1. You hate your job so much you spend your day pulling out precious tufts of your already-thinning hair (if you could just rip out the grey ones, that would be okay, but it doesn’t work that way).
2. People say you should write a book but their ideas for the subject of said book are terrible.
3. You read 50 Shades of Grey, puke, pull out what hair you have left, and despair for the fate of literature and the English language. Secretly, you are insanely jealous.
4. You spend months researching the publishing industry and discover that writing literature has little to do with book sales; it’s all Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn and Instagram and Snapchat and blogging and writing conferences and author websites and establishing your social media platform and your “personal brand.” You delay starting your book so you can do all that stuff.
5. You quit your job and spend two years writing in a coffee shop, spending more on coffee than you could possibly earn if your book becomes a best seller.
6. You hire an editor whose notes of things wrong with the manuscript are longer than the manuscript. You do nothing for a month, wallowing in depression. Then you re-write your entire book.
7. You hire another editor to review the second draft. The second editor provides less guidance than the first editor, but charges more. You spend several months writing draft three.
8. For six months you send query letters to potential agents. You learn that memoirs were hot three years ago, but now if a book isn’t pornographic or have “Chicken Soup for the……..” in its title, it won’t sell.
9. Random House won’t take your calls. You find a small publisher in a Surrey strip mall, squeezed between a pawnshop and Payday Loans.
10. Your publisher’s advance is $500, for three years’ work. You’re one of the lucky ones.
Author’s Note:
Don’t despair, dear reader. It doesn’t have to turn out like this. I’m still writing draft number two, so who knows what will happen next? As I said in a previous post, I don’t doubt for one minute my choice to become a writer. I rejoice in my decision to discard my old, ill-suited profession and embrace this artsy world of creativity and uncertainty. Knowing what I know now, I’d do it all over again.
