No publishing without penalties.
By Allison K Williams
A writer asks: My book is controversial, and publishing could open me up for harassment, maybe even violent threats. How do I get ready to face this?
Another writer: How do I build platform without opening myself up to unbalanced people or too many opinions or being too available to anyone who wants to get in touch? I’ve already deleted all my social media out of fear. I plan to market through speaking engagements, podcast appearances and publishing companion essays and articles, but how do I share my book without allowing people to just yell at me?
Here’s the thing with being a writer: there is no publishing without penalties. No matter how tightly you lock yourself up, there will be people who aren’t happy with what you have to say and tell you so.
But when people get angry or mean, that is proof that your work is working. That what you have said has been so well-written and so powerful, it has threatened something important to the person yelling. People don’t get all stirred up because they don’t like you —they get stirred up because you made them question what they believed, whether that’s what they believed about your mutual family history, what they believed about themselves, or what they believed about an issue. In reading, they poked themselves where it hurts, and they aren’t happy about that.
You are not obligated to engage, respond or even listen.
Generally, don’t read your reviews, get a friend or your significant other to read them for you, and they can pass you the good ones. Don’t react to reviews unless it’s “thank you.” But let yourself know as well that it is actually very rare that anyone can do you significant harm. If anybody bothers you online, mute them, block their email, block them on social media. Concentrated, sustained harassment that we read about in the media, and hear about on social media, are the unicorn events. A female game designer bombarded by misogynists on social media and chat forums. A writer withdrawing a book set in Russia because readers didn’t want Russia right now.
But unless your family is highly active on social media, they will not be able to mount that kind of attack. And unless your family and friends are highly active on social media, if you do suffer a campaign of harassment, they will barely recognize it happening, and when you explain why it’s bothering you, they won’t understand why you don’t just get offline. (You know, like when you came home in middle school and your mom said, “you must be exaggerating, you can’t possibly have no friends.”)
Our literary world feels enormous, and that’s good. If we’re building a strong platform, we are connecting with readers and other writers near and far, talking to them regularly online or IRL. Especially after limiting our interactions with the in-person world over the past three years, the literary world—particularly the part of the literary world on social media—starts to feel like the whole world. It’s not. American Dirt bombed on social media— even the book-launch centerpieces went viral for racism —then sold 3 million copies worldwide.
Most people don’t read most things.
We aren’t as important as we think we are. Marketers have learned that author name recognition is a key indicator of whether someone buys a book, yet getting readers to remember our names is so difficult that Paula Hawkins’ second book was marketed as “from the author of The Girl on the Train.” Because a Big Five publishing company with a full set of marketing tentacles couldn’t get readers to remember the author of an international best seller the first time around.
Writing is not safe. Writing can’t be 100% safe. We are blessed and cursed to follow an art form where when we become our truest and most beautiful self on the page, that person is going to powerfully anger some people—very often, for reasons you would not have expected.
But the reward for the risk is that work that angers some will powerfully lift up others.
As a writer, I have a moral code: those of us who have the ability to live through the experience, to make it to the other side, to turn back and say, “you can make it, too,” must do so if we possibly can. We must write our stories on behalf of those who cannot tell their stories themselves, who don’t have the skill or determination to get the words out, or who aren’t yet on the other side.
It is not possible to both write a powerful message and dictate how it is received.
You may not be ready for that commitment, and that’s OK. Someone else will risk on your behalf. But if you can pay the price, there’s a reader who needs you to take that risk for them.
_______
Allison K Williams is Brevity’s Social Media Editor. Her work has been trashed by critics and online commenters in Toronto, Edmonton, Chicago, Tampa, London and Kalamazoo. Ready to risk? Join her, Jane Friedman and Dinty W. Moore for a Craft & Publishing Voyage aboard the Queen Mary 2, April 28-May 5. More information/register .
All Rights Reserved Book Blog