Posts by Julia Whelan
It is a truth universally acknowledged, a reader in possession of a platform must be in want of an opinion.
As news desks covering books have disappeared, book bloggers and bookstagrammers and booktokers have proliferated. As such, I hate to break it to you, but you’re going to see some really mean comments about your book.
But chin up, because the reality is? There have always been people who hated your book. In a different generation, they just wouldn’t have had an easy way to let you know they hated it. And while that might not seem like much of a silver lining, then let this be: there are also people who love it and will talk about it so much you’ll wonder who, exactly, is paying them.
So, this is the way of things now, for better or worse. But whether the social media reviews are good or bad, it’s the volume of them that can feel particularly relentless. Your publisher wants them to be relentless. Relentless is a good thing in this ecosystem of content attention. Yet for all the good it may ultimately do, we should at least acknowledge that it’s different. That authors today are dealing with something authors yesterday did not: the presumption of access. And its corollary: the feeling that your reader is now looking over your shoulder.
So here are some things that help me navigate all that (when I remember to take my own advice):
No book is universally beloved so stop trying to write one that is. Because of my day job, I get tagged in reviews of other writer’s audiobooks. Sometimes I’m tagged even when the author isn’t, because while the reviewer liked my performance, it’s a bad review of the book (and the good reviewers have learned not to tag the author in negative reviews – seriously, what HEROES). So let me tell you: books you may think are universally beloved? Aren’t. There is some corner of social media that hates them. One of my favorite moments in one of my favorite movies, The Big Sick, has Ray Romano’s character utterly baffled by internet opinions: “This is why I don’t want to go online, ‘cause it’s never good. You go online, they hated Forrest Gump. Frickin best movie ever.” Even if you, in your social media bubble, have seen only positive posts about these books, trust me, if you scroll through the comments, you will inevitably see that someone has written: “oh, I’m so glad you liked it! I’ve heard such mixed things.” Whaaaat? you will think. Where? The internet. That’s where. Universally beloved books don’t exist. No one has ever written one. You will never write one. So you don’t have to try to!
Your opinion is just as valid as theirs. Roland Barthes argued that once a text is out in the world, the author, for all intents and purposes, is dead. That their opinion of the work they’ve created is no longer more valid than that of any reader. That’s a tough pill to swallow. After all, we are the final arbiters of right or wrong interpretations of our work. If a reader fundamentally misunderstands something about, say, our plot, then they are, objectively, wrong. But that doesn’t […]
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My second novel comes out next week and I’ve thought a lot about why sophomore novels are so notoriously debilitating to write (and launch) and I think I’ve figured it out. It’s because — excruciatingly long drumroll followed by anticlimactically sloppy cymbal crash — you now have two books. You had one thing and now there’s another thing. And by virtue of paradox, those two things don’t just co-exist; no, now they are compared. Which means the whole endeavor inevitably becomes, through no fault of your own or the publisher’s or even the books’, but just because of how numbers work: a deathmatch.
I’m not saying authors of multiple books don’t suffer, too. Three books? People have a favorite. Four books? People rank them. But it’s not the same as the two-book problem; it’s not binary. Binary can go eat a bee.
This anxiety is further exacerbated by the publishing truism that debut novels are shiny new things people want to talk about and second novels are… well… not. If the plot and themes of my second novel didn’t borrow heavily from my real life and career, I’m not sure anyone would want to talk about it. I didn’t consciously write the books in this order for this reason, but I am glad it happened this way. It means this new book has a shot. It might just do better than my first book. And I will consider that a win, count my lucky stars, and keep my head down while I write the next novel lest I anger the book gods by thinking any of this was in my control.
Because it wasn’t. It’s not.
Personally, I don’t naturally handle that well. But I’ve had to learn to.
Because of the years I spent in Hollywood, I don’t suffer from the delusion that I can control the outcome of things I don’t, in fact, control. You wrote a great screenplay. That’s literally the beginning and the end of what you can control. You think that means it’s going to get made? Similarly, I never felt I was competing with other actors. I could be jealous, sure, I could wonder why them? I could think it’s unfair that someone who hadn’t paid their dues got the shot of a lifetime or the dream agent or nominations, but what did that have to do with me? None of their circumstances applied to mine. We weren’t identical twins with identical training applying for the exact same middle management job that required a known set of skills. It’s Hollywood. There are no rules. How can you control a thing that doesn’t have rules?
In publishing, I think it’s this very lack of control that makes us grasp for reasons. Surely there was something that happened this time – or didn’t happen this time – that explains everything. And if there are reasons, then there are fixes. You could get a new agent, a new editor, hire a publicist next time around and, sure, those fixes might make a difference. But it won’t make a difference for this book, in this particular market, at this particular time. The cake has been baked. The only thing for it is to bring out the stand-mixer and make a […]
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Please welcome WU’s newest contributor–author of the best-selling novel My Oxford Year, screenwriter, award-winning audiobook narrator (of over 500 titles), and actor, Julia Whelan! She is also (stealing from her bio) “a Grammy-nominated audiobook director, a former writing tutor, a half-decent amateur baker, and a certified tea sommelier.”
Her forthcoming book, Thank You for Listening–about a former actress turned successful audiobook narrator who has lost sight of her dreams, and her journey of self-discovery, love, and acceptance when she agrees to narrate one last romance novel–releases in August, 2022.
You can learn more about Julia on her website, and by following her on Twitter and Instagram. Welcome, Julia!
I am one of the writers with a book coming out in 2022 that was written during 2020-21. You know, that notable era of peaceable calm in American – and global – history.
Now that I’m beginning another book, I’ve found myself trying to remember how I did it last time. Though it wasn’t all that long ago, the past two years have made time elastic. Months feel like days, and weeks feel like years, and I have somehow erased the pain of writing the last book from my memory. But surely the lessons I learned – if there, in fact, were any? – could be applied to this new one?
I’ve been retracing my steps and, in hindsight, there were two decisions that got the book written.
First, I drafted Thank You For Listening in 500 words per day. I know this because I tweeted about it:
“I, for one, have to get back into a routine. For now I’ve set a goal of 500 words a day. If you’d like to join me, I’ll post once a day and if/when you hit 500, heart it. Simple, clickable, low-impact accountability. Not aiming for King Lear here; I just need words on the page.”
Hilariously, when I went looking for this tweet, I began searching in May of 2020, but, because those early pandemic days felt like 347 years, it turns out I’d actually tweeted that in March. March! All of ten days into the madness, on March 23rd, this sweet summer child announced she was getting back to normal.
Bless her.
500 words a day. Often more, but never less. And it was not, as I had accurately predicted, King Lear. Not even close. But I got a proposal out of it, which we sold in October 2020, and I promised my editor a full draft by March 1, 2021. The whole while, I kept on with my 500 words.
500 words while attending to my day job as an audiobook narrator, recording other people’s books, and watching publishing timelines and deadlines collapse around me.
500 words while I recorded news articles and longform journalism for an app called Audm, which meant there was no unplugging, no way to not engage with the outside world.
500 words while the American experiment careened around a hairpin turn on two wheels and thousands of people were dying daily from a virus that thousands of other people didn’t “believe” existed.
500 words while people I loved moved, or lost jobs, or had babies, or broke up with other […]
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