Let me begin by saying no one knows exactly why a novel is successful or able to stand the test of time. Successful and long-lasting are two distinctive—and subjective—measures.
When trying to determine success in publishing, we calculate our P&L sheets, we bet against what’s in the zeitgeist(s) and what’s come before (yes, comp titles), we gather our publicity hit lists and our marketing ad dimensions. That the only fluctuating factor in a novel’s success is how much money is put behind it wouldn’t be a total lie. Smaller factors like cover design, blurb name recognition, easily “packaged” plot lines or ideas can play a role, but none of these explains the success of Carmen Maria Machado’s debut, Her Body and Other Parties, or Maggie Nelson’s third nonfiction book, Bluets. These two books, a short story collection and a hybrid somewhere between essay and poetry, rarely fit the mold of mainstream publishing success. And if I’m being honest, as a publicist, it’s a conspiracy of publishing that publicity and pitching media can do anything at all for a book.
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Earlier this year, Kate Dwyer wrote an article for Esquire about debut books’ failure to launch. Debut books are still living in their guardians’ basements. Debut books need to simply commit.
But is it the readership that can’t commit to what Ron Charles of The Washington Post calls the “Fantasia” of new books—“The absurd number of new books published each month necessarily requires moving the stock along quickly out the door”—or the different efforts the industry puts into lead titles, midlist, and everything else? Is it the debut author’s lack of “platform,” expected to be built before launch, if not before the book deal?
Michelle Brower, founding partner of Trellis Literary Management, says, “I find it’s almost impossible to divine which books might have sticking power in the long haul, but there’s also a silver lining to the uncertainty: A book does not have to be a big sale or an early publicity powerhouse to grow its audience, as long as readers love it and talk about it with each other.”
It comforts me to know that readers can take charge of cementing a book’s permanency, but without publicity, or at least a little traction and momentum, how do readers discover that book in the first place? And if debuts are not launching, how could they ever stick? Become a lasting book in the cultural or literary conversation? Say, Sally Rooney’s debut, Conversations with Friends, and her subsequent novels. Say, Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles.
On closer analysis, these books have explainable journeys to long-standing relevance and beloved status. Of course, they also have a combination of luck, timing, and incomparable sentences.
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Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties was released in October 2017. Its opening story is based on an Alvin Schwartz classic from one of his Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark anthologies. Millennials like me, who grew up on Are You Afraid of the Dark?, who may or may not have secretly purchased a Schwartz anthology with allowance money from their local Toys “R” Us, were already familiar with the green ribbon. A transformation of this familiar story, a play on timely nostalgia, was an invitation through the gate of Machado’s surreal and all-too-honest world. Nor could it have hurt for this collection to come out so close to Halloween. As the fashion industry knows, trends come back around, as do stories and cultural narratives.