What I’ve Learned About Being an Author

Being an author is not a job, though it has become my profession, and even my primary way of making money, over the last nine years. I wrote my first book while I still had a full-time magazine job—not something I recommend, though I did enjoy the steady paycheck while I spent nights, weekends, and vacation time writing my book.

I have survived mainly on book income since quitting that job in 2011 to write books. At times, it has been precarious, and it has rarely been totally financially comfortable, even though my advances are higher than a lot of authors’, and even though one of my books was a New York Times bestseller for several weeks. And I have yet to reach the magical, theoretical point—which I have often dreamed of, even more than I’ve dreamed of total financial stability—where I can “do what I want”: i.e., think really hard about what I want to write my next book about, come up with a plan, and then just do it, paid well by a grateful publisher.

This has been my hardest lesson, but there have been others, too. Here are a few things I’ve learned the hard way, so you don’t have to learn the hard way, too:

1. Books are not long articles. Going into my very first book, Why? Because We Still Like You, a history of the 1950s Mickey Mouse Club, I figured I knew how to do this, since I had spent four years in journalism school at Northwestern, 14 years as a professional journalist, and 8 of those years at a national magazine, Entertainment Weekly. But to write the book, I found, in a relatively panicked state, that I had a lot to learn about the literary tricks that sustain a story over hundreds of pages: narrative arc, character development, scene-setting, even theme and symbolism. I got some of that in there in time, though I was still learning. It wasn’t until my second book, a history of The Mary Tyler Moore Show called Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted, that I really got it. I was lucky enough to be edited by my publisher, the great Jon Karp at Simon & Schuster. During a formative phone conversation about my first draft, he said something like, “In its current state, this will likely get perfectly fine reviews, but it’s a long Entertainment Weekly story.” It clicked for me then, and I made some of the best revisions of my life. All the best scenes in that book—including the introduction, which is my favorite part—came after that conversation.
2. Good reviews and/or lots of coverage when your book comes out do not mean it will sell well. No one believes this. I say it all the time, other people in publishing say it all the time, and then people who have heard it many times will have their own book out and still be surprised when it happens to them. Perhaps no one wants to believe it, since the only thing an author can do to try to drum up sales is to get out there and talk about their book. Succeeding in getting coverage feels like such an accomplishment, and it is! But you can’t make people buy books. All you can do is tell them about those books and hope. It’s such a bummer when it doesn’t work. Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted got decent amounts of coverage, including a great review in The New York Times—the holy grail of book coverage. Still, it did not set the world on fire in terms of sales. But! I was really proud of it, and good coverage is better than bad or no coverage. (Ahh, the sweet relief when, as you read the opening paragraphs of that NYT review, and you finally see, “As Jennifer Keishin Armstrong reveals in her energetic account …” Phew! “Energetic” is good, right?) It did better than Why? Because We Still Like You, and it gave my career momentum. And no one told me at the time that its sales were disappointing, for which I am grateful—I honestly had no idea. And now, seven years later, I’m getting more messages than ever from people who have found it somehow and loved it. So overall, this one is in the plus column—a lesson in itself.
3. The wrong book might ruin your career … but it might not. Once you start talking to other authors, you’ll hear horror stories about somebody whose book tanked and was never given another book deal again because the sales numbers were so bad. I actually do know people this has happened to, and when I found out about it, I was terrified. I could have wrecked my career before it started by agreeing to write Why? Because We Still Like You, which was the publisher’s idea, not mine. I signed on because I wanted to write books and it was an opportunity with a Big Five publisher that felt like it was worth seizing. But what if the failure of that book—attributable to a number of factors, from a misread of a market to a lack of promotional support to my having no idea how to promote it myself to that market—had tanked my future? I vowed to make more careful decisions on my projects once I heard these tales of woe. But I survived a disaster, and have since weathered ups and downs, but have always lived another day to write another book under contract. In my case, this happened because Jon Karp knew what had gone on behind the scenes on Why?—and, crucially, he loved my Mary Tyler Moore Show idea enough to give me another shot. A good idea or manuscript can trump bad sales numbers. I know many, many other authors who have done the same. The difference between professional authors and aspiring or could’ve-been authors is that professional authors keep going. So …
4. Keep going. I wrote an entire novel that took me years. I got an agent. She tried to sell it to pretty much everyone in town. Nothing but rejections. But I got a different agent and wrote Why? Because We Still Like You. It tanked. My agent left the business. I got another agent—the one I have now, the excellent Laurie Abkemeier—and she sold Mary and Lou within a month or so of my signing with her. (Learn more about getting the right agent on my podcast, #Authoring, in which we talk to Laurie about what she’s looking for.) You have to keep going if you want to be an author. This also applies to pitching new book ideas, and brings us back to my mythical idea of a career point called Doing What I Want. To illustrate this, I’ll walk through a brief history of how my book subjects since then have made their way from idea to book contract. After Mary and Lou, it made sense that my publisher, agent, and I worked hard to come up with just the right idea: We wanted to maintain the momentum of those good reviews and deliver something the market would respond to. I pitched books on a few other TV shows, including, good lord, The Cosby Show, an idea for which I wrote a whole proposal. (This was before we all knew what we all now know about Bill Cosby.) The Book Gods were truly looking out for me, because Simon & Schuster was already planning a Cosby biography written by someone else, so Cosby was off the table for me. (It would have come out pretty much concurrent with all of the sexual assault allegations against him. Bullet dodged.) It was Jon Karp who suggested Seinfeld. I spent a few days researching and writing up an outline to see if I thought there was a story to tell. There was, and a bestseller was born, the perfect combination of story and a fanbase who wanted to buy books. After that came out and was a bestseller, I thought this was it! I would do whatever I wanted now! You can probably guess … no such luck. Instead, I wrote a proposal that my agent liked — and that I still believe is worth doing — that my publisher then didn’t want, so we sent it out to several other houses to nothing but very warm rejections. So I stuck with S&S, and we agreed on Sex and the City, a show I had been circling since before even The Mary Tyler Moore Show. After that, I thought it would get easier, what with the “bestseller” in front of my name, and having done something my publisher liked for the last one, but it was harder than ever. I wrote one proposal that my agent didn’t like. (It’s worth noting here that a proposal is maybe 75 to 100 typed, double-spaced pages that require lots of research and should be 100-percent polished prose. So it’s a serious time investment. You can learn more about honing ideas and writing proposals on my podcast, #Authoring, where we go in-depth on proposal structure.) I had meetings with editors to discuss ideas; we couldn’t agree on anything. I made lists of almost every TV show and movie of the last 100 years that I could imagine writing a book about, but came up with nothing that everyone liked. I felt farther away from Doing What I Want than ever. The happy ending, however, is that in all of those crazy lists I made, I included the idea for an illustrated book called Pop Star Goddesses, which comes out this April from Morrow Gift. And I wrote a proposal for another idea I’d put on lists back in the Mary era, which felt like a long shot—but became When Women Invented Television, which I’m currently writing for Harper Books. So while I’m far from Stephen King levels of Doing What I Want, I am, somehow, in the middle of two projects that feel like dreams. But that’s only because I kept going after rejection, picked through the computer graveyard of my dead proposals and abandoned idea lists, and found the ones that someone would pay me for this time. I know how lucky I am any time someone will pay me to write a book, much less one I’m passionate about. The alternative is to get a job, but so far I’m happy I made this my profession, uncertainty and all.

We discuss all of these issues and much, much more on my podcast #Authoring. Visit us online here and subscribe wherever you listen to your podcasts.