The Seven-Year Long Mistake I Made Writing ALU

Somewhere between writing skill and a marketable idea is where a book get published

If you’ve been following along with this blog from the start (and you have, I’m sure), you’d remember that I started querying my urban fantasy novel, ALU, around mid-February, and was also writing another sort-of urban fantasy I was calling TOCI. Given you’ve been following along there was absolutely no need to provide this context, of course.

Going into querying, I already knew that I was going to learn so much. It’s impossible to do anything new without learning so much, and a lot of that must be from the doing. It’s evil, but also a little cool in that way (as all good things are). But the lesson I got out of querying wasn’t the lesson I was expecting to learn. I thought I’d learn how to market a book, instead, I learned I was not a writer ready to be published, because I was not a writer who understood market.

As you know, I’m sure, from following my blog for so long, my first manuscript was a near-decade worth of effort. That meant that I started it when I was around fifteen, and all of the elements and themes and vibes that went into it was stuff that I was interested in when I was fifteen—there wasn't much more tact to how I chose them than that.

I often call ALU the novel that taught me how to write a novel, but it didn’t teach me how to sell one, and I think that side of traditional publishing was missing from my initial novelling efforts. I had the ‘write a good story’ part down, but was missing the ‘write a marketable story’ side.

It’s a natural, if maybe a bit unfortunate, aspect of being an aspiring author. I want people to read it, so people need to buy it, so I need to convince someone else that people will buy and read it. Thus, it’s not enough that it’s a good story. When I realized this, I really started to scrutinize its marketable aspects. The biggest hurdle in trying to query this manuscript was that it was almost impossible to explain without trapping my audience in a room for half an hour, and didn’t fit neatly into any one genre. I call it an urban fantasy, but my beta readers called it a dystopian-adventure, it could also be considered a NA written in YA style, just short of upmarket fiction, kind of slow burn kind of found family kind of a lot of things. If it’s for everyone, it’s for no one, and I think that breadth of ideas placed it into the “no one” category.

That was a tough thing to realize, and I spent a lot of time doubting myself and denying it. But in talking to a very honest friend, I was trying to describe it, and she interrupted like halfway through and was like, “hm, this doesn’t bode well.” Listen L I was trying my best. Of course, she was right. The fact that I really couldn’t describe it succinctly even after so much time spent putting together query letters really didn't bode well.

So I decided to take a few steps back from ALU and instead turned my attention to researching the genres—their conventions, their markets, how they looked across different books etc. And I discovered that I didn’t really want to write an urban fantasy. Or rather, my book was trying to be something else with maybe magical elements, but given I didn’t know yet what that ‘something else’ was, I was falling short of it. It left ALU in a mushy grey area that even I didn’t have faith that I could sell. Imagine my query letter: “I am seeking representation for my mushy grey area manuscript…”

I was also reading a very wide range of genres at this time trying to train myself on what upmarket writing looked like (rather than ‘just short of upmarket’ writing, which I was already a master of). It wasn’t until I discovered gothic literature—and to be clear, discovered is a heavy word here, I ‘got into’ it—that I realized what that ‘something else’ was. I had written a poorly executed gothic. Good to know.

Actually, great to know, because this was the leaping off point I needed to accomplish both of my goals: improve my writing skill, and write a marketable story. I did a swan dive into gothic literature, starting with the classics as my foundation and slowly expanding my scope to contemporary takes on the genre—from YA to NA to adult. The more I delved into it, the more sure I was that this was the kind of genre my works belonged in all along. I mean, in hindsight, it’s kind of obvious. What’s a better way to say ‘dark and tense and sort of magical with paranormal elements’? No need to reinvent the wheel here.

And with an actual, concrete genre, I could start collecting the people I know would be interested in reading it. There's an established community I can aim for on social media. In fact, I’m planning an entire gothic month for October on my Instagram (@gatesannai), so you should follow me to catch that ;-)

Do I wish this lesson had come sooner, like say at the start of my near-decade of writing ALU? I'm... still not sure. There is a certain innocence and joy of creation in just writing what you want to write without thinking about how you’re going to sell the thing afterwards. That’s what ALU was—it was a conglomerate of everything I’ve ever loved and feared and wanted and hated into one mushy grey area. It was the perfect book for an audience of one: me.

And like I say, it taught me the technical aspects of novel writing. It’s hard to say how focusing on a market would have changed the process. Maybe I would have come out with the novel I always thought I would publish… Or maybe I would have fallen out of love with it, gotten frustrated, and given up.

So for that reason, this isn’t the kind of lesson I think I would teach young writers if I were in that position. I think it’s much more important to just be excited about writing and fall in love with it first. I have time to write things for an audience of more than just me—I have time to fit myself into a market.

Going forward, I’m letting poor ALU rest a while and am moving onto a new project with everything I’ve learned and practiced. I figured I needed a fresh start, a blank page. To unravel a project 7 years in the making and rebuild it Frankenstein-style (I’ve actually read that book now) while it’s still so fresh in my mind feels like an uphill battle (didn't end well for Victor either). I won’t say I’ve given up on it, but I’m ready to let her sleep for a while.

I feel like I'm stepping into the next era of my writing journey--a brand new blank page. And given I'm trying something new, I'm sure I'm bound to learn so much more.