About Artistic Compromise

 

I read another blog the other day where an author was speculating as to why some books sell and others don’t. This is a question that haunts all writers from the most successful among us to the poor, passionate scribe who never manages to sell fifty copies.

 

The suggested explanations for less than stellar sales are always good ones. Cover art and cover blurbs do matter. Some sub-genres just sell less than others. Marketing — if no one knows about your book, they can’t buy it — definitely influences sales. Everything from your title to the month/week/day your book releases can influence sales.

 

But the one thing you rarely read in these blogs, the one thing we are all afraid to consider (let alone put it into words) is that we are not writing books a lot of people want to read.

 

This, however, is usually the painfully simple answer.

 

So painful is it to contemplate, most authors reject the idea instantly. After all, we can all name books we don’t like that have turned out to be enormously popular. We all know that a book can be both bad and successful. And we all know that brilliant books can sink like a stone. Success is no more fair in publishing than anywhere else in the world, and that is never an encouraging thought.

 

It is especially discouraging in a climate of just keep trying!!

 

If writing is your dream, then you should certainly keep trying to succeed at it. But endlessly repeating unsuccessful strategies is unlikely to result in a new and exciting outcome. (Unless you consider a nervous breakdown or complete despair new and exciting.)

 

If your work does not appeal to a lot of readers there are two possible reasons:

 

1 – The type of stories you are interested in telling don’t resonate with a broad spectrum of readers.

 

2 – Your writing chops aren’t there yet.

 

If the problem is technical — you’re still learning your craft — that’s a relatively easy fix. Keep reading, keep listening to readers, keep learning, keep writing.  That’s basically it. Writing is both craft and talent, and craft can be learned. In fact, craft is more reliable than talent. Craft will carry you over those periods when inspiration takes a holiday and you’ve got nothing but the power of the words to scoot you along to the finish line.

 

But sometimes the problem is the type of story you are interested in telling.

 

And this is where you must be honest with yourself. If you define “success” as making money writing or having a lot of people read your work, then you must be realistic about whether your stories are commercial. You must accept that you liking something is not automatically the same as being commercial. You must analyze and evaluate the books in your chosen genre that are commercial, and you must consider what these books have that yours do not. And no, “lots of sex” is not usually the answer. As comforting as this is to believe.

 

On the other hand, if you define success as being able to write exactly what you want to write, whether anybody ever reads you or not, then you must be realistic about what that means. It means intense personal and artistic satisfaction — and the possibility that you will be the only one reading your work.

 

Too often I see and hear authors who want to have it both ways. They want to write exactly what they want to write AND they want to make lots of money at it and be widely read. And this does happen sometimes. If what you naturally want to write happens to be popular, that could very well happen. Even so, there is a certain amount of compromise behind every success story. After all, just learning to spell and punctuate is a compromise.

 

You have to be honest with yourself. What do you really want? Only you can answer this. You cannot expect readers to define success for you.