By \u201cwriter,” I mean good, unpublished novelists who don\u2019t, for whatever reason, catch an agent and\/or editor\u2019s eye. I\u2019m not talking about the people who don\u2019t hang out on agent and editor blogs, learning every query trick in the book (some of which are flat wrong to some agents and golden to others). These are the writers who assume that the problem is with them, not with the odds.<\/p>\n
Write a better book next time.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Oh, fuck that. It\u2019s odds, folks, whether you want to believe it or not\u2014and the odds get worse every week. And that write a better book bullshit? How do you know the one you just wrote is bad?<\/p>\n You don\u2019t.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n And then some of you will crack under the discouragement and say, \u201cI write crap.\u201d And you\u2019ll stop submitting. You may even stop writing.<\/p>\n I did that.<\/p>\n I didn\u2019t write crap, per se. I wrote slightly off-tick that didn\u2019t hit the romance formula bullseye exactly right. Yeah, I said it. There\u2019s a formula. I couldn\u2019t hit it, and the misses were near enough that it was sickening.<\/p>\n Why are you basing your goals on decisions someone else has to make? And, by extension, why are you waiting for validation based on odds that aren\u2019t in your favor? And why are you acting like a job applicant?<\/p>\n You\u2019re not powerless.<\/p>\n But somehow the idea of taking control of your work and presenting it to the public\/the readers\/the (gasp) curators<\/em><\/strong> is \u201cgiving up.\u201d<\/p>\n Because \u201cmoney always flows to the author.\u201d Fuck that, too.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/11\/20091110_willworkforfood.jpg\")
This is not an anti-traditional-publishing rant. This is about writers, about you<\/em><\/strong> and your work <\/em><\/strong>and how much faith you have in it<\/em><\/strong>.<\/p>\n