We always talk about hard work and persistence. Especially on this blog — we’re all working very hard, I think that’s clear. Hard work breeds success.
So it seems a little odd to talk about luck. But that’s what I’m going to do today. Because I got lucky in two specific ways that I couldn’t have predicted or controlled. This is also a good way to talk about how some parts of the publishing business work.
The first piece of luck: I wrote the first Kitty short story in 1998 and the first novel in 2002-2003. Urban fantasy in its current incarnation didn’t quite exist then. In my query letter, I called the novel supernatural/dark fantasy. In fact, one agent I queried told me he was turning it down because even though he liked it, he wouldn’t know how to sell a novel with a werewolf heroine. This was December 2003. Oh, what a difference a year or two makes. Because within a couple of years, urban fantasy had become a bandwagon. By the time Kitty and The Midnight Hour was released in late 2005, the urban fantasy bandwagon had turned into a nuclear-powered rocketship. And the series was right there to take advantage of the trend. I couldn’t have planned that if I tried. I got really, really lucky.
The second piece of luck: The publisher got behind the book in a big way. Here’s some behind-the-scenes publisher neepery. General-interest mass market book publishers have a monthly schedule. Each month has slots to fill: a lead title (usually the paperback release of last year’s big hardcover blockbuster), a second lead title (this might be a big paperback original), and then new titles in various categories: a couple of titles in nonfiction, and a couple of titles each in mystery, romance, and science fiction and fantasy. Kitty and The Midnight Hour was acquired to fill one of the science fiction and fantasy slots. It was going to be a basic, normal book, and I got a basic, normal advance ($7500, for those keeping score). Books in these slots will get print runs of something like 20,000, unless they’re a big title with a big name author. Then something weird happened. I got word that ARC’s of the book were given away at BookExpo, the American Booksellers Association’s big annual conference and trade show. The publisher had decided to promote the book and give it a huge push. (I’m sure this has something to do with my first point, and signs that this genre was about to get big.) In the end, Kitty and The Midnight Hour appeared in the catalog as the second lead title for that month, and got an initial print run of something like 50,000 copies. This meant that the book didn’t just go to a lot of stores — it got stacks in the new release racks up front. Under normal circumstances that never would have happened. Again, I got really, really lucky. (More neepery: If you look on the spine of one of those ARC’s of the first Kitty book, it has the logo for Aspect, Warner Books’ SF&F imprint. But the actual published book has the logo for Warner Books — now Grand Central. That goes along with how the book was bumped from one section of the catalog to the other.)
Other ways people get lucky: We’ve all heard stories about the writers who landed a big, prestige publisher or agent right out of the gate, on a query or an elevator pitch. They had exactly the right project on the right day to get attention. The first Oprah Book Club book was a first novel by an unknown author — The Deep End of the Ocean by Jacquelyn Mitchard. That selection made the book hugely successful, and no one could have predicted that.
So how do we get lightning to strike?
There’s a saying, that luck is the intersection of preparation and opportunity. Preparation is what you have control over, and the reason preparation is so important is that you never know when those moments of opportunity are going to arrive. Be prepared. Write the best book you can. Meet your deadlines and continue writing the best books you can. Behave professionally. Have more pitches ready to go when the publisher makes another offer. Have a plan.
It’s now five years after my first novel release, and I’m trying to keep these things in mind. I have no idea what’s going to happen next, but I want to be prepared for anything.
