What is Success in Publishing?

Sometimes it's easy to define a win. A promotion, a perfect score, winning the spelling bee. All of these things can be measured and quantified. And in many careers, certain benchmarks tell you if your trajectory is up, down or lateral.

But not so in publishing. As I thought of a topic for the blog, I perused the forums and thought about my critique group meeting last week. It struck me that we ask each other for input and endlessly fret about rewrites and editing and because we are all seeking success in our writing careers. But success in a publishing career is really in the eye of the beholder. In one of my favorite movies, Caddyshack, another golfer asks Chevy Chase's character how he measures himself, since he doesn't bother to keep score. Chase responds, "By height."

There is a lesson in the quip. If you keep score based on number of books written, or number of national awards received, or sales, you will almost always feel you've failed. It can make you crazy to compare yourself to another writer. The odds are stacked against any of us being as prolific and lauded as Joyce Carol Oates or selling as many books as Stephen King.  Most of us will never quit our day jobs. Many of us will not be agented. Even those who are agented may not get a publishing contract. If we do, maybe it is with a small press and not a large one. Meanwhile, a semi-illiterate reality star gets a ghostwriter and a book deal and goes on a national book signing tour. Success? Well sure, depending on how you measure it.

Defining a win, I think, requires us to stop looking outward. There is always a golfer with a better score. There will always be a writer who has something we don't. So define for yourself what your "win" is going to be. Start with writing a great story. Then add the other ingredients to your own taste and your own score card.

I'm curious how you're measuring your careers. Is it completing a series, getting an agent, or getting your self published book out into the world? Or something else? Or do you write for the joy of it and not bother with the business side? Let's talk success.

Kim English - is the author of the Coriander Jones series and the award winning picture book 'A Home for Kayla.' Her latest picture book, 'Rolly and Mac' will be released in 2016. Her website is Kim-English.com. She is represented by Gina Panettieri.

The Heroic Journey of Every Writer: Part Two

By Martina Boone @4YALit

Today, we continue the journey from where we left off on Monday. Following the dreaded rejection.

THE REWARD

But there's a hidden treasure in every rejection, a measure of achievement. We have tried. We have succeeded at putting ourselves out there. And we are learning that being creative requires us to face rejection. We are preparing ourselves for years of rejection yet to come. Rejection by agents. Rejection by editors. Rejection by acquisitions boards. Rejection by reviewers. By readers.

Art is subjective. Not every agent is going to love our work, and when we submit our first book, or our second, or third, or sixth, we may discover that it's still meeting with rejection. But maybe, maybe, instead of a form rejection, if we keep battling, we glean a piece of knowledge that points us in the right direction. We learn what we are good at writing. Do we have a great voice? A way with description? A facility with rhythm? Plot? Characterization? And we learn what work we have yet to do, all the elements of writing where we need improvement. We discover that rejection can be energizing, and we realize that we stand on the brink of a landscape that is only just opening up before us.

THE ROAD BACK

Having come through the initial battle, we must now regroup. We pull out the craft books. We dig deeper. We seek more experienced mentors. We attend different kinds of writing conferences—conferences focused on craft instead of sales. We read more fiction than we have ever read before, and we begin to read it in a different way, critically, not to find fault, but to peer beyond the curtain of story to examine the motions and machinations of the wizard. Now we are determined to complete the journey and come home with an agent and a book deal. We can smell success… Our mentors can smell it on us. (And yes, this is often the point where we do find ourselves wearing the same pajamas the entire weekend and feeding our families cold, leftover pizza for breakfast on Sunday morning.)

THE RESURRECTION 

The faster we race toward that finish line, the more painful it is to trip and fall. And we will go splat at some point. Getting a Revise and Resubmit on a manuscript may make us believe we are almost there. Or at least that the next manuscript will surely be an easy sell. After all, this time, we've done everything right. We've plotted. We've schemed and themed. We know (and like) our characters better than our siblings and in-laws. (At least some of them.) We would like to move out of our current homes and take up residence in our storybook settings. And yet. And yet. When it comes down to it, we may be close and still not close enough.

At the climax of our writer's journey, we are going to be tested again, usually when we think we can see a champagne bottle set out on the table. That's the moment when we stumble and go down. We fail. Again.

At that moment, while we're lying curled in a fetal position on the cold cobblestones and whimpering for chocolate, the thought of picking ourselves up and trying again seems like more heartbreak than we can bear. Another round of revisions? Another unagented manuscript? Another unsold book? Or one that's published but undersells or underperforms our hopes? It's all useless anyway. What's the point? We can't DO this anymore. We can't keep spending a year or more writing a manuscript, pouring ourselves into the pages, only to fail again.

But wait. This—yes, THIS—this exact moment, is our defining moment! Our darkest moment. Our long night of the soul.

Everything we create comes from within us. By sharing it with the world, we lay ourselves naked for judgment and ridicule. That's painful. It's hard. It's our battle. Sometimes it can feel as if death would be easier. Certainly, it's easier to give up.

As Walter Smith put it, "Writing is easy. You just sit down at the typewriter, open a vein, and bleed it out drop by drop."

It is also worth remembering that writing fiction is both a selfish and selfless endeavor. We write to communicate. The human spirit aches to share experiences. There are readers out there hungry to escape or enhance their own lives. And they may be struggling with a problem they will solve through or during the reading of a book. They may be searching for just the thought, the sentence, or idea, or emotion that we have labored over within the pages of the book we've written.

The moments of communion when a reader feels a book was written just for them—we've all felt like this when reading, right?—is what lets a book live on and grow beyond us. It's the elixir we are all hoping to find and bring back. The writer's holy grail. The lucky few writers who achieve a communion like that leave behind a legacy. And doesn’t that deserve a battle? Aren't we willing to fight for it? Aren't we willing to keep learning to achieve it, fighting to achieve it—because, yes, we will have to keep fighting, fighting harder, with every new manuscript we begin.

If we want, need, that elixir, we will pick ourselves up after that long night of the soul.

We will be reborn into a world that's very much bigger even than the one that we believed we had found. We finally know how very little we actually know, and we see the breadth of what we have yet to learn. That in itself is staggering. But we are committed to a lifetime of learning, experimenting, reaching. We are strengthened by our successes and our failures, and in the act of pushing past our dark moment, we finally break through that dark veil of doubt that held us back from writing in the first place. The turmoil in which we began is finally resolved, our wound is healed at last.

RETURN WITH THE ELIXIR

We return to our families and jobs at peace with ourselves, prepared to continue the journey of the writer. Whether we have achieved the first stage of publication or finally broken through with a novel that takes us to the next step, or anything in between, we carry success within us. Because we no longer feel like we're in a hurry to get "there." We can let ourselves fall in love with the process. We can love the writing, the current book, the next book, knowing that there is an endless well of creativity inside us. Not every book will sell. Not every book will sell well. But every book will teach us something, about ourselves, about our world.

Every book is a brand new journey.

FOLLOW YOUR BLISS

"If you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Follow your bliss and don't be afraid, and doors will open where you didn't know they were going to be." ~ Joseph Campbell

Can you relate to the writer’s journey?

ABOUT MARTINA BOONE

Martina loves reading and writing books about beautiful, vicious, magical worlds that intersect our own, and about the monsters of myth and folklore that sometimes show more humanity than we do. She's the founding member of the Adventures in YA Publishing blog and runs the monthly First Five Pages Workshop. Follow her on twitter as @4YALit [http://www.twitter.com/4YALit] or visit her website.

The Heroic Journey of Every Writer: Part One

By Martina Boone @4YALit

“If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you know it's not your path. Your own path you make with every step you take. That's why it's your path.” ~ Joseph Campbell

When I decided to write a novel, I didn't stop to think where I was going or how long the journey was going to be. I simply wrote. And then I discovered that the novel needed—deserved—more than that. It needed me to have a clue about what I was doing, inconsequential things, you know, like structure and story elements.

As writers, we can try to reinvent the wheel, sure, but we will get farther faster if we start with a working wheel and then concentrate on making a different or, hopefully, better one. Maybe a few of us are lucky enough to have taken English or Literature or Creative Writing. For the rest of us, learning the basics of crafting fiction is a do-it-yourself MFA program. These days, many of us are doing that program together, making the same journey and blogging about it en route. Of course, some of us are on foot and some are in race cars. But that's okay. I honestly believe we are all going to get there at the pace we need to set.

My pace? Think turtle crawl.

One of the first books of wisdom I encountered on the road was The Hero with a Thousand Faces, the Collected Works of Joseph Campbell. From there, I devoured Chris Vogler's The Writer's Journey. And as I was searching for a way to tighten up the framework of my manuscript, I began to correlate all the brilliant insight from these teachers and various other sources into something I called the Complications Worksheet. I go back to that worksheet each time I start a new project, and the other day while I was on the phone with the brilliant Angela Ackerman (co-author of The Emotion Thesaurus and The Bookshelf Muse blog, I had a revelation. The journey the hero takes in our manuscripts is essentially the same journey many of us take as writers.

THE ORDINARY WORLD

Here we are, bumbling through our careers and family lives, vaguely uneasy and unfulfilled but maybe not even aware that there's a void inside us, a gaping wound. Why haven't we written yet? It could be that we tried and failed, or that we had to get on with the business of making a living, or raising kids, or maybe we have a family who has always dismissed writing as a pointless pursuit—something everyone wants to try but only a chosen few achieve. Implying, of course, that we're not good enough. So we shelve our illicit hopes, paint on a smile, and get on with our lives not realizing that something inside is tugging us in a different direction than the path we are still trudging down.

THE CALL TO ADVENTURE

But then . . . Then we have a dream, or read a book, or see a movie, or witness an event that shakes us. Something stirs inside us, an elusive wisp of an idea scented with adventure. It begins to rise and pull us with it, beckoning us to come along, to put our own spin on the wheel of inspiration.

REFUSAL OF THE CALL

Of course we refuse. We're human. We're afraid. We don't have time, we don't have money, we don’t have the knowledge to pursue something as overwhelming as writing an actual book.

Or maybe we don't refuse. Maybe we take those first tentative stops, only to hear someone else, someone who means well, who doesn't want to see us hurt or disillusioned, make the refusal for us. For our own good. Because really, the idea of writing for publication is absurd, and we shouldn't have any expectations.

MEETING WITH THE MENTOR

Still, someone, somewhere, gives us a few words of encouragement. Maybe it's something as small as a sentence in the Author's Note of a book that resonates, or something we read in an interview or on a blog, or maybe we're lucky enough to know a writer. It could even be that someone reads our first hesitant scribblings and has the kindness not to laugh. These encounters give us our first supplies for the long trek, the first guideposts to set our feet on the long and rocky road. We reach deep and dig out some hidden spring of courage and take that initial, hesitant step.

CROSSING THE THRESHOLD

At the end of Act One, we've committed to venturing beyond the Ordinary World of 8 to 5, diapers, homework, cooking dinner, cleaning house. We step into a mist-shrouded swamp, someplace new and different filled with rules we don't know and emotions we're not prepared to feel. 

TESTS, ALLIES AND ENEMIES

We don't exist in isolation. Suddenly, we encounter all sorts of other people with feelings and opinions about us and the journey we're undertaking. Some of them help us and some make us wish we'd never even thought of writing. Some aren't actual people at all; our manuscripts themselves serve every one of the roles a hero encounters in his travels: heralds, allies, mentors, threshold guardians, villains and enemies, shapeshifters, and tricksters. They all serve a role, testing us in some way while we sort out who they are to us and how we have to deal with them. Some we're happy to leave behind; they criticize us to make themselves feel better; they hold us back. Some we have to reluctantly leave behind; they present so much drama we're worn down trying to help them instead of helping ourselves. Some we follow and some we lead. All of them teach us about ourselves, all of them help us settle into the voice that will shape our themes and writing.

APPROACH 

We approach the biggest obstacle. At the time, we probably don't even know it's going to be that hard. We've got the manuscript written. Rewritten. Edited. Refined. Polished. We think the story is solid, plenty of conflict, no plot holes, no sagging middle, no weak Peggy-Sue characters. The writing shines. We've gathered our critique partners, our beta readers, and they have trained with us, cheered for us, pushed us until we know that we are ready to battle through to submission. And make no mistake, querying the marketplace is the biggest battle we will face.

THE ORDEAL

We prepare the list agents or publishers to query, and we think that puts us almost at the end of our journey. In truth, we have barely reached the midpoint. But it is the most crucial point, the initial test. Did we do more than write a book? Did we write a saleable book, a book that's unique, a book that's the right marriage of story and writing craft? One that readers will eventually hold in their hands and make greater by bringing their own experiences and ideas into the reading? We face our greatest fear, the question of worthiness. Have we spent months, years, writing something no one will ever read? We die a little each time we obsessively check the inbox and read another rejection letter.

Not to leave you hanging about what happens after a rejection (other than drowning our sorrows with chocolate), but part two of your writing journey continues on Wednesday.

Do you relate to any of the steps on the journey so far?

ABOUT MARTINA BOONE

Martina loves reading and writing books about beautiful, vicious, magical worlds that intersect our own, and about the monsters of myth and folklore that sometimes show more humanity than we do. She's the founding member of the Adventures in YA Publishing blog and runs the monthly First Five Pages Workshop. Follow her on twitter as @4YALit or visit her website.

Beware What You Say!

by Stina Lindenblatt @StinaLL

 ©Stina Lindenblatt

The drive to publishing success can result in the good and the ugly, and everything in between. It motives writers to dissect novels and movies, so they understand what makes for an emotionally compelling story. They attend conferences and workshops. Network and join writing organizations. Develop friends with like-minded writers who understand what they go through, and who can support them during both the high and the lows. 

But with the good comes the ugly. Here are three syndromes that can occur with success. Hopefully none have impacted your life, in one way or another.

I-have-fault-with-your-success syndrome

On the dark side is jealousy. When people you know land agents and book deals, it whispers in your ear, “Why them? Why not you?” And that’s okay, if you use that voice to help make you a better writer. Let jealousy inspire you to sign up for a writing course on emotion or stronger characterizations (or whatever weakness you struggle with). What you want to avoid is finding fault with the person’s success, no matter how small, and verbalizing your opinion. If he wins a manuscript critique from his dream agent in an auction benefiting a charity he believes in, don’t tell him he paid too much. If a small press requests a manuscript from a pitch contest he entered, don’t tell him not to send it because you don’t think much of the publisher. He obviously did if he entered the contest. And if an agent wants to talk to him, congratulate your friend, even if you have issues with the agent. Let him enjoy his moment first. 

Remember, while you’re finding fault with his successes, you can guarantee his other friends aren’t. They’re happy for him and being supportive.

It’s-only-good-if-I-succeed-at-it syndrome

Lately, we’re seeing a lot of success stories in both traditional and self publishing. We’re also hearing a lot of negative talk about both forms of publishing. The best thing to do is be careful what you say. If you are only cheering for one and constantly pointing out the negatives of the other, you’ll lose all credibility if you do an abrupt turn and go the other route. 

If you claim you don’t trust agents and you aren’t interested in querying, how is it going to look to your querying friends when an agent out of the blue offers you representation, because your self-published novel is a bestseller, and you jump at the chance of being signed? Now you're a hypocrite. You didn't trust them before, because they rejected your manuscript when you were querying. Suddenly they are trustworthy because your book is now desirable due to the sales. Really? Don't you see the irony in that? Instead of saying anything negative about agents, especially if your friends are querying, you are better off saying nothing at all.

You never know when things will change and your words and actions will come back and pie you in the face. It's best to be supportive of all opinions available, no matter where they currently fit in your goals.

Broken-record syndrome

Publishing is tough. No one will argue that. Each tiny success should be celebrated. But you know how it is when a song you like is played on the radio ad nauseam. The song goes beyond annoying. That’s what it’s like when you use social media to mention your success. It’s great the first few times, because we want to celebrate with you. But when you go on and on about the same thing, like a CD stuck in repeat mode, people will tune out. It becomes promotional spam. And when something big does happen, few people are now listening. Or worse yet, few will even care. Share your successes, but know when to say ‘thanks’ and move on. Know the difference between being excited and being self-absorbed. One is great, the other isn’t.

The writing community is a supportive place. Let’s keep it that way. Make sure your drive to success is leading you in the positive direction. 

What’s your favorite way to deal with those moments of jealous we all get? Have you ever had to deal with someone whose jealousy became toxic? 

Stina Lindenblatt @StinaLL writes young adult novels. In her spare time, she’s a photographer and blogging addict, and can be found hanging out on her blog, Seeing Creative.