Preparing to be hated

Building an emotional emergency kit before my debut launches

My debut novel is coming out in November this year. That I’m actually able to say those words definitively is a lifelong dream come true. You know those memes that say things like: Where you are right now is what you were only dreaming about five years ago? That’s where I am. I labored for fifteen years on a novel that is going to launch in ten months, taking on a life of its own.

Though I’m over the moon, I also know I need to get myself pumped up—yes, for the excitement, flurry of activity, and extroversion that a book launch will require, but also for the negativity. The bad reviews, the ugly comments, and maybe worse. I’ve got to figure out the emotional and mental strength-training regimen that’s going to build up the armor I need to protect myself.

I operate on two planes. First, I’m a career journalist and writer, hardened to feedback on my writing. “You can’t break me,” I tell my critique partners. “Do your worst.” Back when I worked at Facebook, our COO Sheryl Sandberg used to tell employees all the time, “Feedback is a gift.” I believe that, and I treat it as such: a cherished chance to see my work through readers’ eyes, to learn and improve.

But also, I’m a lifelong people pleaser, in recovery but still struggling with it every day. I live in perpetual fear of letting people down and being disliked. Intellectually, I know that my book won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, that some people who read it won’t be my audience.

Whether reviews are good or bad, I’ll feel grateful people are reading it at all!

Fundamentally, I think I can handle that part: knowing that some people will like it and some will hate it, and plenty of people will fall in between.

The ingrained fear of rejection

It’s the darker, more vulnerable part of publishing my beloved novel that I worry about more. This morning I found an Instagram post by Matt Haig, author of the smash hit The Midnight Library, discussing why he doesn’t publish as frequently as he did before. It’s because when his book became a bestseller and then an international phenomenon—seriously, everybody was reading this book a few years ago—the knives came out. First critics began calling the book “overrated.” Then the press got more personal, meaner, even political. Suddenly Matt Haig was a pariah in some corners of the online literati.

As I’ve gotten more familiar with online writing communities, I’ve watched authors go from popular to outcasts in a matter of hours, when someone points out a problematic line in the author’s book and everyone rushes to stand up against it. (This just happened the other day, in a genre I don’t know well, but within twenty-four hours a conference announced they’d disinvited the author as a speaker.)

It’s not like any of this is new. I’m currently reading the biography of Max Perkins, the famous Charles Scribner's Sons editor who published Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, and Hemingway. In a passage I just read, a critic for The New Republic wrote a scathing and personal hit piece criticizing Hemingway’s “evidences of red-blooded masculinity,” accusing him of lacking “the serene confidence that he is a full-sized man.” Hemingway was so livid he wrote an angry letter to the publication threatening legal action and complained to his editor that he could “beat the shit” out of any of his critics.

I don’t plan to fight my critics, like Ernest Hemingway. I’m more worried that a glimpse of anything too personal is going to send me sobbing into my hovel of self-criticism and loathing. That I’ll too easily agree with anyone who thinks I’m the worst. I’m especially concerned that, if I’m not prepared, my spiral into the negativity will strip away the joy and pride I should be feeling that my novel—as imperfect as it may be—has made her gentle entrance into the world.

Building my emergency kit

I haven’t exactly figured out my game plan yet, but I probably need to get going on it soon. Publicity kicks off in March. Advance readers will be getting my book in late summer. I have all the tools at my fingertips; now it’s just a matter of pulling them together into a full-fledged plan for protecting my mental health. I suspect that will include:

• Deciding whether or not to read my reader reviews (a lot of authors don’t)

• Choosing to focus on, and celebrate, the positive parts of reviews

• Journaling every day, meditating, and practicing self-validation with mantras of self-worth and self-pride

• Practicing stoicism: focusing on the things I can control, and letting go of the rest

I’m interested in hearing from other authors about what works for you!