Not an Overnight Success

I finished my first manuscript back in 2003.  I honestly expected it to sell right away.  Yes, I was that arrogant.

In my defense, I’d had people telling me what an awesome and rare gift for writing I had for years.  Sure, some of that praise was Lake Wobegon feedback (you know, where ALL the children are above average).  But enough of it came from people who ought to know good writing and who weren’t easy to please that I believed it.  Plus, I’d always had a bone-deep certainty that writing was what I’d been put on earth to do.  Now that I’d finally finished a book, my real life as an author was about to begin, right?

Not so much.  No one wanted that book.  With the exception of one agent who requested the full and THEN rejected it, I got nothing but form rejection after form rejection.  I was crushed.  Didn’t they notice my smooth, polished prose and my carefully crafted historical voice?  Weren’t they charmed by my heroine?  Above all, didn’t they know this was my DESTINY?

But I’d already started my next book. Somehow I got it through my thick head that maybe I wasn’t quite the God’s gift to the art of writing that I thought I was.  Sure, grammar and the mechanics of the craft came easily to me, and I had a knack for characterization.  But I was like a young pitcher with a good fastball but no control.  I needed to bring my plotting and pacing skills up to par and learn that there was more to editing than checking for typos and reducing my adverb count.

So I worked.  I made my second manuscript far, far better than my first.  Most of the editors who read it even agreed.  They said it was a good book–it held their interest, they liked my voice, and the heroine was wonderful.  It just wasn’t a good fit for their lines.  Any of them.

I still didn’t give up.  I’m stubborn like that.  I rewrote the heck out of my first manuscript.  I wrote another in a whole different genre.  Each time, I believed I was working on my Overnight Success Book.  No matter how many rejections I got, with each new query my hopes climbed back up again.

At long last, a year ago I sold my second manuscript, The Sergeant’s Lady–the one all those editors praised but rejected nonetheless–to Carina Press.  It came out in August 2010, and its prequel, A Marriage of Inconvenience, released last week.

So, it’s all good now, right?  I’m published, so I must feel happy and successful.

Well…not always.  The problem with success is it can become a continually moving target.  Back when I was getting form rejection after form rejection, success meant selling a book.  Now that I’m published…well, success is starting to mean quitting my day job, or at least going to part-time.  And that’s still a long way off.

Then there are the comparisons.  There are authors out there who write so brilliantly they almost make me want to put down my pen and step away from the keyboard forever, because I just can’t plot as brilliantly or turn phrases as artfully.

And then there’s everyone out there who’s selling more than I am, who’ve maybe already quit their day jobs.  I study them to try to figure out what they’re doing right and I’m doing wrong.  Unfortunately, the answer is rarely easy or straightforward. Sometimes they’re better writers, sometimes they’re faster and have built up a backlist by writing three books in the time it take me to finish one (not having a day job sure helps with that!), sometimes they’re creating or chasing a trend I have no interest in following…but a whole lot of it seems to come down to luck.  At least, there’s no simple formula where if you write X kind of book, get a good review from Website Y, and spend Z amount of time on Twitter, you’ll be a bestseller for sure.

I’m still coming to terms with the challenge of being happy while I’m not yet quite as successful as I’d like to be.  The simple answer would be to forget about everyone else and be happy with where I am now.  But I believe in having goals and in learning from the examples of others, so I don’t think that’s quite the right route.

What I’m trying to do is to consciously separate planning time, when it’s OK to look at the market and what works for other writers, from writing time, which needs to be all about the story in front of me.  To write well, I need to engross myself in my characters and their world, without worrying whether I’m too late for a trend or if I’ve made a heroine too sweet or too dark for the market.  Staying caught up in my story’s world is what keeps writing FUN.

My other trick for staying happy is to keep good feedback on file–fan emails, positive reviews, and the like.  That way when I start envying others’ success, I can read it and remind myself that I already AM successful in my most important goal as a writer–bringing the characters and settings that live in my head alive to entertain and touch readers, even ones I’ve never met.

—————-
Susanna Fraser lives in Seattle with her husband and 7-year-old daughter. By day she’s a research administrator. By night, weekend, and any time she looks particularly abstracted while waiting for the elevators, she works on her novels, though she squeezes in time to sing alto in a local choir and to go to 15-20 Mariners games per year.  Her first historical romance, The Sergeant’s Lady, was an August 2010 release from Carina Press.  Her latest release, A Marriage of Inconvenience, came out earlier this month.

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