Luck, timing, and publisher support are at least as important as anything that I can do as an individual author. The time and mental energy wasted trying to find the one true key to achieving bestseller status is energy that might be better spent writing another great book.
Yes, yes, yes, and yes.
Did I mention yes?
It's so easy to think we must be doing something wrong if our books don't break out. And really, these days everyone, even many publishers, in saying, "you have to promote yourself" are sort of propogating the myth that it's all about how hard and cleverly we beat the pavement.
We should do what we can for promotion, but we shouldn't knock ourselves out. In the end, nothing we do is really going to sell even a fraction of the copies that whatever the publisher decides to do, and whatever word of mouth does in its own mysterious way.
And there's no real way either to know if the next book is going to do better or not--all we can do is write the best book possible, and not beat ourselves up about whether it's the "right" book to be writing.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2007-05-30 02:16 am (UTC)Yes, yes, yes, and yes.
Did I mention yes?
It's so easy to think we must be doing something wrong if our books don't break out. And really, these days everyone, even many publishers, in saying, "you have to promote yourself" are sort of propogating the myth that it's all about how hard and cleverly we beat the pavement.
We should do what we can for promotion, but we shouldn't knock ourselves out. In the end, nothing we do is really going to sell even a fraction of the copies that whatever the publisher decides to do, and whatever word of mouth does in its own mysterious way.
And there's no real way either to know if the next book is going to do better or not--all we can do is write the best book possible, and not beat ourselves up about whether it's the "right" book to be writing.