Behind the Scenes of Cost of Living (and Elsewhere)

Or, rejection is everywhere

Yesterday, a writing friend got some bad news. Writers are always getting bad news. It’s not specific to this person. Not that the details don’t matter, but rejection is nonstop if you’re a writer. That part you may have heard—that lots of people encounter rejections, and some of them may be career-reorienting. But I think some people believe that once you have X—whatever X is (big book deal, tenure if you teach, hitting the bestseller list, an agent, MFA degree, multiple books published, or receiving a big prize)—you are free of those types of issues. It’s not true. In some ways, sometimes, every book is a brand new book, separate from the successes and failures of past books. You have to learn a certain kind of resiliency in order to survive. To lean into the rejections and everything else. My friend and I talked on the phone, came up with a plan. Next steps. New steps. How to weather the storm. They will be okay, maybe even better than before, in the end. But it’s vital to have people who understand. This industry is crazy, and it’s so important to have friends who will listen when things don’t go well.

A few years ago, a different friend had their book rejected by their editor. This book was under contract. They’d worked together before. This was not their first rodeo. But the editor wanted the previous book part two, to build on prior success, apparently, something my friend didn’t know. The proposal for the book matched what my friend turned in, but it wasn’t what the editor wanted. My friend didn’t want to write previous book part two, didn’t feel like that was even possible. I hope everyone gets to read it someday; my friend made an absolutely gorgeous book. But the editor said no, and then some phone calls were made, and the contract was canceled. The previous book sold very well, by the way, and went into multiple printings. They have a following. My friend earned out their advance, which is unusual for many writers (for folks who may be unfamiliar reading this, books under contract at big publishers receive an advance against future royalties, minus your agent’s fee (typically 15%). My friend sold enough books to pay back the advance (at 10-15% of book sales) plus earn royalty checks. This is very hard to do for most writers). Still, the editor didn’t want it. Maybe the editor’s mind was changed by covid, or by the market, or by internal politics at the imprint, a sort of shift my friend didn’t anticipate. Nonetheless, the outcome was the same, immutable: the book was canceled.

Cost of Living almost didn’t happen. For a few years since the book came out, I’ve told a story, or a version of a story. That I sold it as an essay collection, and then it was revised into a memoir, and then back into an essay collection, and then it was released. This part is true. But it’s not the whole story. In fall 2019, I sent my book to my editor. This was after I had agreed to make it into more of a memoir. I tried. I really did. It wasn’t a terrible book, just not the book I had originally set out to write. I didn’t know how to manage time in the book, but I did my best. Then my editor didn’t say anything. I’d tweeted a little about how I was hoping to hear news from someone, let this slip to another writer I didn’t know well, who then relayed it to my editor, that the tweet was about him. He was upset. 87 days later, we had a phone call. 87 days is a lot of days to wait for any feedback from your book, especially if your contract might have a clause that says something like—for example—after 90 days without any feedback your editor is in breach of contract. So 87 days could be cutting it close. Still, I was grateful that he had news for me, had scheduled the call. Taken the time to read my book, I’d hoped. This was early January 2020, just after the new year. My editor was upset about my tweet, which was a joke. This, of course, would also come to color our call, and our relationship.

On the phone, it was a disaster. He kept telling me he didn’t get it. There was no real additional feedback that I could glean from this call. Just that he didn’t get it. I wondered if he’d read the book, or prepared for the call. Everything seemed vague and overly critical. I’d previously gotten positive feedback about the book from him. This iteration wasn’t too far removed from previous drafts, or from the final book. The prose was all still there. I was devastated. I thought, maybe we’ll pull the book, and find a new press somewhere else, someone better suited. I would cash out my old 401k and pay back the part of the advance I’d already received. Maybe go back to work as a project manager, regroup, make some money, find a press and an editor who would get it. I didn’t say anything about this on the phone, of course. I was so angry, I could barely speak at all. My agent, god bless him, was also on this call, and finally said, “I think we should end this call.” So we did. A minute later, my editor phoned him and said he didn’t want to lose the book. “Well,” my agent said. Then my agent called me and asked what I wanted to do.

I wanted to pull the book. I was so angry. It didn’t seem like my editor had read my draft at all, based on the feedback I’d received. My editor had mostly edited big, glittery books before mine. Commercial books, not literary ones. Books that made bestseller lists, formed endcap displays in big box stores, books that were ghostwritten for celebrities, pop culture, for TV tie-ins: automatic bestsellers because the person who wrote it had millions of followers on Instagram or Twitter and all the marketing money and possibly a reality show. Books that came pre-polished from developmental editors—this is increasingly common in the industry. Or books where the prose didn’t matter as much, where the sentences came secondary to the story. I was into good sentences, couldn’t he understand? He acquired my book knowing it was literary. I knew this could be a sort of risk, that all the other editors I had spoken to had edited literary books. He was the outlier, but he had expressed so much interest in my book, had spoken about it so passionately. He seemed to see me, at least in our initial calls. I had an MFA, an essay in Best American Essays, and an extremely literary-minded agent who represented poets, for goodness sakes. How was it that I was so far off from what my editor wanted?

I took some time to be angry in different places: the grocery store, the pharmacy. I sullenly tacked up my friend’s horse and tried not to think about things as I rode. I was mad making the bed, watching TV, doing laundry, editing for others. I stomped around the neighborhood with the dog. I could not read. I was pretty insufferable; Ori can attest to this. I called everyone I knew, all my writing friends, and complained bitterly, though never publicly. I couldn’t post about this on twitter, or facebook, or any public place. I texted with friends instead, had overlong FaceTime calls where they lent a supportive, exhausted ear. Then in late February 2020, six weeks after the call, I impulsively bought a plane ticket to New York to see my friend’s book launch. I stayed with my youngest brother, who lives in Manhattan. And I emailed my editor and asked if he had time for coffee.

We met at his office, upstairs, at the coffee bar. He paid with his corporate card. We sat and talked for an hour. In the end, I agreed to give it another go, suggested that we start over on our relationship, apologized for my tweet; he seemed satisfied with this. If you were to look at this scene from another angle, you might think it’s not necessarily my responsibility to smooth things over. But I did anyway. I wanted my book to exist. Sometimes the choice feels impossible—like my friend, who couldn’t have written that other book their editor wanted, even if they wanted to. That other book didn’t exist, because the stories the editor wanted never happened. I had a choice, so I made it.

I have other friends who didn’t sell books the first time they went on submission, revised, and came back years later with multiple offers. There are those who switched agents and then suddenly sold a book they’d been trying to sell for years. Writers denied NEA grants every application cycle who went on to win a Guggenheim. Or people who got into residencies and then denied upon reapplication. There’s no telling what to expect. Rejection is everywhere, all the time. It’s stupid, but you need to keep going anyway.

Shortly after I met with my editor, of course, the pandemic hit. And then I revised. My editor provided edits, and they were good edits. I leaned heavily on friends for writing and editing support as well. And Cost of Living came out in February 2022. It got some good reviews. People seemed to respond to it. I feel good about the book that came out of that time together, and the edits I ultimately got from my editor. I sold another book, this time a memoir, that will come out in a couple years. I’m working with a new editor, which I’ve mentioned here before. My first editor left for a different publisher, so I’m not sure how it’ll work, but I’m so relieved to know that she’s worked with lots of literary books, and she’s a writer too, so she knows how hard it can be. I hope she likes my sentences, and the story I have to tell.