Failing at Art, or, The Art of Failure
By Therese Anne Fowler | September 1, 2023 |
When I talk about the writing life, I prefer to focus on the pros, not the cons. After all, highs are so much more fun than lows! When authors craft their bios, they don’t list their rejections, insulting reviews, readings where no readers show up, low sales figures, writers block; they mention awards, best sellers, TV/film adaptations, publications that are perceived as prestigious. And just by my nature, I prefer to encourage, not discourage. So, to focus today on failure may seem a bit off-brand and maybe even unwelcome, from your point of view. But bear with me; I have a purpose!
My last post here at Writer Unboxed was my first after several years’ absence. That being the case, I gave a quick-and-dirty bio to (re)acquaint myself to the community. In it, I told how I’d had a novel (my third, Exposure, 2011) come into the marketplace dead on arrival. Then I went on to talk about that day’s subject: whether obsession is a necessary component in creating compelling fiction. However, amid other things in the post’s comments, someone (Hi, Deb Boone) suggested I should speak to how I overcame failure and went on to write the first of what turned out to be a string of bestsellers. And so I shall, with the hope that in sharing that experience I will in fact encourage others.
I want to also note that I’ve made it my practice to speak candidly about all aspects of the business, money included, having found that too often publishing campaigns, sales figures, and author advances are vaguely discussed or shrouded in secrecy or in some cases even deliberately misrepresented in order to make the author/book appear more successful than they are. This business is too opaque. Knowledge = power.
Now, on with the subject at hand!
Here’s a fact: the writing life is replete with failures, small and large—because unfortunately that’s the nature of creating art for public consumption. Failures are with us at every stage: We start stories we can’t seem to finish. We finish stories, but they’re not good enough, and though we try to fix them, we eventually see they’re unredeemable. We query agents and get rejected. We submit to contests and lose. We have an agent, then go on submission and get rejected. We self-publish but no one buys our book. We get a book deal, but our books are dead on arrival. We sell and publish a fairly successful book, then can’t get another deal.
Opportunities to fail are everywhere, of course, and I have failed at plenty of things that have nothing to do with writing: my 9th grade geometry class; learning to play the trumpet; selling Mary Kay Cosmetics; winning Powerball; and staying married to my first and second husbands—just to name a few. And though I have no issues with any of that now, the truth is that I hate to fail, especially at things that are more or less within my power to effect or control. It’s all too easy for my brain and heart to transmute “I failed at x” to “I am a failure.” Being a failure is very different from having a failure. It feels a lot worse, and is a lot harder to overcome.
With writing (and especially with fiction) there are so many obstacles, so many hurdles, such a long road to traverse to have even a modicum of success, that it can (and many times does) feel like there’s no point in even trying.
But as it happens, whatever we ultimately accomplish with our writing lies largely in what we do—or don’t do—when we can’t get what we want.
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Nowadays when I refer to that DOA novel, Exposure, I will often quip that it sold about twelve copies, and that often gets a laugh, as it’s meant to—but I assure you I wasn’t lighthearted about it at the time. I don’t recall the actual sales figures, but I believe the number was less than 1,000. This, when I’d been paid $125,000 for the book and had a second book under contract with the same publisher for the same money. I should also mention that writing was (and remains) my only source of income, and my previous novel had also performed below expectations (mine, at least; I can’t speak to my publisher’s). Exposure’s subject was topical as well as connected to me personally, so because I was trying everything I could to reverse my sales trend and protect my young writing career, I paid an independent publicist $15,000 to help my in-house publicist with securing high-quality coverage. The most significant thing she got for me was a profile piece in USA Today (no small feat!), but the results were otherwise tepid.
In traditional publishing, authors often have a good idea ahead of time whether their book’s more likely to sink than it is to soar. If you’re fortunate enough to be selected for any high-profile sales-driver like a major book club (GMA, Reese, Oprah, B&N), Book of the Month, Amazon “Best of,” etc., you almost always know it well in advance, and you know if you’re in the running for big sales-driving “gets” like People’s Pick of the Week. Similarly, major media interviews are usually booked at least a few weeks in advance. Exposure got none of that, the USA Today piece being the one exception. That ran the weekend before publication, and I remember vividly—viscerally—the dread I felt when I saw that the book’s Amazon ranking barely budged, remaining still dismally high and staying high through publication day—a clear indicator that readers weren’t coming to the book on Amazon, or anywhere.
Every book of reasonably decent quality has a sizable potential audience that, if marketed to correctly/effectively, will buy that book. When a book doesn’t find its audience and sells as poorly as Exposure did, it’s largely because its marketing and publicity campaign was not well-designed and/or well-executed and/or was simply not enough to move the needle. If the book’s target readers don’t know the book exists, they aren’t going to buy it.
The majority of traditionally published novels get little-to-no publisher support at all, and sell few copies. For books that got low advances, this isn’t generally regarded as a problem; the performance matches the publisher’s expectations. When the advance is higher and the book sells poorly, the publisher may well also expect that (after all, they designed the sales and marketing campaign) and not see it as a problem—because for them, it isn’t; for one thing, they made decisions about where to place their bets and set their expectations accordingly, and for another, they’ve got SO many other books that can and will offset any one book’s sluggish sales. But for the full-time author whose future career and livelihood depend greatly on their previous book’s performance, a situation like the one I found myself in sets up a career death-spiral.
My book had failed. I had failed. My career was failing. I felt like a failure.
My editor at the time brightly suggested that for the remaining contracted book I write a similar kind of story (domestic drama) but use a pseudonym as a way to basically get around the problem of booksellers ordering my next book solely based on my previous book’s sales (which as you may know is the standard practice). She also said going straight to trade paperback might make sense, rather than hardcover first. These are common-enough strategies, and I was glad to at least still be under contract, so I pulled myself together and agreed to consider the pseudonym while getting to work on something new.
I came up with an idea, ran it by my editor, got a green light, and wrote a first draft. But all the while I was thinking, This is dumb, this won’t work, I’m only going to make a bad situation worse, I need to rethink this, do something different, write something different. For several reasons, I had little confidence in my editor, and the further into the process I got, the greater was my dread of yet another failure.
This is not an ideal condition under which to produce good fiction.
I was sure I had not produced good fiction.
I told my agent and editor that I was pulling the book. I would write something else. Something different. Stay tuned.
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Now follow me on a relevant sidetrack for a minute:
Back in spring, 2005, I was in my final semester of NC State’s creative writing MFA program. I took a novel-writing workshop in which several spots were also made available to non-degree-seeking students. One of those spots was filled by a woman named Sharon Kurtzman. Like me, she was an aspiring novelist. Unlike me, she wouldn’t have as easy a time getting her foot in the door. To cut straight to the chase: over the next 18 years, she would complete six novels and endure scores of agent rejections for several of those; then, after gaining an agent, endure a dozen or more editor/publisher rejections; she would lose two agents in that lengthy process; then she’d gain a third agent and, as of early this year, celebrate the sale of her debut novel to none other than Pam Dorman of Pamela Dorman Books. A person might be tempted to say Sharon spent 18 years failing. She says she spent 18 years learning.
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Following my post-Exposure learning process, what came for me, eventually, was the inspiration to write a biographical historical novel about Zelda Fitzgerald. I wrote a proposal and some sample pages. My editor rejected it. I decided to write it anyway.
At the time, I didn’t know whether I was saving my career or killing it. What I did know was that I’d recovered my joy in the act of creating, and because of that, I regained my optimism that somehow it would work out for the better. It did. The resulting novel was bought at auction for $400,000 (making the return of advance monies I’d been paid for the book I pulled a lot less painful). Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald, published in 2013, became a best seller on every list, sold in translation to dozens of countries, got adapted for television, and—most importantly—restored my faith in my ability to self-assess and act in my own best interests.
Here’s the lesson in that: I had to fail badly so that I could learn how to succeed.
Here’s the rest of the lesson: success is always fleeting; it doesn’t self-sustain. And new failures will come, because, as I said, failure is embedded in the very nature of creating art for public consumption. The question, then, always lies in how we decide to respond.
Therese Anne Fowler is the New York Times, IndieBound, and USA Today bestselling author of multiple novels including Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald, which was adapted for television starring Christina Ricci. She has been a finalist for the Goodreads Choice Awards and the Southern Book Prize for fiction. Her articles and essays have appeared in The Week, Harper’s Bazaar, the Telegraph, and elsewhere. Therese earned a BA in sociology/cultural anthropology and an MFA in creative writing, both from NC State University. She lives in Raleigh, NC, with her husband, author John Kessel.
[coffee]
This was exactly the post I needed to read today, Therese. I suspect I’m not alone. It’s one thing in this business to know that failure is a regular recurring feature for most of a creator’s career, but that doesn’t make it any easier–and too often it doesn’t keep us from globalizing it as you said: not, “This was a failure,” but “I am a failure. And I will always be a failure.” And this often despite so many successes also. Our negative bias.
What I especially love about your story is how you take the reins of your own career. How you decided what you wanted to write, regardless of expectations and despite uncertainty and doubt and risk. I think that’s all we can ultimately do as creators if we want to have a truly satisfying career. It’s its own reward often, but it was especially delightful in your post to see that sometimes it’s also rewarded by the market.
Congratulations on your success, your perseverance, and your belief in yourself and your own writing, and thanks for sharing. I’ll be passing the story along in my newsletter.
Thank you, Tiffany! That damn negative bias––it’s built in and so hard to counter. The support of fellow travelers helps so much.
Great post, Therese! And then there are those like me who have written a few biographical historicals that have landed like dead weight. My other non-bio historicals have performed far better. It’s crazy how even in the same genre, there’s such wild variation. Such is the nature of our creative business!
I’m considering a pivot these days, too. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about this business (that you so eloquently talk about above), it’s that being flexible and starting again sometimes is exactly what we need to find our joy again–and to succeed. Looking forward to reading your next! xx
I have seen it many times. After a career crash, a fiction writer goes on to write their best work.
Why? Because having faced failure, they have nothing to lose. They write with heart. They write in freedom.
If you lose you learn, the saying goes, and I can report that’s true, and what post-crash writers learn is that you write the best when you write for yourself. Which was true all along.
You’re right, Don, that we write our best when we write for ourselves. That can be hard to reconcile with career pressures, especially while the crash is in-progress, so it’s really helpful when agents like you and like mine (Wendy Sherman) bring that counsel to the conversation.
I have learned (and re-learned) that if there’s no joy in the work, there’s no reason to do it. SO MANY occupations are easier! Wishing you all good results with your pivot, if that’s what you choose, and cheering you along regardless. xx
Thank you, Therese! I really appreciate your sharing these insights. As I have myself noted, it is not whether we write well, but how well we market what we write.
Clearly you are a talented writer. I imagine your skills were just as impressive when you wrote Exposure as they were when you wrote Zelda. So question: Had there been no Tender is the Night, would Zelda have met a different fate? Likewise, if you were to release Exposure again, this tjme with the jacket proclaiming your well earned status, would that novel too find a warm reception?
Good on you for sticking with your instinct. And for continuing to share your artistic work.
About whether writing well is the main factor in a book’s/writer’s success, I would just add that there IS a baseline standard that needs to be met, but once beyond that, yes, marketing is everything.
Would Zelda have met a different fate without Tender is the Night? I’m not sure if I understand how you’re seeing that book as the key factor, but regardless, I think for Zelda to have had a different fate, she’d have had to have a different husband––one who wasn’t so conflicted and over-confident and self-involved. But would she have been attracted to such a man?
About Exposure: some booksellers who really loved that book encouraged me to re-release it (I took back the rights several years ago) and I’ve considered it. It likely would get a much better reception. That said, the writer I am today isn’t satisfied with the book and would be compelled to improve it first, and, frankly, I think my time is better spent on new work.
Thanks for sharing with transparency, Therese; these stories are important! Key takeaway is that you abandoned what felt like a joyless pursuit, listening to your gut, and searched until something nudged you toward excitement again. Excitement inspires involvement inspires commitment inspires that glorious catalytic cycle of fuel and work, and off you go. I’m so glad that you found your optimism again, and that Z made it out into the world. Thanks again for being here and for sharing. Write on!
“Excitement inspires involvement inspires commitment inspires that glorious catalytic cycle of fuel and work, and off you go.” That is precisely it. But, geez, sometimes we have to fumble a long time in a dark wood before we arrive again at Excitement! (And thanks again for bringing me back into the fold, here. xx)
Great post, Therese, and a big YAY for Sharon!!
I am just crazy excited for her and the book! xx
Therese, thank you for writing so honestly about both the writing and the business of it. I just looked to see whether Exposure is in the library and it is! Failure, it is not. I used to be a scientist before I became a mother, and in a way, it prepared me for the writing life. There are so many failed experiments, but with each iteration, you fail better, until you discover that perhaps you were asking the wrong question… and voila! You’re on the right track, until another conundrum appears and you puzzle and puzzle over it, turning it this way and that. I’ve had to abandon some experiments entirely because nature wasn’t willing to show me those secrets yet.
What really resonated in your essay is how you knew to abandon that second book to work on something you had a fire for. How beautiful that you were also rewarded for it. I’ve made major pivots in life–scientific, personal, writing–and they’ve been instrumental in my growth. No regrets whatsoever. Thank you for a very encouraging post to follow your heart. Right now, I’m trying to develop the instrument I was born with–my voice!
Very well observed, Vijaya. I think I have a scientist’s brain, if you will (had I not found success in writing fiction, I was looking into going into medicine), and bringing that mindset to problem-solving both in the creation of fiction and in career management is so useful.
How exciting for you to have that new endeavor! I expect it will be a rewarding one for you.
Great article, Therese! Wise and honest words. My sis used to say a failure wasn’t a failure, it was practice. And glad you included Sharon’s story! Thanks for an enlightening read.
Thanks, Bernie! Wise words from your sister.
Therese,
As a longtime fan of your work, thank you for sharing your wisdom. So many random factors beyond a writer’s control influence a book’s success: what other books are released at the same time, whether your publisher/editor push for your book, whether the publisher remembers to include the blurbs written by other writers who took the time to read and endorse your book. (The blurbs were left off my last book–probably due to the fact that the team was working remotely and may have been a bit disorganized.) Talent and writing ability have little to do with “success.” Your insights have reminded me that we have to believe in ourselves.
Onward!
Sally
You are SO right about those factors and how little control authors (especially those published traditionally) have over their books’ success/failure. The frustrations and grievances have discouraged and derailed many authors––but I’m hopeful you won’t be among them; otherwise I wouldn’t get to read another Sally Koslow novel, and I am eager to do so!
Wonderful post, Therese! Raw, relatable, and inspiring. Thank you for being so transparent.
Thanks, Tori!
What a wonderful post! You’ve made failure shine like a diamond. It’s frightening to think what you might do with a more sanguine subject. Thank you.
Thank YOU, Bob.
Hi Therese, I read and reviewed IT ALL COMES DOWN TO THIS for Good Reads and New Kindle Releases. Now I am eager to read ZELDA. Thanks so much for your honest take on the writing journey.
Thank you, Elizabeth!
Thank you for this post. I so needed this today. Have been a little lost but your words bring hope and inspire me to continue.
<3
I hope you better times are ahead.
edit: strike that “you” :)
Therese, I remember when your very first book came out – Souvenir. You sent me a copy and some postcards to help you market it, and I was glad to do so. That story has stayed with me all these years later – you write powerful, incredible stories.
I had my novel published as an ebook during the pandemic by a major publisher that was supposed to release it in paperback; This never happened. I parted ways with my agent, and my novel sales were dismal. However, the reviews made my heart soar – some people just LOVED it, and that was enough to keep me going. I re-dedicated myself to my writing, and finished my latest novel in 9 months – somewhat of a record for me!
Thank you for this post and for being open and vulnerable about your journey.
Melissa! So nice to “see” you again. Thank you for your kind words (and for helping me get started all those years ago).
I’m sorry you’ve had such difficult experiences with your novel/publisher/agent. It sounds like you’re dealing with all of that exactly as one should: focusing on the positives and getting engaged with new work. Wishing you only good luck ahead!
Great post Therese! You and Sharon are inspirational. 😊
Thank you!
Thanks for sharing your story (and Sharon Kurtzman’s) here. As someone who has been walking this path for a long time, so much of this resonates with me. I guess I’m still “failing” — i.e., trying, and learning, and finding my way to success.
Keep fighting the good fight, Kristan. And remember to celebrate whatever small successes that come in the meantime; those are what sustain us along the way.