Five Things I've Learned From Writing And Publishing Books For 20 Years
And one thing I've never been able to learn
Hi friends.
I’ll be honest. I’m writing this, a little bit, out of desperation.
It’s been a year since I got the offer for my sixth nonfiction book, tentatively titled Falling In Love With The World Again: Finding Your Way When Everything Feels Broken. I have a complete draft (Thank you Harmony House!). I have feedback from friends (Thank you friends!) I have a deadline extension until the end of July (Thank you Bloomsbury!) I need to be dedicating serious time each week to polishing and revising and even rethinking parts of it. And what am I doing instead?
I’m completing a six-episode limited-series podcast about students with disabilities for the nonprofit Understood.org (launches in the fall). I’m freelancing for publications including New York. I’m flying off to two different field-building convenings in the next three weeks for my climate mental health community and my youth well-being community. I’m parenting through the hectic end of a school year, full of dance recitals and concerts and camp packing lists. I’m trying to get enough rest, not to drink too much coffee or too many patio cocktails. And I’m pouring my soul out here for you all, week after week.
This is not a brag or even a humblebrag. This is a genuine cry for help. I’ve ridden in this rodeo before, and I know that my problem is not time management. I’m engaging in productive procrastination, which has spiraled to a level approaching avoidance, because this book is a big deal for me. It’s about helping people feel less alone with their big feelings about the state of the world. It includes details about my life and my marriage that I’ve never shared publicly before. It’s a baring of my heart.
It’s also more ambitious at a craft level than any book I’ve done before. I hate to admit this, but I’ve rarely aspired higher than clarity across the span of a book. My books were fundamentally journalistic, sometimes essayistic, with a dash of polemic. Now I’m going for affecting and evocative and lyrical and also inspiring and grounding and geniunely helpful. It’s terrifying!
So I thought I would use the space this week as a place to take a deep breath, to remind myself that I HAVE done this before, maybe not exactly this, but something very much like it.
This post is also a form of public accountability—if you see me on Substack Notes in the coming weeks, or elsewhere on social media, or even out in the real world where many of you know me, feel free to say “Hey, how’s the revising going?” and I will curse under my breath and pretend to be grateful for it.
And finally, I’m writing as a way of sharing what I’ve learned, in case it’s useful for someone else, because I know that a lot of people who read this, are interested in writers and writing and books.
Here are five things I’ve learned since I was a baby author, 24 years old with my first book deal. #5 is behind the paywall because, fittingly enough, it’s about money—including my precise advances for all 6 of my books.
1. Ideas are worthless.
I cannot count the number of times that someone has heard that I’m a writer and responded, “Oh, I have an idea for a book!” I usually smile and nod and ask them about it. What I’m dying to say is something snarky, like “Oh, cool, I have an idea for a house I’d like to build some day!”
Ideas are a dime a dozen. Execution is everything. By the same token, ideas can’t be stolen, so don’t worry about talking about your idea. It will only get better, clearer to you, the more you sound it out with intelligent people. I also respect people who hold an idea close to the vest when they’re still cooking on it. The important thing is not to mistake the egg for the cake.
I can’t even tell you what I think when I hear people say, “Oh, I have an idea for a book…and I used Claude to write it for me!” But it’s not nice.
2. No one in publishing knows anything.
I cannot overstress the extent to which publishing is not a proper industry with rational or fair decisionmaking based on data. It’s a lot of lovely people who love books and a couple of hard-nosed business types who obviously are rather bad at business, because if they were good at business they would choose another business besides publishing, which is not a good business. It’s not a place for people who love money above all else. That’d be tech or finance or manufacturing or something.
I’ll give you an example of why this is a fake industry. When you write a book proposal, which is the document you use to sell your book, you need to include “comps”—comparable titles, preferably those that sold well. However, books are inherently sui generis. Bestsellers will of course spawn imitators, some of which will do well, but there is no guarantee that your book will sell similarly to any of its comps. And it’s not like the publishing companies actually survey the book-buying public to figure out what they want.
So even though getting a book deal can indeed feel validating, it’s important to remember that not selling a book is in no way invalidating.
3. You can hit every publicity goal and it means nothing.
I launched my first book, age 25, on CNN’s American Morning. I will never forget sitting in the studio overlooking Columbus Circle in the predawn, wearing an ill-fitting blazer, taking deep breaths and trying to remember my talking points.
In the course of 20 years I’ve had many of the possible Big! Exciting! Breaks! for my books. I’ve been blurbed by Arianna Huffington and Daniel Pink. I’ve been on The View, Larry King Live! and every major TV news network. I’ve had an excerpt in The Atlantic. An adapted essay on the cover of the New York Times’ Sunday Opinion section. Multiple interviews on Morning Edition. Featured in the Next Big Idea Book Club. I’ve had really great events too, at SXSW and TEDX and Aspen Ideas, Powell’s and Politics and Prose and Barnes & Noble and Book Passage.
All of them were wonderful in the moment, and wonderful recognition. None of them moved the sales needle in any measurable way.
One surprising thing that did? C-Span Book TV. People who watched that ordered the book while they were watching, and my Amazon ranking went up for a day. I also got an email from an old man with thoughts about my eye makeup.
4. Writing is its own reward. Publishing is also its own reward.
Over spring break my family and I visited a frigid reservoir in the valley below Sequoia National Park. As my 9-year-old and I stepped down off the rocks and into the inhospitably cold water, I said out loud “This is recreational! I’m doing this on purpose! This is for fun actually!”
That’s kind of how it feels to write, to face down the blank document every day. You have to forcibly remind yourself that you don’t have to do this. You get to do this. And, at this point toward the middle of my life, I feel incredibly lucky that I have so much growing to do as a writer. There’s so much I haven’t done. So much I haven’t even attempted, or not in years (fiction! poetry!). The challenges are infinite.
Publishing has been great too. It’s led to lots of different opportunities—assignments, jobs, media requests, and speaking engagements that have brought me all over the country. It’s led to countless students emailing me for school assignments, and occasionally a person telling me that I made them feel seen, or less alone, or that I helped them understand something better, or I got something right.
I am flattered as well as bemused when rich and famous people want to reify their cachet by publishing some kind of ghostwritten piece of fluff—they are trying to essentially get credibility and grab cash by impersonating me and my fellows, people with frizzy hair and a laptop slump.
But writing is the thing. Always. If I had to choose between writing the rest of my life and never publishing another book, or never writing again if it meant my next book succeeded beyond my wildest dreams….hmm. That would be a tough one, actually. I do care about this project a lot. But I think ultimately I’d keep writing.
5. Your sales record isn’t everything.
And that gets me to my next point, which is that your sales record isn’t everything.
How do I know this?
Because my sales record….isn’t everything.
(after the break, I’m putting in my exact advance numbers and sales numbers between 2006- 2025)
