Baffled: why isn't my novel on the bestseller list?

This article from The Baffler (link at the bottom) is way too long to even quote here, but it has some interesting ideas in it.

To a point.

I was irritated at the way she delivered a long-winded dissertation about how society makes everything our own individual fault and how narcissism/self-absorption is the only defense (paving the way for "remedy-of-the-week" packaged solutions, available online for a price), THEN she abruptly switched directions and wrote in a rather smug way about how practicing yoga/radical self-care has completely revolutionized her life, lifting her neatly out of the quagmire she has just written about.

She seems to be praising, practicing and extolling the very thing she was dissing only a minute ago.

It's the same feeling I get - and how I wish I could just stop reading these things - about articles I see on Facebook that talk about "The Miserable, Lonely, Traumatic Life of a Writer" - only to find out, near the end of the article, that the writer is either J. K. Rowling, Stephen King or a clone thereof. Meaning: yes, it was hell at first, but now I'm in the chips big-time, so I thought I'd throw you dogs a crumb or two of my deathless wisdom so YOU can drool over my unreachable success.

Hey! I was once like you, lonely, unsuccessful, stigmatized, and probably fat. I mean it! Then I joined another species and began to accumulate sales/literary awards like a snowball rolling down a hill.

I always feel the tide turning in these pieces - I know it's coming. It happens at just past the 3/4 mark. They're about to abandon us. Any time. Their compassion for us or whatever-it-is is about to evaporate. A Grand Canyon of exclusivity is about to open up between them and us. So much for their ability to "identify" with us literary peons who, if we finish our novel at all, will never find an agent; or who, if we find an agent, will never find a publisher; or who, if we find a publisher, will never find a publicist; and who, if we never find a publicist, will somehow, and mysteriously, never find ourselves at the top of the New York Times Bestseller List.

Aim at 100 rejections, the articles say. Or a thousand! The implication is that if you persevere and persevere, if you never give up, never give up, never give up the ship, and (of course!) never take any of it personally, one day success will inevitably come. It simply has to, after all that perseverence, doesn't it? It's the law of physics or something.

But the awful truth (and I realize this is a totally taboo and unpopular thing to say) is that it might not: in fact, by the law of averages, it likely won't.  With every rejection you receive, the odds of success become slimmer, not fatter. It means more and more and more editors are telling you that they just don't like your stuff, increasing the odds that it is basically unpublishable and you should just go home and do yoga.

Saying this is the ultimate taboo because it makes you a party pooper. But I had a favorite line from a Moxy Fruvous song (until I found out, to my horror, that Jian Ghomeshi was in Moxy Fruvous):

"Everyone's a novelist, and everyone can sing
But no one talks when the TV's on."

This was long before the ubiquity of self-publishing, not to mention all those talent shows on TV. The only point I am trying to make - and please don't throw rocks at me - is that for every person who performs on America's Got Talent and the like, hundreds or even thousands of people audition and are rejected. Each and every one of those people believe they have what it takes to win, to be a star.

They don't.

Does that mean you shouldn't try? Don't take advice from me, please - Ms. Three Failed Novels! At least I finished my novels, sent them out a billion times, found a publisher, and saw my books (all three of them) on store shelves. This filled me with satisfaction and pride. But that was that. All the other shit didn't happen. No New York Times. No glass slipper.  I did get absolutely glowing reviews for the first one, it was considered worthy of major awards and compared to Alice Munro, but nobody bought it. My fingertips just brushed the brass ring, but I wasn't able to grab the prize.

Why? Hell if I know. And it happened two more times after that.

So am I bitter? Don't know. A realist? Definitely. "It's always so hard to leave Paris," a friend of mine recently wrote on Facebook. Myself, I find it hard not to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Oh, I know that collecting 100 rejections is an exercise in self-toughening that might serve you if you were ever in a plane crash in Antarctica. But they might just lead to 101, or 102. There is no guarantee you'll have a sudden, remarkable breakthrough that will cause millions of people to buy your book.

And believe me, if they don't BUY it, you've pretty much failed. Publishers have to go home and buy groceries too, and if they keep taking a bath on your books, they may be a little bit reluctant to take a bath on the next book, and the next. Everyone has to survive. I am not blaming publishers, at all. In fact, I'm not blaming anyone. But unless you are in the tiny fraction of a percentage that makes a go of it, these are the facts as I see them.

As for self-publishing, well. . . I won't get into that, except to say "ditto, and double".

Is this gloomy? Or realistic?

You decide. But you will note that I have not stopped writing.

http://thebaffler.com/blog/laurie-penny-self-care

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

Harold, this isn't your fault

Every once in a while (not often, since I've been over this ground at least a million times) I find a new picture of Harold that I like. Here it's in two versions, though even the larger one has been cropped out of another one that had huge orange letters reading BRITISH PATHE at the bottom. Probably this means I'm not supposed to use it, but fuck them.

Why is it my enthusiasm is so flat today? I am sick of being chipper about the book. I have had no reviews, NONE, except for one sort-of review in a online magazine from Winnipeg that doesn't strike me as very literary. It was written by a 30-year-old standup comedian who, by his own admission (in a published article in the Globe and Mail, no less) admits he's unambitious, unemployed, a general layabout, and feels the world owes him a living. He also said he was only writing the piece for the $250 cheque.

I don't  know what happened, because my first two novels got nearly universally glowing reviews, even in publications in the U. S. which had never been sent a copy. The Calgary and Edmonton papers interviewed me, I got a full-page spread in the Montreal Gazette (complete with full-color author photo!), and the Vancouver Sun said I should be a contender for the Leacock Award. Both my hometown papers interviewed me at length and put out big spreads. The second book was favorably compared in the Globe and Mail to the work of Nobel-winner Alice Munro and Oprah pick Anne-Marie MacDonald.

My first publisher phoned me breathlessly to say, "Margaret, it's a miracle. We've never had so many reviews for a novel, even in places we didn't send copies to, and they're all positive. We can't believe it!" A miracle being a supernatural event not caused by human beings. Then she went on to say that my sales were worse than any book they had ever published before.

What happened? You tell me. Maybe I'm just too old and don't know what I am  doing. An act of love has become an act of poorly-executed, even disastrous commerce. 

I don't know how to invite myself to writers' events and seem to be getting no help from anyone. It seems as if you have to know some sort of bizarre secret handshake, like a Freemason. This did not happen before. They asked me. But because it got no reviews, my book does not seem to exist. It does not exist because it got no reviews. And so on. Begging is undignified and destroys my morale. Not having my emails answered is worse, giving me the impression that I don't exist, or, at least, I don't exist in their minds (or they would rather I didn't exist). 

I've sent out multiple copies of the novel to people whom I thought might be interested. I might as well have dropped them into the fucking Grand Canyon. The waste of money, the hundreds of wasted dollars isn't the half of it: it's the waste of hope, the wasted years of creative effort, out the window. If a story doesn't get told, it ain't a story. Isn't that true?

I no longer care about what will happen because no one will see this anyway. They never do. I am tired of the whole goddamn Facebook popularity contest and how many "likes" I get, all the simpering profile pictures with hair gently streaming in the artificial wind, and the phony modesty, feeling so "humbled" by winning a major award, followed by the usual "oohs" and "ahhhs" of the sycophantic Greek chorus who secretly want to kill them with envy. Fuck it. 

One day well over a year ago I got a phone call from Rich Correll in L. A. saying he was very interested in the book. This was more than a year after I sent some excerpts to an address I wasn't sure was valid. Rich Correll was like a second son to Harold Lloyd, almost one of the family, and was his filmographer and is in every documentary about him.

When we talked, he told me he thought a feature film about Harold's life was long overdue. My God, this was what I had been thinking about from the start, and now a major Hollywood director agreed with me! Could it be he was seeing potential in my work? An adaptation? A SOMETHING?

I wasn't just excited, I was walking on the ceiling! How could this BE? How could Rich Correll be interested in my work? Well, it can't be, folks, because he stopped answering my emails some time ago, and like an idiot I don't know why. In fact, to this day I don't even know if he got his complimentary copy because I haven't heard from him. Like an even worse idiot, I phoned him and left a message last week. He didn't call me back. It was last-ditch and I feel vaguely ashamed that I did it, but Jesus, Rich Correll! I wrote a whole post on him and about how I felt he might be the key to blowing this novel out of the backwater it's stuck in. I just never get the message, do I? Do I? My stubbornness, my refusal to give up is pathological, even poisonous. Certainly it is not a sign of health, as it nets me exactly nothing.

Losing interest is just fine. I am not referring to losing interest. I am referring to having a blank intractible silence open up where the interest used to be, so that I automatically fill it in with what might be the truth, in a hundred different poisonous ways.

I need information to get me out of this. "Your book sucks, it's offensive, it's inaccurate, I hate how you portrayed Harold, (or, worst of all) it bored the piss out of me and I hate you for writing it" would be better than this. One three-word email: "I've lost interest." ANYTHING would be better than this. For, like my book, now I don't exist either, or I am not deemed worthy of a reply. 

I can't deal with it. Help me here. But no. I know it already, I know what no answer means.

Now I will tell you something really stupid, or at least now I know it's stupid. I used to worry this book might bother someone in the Lloyd family, who were badly burned by an insensitive and poorly-written thing Richard Schickel wrote to fulfill a contractual obligation. So I let them know I was writing a novel about him (though I never quite got past the front desk). I didn't do it to avoid a lawsuit, which wouldn't happen anyway. I didn't do it to avoid "stepping on anyone's toes". I didn't do it so I "wouldn't get in trouble". I did it because I love Harold Lloyd and I care what his family thinks about any book written about him. 

But as with everything else, I'm not on the radar. Oh. Did somebody say something? Sorry, no, I must be mistaken.

Why is it I am ALWAYS dumped on my head? What is it I'm doing so wrong? Is the book really weak, or even a piece of shit? Once in a while I think, well, what else could it be? But I surely didn't think that at the time. God, at the time it was nothing short of a rebirth. I didn't think I'd ever write again, and I was so disabled it was unlikely I'd even want to try.

Oh, I realize I shouldn't even be writing this, as it's taboo to say what you really think, but I am at the point that the loneliness and isolation are killing me and I wonder if I care any more who (if anyone) sees this. I wanted this so badly for so long. I am being punished by the gods, it seems. And if you think this is bad, you should see the paragraphs I just deleted. 

I read a piece in the Globe and Mail by Russell Smith who said writers should not blame themselves for a huge shift in the global economy. Maybe. But some authors, as others point out ceaselessly, are doing just fine, which is I guess supposed to make me feel better.

I just get tired, is all, of being entertaining, which nets me exactly twelve readers anyway, sometimes. Or not. What a futile enterprise this all is! And it has gone on for seven years, from the first moment the idea hit me like a brick on the head. Harold Lloyd - I would write about Harold Lloyd!

I will not do this to myself ever again, no matter how badly I want to, as it's obviously too late for Harold after just over half a year. My tiny window of opportunity has already slammed shut, and guess who is responsible. 

I loved him, I did this for love, I still love him, and the silence (no doubt mysteriously caused by me) is bloody deafening. And by the way, I am NOT saying, "Oh, I wrote such a crappy book that everyone is ignoring it". I still think it's the best thing I have written or am likely to write, and it far surpasses the first two in complexity of story line and characters. Though I also realize that there may be no one else on earth who thinks so.

We're supposed to embrace failure. Right. I have embraced it three times, and all it has done is kick me in the head. All I know how to do is be a writer, but no one told me there was an imperative to be a "successful" writer (i. e move copies). It is becoming increasingly obvious that it was not meant to be. About all I can do to deal with this feeling is try to walk away from it and do something else. Sometimes, it almost works.

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

Steal this book (no, I mean it!)

I will tell you what I'd like to see.

Go to the library to read The Glass Character. Don't pay. Borrow it from a friend. Kindle it because it's cheaper and can't be pulped (or at least I don't think so, though no doubt it can be terminated somehow). I prefer the idea of Kindle now because Kindle never seems to be outrageously discounted - it's worth something to them, I guess. Though I hold my nose to say this, you can buy the paper version very, very cheap on Amazon now - I can do nothing to change this. I would prefer you buy it at the sane price offered by Thistledown Press or even the retail stores, who can't afford to sell a new book for four dollars a pop. I'd say, don't support these capitalist pigs. On the other hand, you can get it way cheap, four for the price of one, and give three away to friends. Or resell them: they ARE yours, after all, aren't they? And that means more people will read it. It's all I have right now. 

It amazes me how often this is seen as pure ego. You mean she wants someone to READ this? Isn't the process of writing its own reward? If you cooked a great dinner and no one ate it and it sat there and rotted, ask yourself if preparing it was "enough". If a concert pianist, after 20 years of training, had to play in an empty hall that he had to pay to rent, well. . . you get the idea. I hope.  Not only that - the passion and excitement I felt around this era and Harold Lloyd himself led me to the false conclusion that my enthusiasm might catch fire somewhere. Wrong.

If nothing else, my link tells people how to get their hands on my backlist, and tells them there IS a backlist, that it didn't disappear altogether. If this story gets into people's hands, I don't care whether there is money attached to it. There isn't going to be, anyway. The only review I had, after waiting half a year, was an evisceration by a standup comic from Winnipeg, and I wasn't supposed to say anything: in fact, I was advised to thank him! The whole system is so bizarre and sick, no one else would put up with it, but there are always a few who are fat and happy and thriving and very quick to tell you what you are doing to bring this on yourself. 

So go ahead, order it from Amazon. I can't stop Amazon, and I can't stop you. It means you get the book and hardly have to pay anything. In an economic sense, it's a fantastic deal. You, the consumer, the potential reader, will benefit. So will Amazon, but what's it to them? Used marbles would garner them more profit. They told me the writer still makes the same royalties, though I don't see how that could happen. So why aren't I happy? Everybody seems to be really puzzled. Hey, it's on sale now! More people will buy it! Isn't that a GOOD thing? Who cares about prices anyway?

Meantime, my copy of The Movies, my cinematic primer from when I was a kid, just arrived at the door. I never thought I'd see it again, and in fact for many years I thought I had dreamed it, like a lot of those old TV shows buried in the grainy vaults of the brain.

Go on and have a good week. No, go on.

(News flash: today I noticed that Amazon has just knocked another 20 cents off the price of The Glass Character! Go buy it, no, I mean you really SHOULD buy it now, because at these bargain basement prices, they'll really go fast.)

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

         It took me years to write, will you take a look. . .

I'll have another. . . disappointment

Sept. 20, 2012

Diary of some writer or other, somebody I don't even know but have seen in the mirror a few times

 

 

(I thought this was worth quoting, even if it's totally irrelevant to anyone else but me.)

It’s as if I can’t think too closely about my life because if I do, I see the emptiness. The failure. The promise not fulfilled. I know I am not the only writer facing this, or at least I hope so. I found a blog post yesterday that said due to financial necessity, literary fiction  has been largely handed back to the literary presses, making it harder for writers because the literary presses must be inundated with stuff. I would imagine at least 80% of it is totally unpublishable, so if you don’t grab them immediately you’re lost.

 

 

 

 

One agent I tried to contact would only read the first 3 pages of my novel.  Her response was, "It just didn't seem to be going anywhere." It killed me, but it told me something about the reality of publishing now.  My hopes for my third novel are in ruins. None of it worked, nobody was interested, and I was crushed because I was *sure* this one would work, bigger than the last 2 combined, maybe even really big.

 

I feel like a total fool for contacting these people, but what could I do? Everyone constantly tells me to “make contacts”, then when I try to, I look stupid and/or desperate. I don’t know how to do it effectively. I’m told all sorts of conflicting things: be outlandish, wear an orange shirt with suspenders and a rainbow wig, and carry one of those honking Harpo Marx things; DON’T be outlandish, wear a three-piece suit and a Smart Phone balanced on your head. Make yourself indispensible, provide certain services, discreetly.  Probably that last one would work best.

 

 

 

 

It could be I am perceived as too old and over the hill, as publishers now want sexy, smoky dust-jacket photos, young women with long hair and a sultry, pouty, “I don’t care if my book sells or not” expression. (I've seen numerous articles about this, but if *I* say it, everyone is horrified I would even think such an awful thing. Oops, there goes my last chance: no one wants to publish anyone spreading such lies just because she's bitter, and too old.) And if you're a graduate of the UBC Creative Writing program, you're practically a shoo-in. I was also told - the identity of this person is forever locked in the vault of my most useful information - that if you're a woman of colour, it really doesn't matter what you write, so long as you write.

 

The problem is, the more queries and manuscripts you send out and have rejected, the worse you look. After a while you’ve used up all your chances, you're perceived as a pest and a failure and a wanna-be, and - then what? 

 

 

 

 

So why am I even thinking of this? To keep up my hope, which you're supposed to do, I suppose.  But I get ahead of myself. I dream too much, and none of it comes true. Then my heart breaks, over and over and over again. Jesus, can I have just *one* more book out, even another failure? Can I do this, am I allowed?  I can’t write another one, it’s not in me to have a big stack of unpublished work that will never see the light of day because all the presses in Canada now see my work and think, "Oh, no, not HER again." (Get out the form rejection letters.) To come crawling like that, and have the door slammed in my face for the 1000^th time - it’s embarrassing, they will be embarrassed for me.

 

It's not as if I've never done this. If anyone calls me "aspiring", I will choke them to death. I won't quote the reviews for my first two novels, except to say about 90% of them were positive, some of them glowing. Some of them even popped up in places which had never received a review copy, such as the U. S. My second novel won a New York City Book Festival award. Big, fat, hairy deal: this meant NOTHING when I tried to get some attention for my Harold Lloyd novel, The Glass Character.

 

 

 

 

Part of the reason might be the fact that no one in Canada has ever heard of Harold Lloyd. There are thousands of small publishers in the U. S. , but that's just the trouble: thousands. . . where do I start? Taking random stabs is a very bad idea because with that many options, you can go on stabbing for years and years without getting anywhere, meanwhile spending vast amounts of time, money, and hope.

 

Not that I haven't tried a few stunts outside the box. I tried to contact Rich Correll, who was like a second son to Harold Lloyd and one of this closest friends. Never got a response.  I sent emails to Harold Lloyd Entertainment, whose CEO is Suzanne Lloyd, Harold's granddaughter (whom Harold raised like a daughter). No dice, only a polite reply. Mostly my attempts were brushed off like dandruff or ignored altogether.

 

I will never get over my bitter disappointment that my talent was never used. You choke on it if you don’t find a way to use it, if you just stick it in a drawer and never look at it again. I used to believe in God, but now I see that it was something like a horse race where you pick the lucky numbers, then stand beside the race-track pumping your fists up and down and shouting, “Go, go, go!” Just like the brief, flukey, heartbreaking career of I’ll Have Another. Yet another "also-ran".

 

But I WILL have another, another disappointment, another heart-crush, because it seems the fates have decreed I haven’t had enough of them. I will never get over this because I do not WANT to get over my life’s work, what I was destined to do from the beginning!

 

 

 

Confession: I killed a panda (with scissors)

So we all know what pandas look like. Roly-poly, black-masked, adorable,  with their woolly black-and-white contrasted coat. I wouldn't get in a cage with one, but I can admire their cuddlyness from afar.

So Caitlin said to me not long ago:

Grandma.

Yes, Caitlin.

Could you knit me something?

Sure, what would you like?

Could you knit me a panda?

 

A panda? I had so many panda patterns I didn't know where to start. Most of them were plain lousy, or even frightening.

This poor guy looks as if he was run over by a truck.

But hel-lo-o-o-o-o-o:  what was this? Just about the cutest knitted panda pattern I've ever seen! And he looked easy to make. The pattern came from World of Knitted Toys by Kath Dalmeny,  a book I've used for several successful projects, such as many of the characters in my Ugly Duckling story  which I gave Erica and Lauren for their birthdays.

I showed her the pattern. "I want it! I want it!" Caitlin said, so I told her, alrighty then, I'll knit it for you.

And then.

Well, it got weird.

Then weirder.

This thing didn't look like a panda at all: more like an anteater who was a victim of Monty Python's Owl Stretching Time.

By the time I finished the body, which was knitted in one piece, I knew I was in trouble. It looked like a fat bowling pin crossed with a pig. The head had a strange point on it, and was twice the size of the body. The eye-patches were about 2" too long.

Where did I go wrong???

Trying to sew the legs on was worse: they were long, skinny and tubular, and the animal wouldn't stand up. It splayed on the floor like a disabled anteater.

I  stuffed the body, tried and tried to sculpt it into some kind of shape that wasn't totally grotesque. It didn't work. I tried to open it up so I could unravel it and salvage the wool, which was very expensive.

No dice. It wouldn't happen. I took scissors to the thing, hacking the head off so I could at least have the stuffing back.  My panda lay before me, a mass of unravelled wool and destroyed morale.

I felt like crap. Obviously I had done something very wrong, but what?

Then this morning, something happened. . .

I found an example of the same (finished) panda on a web site called Random Meanderings. This entry is for some time in 2009.

OK then. . . it's supposed to look like  a pig on stilts!

Yes. It has a definite piglet quality, with elongated limbs, as if someone had fed it growth hormone.

And it doesn't look like it would stand up, either, with those floppy legs. For the sake of comparison, let's take another look at the original, then Piggy:

So it wasn't my fault. Moreover, it looks to me as if Random Meanderings followed the pattern exactly. It wasn't bad knitting, at all. In fact it looked very neatly done, which is not such an easy thing with a larger stuffy.

But this is what she got: a "what-is-it?", which I simply could not give to Caitlin.

The only thing I could think of was that I used a yarn substitution. These patterns all call for something called DK, which is not available in Canada and which no one has even heard of in yarn shops (which don't exist any more anyway - you have to dive into sale bins at Walmart).  I used a thinner version of "worsted weight", which makes up 90% of the yarn you can get here. It varies from almost threadlike to so massively thick, it should be labelled "super bulky".

(Blogger's note. No, that's not true. The funny-looking panda was knitted with the correct yarn and STILL came out looking like an English Bull Terrier with anteater genes.)

Whew. These two could be cousins. Is that genetically possible?  Anyway, my poor trashed  anteater-panda didn't look nearly as good as this one because it had weird bumps and bulges and a lot of very visible seams. It didn't look so much like a handsome English Bull Terrior as Eeyore from Winnie-the-Pooh.

 

Let me tell you my best and worst traits:

(a) I never give up.

(b) I never give up.

I just can't. I have to try again, try to win, because failure opens up a desperate plug-hole in the bottom of my spirit, causing all my will to live to drain away.

In my life, I've had about 90% failure, so you can imagine how I feel when something like this happens.

We live in an age where we can order a pattern for a few dollars, and get it via email within the hour. I decided to gamble on Debi Birkin because I think her patterns are brilliant. I was even able to manage Piecrust the Tortoise (below), though it still doesn't look like the original picture.

I made a turtle family which I gave my daughter-in-law for her birthday. The pattern was challenging enough to be interesting, but never once felt the wrath of my scissors or the ripping-out of fibrefill guts.

So now, probably stupidly, I will essay to waste still more money on still more black-and-white wool to try to make Ping Pong Panda. If he turns out at all, he'll be more of a cuddly teddy than a stand-up panda (who never stood up anyway).  But hey - if all else fails, I'll still have that tiny blue sweater. 

(Coda: I found this entry on a site called Stream of Consciousness, dated sometime in 2005. Makes me feel even better, because this panda is a lot closer to the original photo and the knitter STILL doesn't like the result.)

Monday, January 24, 2005

I received The World of Knitted Toys for Christmas. I decided to try a panda bear. It knitted up quickly, but finishing took forever. For me, finishing stuff is not nearly as fun as knitting. Oh well, I'm not terribly pleased with the end product. The corners are too square. And his legs seem awfully long. Maybe next time I'll try something with fewer parts.

Here's the funny looking Panda: