First published in The Author (Summer 2023 – vol 134.2)
At the end of April, The Bookseller – the weekly trade magazine for UK publishing – published the results of its survey into the mental health of debut writers. More than half of the authors surveyed (54%) said their experience of publishing their debut book negatively affected their mental health. Only one in five (22%) reported a positive experience overall.
Many in the industry were shocked. For my part, I was saddened, not least because my own experience of debut publication was generally a positive one. (I was one of the 108 who responded to The Bookseller’s survey.) That’s not to say I haven’t had dark nights of the soul in the course of my writing career. I’ve been floored by devastating rejections; I’ve cried over edits I was convinced would never end; I wrote, re-wrote and then binned an entire 90,000-word manuscript. But I think I’ve also managed (so far) to maintain a fairly optimistic and confident attitude to being a professional author.
How? I may have been lucky in some respects but I think it’s also because of my ‘day job’ as a clinical psychologist. My work involves helping people manage anxiety, depression, insecurity and work stress, among other things. The foundation of my training was an undergraduate degree in psychology, studying the fundamentals of human cognition, emotion and behaviour. I’ve also had plenty of my own therapy – probably a total of about five years’ worth in my 41 years to date.
Publishing triggers…
All that has helped me understand the significant psychological challenges and stresses that the industry presents to authors. It also allows me to believe it’s possible for all authors to take actions that can improve their resilience in the face of adversity. I’ll discuss four of the most common ‘publishing triggers’ and our instinctive human responses to them, and then focus on what we, the author, can do to get the best from our publishing experience.
So, the triggers. Let’s start with a biggie: uncertainty. Many, many things in publishing are uncertain. Will I be accepted or rejected? Will my book sell? How many people will read it? Will they give it a one-star or five-star review? Will my editor leave to have a baby or go to a new job? Will my editorial notes suggest a page-one rewrite? Why did no-one tell me my release date has been moved?
For our (still fairly primitive) brains, uncertainty is inherently stressful. Uncertainty means not knowing where the lion is in the dark or whether there’s a snake hiding in that tree. Although in the modern age we don’t typically need to fight lions or snakes, to our ‘chimp’ brain, uncertainty still taps in at the level of life-or-death. It therefore creates a fear response: the surge of adrenaline required for flight or flight. In the modern day, that response can manifest as toxic anxiety and stress.
Especially for aspiring, debut or early-career authors, uncertainty often comes hand-in-hand with lack of control, both real and perceived. It’s easy to feel things happen or don’t happen with little say-so from you; that there are bigger people with bigger voices who call all the shots. You may have opinions (for example, on THAT COVER), but don’t want to tip the boat. So, it’s easy to find yourself in a passive role – even though this is your book, your career and your life. Lacking agency, especially when the ‘stakes’ are high, is also acutely stressful. It’s hearing the lion coming and not being able to run. It’s spotting the snake and having nothing to defend yourself with.
Talking about ‘stakes’ brings us to another factor which can significantly affect our publication experience: self-esteem. For humans, self-worth tends to be fragile: it takes a lot to build up and not much to knock down. Our sense of worth is particularly precarious when we pin it on just one narrow peg. If our entire sense of worth hangs on book sales, Goodreads reviews and the content of our latest edit letter, we’ll find ourselves in a constant state of existential dread. When things go well we can feel great… but as soon as we hit the inevitable dip, we’ll be plunged into catastrophic despair.
And as an author, ‘dips’ crop up all the time. The writing/publishing journey is always a rollercoaster. Our human brains make this even worse with their tendency for negative bias. Ever wondered why, when you take a peek at your Amazon reviews, it’s the negative ones that sear into your brain? Ever dismiss your editor’s comments as ‘just being nice’ when she gives you positive feedback? As humans, we’re naturally programmed to scan for threat, in order to avoid being eaten by those lions. Stopping to smell the pretty flowers tends to be secondary. This means that, unless we are very careful, negative information will always lodge in our brains more saliently than positive.
This sort of bias similarly shows up when we compare ourselves to others. As social creatures, it’s normal to look to others as a frame of reference. At best, other writers and their successes inspire, guide and motivate us. However, because we aspire up (who would aspire down?!), we also tend to compare upwards, which highlights our (perceived) shortfalls or failings, instead of our genuine successes.
…and what you can do about them
So – what to do?
First, I advise writers (and my clients) to seek out information whenever they can. Information creates clarity, and clarity is the best antidote to uncertainty. Read articles and blogs. Listen to interviews with others who have walked this path before you. (I recommend the ‘Honest Authors’ podcast with Holly Seddon and Gillian McAllister, and ‘Off The Page’ with Polly Phillips and Holly Craig.) Many respondents to The Bookseller’s survey criticised lack of response from their agent or publishing team – the dreaded ‘silence’. So ask direct, specific questions of your agent, your editor and your writing peers. If you don’t hear back, ask again. I’m not keen on the term ‘managing expectations’ (which sounds like our passionate hopes need squishing), but I do believe in gathering as much information as we can to predict what the reality will be like; the bigger the gap between expectation and reality, the greater our suffering will be.
To help address the issue of lack of control, remember that this is your book, your career and your life. So it is okay to speak up. Be diplomatic and always aim to be collaborative – but it’s fine to be assertive about your preferences, ideas and goals. At the same time, remember that while some things are your responsibility and under your control (writing as good a book as you can, for instance, or being nice to your fans), some things are not and never will be. Be careful not to muddle up these very distinct categories.
When it comes to negative bias, a helpful tactic is to keep a ‘positive data log’, which is something I regularly set my clients as therapy homework. Proactively list (in a notebook, for instance) all the pieces of positive information about your writing and publishing career that cross your path. Your brain is automatically logging all the negative, so we need to consciously counter this by proactively collecting the data on the other side.
Incidentally, you don’t have to read your reviews. Honestly, you don’t. We often check reviews for certainty, control or a self-esteem boost (see above). We want reassurance that ‘people like my book’. But as we’ve discussed, it’s hard to read reviews in an unbiased way. Happily, though, reviews aren’t actual lions. It’s quite safe to simply walk away with our fingers in our ears.
Seeking clarity, agency and positive bias-correction can be helpful day-to-day, but if you’re aware that your self-esteem hangs heavily on the peg of ‘writing success’, my advice would be to consider some therapy. After I experienced chronic fatigue in my twenties and could no longer prop up my shaky self-esteem with ‘glamorous’ hobbies (I tried parkour and rock climbing), that’s what I did. Self-help guides can be a good starting point if you don’t feel ready for formal sessions. But the fact is, if your self-esteem wasn’t great before you got published, it’s at risk of fraying further once you have your heart and soul (books) out there for the whole world to judge.
I’d also suggest surrounding yourself with supportive friends, especially supportive fellow writers. Sometimes we just need someone to tell us unconditionally that we’re great, that they love us and our writing, and that everything is going to be okay. Isolation exacerbates all of the above, but connecting with other writers (via online networks, social media, events or festivals) allows us to construct an additional buffer against the bumps and knocks of this career. The SoA offers members a huge range of resources in this area.
We all want to be happy, healthy writers, working hard while enjoying and feeling proud of what we do. Psychological insights can give you practical strategies to access this positivity, even when times are hard.
Paying it forward
I want to ask readers to share this article with aspiring writers, not just those who have already crossed the threshold into the publishing world. As we know, prevention is better than cure, so let’s give those coming along after us the recommendations and advice they need before they join us in taking up this dream job.
I must be one of the lucky ones. I’ve had six books traditionally published and each one was a decent experience, and I learnt a huge amount from each process. I do think that there is this attitude that writers need to be angst-ridden, down-trodden, token tick-box tropes. That seems to more prevalent in fiction circles; non-fiction writers tend to be more pragmatic realists, perhaps because we deal with reality. I’ve suffered from (diagnosed) moderate depression and anxiety for four decades, so I am probably a bit desensitised to the current over-obsession with mental health. Having a bit of a… Read more »
Brilliant article. Spot on. The uncertainty, negative bias, low self-esteem are all horribly familiar, and don’t automatically get easier book by book (at least in my experience). Call to action noted – sharing this with writer friends now…
I have very strong objections to surveys like that mentioned in this article that The Bookseller carried out asking people about the impact of trying to get published on people’s ‘mental health’. Once upon a time things like deep disappointment, high-levels of grief, anger at injustice, frustration, etc, etc, were seen as normal responses to life situations. We allowed people to feel them, stay in that emotion for some time if needs be, because we understood that those emotional responses, whilst negative for a while, are also curative and spur us onto better things. Today people get told that they… Read more »
I agree for the most part with your comment. Life is unfair. The sooner we accept this, the sooner we can learn to deal with it. The article gives good examples of how to develop this.
Constantly talking about ‘mental health’ can lead to a situation where feeling a bit gloomy on a cold February morning is conflated with severe psychological issues.
If ‘mental health’ is over-emphasised for small issues (like a one-star review on Amazon) then those with serious problems can be harder to find in the noise.
Hi James – thanks for your reply. I’ve been waiting for someone to do so before I addressed a point that I think I was slightly incorrect about. This culture of ‘helping’ others, which I don’t consider to be about helping others at all but rather, in too many instances, of the person claiming to be ‘helping’ gaining a chance to use someone else to help develop themselves, is probably doing more harm to our societies than good. But where I am wrong is, the approach isn’t leading to ‘giving a person a fish for a day’ as I wrote… Read more »
My take on a lot of the disappointment or angst experienced by aspiring writers is that their expectations are far too high and their skills too low – they all think they will be the next JK Rowling. Everyone wants to be a writer these days, and rather than experiencing the criticism and judgement of their seasoned peers, and/or rejection by a publisher, they will employ every avoidance tactic, from not actually writing but merely talking about writing, to jumping into the self-publishing route and producing what is basically an unsellable product. They then spend days/weeks/years moaning about how awful… Read more »
I agree with everything you’ve written here, P.J. And the second job that most writers require shouldn’t, actually, be something unpleasant in a writer’s life. What stories you learn working behind a bar; how much time you can spend inside your own imagination whilst you work, say, cleaning hotel rooms. Not making much money out of writing shouldn’t be something people feel terribly annoyed about if the money can be earned in a job that doesn’t tax the brain too much and take you away from thinking about your work. The problem as I wrote about above is that a… Read more »
Hi Helen, I have to say I strongly disagree with you. I think Phillipa’s article is incredibly helpful to writers who have been struggling with rejection for years – writers who work hard at their craft, and are talented, but whom are subjected to the fickle world of what’s trending or the subjective decisions of what’s ‘good enough’ inside a publishing house. I grew up in an era when mental health was brushed under the carpet. The fact that it is now openly discussed is wonderful and I think my children will hugely benefit from it. Yes, like anything, things… Read more »