Why I'm Glad My First Book Didn't Sell

What You Need To Know About Publishing Before You're Ready For It

Kornati National Park, Croatia

I started writing my first book in 2017, while I was still working full time as a (Croatian) attorney. It was the “closet time” of writing, when I was ashamed to admit that I had this big, bold dream of writing a book even to those closest to me.

That was the dream then, though. To write a book. I didn’t think much about the hows and the whens and the wheres of what happens after writing it.

When I finished my first draft, the inevitable question surfaced: What now?

I would need an extra blog post to fully explain why, but I couldn’t stomach the idea of publishing my book in Croatia. Let’s just say that by then I was sick of growing crookedly under glass ceilings, never having the right connections, and seeing less-talented people get opportunities I could only dream of. Somewhere along the lines, it seems, I had been infected with the American dream, or at least my private version of it: that I’ll be able to let my work speak for itself, and live and die by the quality of what I do, and nothing else.

It was the end of 2018. when I hired someone to translate my book into English. Obviously, I was completely clueless about how publishing worked back then. I really thought all it took was to finish a book (I didn’t call it by its name then—the First Draft), have it translated, and then you got an agent and the publisher took it from there. (Yep, it didn’t occur to me that I would have to know English myself well enough to revise with an agent and then with an editor. That’s precisely how naive about publishing I was just six years ago).

It was only when the ‘translator’ returned the Google-Translate pages to me that I realized I either needed to do it myself or give up my dream of publishing my book in the US.

And, again, being naive as I was, I thought, “Hey, I already did most of the work, so why don’t I just translate the damn thing and be done with it?”

Get it? Most of the work. 😂 Done with it. 🤣

And so at the beginning of 2019, I started writing and reading in English, translating the book so that I could get it into agents’ hands. I started reading about the publishing process, and this is where I realized I had not finished my book at all—it was only the first draft 😱.

I invested in a developmental edit (which—I ended up getting four-page-long account of everything that wasn’t working in my book, and zero explanation or guidance on how to address it. This horrible experience is precisely why my developmental edits run as long as 15+ pages, offering actionable advice and solutions for each issue raised; I never want a writer to feel as lost as I had when I received that editorial letter).

I also started connecting with other writers to have my work critiqued.

When I got matched with my first critique partner, a girl almost half my age, she read my first chapter and emailed me to say she didn’t think we were a good fit to work together. She thought I didn’t have anything to offer her as a critique partner, which cracks me up now that I do this work professionally. But back then it was a heartbreak all its own, and it almost made me give up on writing.

In any event, by mid-2019, my novel was, more-less, query-ready.

I participated in the WFWA pitching event and got 7 requests based on my 50-word pitch and the opening page. I ended up querying my book widely, with a request rate of around 10-12%, but ultimately all the requests turned into rejections, or R&Rs at best.

This didn’t happen in one go. I would send a batch of queries out, get a slew of rejections, revise to the best of my abilities, then send out queries again. By that time I was training to be a book coach, and I even got three developmental edits done by my colleagues. But no one could quite put their finger on why the book wasn’t working, or offer a way to make it work.

I didn’t see it for what it was back then. Why, no matter how much I revised, I couldn’t get the damn thing to work. But the truth was—I didn’t have the chops yet to write that book the way it needed to be written.

So, one day, sometime after I crossed that 100 rejection threshold, I woke up and realized it hurt too much to continue to work on this book.

All the revising I’d done ultimately felt more like churning of words than something substantial and meaningful.

What’s worse, I didn’t recognize the story anymore after all the feedback I tried (often ineptly) to apply to it. It felt like someone else’s book at that point, and this I mourned more than anything else—the way I suspect a person who’s gone way overboard with plastic surgery misses the lines of their own good old face.

Decision to shelve that book was one of the hardest decisions of my life. But when I did that, I only felt free.

The Pain Of The Shelved Book

The pain of the shelved book is real. And it’s scarring. Much like getting burned will make you think twice about playing with fire again, it took a lot of time to shake that fear of failure and start working on a new project.

But it was inevitable, as writing really gets under your skin. I wasn’t happy while I wasn’t writing. I find that I need that second world in my head at all times. For some reason, keeping one of my feet in the real world, and another in the imaginary world helps keep me sane.

By this time, I had made some writing friends. I saw their own writing stories unfold. I saw them get published with presses big and small. I saw them get agented with better and worse agents. I saw them part ways with their not-so-supportive agents. I saw them publish with Big Five as A-list authors and B-list authors, and everything in between. I saw them publish with independent presses, or with hybrid publishers, to various degrees of satisfaction.

I gathered their knowledge and experience alongside doing the work of mastering craft: exploring relentlessly how stories are woven together, what constitutes a narrative voice, how to write quiet stories and protagonists, how to show instead of tell, and more importantly, how to tell well.

To Get Somewhere, You Need to Know Where You Want To Go

Over the course of these years, I kept asking myself where I wanted to go. This was not a question I had thoroughly understood at the beginning of my writing journey.

With my first book, all I wanted was to get my book published, but I didn’t think or know much about what that meant. About how your first book sales can make or break your career in the long run. How not getting enough marketing from your publisher can dictate poorer sales and then prevent you from selling your next project because the publishers will deem you a failure.

I didn’t know or care that there were publishers that cast you in a certain role. That, like Jason Statham or Vin Diesel, you’re stuck playing out the same role over and over again. Write the same book over and over again.

I didn’t know about genres. I couldn’t define my first book’s genre, and it was only as I did an extensive research on genres and really got the differences between them straight, that I understood that the genre I wrote my first book in was not the genre I want to be writing going forward.

For that first book, I needed the confinement of genre fiction to learn so many things (write a scene, show vs. tell, build a character arc, narrative drive, etc.), but now that I’ve learned all those things, I find myself drawn to subverting and playing with everything I know.

All of this to say—I was clueless.

Writing Can Be A Great Hobby But…

If you’re writing for the joy of writing, that’s great. Writing is a wonderful hobby, but if you want to get published, you need to see it for what it is—a career path.

You cannot step into a courtroom and try a case without proper education and passing the bar exam.

You wouldn’t be allowed into an OR to perform brain surgery after merely reading an Anatomy Atlas, either.

You might get ‘lucky’ and get a publishing deal even if you are green about all things writing, but would that really serve you? Or would it be great until you realized all the different ways you’ve crippled and pigeonholed your career without even knowing it?

See, you can get lucky with publishing and work in it without the type of vetting medicine or law requires. But the thing about publishing is that it’s a one-off industry.

You only get one shot, and if you want to do it again, you need to get that one shot right.

So while it’s understandable and only human that we want to get to the results as fast as we can, also make sure you’re informed and ready for everything that lies ahead.

Some Things To Think About

Here’s a list of some things to think about as you’re plotting your way toward being an author:

• Do you know your craft well enough?

Can you tell your story in the way the story requires it?

With my first book, the reader got thoroughly hooked when one of the characters died, which happened at 30% of the narrative. The regular feedback I got was—could you open your book here? The problem was, if I opened the book there, nobody would care about that character dying. I needed the set-up to make the reader care, but the reader didn’t care about the set-up.

So you see the conundrum. Back then it was unsolvable for me, as I only knew how to write linearly. This happens, then this happens, then this happens.

You should see my current book, though. It is all over the place, chronologically. I couldn’t do it in 2017, but now, I can jump in time in whatever way I want. I don’t even have to think about it.

Same goes for info-dumps, telling, author intrusion, emotionally uncalibrated characters… If you’re getting this kind of feedback from your readers, it means you need to level up as writer before you’re truly ready to move forward.

• Can you identify your genre with certainty?

Know your genre. Know if you are adhering to its rules, or at the very least subverting its tropes masterfully.

Know your comps, too. If you tell me you can’t find at least two comps for your book, it’s a sure sign you either don’t understand what comps are, or you don’t read extensively in your genre.

When I said I’d queried my first book—I meant I’d queried the heck out of it. And as I wasn’t sure about my book’s genre, I pitched it both to agents representing women’s fiction and literary fiction. I didn’t know the difference. But they sure did. And I wonder how many rejections I got just because I sent the book to the agents who didn’t represent the type of book I was pitching.

My second querying process was much more streamlined. 25 queries and 9 requests. There might have been more requests, because I got my offer within the first two weeks, which was well within the 6-8 week period that agents usually take to review queries.

• Do you want to be traditionally published or not?

I have friends and clients who don’t want to go through the ordeal of traditional publishing. They don’t need the acknowledgement of the industry professionals—they feel confident putting their work into the hands of their readers on their own.

While this is a perfectly valid path, I always knew it wasn’t for me. Maybe it’s because I write in my second language, and maybe it would be like this even if I weren’t. But I do want that validation. And I’m ready to wait for it.

• What kind of agent would you like to sign with?

Being in the mindset of ‘Gimme an agent, any agent’ is an indication that you are not yet ready to go into the trenches. Finding the right agent is a business decision before it’s anything else.

Not all agents are the same.

While it is true that most agents in (legit) agencies will be pitching your book to the same Big Five editors, there is still a lot you want to think about.

Some agents are already well established but that also means they have less time to work with each individual writer, so they tend to be less hands-on, and with some top-tier agents you only get to communicate with through their assistants.

Some agents are personable, some are more professional in their approach. Do you need hand-holding when the going gets tough?

Do you want someone who does extensive editorial work or not? Do you tend to need a lot of editorial support?

Do you like to stay in control, or do you want to give the helm over? How often would you like to be notified of the sub or other things? Do you want to be cc’d in all their emails to editors or would you rather get a more generalized feedback?

I could talk more extensively about what types of questions you need to ask when trying to vet the right agent for you—so let me know in the comments if you want me to write a separate post about that.

• What are things about your book you don’t want to compromise even at the cost of not signing with your dream agent/publisher?

As long as you’re in the mindset of “If they tell me to put King Kong instead of the main character, I’ll do it,” you’re not ready for this next step.

But simultaneously, you need to be a pro at receiving feedback. Do you know the difference between maintaining the artistic vision vs. getting feedback that strengthens your writing?

Feeling combative or distraught when getting feedback is usually a sign of a writer who still hasn’t mastered receiving feedback.

Being able to process feedback is crucial for getting published. And knowing how to process feedback (and not get defensive, while also standing up for the artistic integrity of the work) is something you acquire by knowledge and experience. Lots of it.

It is through knowledge of craft that you will know if the feedback has merit or not. It is through experience that you will be able to tell where you want to put your foot down, and what feedback is worth considering and applying.

For example, discussions at the Writers’ Book Club helped me to start noticing the fine line between readers’ personal preferences and craft issues in any given book. This allowed me to notice these same differences when receiving feedback from my critique partner, and knowing which issues I wanted to tackle and where the feedback was slicing into the fabric of my story, which I wasn’t willing to compromise.

• What do you want to be known for as an author?

In 2017, I didn’t think about what kind of author I wanted to be. If asked, I probably would’ve said ‘the published kind.’ But that isn’t the answer I would give today.

I have been watching carefully and my answer is much clearer today. Given the right opportunity, I will know which choices I’ll need to make to get there.

• Are you thinking about your career strategically?

Are you thinking about your career beyond that first book? Would you be happy writing a different iteration of the same book over and over again? Writers tend to get cast in certain roles, so make sure you like the role you are auditioning for. And if you want to be someone who has open hands to try out new stuff and not let your creativity get stifled in any way—then make sure all the people you choose to be your collaborators on your path (agents, editors) are aware of this and on board with this.

• Are you in this for a long haul?

For some people, the dream is publishing a book. A book, as in one.

But if you’re in it for a long haul, make sure each decision you make is not only right for your current project. Instead, each step needs to carve out the path for the indeterminate number of books you will write going forward.

Think of it as setting yourself up for writing standalone vs. writing a series. You don’t tackle the book in the same way if you already have future work in your mind as you’re drafting the first one.

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I’d love to hear from you. Let me know your thoughts and questions in the comments!

Until next time, may your reading and writing be joyful!