How I Wrote This Book (Part 1: FAQs)
Introducing Delia's Publishing Doc.
Earlier this summer, I did an IG “Ask Me Anything” about publishing a novel in lieu of being too coughy-sneezy to make it to a McNally Jackson panel on the subject, and the ensuing Q&A totally dropped me back into the depths of not just 2023, when Central Places came out, but also the years before that spent in the thick of it, writing and editing.
I didn’t realize until I was typing my little responses out on my phone that I’d kind of repressed a lot of the memories and sensations about that time. Even though it’s only been a few years since publication, the concept of having written a book feels eons removed from my current reality of freelancing with a very humbling beginner’s mindset. Reminding myself that I’d actually worked on and finished a giant project like a book helped me feel a lot more motivated and excited about writing, in all of its forms, than I’ve felt in a while. It also, let’s be honest, felt plainly nice to be helpful and knowledgable about such a mysterious and subjective process.
So! I compiled all the Q&A material together with some general advice and (probably most interesting to the real voyeurs and craft heads) made copies of the exact Google Sheets I used to track my work and shape my schedule between 2019 and 2023 (AKA the years when Central Places went from Google Doc to hardcover). It’s a Google Doc, so you can view it, share it, save it, etc. to your heart’s content for free even after the Substack archive paywall kicks in. (If there is a fortune to be made from sharing publishing advice, I’m sure it’s great, but I think it’s better for all of us if more more people know more about the process.
It’s clear that something’s definitely in the air re: the desire to demystify the publishing process, because Charlotte Shane also just did a big post on this with a bunch of other great writers. So I’ll add mine to the mix, if any of it ends up being helpful to you in either a practical or voyeuristic sense.
If you already clicked into the doc, great. The whole thing’s already there, but I’m also sending the same info out in parts via this newsletter this week (Part 1 is the FAQs, Part 2 is the spreadsheets, Part 3 is general advice) so you can read it in chunks if you want, too. Enjoy!!
Delia’s Publishing Doc Part 1: FAQs
How do I get people to read my book?
If anyone actually knew the answer, the publishing industry would be very different, if not imploded entirely. Realistically, what I can tell you is that everyone will harp on how important it is to “build a following,” and it’s unfortunately probably the only thing within your agency to do, unless you have $40k to spend on a freelance/external publicist (some people spend a chunk of their advance on this; it’s probably worth it if you care a lot about critical acclaim/awards/lists…)
But can you build a “following” if you’re not willing to do the TikTok thing or totally debase yourself online? Yes, you do have to be “out there” on the internet, but also consider being out and about in your local literary scene (i.e. your local indie bookstore’s events page) and the community in general. Get a lot of practice with identifying as a writer and talking about your writing and interests so it doesn’t feel so self-promotional, but rather as if you are simply being helpful. With a lot of time, patience, and relationship-building, the people who are interested in you as a person will also want to know what you have to say. You probably should have a newsletter if only to have it as an email marketing device; make it on whatever platform you’d like and use it to send updates about your writing and your book the way you’d inform a long-distance college friend.
Getting blurbs is a big part of it, supposedly. But this is a tough game to play, too, because unfortunately, a lot of book promotion comes down to “do you have any famous/clouted friends? Can they make a post about your book? Do you know dua lipa?” But most of us do not have social relations with Dua or Lena Dunham or Reese Witherspoon. Still! Make a giant spreadsheet of all of the friends and acquaintances to whom you can send a copy of the book (or at least an email about its impending release) with their addresses, emails, etc. Try to do as much of the reachout as you can yourself, rather than just forwarding that spreadsheet to your publisher’s PR team.
How to do a novel?
Think about someone who has wronged you, or how you wronged someone, or what you want to tell your mother, or what you think she wants to tell you, or how you think high school should have gone, or how you wish you could have done it differently, or what if you hadn’t done it differently? Stew over this for a few years, and then start writing stuff down.
Have you published fiction prior to your novel? How was it writing the first manuscript?
I wrote a lot of fanfiction and eventually original fiction between the ages of 12 and 18, which did not make me a very cool or fun teen BUT because I was posting a new chapter every week on this online community (Quizilla.com, kind of like Wattpad of its time), I got a lot of practice writing on “deadline” and also getting feedback from readers (AKA other middle school girls interested in Draco Malfoy) on a regular basis.
Went to college for journalism and put fiction aside until 2019, when I was 26 and going through a “bad breakup” lol and decided I’d write a short story about it. At the time, I had the luck of having a friend who worked at an indie literary zine (Catapult, RIP) who was willing to spend many months editing this story with me for publication. That story came out September 2019, and it caught one of my future agents’ (more on this in a sec) eye. She DM’d me, we connected over coffee, and she basically told me to get in touch once I had something to show her (i.e. a completed novel manuscript). I started writing that ms a few months later, around December 2019.
That first draft was written under two highly specific conditions: 1) quarantine, and 2) a time of employment at a very cushy desk job that did not require much of me. (It was, crucially, not a writing job — I was on the very chill audience development team at BuzzFeed). So it was easy to designate Saturdays as “writing days,” wherein I would try to pound out roughly one chapter (I did not say it was a good chapter) each week. This was my old fanfiction pace, and I fell back into that routine pretty easily because I mean, that was basically the thing I did for six formative years lol. That first draft was obviously terrible, but the only measure of success for a first draft is finishing it! It doesn’t have to make any sense, the characters’ names might change midway because you forgot who they were supposed to be, etc. Doesn’t matter. Once it’s done, THEN the work begins. But it’s still easier to build on something than to pull it out of thin air the first time around.
How did you find your literary agent?
I have the incredible luck to be co-represented by both Caroline Eisenmann and Jade Wong-Baxter at Frances Goldin. Jade and I connected after that 2019 short story came out; I knew Caroline because she repped a close friend, and so she and I followed each other on Twitter. I think at one point I tweeted/mentioned in Deez Links that I was working on a novel, and eagle-eyed agent that she is, she messaged me and was like, yeah make sure you send me that.
So when the time came to send my manuscript around (~January 2021), it so happened that both Jade and Caroline now worked at Frances Goldin together, so we got to make our arrangement a rare literary throuple.
(Tl;dr, start publishing or self-publishing stuff that might feel small, because people are always looking for new voices/writers. And pay attention to your author friends’ social circles!)
Also, if you buy yourself a subscription (or get someone to share their login) for Publishers Marketplace, you can look up who reps which authors, and also vice versa if you want to see, for example, who did Sally Rooney’s book deal. (A less expensive way to do this is to buy an author’s book and look at the acknowledgements section)
Does journalism help market you to publishers or do they care more about story content?
My cynical take is that anyone with some kind of established “following” is going to have a leg up when it comes to publishing a book (see: every bad celeb memoir), but if the book sucks, it’s embarrassing for everyone involved.
Of course, I do think it’s objectively helpful to be a journalist specifically, because that means you probably have a lot more connections in the media industry than the average person, and you know who to hit up for a potential interview or Q&A or even shout-out in a magazine when it comes time to promoting the book. I’ve also been told that publishers like working with journalists because they tend to understand deadlines/the nature of editing. But otherwise, it’s not really a huge plus in the fiction world necessarily (whereas in nonfiction, of course, you’re more of an obvious expert on the topic matter). It just positions you in a way where you can ask for a lot of favors.
Were you nervous to have people you know read your book?
Oh yes. Though the whole point of fiction, to me, is that you get plausible deniability for airing out grievances/fantasies/memories galore.
There were a few characters in my novel who were obviously based on people I knew as a teenager; I was not in touch with them at the time of writing and had not for several years in one case, so it didn’t seem worth telling them (I imagine they have since found out.) Whereas I did print out separate copies for my parents and mailed it to them many months before publication; they both read it and we never spoke of the contents for longer than a few minutes total :)
How did you learn to pace a novel? To keep the story engaging but not rushed?
Literally this book (weird title but it’ll make sense when you read it): Save the Cat! Writes a Novel tells you what beats to hit in a basic fiction narrative (across various genres) and in what order. This is the only book I read about how to write a book, and you don’t even need to read the whole thing. Very useful, and you’ll never watch a movie the same again without noting how they hit the exact beats every time.
How much of a “following” is it helpful to have when publishing your first novel?
I don’t think there is a magic number. Having some kind of "presence" on social media (I would count that as IG, TikTok, Substack in this day and age) and a few published clips (AKA articles written for media outlets, can be mainstream or indie) is certainly a lot easier for your publisher’s PR and marketing teams to work with than a total blank slate. (Unless your book is totally Ferrante-level brilliant, and then you can afford a ton of mystique and no need to promote it!)
But it’s not like being an influencer, I don’t think, where if you don’t have 10K followers at minimum it doesn’t matter. If you have a newsletter with 200 loyal readers, that’s still a big deal.
Is it realistic to have a 9-to-5 and still write enough to become an author?
Yes! Most authors I know wrote their books while holding down their day jobs. It just depends on the particulars of that 9-to-5. Ideally it gives you enough money to not worry too hard about money and is also not too mentally taxing and does not infringe upon your weekend/weeknights. I personally could not have written a novel if I was a full-time writer/reporter…a person is only capable of emitting a set number of words/thoughts per day if you ask me!
But I know a lot of writers who write for their day job AND they’re working on a book, too, and those people are the real sickos (a compliment). I imagine that it takes a lot of patience, discipline and sacrifice to do that.
FWIWI, I wrote each Saturday morning and eventually also Tuesday nights, for 2-3 hours at a time, over six months to get a first draft. Pretty efficient TBH but remember I was a fanfiction savant!!!
Did you ever get bored of your own novel?
Oh my god yes. I tried reading it through the days before it came out, and my takeaway was “Hmm, not bad. But I never want to read this again.” For this reason, I am in favor of scheduling your work in a series of sprints (more on that below) with a lot of breaks in between that you can look forward to. I don’t think it serves anyone’s writing to treat it like a daily drudgery that never ends.
How much outlining did you do?
A lot! That book I referenced earlier (Saves a Cat…Writes a Novel!) tells you the basic 20 or so beats that every narrative plate hits, so I outlined around that. Not everyone likes/needs to work that way, but making an outline was basically making a bunch of mini deadlines/tasks that could be completed, which made everything feel more feasible.
How did you know when your manuscript was ready?
I did a round of revisions on my own and then sent a copy of that draft to two friends whom I trusted deeply to be honest with me (along with gift cards as thanks for their editing work!) I sent them like 4-5 questions to consider, such as “do you think it makes sense that character X is doing this?” I gave them a month and then asked them to send the manuscript back with their notes and responses to my questions. After I addressed all of those notes, I was like, Okay I honestly don’t know what else this ms needs, so it’s time for some professional eyes on that.
Tl;dr if you still know what needs to be fixed, it’s not ready yet.
Did you join writing clubs before or when you started writing your novel?
No, but that’s because I like to go off on my own when it comes to writing. If you’re motivated by a little group pressure (this framework can help you understand what kind of motivation works best for you), I imagine it can be extremely helpful and probably less lonely. Even if you like working on your own, I do recommend making friends with at least a few writers in your niche/region/stage of career so you can commiserate on a semiregular basis.
Can you talk about query letters? At what point did your agents come on board?
I got to take a shortcut in that I never had to query, and I think this was the biggest boon of being a journalist already with a tiny bit of name recognition in New York media/publishing circles. My agents Jade and Caroline got in touch with me first, and we kept in touch until I had a full ms to send them (which was at least a year after we first met). I spent that year writing/revising the ms on my own (and with my beta reader friends) before I felt like the ms was as far as I could take it alone, and that’s when I emailed it to Jade and Caroline (it was like right after the new year, January 2021). We hopped on zoom to chat within a week or so, and I signed with them pretty quickly after that.
What do you wish you’d known before starting the process?
This is probably obvious to everyone else, but I wish I’d known that writing a novel would not solve all of my personal problems. In fact, it sort of deepened a few existing ones (I was too isolated, too in my head, too checked out on friendships. She should have been at the club!!). I thought that finally publishing a book would make me feel some kind of lightning bolt moment — like YES, I ROCK!!!!!! I AM WORTHY!!! — but honestly, that capital-M moment never came. It was more so little waves of nice feelings about achievement, but even those waves never lasted longer than a few days.
The joke I always have with people who put out a book is “so, how long did you feel good about it for?” and the answer is without fail maybe a month, tops. And then life moves on. Everyone moves on, and you’re kind of like, wait, shouldn’t everything feel different? Am I not an entirely different person now???????
I do feel proud of the book, and I do feel like my career followed a slightly new angle in its aftermath, but almost no one writes an instant bestseller that gets them a house upstate (or a house at all). Mostly you just buy yourself some time and Google results and if you’re lucky, new friends/induction into a nice sorority of readers and writers.
I think the reason we hear so many authors wax rhapsodic about “craft” or “the work” all the time is not because they’re humble-bragging usually (I mean, some of them are). But it’s more so, in my view, a sign that even really big literary success does not feel all that gratifying for the long term. I mean, I’m sure Zadie Smith etc. are very happy. But mostly, the publishing process feels like being put through a strange song-and-dance where you are shilling and hoping and wishing people will understand you and like you enough to buy your product (the book). It grinds you down mentally, even when you have a perfect team and publisher. Writing is such a sick type 2 fun but promoting/hustling is the antithesis of even that — it’s only worth doing if you liked the first part.
So: I wish I knew writing WAS the fun part. It does not get more fun once that document leaves your private little laptop.
I’m writing a novel, and I’m worried I should have clips for trying to get published. Any advice for getting started?
I would focus on the novel! You don’t want to be generating clips in a half-assed/distracted way if it doesn’t come naturally to you (or the dictates of your day job). Nonfiction really depends on a lot of supplementary writing so that you can position yourself in media as an expert, but getting press for a novel is a different beast. I wouldn’t waste time sweating it until you’re actually done with the novel and ready to think about promotion. Fiction, as I understand it, relies more on placing an excerpt somewhere good, anyway…
Can I ask about $$? How does payment work?
For fiction you have to have the entire manuscript before you sell it, which also means you may go back and forth with your agents on edits for a while before they take it to market (“go on submission.”) Your book “deal” gets broken into several payments—maybe two, maybe three, maybe four. These payments are tied to specific milestones (i.e. when you turn in your ms, when it finally gets published, the paperback date), so they are often spread out over years. Your agent(s) get 15%, the tax man gets his share, so it’s almost never the kind of situation where you can quit your day job as soon as you sell the book. (Though I did negotiate an unpaid leave at Vanity Fair, which I funded with some of my book deal money.)
Do you plan to write another novel? Where do you see your career going?
I definitely want to write another novel, but the one thing that the first book taught me was to really try to take my time. I think of Central Places as the book my 26-year-old self wrote, and I love her (the book) like I love a project that a little sibling made. Good for her, so cute. I’m glad it came out when it did instead of having myself stew over high school for another eight years or whatever, but the next novel needs a lot of life lived between now and then.
I have an idea for it, but I’m basically only "working on it” in the form of journaling and observing how I feel about certain life events. And testing some theories out with friends. At the moment, I’m trying to take work a few months at a time. Freelance life has stabilized a lot over the past year, but the idea that I would one day get disciplined enough to do freelance AND work on a novel on the side is now hysterical to me. That was never going to happen. But I probably have to get it together at some point, unless I luck into a chill full-time job in media in 2025 …
Once again, here’s the link to the entire doc. Next up tomorrow: spreadsheets…
What a gift!
Not a writer but this is super interesting!