The Publishing Industry Gambled on Me... and Lost

Eight years ago, when I sold two books to an imprint of a Big Five, I was on top of the world. I was thirty-one and eight weeks pregnant, a recent graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. My agent sent out my books on a Thursday, and by Monday, I was fielding calls from seven editors. The books sold at auction. I had spent my twenties working various underpaid jobs while writing every free moment I had, and I felt like I was finally at the precipice of my long career as an author. I didn’t realize that what felt like the opening salvo would be more of a death knell after my two novels had greatly underperformed, turning me radioactive.

In her recent essay for The Walrus, “The Publishing Industry Has a Gambling Problem,” Tajja Isen discussed how the Big Five publishers chew up and spit out debut authors, giving them huge advances in the hope that they break out, though only 20 to 30 percent of books earn out their advances at all. I am a poster child for this phenomenon, I guess. A month before my coming-of-age immigrant debut novel, Oksana, Behave! came out from a Random House imprint, the imprint folded and I was “orphaned,” as my agent scrambled to find me a new editor within Random House.

My new editor later passed me to her assistant, who was recently promoted to full editor, and while they did what they could, it was an arranged marriage. I had lost my “champion,” a legendary editor who discovered Gary Shteyngart and who made me feel like I would follow in his footsteps. I had the sense that my books were not “doing well” due to a general lack of buzz or an appearance on those “The 60 Most Anticipated Books of the Next 60 Minutes” type lists, but any emails I sent my “team” were met with an insistence that everything was great. It wouldn’t take long to be validated for my fears.

Inconveniently and perhaps not entirely coincidentally, I had a mental breakdown before my debut came out, courtesy of the debilitating postpartum insomnia that nearly killed me when my daughter was born. I managed to write a follow up to Oksana, Behave! about, yes, Oksana struggling to sleep while her book came out to lukewarm reception, which I knew was my best work by far, and my agent agreed. However, just after my second novel came out to even less fanfare than the first, my editor rejected my new book. This novel feels too personal and too autobiographical, she told me. Given the track, our best chance at giving new life to the next book would be to set it up as a departure from the previous, whereas this feels like a doubling-down.

I don’t think the world will suffer without my postpartum insomnia novel or the latest book I’ve written. However, I do think the world will suffer from not reading the third or fourth novels of so many authors who aren’t given a chance to keep going.

The logic didn’t compute. While, like most writers, I had doubt about the quality of my own work, my “too autobiographical” writing did get me into Iowa and was the reason I was courted by seven editors, leading me to think I was doing everything right. And now, I was being told hey, try something else. I had held up my end of the bargain. I wrote, and rewrote, the best books I could. Being punished for my sales made about as much sense as it would for me to blame my publicist for the fact that my first novel had a meandering plot. Eventually I convinced myself that if I had seven editors fighting for Oksana the first time around, that at least some of them would want her again. But the book was repeatedly turned down, often because of “the track,” by the very editors who fought so hard for me the first time, and many others, too. I felt like I went from being the belle of the ball to standing alone at the bar after last call, drunk and disoriented. Where did everybody go?

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To be clear: I am beyond grateful that I got to publish those books and recognize that my “team” was just following the company line. I don’t expect anyone to feel sorry for me and my bloated advance. I made out like a bandit, getting paid for selling a projected 160,000 copies of my books instead of, well, just over 10,000. This money allowed me to start a life for my family, and furthermore, those books got me a highly-coveted dream job as a professor. With tenure, I don’t actually have to publish a book again, and plenty of people in my position don’t. But I do want to. And I can bet my life on the fact that my newer books are much better than the ones I published. I don’t think the world will suffer without my postpartum insomnia novel (though I’m pretty sure no novel has yet focused on this topic, and it’s hilarious!) or the latest book I’ve written. However, I do think the world will suffer from not reading the third or fourth novels of so many authors who aren’t given a chance to keep going.

Even my author friends whose debuts “did well” are struggling when their second novels get a tiny fraction of the support of their first. And that’s a shame. Because as we keep living, reading, writing, mourning, seeing the world change, maybe adding spouses or kids to the mix, we are more primed to make complex art—as evidenced by many not-first novels including Moby Dick, The Remains of the Day, The Things They Carried, Atonement, Beloved, and Geek Love. Take Jhumpa Lahiri’s masterful latest New Yorker story, “Jubilee” and stand it against any story in her debut Interpreter of Maladies and try to tell me that decades of living and writing does nothing for your craft. We aren’t aging athletes or former beauty queens, despite what my flirty author photo might suggest. Our brains are our business. Let us cook.

I may not ever make more money on a book than I will for writing this essay, and that’s okay.

It would have been great if when my books went to auction, someone stopped and asked why a writer with only an Iowa MFA and 300 Twitter followers to her name would be expected to sell over 160,000 copies of her absurd comic novels about Ukrainian-American immigrants whose closest “comp” is the niche Soviet dissident writer Sergei Dovlatov. Instead, they gambled on me—one of many gambles they took that year, no doubt—and lost. Maybe that money would have been better spent on multiple debuts, or on supporting a variety of authors at more advanced stages of their careers.

Isen’s essay offers no solution for overcoming a bad track record, because there isn’t one. She says switching genres doesn’t really give you a fresh start and even jokes about faking your own death or writing under a pen name. This past winter, Kate Dwyer’s Esquire essay, “Why Are Debut Novels Failing to Launch?” offered the consolation that, well, most debuts are doomed to fail despite unboxing videos and external publicists, but you can at least build community on Instagram. This seemed like a poor concession when I first read it, but I do believe the only way out is to focus on a much smaller but more devoted audience, like how I feel about teaching the offbeat creative writing majors at my Deep South university.

I suspect most literary fiction will eventually go the way of poetry and creative nonfiction, to the indie and university presses. I understand Isen’s point about people feeling like the Big Five rejects like me are crowding out the “true” indie or experimental writers, but the differences seem to be eroding. In these days of “book content” and algorithms and celebrity book clubs instead of book reviews guiding taste, I’m finding that even my literary-minded friends are drifting away from books that sound like mine. I was recently hanging out with three literature professors who gushed about their favorite dragon sex books for a good twenty minutes while I chugged my wine, imagining my weirdo books that feature more references to Lenin than sex disintegrating before my eyes.

As my hero Sergei Dovlatov, who himself published a book about not being able to publish under a repressive Soviet regime, once wrote, “Our life is but a grain of sand in the indifferent ocean of infinity.” These days, I feel most at peace in my literary life when I’m discovering new writers by reading submissions for my university’s literary journal, writing and submitting stories of my own, in which I happily “double down” and have a higher acceptance rate than ever, and introducing my students to my favorite writers, whether they are long dead or visiting authors. I may not ever make more money on a book than I will for writing this essay, and that’s okay. Still, I’d like to believe that I’m only just getting started.