Thursday 13: Why You're Not Published

13 Reasons Why You're Not Published:

1. Best-selling authors are not discovered by talent agents wandering the local shopping malls.
2. Your male-male-male paranormal romance is not Middle Grade fiction.  Ever.
3. You tout yourself to be the next King, Rowling, or Shakespeare – sorry, you're not.
4. You're not ready to be published yet.  You haven't written enough.  Scouring the web for farting Pandas is not writing.
5. Your pitch is too weak.  "I can solve the Rubik's Cube."  Big deal, who can't?  Tell me you can solve it while juggling and now you've at least got my attention.
6. Forty chapters of your main character staring at themselves in various mirrors will not sell.
7. The Simpsons did it already.
8. Your first novel does not deserve solid gold typesetting for your revered masterpiece – nor a seven-figure advance.
9. Your scented submission printed on glow-in-the-dark paper was sent directly to – the recycling bin.
10. You handle rejection as poorly as one of your angst-ridden YA characters.  Despite the temptation, always bite your electronic tongue.  Admittedly, the use of profanity and insults via email, Twitter, Facebook, and your blog will get you noticed – but only as unprofessional and difficult to work with.
11. Your mom is not an editor.
12. Your novel cannot be sold as a series.  Publishing is a business.  I got hooked on the Rubik's Cube, and then on every variation of that theme.  Just ask my wife how much money we're sending overseas to find the next great twisty puzzle ;-)  It was the original one that started it all, and each subsequent one brings in the real money.  Keep that in mind with your novel.
13. There is simply too much competition.  Vampires, need I say more?

Thirteen is certainly not an exhaustive list.  Do you have any to add to my list?

Thanks to the queen of subtle on Flickr for the fantastic picture.

And Then You Think, "I'm a Genius"

I felt elated when I finally figured out how to solve the Rubik's Cube for the first time.  There are 43 quintillion (or 43 million, million, million) possible scrambled combinations.  In other words, each variation lined up end to end would be 261 light years long and I could solve any one of them you picked...assuming we didn't die of old age waiting for your selection.

Impressed with myself, I had delusions of grandeur.  Never mind that it initially took me countless hours to finally solve it.  "I'm going to break the world record."  At the time, I wasn't aware that it someone had solved it years earlier in less than 10 seconds.

We're competitive, aren't we?  Give us a challenge and suddenly we believe our personal journey will be revered by humankind.  Like me, you have probably thought, if you wanted to, that you could write the next New York Times Best Seller, win the Pulitzer Prize, and be as famous and successful as Mark Twain, Stephen King, J.K. Rowling, or Kurt Vonnegut your first time out.

But, let's be realistic.  To be great, or even good at anything takes time and effort.  I never really set out to solve the Rubik's Cube faster than Man can run the 100 meter dash.  However, as I became more and more comfortable with my cube, the competitive streak kicked in:  2 minutes, 90 seconds, under a minute, less than 40 seconds, and so on, but not necessarily ever on to a World Record.

When I started writing fiction seriously, my first story was not good, and it certainly wasn't publishable.  But it was a story.  And it was a masterpiece to me.  It didn't matter what anyone else thought because I knew it was great.  Mozart didn't revise, why should I have to?  I was going to quit my job because my greatness as an author would be discovered and the world would soon bow down.  Yeah right!

Only a small fraction on the steep bell curve of life perform at the elite level.  Stories can be strong.  Stories can be published, but World Record material is rare.  Sure, I hope to be the next one to be squeezed into that elite company.  I hope you can be there too.  But in the meantime, I will keep solving the cube in the double digits and practicing my writing craft.