This post was originally published at Novelicious.com and is now at WritingTipsOasis.com. WritingTipsOasis.com acquired Novelicious.com in June 2022.
One of my favourite Novelicious features is My Book Deal Moment. Not
only does it fill me with hope that dreams really can come true, but it also
shows that the road to publishing success is often a long, bumpy road. As I
look back over my writing career to date, I’ve definitely had a few bumps along
the way.
I think my biggest bump was about a year and a half into writing. I had written my first novel and had it rejected from nearly every top agency slush-pile. I’d discovered Twitter and blogs by this point and realised that nearly every man and his dog was trying to get an agent or a book published. It was a whole different world from what I believed. I thought you just sent your book away to an agent, got snapped up, and were offered a publishing deal overnight.
I remember being so disheartened after I’d been writing for a year and a half and wondering whether all the sacrifice of my evenings, weekends, and general social life, were worth it. And I remember setting myself a deadline. I gave myself a year for something to happen, a glimmer of a publishing deal, a little bit of interest from an agent. As I felt that I was wasting the best years of my late twenties having an intimate relationship with Word.
That was a few months before I started self-publishing and in the end, within eight months of self-publishing I’d been able to quit my day job and become a full-time writer. I guess I got my sign and carried on writing. If I hadn’t have self-published and I was no closer by the end of that year to getting anywhere, do you think I would have been able to give up? Now I couldn’t possibly ever imagine it.
I also wonder if I’d known how hard it was to get an agent or to get published before I started writing, would I have started at all? Or would I have been big headed enough to think that my writing would be good enough to stand out. I’ve always lived in a fantasy world in my head, so probably the answer to that would have been ‘yes’.
But if we didn’t have these bumps on our path to publication – then that book deal moment wouldn’t be as fun to write about. It wouldn’t be an achievement. In fact, I couldn’t think of a story that would be worse to read: I wrote three chapters of a novel, sent it to an agent, the agent loved it, sold it the next day, and a year later I was a millionaire author. I mean how dull is that? Where’s the pain, the agony? We’re all suffering artists, after all.
I wonder though, how many aspiring authors who could have had a gem of an idea, or a real writing talent, gave up because it was too hard to get where they wanted to be. Is that one of the prerequisites to becoming a published author, a resounding self-belief that you will make it and that you’ll stop at nothing to get there?
Have any of you almost thrown in the towel or set yourself deadlines for when something has to happen?