I’m often asked why I haven’t yet written a book and I don’t have an answer that tells the entire truth.
I’ve rejected a few offers from editors because the books they wanted me to write sounded were academic and not of interest to me. I’ve also turned down multiple ghostwriting offers because the money, while okay, was just a little bit more than the money I make through journalism, where I get a byline, build a brand, and nurture relationships.
But mostly, it comes down to this: I didn’t want to compromise.
As a journalist who sells piece by piece, I don’t mind making a compromise because even if I don’t get the pay I want or the style I want in one article, I can quickly move on to the next within weeks, if not days. By compromising on the subject (writing about a boring topic, say) or the way in which I choose to write it or how much money I earn for it, I live with that decision for a couple of weeks, maybe a month or two at most. Not years.


I feel differently about books. When it comes to books, I like control. I want to be an artist when I write my book, bare my soul to the world, and explore things to a degree that challenge, inspire and motivate me. And I want to be a hardcore professional, a businessperson when I go out to sell it because I’m not working years on something that is meaningful to me only to then sell it for a few thousand dollars.
If someone believes in my work, they’re not going to offer a pittance for it. And if they don’t believe in it one hundred percent, they’re not the right person to be bringing it to readers.
(What if you don't believe in your own work? Here's some help.)


So I say no and I say it often because the only thing worse than not having written a book is having written a book that didn’t sell because people didn’t believe it it enough to give it that editorial and marketing push that it needs to survive in a crowded marketplace

 

 It is a myth that only successful writers have more control over their careers because they’re successful. While that is undoubtedly so, most of the successful writers have demanded that control right from the beginning—even when they were failing miserably—and that’s what led to that eventual success.


A few years ago, I interviewed Amish Tripathi for The Writer magazine. Amish is a literary rockstar in India with his Shiva trilogy being the fastest-selling book series in the history of Indian publishing with 1.5 million copies sold in the first few years. The year I interviewed him, Tripathi had received a million dollar advance from an Indian publisher for his next, then-unwritten trilogy. But Amish had humble beginnings, having written his first two books in the back of a car on the commute to work each morning. His now best-selling trilogy was rejected by every single publisher in his country and he was told, “Religion doesn’t sell. Write a love story.” He heard everyone’s advice but didn’t agree with any of it, so simply ignored it. Amish self-published those books and they went on to become literary sensations.


In his interview with me, Amish had three tips for writers.
“It’s a good idea to have a job on the side so that you’re not forced to compromise on your writing for the sake of money,” he said. “If there are some bills at the end of the month, it’s kind of difficult to tell your editor where to get off if you don’t agree with him or her. If you have a job that is paying the bills, you can be fearless. Write because you have something in your soul that you want to communicate. Some people may like it, some people won’t. That doesn’t matter. That’s not the reason to write a book. Third thing, however, is that once you’ve finished the book, you have to put your pragmatic hat on and become a marketer. You have to realize that a book doesn’t sell itself, no matter how good it is. It has to be marketed.”


Sylvia Day, who is more known in international literary circles gave an interview to Digital Book World recently that went viral and inspired many. Day approaches writing very differently from Tripathi, but they have one thing in common: They both refuse to compromise or do things they don’t agree with.


This paragraph, sums up for me, the reason for Day’s success: “I never wanted to be someone who just sits down and writes just for the hell of it. This is my career. Being a long-term writer is so tremendously about strategizing and constantly switching your game and being proactive. And your agent is supposed to be a sounding board for that to hit the pavement. That’s their job. I didn’t think I was getting that. Their strategy was to sell as many books as they could while ‘She’s hot.’ They just said, ‘Crank out as many books as you can and you’ll get there.’ So I fired that agent and hired another. That agent came on board and saw everything I had on my plate and said, ‘I don’t even know what to do with this.’ That ended and my next agent came in and tried to clean some of this up. She talked about ‘let’s just clean this up and then talk about moving forward.’ This was not a viable option for me. You can’t expect me to sit around for three or four years without a strategy. So that relationship didn’t work out either.”


During my own agent hunt, I read on an agent’s blog that she got very upset when a client turned down a $20,000 deal because she had worked really hard on it. She went straight on to my “Do not contact” list even though I like her and what she usually has to say about publishing because any agent who expects to dictate what clients can or cannot demand as value for their work, is out of touch and expecting to wield all the power in the agent-writer relationship. In fact, three years ago, I turned down offers of representation from London-based agents and chose to remain unagented because I didn’t think they understood what I wanted to do with my career, even though they liked the one book idea I had proposed. For me, it’s not about one book, it’s about a career. They had to understand that before I could choose to work with them.
(I'm pleased to say I do now have an agent I'm very happy with and we're working on bringing my first novel to market.)


The wonderful thing about being a writer in today’s world is that we are truly, for the first time, completely independent and self-sufficient, which means we get to make the rules by which we want to play. We can experiment. We can take risks. We can follow our gut and make mistakes and not worry about ruining our careers if our first or second or third or tenth books don’t sell. There is no publisher looking at past sales if we don’t want them to.