5/12/2023 0 Comments The Heretic by Lucas Bale![]() A much smaller proportion of the royalties (if my book earned enough to even pay back the advance, if I got one). Then find a distributor, and sell well enough to be kept on the shelves and not pulped. ![]() Followed by the wait for my agent to pitch to publishers who would themselves need to pitch it up the line to the various departments within their own company who need to sign off on a new book. I recall weighing the options: the emotionally tortuous and time-consuming process of writing letters to agents and papering my toilet with the rejections as Stephen King suggested in On Writing. It’s too far in the distant past now, almost a whirlwind year ago. I can’t remember what the spark was which lit the touch-paper of my decision to self-publish. “There are no happy endings, Nyxnissa,” Hurley’s main protagonist in God ’ s War is told. You write because you love writing, not because you want to be the next Howey or Scalzi. The chances of breaking out are pretty grim. Yet, she learned, after she received her first book offer, that writing is a business, and expectations are often crushed. ![]() As rejection letters built up, hope dwindled – writing was one long road of rejection and disappointment. ![]() She even pasted the word ‘persistence’ to her monitor, where it still sits today. Kameron Hurley wrote, in We Have Always Fought, of the long con of being a successful writer how important persistence was. **In keeping with my efforts to help new voices in publishing be heard, I’ve turned over the blog today to my friend Lucas Bale. ![]()
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