What If I Never Publish Another Book?

Book publishing is one hell of a marathon. As soon as one race ends, another begins.

Years ago, when I was a sleep-deprived mother of two very small children, I read everything I could about parenting. I’d recently quit my job as an attorney to write, while juggling an infant and toddler. One afternoon, at a park playdate, I noticed a woman with long straight hair who possessed an air of calm that seemed out of character for a busy mother.

I was immediately drawn to her.

Soon after we met, I learned she was an author and had, in fact, written a parenting book I’d recently devoured. In the early 2000s, a decade after Dr. William Sears coined the term attachment parenting, I felt that if I didn’t breastfeed around the clock, sleep with my babies, and quit my job, I wouldn’t sufficiently bond with them. The author from the playdate had written a parenting book that was free from such judgment. Instead of pushing one parenting style over another, she gave practical advice while also considering parents’ physical and emotional health. It was exactly what I needed during those first few years, when raising children felt like searching for a light switch in a pitch-black room.

My career transition, which had begun three years earlier, seemed to be going well. I wrote during the kids’ naps, and for four or so hours a night. My articles and humor pieces found their way into parenting magazines, and I found the work to be far more rewarding than taking depositions or writing legal memos. But my ambitions were far greater—I wanted to write and publish books. Plural. I longed to be the kind of author who put out a new book every three to five years for the rest of my life, who toured bookstores in large cities and took photos with readers at signings. I was hungry, and I was prepared to fight my way to that goal.

When I asked this author what she was working on next, she shrugged her shoulders and said, nothing. She had no idea whether her future would involve another book at all. There was no hint of irony or regret in her voice, no despair or even a touch of wistfulness. She seemed perfectly content to let her debut book be the only one of hers that made it out into the world.

At the end of the afternoon, after I’d wrestled my sleepy kids into their car seats and settled them with sippy cups, I mulled over our conversation. What author wouldn’t want to write another book? How can any author stop at just one?

Sixteen years later, in 2021, my own books, Southbound: Essays on Identity, Inheritance, and Social Change, and my novel, The Parted Earth, were published in the midst of a global pandemic. Almost all of my book events took place online. I was thankful that my dream was coming true, and that I was vaccinated. But I also felt very isolated. It was not the debut author experience I’d fantasized about all those years ago.

What author wouldn’t want to write another book? How can any author stop at just one?

What’s more, even in pajama bottoms and slippers, book promotion was far more emotionally and physically draining than I could have ever imagined. Southbound came out in mid-April, followed by The Parted Earth in early May. I had two separate book launches, and a string of online events on most weeknights for almost two months. I appeared on myriad podcasts, radio shows, and Instagram Live events. Though I was grateful for every opportunity, I was also filled with guilt for talking about my books while hundreds of thousands of people were dying of a dangerous virus.

What’s more, during this time, my chronic illnesses flared out of control. Five weeks after The Parted Earth’s release, I had to have foot surgery. It was a relief to use my recovery as an excuse to take a break.

My convalescence gave me time to reflect on my experiences as a double debut author. Certainly, it was a joyous and exciting period. It also felt as if I’d been run over by a Mack truck. I recalled my conversation with the author I met at the playdate all those years ago. Now, I could better understand her reluctance to devote herself to another book project. When we spoke, she was possibly still processing her own first publication experience and trying to put her life back together, as I was now.

Since my surgery, I’ve been mulling over my future as an author. I don’t have another completed manuscript ready to shop around, nor do I have an agent prodding me to finish it. I wish I could say, at the very least, that I’ve experienced an explosion of creativity during this pandemic (I sure haven’t), or that I have maintained a vigorous writing routine (I certainly have not). In other words, after publishing two books, I’m right back at square one.

Book publishing is one hell of a marathon. As soon as one race ends, another begins. At conferences and workshops, I’ve often heard industry professionals advise that while searching for agents for one manuscript, writers should be writing and revising the next one. But this is neither sustainable nor healthy. Creativity is not an infinite resource, the submission process is taxing, and many of us are not book-writing machines—we need time and space between projects to rest and recharge.

Years ago, when I’d only published a handful of essays and book reviews and my desktop folders bloomed with hundreds of rejections from agents and editors, I made myself a promise: If I ever published a book, I’d never want for anything ever again. Yet the more time that has passed since my last books were published, and the more words I add to my current work in progress, the more often I hope that, someday, I’ll be lucky enough to see book number three at my local library. This cycle of want recalls my experiences of pregnancy and childbirth. When I was finally holding each of my babies in my arms, I forgot how exhausting and painful the journey was to get to the end.

I will always write, no matter what. I can’t not write. I also maintain a deep-seated desire to share my work with readers. And buried beneath this desire is my fear that my stories are only relevant if they’re published. The anxiety is rooted in a mix of writerly ego and a fear of mortality. After all, if I didn’t want to be read, I’d just write in a journal.

The first few years I published articles, I never even called myself “a writer.” I didn’t feel as if I’d earned it. After all, I wrote for small print publications that hardly anyone had heard of, much less read. It took me time to build up the confidence I needed to tell anyone outside my family what I did all day. I suppose, now that I’m “an author,” I find myself in a similar identity crisis. Will I still be an author if, say, twenty, thirty, or forty years pass before I have another book out, or after my current books go out of print? Am I still an author if I only ever publish non-book-length writing, or if my only public words are my emails and tweets?

There are few guarantees in this business. For many of us, especially small-press authors, this isn’t the kind of industry where the more books we publish, the more likely we’ll receive another contract. Some of my author-friends have easily sold their second, third, and fourth books. Others, whose first books received many accolades, are still struggling to find a press to take on their next project.

Even as I slog through my current work in progress (painful aside: What if my work never actually progresses?), I’ve been thinking about what I would do if I was never able to publish another book again.

But I also find myself wondering what it would be like to get off the hamster wheel that is book publishing. What if I continued to write books but, instead of submitting them, I left them on my hard drive? What if, in my will, I bequeathed them to my children and made it my final wish that they submit my books for publication?

Alright, alright. I would never be so cruel.

It’s possible, though, that absent the pressures of capitalism and commerce, writing books with no intention of publishing them might liberate my storytelling in ways I’ve never considered. Perhaps I’d take bigger risks with structure, or attempt genres I don’t otherwise feel comfortable in. Maybe, at the end of the day, creation outside of the industry framework is a purer form of artistry.

The irony, of course, is that I need not have worried about that author from the playdate. Whether it ended up being her only book or the first of many, years later, long after it disappeared from the front tables of bookstores and the last reviews appeared in magazines and newspapers, at least one grateful reader is still contemplating the impact the book had on her own first lonely years as a parent. That book ended up having the kind of afterlife all authors dream of.