THE ONE WITH TWO BOOKS IN FOUR YEARS
Category: Adult
In 2018, I went on sub with high expectations. I knew that most books didn’t sell fast—or at all—but I had friends who sold after just a week or two on sub, and I was checking my email every few minutes. You know the feeling of a phantom phone vibration? That was me, all the time. I had revised my YA crossover fantasy with my agent for two years, during which time I had rewritten around half of it, and everyone who had read it had loved it. CPs told me that they couldn’t imagine that this wouldn’t sell, that it was one of their favorite books, that it was timely and important and also just a gorgeous read.
I bet you can guess where this is going.
We languished on sub for days, then weeks, then months. Passes began to roll in. They were all very nice and very contradictory—the topic was either too niche or too overdone; adult editors saw it as too YA and YA editors saw it as too adult—and the overarching theme was just that they couldn’t connect with the book. They didn’t fall in love the way they needed to.
There was one piece of good news, though. One editor who had reluctantly passed mentioned some thoughts on ways to make the book stronger, and said she would be happy to read another version. And so I got back to revising. I thought her suggestions made sense, and more than anything I wanted this to be the book. It was the first book that I had written that I was really, really proud of, and I wanted it to be out in the world. I thought it deserved to be.
Fast forward another several months, and we had gone back on submission. That editor loved the new version, and so did her team—she just wanted to see if we could up the pacing a little bit. So another revision, but I could do that! I was sure that we were close, that this was about to be that moment. The last yes.
It wasn’t.
That’s the thing about these early revisions with an editor, known as R&Rs—while a good sign, they’re no guarantee. And when we heard back from the editor that after all this it still wasn’t going to be an offer, I suddenly went from excitement to crushing despair. There were more rejections after that, but that was the moment when I began to suspect what would turn out to be true: this book wasn’t going to be the one. I was no longer checking my email with frantic excitement, though every day my terrible, treacherous heart would whisper, what if today is the day?
All in all, we were on sub for about two years, including 3+ rounds of editors at just about every major publishing house. In 2020, I finally began to let go of this book that had consumed so much of my life and work on something new. It was completely different—a new age category, a new genre, and though it was hard to write anything at that point I think it was easier because of how different it was, and because at the end of the day it was a story I wanted desperately to read, which meant I had to write it for myself. The idea had been simmering in my mind for a while, but I didn’t finish writing it until halfway through 2020, when the pandemic meant I had nothing else I could do. Before all the despair of sub, writing had been a way to give me hope, and I really needed some of it in that moment. I was expecting to spend another two years revising with my agent, but it turns out that all my rewriting of my first book had actually done something: I had a better sense of structure, plot, and character arc, and because I had outlined this one first (and run my outline by my agent!), I didn’t have to rewrite anything from the ground up. We went through a couple rounds of revisions, and then suddenly we went on sub.
I wasn’t expecting anything this time around, of course. I was definitely still stressed; I felt like publishing had clearly and definitively rejected me once already, and it hurt like hell to voluntarily put myself through the same thing again. I did a lot of reading and tried not to think about editors reading my book—at least they were different editors, I guess? And then I did something that I hadn’t done in a long time: I opened up that old book, the one I had rewritten and cried over and loved so much, and discovered that for all the heartache of sub…I still loved reading it. Even though nothing had come of it, I realized I was still glad I wrote it. And so I told myself that if this book didn’t sell either, I would be okay. I would grieve (again), and then I would pick myself up, and eventually I would write a new book.
One week into sub, an editor asked for a call.
She was almost done reading. She loved it. She wanted to know if I had any time to chat. Of course, I immediately began to panic. What if she hated the ending? What if her team didn’t like it? What if it didn’t make it through acquisitions? From my experience, the close calls are always the ones that hurt the most, because those are the moments you get your hopes up. But—the call happened. And my agent called me right afterward, and I asked because I had to, because I needed to hear it, Does this mean what I think it means? Is this happening?
And my agent, who had been with me through all the ups and downs of the past four years, said very calmly, They’re putting in an offer. You’re going to be a published author.
And then my agent had to say it again, because I was crying.
Honestly, even all these months later, it still feels surreal to me. I think back to the person I was the first time I was on sub—nervous, hopeful, all my dreams resting shakily on circumstances so outside of my control—and wish I could give that person a hug. Sub is so hard. It’s full of emotion and fear and you feel like your whole life can change in an instant, because it can. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from this experience, it’s that what happens to your books aren’t a reflection of you, or your worth. All we can do is write the stories we want to read, and to keep on writing them.
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The stories on this blog are posted anonymously so that authors can speak candidly about their experience. If you have a sub story you’d like to share, drop me an email at: katedylanbooks@gmail.com
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