Publishers are supportive of the artistic side of writers, as well, wanting their books to be critically well received, but mostly they want them to sell lots
and lots of copies. Publishing is, after all, a business.
THE WORD AND
THE VOID
IN THE WINTER of 1993, an extraordinary opportunity came knocking at my door. My publisher, Del Rey Books, offered me a lot of money to write a new fantasy series, one not connected to either Shannara or Magic Kingdom. I could write on any subject (so long as it was fantasy related) and break the series up into separate, stand-alone books or keep them as a trilogy. Because I was in the middle of fulfilling obligations for books on another contract, I didn’t have to write these new books until I had finished the old, which would give me several years to think about what I wanted to do.
Let me stop here and explain something to you about the way publishers view writers. Publishers view writers as investments. They spend time, money, and effort promoting their books, hoping in the end for a decent return. They are supportive of the artistic side of writers, as well, wanting their books to be critically well received, but mostly they want them to sell lots and lots of copies. Publishing is, after all, a business.
Mostly, it takes more than one book to “break a writer out” (a favorite publishing term for increasing sales dramatically) so that the books the publisher has been nurturing and supporting for all these years finally begin to pay off. When one book sells, usually the others start to do better, as well, and the publisher can anticipate the possibility of recouping its outlay and seeing a profit—so long as it can persuade the writer to remain in-house and not decide to take his newfound success elsewhere. When a writer produces a book that makes the jump from obscurity to midlist or midlist to best-seller, what the publisher wants the writer to do is to repeat the success. The writer can do this best, in the publisher’s experience, by writing another book just like the last one.
You see where I am going with this.
When the writer decides to do something different, maybe only a little different, maybe altogether different, the publisher is usually not overjoyed. After all, it took time and money to break the writer out and build an audience for his or her work, and it was done, almost always, with a particular kind of book or series. Only a few contemporary fiction writers regularly write a different kind of book each time out, and even then they tend to stick with the same themes and types of characters. Yes, a handful of writers are so successful that no matter what they write, they are going to sell a lot of books. Tom Clancy, Stephen King, John Grisham, Danielle Steel, and Michael Crichton come to mind. They might not sell the same numbers as they would if they were writing what they usually write, but they will do well enough that the publisher can afford to indulge them. (Indeed, given the amount of money their books earn, a publisher had better indulge them.) But there aren’t many of these, and all the rest of us made our names by writing a particular kind of book in a definable category of fiction.
So when one of us who isn’t King, Steel, Grisham, et al., decides to move away from the type of fiction that the publisher has spent all this time and money promoting, a concerted effort is made by all those concerned with the business end to get the writer to reconsider. This is not to say they will flat out tell the writer not to do it. That would be like waving a red flag in front of a bull—especially where you are talking about a writer’s art. You don’t hear anyone trying to tell painters what to paint or composers what to compose, do you? It’s no different with writers. Nevertheless, those with a vested interest in the writer will try to make clear the possible consequences of abandoning established ground for new country.
In all fairness, the publisher has a valid point. Attempts by established authors with established audiences to try a new kind of fiction usually don’t succeed. What happens is that a sizable chunk of the audience drops away to wait for the next book because they read the writer for the kind of book that won them over in the first place, not this new stuff. Even front-rank authors have to accept that not writing the sort of book they are known for is likely to decrease their sales for at least one outing.
The reason for this digression on how publishers view authors is to demonstrate that Del Rey was showing a certain amount of confidence by agreeing to allow me to write anything I wanted, even if the agreement stipulated it must be fantasy. Fantasy, after all, is a big tent. A lot of strange animals tend to wander inside.
I am not sure to this day what Del Rey expected me to come up with, but I do know that I was quite certain from day one what it was that I wanted to write. When the offer reached me I already had something very specific in mind and it wasn’t like anything I had ever done before. I wanted to write a dark, contemporary fantasy, one set in our world that would address current social issues and incorporate a framework of magic that would fit seamlessly with what we know to be true about ourselves. I wanted to set the story in a fictional town in the Midwest that would be modeled after the town I grew up in. I wanted to talk about growing up—about how when we are children we believe in a sort of magic, the kind that lets us accept for a short time that anything is possible. I wanted the main characters to be a fourteen-year-old girl who could do magic and was struggling with her identity and a raft of family secrets, and a drifter who had been sent to find her because she might be the key to either triggering or aborting the Apocalypse.
It would be the kind of story that I knew would never work in either a Shannara or Magic Kingdom setting.
It would also be exactly the kind of story that would violate the rule I have just described about sticking to what your readers and the publisher expect of you.
I knew this going in. I also knew the probable consequences. I had experienced them once already when I did Magic Kingdom for Sale some ten years earlier. Even then, my audience overwhelmingly preferred Shannara books—epic fantasies in the Tolkien tradition. I had seduced my readers with those books, and they had come to expect, rightly, that this was the kind of book I would deliver each time out. When I wrote Magic Kingdom for Sale, they were accepting, but not altogether pleased. They liked the story well enough, but the most frequent comment I heard was, When are you going to write another Shannara? When, instead of doing that, I wrote two more Magic Kingdom books, it did not endear me. The consequences were these: fewer sales by as much as two-thirds, publisher and reader dissatisfaction in the change, and author disappointment that the books hadn’t caught on.
Eventually, they did. They found an audience, and they gained acceptance from both the publisher and the readers. Now I am regularly asked, When are you going to write another Magic Kingdom? But it took some time and effort to get there.
And it did not involve the kind of money that this new series did, which I knew would color everything.
But here’s the whole point of this chapter. Sometimes, when you are a professional writer, when you have successfully published and no longer have to worry about breaking down doors, you still have to make the occasional hard choice, and one of the hardest is choosing between writing what compels you and writing what makes money. The choice isn’t always clear, and the one doesn’t necessarily exclude the other, but in many cases you have a pretty good idea of which is which. I didn’t understand this when I wrote Magic Kingdom for Sale, because I had never done anything but Shannara books and was still naÏve enough to think my audience would follow me anywhere. But by the time I got to the book that would become Running with the Demon, I knew better.
Still, writing is an art, and artistic expression requires that the artist follow his heart. This was true to some extent with Magic Kingdom for Sale, but in the case of Running with the Demon, it was everything. I was passionate about this story, so much so that I told myself it didn’t matter if it didn’t sell the way everyone hoped it would. Not that I believed for a minute that this would happen, because I am as capable of self-delusion as the next guy. In fact, I thought this book would do even better than the Shannara books. I was so invested in it, so enamored of it, that I was convinced everyone else would be, too—even though I should have known better.
Well, you can guess the rest. I wrote what I believed then and now to be a really wonderful book—maybe the best book I have ever written. Hopes were high, fanfare was great, promotion was strong, and the book went right onto the New York Times Best-Seller List on the very first week of publication.
And then it promptly sank like a stone. Oh, it did pretty well, don’t get me wrong. It just didn’t do nearly as well as everyone, myself included, had hoped. It sold about as well as a Magic Kingdom book, but nowhere near as well as a Shannara. It got on all the best-seller lists, but it made only a cameo appearance. It was well placed in all bookselling venues, but only for about a month before everyone could see the handwriting on the wall.
As my contract provided, I wrote two more books in what would become The Word and The Void series, and neither of these books did any better than the first. But slowly an audience began to build, just as it had with Magic Kingdom. Readers quit wondering when I was going to do another Shannara book and started asking about the new series. Now I am as likely as not to hear from readers, When will you do another Word and Void?
Still, commercially, they disappointed.
So what is the lesson I took away from all this? It has to do with learning to live with unrealized expectations. Sometimes art and commerce collide in a way that diminishes one or the other. A writer has to realize and accept this truth. You can always write the book you choose, but you can’t always make the readers love it the same way you do. I wish that weren’t so, because I always think readers should love my books in equal measure. But they don’t, and no writer can control that. No more so than a writer can control the sales a book generates. Readers will make the choices that please them, and that determines who sells and how much. When I hear someone gripe about how this or that writer sells so many books and they shouldn’t because they really aren’t very good writers, I want to say—Hey, the readers are the ones who decide! It’s a democracy!
A writer can revel in unexpected successes, but must learn to live with crushed dreams, as well. If you are a professional, you accept both results with equanimity and move on. Another chance for either lies just down the road.
For me, maybe that chance will come in the form of another shot at The Word and The Void. I would like to do three more books in that series. I think the audience is out there waiting for them. I think the new books will be wonderful and will sell like hotcakes. The front money won’t be the same, but that’s a trade-off I’m willing to accept. I’ll earn it back on sales.
On the other hand, those first three books will earn out their advances about the time I turn seventy-five.
Hmmm. Maybe I’ll wait and talk to the publisher about it then.