Angst

There were all these things I was looking forward to once I became an author, but I kept finding out that they were mixed blessings. Congratulations! You’re published. Now, you have to figure out how to market your book, and no one knows what’s effective and what isn’t. Great news! You’ve sold three linked novels. Now, you have to think of more stories on demand—no more waiting around for muses. Fabulous! You have a much larger print run than most new authors ever get. Bummer, your sell-through isn’t so hot because you had such a large initial print run. And if you think that once you’ve sold a few books you can sell everything you write afterward, guess again…

Now, all of this sounds like complaining, and really, it’s not. It’s the learning curve. It’s like any time someone enters into a career field she really wants to be in. Pretty quickly, she discovers that it’s not a bowl of cherries, no matter what it is. It may still be a rewarding career field. It may still fulfill her passion. It just has its pitfalls.

So I’ve sent my contemporary women’s fiction to my agent, Kristin. The last time we really talked about it, she liked the concept but felt that my execution just wasn’t cutting it. Finally, she said, “Write the whole book and we’ll take it from there.”

Hey, wait a minute! I’m a published author. I’m supposed to sell on proposal.

I completely understand why Kristen took this approach. I was really excited about the concept, and rather than say no based on the first initial attempts, she gave me a chance to work it through, which I really think I’ve done. The thing is once you write a whole book, you really are in love with it, most of the time. What am I going to do if she hates it? If I didn’t have an agent yet, I would simply query another. I wouldn’t give up. But I do have an agent, and she’s been terrific, so what if she passes on this book I really love and think I can sell?

Which may be a moot point, because she hasn’t even had a chance to read it, yet. I know because I bugged her about it the day before yesterday.

So I’ve done what I always do once I’ve sent one of my babies off into the big, bad world of publishing. I’ve started working on a new one. I’m back in the world of historical romance—a time-travel to Anglo-Saxon England. Since I’m sure that Kristin doesn’t have enough to do, I sent her three sample chapters and a synopsis when I bugged her about the women’s fiction. Well, heck, it’s off to a really fun start. This is what always happens—I get my teeth into those initial chapters, and I want to run with it.

But wait a minute! I’m a published author. I’m supposed to sell on proposal.

I promised myself that I wasn’t going to suck up months of my life writing books unless I had sold them, now that I no longer have to write the whole book to sell it. But I love to write. I HAVE to write. But if I write this whole book and it doesn’t sell, I’ll be so sad, and I can avoid that by not writing it until I have a publisher, but I love to write, and I do it mostly for myself anyway and…

See what I mean. Nobody told me about this part.

People, start buying historical romances again so that we who write them can sell them. Just look at all the angst you’re causing by reading contemporary comedies and romantic suspense and chick lit. Go back in time, when men were men and women wore really great underwear. Or better still, when they wore no underwear at all, like in Anglo-Saxon England…