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The Jade Temptress & the Future of Jeannie Lin

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I received an inquiry from a librarian today asking me if The Jade Temptress has been cancelled. This is the question I’ve been dreading for a while now and I know more readers will have questions, so I thought I would lay it all out here:

Do you want to know what it feels like to write exactly the stories that you want to write, in a setting that the industry insists is too much of a risk, about characters who are a hard sell?

For the last five years, I’ve been able to do exactly that. EXACTLY that, no compromise. How did it feel?

So damn good.

I want that to be the very first thing I say about this. From the moment I stood on that RWA stage in 2009 to announce that Harlequin would be publishing Butterfly Swords to this moment right now, I did it my way, writing the stories I wanted to tell, the way I wanted to tell them. It felt really frickin’ awesome to be able to do that.

lotus_palace_cover_mediumIn September 2013, Harlequin HQN released my first single title historical romance set. The Lotus Palace was supposed to be a new milestone in my writing career. A chance for a higher advance, wider distribution, more readers.

It tanked. The print sales were so poor on Lotus that Harlequin pulled the sequel, The Jade Temptress, from print distribution to publish it digital only. There’s no other way to slice it – this is a huge step back from the Jeannie Lin master plan.

I once reflected to my BFF Amelia, the same friend who got me into romance novels, that whenever you talk about a past relationship, it inherently has to be a story of failure because that relationship is now over. Well, I know how this sort of publishing story usually ends, but I don’t want to spin a tale of “unfortunately” and “not as well as I hoped”. I’m not going to go into why the book didn’t sell because…boring. You’ve heard that lament before. I’ve heard that lament before. You know how it goes.

I’ll be brutally honest and say I did cry actual tears over The Jade Temptress losing print distribution. I need as many eyes as I can get and that means I can’t discount any opportunity to have my book on shelves in stores and libraries. It’s hard enough for readers to find me as it is.

I haven’t cried actual tears over publishing since I saw what they did to the cover of Cindy Pon’s sequel to The Silver Phoenix. And in my angst-filled write up on Phoenix’s behalf, I lamented that it takes a while to build a name and a readership and that it was unfair to dilute Cindy’s brand because of lower than expected sales on her first book and immediately blame the Asian theme.

Well, this didn’t happen with me. For six novels and four short novellas, Harlequin stuck by me. They never white-washed my covers. They promoted me when they could have easily spent time talking up other more lucrative authors. I can almost guarantee you that Harlequin at any time could have put out a historical romance in my slot set in almost any other era besides mine and made more money. Instead, my editors worked their asses off. The art department went above and beyond themselves again and again. The digital department stepped forward, creating trailers and trying out promotions. And even when my sales in the category line were humble at best, they still said, “Let’s try you in single title with HQN.”

I’m not being naive and saying this was charity. In the beginning and the end, publishing is a business. My stories failed to woo a significant number of readers even after five years and multiple releases.  It’s down to the numbers; the cold equations. I can’t say that Harlequin and I didn’t give it a fighting try.

The truth is I knew in 2011 when my second book released that this couldn’t continue forever. I looked at my royalty statements and knew that any publisher worth their salt couldn’t continue putting money into a risky investment like me. I started to get depressed back then, but I thought of an analogy from tennis that I’ve taken to heart.

I was watching the Wimbledon women’s final one year and the announcer was remarking how the player who was behind in the score was feeling timid, so they were pulling their swings, afraid to hit out of bounds. When you’re under the gun, the instinct is to pull back and be conservative, but that actually makes the ball more likely to ping outside.

The real answer is to swing harder. That’s how you control the ball. So even though I had the sinking suspicion I was going down sooner or later, I made the decision to keep swinging as hard as I could.

Lo and behold, after The Dragon and the Pearl, Harlequin offered to contract more books and I took the opportunities, swinging for the fences in each one. I would go down swinging.

Now that my writing career is hitting this setback, it’s hard not to feel down. To feel that this great experiment has failed. But I wrote ten stories in five years set in a historical era that no one had ever done before in this genre. I convinced a major player in the romance world to go along with me, hand in hand, in a real way. Over and over again, I wrote the book of my dreams. Every single one; the books I dreamed of writing.

Six full-length novels set in the Tang Dynasty and pretty good ones at that. Yes, I said it. Memorable stories. Emotional stories. Romance novels, the books I had always wanted to write. That doesn’t suck.

In fact, I think that’s pretty badass.

9780373778478To the readers, authors, reviewers and bloggers who have supported me, I owe you everything.

I still have one more Tang Dynasty romance for Harlequin in the works, the sequel to The Sword Dancer. I have a two book Opium War steampunk duo to write for Berkley Intermix. After that, who knows?

The Jade Temptress is still releasing next year March 1, 2014. I’m proud of this book. Ironically, of all my books, it’s the one that the most readers have e-mailed me to say they wanted to read immediately after reading the previous book.

I hope readers who enjoyed The Lotus Palace in print, will still buy the sequel in digital. I hope that new readers will still be able to discover The Jade Temptress.

In the meantime, I’m still swinging hard.

Cultural stories in the mass market

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Sunita from Dear Author mentioned a few of my books in her editorial post “POC romance and the authenticity question” and I started to reply, but in typical Jeannie fashion, it started to become an essay, so I thought it best to put my thoughts down here so not to bore the readers with a TLDR answer.

As you know, I think a lot about what it takes to write in a niche setting while trying to succeed in the mass market. Here are some thoughts I’ve compiled:

I want to add a theory that I’ve been pondering — I do bring my culture into my POV when I write — it’s actually very hard not to. I wonder if depictions from more mainstream viewpoints, to use a blunt instrument here — the white male perspective — are simply more easily consumed by the reading public. Because this is the perspective people are used to consuming. For example, would GGK’s Under Heaven be much better received than a Chinese author’s works in the US mass market? Neil Gaiman announced that he’s working on a project based on a Chinese legend and I’m sure that will be well received. Now, those are powerhouses and it’s impossible to separate out their clout, fame and skill from a possibly more palatable perspective. Perhaps pure skill makes their works accessible. I loved GGK’s Under Heaven, BTW.

If we take the example of Jay Kristoff’s Stormdancer where no attempt for Japanese cultural accuracy was made, it appears that appropriated cardboard representations (he proudly admits to basing his worldbuilding off of manga and anime and little attempt at research into Japanese culture, so I feel justified to say that)  were very well-received and widely adopted, perhaps more so than a culturally accurate depiction.  Of course, he was creating a steampunk fantasy and can argue he never meant it to be realistic — but that goes to my point. The stereotype is easier to consume than a fleshed out depiction.

This question may never be answered due to the process of 1) creation 2) public acceptance being shrouded in so many variables, but it’s an interesting thought, right? Theory 1:  The mainstream voice, the dominant voice, is still the one readers are used to hearing.  Theory 2: The stereotypes and the cardboard representations are more easily accepted by people who have limited exposure to the culture (there is cognitive science research to back this idea) Theory 3:  This is felt more keenly in mass market genre fiction where books are aiming for wide, common denominator appeal. (i.e. in literary or other markets, where readers are seeking the unique, unusual, unexpected, it may not be as much of a factor)

That may not leave us in a happy place when we think of POC authors with “authentic” voices writing cultural stories at least for the mass market, but I think this is something authors should know they might be up against. It doesn’t change much — just write your heart. Write your heart out. But it may be a fight.