Are You Ready for Publication?

Not your manuscript. You.

Here’s the test: Strip down to your pre-fall Garden of Eden nakedness and stand on the fifty-yard line during halftime at the Super Bowl while everyone submits critiques of your body on the JumboTron.

If you can handle that without buckets of drugs and/or a lifetime of therapy, then you’re probably ready. Because here’s what I’ve come to learn a year after my debut novel was published and months after the release of my second:

1. You can’t follow your writing. I’ve been chanting this to my students for years (I teach high school English…on a good day), but this never became so alive to me as it has since my own words hit print. If I could tap a reader on the shoulder as she’s finishing my book, I could explain why I phrased that sentence a certain way or why included that simile.  The ending of my novel is most frequently slammed. Might I have ended it differently had I known the sequel wouldn’t have been contracted? Perhaps. But as one reader at a book club stated: “I think how people react to the ending says more about them than it does about the ending itself.”  Crazily, that’s been true more often than I would have expected.

2. You can’t obsess over ratings. Some days, my Amazon and Goodreads ratings plunge faster than the stock market. When I find myself getting angsty over a drop from 4.2 to 3.25, I look at the front page of the newspaper. It’s called perspective.

3. You are not your writing. Okay, maybe I am in that a writer invests so much of him/herself into a novel.  When I read a review like this: “Buying and reading this book was the biggest waste of money and time since buying the magical egg peeler the infomercials. It was horribly written and tedious,”  I make a conscious effort to not personalize it as if I’m horrible and tedious (well, don’t count this week any week I’m grading research papers). It also helps to envision dropping the reviewer in a vat of crunchy peanut butter.

If you’re a pre-published writer who feels compelled to vehemently defend or sarcastically retort to someone who has critiqued your writing…fasten your seatbelt.  Dealing with an assessment of your writing that might suggest it needs more work pales in comparison to some reviews you may receive. When my publisher generously offered free Kindle downloads of my novel, I read several lovely reviews. Others…not so much.  Just a few of the top vitriolic ones:

~the ending was so terrible I could barely justify this 3 (rating)

~this book was unrealistic and a waste of my time

~confusing and in my humble opinion, pointless

But to quote Joyce Magnin of the amazing Bright’s Pond books, “here’s the thing”: If now and forever, all I ever have is that one response from that one reader who said she saw herself in Leah (my protagonist) and changed her life because of that…the emotional nakedness was worth the price.

So, if your response to this is,  “Bring it on!” then you are R-E-A-D-Y.