7 Myths About Publishing
December 5, 2011
- All authors make a bucket load of money! (Actuality: We make about 78 cents a book. Most of us make less than a teacher’s aid).
- Rejection ceases to exist once you’ve signed your first book contract. (Actuality: It gets worse, and the rejections hurt more.)
- Publishing is like those models who get discovered in diners. It just happens without much effort. (Actuality: 10,000 hours of writing finally makes you a master at it. That’s about ten years. When I signed with an agent and sold two books in that year, folks thought I arrived quickly. Wrong. I arrived after 10,000 hours of my behind on the chair.)
- Publishers revel in marketing your books. (Actuality: They do the best they can, but in today’s climate, it’s truly up to the author to get the word out.)
- Authors don’t go to the grocery store. (Actuality: Um, yeah, they do. Off to Kroger soon…)
- You can usually skip the busywork of writing for smaller publications and go for book writing out of the gate. (Actuality: It’s better and more “normal” to have a wide body of periodical work published before you find an agent. Otherwise, how will an agent know if you can write, meet deadlines, and take editorial direction?)
- Book signings are the cat’s meow for authors. (Actuality: We don’t really like them, often because folks don’t show up and you feel like a 7th grader again, standing near the wall, waiting to be asked to dance. So not fun. Although I will say it’s an author’s rite of passage to attend a book signing and sell zero books. Yes, this has happened to me.)
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