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I love the way Kay Kenyon talks about writing, writing careers, and long term perspective. Sometimes she articulates what I've been wrestling with, and come out with exactly what I need to hear.
In this age of self-publishing, it's all too easy to slap together a Kindle edition of an otherwise unpublishable book and voila! instant author! There are solid reasons for self-publishing and for putting out ebooks. That's not the discussion here. If you want to sell to traditional publishers -- or go through an equivalent quality-control process -- then discouragement is on the agenda. We need a different kind of perspective, one that's also helpful when we've sold a book or twelve and the next one gets rejected. Or we find ourselves going stale. At a dead end.
Kay writes, "At some point in their careers even traditionally published novelists will spend a year writing a novel that does not have legs, that will not get picked up. What to do? Ah, friends, we must let the story go. It may be salvaged by several excruciating rewrites, but don’t flog it to death. In the context of the dozens of novels you will write in your career, one or two non-starters is not a particularly cruel fate. Sometimes an unsold book is just an unlucky one. It is not a trend. Every story starts your chances all over again."
5 ways to beat the publishing odds | Writing the World, the Official Website of Kay Kenyon
In this age of self-publishing, it's all too easy to slap together a Kindle edition of an otherwise unpublishable book and voila! instant author! There are solid reasons for self-publishing and for putting out ebooks. That's not the discussion here. If you want to sell to traditional publishers -- or go through an equivalent quality-control process -- then discouragement is on the agenda. We need a different kind of perspective, one that's also helpful when we've sold a book or twelve and the next one gets rejected. Or we find ourselves going stale. At a dead end.
Kay writes, "At some point in their careers even traditionally published novelists will spend a year writing a novel that does not have legs, that will not get picked up. What to do? Ah, friends, we must let the story go. It may be salvaged by several excruciating rewrites, but don’t flog it to death. In the context of the dozens of novels you will write in your career, one or two non-starters is not a particularly cruel fate. Sometimes an unsold book is just an unlucky one. It is not a trend. Every story starts your chances all over again."
5 ways to beat the publishing odds | Writing the World, the Official Website of Kay Kenyon
