I sacrificed my twenties on the altar of a book deal. Some thoughts on trying to do it young (pt. 1)

That's a dramatic title, but in fairness: it was a dramatic process.

Two weeks ago, I had my five-year college reunion, which was fabulous. We were the COVID year: class of 2020 graduates who last saw each other in March before scattering. Lack of closure is something I write about frequently; I say my debut novel is about corrupted nostalgia, and I often define Southern Gothic—its genre—as being at its core about the fear of change while it’s unfolding.¹

After graduation, I went all in on the novel that will be my debut, which I’d started in 2017 during my summers spent as a counselor at an all-girls camp in Western North Carolina. Each year I returned, I’d chip away at the manuscript—then titled Black Bear, now titled Mountain Sounds.

Over eight years, I’ve rewritten my book eight times, which is just as brutal as it sounds, so each version has been wildly different. Each draft has a certain patina or lens that reflects my evolution and influences at the time. It’s a living document in that way, and will be until [redacted.]

Anyway, I constantly meet people who tell me they want to write a book. Or I’m introduced to others as “Grace is writing a book,” which I immediately correct. I wrote a book. I wrote it in 2018, actually. (It’s also not the first book I’ve written.)

I’m so supportive of others’ desire to finish a manuscript, and I’m happy to share my many concrete resources for getting through a draft, but being on the other side and in the thick of the traditional publishing process is a different crucible. (Self-published authors may deal with a different, equally tricky set of problems, which is why I specify traditional above. I’m only speaking to my experience here.)

Re: “I want to do that,” there’s some stat like writing a book is cited in the top five of bucket list items or goals (which is why you’ll see a lot of retirees chipping away at memoir) but less than 3% of people will actually finish doing it. And that doesn’t even include making it good!

The stats drop off lower and lower through the rings of getting a literary agent and getting traditionally published, although finally typing THE END is the level at which I’ll finally commiserate versus just offering standardized resources and well wishes. Otherwise, I’ll assume you’re just not there yet.

Why was I so desperate to write and publish a book young?

I’m 27 now, which no longer counts as the “wow, prolific teen wrote a book!” status I desperately wanted to achieve throughout my childhood.

The book process post-2020 stretched longer than I wanted to for several reasons, some outside of my control: actual survival and rent payment, COVID circumstances, agents’ inboxes multiplying, leaving my first literary agency and re-querying, shifting genres because of that, horrible perfectionism at times, etc.

Obviously I can’t speak from the other side of a book launch (yet), but in the last months, the costs of my emphasis on this dream are increasingly clear and have not gone away. They’ve only intensified. You can do it, but it will probably come with significant sacrifices across most areas of life and there are many aspiring authors I adore who will simply not make them when the time comes. I hope you don’t have to make the same choices I did.

Which leads me to examining my motivations for chasing this in the first place.

First, the emotional side: I have a childhood prodigy complex because I joke I was grandfathered into publishing—

I recently stumbled onto an article written about me in high school almost ten years ago entitled This Plant High School grad is already more focused on her career than you. Better (and worse), I was Most Likely to Succeed (and there’s no good way to say that without sounding like a brat.) I knew more then than now because there are so many shapes my ambition could take that I often drown in the idea of a “right choice” and the paralysis of potentially making the wrong one. In hindsight, I will find plenty of ways I could have optimized my circumstances if only I’d been aware.

I’ve gotten better about comforting myself with “I did the best I could with the information I had at the time” but I still have colossal expectations for myself.

Knowing the author / book blog through-line goes a long way. My certainty never wavers even when the path does. In testing grit, I score (supposedly) in the 99th percentile, but part of being able to stick with something involves the luck of knowing what it is you need to commit to. So I am lucky, even when my ability to stick to the long game makes me more worried that I’m somehow forgetting something crucial to building stability, significance, etc.

from the review of Angela Duckworth’s Grit on my blog

I like to joke (in a way that’s really not a joke) that I hate birthdays because every year I age is a year away from being a child prodigy. I actually wrote this into my book through a side character who’s the genius I long to be. (Cue also a teenage obsession with Sherlock retellings á la A Study in Charlotte by Brittany Cavallaro, or some addictive spy/profiler series like Gallagher Girls by Ally Carter or The Naturals by Jennifer Lynn Barnes.)

I’ve rewritten this line since this screenshot, but the sentiment stands.

Logically, I know success comes at any age, and I’m friends with older journalists and authors who are debuting or enjoying much-deserved recognition. I don’t hold them to that standard whatsoever so it’s completely hypocritical of me to do it to myself. My view of myself is braided together with that awe of encountering publishing young. If I knew it young, surely that means I can do it young too?

(Similarly, however, I often run into the opposite problem: writers assuming that age correlates to quality and young writers must not be seasoned or practiced enough too. And time elapsed while working on the book does not inherently correlate to quality, which I’m very aware of when I say “it took eight years” and get jealous of books that took the author a single year from draft to deal. Taking longer actually doesn’t mean mine is any better. Sometimes stretching it out can make it even worse!)

Some of this impossible terror leaks into my own book in themes of the fleeting vs. permanent tension and the paradox that forms Mountain Sounds’s core conflict: the impossibility of holding onto something that was only ever meant to be temporary. In this case, that something is the brief admiration afforded to me by age. What if I miss my window of being able to use that as momentum?²

With David Levithan, the Editorial Director at Scholastic, at around age 16. Most recently, you can recognize his fingerprint in editing Suzanne Collins’s masterful Sunrise on the Reaping.

I have photos of me at BookExpo America as a baby blogger (age 14), where I fearlessly networked before I thought of it as networking.³ My photos with Jenny Han (author of The Summer I Turned Pretty) and David Levithan are grainy as hell. I have ARCs of Throne of Glass, Caraval, and other major hits. In recent years, I’ve seen titles that used to be backlist claw their way up the online ecosystem and bestseller lists, like Girl in Pieces and Love and Gelato.

In many ways, I beat myself up in irrational ways for not being completely psychic about being an early adopter of the way the industry’s changed so that I might have the following (and therefore funding) to do more of what I love without so much stress. I was around, after all, but you can’t do everything all at once—which gets me to my point about sacrificing. Nora Roberts has an excellent quote about the impossibility of juggling writing and life, being that the key is knowing that some of the balls in the air you have are plastic and some are glass.

While querying and in [redacted book process], my connections didn’t help me as much as you’d expect beyond a few choice referrals for which I’m very grateful. When I was in college, I went on a career visit to all the publishing houses in NYC to talk to editors, scouts, marketing teams, and other industry professionals to decide what I wanted to do. Then, everyone I knew basically sat me down to say “Because we love you, don’t work here. Do something else.”⁴

The pay is low, the turnover is high, and that strain’s only intensified in recent years of multiplied job responsibilities without compensation, private equity’s involvement in the houses, etc. Everyone is doing the combined job of five other people, which trickles down to slowness (and occasionally sloppiness, although not their fault) in acquisitions—and by extension, the ability of literary agencies to sign new clients. Authors experience lower advances and have less support, which is then used as evidence not to pick up more books: self-fulfilling prophecy. We need to be giving a lot more support arts, media, and those who shape it—but that’s a discussion for another time.

Publishing changes, and the way we consume book recommendations does too, but I’ve been here through all the changes since the blog era. BookTube, bookstagram, BookTok, Substack. I’ll be here long after we go to the next thing, in various capacities. I’ve been a bookseller, I’ve put together book clubs, I’m passionate about kids’ literacy rates and book bans, I’ve interned (briefly) for a long-gone indie press and a very successful literary agent. I’ve gotten to put together book lists for magazines I adore. And now…the author side.

Second, the publishing industry logic: the necessity of a backlist + in-house marketing

Right now, publishing absolutely throws its weight behind the top 1% of acquisitions. It seems to many that it’s more possible to command attention as a debut with a blank slate—but, in contradiction, like many debuts don’t see meaningful support. (Algorithms reward sales history, so the same backlist titles seem to command the lists.) For that reason, there’s also more pressure to break through.

The lower advances may sink lower; the higher advances may go higher, with an emphasis on indie-to-trad acquisitions that was frankly not there a few years ago. A lot of the publishing industry is built on self-fulfilling prophecy, and plenty of that is branding, positioning, and perceived star power of the chosen, divine few. Kate Dwyer wrote an excellent article for Esquire in 2024 titled “Why Are Debut Novels Failing to Launch?” that frequently scares me to death. More and more debuts have to invest personally into their own PR and marketing, spending tens of thousands of dollars on agencies and plans—or at least the time carved out to try to DIY to the same effect. And it is hard. Recently, I’ve heard in-person events don’t move the needle much for debuts, but social media is obviously saturated too. What’s a gal to do?

Even on Substack this week, industry people have been buzzing over articles on publishing’s gambling problem, how retailers stock books, the POV of indie booksellers, the tracklist stigma, etc. If those all sound like nonsense to you, consider yourself lucky. There’s a lot of challenge ahead, and the earlier I try to tackle it, the less afraid I’ll be.

(I also frequently say that God gave me a passion for book publishing instead of private equity and I’ve been suffering ever since.)

The elephant in the room: sometimes publishers also seem more willing to prop up someone young!

You can tell it was the ‘10s because of the combat boots and statement necklace. Since the event was technically for 18+, I wore only blazers so I would “look adult.”

I figure my next real goal is to ensure that in-house teams buy into any possible angles that could help them want to push me. If they have a catalog of many titles, I want them to want to push mine. Of course, the manuscript is the first step here, so hopefully they fall deeply in love with the story itself.

But I do hope my certainty at such a young age, as expressed online and within publishing, counts as social proof of how long I’ve cared about this industry, how willing I am to weather the storms, how stubborn I am about succeeding, etc. I have been here for almost 15 years already, and I will be here for another 15. I never see myself stopping my blog; I just hope I eventually secure the stability that allows me to devote more to it. I’m scary in my tunnel vision and willingness to stick it out, which is why people tend to call me “intense”—which is also a major emotional point in my book.

Unfortunately, I know I’m a long game person. Hopefully that pays off here, but I’m also hoping I get the home-run first thing with this first book because publishing success largely seems exponential: perk of being in a word-of-mouth industry. Most consumers pick up a book because they recognize it; it’s only publishing insiders who care about the specific drama or complexity of a certain popular author or title. Best Sellers Sell Because They’re Bestsellers. Positive feedback loop.

Authors used to break out with later books. But nowadays, that’s gotten harder.

Whereas some authors broke out on their later books (see Jenna Satterthwaite using Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow as an example, as I read Gabrielle Zevin as a young teenager when she only wrote “quiet books”), most authors don’t even get the chance to build a backlist nowadays because publishers so heavily rely on previous sales as a way to determine acquisitions by the same author.

Firstly, certain demographics of authors have an easier time. Remember #PublishingPaidMe? While not always true, a baseline assumption is that the proportion of marketing and sales help from a traditional publisher often correlates to the size of an advance. Authors reasonably believe that a book given a significant ($250-499K) to major ($500K+) advance is likely to get more attention at first because they need to recoup their investment. This isn’t the fault of individual workers in those houses, either. If a publicist is juggling 40+ titles in a catalog, they’re under pressure to give their limited time and energy (on a path to burnout already) to those big fish. They’re trying to survive too. If you don’t have the slam-dunk “probably” of a huuuge deal, you want to convince them you’re worth fighting for when they’re also exhausted.

Pros and cons to this, of course. A midlist title or “quieter” second-time author might have an even harder time getting a fair shot. When analyzing who’s hit the bestseller lists or trying to decide what are “good” numbers to aim for in my own (ugh) attempt to build my platform before debuting, it’s helpful data for my own process. Sure, so-and-so has 30K followers on a certain platform, but they likely had a lot of buy-in from the publisher’s sales and marketing teams, and most authors won’t know what they’ll receive until closer to publication. They’ll see if they’re getting actively pitched or whether it takes aggressive follow-ups to even get on someone’s radar. (Again, this is just the way it goes. And there are massive advances that get zero push and smaller ones that get hefty resources; it’s just sometimes unknown until it’s too late.) Rich authors can buy external teams. Your agency also matters, because your agent can pressure the publishers to stick to their promises—or negotiate certain aspects of your contract to advantage there.

For me, this is all relevant because it makes the advice older, established authors give that “sometimes you don’t break out until your second or third book” ring slightly hollow to me. The market is different, and you’re less likely to get that second or third deal. The advice feels aged out, just like querying tips from ten years ago do.

And that’s not bitter to say, just a fact of the matter. Publishing’s not the same landscape as it was 10-15 years ago with a healthy midlist! I assume anyone who debuts nowadays will not have the privilege of hoping for a later book, although there’s always the potential the next manuscript is such a zinger that everyone bids frantically in a 7-figure auction. All my prayers go towards being positioned as a lead title, which would hopefully generate its own momentum.

I use V.E. Schwab’s The Near Witch as an example all the time; I loved it as a “quiet” debut (so atmospheric) but it went out of print until she enjoyed massive commercial success with Gallant, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, and more; now, she tops the chart and The Near Witch was re-released. Even using Jenny Han as an example, she coolly commands an audience of 3.4M on Instagram alone (although The Summer I Turned Pretty was always popular and we passed it around in middle school, it wasn’t mentioned in every single brand social post then.)

Third, my financial + stability logic: the idea that investment compounds

I do think, regardless of the problems with tracklist and getting later deals, that more years spent and books published in the market means there’s more chance for your backlist to become frontlist. If a book pops off, your backlist starts to sell! See The Last Letter by Rebecca Yarros after the success of Fourth Wing.

Of course, you care about craft and improvement, but a first book out matters too. (I would not have pursued a book deal if I were not absolutely confident in my craft level first.) I did tell one of my agents—which shocked her a little—that I hope Mountain Sounds is the worst book I ever publish, because I hope my writing only gets better. But I also want a National Book Award for that book, so. A girl can dream.⁵

My logic is that the earlier I get in with work I’m proud of and deem worthwhile, the more likely that any success later is exponential. In the same way that I say my book writing process was very similar to a startup mentality, this hope aligns with the same practical philosophies as investing. Time compounds. Hopefully, it compounds this.⁶

And if all this sounds like a drag, the main reason to stick with this dream is fundamentally so based in love and need. I want to do more of this and be funded for it. Hopefully the earlier I get in, I can get lucky and spend even more time—and a bigger proportion of my life—doing what I love.⁷

Plus, of course, if you have a life dream—you want to do it.

At that same college reunion I mentioned, I was talking to a friend (okay, fine, ex) I hadn’t spoken to in six years and I told him how I’d always appreciated he was such an active, decisive person. Those are the type of people I get along best with. When people hear what I’m doing, when they say I’ve always wanted to write a book, I’m a kind enough person to (actually) feel supportive, but stifle the flashes of frustration and annoyance when I then see them…wasting time, waffling, coming up with excuses that have absolutely nothing to do with the genuine situational struggles that keep many from pursuing what they care about.

When I express a hatred for excuses, I am not speaking about the latter category of artists, writers, and other people not yet “doing it.” If you are perfectly capable—but you won’t do it—then I’m sorry for not viewing you in the same way I view peers and others around me who are fighting for it or have fought for it. There are plenty of us, some with the end result and some without the luck or craft level yet. If you don’t feel the hunger, you’re not in that grouping, and that’s okay.

I’m not being dramatic when I say I absolutely killed myself to make this happen. I hit a rock bottom repeatedly. I scraped up everything I had. I lost my grip on aspects of my life and self I deeply cared about, which maybe speaks to my obsessive tunnel vision in a bad way, but also makes me proud and convinced I will make my life meaningful. I spoke to my therapist about that repeatedly last year: about how I never thought going after this book deal would eventually chip into characteristics I thought of as “me,” but I was so worn down and starving that it actually started to have such a significant cost.

It’s not the hours or exhaustion or sacrifices themselves that make up the cost of the book deal; it’s actually the bits of yourself you never even thought you’d lose. That you never even thought it was possible to lose! And the real win happens when it’s taken and taken, but you’ve seen it through anyway. If you’ve done this process and that sensation isn’t familiar to you, I’m happy that it didn’t look like this for you. For me, that feeling ran in parallel to the conflicts of my protagonist, so the further I got into that cycle, the stronger her narrative got too.

That endless The Giving Tree-esque sacrifice also led to the epigraph of my debut novel, which is a sentiment that both encapsulates the book and my experience with it. From Jane Hirshfield’s The Weighing:

The world asks of us
only the strength we have and we give it.
Then it asks more, and we give it.

I also want to talk about what this looked like doing it in my twenties, and how it shaped the landscape of everything from finances to dating to career choices to moving. I have a lot of analysis about how my debut novel has affected every element of my personhood. (Healthy detachment? Never!) This one’s more focused on the why behind the hunger.

And then, of course, a lovely thought. I wanted to get a book deal young because it’s my life dream. Hedonistic treadmill aside: after this, I will come up with another.

And the book blog will endure through all of it.

1. I just listened to a fantastic podcast on the Southern Gothic genre, and I’m not a podcast person.

2. By the way, I’m still running my book blog with the same hunger almost 15 years later. I still say the 7th grade stat all the time simply because I’m so damn proud of it, and also use it as evidence that we need to be a whole lot better about supporting kids and not being condescending towards a teenager who knows. And kidlit, but that’s a separate conversation.

3. God, I wish I’d kept my subscriber list when switching platforms in high school. I had roughly 7,000 subscribers on my email list before about age 15, and nowadays, that would benefit me greatly—and likely would have multiplied. But alas: I have to rebuild that stability, and I’m grateful for updated blog designs, time away from my screens, and years in which I indulged other aspects of my life. In adulthood, I struggle more with the feeling that visibility on the Internet takes something from me.

4. Most people I know who have stuck it out in the industry are in adjacent companies: book clubs, tech companies, and the like. For the record, journalism can be similar; right now, I’m looking for editorial-related roles, and I’m tired of fighting so hard just to not be compensated fairly.

5. And I do want all the fancy, secure, larger-than-life growth to scheme for after: #1 NYT bestseller, film & TV adaptation that builds out an entire ecosystem, phenomenal critical reception, a National Book Award for either category, a Printz if it’s a YA book. I want to be one of the chosen and one of the best, and I make no apologies for aiming for it.

6. (Of course, if you’re on the older side or haven’t had your luck yet—time also compounds skill. But if you’re confident in where you are, I do think getting in early or having more of a backlist will help long-term because of the algorithms and all.)

7. I hit a cool milestone a year or so ago in that I’ve spent more time in my life running my book blog than not. I started it at age 13, but have been running it now for 14.5 years.