Posts by Therese Anne Fowler
As I write this, I await my editor’s feedback on my new historical novel. If you want to know the truth, I’m nervous. Because, while the draft does hew closely to the outline and intentions we agreed on when I sold this book on proposal, and while I did think the draft was ready for her to assess, the waiting allows my imagination to cook up all sorts of ugly scenarios and serve them to me fresh each day. Nature abhors a vacuum, or something like that.
My nervous imagination calls me a talentless hack. It suggests I quit writing and put my creative energy into making pottery—which, it reminds me, I’ll never have to show to the public, and wouldn’t that be a nice change? There are a lot of great things about being a published novelist, but there’s also this: having one’s work publicly and perpetually reviewed and reviewable by industry, media, and ordinary readers feels similar to how I imagine it would feel to live naked in a brightly lit glass house while observers broadcast their critical assessments of my not-sculpted, middle-aged body to the world. And, as with reality, they also make critical assumptions about my intelligence, intentions, and character.
I know I should be well past these insecurities. The Voice of Good Sense says, “Dude, what’s the problem?” (It likes to call me dude; it’s retro that way.) It reminds me, “This will be your eighth published book. You’re a professional. You got this.” But here’s why confidence is easier declared than embraced: every time I write a new novel, I honestly don’t know how I’m going to do it.
Fool that some might say I am, I don’t (maybe even can’t) write the same type of book over and over again. To date, the tally is three women’s fiction, two historical fiction, two contemporary general fiction. Even within genres, my approaches vary greatly. Had I been gifted with the trait that lets some authors write, say, only mysteries, or only thrillers, or only romances, I would at least have my genre conventions as framework for every book. I might, over time, achieve something like a mastery of my form. But, no; every time, I have to figure out anew just what it is I’m trying to build, and then figure out how to go about building it. Add to this stress the fact that I’m in a new editorial relationship at a new-to-me publishing home, and the Voice of Good Sense just can’t quite drown out the Voice of Anxiety.
And yet, I’m excited about this new book (especially now that it’s finally written)! I’m excited to have tried a new form and (maybe) succeeded with it. And so, while I wait to know whether I’m more deluded in my excitement or in my anxiety, I’m going to take this opportunity to talk about the scaffolding I stood on to construct this latest book.
From the time I conceived the story, which is inspired by my own family’s history, I knew its scope was large—even “epic,” given its time setting (WW1’s chaotic aftermath in eastern Europe and the Russian Civil War) and its multiple geographical settings. I knew the story was of an arduous journey—an […]
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Here’s a question I put to myself while watching the unfolding drama about Olympic gymnast Jordan Chiles and her near-miss of, then award of, then loss of, and, now, appeal for reinstatement of, the bronze medal in floor exercise: Is there any occupation that is simultaneously as soul-crushing and soul-affirming as the process a writer goes through when getting a novel published?
To answer, first I considered athletes like Jordan Chiles: As most serious writers do, serious athletes train regularly and for a long time before they reach the top levels of their sport. Also, as with writers seeking agents, they have to vie for the best coaches. And whenever they compete in their sport, losses feel crushing, wins make them soar.
Then I thought of emergency room physicians: They, too, train for a long time, and vie to get into good schools, then for jobs in good hospitals. Whenever they lose a patient, they feel defeated, while saving a patient brings euphoria.
So, yes, a quick survey shows that there are some rough equivalencies here, and likely in other fields as well. But I think what writers endure is more emotionally extreme on an individual basis. Why? Because of the particular ways power is wielded in the publishing business, and by whom.
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My first seriously soul-crushing experience happened in 2006:
Early in the year, the novel that had gained me representation and made me believe that I did, in fact, have the chops to be a professional novelist, failed to sell. This was not my first go-round with rejection; throughout 2002, I’d suffered through scores of agent rejections for my first completed manuscript, and responded by enrolling in an MFA program from ’03-’05, where I’d then written as my thesis the novel that got me my agent.
While that novel was in the months-long failing-to-sell process, I wrote another novel, called Souvenir. It was commercial fiction, a hybrid of Jodi Picoult’s issue-driven stories with the emotional resonance of, say, a Nick Sparks love story. That one went on submission in the fall and quickly sold at auction: a two-book deal, North American rights, for $310,000, and a piling-on of something like 16 or 18 foreign rights sales, many of them at auction as well, the largest being €100,000 from a German publisher for just the one book.
The reason I mention the money is to help illustrate how momentous this felt—especially given that I had never published anything anywhere in my life. More than that, I’d come out of a long spell of divorce, single-parenthood, seven semesters of college earning my BA and MFA, was almost 40 years old, and had significant school loan debt. I hadn’t just sold a novel, I’d SOLD A NOVEL! A novel that, according to all of these different publishers, was pretty damn good.
The honeymoon was glorious, and lasted until late the next year, when review copies of the book had gone out to the trades. You know: Kirkus, Booklist, Publishers Weekly, and Library Journal. These were, and still mostly are, the first-line influencers, whose reviews shape the perception of a novel and guide store and library purchases in advance of publication.
One afternoon I must have self-Googled, though I don’t recall for sure—and there was […]
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If you attended the opening night of last fall’s UnCon, you heard me tell of the career struggles and dismay I experienced in the wake of my 2022 novel’s release, and how I dug my way out of that hole by embracing the theme Therese Walsh had announced for conference: All In. Today’s post revisits that struggle, along with what came next.
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Two years ago, for the second time in my 15-year, seven-novel writing career, an ineffective marketing plan led to anemic sales—which meant that I once again found myself at the bottom of a steep hill with a heavy rock to push if I was going to continue to have a fiction-writing career (where each advance, as well as retailer orders, are determined by the previous book’s sales). Did I want to keep writing novels and publishing them traditionally? I stood there looking up the hill. I nudged the rock to gauge its weight. I’d been writing fiction full-time since 2007. I knew exactly what it was going to take to push that rock up that hill again. I thought, Fuck it.
Yet, even as I lamented all the ways things hadn’t gone well and all the ways the industry is stupid, my brain just kept doing what it’s been doing since the days when Captain and Tennille ruled the radio stations: noticing things and people, wondering about them, fitting them into scenarios and then playing with those ideas as if they’re Rubik’s Cubes. IT…JUST…HAPPENS, even when I don’t necessarily want it to. So, what I needed was something to spark not the creativity for producing fiction, of which I have plenty, but rather the ambition to persevere despite the aggravations.
Perseverance is fueled by ambition, of one kind or another.
The spark eventually arrived in the form of a new story idea that, the more I explored it, felt like I’d found lightning in a bottle. I celebrated the return of those old familiar loves, Impatience and Excitement. If I could figure out how to transmute my idea into words on a page, I might have a rock worth pushing. I also recognized that if the book-to-be was going to get its best chance in the world, I needed to cancel my existing contract and find a publishing home that would be a better fit for my work. Doing this is not fun. But sometimes it’s necessary. I made a big commitment to clearing the decks and starting fresh. I went all in.
The universe sometimes seems to reward bold actions and difficult choices, and this was one of those times: soon after I made the big commitment, Amy Einhorn, an editor/publisher I’d admired from my earliest fiction-writing days, left Holt to restart the fiction line at Crown using a publishing model that promises careful attention to a small number of titles each year. It sounded like the perfect new home for me and the new book-to-be—an ambitious novel set in the chaotic wake of WW1 and inspired by my own family’s history. I wrote a detailed proposal and some sample pages, sent them to Amy (through my agent), we had a great conversation, and she offered me a contract, which I accepted. Then we lived happily […]
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Today’s post was inspired by a novelist friend of mine who has been having a hard time of it lately, and in their struggle to regain footing in the fiction market, suggested that I address the question of how to keep the faith in today’s challenging publishing environment. What follows are my thoughts and observations about what’s going on and why, and what can be done, and whether there’s any cause for hope. I welcome your thoughts and observations, too.
Times are tough these days for novelists who are not long-established perennial bestsellers, literary luminaries, or aren’t named (for example) Colleen Hoover, Bonnie Garmus, Rebecca Yarros, Taylor Jenkins Reid, Hannah Grace, or Ana Huang.
Fiction sales to consumers over the past three years have been robust in comparison to pre-pandemic years. Yet, across genres, published and aspiring authors alike are finding it especially difficult to get read, whether that be by editors or agents or the reading public. Authors who’ve been in the business for a while (sometimes for decades) can’t get new book deals. Agents are rejecting new authors at even higher rates than usual. What gives?
I should note that publishing always has a component of what I call “eight-year-olds chasing the soccer ball”—wherever the ball is going at any given time, the herd is running after it. Which is to say that when a given genre or sub-genre starts trending, a significant proportion of the publishing ecosystem, from writer to bookseller and all points between, wants in. In years past, this wasn’t especially problematic for those who exist outside of the trend(s); there was demand for and space for all kinds of books. So what’s changed?
Let’s look, first, at space. National media book coverage has shrunk to almost nothing, and where it exists, coverage has in many cases become so clotted with titles that it’s practically meaningless (take for example, EW’s recent list of “The 42 fall books we’re most excited to read”). Bookstore space is also tighter, due to rising rents, the proliferation of eBooks, and online book-buying. What’s more, many physical bookstores, wanting to capitalize on the biggest trending books, are prioritizing that handful of titles by placing even larger orders and creating big, obvious, exclusive displays. Publishing space—meaning the number of publishing imprints as well as the number of books being acquired—has contracted, too.
Now, demand. Demand is a wibbly concept. Seen one way, it’s demonstrated concretely by what readers are buying en mass. The books they’re buying, though, are less a reflection of what, independent of influence, they may desire than of what they see the most of (this is the principle behind advertising; create demand). By the same token, if we don’t know a book exists because we haven’t seen or heard about it wherever we spend our time, we aren’t going to seek it out—and this creates a perception that there was no demand for it. (This is the all-too-common Kiss of Death for authors’ careers.)
These days, the primary, most effective book-discovery resource is TikTok—where nearly 75% of users are younger than 45, and 44% are under 25. During the early phase of the pandemic, lightning struck Colleen Hoover there. Her blaze was astonishing. If I’m recalling correctly, I think that […]
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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 […]
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Therese (Walsh) here to re-introduce you to former WU contributor Therese Fowler, who–happily for us–is returning to WU as a regular contributor! Therese will also join us as a community session leader at this year’s Writer Unboxed UnConference. Welcome back, Therese!
Greetings, all. It’s been a minute (as they say) since I’ve posted at WU, and I’m pleased to be rejoining the community. I’m known here as “the other Therese,” a label I wear happily.
To frame today’s subject matter, let me first give you a little background about me: I’ve been making my living as a novelist since 2007 and am now seven books into a career that’s had some wonderful highs (three NYT bestsellers and a TV-series adaptation, to name a few) as well as some crushing lows (my third novel, Exposure, was DOA in hardcover and sold so poorly that the publisher decided not to give it a paperback release). I’ve written women’s fiction, biographical-historical fiction, and general fiction, first with Ballantine Books, then with St. Martin’s Press. All of which is to say that I’ve been swinging my pickaxe at the rocks for a long time, now.
Here’s something I’ll bet you already know: for most of us mortals, writing a novel is hard. It’s damn hard, and it usually takes a long time, even if we’re able to work on it daily for hours at a stretch. Months of work. Years, sometimes. Maybe we’ve had rejections or disappointments with previous efforts, which makes choosing and writing a new novel even more challenging. How best to do it? This issue has been on my mind for a lot, lately, and came up in a conversation I had with Therese Prima—i.e. Therese Walsh—this spring. We are both currently “between books” and were discussing what it takes to make it through the long and arduous journey from premise to (ideally) publication.
As many writers do, I find story ideas everywhere I go and am forever making notes for later reference. Interesting people I’ve seen someplace form up as interesting possible characters. Interesting situations I witness become intriguing plot possibilities. When I am in between books, I feel itchy, unsettled. I need to know what’s next for me. So I’m perpetually exploring new story prospects—even to the point, sometimes, of drafting ten or twenty thousand words derived from the initial spark of interest, hoping for flames. In the process, I evaluate the prospects and try to determine whether they seem to be the “right” next book for me. And because I make my entire living from my novels, “right” has to take into account factors like publisher expectations, reader expectations, and career trajectory, as well as being sufficiently intriguing to me.
The course of my career has seen me writing from what’s felt like divine inspiration as well as from “Oh, shit, my deadline is looming, better come up with something soon.” I am capable of writing a publishable book from a place of what seems to be a “logical right choice” and have done so, but time has taught me that my best successes each arose from a place of real passion. Actually, more than passion: Obsession.
If you’ve experienced this, you know the feeling: […]
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(Author’s note: initially I thought I’d write some type of instructional post, but in the process of planning and writing, it turned into more of an effort to inspire those of you who are in the early phase of your writing life—probably because I’m in the early phase of my most ambitious project to-date and can benefit from the sentiment myself. –TAF)
When I was an aspiring author working on my MFA from ’03 to ‘05, my goal was to become a working novelist, i.e. to make my living from my books. To that end, I began reading the trades—Publishers Weekly and Publishers Marketplace—so that in addition to learning the art and craft of fiction writing, I could learn the business of it as well.
In addition to the news about publishing houses and editors and agents and bookstores, I read deal reports announcing lucrative book and film/TV deals almost every day. And I was envious. I wanted to see my name there, see my book there. Whenever I visited a bookstore or library, I would find the shelf on which my book(s) would one day rest. I’d scan the authors’ names—Ford, Forster, Foster—and there, that spot, right next to Connie May and Karen Joy, that’s where I would live. When I watched films or TV shows adapted from novels, I’d imagine the thrill those novels’ authors must have experienced (and, possibly, the disappointment or anger when the job was done badly, but never mind that; in the dreamer stage, only good things result).
However: I also knew there would be none of the above for me unless I could write a saleable book. So I kept at it. I finished a draft of my thesis, showed it to my thesis director, listened to his feedback, and then rewrote the damn thing from scratch. Defended it successfully. Sent it out and acquired an agent—who sent it out, and sent it out, and sent it out, and…eventually we faced facts and I wrote another, different book. Which sold!
In late ’06 I saw my name and my book deal in the trades. In ’08, that book was on the store and library shelves I’d once stroked with intent and affection. There was some action on film/TV rights, but nothing came of it. Same thing with my next book, and the next. Selling an option was, for me, like trying to catch a minnow in a stream with my hands.
But my fourth and most recent novel, Z, was the charm. My first historical novel, first NYT best seller, first book to earn out its advance—it got the attention of a particular someone in the film industry (Christina Ricci) and, after a lot of behind the scenes effort and then many months of negotiations, we had a deal for a TV series. I finally had that minnow in my hands! I was, once more, one of those authors I’d used to read about. Or, nearly—
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I. Confidence
Consider the swaggering Ernest Hemingway. Even those who despise the man he was will credit him for introducing a vivid, muscular prose to the art of storytelling. You might hate the insulting misanthrope he could be but admire his keenly drawn characters, the emotional insights, the robust themes in his work. Here was a man with no shortage of confidence and a long list of accomplishments and a literary reputation that will live on well past our own lifetimes. This would seem to suggest that confidence = success. And perhaps great confidence = great success.
But most of us, no matter how expansive our egos, are not going to break new ground in the art of fiction. We are unlikely to win a Nobel Prize in Literature. Few if any of us will see our novels adopted into the English canon. Schoolwork essays relating to our stories won’t be available for purchase on the Internet.
Still, every one of us who puts a story on the page and then submits that story for publication is able to send it out it only because we believe we’re pretty good at this writing thing. We might even be better than other aspiring authors—which, when we get published, becomes a self-evident truth, given the stiff competition. The thinking goes like this: Someone published me, ergo I am a talented writer. It only stands to reason, right? The same kind of logic applies to the successful self-published author: Gobs of people are buying my book, ergo I am a talented writer.
From that first success, we labor anew for months or years over the next project, continually moving toward a goal of being read again, and the bigger our imagined audience, the more confidence we have that the product of our effort is going to be worthy of that audience’s time and attention. Big ambitions = big ego. I don’t say this pejoratively. Ego is not in itself bad.
[pullquote]Big ambitions = big ego. I don’t say this pejoratively. Ego is not in itself bad.[/pullquote]
II. Terror
When I began to draft this post, the proposal for what will be my fifth novel was on submission. My agent had been in love with it before I’d even written a word. When she read the first hundred pages, her response email began with “Wow!” Other early readers were similarly enthusiastic. Yet, the moment I turned in the final, polished materials—those hundred pages and a detailed outline for the rest—I was instantaneously certain that no one would love it, want it, publish it. On the day after my agent sent the materials to interested editors, I woke up feeling convinced that those editors who’d responded well to the pitch would have an opposite response to the materials, and now it was just a matter of waiting for my agent’s inevitable call explaining, gently, that this was one of those rare times she’d gotten it wrong. Just anxiety talking, you say? Maybe—but a version of this happened to me in early 2006. It began with excitement, then submission, then rejection, rejection, rejection… You really don’t ever know que sera.
But, all right, say your book is being published (traditionally). It stands to […]
Read MoreKim here to welcome and introduce WU’s latest contributor, Therese Anne Fowler. Therese is the author of the New York Times bestselller Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald and three other novels. She has a BA in sociology/cultural anthropology, an MFA in creative writing, and occasionally teaches writing workshops at North Carolina State University. Therese lives in Raleigh, NC with her partner and their (mostly) agreeable cats.
In early 2008, Therese Walsh emailed me with an interview request. She was a regular visitor to my blog (as I was to WU) and knew my debut novel was about to launch. With characteristic generosity, she wanted to help me get the word out, and we ended up producing a two-part interview (that you can read here and here). It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship that has seen us through the promise and perils of this publishing life—four books for me, two for her, in seven years so far.
We were on retreat together in the North Carolina mountains last September when “the other Therese,” as she first referred to herself, mentioned there was an opening at WU for a new contributor. Might I be interested? I said, “Absolutely! Count me in.” The novel I was trying to configure during the retreat would surely be well underway by the time my first post came due in March.
Alas. I’m no closer to having a completed manuscript today than I was last fall—or, in fact, the previous fall. Which just goes to show that you can think you know something, can believe you know it, can foresee a path ahead, and even then can be mistaken. This is true for a lot of things, but nowhere more so than in publishing.
Note that in the above paragraphs I’m saying “publishing” as opposed to “writing.” I referred to the perils of the publishing life, the mistaken beliefs I had about publishing. It’s an important distinction. Writing has its own very different perils and paths.
In re-reading the 2008 interview, I had two prevailing reactions: I thought I sounded pretty competent, which made me happy. I certainly don’t always feel so competent. And I thought Wow, was I ever naïve.
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