Watch Me Try to Bust Out of My Rut
Plus you won't believe who I'm donating to--please stop me!--and some good news at the end. Americans really do buy lots of books!
I’ve been writing lots of newsletters for you. You haven’t read them because each time, I set them aside as drafts, and within a few days or weeks, the story and the mood had changed!
I wrote thousands of words (which ended up being a useful form of self-therapy) about the rut I was in, and why I haven’t been feeling content or successful for at least two months. It’s not the first time I’ve had a case of Writer’s Blues. (Hint: nearly always a few months after a book launch, as the adrenaline and sales optimism subsides, to be replaced with grim reality and a hatred for BookScan.) These blue spells aren’t quite writer’s block. I don’t stop writing and I don’t want to stop writing, which is something friends often suggest. But I do lose joy and ease. I procrastinate more. I google myself as if finding new reviews or coverage will prove I exist. I ponder the futility of writing for small audiences. Or even large ones. I find new ways to ask, “Why bother?”
In these draft newsletters that I never sent to you, I explained all the things I was trying, everything from changing the location where I write to analyzing my desire for control and my overreliance on metrics and external validation.
Every time I thought about my mental state and what it needs, I pondered my deep love for ultratriathlon. Ironman training rewards me for every effort I make. There are few gatekeepers. (No rejection letters. Imagine!) Everyone can do it, and since just finishing is the whole point, nearly everyone wins. The races themselves feature the perfect ratio of “can control” (preparation, nutrition, focus, effort, attitude) versus “can’t control” (weather, illness, flats), plus a level of exertion that creates flow, plus a feeling of community rather than competition —which is pretty funny, because it’s a goddamn actual competition! But I promise you! Ironmans are easy, fun, and noncompetitive compared to book publishing. Maybe that should give us all pause. Should making a life as an artist or writer be ten times harder than ultraendurance sports? I wish it weren’t so.
Every time I penned a new newsletter, I was really talking to myself, of course. Coaching myself. Questioning myself. Lecturing myself. Re-orienting myself to the same old lessons I’ve been learning my whole writing life. Things like, process, not outcome. Things like, one must decide each day to make meaning. Things like, help others.
Everything helped a little. But in the rest of this newsletter, I thought you might want to know the three things that helped the most.
Here they are:
Setting aside the novel that I was working on, which had stopped being fun over a month ago, and then allowing myself to wallow for a week.
I tried other fixes. I was at 44,000 words of a new novel—one my publisher doesn’t know about yet—and I kept telling myself “Just finish a full draft between now and late fall! You don’t have to love it to finish it.” We always hit moments in a draft when we are bored or pessimistic, but my gut was sending me messages and I finally had to listen. It is very very possible I will pick up this draft again, sometime in the future. That’s fine! But for now, I needed to work on something that felt more like a discovery process and less like dreaded Sunday night homework. Also note: I did have to let myself wallow. For me that means food, drink, fresh air, sleeping in. But not too long.
Telling my writers’ group and another friend that I was HUGELY, no I mean HUGELY, DEMOTIVATED.
I feel like I confess to ups and downs readily, including in these newsletters. But for some reason, just asking my writers’ group for ten minutes last week to talk about my current mental state and then doing so really shifted my mood. I hadn’t handed in any pages, and I really needed to talk and hear from others about their struggles. In fact, hearing my fellow writers’ motivation problems probably mattered more than talking about my own. Funny that. Only connect, E.M. Forster wrote. I love that guy. (There’s a repressed Edwardian man deep inside me.)
Donating to Trump’s PAC.
Did I catch you? Are you still reading?
Okay, that was a cheat. I didn’t actually send money to Trump. Yet.
But I did provide my credit card information to a website called Stickk that will donate $5 a week between now and the election for every week I don’t meet my writing goal! Yes, I really did!
I don’t need that kind of accountability regime for my fiction, but I do need it for a nonfiction project—a language learning memoir about four years I spent learning Spanish, including over a year spent living in Mexico—that I’ve been writing off and on since 2017. Finishing that manuscript in 2024 would make me so happy. For the moment, I don’t even care if I sell it, or if it makes me any money. In other words, it’s a pure-hearted goal—all process—and that’s perfect for me right now, in a year when I spent too much time thinking about marketing and not enough time thinking about the joy of writing a book that will mean the most to a very select audience. (Starting with me! I want to read the damn thing when it’s done.)
If you’d like to check out Stickk, it’s been around a long while and has some amazing stats to ponder. Over a half-million people have put $66 million on the line in order to coax themselves into getting fit, quitting smoking, sticking with a hobby, learning something new for work, you name it. You can use a “referee” or choose the self-reporting method. You also get to choose if you name an anti-charity, as I did, or want your money to go to a pre-named friend if you don’t meet your daily, weekly, or monthly goal. Or you can skip the actual “stick” part of the commitment. But I personally think you should go “all in.” Choose a minimum goal and then make that stick really big and dangerous! (Carrots are good, too. Carrots PLUS sticks are the best.)
And now that I’ve told you about this, you can email me or comment on my social media every darn week, reminding me, You better be writing that language memoir, Andromeda! Don’t donate to the dark side!!!
See how fun that is? I’m smiling just thinking about it.
Don’t listen to people who say no one reads anymore.
Americans bought over a billion books last year. As Lincoln Michel explained in his Substack post in April:
Is one billion plus a lot of print books? Depends on your point of view. For comparison’s sake, there were 825 million movie tickets sold in the US and Canada in 2023. So roughly as many books are purchased as movie tickets, two somewhat comparable entertainment options in terms of price. OTOH, that’s new movies in theaters versus all books in publication. Additionally, far more books are published each year than movies, meaning that—as everyone knows—most individual movies are watched far more than individual books are read.
Whether this number is big or small, it’s fairly stable. Print book sales have not been decimated by digital sales/streaming. That’s right, despite the introduction of ebooks, various Netflix for books services, and endless cries about the death of publishing…. overall print sales have held pretty steady. And when we add in ebook sales, that means overall book sales are actually increasing.
I was surprised and heartened that Americans buy more books than movie theatre tickets.
Even so, you still might be feeling like people just don’t read much these days. I say that because I get emails from friends expressing that exact lament. (If you’re one of my friends who says this, I’m not outing you in particular. A lot of people say this!)
The proof I get that people are still reading and talking passionately about books—even aside from Ron Charles of the Washington Post, who is paid to do so—comes largely from the Substacks I read. There are so many newsletters out there written by people as thoughtful labors of love.
This is not the same thing as social media posts—including ones of book covers, potentially posted by people who may or may not have actually read the books shown. It’s also not the same thing as New York Times “best of” lists that frankly bore me. Maybe I’m the only one annoyed by the NYT’s latest successful effort to entice people into creating free, shareable content for them, as versus the old NYT, which used to have long-term reviewers I actually enjoyed reading.
What I most want to read isn’t a review written by a one-shot freelancer (who may or may not know much about books) but rather an ongoing conversation hosted by someone who just plain loves talking about books, including ones that aren’t making the news.
I want diversity. I want surprises. I want eclectic takes. I want deep dives. I want to get to know the particular bookstacker/book-sharer’s taste over time, so that I know whether her recs might be just the thing for me to add to my own TBR/nightstand.
If you read Substacks, here are some free newsletters to check out. Don’t be put off by the pop-ups that ask you to pay money, by the way. It’s usually an option, not a requirement.
Cassie reviews the books you aren’t seeing EVERYWHERE this month, or maybe never heard about. Which is such a nice change.
Elizabeth Held makes recs that often play off topics in the news or just stuff she loves. She covers a fair bit of romance, but other genres as well. Again: diversity! Not only new releases! This woman loves all kinds of books and her enthusiasm is contagious.
Quirkier and even more eclectic, Natalie’s Substack often challenges me to consider books I wouldn’t typically read. Or simply to think about book stuff—like the allure of being a “completionist” (reading every book an author has written).
Jane Ratcliffe has an extremely popular interview series (some of it paywalled) on Substack. Within it you will find a once-per-month only new column of book recommendations by Joanna Rakoff. If you don’t want to be assaulted by endless recs, this may be the thing for you!
OK, so JD Vance (blah) comes from Ohio. But so do the 40,000 people I met in July!
One last proof that readers exist.
In July I was invited to be a featured author at the amazing Columbus Book Festival, only in its second year and planning to continue. (Praise the lord.)
So many readers, librarians, authors, families, and book-loving volunteers. So many book sales. And funny little bookish gifts. So much joy. And wow, this thing was organized.
One of my favorite parts was participating in a kind of “speed dating” involving authors and readers. We authors stayed at a table, then every ten minutes the readers (in groups of three to five) moved. They got to ask us questions. We got to ask them questions. Boy, did I love this! So much more personal than just one author talking to a roomful of people.
Did I mention I sold a few books? That felt very good. Not that sales are the most important thing—see the opening of this newsletter. But we gotta make a few sales sometime, somehow.
I hope I didn’t give you some emotional whiplash.
This was an long newsletter. That’s because I couldn’t bear to send you a glum snapshot without any cheerful news, or even worse—lots of cheer without the grim reality.
I started out talking about a deep rut. I ended up with happy photos and lots of exclamation marks about people met and books sold. Both of these states of mind co-existed in the last month, and the rut (two months) was a lot longer than the “Yay, Columbus!” (two days) giddy spell.
For now, I am deeply grateful to be writing again—something I’m excited about, something that wakes up my senses and makes me appreciate the authors who have gone before me.
Whether you’re in a rut at the moment, or in the zone, or somewhere in between, I send you my very best late summer wishes.
Looking for book coaching? I have fall openings for full manuscript developmental editing as well as monthly coaching packages.
Still here? Then you won’t mind me sharing this one last nice thing, fresh off the interwebs. The Deepest Lake made a darn nice August list at The Observer.
Deepest Lake at Goodreads (reviews always appreciated!), Amazon, and Bookshop.org.
Hi Andromeda. Thanks for the newsy update.
I'm so impressed that you wrote all those draft newsletters. I only write them in my head and then later I can't recall what I was going to say that was so brilliant/insightful. The words slip away so easily and probably weren't that brilliant in the first place if I'm honest, but I like to dream.
I love all the bookish newsletters you featured. I get so many great ideas from reading other people's recommendations. I'm conscious that we all have different reading tastes, but it's always nice to see a recommendation that's right up your alley. I also love discovering new books that I might otherwise have missed. The Substack book community is a wonderful place.
Save Democracy, Write!! :D