Fuck it. Write what you want.

I recently took part in a pitching event where I sent the elevator pitch of my urban fantasy, THE REAPER, to an agent. She liked the pitch and asked me for my submission package (first 10k words and synopsis). I received the rejection a couple weeks later. The first part of the feedback was reasonable: she wanted a bit more excitement during a scene where the main character is hunting vampires. She also wanted some more info in my synopsis, which I’ve now added for future submissions as it does make sense to include that vital information in order for the synopsis to make sense.

The second part of the feedback was frustrating. According to this agent, THE REAPER would fit into “New Adult” instead of “Adult”, and this demographic doesn’t exist in the UK, despite it being very popular on TikTok and on BookTube. Apparently, it’s massive in the US, but over here, publishers won’t know what to do with it and so it would run into marketing issues. None of that helps me whatsoever, as I can’t control what publishers decide to put their marketing money behind, and I’m not American.

I read the feedback once, then a second time. Made the additions to the synopsis. Switched off the laptop. Played with my son in his room. I took a break and sat on the rocking chair and that’s when the tears fell. I’ve never cried receiving a rejection before, but this one overwhelmed me. Maybe because the agent enjoyed the pitch and so I was genuinely expecting a request for a full. Or because the agent belongs to an agency that prides itself in publishing the unpublishable: underrepresented authors that don’t get the attention or backing from the mainstream industry. Or maybe because this is the third book I’ve submitted to agents because the other two had “marketing issues”, and this very fine, funny, exciting urban fantasy still can’t be marketed. Apparently. It’s fantasy. Fantasy never goes out of fashion.

In 2021, an author I’ve never heard of released her third novel. Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You was…everywhere. Publishers pulled out every gimmick in the book to market this novel. They invested in her and put their money behind her name, so that even someone like me would learn about her. Publishers can very much choose whether they want to back an author and make the “unmarketable” marketable. They have the money and resources to do so, but they pick and choose who gets to receive that investment.

Publishers shouldn’t decide the market. Readers should, and we do. If a story is good, it’s good. In an ideal world, everyone who has written a good story will find a home for their book because the industry dedicates time and money to help the author make sales. If the book doesn’t sell with all that help, then the readers have decided it ain’t all that. And we know that publishers get it wrong all the time: after Harry Potter, children’s literature was inundated with little white magical schoolboys. And the only reason why Rowling was accepted by Scholastic in the US isn’t because they used their “marketing expertise”, but because the editor’s daughter got hold of Philosopher’s Stone and couldn’t put it down. Scholastic would have been the 14th publisher to reject Harry Potter if it wasn’t for that little girl.

Same thing happened with Twilight—vampires have never been out of season, but for years during and after the height of that series, the YA shelves of every Waterstones in the country were flooded with black velvety covers, swirly scarlet writing, and romances between every supernatural creature and every ordinary white American girl, from fallen angels to zombies. I could say the same for Hunger Games and the YA dystopia boom that that series created.

This is all to say that publishers quickly scramble to atone for their rejection mistakes by finding the Next Best Thing in that genre, solely based on meteoric sales determined by the reading public—not their industry peers. So I’m bloody fed up of hearing about how unmarketable my books are.

I dropped TWENTY-NINETEEN because, despite winning a national competition in which Penguin is supposed to get me an agent at the least, and a book deal in the best, ideal scenario, the coordinator of this very same programme told me that dystopias aren’t “in” right now, that editors and publishers aren’t taking them on, and that out of everyone on WriteNow, I would most likely take the longest to get published. So I shelved it and went with THE REAPER in the hopes that if sales of that book went well, I would have proven myself to receive the Sally Rooney treatment for TWENTY-NINETEEN. So to hear that “UK publishers don’t know how to market your demographic” after letting go of a book I loved a lot, even consoling myself with the idea that I was just being business-savvy, was too much for me to bear.

ETA: what else got to me was an announcement from Netflix about an upcoming dystopian film starring Daniel Kaluuya and Kano. ‘The Kitchen’ is set in the 2040’s in London (TWENTY-NINETEEN is set in 2050, also in London). The response from fans was excitable. There was no “ugh not a dystopian! We don’t like those right now!” So really, what metric are publishers using to determine that people don’t want dystopian fiction???

I got a bit depressed and ranted on twitter and took a mental health break from Black Girl Writers because at this moment in time I want fuck all to do with the industry.

But I’m back now, here to say that TWENTY-NINETEEN is back on the table, and that I’ve re-submitted it, and THE REAPER, to the WriteNow coordinator who is going to match me with a new mentor/editor after the one I was originally paired with just stopped responding to my emails and has been missing since January (LOL). After TWENTY-NINETEEN is published, I’ll be free to put all my time and energy into THE REAPER, which will be the first in a long-running series called GETHSEMANE.

If you try to chase what the industry deems as marketable, you’ll never get anywhere and just be unfulfilled. Sorry I doubted you, Toni Morrison.

Fuck it. Write what you want.