Writerland, Chapter 17: Audience and Paychecks Part II; The Network of Joy
Writerland is a newsletter from The Delacorte Review whose mission is to help writers tell the stories they need to tell.
If you were still laboring under the illusion that publishing was - as it had traditionally and perhaps mythically been – a tweedy world populated by sagacious editors forever on the hunt for new and exciting talent, the recent New York Times profile of Madeline McIntosh, the CEO of Penguin Random House and without doubt the most powerful person in publishing, should, if it hadn’t happened already, brought those innocent ideas to an end.
The rise of McIntosh underscores what writers, agents, and editors, have been saying for years: that publishing ever more resembles Hollywood -- it’s all about the blockbusters. Which means it’s all about the numbers, specifically the big numbers, the bigger the better. For decades the words computer, let alone data, were seldom uttered by publishers; decisions were made by the gut. Now, wrote the story’s author, Alexandra Alter, publishing “is an algorithmic marketplace that serves up mostly the hits, driving a cycle so self-fulfilling it’s nearly tautological: Best sellers sell the best because they are best sellers.”
I learned this the hard way eight years ago, when after spending months on a book proposal that my agent had initially liked, I discovered that while I was busily researching and writing, the world as I knew it was vanishing. My agent read the proposal and called. He said, I cannot sell this book. He explained that the business that made possible the careers of “mid-list authors” like me and most of my writer friends (read: modest advances and modest sales) was gone.
He continued: Unless I came up with an idea that was sure to be a big seller I was, and the word still rings in my ears, toast.
I had at this point written six books and had seen my advances, which started at $15,000, climb steadily, though not dramatically. And now I was looking at a future defined by a side order on a breakfast menu: white, wheat, or multi-grain?
Such moments do clear the mind. I stopped writing books. I became a publisher, not of books but of long nonfiction stories, ranging from 5,000 to a whopping and fully-deserving 50,000 words. I wanted our authors to be read, which meant I needed to learn lessons that writers, who by and large left matters of sales to their publishers, never had to consider. And it is from those hard lessons that I have arrived at a moment and place where my reaction to the Times story was not despair, but hope.
Yes, hope.
Illusions are a pleasant sensation because they imagine the world as we’d like it to be. In that regard, the Times story was unsettlingly liberating. For many years I have seen how writers, myself included, defined success by the traditional metrics: selling a book or story to an established publisher or publication for decent money; having that book reviewed, hopefully well, in one of the important book reviews; appearing on NPR – please Terry Gross, choose me!! Being a finalist for, and if the fates smiled upon you winning, a literary award.
In other words, writers lived to please the people whom everyone around them was trying to please. And even when someone was pleasing them more – she’s on the cover of the Times Book Review? He’s on Oprah? – at least you could feel you were in the game.
Missing from this calculus, however, was the verdict that mattered most: the readers’. The problem with readers is that they are unknown and unseen. Instead, they were a number on a royalty statement, or more recently the suggestion of a number corresponding to a book’s Amazon rank. Authors began to check their Amazon number like mad, especially after a review appeared and they looked for a bump, the way presidential candidates do after a convention. Authors feverishly called their agents to tell them to call their publishers to find out what in heaven’s name they were doing to market and sell their book, only to be told: not a whole lot. Promotion was for those books the publisher had long before decided to invest in. So authors were left to post to Facebook and Twitter to remind friends, who’d likely already bought the book, to buy it.
Ask a writer whom they want to have read their book or story and they will answer: everyone. But if not everyone then who? It is in considering the second question that writers can begin changing the way they think about what it means to succeed.
For the past several years I’ve taught a class in which students write stories that form a collection that they then publish and sell as a book. I teach this class with James Robinson of the Times, who is one of the most astute and trenchant thinkers about audiences – how we identify and connect, or in the parlance of the trade, engage with them. James begins the first class by asking the students what would represent success. Who do they want to have read their book? Is it one person, say a prominent editor? Or is it many people? If so, how many? A thousand? Five thousand? Fifty? There are generally fifteen students in each class, and at the outset, no agreement. How could there be when they really haven’t ever thought about this before?
Over the next three months the students report and write and at the same time conduct experiments on audiences as they begin wrestling with the questions that writers too seldom ask themselves: Who needs my story? Who needs this book?
Emphasis on need. You are, after all, asking people, most of them strangers, to pay for the experience of reading what you have written. Those people have no shortage of choices. So why choose you?
The class’ book is a disparate collection organized around a single conceit: each student chooses a photograph and sets about finding the story in that frozen moment. A designer produces the covers and lays out the text, all which gets shipped to Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing, which will in a week or so have the book available for purchase as an ebook and print-on-demand. Amazon makes its money by taking a cut of the sales. As to the selling -- that’s on the class.
By the time the book goes on sale, James and I have all but stepped away and left things to the students who are delighted to have us out of their hair. Two years ago, the class sold close to a thousand books in a matter of weeks, and made about $3500 in royalties that they divided equally. (This year’s numbers were more modest, upended by Covid-19.)
Those sales figures for a book written and published in fifteen weeks by a group of unknown writers suggest that they sold not just to family and friends but to strangers. Somehow, they convinced people they did not know that they needed to spend $9.99 for the book by writers they had never heard of.
How did they do it?
They created a network.
Network theory is at once highly complex and quite simple. Consider this scenario: you are at a baseball game and suddenly, with two men on and two out for the home team in a tied game, the ballpark echoes with the sound of rhythmic clapping. The clapping began with one person, and was picked up by another person and then another until everyone was doing it. An inning later, with precisely the same situation on the field, you try the same thing. You start to clap. The person next to you claps. Then it stops. Why? Because, as people wise about networks will tell you, networks are a wondrous thing to behold and all but impossible to predict.
But, and here is the part that most matters, you can increase the chances of activating networks by understanding what is most essential: making weak connections into strong ones. Think of your family. Is there a person who seems to have her or his pulse on everyone and everything? That would have been my grandmother. My grandmother worked tirelessly to keep an ever more disparate group of relatives connected. And it worked, until she died, and the family fell apart. In a network context, she was the key influencer, the one who made those weak connections strong.
But you needn’t have a Tzippi Shapiro or an Oprah to power a network. You can do it yourself. Or rather, writers can do this for themselves and for each other.
I have spent years pouring over analytics for stories -- how many people open a link, how long they stay, and the path they took to that story. And I can tell you without doubt the most powerful social sharing tool is not Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or TikTok.
It is email.
If you get an email from a friend telling you to read something, the odds are that at the very least you will open the link. Why? Because that friend invested some of her or his social capital in sending you that email, essentially saying, I know you and I believe you will like this, and I am willing to risk upsetting you because I am confident you will read it and be made happy.
If, on the other hand, a Facebook friend posts a link to a story the odds are you will hit like and scroll on. You have fulfilled a social nicety of liking something that you will never read. I know this because even if you spend money, as I have, to boost a Facebook post, the odds of that link being opened through Facebook are about one percent. One. Per. Cent. Thank you Mark Zuckerberg and I’d like my money back.
But what if you had access to, say, 20 people who were willing to share your story, via email, with their networks? People who were willing to do you this favor because when the time came, you’d be willing to do the same for them. Other writers. Each of those writers has a network, and those networks inevitably overlap with other networks. A mosaic of networks, each holding the potential for readers. Potential, like the rhythmic clapping at the ballpark. All you can do is try to activate it.
If you’re thinking, that sounds easy, let me now point out a core problem, one that, sadly, I have also seen confirmed by the data: writers don’t help each other. They really don’t. Writers are interested in their own stories. Maybe the work of a few friends. But for the most part that is where it ends.
As an experiment some years ago, I joined several Facebook writer groups, each with thousands of members. I posted our writers’ stories. Very few people shared them. And in fairness, why should they? Our connection was weak and from a sharing point of view meaningless.
But consider the power of a group of like-minded people committed, say, to narrative nonfiction. Each member of that group would commit to sharing the work of the others, via email with, say, ten or so people whom they believe will want to read the story, who will need it.
The email comes with one ask: if you know someone who would also like – read: need – this story, please share it with them.
Yes, you do have to make the ask explicit because otherwise people may not necessarily do what you want them to do. And if you are hesitant to ask, if you feel it is intrusive, if you feel you’ll be ignored, bear in mind that when we launched the Review’s predecessor, The Big Roundtable, in 2013 we asked readers not only to share stories via email – which they did – but also to support writers by donating to them. Most readers did not. But enough did – the average donation was $18 – that writers made on average $350; some made far more. Most of the donations came from people they did not know.
The paradigm worked. It worked for my students and their book. It can work for you, too.
If you are waiting for Madeline McIntosh to make your book a best seller, you are going to wait a very long time. If you are waiting for The New York Times Book Review, or All Things Considered, or The New Yorker, to anoint you and your book, get in line.
But if you and your writer friends are willing to vault past those people and institutions whose approval so many have and continue to seek, and work together to find your readers, you will, I have come to believe, find joy that comes with strangers discovering the wonderful stories you need to tell them.
Nothing good ever came from writers punishing themselves. We know writing is hard. We’re here to show that it doesn’t have to be torture. The Delacorte Review Newsletter comes out every other week. Subscribe to get full access to the newsletter and website. Never miss an update.