Hell, High Water, and the Day Job

The limbo before the launch

I usually write about things I know or that I’m curious about. But what’s been on my mind lately is what I don’t know. My book launches one month from today. And I am consistently surprised by everything I don’t know about publishing a book. Not the mechanics as much as the experience of it. I understand intellectually the process of publishing a book; the need for social media, the shouting from the various hilltops that you wrote a thing and you need people to buy it so you can get the chance to write another thing.

What surprises me is the emotional ups and downs that have taken place between the finishing of the book and the launch of the book into the world. It’s a kind of limbo. I don’t have distance from it, and the only reason I’m writing about it is that I try to write a substack every week come hell or high water and all I can think of to write about is the hell and high water I’m in, up to my neck.

Getting a book published by a real publisher is something I’ve wanted and worked for since I was in my early twenties, which was four decades ago. Since most of my life has been spent in this dream deferred territory, I did some psychological adjustments to make it bearable. I write because I am a writer. The results are not up to me.

I didn’t start out that way. When I graduated from Stanford with a degree in Creative Writing I figured it would be a two years, at the most, until I got published. I wrote my first novel. A friend from college connected me with someone at Creative Artists Agency in LA. I wore a purple dress to the meeting and when I sat in the lobby waiting for my appointment, Faye Dunaway sat next to me. She was lovely and kind and we chatted. I was in my early twenties, and I thought this was the start of my new life, a life where I had an agent at CAA and wrote books and got famous.

In the 90s, famous writers got advances and did book tours. Writers on their way to getting famous got teaching fellowships until they got agents and small book deals, then larger book deals. For the select few there were movie deals. I was ready for all of that.

Only it didn’t happen. I realized I was an alcoholic and got sober in my mid-twenties. I also realized my first novel was about an alcoholic, so I changed the end of the book so she, too, got sober. I always had that romantic linkage between heavy drinking and writing, Hemingway and all that. I wondered if I could still write sober. I doubt I would have finished even one book if I had kept drinking.

My same friend from college won an Academy Award for a short film he did. He asked me to write him a story. I did. Then he asked me to change it up, and make it more Hollywood. I was in love with the characters by then, they felt real to me, so I took the story back. And I made a book out of it.

I got an agent. She was enthusiastic, the Stanford degree, the connection at CAA, all the things. Then she told me, rather abruptly, that I wrote too much about God, and she dropped me. I was mystified. My main character believed in a God, in a complicated searching way that reflected my own, but she was cussing and smoking and fucking her way through the small town in which the book took place. It was in no way a “Christian” book. I worked on it off and on for years, probably too long, and then I finished it and published it myself. You can find it on Amazon, it's called Radio Silence. I did no marketing, and I think it sold about 100 copies.

I still don’t have an agent. I sent my new book to a publisher who turned it down because he had a similar work in the pipeline, but he loved the book and told me to send it to a friend of his who was a literary agent. She wouldn’t even read one chapter, because she said I didn’t have enough followers on social media. Does that sound bitter? I feel bitter.

In an unexpected turn of events, the book got picked from a slush pile, without an agent, and I got my book published by a publisher in London. Joy ensued. Dream come true material. Editing, book design, marketing strategy. All good. I’m floating around in a cloud of fulfilled dreams.

I knew there wasn’t going to be a big advance or a book tour or anything fancy. I also knew that I would need to step up my social media game. So, when the mechanics of the book production were done, around the end of the year, I turned to marketing. I got serious about social media, finally joining tiktok because #booktok, ramping up my posting on Instagram and LinkedIn, doing every interview, podcast or whatever the PR people could get.

Plenty of people publish books without agents or traditional publishers and work the marketing and social media angle successfully and do well. A significant industry exists that keeps telling me that I can pay them to make my book succeed. But they cost significant amounts of money which I don’t want to spend. I’m a DIY person, and I now know how to work multiple types of recording and editing software to generate my own social media content.

But it’s a slog, feeding the social media machine, which means I spend most of my days doing work I’m not good at, I hate doing, and I am not getting paid to do. Oh, and I still have a day job.

I feel like I’m in a very specific limbo where I’m trying to get traction on my own – with my publisher’s help, they do help – in a market that is not working in my favor. Older women buy books, but people don’t want to hear older women talk about the books they wrote. Make sense to anyone?

I’m a writer who intentionally left a career in sales and now I’m selling me, my book, and it’s so uncomfortable. Here’s what I’m trying to keep in mind.

I’m not in charge of the outcome. My job is to do the best I can, with the time and resources I have, to launch the book. I may sell 17 copies, and if those 17 copies make a difference to the 17 people who read them, then my cosmic job is done.

Recognition, from social media or agents or the press, is not an indicator of talent. Eugene S. Robinson, my friend and podcast co-host, keeps telling me when it comes to followers, it’s quality not quantity. About three hundred people read or listen to my work regularly, week after week, month after month. Some pay for the privilege even though they don’t have to. That’s 299 more than I had before I started the substack and the podcast, my husband being the one consistent fan. That’s you, you’re the 300. And you really keep me going. One of you got me connected with a huge podcast that you were a guest on. Others share my work, and my subscriber numbers keep going up every month. That matters.

There is freedom in the day job. Although my most cherished dream is to be able to make enough money from the writing that I don’t have to do anything but write, there is a freedom with the day job. I love my clients, I’m good at what I do, and it gives me some independence. If this book doesn’t sell more than 17 copies, I’ll still have a job. After months on tiktok, my staid content can’t compete with the earnest influencers leaning in so very close to the camera. I have 19 followers on tiktok. I’m done with that channel. I will not take #booktok by storm, my social media manager will have thoughts on that, but I can’t anymore. And since my money comes from my actual job, which is not dependent on how many social media followers I have, I can do that.

I’m not alone. Most writers have day jobs, writers whose work I admire and who are terrifically talented, still work a day job. I know many gifted musicians, dancers, painters, who work day jobs. We’re really committed to our art, so we keep doing it.

I remember in my late twenties when I realized I wasn’t going to get published, I wasn’t going to have an agent, I wasn’t going to show up, like some of my classmates had, in the pages of the New York Times book review or on their best-seller list. And I had this rush of relief. Now, I thought, I can write whatever I want, since I don’t have to worry about selling it. There was such joy in that understanding. I write because I am a writer. I lost that for a minute in the thicket of marketing what I wrote, but it is still true.

My book The Saint and the Drunk A Guide to Making the Big Decisions In Your Life comes out in May and is now available for pre-order in the U.S. Or pre-order here for the UK. Pre-orders really help.

Reposting, commenting and sharing this substack, as well as following me on Instagram, LinkedIn and BlueSky @speirolo and reposting on those platforms also helps with all the metrics.