5 More Big Bad Media Myths

As I said last week, the media has done a terrible job showing people the realities of what it takes to produce a book. Here are five more myths people believe because movies and TV shows portray them as the truth.

1. The Myth of the Single Book. The media implies one book changes everything. The truth is, most careers are built across multiple books. J.K. Rowling is a billionaire because of seven books, not just because of the sales of her first book, the only one to sell more than an estimated one hundred million copies. R.L. Stine wrote sixty-two Goosebumps books in the original series. Stephanie Meyer wrote six Twilight books; Suzanne Collins penned five Hunger Games books.

And like I wrote above, the backlist often outsells the frontlist over time. The first Harry Potter book and the first Hunger Games book sold the most copies. Reports vary as to whether Stine’s biggest seller is the first, seventh, or eleventh book; regardless, they’re all early in the 62-book original series.

2. The Myth of the Gatekeeper. Movies like to show an author or agent pitching a single person the book, and it gets accepted. The reality is far different.

First, agents pitch their client’s book all over the place to all sorts of publishers (which is why there aer so many rejections). Additionally, when a publisher buys a manuscript, usually multiple departments have been involved, so it’s not one person saying yes and everybody follows. 

A publisher’s primary concern is making money, so you can bet the company has done an in-house profit and loss projection before accepting any manuscript. Plus, timing and market trends are a factor. 

I once had a publisher express interest in my client’s memoir, only to tell me later that they’re backing off memoirs because they found memoirs so financially risky due to liabilities surrounding using real names. Through no fault of our own, a promising publisher suddenly wasn’t.

3. The Chaos Myth. The media likes to show an author enduring chaotic situations in their lives, leading them to being labeled a tortured genius who uses the chaos to produce a novel that would be called brilliant.

While it’s true that many of my ghostwriting clients have gone through intense struggles and come out the other side wiser, smarter, stronger, more resilient, and more determined to tell their story, chaos does not produce brilliance. It just produces more chaos.

True, sustained success, requires discipline, time management, business savvy, and emotional resilience.

I have a client who at first was excited to hire me to tell his story. Then he backed off when I sent him a contract, saying it got “too real.” When he was finally ready, the Trump tariffs wiped out the investments he had planned to use to pay for ghostwriting. 

When his investments recovered, he remained on the fence, finally telling me, “Why should I do this?” It required me to have to resell his story to him and remind him why it’s so worth telling. But he did, and now he’s very disciplined, insisting we meet twice a week, making sure he has left the time open, always calling me two minutes before the appointed time, and dealing with the emotions of the story.

Consistency beats torment every time. That’s no myth.

4. The Myth of Instant Cultural Impact. Movies and TV shows like to paint a picture in which a book explodes onto the scene and makes an immediate and massive impact on society or the culture.

Again, this is a myth. The truth takes more time. Many successful titles grew through word of mouth, book clubs, niche audiences, or strategic marketing.

This is not a new phenomenon. Frankenstein was rejected by multiple publishers before getting a 500-copy first run in 1818—and sold twenty-five copies. It wasn’t until 1831 than it gained the major commercial success we now know.

Kathryn Stockett suffered rejections from sixty agents over three years before somebody took a chance on The Help. Don’t forget what Stephen King went through to get Carrie published. The Hobbit was published before The Lord of the Rings, but the success of the latter helped send the former into the sales stratosphere.

Finally, there’s The Alchemist (1988). It began with a small initial run by a Brazilian publisher that didn’t reprint. Meanwhile, author Paulo Coelho wrote a second book, Brida, which after its 1990 release caused Brazilians to take a second look at The Alchemist. Word of mouth spread, and this got HarperCollins’ attention, and the Big Five publisher picked it up and released it in 1993 with a 50,000-copy run.

5. The Myth of Talent Alone. The media shows that the author is a singular talent and his or her words are all it takes for a novel to take off. No publisher will work with an author based on talent alone because talent alone doesn’t make a publisher money.

There are so many behind-the-scenes moments that movies and TV shows don’t show, probably because real life is boring. Who really wants to sit in on meetings in which the market department discusses how it’s going to position the book in the market? Is it really interesting to listen to some publishing people discuss the strategy behind whether or not this genre should be chosen? I’m not sure how much interest there would be in watching various book covers be considered then rejected. 

Nor am I certain that metadata optimization would be something that would be of enough interest to put in a movie or TV show. Distribution channels? Forget it. Nobody care to listen to people talk about where they’re going to put this book. 

Maybe there’s a way to make it interesting for an executive to tell the staff, “We’re going to spend X dollars to advertise, promote, and market the hell out of this book,” but my guess is that’s about fifteen seconds of screen time. Not worth it.

These are some of the myths that need dispelling. As I wrote last week, this isn’t to dissuade anybody from wanting a book, ghostwritten. It’s to alert them to the reality that there’s a lot more that goes into producing a book.

Feel free to read and check out my other posts related to ghostwriting. Go to https://leebarnathan.com/blog/