Being good can be a shortcut. There is no shortcut to being good.

[scott_lynch]

The give-and-take with the audience at any bookstore or convention appearance I make usually comes around sooner or later to the topic of publication. How to get published, how to stay published, what it’s like working with publishers; all that inside baseball. It’s probably a dreary subject to the folks that just love the stories or the genre, yet

Comments

[nancylebov]

The funny thing is that the marketing-only folks understand (at least to some extent) that marketing takes work and knowledge, but they can't transfer that understanding to writing.

[julian_griffith]

Hear, hear. First thing I ever wrote was a travelogue of St. Croix, lavishly illustrated in crayon. I was five.

I made my first professional sale last year. I'm 43.

In between... you get the idea. You've pretty much outlined it, though the particulars change: I had a Tolkien phase (age 7-9) and a Bradbury phase (I do not recommend this to anyone, nobody else can get away with it) and there was the shared-world writing with a friend when I was a teenager, and the epic Harry Potter fanfic, and I'm still kinda in a Jane Austen/Georgette Heyer/Patrick O'Brian phase, or so says my editor when she makes me change my commas to look more like modern usage... but yeah, almost forty years of practice, practice, practice.

[matociquala]

My desire for a mallet with "There is no magic get-published button" embossed on the head in reverse never flags and never ceases.

[archangelbeth]

In fairness, there is totally a magic get-published button... for self-publishers. Unfortunately, that button does not also come with the Magic SELL BOOKS LOTS button, so you can wind up staring at self-pubilshing dashboard, watching the number hold at 0 (zero, zilch, nada) for aaaaaages.

Plus it doesn't come with the Only Good Reviews button, and if people think editors, agents, and other slush-readers can be harsh... Pardon me, I'm going to be sitting behind a potted plant, giggling disturbingly.

[racebannon42]

"Your life is now an endless line of refrigerators, kid." may be my favorite analogy ever.

[mogwai_do]

Yes. ALL OF THIS!