A "Creative Control" Conundrum
the great self pub vs. trad debate continues
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Dear Kate,
I’m wondering if you can help me with a conundrum I’ve been thinking through. I’m deciding between self publishing or pursuing an agent and traditional publishing, but my hesitation is over a specific reason: I don’t know if I want to give up creative control. I’m worried that the agent will want me to make changes to make the book more marketable or fit a certain pigeonholed ideal, and I’m going to wind up losing my vision and my voice. Do authors push back against edits? Can you can shed light on how it works if you disagree about edits or if you get pushed in the wrong direction (what feels like the wrong direction to you). Thanks for any insight you can provide.
— Undecided
Dear Undecided,
Since I had two questions come in that touch on the decision to self-publish vs. query agents, and what factors go into making that call, I figured I’d answer them back to back. If you missed last week’s question, which is about word count and editing and norms and expectations and how to tell your story and do your own thing while maintaining an awareness of those norms and expectations, click here.
For an earlier post on deciding between self-publishing and pursuing an agent and publisher, click here.
If you’re someone who’s decided to self-publish, whether you queried agents first or decided to skip that path altogether, I’d love to hear from you and know more about your decision and how your journey has been! If you’re the original questioner who prompted the “When to Go Rogue” post about self-publishing, I’d love to know how things have gone for you since then! Comments are open to everyone—thank you to the paid subscribers who allow me to keep this content free to all!—or you can reply to this email and it will get to me. (To contact me anonymously, use the Ask a Question form.)
My thinking on all of this stuff continues to boil down to: the two paths both have pros and cons and one isn’t inherently a backup to the other. It comes down to your goals and your interests (and your genre), so I don’t think it’s always a question of “try querying and if it doesn’t work, self-publish instead.” Although it can definitely work that way!! If you’re on the fence, testing the querying waters can be a good way to see what responses you get and how you feel about the process. But deciding whether to be your own publisher is a big step, so I can understand feeling undecided and wanting to make sure you’re thinking all this through.
First off: there’s a huge difference between someone giving you feedback and someone taking away your creative control. If an agent, or editor—or anyone you’ve sought out to read and respond to your work—makes a suggestion, they (hopefully) aren’t doing so in order to change your manuscript at its core. Their goal should be to help you make your book as fully realized as it can be—the best version of itself, that goes even beyond what you initially envisioned or ever realized you could do.
If someone comes to you and says “You should set this book about a suburban marriage in outer space, and maybe add dinosaurs. Dinosaures in space?” Or, far more commonly: “Love your writing but this would sell better if you made the characters cis, white, straight, thin, able-bodied WASPs, and also told a completely different story,” you have every right to run away screaming. Some people give feedback thinking about the book they wish you’d written (or wish they’d written themselves…) rather than the book you actually wrote and are working on. And I’m not out here pretending that everyone has the same opportunity to tell their story and receive the same reception. But a good agent and a good editor (and a good beta reader or critique partner) should want you to write your book in the best possible way.
Many many many of the big works we think of as “the canon,” from The Waste Land to Infinite Jest to The Corrections, had heavy editorial hands and would not be the pieces they are without a) someone to shape them, and b) the authors’ reception to being shaped. I’m intentionally choosing male blockbusters for these examples—men who have been lauded as geniuses but, guess what, did not become those geniuses alone. But that doesn’t mean the authors ceded their creative vision or only wrote their works to fit someone else’s agenda. It should ideally feel like a team, where the people you work with are on your side.
It’s entirely possible, even likely, that your agent will suggest changes, and your editor will suggest even more. But remember that no one expects you to follow every single edit to a T. It’s not paint by numbers, where they tell you what to do and you’re supposed to do it. You don’t have to agree to everything, and you can always take the time you need to think things through and then come back and discuss more.
I think the only baseline expectation is that you keep an open mind, think through problems and solutions, and communicate in such a way where everyone can move toward the shared goal of making your book its very best. If you feel like making any changes at all would compromise your vision, then you probably don’t want to work with a team in this way, and self-publishing would be a better choice. But even if you pursue that route, I encourage you to seek out critique partners, early readers, and professional editors. Everyone benefits from feedback and support. Even the process of sifting through that feedback and figuring out what you want to take or discard, and how you want to use it or not, will help hone your eye and strengthen your prose over time.
It’s possible, even likely, that you’ll butt heads with someone on your creative team at one point or another—your agent, your editor, your cover designer, your publicist, your marketing director, you name it. Working with people just inevitably means different personalities and different ideas and different approaches, even when you all share the same goal: selling a great book (yours!) and getting it into the hands of as many eager readers as possible. My agent and editor have both suggested things that have made me say, hmm. And sometimes I’ve followed the suggestion and realized, damn! They were 100% right, and I’m so glad I listened and gave it a shot. Other times, I’ve thought they were right to point out the problem, but I had an different idea for how to approach the solution. This is super common, and no one will bat an eye if you come back with something that’s different than what they suggested—especially if it winds up working even better. Sometimes it takes a few stabs to get there (pour one out for the four different versions of one short scene in Greenwich that I wrote and rewrote at 5am mere weeks before the final final version was due). But that’s one of the perversely great joys of writing, isn’t it? When something goes in a new direction and you get that magic of new pieces coming together and deepening the story in ways you never could have foreseen when you first sat down to write. Agents and editors love that shit, too. And nobody objected to reading my different versions or having to think through which direction to take that tricky scene in. Editors aren’t gods, and they’re trying things and thinking it through right along with you.
The unknown is daunting, and there are certainly horror stories about authors put in terrible, untenable positions. I do, uh, constantly feel like I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop when it comes to this whole publishing thing. Ask me again how I feel about this question after Greenwich comes out in July! But I think that if you go into querying anticipating an antagonistic relationship with someone who’s going to wrest your book away from you and ruin it, you may be misunderstanding the role of an agent and editor and the work they’re hoping to do for/with you, and you risk missing out on what could be a productive and positive (and honestly, life-changing) relationship.
On the other hand, I’m not here to push you into traditional publishing! I truly have no skin in this game and want only the choice that works best for you. If everything I’ve written about working with agents and editors sounds like a nightmare and isn’t what you want for your book, it’s as valuable to know what you don’t want as it is to know what you do, and I think self-publishing could be a really great choice. You don’t want to be stressed about having to work with someone or having to make compromises down the road. Are you really excited about doing everything yourself, from hiring a proofreader to formatting interior pages to figuring out what cover will be best? It can be incredibly satisfying to manage every step of the process, and it’s definitely something you don’t get to do if you wind up following a traditional route.
If you think you can sell your book better on your own (and make more money because you aren’t sharing the cut with an agent and publisher) then that’s another argument in favor of self-publishing—especially if you’re writing in a genre that already has a robust indie scene and great opportunities to get your work out there. If you want to keep your every word exactly as is and aren’t worried about sales, self-publishing is, again, a better choice because you don’t have to think about what will be marketable if you don’t want to. You don’t have anyone to answer to but yourself—whereas a publisher has a bottom line to worry about.
If you work with a publisher, you have a say in some things but you don’t have a say in everything, and you rarely have the final say in how something will go. There will likely be things you have to compromise on, because while you may have input on your cover or your internior design or your marketing strategies or who narrates your audiobook or how hard to push to sell translation rights to Azerbajain, your publisher’s entire job is the part where your book is the product being sold, so they will be making the final calls for anything where that all comes into play. Again, I don’t think this is the same as giving up all creative control, or being pushed to write or sell a book that in no way resembles the manuscript you started with and want to represent you out in the world. But it really comes down to how you feel about being edited in the first place, and whether you even want to work with a team or want to keep everything on your own plate.
There’s no right or wrong answer here—only what’s right or wrong for you. If you have a network of other writers, or are connected to writing groups online, post this same question and try to get responses from people with self-publishing experience in your genre to get their take, too! Consider the comp titles for your novel, as well as the books that you yourself like to read and want your book to be in conversation with. Are they largely self-published? Small presses? University presses? Big 5? Zeroing in on the publishing paths for the books you’re into can also help you get a sense of the next steps for you. If your book is pretty far outside what larger publishers are churning out these days, it might be hard for an agent to sell it. If there’s not a market right now in indie publishing for books like yours, it might be hard to find readers if you self-pub. Again, neither path is better or worse. But knowing the existing market for your genre can help with this decision. (If you aren’t sure, feel free to reach out to me again with some more information about your book and your comps and I’ll see what I can suss out.)
No matter what, keep writing!
Kate