When I was working at a quite large publisher, part of my job was reading books that had already come out to see if they would be good candidates for online materials and book collections also created by the company — and one of those books was The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. Although the book is a little bit dated at this point, with the movie coming out recently, I think it’s kind of fitting. Now, I will be candid that this was my first introduction to the book series (the movies I had already seen) and I was not impressed. While the prose did draw me in, nothing really happened for the first ten or so chapters.
If it wasn’t my job to read it, I probably would have DNF’d it, but hey, that’s just me. All of the books I have recommended or helped take through the editorial process have been somewhat fast-paced or had such an energetic first hook that it could slow down without feeling like a nothing burger — that’s my thing! One of the reasons I was told I would do well in publishing was because of my pickiness. If you don’t have a specific thing you’re looking for you drown in submissions and don’t know what to pick, and that’s more stress for everybody. But all that being said, I’m glad I kept reading and I would have been wrong not to: because I ended up really enjoying it (this might be a controversial take, feel free to tell me in the comments lol).
I immediately realized that the slow start, while a bit drawn out by my standards, was needed to flesh out Snow, where he comes from and how participating in the hunger games, even tangentially through the control room, slowly changes him and his perception. Without that context, his painfully slow pivot toward ruthlessness would have less impact and stifled the story.
I think there’s a lesson here in story writing: not everything that is successful for a story will be for every reader. It certainly wasn’t the best for me, and I’m sure I’m not the only one who would complain about the start of the book being slow, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the choice was bad for the story. This comes into play in every step of the publishing process: your agent might give you advice that might undermine the story you’re trying to tell; your editor might ask you to nix seemingly unnecessary details from their perspective, but may be set up for something in the story later; your readers and book critics might look down on your choices; and all of that is expected.
Just as much as people in publishing, like myself, need discernment to make the process smoother, authors also need discernment: to know when to take and when to ignore advice and why. Now please, don’t take this advice as a reason to just ignore everything your agent and editor say that you don’t like or want to hear — that’s not at all what I’m saying. The express job of agents and editors is to make manuscripts better and they’ve built up careers knowing what not only the market wants but what readers respond to, their insight is often really good and always valuable. What I mean is that you should know your book better than anyone else in the process, and sometimes you will need to make a stand for some of the things that need to stay in or stay out of your book. While agents and editors are experts in their fields, they are still human and may miss what you’re aiming for or trying to do.
Editing should be a conversation between the author and the editors and agent. Where you come with writer’s block, they give suggestions, and you pick one and run with it; or they tell you some parts of your manuscript needs work, you ask for clarity, they give it to you, and you fix things; or even they give feedback, you explain why it’s needed, and they backtrack or give you ideas on how to reframes things so they’re better. After all, it’s your name on the cover, why shouldn’t you have a say in what the final product is?
Now I did not help The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes get published, nor do I know the agent or editor who worked on the book to know for sure anything about the process of the book being published, so I cannot give any detail into what actually happened (although I can with a certain Lisa Jewell book...). It honestly might have been a smoother ride since Suzanne Collins was an established best-selling author by the time this book was in production. But it’s important to keep in mind that you can put your foot down sometimes, no matter where you are in your writer’s journey: whether you’re a best-selling author or an unpublished author getting unsolicited feedback from family and friends.
