trying to befriend my sense of failure

that weird post-debut feeling

People will sometimes ask me lately: how do I feel now that my debut novel is out? And I usually say: I feel relieved, and a lot calmer than I did last year.

Both of those things are true—and a lot of the people who ask were around to see how anxious I was then, so they know! (One thing I realized during debut year: That anxiety wasn’t worth it, and I never want to let myself be that anxious about publishing ever again. But maybe this is the kind of thing you can only really internalize by going through it once).

Another thing I feel (but don’t tend to mention when people ask me) is a persistent, dull, tenacious sense of failure.

Let me clarify up front: I don’t actually think my debut novel is a failure. I’m still immensely proud of Midnights With You. I can still say with my whole chest that I think it’s beautiful. I’ve heard from people who say it meant a lot to them, and that’s…wild, honestly? It’s everything I hoped for when I set out to write it and wondered if anything I was saying would ever make sense to anyone. And I actually still don’t even have a real sense of how many copies it sold.

What I’m going to talk about in this newsletter is more of an atmospheric feeling—a vibe that has crept in like mist to fill the silence after a book comes out. And I don’t know if it’s as persistent for other people, but authors I’ve spoken to over the years—including authors I consider to be way more successful than me—seem to have felt like this from time to time, too. Which makes me think maybe it’s less about what has actually happened with my book, and more something that’s baked into the experience. So I’m going to talk about that a bit more, in case anyone else can relate. (One blanket disclaimer: Everything I’m saying is about traditional publishing, because that’s the emotional rollercoaster I know).

I’m writing this, in particular, with a few groups of people in mind:

1. Anxious debut authors trying to figure out what they’re in for. (I’ve been there! And also: every book’s life is so different, and maybe none of this will end up applying to you at all—but I know I would have been interested, anyway).

2. Writers dreaming about becoming published authors who perhaps think that the struggle ends with selling a book. (Even if you have a vague sense that the struggle continues, there’s a lot of information out there about querying, a little about going on submission, and way, way less about everything that happens after that).

and 3. Authors who have recently published their first book, who might be feeling this way too and want to know they’re not alone.

Instead of adding a bunch of anxious caveats here like I’m always prone to, I’m just going to proceed assuming you’ll understand that I’m not saying all this to whine or to brag, but to reflect on this particular experience in all its weird nuances. I trust you!

---

So first off: We’re talking about feelings, not reality. I can list for myself many ways in which my debut was not a failure, and this is the main thing I do to comfort myself when that feeling gets a little too acute. And when I sit down and think about it, there are so many things from my debut experience that I’m overflowing with gratitude for; somehow both things are true and present at once. At one point, I was trying to cram both into this newsletter, but it just didn’t really work.

Maybe I’ll write the recap of my debut experience (gratitude version) at the six-months-out mark, but I want to dedicate this one to examining that sense of failure that’s been floating around. It is just an observable fact, many months after my book came out, that it’s there all the time. I’ll talk myself out of feeling that way for a little while, but it creeps back up on me when I’m not thinking about it. It’s there when I wake up, it’s there when I go to sleep. It’s dull, in the background, but it’s still hanging out.

I’ve started to picture it like a dark version of the dog from The Nightmare Before Christmas, mostly because this amuses me and makes it seem less menacing. I started thinking: maybe I can’t get away from it, but maybe I can tame it? Befriend it? Or at least try to understand where it comes from and what it wants from me.

---

A couple newsletters ago, I mentioned in passing that there are way more opportunities to feel like a failure in traditional publishing, post-book deal, than I’d expected. That was kind of vague, and I love being specific, so here are a few hypothetical examples: There are taste-making institutions that might pass on your book (the ABA with Indie Next and Indies Introduce; B&N, Apple, Target and Amazon with their editor’s picks/book club picks; the ALA and School Library Guild’s recommendations for librarians; the list goes on). There are “most anticipated” and “best of” lists you might not get on, and trades that might ignore or pan your book. (To be clear: I’m listing a range of things that can happen, not things that happened to me—my trade reviews were decent lol! Even the one where Kirkus called Midnights With You “gut-wrenching,” I generally took as a compliment).

There are stores that may ghost you or turn you down for hosting your launch events. Stores might not carry your book (and some well-meaning person in your life might accidentally rub it in by asking why they couldn’t find your book anywhere). There are awards you don’t get, and festivals and events you want to get invited to, but don’t. There’s your Goodreads rating, and your B&N and Amazon rankings, which you can really torture yourself with if you’re so inclined (of course, my advice is: try not to!). There’s every time you open an app and get tagged in a negative review. There’s your publisher taking a long time to consider, and perhaps ultimately turn down, your “option” book—the proposal for your next book that they get the first right of refusal on.

Just when you might think it’s all done, there are more lists, or more awards, or another festival—it goes on like that. An unfortunate aspect of author life is that you learn you didn’t get certain things you might have been vaguely hoping for via other people’s announcements that they did get them. Up until debut year, whenever someone else’s good news momentarily made me feel bad about myself, I’d repeat in my head “It has nothing to do with you!” and it really did make me feel better. And with things like agent and book deal announcements, it’s true: That good thing happening to someone else really has nothing to do with what might happen for you in the future. Unfortunately, there are some things later in the process—awards and events with limited slots whose recipients/participants all get announced at once—where other people’s good news is also simultaneously the delivery mechanism for bad news about yourself, and you just have to smile and walk it off.

And then there are your sales. (And part of what’s at stake in all the things I just listed is: more visibility and buzz, which ideally, but not always, translates into sales).

Of course, having a book out, in itself, is a huge accomplishment, one so many people long for—one that I remember longing for so intensely, and something I thought for years might never happen. Authors talk a lot about how the goal posts keep moving in publishing—but they’re not just moving on their own, babe, it’s capitalism! The invisible hand is picking them up and moving them down the field. While there are plenty of things for authors to be stressed about, I think a good chunk of our stress boils down to one thing: The commercial success of your latest book factors in when publishers weigh whether or not to buy a new book from you.

I feel like this is something a lot of authors earlier in the process (or well-meaning friends and family) commonly misunderstand—that there’s not really a “get your foot in the door and everything will be easier from there” dynamic in publishing. You’re fighting for your place all over again with every new book contract.

The thing I came to realize over the past year is that, while your past sales are one factor, they don’t seem to be the only one. I’m basing this on anecdotes from other authors that I heard over the course of my anxious debut year, and things people with more industry knowledge who are wiser than me have told me. This very informative post from an editor about how acquisitions meetings work also supports the idea that your past sales factor in, but there are other things that publishing teams consider—and the strength of your new idea and how it can be positioned in the market count for a lot. If you’re doing something really different from your most recent book—a new age category, a genre pivot—I gather that can mean your past sales become less of a consideration, too.

But one reason I was so anxious last year is that I was consumed with the thoughts: Is this book I poured so much of myself into going to flop? and: Will I ever be able to sell another book?

In the end, I got a new idea that possessed me so much, I was able to write and revise it fairly quickly. I got lucky and it sold before my debut came out. (Endlessly grateful to my amazing agent for everything she did there!)

So the edge is off of that particular fear for the moment, but not exactly off the sense of failure. (Feelings versus reality, again). Five months after Midnights With You came out, I’m not exactly sure how it did, but the incomplete (and potentially quite misleading) information I have at my disposal is not exactly encouraging.

Here’s another thing it might be good for pre-debut authors to hear: The sales information that authors have free, direct access to—i.e. the Bookscan information captured in the Amazon author portal—paints an incomplete picture. It’s a specific slice of book sales: physical copies sold through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Target, and maybe some other big retailers I don’t know about. As far as I understand, it doesn’t include ebook or audiobook sales, school and library sales, and many (most?) indie bookstore sales. (Everything I know about this, I have largely learned from word of mouth, so someone correct me if I’m wrong here and I’ll update this part).

And there’s not really a reliable way to know how this slice of book sales reflects the whole, because some books sell really well to libraries, some sell more in indies—the percentage of overall sales made up of physical copies sold in big retailers will vary widely, book to book. I’ve talked to authors who said their actual sales (as reflected on the royalty statement you get about six months after the book comes out) ended up being five times more than what the Amazon Portal said. And I’ve also heard from authors who said their Amazon Portal numbers ended up being pretty spot on. It depends on the book. It’s confusing! It’s Schroedinger’s Sense of Commercial Failure.

Sales in traditional publishing are mysterious. So much there lies out of your control—it seems like a lot about how to sell books baffles publishers, too.

Anyway, I loved this bit from Jami Attenberg’s Substack:

“Without even getting into the publishing industry itself, or how hard it is to get published, or get published well, and all that you must do to promote yourself, I will tell you simply that you can write the greatest book in the world and get lovely reviews and then go on to sell no copies of it, and wonder if you still even exist. (You do.)”

---

One confusing thing is that there are a lot of ways to think about a book’s success. And because there are so many ways to look at it—because there’s a lack of a clear moment when you’ve done enough, and so much is ambiguous and intangible—it can be…pretty easy to default to feeling like a failure, unless you have a splashy and obvious external marker of success?

But it’s been soothing to me to break down the different possible meanings of the word, when judgments about my own success and failure are bouncing around in my subconscious.

1. There’s commercial success—as we’ve discussed, confusing!

2. There’s critical success—awards, good trade reviews, getting on lists.

3. There’s being treated like a success, socially—being invited to events, getting to meet readers, generally having the esteem of your peers.

4. There’s artistic success on the work’s own terms—does it have the effect on readers that you were going for? Does it say what you wanted to say? Does it meet the artistic goals you had for it, in its creation?

5. There’s success in how the book touches the lives of others—in hearing from readers who said they got something out of it or that it meant something to them.

So was my book a success? By these standards, respectively: 1) inconclusive; 2) a little bit; 3) actually yes, when I think about it?; 4) yes, it largely seems that way; and 5) wow, yes, in a way that’s been the most life-changing part of this experience.

Maybe this comes with writing a book that gets called emotionally “raw” (and, you know, gut wrenching), but I have gotten notes from readers that make me feel so seen, so the-opposite-of-alone, in a way I would have simply not believed when I was younger. Every moment that someone reached out and said they saw something of themselves reflected back at them in my book means so much to me. It honestly takes my breath away. (And if you’re one of those people, truly, from the bottom of my heart, thank you.)

I was such a lonely kid growing up, and when I wrote this book, I was channeling that kid’s emotions. I think she would be so shocked to read even a single one of these messages. And the emotions of that are so big and overwhelming, I kind of just…reply real quick, squash those feelings down and carry on with my day? In writing this out now, I’m realizing: huh maybe I should dwell on that more?

I feel like my passively absorbed ideas about success and failure can narrow my perspective on my own life and keep me from seeing it clearly sometimes—but man, the idea that we can actually put some of our inner lives into static words on the page, send them out through space and time, and someone can read them and feel something on the other end? Truly wild. Incredible.

Then there’s another potential standard of success I always circle back to:

6. What the process of writing the book (and also putting it out into the world) added to the author’s life.

I think this is the way of looking at success that can most easily get written off like it doesn’t count—like it’s just sentimental, or selfish even—because it’s about your inner life, and it doesn’t add to the external success ledger that can tell you if you’ll get to keep writing books or not. But in terms of actually propelling you to keep writing more books and sustaining you through it, it seems like it’s…kind of the whole ball game? It’s relevant for the activity that will take up the great majority of your author life—the long silent periods between milestones when it’s just you and your writing.

---

I realized three interrelated things over the past year:

1. I’ll always feel like a failure when I think too much about the business side of publishing (versus focusing on writing as a creative endeavor).

2. I can’t ever completely avoid thinking about the business side of publishing if I have to engage in book promo (and, like, fulfill my contractual obligations on time).

3. The main reason I dread book promo is because it forces me to think about the business side of publishing and the external success metrics that get me down. It makes it harder to dissociate from those moving goal posts. It wakes up my phantom failure dog like fireworks after a Dodgers game and makes it start howling.

When do I not feel like a failure? When I’m in that headspace of playing around and being creative, and when I’m with friends.

But I’ve been thinking, lately…maybe there’s a way to approach social media where it feels less like BOOK PROMO, and more like playing around and being among friends? (Maybe this is glaringly obvious to other people? Maybe everyone else is treating it this way already? Who knows? Not me!)

My next book comes out more than a year from now, and my last one came out a while ago. I’m in a weird in-between space where, if I wanted to fade out and avoid social media, I probably could. But it felt like such an uphill battle for me to get comfortable being online as an author, and that makes me not want to retreat completely—just leaving another uphill battle for myself later. I guess I’d like to take this in-between period as an opportunity to get more comfortable. Maybe this is a good time to break all the rules I set for myself over the past year, be online in a less goal-oriented way, play around and figure what parts are actually fun for me.

I like talking about the process of writing and where I am with it. I like talking about the big feelings around writing and trying to be creative and author life. That’s what I love to read from other people on here, too (I truly can’t get enough lol, please keep it coming!) So maybe I’ll do more of that. Maybe I’ll share more about things I loved to read and what I think makes them so good, too (but that intimidates me for some reason, so also maybe I won’t. We’ll see!)

Anyway! More playing around, even with being on social media and making book-adjacent content on the internet—that seems like a good start. And what else can I do when this feeling of failure is still floating in the background, and I can’t exactly make it go away?

My sense of failure must be really steadfast and loyal, with how consistently it’s around. Maybe it’s actually well-meaning and overprotective.

I think it’s misguidedly trying to save me from getting my heart too broken. I think it’s nipping at my heels out of the fear that some external force will come along to take my favorite thing (writing) away from me. It’s saying: Get used to these little amounts of pain, so being confronted with failure doesn’t make you stop writing! Get used to it so you expect less and you don’t get crushed!

But it’s funny—the writing part is the part you get to have all the time, if you want it.

I think a lot about this piece of advice that Kristopher Jansma gave in Courtney Maum’s Before and After the Book Deal:

“Most of the stress you go through while being an author is really about worrying that if you don’t perform well enough, you’ll somehow have to stop being a writer. But you were a writer before you started being an author, and you will still be one afterward.”

And I think a lot about part of this email Rachel Khong wrote to herself and scheduled to receive on the publication day for Real Americans:

“Maybe the book is doing terribly: people hate it, the reviews are bad, no one is buying it. That’s okay! I am a human being, and not only my work. I’m not writing for approval; I’m writing to learn about the world, other people, myself. If I’m shamed and humbled, that’s okay. From hard times comes growth. I wrote this book as a gift to others; as long as it reaches a few people, that’s all that matters. Writing this book was never about making money, and so the money part doesn’t matter, either. Even if no one ever wants to publish my work again, no one can actually take writing away from me. No matter what, I can still write.”

Publishing is kind of mind-bending because the prize you’re running toward all the time is actually largely the thing you had when you were right at the starting line: The parts where you’re sitting alone in front of your manuscript, telling yourself a story.

So I’m going to try to make peace with my sense of failure. I’m going to teach it to sit and stay, figure out how I can calm it down so it doesn’t bark so loud, or bite at my ankles so often. I’m going to get on a first-name basis with it. (If you have ideas for what I should name my imaginary ghost dog, I am taking suggestions! Let me know in the comments).

And I think the best equivalent of scratching it behind the ears and giving it a treat is to say: Look, I’ll keep writing anyway, okay? No one can take that from us. And to open the project I’m working on and go at it again.