How the meeting with my publisher went

A few days ago, I had an hour-long phone meeting with Danielle, my publisher. We’re working on developmental edits for my next novel, which was supposed to come out this fall but got pushed back to the spring of 2025. Sometimes that happens in this industry.

Sometimes when it happens, it’s for not-great reasons, like your book got kicked to the bottom of everyone’s priority list and suddenly the publisher realizes they’re way behind on everything because they put all their time and resources into the books they’ve decided are more worthy of support than your own, and now they have to scramble to catch up, and you get the impression that they’re not going to scramble very hard or catch up by much, and you can feel the doom of the book you worked so hard on sliding inevitably toward you like a slow-motion avalanche, which you know you won’t be able to escape, and which you know you’ll spend the next five years digging yourself out from underneath, through no fault of your own. (Ask me how I know!)

Happily, this wasn’t one of those times. Sometimes when your publication date gets knocked back, it’s because your publisher is lining up this book for better marketing opportunities and giving it more time to be reviewed and talked about prior to its launch, which typically creates more enthusiasm for the book, a stronger launch, and… drumroll please… a better chance at actually getting read by the panels of overburdened judges at all the major awards.

Fortunately, this time the delayed publication date was for that latter reason, so it was a fun, hopeful meeting full of optimism and lots of clever plotting between Danielle and me.

Danielle is a genius, one of those powerhouse business people who knows their field and their product to a T, one of those who innovates and takes the kinds of risks that pay off (when corporate considerations permit… you know how corporations are.) I am convinced that someday the world of letters will know her name in the same way they know the names of Maxwell Perkins and Gordon Lish. She just gets books and writers in ways that few other editors seem to, and I feel lucky to work with her.

We have had our rocky moments. Two people as confident and passionate as we both are can’t be expected to work together smoothly all the time. Danielle and I are both tremendously ambitious, and (if I can toot my own horn a little) intelligent. We’re both what used to be called “type-A personalities,” though nowadays I think there’s some combination of Myers-Briggs letters that people are using as a shorthand for “intensely confident, driven ball-buster who will stop at nothing to get what she wants.” (I say that with all affection, for myself and for Danielle.) We once locked horns publicly, at a big dinner she was hosting for all the authors from our imprint at the Pacific Northwest Writers’ Association conference. I’d come to the conference to find a new agent to sell a novel to the Big 5, desperate to reach my goal of breaking out under my own name and competing for the big awards. This manuscript was one Danielle had already turned down twice, but now she was telling me face to face that she wanted it. “No,” I said, right in front of an astonished Bob Dugoni, who kept staring wide-eyed between the two of us as we volleyed commentary back and forth. I said a lot of other things, too. So did Danielle. I think we both wanted to clobber each other by the end of the night, but we kept our respective cools for the sake of professionalism. Today, some five years later, Danielle and I can laugh about “the dinner,” and we’ve come to see eye to eye on issues of career strategy and how best to navigate an industry that’s in a state of undeniable crisis. Now, I see her as the best ally I’ve got in this business, and I trust her judgment and her input on everything, from my manuscripts to my next smartest career moves. I’m much more likely to say yes to Danielle, these days. Thank goodness I’m smart enough to learn from my mistakes.

During our meeting, I admitted to Danielle that I was having a bit of a rough time with this book. Something about it wasn’t coming together for me the way I wanted it to. It felt like it was going to be just okay. Another steady and respectable seller, but not a big mover and shaker like Blackbird was. That’s the shadow side of having a big hit like Blackbird. You will always try to replicate the same success—and your publishers will expect a repeat performance—but for a midlist author like me, who can’t coast on name alone to guarantee a bestseller, so much of success comes down to luck. Blackbird is a great book, sure, but I’ve written lots of great books that never hit anywhere near as big. What made it so successful was being in the right place at the right time. It came out just a few months before the pandemic hit, and Blackbird dealt with themes of isolation, confinement, and death—things that were weighing heavily on the minds and hearts of many, many people.

“You’re smart,” Danielle said to me when I stopped wringing my hands. “You’ve got your finger on the pulse. You always manage to stay right at the forefront of what everyone is thinking about. It’ll be the same with this book. The timing will be great for it, and nobody else is even going to touch this subject with a ten-foot pole. Not in historical fiction, anyway.”

But still, it just wasn’t shaping up to be the book it needed to be. It wasn’t pretty enough to fit with the rest of the Olivia Hawker oeuvre. It didn’t have enough emotional resonance, even though all the elements were there and it should have had it.

“Here’s what I want to see in the revision,” Danielle said. She laid out a very short list of very simple features, all of which would polish the book up some but none of which had me convinced that everything would click in the right way, and this book would be able to stand alongside Blackbird.

Danielle said, “Don’t start working on it yet. Give it a few days. Let what we’ve talked about today simmer for a while in your head.”

I promised I would do just that, and we ended the meeting. But I had my reservations still. My usual habit is to fly right into dev edits, trusting my editor’s notes and working as steadily and quickly as I can without giving myself any space to second-guess anything.

Instead, I kept my promise to Danielle. I didn’t touch the book for days, but spent a lot of time walking, thinking, smoking weed, listening to music, and thinking some more. I tried to imagine every way to achieve the effects she felt were missing from the novel. No good ideas came to me.

Then, last night, I woke from a deep sleep at 1:30 in the morning. Barely conscious, I groped for my phone and opened my Notes app and started mashing the tiny keys I could barely see with my bleary, spectacle-less eyes. Ideas were coming to me—through me—from that strange, outside place where all the best ideas wait. The cosmic bullpen, the fractal holding pattern of story and art that sometimes rotates itself to the right point and empties itself into my head. Every time I thought I’d taken enough notes and set my phone aside, new and very urgent realizations would come to me, and I would pick it up again and type out a little more. This went on for two hours before I finally got it all, and was allowed to go back to sleep.

I was very groggy this morning. I still am, even after a long nap. But I cracked right into the revision, and every problem with the story and every solution illuminated like sacred lanterns in the dark. I poured myself into the work all day. There are still a few weeks’ worth of labor to be done on it. But by the end of my work hours, I was able to see a whole new book taking shape—one that lacks none of the beauty or emotional resonance that Blackbird has.

I’ve gone from being “meh” on this book to thinking it might be the best thing I’ve made since Blackbird.

I’m going to have to listen to Danielle more often, and trust her advice. After all, when you’re working with a Perkins or a Lish, you don’t throw that away.