Confession time. I’m petrified of failing, so rejection–any kind of rejection–kills me. That being the case, you’d think I’d have picked different line of work, right? Surviving rejection is pretty much the author’s job description.
Author Job, Purpose: Provide entertainment and illumination to individuals, both as they read your work and as they discuss it with others based on their subjective opinion, taste, and prior life experience.
Author Job, Duties:
- Spend months, years, or possibly decades improving our tricycle manuscripts, until we have developed the perspective to see that no matter how many training wheels we slap on it, it will never grow up to be a bicycle we can ride through to publication.
- Work with critique partners and beta readers on one or more manuscripts, learning to analyze criticism and extract the useful, actionable portions to improve our work.
- Send manuscripts out to agents, and editors who are too busy to offer feedback until the manuscript is good enough, and until they have reason to believe that we can apply constructive feedback quickly and professionally–within the time allotted by the tightly-structured publishing schedule.
- Accept that agents, editors, and copyeditors are seeing beyond the words on our pages to the vast number of books that have already been published and put in the hands of readers and reviewers.
- Throw away our hard-won ability to analyze criticism once reviews start coming in, because we can no longer make any changes.
- Understand that every reader is bringing something different to our work and that no matter how personal that feels, no critique, edit, review, or opinion is ever entirely about what is written on the page.
But criticism, even after the book is “done,” is useful.
For any author, published or pre-published, criticism:
- Opens our minds to new perspectives and forces us to try new directions.
- Teaches us to improve our analytical skills.
- Helps us improve as writers and people.
- Keeps us humble. : )
But criticism does more than that. Post-publication criticism, aka reviews, help us to differentiate and find books.
I love the glimpse into people’s minds I get from reading reviews of Compulsion. I love seeing what they take away and how they engage with the characters.
This morning, I saw a thought-provoking YouTube video about how people should rate books according on different scales according to the writer’s goals for the book.
What do you think? Agree? Disagree?
I also think that book reviews serve a different purpose than they did even a few years back. There used to be fewer books, and more bookstores who could hand-sell the books they carried. Book reviews, then, used to help formulate opinions. But now? Opinions are all over the place. Expert, inexpert, entertaining, brief, exhaustive–the list goes on. But those reviews, good or bad, are an author’s friend because they get the book in front of readers, and most importantly, the best reviews expand the way that readers read the books.
Lev Grossman, author of The Magicians, used to be a book reviewer at Publisher’s Weekly. He talked about it in a piece in Time Magazine a couple of years ago. One of my favorite things he said is this:
“I think of the reviewer’s role now as being more about providing context for a book, tracing its lineage in the tradition and locating it in the literary topography of the present, and all that touchy-feely sort of thing. The critics I love these days do something slightly different from what they used to: they don’t just judge, they open up that weird, intense, private dyad that forms between book and reader and let other people inside. They tell the story, the meta-story, of what happened when they opened the book and began to read the story.”
Critics and reviewers open the doors to the book they see. That’s both wonderful and terrifying.
So how do we authors survive the process?
The same way we survive rejections from agents, or editors, or any other setback in life:
- Hug it out. Contact, or even just looking at, someone or someone or something you love, releases endorphins that will make you feel better. Or at the very least remind you that lots of people love you because they know you. You are not your book.
- Take a brisk walk and a hot bath. Ditto with the endorphins.
- Fake it ’til you make it. Smiling and laughing can make us happier.
- Pull a few compliments from your keeper jar. For most of us, it takes many compliments to cancel out a single bit of criticism, so put together a folder, jar, or bulletin board with every refrigerator rejection, lovely compliment, and positive review. Read them until you internalize them.
- Keep going. Often, writers become “overnight successes” simply by being pig-headed enough not to quit when their books keep getting rejected. Or their sales aren’t as good as they hoped. Or (insert 1001 other options here.) Quitting is easy. Not quitting is HARD.
I keep reminding myself:
We all become writers because we have something to say.
That doesn’t happen when we quit because we listen to the voices whispering in our ears or the voices in our heads that tell us we’re not good enough.
I thought about quitting almost every day while I was writing Compulsion. I thought about quitting EVERY day while I was querying. The first review where the reviewer got facts wrong and said stuff that showed she couldn’t have actually read the book? I wanted to curl up and die.
But I was working on book two, and in my heart I wanted to write my story more than I wanted to quit. How much we want to tell our story is all that matters.
So keep writing. Keep believing. Never quit.
Want to Win Something?
We’re already on Prize Vault number four! Here’s the current Rafflecopter, and I’ll start you off with a repeat of the AYAP Key Code, which is ThankYou. There are twenty-one key codes though, and you can enter once for each one.
Don’t forget to watch the trailer. That’s what unlocks new prizes and triggers the selection of winners. The more you share the trailer, the more prizes I can give away and the faster you can win. Remember also that entering a receipt or order number from a valid Compulsion pre-order will give you an automatic entry for every key code, for every giveaway through 11/1/14–and that’s a LOT of fabulous prizes.
Go here for the details and the locations of all the key codes.
