Storytellersunplugged

Or:

I Didn’t Know I Was a Dark Fantasy Series Paperback Writer Until They Told Me
Or:

In The End You Actually Do Have To Write the Damn Thing

By Justine Musk

1

My agent called me up the other day.

“I just got off the phone with Jessica,” she said. Jessica is my editor.

“You know how Roc was waiting for the pre-sale numbers to see whether or not they’d want another book?”

For the folk out there who might not be so hip to such complicated publishing jargon, I give a translation of the above: “…You know how your publisher Roc, which is a subdivision of New American Library, which is a subdivision of Penguin, was waiting to see how many copies the national buyers for the ruling giants of Borders and Barnes & Noble, who can make or break an author’s career depending on how they choose to stock their stores, would order of your new book, LORD OF BONES, which comes out July 1 and is a sequel to your first book BLOODANGEL, which came out three years ago, which is an interminably long time between paperback genre novels and had Roc concerned that you had lost some or most or all your readership, before they decided whether or not they’d even be interested in making an offer for the sequel to the sequel, which is tentatively titled SOULSTICE, or maybe SOULJACKER (which, by the way, is also the title of a really cool album by the Eels), which you were thinking you wanted to write?”

“Yes.”

“The numbers are in, and Roc made an offer.”

She told me the details and I got off the phone a bit amazed. Not at the offer itself – which is humble yet satisfying and, more importantly, keeps me in the game – but just the fact that there was one. I thought first I’d have to submit an outline, a couple of chapters, something. But not even that proved necessary.

They didn’t need a synopsis, or even a title. They just needed some numbers.

2

So this is how it works now. First you have to get published — then you have to stay published — and if the first is just as hard as it ever was, the second is harder. Sales numbers, in this age of immaculate computer memory, determine almost everything. (Unless you’re writing Literary, in which case prizes and reviews sometimes stand in for sales, in the hope that they will lead to sales.) I could bitch and complain about it, or make somewhat intelligent (or not so intelligent) commentary about how unfair the whole thing is – and it is – but a) that kind of thinking doesn’t get me anywhere except curled in a fetal position in the corner and b) since I write popular fiction, and have always wanted to write popular fiction (albeit of a serious, even literary, nature, if that isn’t a contradiction in terms, which I never in my life thought it was), sales actually do serve as a reflection (if distorted and imperfect) of whether I’m reaching people through my storytelling or leaving them scratching their heads saying WTF?… or, worse, totally indifferent.

And the publishing world that I entered when I sold my first book five or so years ago (my! time flies when you’re having fun/banging your head against the computer screen), turns out to be very different from the publishing world I studied from afar when I was a teenager who knew with every nerve-ending of her being that she wanted to be a novelist. First of all, in that publishing world of my lost and dreamy youth, horror and dark fantasy were hardly on the margins. They took front and center in big, fat novels with elaborate shiny cut-out holographic covers.

But then the genre went and died. As in: the publishers drove it into the ground with so many tacky Stephen King rip-offs that people stopped buying them. When I wrote my first published novel, modeled after those Big Fat Books I grew up on – intricate epic plot, subplots, multiple perspectives, distinctive voice, etc. – there didn’t seem to be any place for it on the bookshelves at all. Then Buffy happened, and Laurell K Hamilton, and Kelley Armstrong, and dark fantasy reared its head again, except this time it had a whole different look and tone. There was a wish-fulfillment element to it and an association with female-driven genres that got the books tagged as ‘romance’ or ‘paranormal romance’. This had not exactly happened with THE STAND.

This is neither good nor bad; it just is what it is. The market changes and changes again. And maybe a whole new branch of mainstream dark fantasy will grow or is growing out of what my editor calls the ‘post-Buffy novels’, and more of the excellent writers from the small presses will find their way into the mass-market, maybe even into hardcover, maybe even into major deals.

What can’t be denied, though, is all these series paperbacks.

3

I read series paperbacks when I was a kid, but they were mostly of the Sweet Valley High variety (again, the romance thing). Or , when I was slightly older, they featured detectives chasing down gruesome serial killers (I now give a moment of homage to John Sandford’s awesome Prey series, still going strong after all these years, Lucas Davenport one of the coolest series heroes EVER). They weren’t something I associated with horror or dark fantasy – you got sequels, sometimes, and the occasional trilogy, but not an entire freaking series.

But when you merge the romance element and the mystery/noir element with the whole undead, fey, or fanged-and-furry thing, it seems inevitable that this is what you get.
Not to mention, the bookstore chains love them. They are the bread-and-butter of bookstore sales, those cheap paperbacks with involved series backlists and rabid genre readerships. Which means the publishers are motivated to keep producing them so as long as the chains keep ordering them so long as people keep buying them.

When my agent first offered me representation, she asked, “Can you see this book as a series?” I said “Yes” because I was flattered at the mere possibility that I would be called upon to write such a thing, but that wasn’t entirely true. My first book was meant to be a Big Fat Epic Novel – which it didn’t quite manage to be, since another difference between the publishing worlds of my teen and thirtysomething years is a demand for a much more streamlined length. So when it came time to write book number 2, I wanted to write one, I was eager and committed to write one…I just had no idea what the hell it should be.
If you’re one of the readers somewhat familiar with my blog and previous essays, you know that my other, secret, personal title for LORD OF BONES is “This Damn Book That Kicked My Stupid Ass”. I kept saying (and writing) about how I would never put myself in this position again. Where I had to write against a deadline. Especially a deadline that demanded an entire novel to be written in so short a time. Never again. Or as the line in King Lear goes: Never, never, never, never, never! The wine of my creative genius needed time to mellow and flower into its truest, smoothest, multilayered-est self….which so often seems to happen while going to clubs or shopping for shoes or watching SO YOU THINK YOU CAN DANCE. Who am I to mess with the ways of the muses?

My editor and agent asked, “So do you think you could deliver a manuscript in six months?”

“Sure,” I said cheerily.

So as I set out to write SOULSTICE – or whatever it ends up being called – I like to think this experience will be different because I am older and wiser now. Theoretically.
I have a better place to work (two places, actually). Plus, the end of LORD OF BONES (or, as a certain young friend likes to call it, LORD OF THE BONERS), left me eager to begin SOULSTICE; how the tracks lead so directly from one book into the next. And perhaps, beyond that, into the next.

Because it turns out that my approach to this whole idea of writing a series or being a ‘series author’ – which by no means precludes the other kinds of novels I want and mean to write – is to think of the series itself as one motherfracker of a Big Fat Book, told in serial, each novel rounding off in a satisfying way yet also offering just a touch of cliffhanger, a shadow of question that will need to be urgently answered. And since I’m fascinated with apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic novels, why not give myself the chance to take my characters through the end of one world and the beginning of another?
So that’s why I want to keep telling this story. Because I think it’s cool.

And also for a much more pragmatic reason: to keep myself in print long enough to establish what one might call an actual career at this stuff.

4

Because here’s the thing. In this age of such relentless number-crunching, books don’t get the shelf life they used to get. There’s no time for a slow build-up: either the book performs once it’s out of the gate (in fact, my deal for the sequel to the sequel to BLOODANGEL offers a ‘bonus’ if the book ships above a certain number of copies within the first few months of its release date) or it gets dumped from the stores altogether and the author gets tagged with a stigma that’s hard to overcome. The problem is that the best way to sell a book – the only way, for most books that don’t get the loving PR attention of the publishers – is reader word-of-mouth. And word-of-mouth, if it’s going to happen, takes a while to get up to speed. People not only have to buy the book, they have to actually read the damn thing, and recommend it to people, who also have to read it, and then have to… etc. And by the time enough people have read it to maybe make something start to happen, the book is out of stores and maybe even out of print.

If you begin life as a hardcover that does well enough to transition into paperback, word-of-mouth can have enough time to build into a surprise bestseller (witness the current runaway success of the paperback edition of Elizabeth Gilbert’s EAT, PRAY, LOVE). Which is why the paperback edition can be like a writer’s second chance.

But if you begin life as a mass-market genre paperback, then your second chance can only come in the form of….your next mass-market genre paperback. In the same series. Which might intrigue some people enough to go back to the first novel that they didn’t pick up the first time. (Case in point: although I saw it in the Fantasy section for years, I didn’t pick up George R.R. Martin’s ‘Game of Thrones’ until the fourth book in his excellent epic series hit the bookstores with a surprise placing at the very top of the New York Times bestseller list. The power of word-of-mouth, busily spreading through the reading community while publishers lavished money and attention on other, more ‘obvious’ future bestsellers.) And if they like you enough, they might even go check out some other, completely unrelated novel you wrote and sold to a completely different publisher (coughUNINVITEDcough). In other words, to give your old books a chance at new life, you have to keep on producing new books good enough to win new readers.

5

So I guess my point– assuming, of course, that there has been a point at all, which is kind of a lot to assume when you really think about it — is something about how the only way I can hope to stay in the game as a published writer is by, well…writing. And in this Internet age of one-on-one authenticity and connection, even marketing yourself as a writer becomes another form of writing. And I’m not talking about the Internet equivalent of flyers pinned beneath your windshield wipers – mass-mailed emails or Facebook notes or whatever — flogging your book to complete strangers who are much too jaded and bombarded in this age of overabundance to do anything with your message except ignore it. I’m talking about putting yourself out in the ether and genuinely showing people who you are as a writer, drawing them into your voice, your style, so that they might then seek you out on their own. It’s a long, slow road….but then, so is publishing.

So I marvel at how the mysteries of being a publishing writer always seem, in the end, to boil off to something so simple as just sitting yourself down and, uh, writing. Day in, day out, as the years roll by. If there really is a secret about how to get ahead in this quote-unquote industry, that’s probably the closest thing to it. After all, not even Oprah or Stephen King can blurb your book to millions if it doesn’t even exist in the first place. You have to be in it to win it, as they say. And sometimes just managing to stay in a game so brutal as this one can be a huge win on its own.