed. Sometimes that’s just how it goes. I live to publish another day, despite everything.
On Sunday, I mowed the lawn for the last time this year (please!), and while I was cutting around the edges of the flowerless wildflower garden, something caught my eye.
Because of course it did. Why would it grow anywhere else?
If you follow me on Instagram, you may have noticed that I made a lot of reels this summer. And I did. For June, July and August, I tried to make 2 writing-related reels a week, posting on Tuesdays and Thursdays around 10am. I was conducting an experiment. Here are some of my results.
I had no meaningful uptick in follower count. I hovered around 9000 all summer.
I had no meaningful increase in sales. The weeks I promoted a Barnes & Noble sale, I sold 17 copies of Pretty Furious.
I had no meaningful increase in engagement. Very few of my writing reels had more than a few comments, and the only one that did I had to shut down because people weren’t getting the point of the video.
None of this really surprised me. I also made reels about Bridgerton and the Olympics, which were much more popular, but definitely didn’t translate to sales. If 1% of the people who watched my most popular Bridgerton video had bought That Inevitable Victorian Thing, I’d have sold 530 copies, which would have been really amazing for a lot of reasons, but it didn’t happen.
In the end, it wasn’t fun, which is my main metric for online shenanigans. Unless you already have a following, it’s hard to go viral with your own thing. Other people (especially if they have bigger platforms) are always going to be better at promoting your stuff. It takes so much time, and mine is better spent writing. We often hear “it’s hard for the author to move the needle”, and now I have some data about me specifically.
ANYWAY, this wasn’t meant to get depressing, but now I feel like this whole newsletter was kind of heavy. At the end of the day, I feel like it’s good things to know, whether you’re a writer trying to get by or a reader wondering why your favourite authors are all so stressed out. We’re coming into the dying season, when the rot and cold sets in, but we know that spring is coming back eventually, and if we’ve fed the earth, then next year’s flowers will be even brighter.
A Thousand Nights turned 9 on October 6th! The book that saved my life is still in print and still available wherever books are sold (you might have to order it, but booksellers are okay with that, and they might even order 2, and put the second one on the shelf, which is great for all of us).
Also, stay tuned because I’m going to have a couple of exciting announcements over the next few weeks.