This post was originally published at Novelicious.com and is now at WritingTipsOasis.com. WritingTipsOasis.com acquired Novelicious.com in June 2022.
I've often seen top authors post on social media that they’re relieved because their editor/agent loved the first read of their new book. I look upon these posts with fascination. Even authors, whose books I think are brilliant, get nervous about sharing their work? It makes me wonder, do the nerves ever stop? I thought that my anxieties would be behind me, now that I have an agent. After all, this is a person who likes and believes in your work. I always thought that finally having an agent would bring a new self-belief and confidence about my writing. That's not the case.
I was sent some notes on Don’t Tell the Groom from my agent, and I was asked to change about half a dozen sentences. That won’t take me long, I thought. How wrong I was! It took me almost an entire weekend to do. I rewrote each sentence three or four times. I would leave them alone for a few hours, and then I would come back and tinker with them again. It was crazy. I was almost as nervous sending over the amendments for those six sentences as I had been sending over the whole manuscript in my initial submission.
I’ve also been sending over proposals for future books. Before I sent them, I started having all these doubts: what if Don’t Tell the Groom was a fluke? What if my agent hates my other work? What if the book proposals I’ve written sound dreadful? If I thought checking your emails was bad when you had sent submissions to agents, then it is nothing in compared to how frequently I checked them after sending over the new work!
The only good thing about these nerves, is that when the thumbs up comes, the relief is enormous and ever so sweet. I guess this is down to the fact that the person – the agent or editor – is someone who knows the publishing industry. You can trust their opinion on your book.
It seems at the moment that the nerves of sharing my work are here with me to stay and I don't know how to get rid of them.
Do the nerves ever fade? How do you deal with them?