As a Writer, You Can't Please Everyone. Also, You Shouldn't Even Try.
What is "success" anyway? And what's the *point* of writing?
Sales of my 2003 gay teen novel, Geography Club, were extremely strong right from the start.
Three days after its release, my editor called me to say, “Good news! Your book is selling so strongly that we’re going into a second printing. And in between the time we decided to go into that second printing, those books sold out — even though they aren’t printed yet — so now we’re going into a third printing!”
Within a month, we’d been contacted by four producers inquiring about the movie rights — and we had many more inquiries in the months that followed. (A feature film was finally released in 2014.)
All the while, I was inundated with literally thousands of fan letters and emails from happy readers.
At the same time, Geography Club received only fair-to-good industry reviews and won no major awards. And it currently has a middling 3.7 rating on Goodreads.
Subsequent books of mine got stronger reviews and did win awards — and most of these books also have much higher Goodreads ratings.
But I also didn’t get nearly as much fan mail, and most of those books didn’t sell nearly as many copies.
Which is all a pretty good illustration of something that took me decades to learn as a writer: you can’t please everyone.
More importantly, you shouldn’t even try. As a storyteller, that shouldn’t be your goal.
We all want to be successful, of course.
But what is “success” anyway?
Reviews? They’re not completely irrelevant, but every artist — including me! — has a story of a well-reviewed project that didn’t connect with audiences.
Beyond that, I think most artists also acknowledge that some projects get rave reviews because critics think they “should” get rave reviews — because they’re about an “important” or underserved subject matter, not necessarily because the work in question is all that good.
And online ratings? Don’t get me started.
Here’s a fun fact about Goodreads: my self-published books are always rated a half a star or more higher than my traditionally published books — and that’s even when I’m self-publishing a reprint edition of an earlier mainstream book.
Why would the exact same book get completely different ratings?
Who knows? Maybe it’s different covers, or maybe it has to do with how a traditionally published book is typically exposed to a broader, more “skeptical” audience.
Even the barometers of popular success can be surprisingly ambiguous. You can cite numbers like “box office success” and “total number of books sold,” but for these figures to mean anything at all, you also have to know how much the project cost to produce and how much was spent on marketing.
What were the financial expectations of the movie studio or book publisher?
Unfortunately, while the movie studio or book publisher always knows this, they definitely don’t share it with the writer.
I think the same question applies even to self-published authors. I’ve heard of plenty of folks who have sold thousands of books — but to do that, they also had to spend thousands of dollars on online advertising.
And they’re not going to tell you this either, because part of their marketing strategy is to portray themselves as “successful” as possible.
None of which means there’s no such thing as writing “success” — or that writers can’t feel it when it happens.
And it definitely is a feeling. Success in the arts can be maddeningly elusive, but it’s still very obvious when it finally happens.
My book, Geography Club, was very obviously a success — not because of reviews, or awards, or even necessarily sales.
It was a success because it had an impact: it created a fandom and inspired others, and it was part of an early wave of books that shifted the trajectory of YA literature — which, in turn, also shifted television and movies.
I mean, hey, maybe it even changed the world a little tiny bit.
I don’t necessarily see my other books as “failures.” Most of them found at least some passionate fans.
Which is what the writing process is really all about, right? Creating passion and having an impact — connecting with an audience?
But after thirty years in this business, I’ve realized something counterintuitive: you don’t connect with people by trying to connect with everyone. At least, I never have.
It’s a weird kind of paradox.
Once you’ve had success, and you realize how nice it is, it’s almost impossible not to think, How the hell do I extend or recreate this?
It can really mess with your mind.
But it’s also a trap, because you become hyper-aware of trends, and fan expectations, and exactly how your career seems to be doing compared to your writing peers.
And ironically, I think all of these things are in direct contradiction to the thing that probably gave you that success in the first place.
Part of the problem with chasing trends in the arts is that most of us aren’t fast enough to write and produce anything to meet the trend — nothing of quality anyway.
By the time your project is done, the world will likely have moved on. There’s also a high chance that audiences will view your work as precisely what it is: a cynical rip-off.
More importantly, if you’re chasing trends, you’ll never have much of an impact. At best, you’ll be riding the coattails of someone else’s impact.
On the contrary, to have an impact, I think you need to attempt something new — or at least put a great new twist on some older idea.
It’s called creative writing, remember?
I think part of the reason why so many people were so excited by Geography Club was because, well, maybe they hadn’t seen anything exactly like it before.
That’s the reason I wrote the book: because most of the gay teen books I’d read up until then had been so earnest, or too literary and depressing, or just not fun or funny enough for my taste.
Look, I can’t prove that what excites audiences — what creates an impact — is originality and authenticity. Lord knows that plenty of cynical rip-offs do find some success. And it’s equally true that plenty of “great” works get ignored — either because they’re ahead of their time, or maybe because they’re simply marketed badly.
But I know that sometimes originality and authenticity sell.
The real question is, why are you writing? What kind of writer do you want to be?
If you’re in it for the money, or even the fame, please know that there are much easier ways to get what you want. Have you considered reality TV?
But if you’re writing to express yourself and to maybe also have an impact on the world, well, why not ask more of the world — and yourself?
It’s the opposite of trying to please everyone. It’s about writing what you think is relevant or interesting regardless of whether anyone else is interested.
It’s about, yeah, pleasing yourself.
Here’s the cold, hard truth about this approach: the audience might find you where you are, and you will have what is very obviously a big success.
Or maybe they won’t.
But failure was always a possibility anyway; you can never guarantee success. Writing is literally an art, not a science, and no amount of trying to game the system is going to change that — not even with AI, at least not for decades to come.
At least my way, you’ll have a chance of having a big impact on the world.
And it’ll also probably be much easier to live with yourself.
P.S. People often ask me what my favorites of my own books are. It isn’t Geography Club, which wouldn’t even make my top ten.
Here are my three favorites:
Barefoot in the City of Broken Dreams: This novel for adults is about the main character from Geography Club, now in his twenties and trying to make it as a screenwriter in Los Angeles. It’s my most autobiographical book, based on what happened to me when I moved to Los Angeles to try to make it as a screenwriter. It wasn’t until my experience was over that I realized I had essentially lived the story of the classic movie about Hollywood, Sunset Boulevard. Except — spoiler alert! — I didn’t die at the end.
Project Pay Day: This is my stab at a middle grade novel — with lots of humor, mystery, and adventure. But it’s also about a particular moment between childhood and adulthood. When I was fifteen years old, I had a lot of the freedom of adulthood but with almost none of the responsibility, and I really didn’t want it to end. I think this is a fairly common feeling, but I felt like I’d never read exactly that before.
The Otto Digmore Difference: This is another adult book, about a burn survivor with a disfigured face trying to make it as an actor in Hollywood. Books almost never turn out as well as you imagine when you first start writing them. But this one did.
Brent Hartinger is a screenwriter and author. Check out his other newsletter about his travels at BrentAndMichaelAreGoingPlaces.com.
Nice one, Brent. Great post, and a great piece of advice. And totally with you on this. I feel like we all need to learn this eventually. It was sort of the theme of the picture book I made. And that too was making something for myself 😱 IT'S ALL CONNECTED.
Re changing the world, it was your early books and those of David Levithan that inspired me to write in the LGBTQ+ genre, especially when I compared them with books I found depressing, like Dancer from the Dance (Holleran) and A Boy’s Own Story (White). I wanted to write stories about real people whose destinies were not dictated solely by whom they loved, rather than tales ending in tragedy because the characters were not het-cis. I hope my work, like yours, has contributed to a lifting-up of life’s possibilities for my readers.