Ep. 154: How Do You Keep Writing When No One is Reading You Yet? Bonus Mini-Episode

How Do You Keep Writing When No One is Reading You Yet? Bonus Mini-Episode

Yeah, writing alone while you’re unpublished is so difficult. How do you keep your spirits up? How do you keep believing in yourself when you’re spending hours, weeks, months, and years doing something that has nothing to show for it yet? Listen along as Rachael Herron answer’s Leftie’s question on this mini-episode of How Do You Write.

Transcript

Rachael Herron: 00:00 Welcome to How Do You Write, I’m your host, Rachael Herron, and this is a bonus episode brought to you directly by my $5 patrons. If you’d like me to be your mini-coach for less than a large mocha frappuccino, you can join too at http://patreon.com/rachael. 

00:15 Well, hello writers. Welcome to episode number 154 of How Do You Write. This is a bonus mini-episode and today’s question is brought to us from Left. Leftie is a longtime listener. Hello, Leftie, I’m thrilled that you left this question and I hope that it helps other people. It’s a long question, so here we go. From Leftie, “A long time ago, you asked for questions for your newsletter for writers, and I asked you to give your advice to new-to-publishing writers about traditional versus indie since you know both from experience, and I’d still really like to hear you talk about this. But the question I’d really like you to answer is this one, how did you keep going when you had no agent and no publishing credit? You touched it a bit in the episode of the writer’s well, is it worth it, and you said that it’s the worst when you don’t have a published book. But I’d really liked to hear you talk more about this because it’s going to be soon five years that I’m writing really regularly with intention, that I’m learning about the craft and the business, that I’m really into it and close to 13 years of writing for fun, and sometimes I feel like I’m not farther along in my writing journey than I was five years ago. I love writing, I need it in my life, but with a little one and a partner and a full-time job, sometimes it gets discouraging to feel like I’m investing so much time in something that seems, at least to everyone else but me, to bring absolutely nothing in return. I know you have been there and you are now where I want to be and I’d really love to hear you speak about how to keep going from one place to the other”.

01:44 Oh, Leftie, this is such an incredible question and I also want to address the great tact with what you said, “I asked you a question and you never got around to it”. And I apologize for that, I remember you asking me that. So there’s actually two parts of this question, and I think that the really important and most difficult part of this question is, “How do you keep going when you are not getting any outside encouragement, any outside motivation?”. And that is a really hard question to answer for me. I was by myself and that is what I don’t recommend. So after I got my MFA, I tried to write three different books and totally failed. They’re in the drawer, they’ll never come out. And then I was writing by myself for another couple of years after that, all by myself. I had NaNoWriMo, which was my first experience with community, but I didn’t engage with the community on a personal level. So I went to a couple of writings, but never made any friends. So I was trying to write professionally and failing to really, really get my heart work done. I was not feeling to get to the page, but that was nine years. So if that makes you feel better, I was writing in the dark, alone, for nine years, seven years before I started NaNo, and then two years afterward.

03:15 In that time I wrote a total of four books, and the fourth book was the one– there was the NaNo, and I got an agent from it, and I sold that book. And I say that really easy and simply, and it sounds like it wasn’t hard and it was hard. My mass rejections came from that agent search and that was really difficult, and the most difficult part of it was that I was doing it alone. I didn’t understand how community was necessary. And Leftie, you already have such a leg up on that because you have this community, you have us, you are our friend. You know me and Jay over at the Writer’s Well, we know who you are and we know what you do. I follow you on Instagram and I find your Instagram posts on your writing journey completely inspiring to me. I’ve told you that before and I’m not blowing smoke, I try very hard not to blow smoke ever. You are already finding your community. But what I wonder, and if anybody else is feeling like this out there, I wonder if you have those heart close writing friends, close to you, where you live, that you meet on a regular basis.

04:24 I honestly think that that is one of the most important things for writers. I don’t think that I would be where I am if I didn’t have my core group of writing besties in the Bay area, in a place where we get together as often as we can, and that was a very deliberate putting together a people in order to have this community. And I cannot claim credit for it, Sophie Littlefield, who I’m sure you’ve heard me talk about, she put it together. And it was back in the day when grogs were a thing, group blogs, it’s a terrible word unless you’re talking about drinking grog, that’s okay. But a group blog called a grog is not okay, but we did it and she gathered together eight women whom she liked. She just picked them, she handpicked them, they were writers she knew from RWA, which is when I first started to get community. That’s what I joined, Romance Writers of America, and I met Sophie in it. Shortly thereafter, she started the grog, invited me, and those eight women are still so tight. We gave up the blog years ago. It was called Pens Fatales, I think it’s still archived out there somewhere. But it was almost an excuse just to become friends, we had to get together and talk about how the group cloud blog would work, we had to talk about who would write what posts and from that we fell into this friendship, but it was very, very deliberate on Sophie’s part.

05:47 And so perhaps anyone who’s listening to this who says, “I don’t have those in person friends”, it might be up to you to go out and find those. If you live in the Hinterlands and there is no community, there’s no town near you, then this is something you’ll have to do online. But I recommend that if you’re in a little town where you can make a couple of writing friends, even if they’re not writing in your genre, that’s totally fine, they just have to be people that you connect with on a really true level. I would say that my writing friends are my closest friends and I have a lot of friends. Luckily, I am lucky enough to say that, but the writing friends are the ones who get me the most. So form a group, do a meetup, you will get that guy who comes and he’s so annoying and he wants to run the group, and that’s okay because the group that you set up is really just a place to poach friends from. Then you start hanging out with those friends and talking writing all the time, and you’re not even meeting up anymore. You’re just getting coffee, you’re getting breakfast, you’re getting lunch. And it turns into a community that you can keep going through all of this pain and disappointment and wondering, “Can I really do this?”.

07:03 Because they’re saying the same thing. And that’s the most important part, is to have somebody to say this to. And I’m so glad that you have me, and Leftie, yes, it’s so hard to just keep going. Once you have a book published, whether it is traditional or independently, and let’s get into that really quickly, it will feel a little bit different. People before they are published always feel, and I felt this way, that being traditionally or being any kind of published would complete me. That was my goal in life, was to publish a book. Then once I published a book, the goal was gone and my goals for life got bigger and further away, and I still feel like I’m just touching the edge of the water I want to be in, but I understand the feeling completely. Today, traditional versus indie, it’s such a difficult choice and I really like how my friend J Thorn always points it out, “You can’t choose between traditional and indie, you can choose between pursuing traditional and going indie”. You can pursue the traditional path by going after an agent and getting that agent to sell your book into the traditional marketplace, which is usually the way it goes.

08:17 No one can guarantee that you’ll get into that, it is a small number of people who get into that. It is still the gatekeeper system and it is still disheartening. The lovely thing about indie publishing is that you just do it. You just do it. You hire the cover designer, you always hire the cover designer, you always hire the developmental editor, and then the copy editor and the proofer. You do all those things, but then your book is just as legit. I think that at least 12 or 15 of my books are indie published, so I’m almost half and half right now, hybrid, and I can’t honestly tell you which I like more. I do enjoy the cache of traditional publishing, I always admit that, and I like going into a bookstore and seeing my book on the shelves. It is always a thrill and it is a thrill I hope I never get over cause I would be an asshole if that wasn’t a thrill. But independent to me is more fun. I have more creative control and I honestly, normally most years make more money in the independent publishing sphere.

09:21 So it is really about what you want and if you want to be traditional published and you want to go after the agent, then do that for a while. Go after it, give yourself a time limit. Don’t say, “I must be traditional published or I will die unpublished”. Why do that? Give yourself a year to look for an agent or two years or whatever feels comfortable to you, and then reassess whether you’d want to be indie. Or you can do what a lot of friends of mine do, they publish a few books indie while they’re taking this particular book, whatever, for whatever reason, that’s the one they want to save for the agent and take it out. And you could just keep on sending those query letters out. Remember that a hundred query letters is not a lot of query letters to send out in order to get an agent. I did hear about a guy, and I can’t remember, it was recently, he had sent more than a thousand query letters and had never been asked for a partial, so I’m thinking that guy might want to reassess his query letter at least. So know what your heart wants, know that it’s okay to go either way. Like I said, I love both, I really believe in my heart that for me, being hybrid is really my happy, sweet spot, and I find a lot of people feel like that. I know some indie diehards who are now thinking, “Well, you know, I wouldn’t hate trying a traditional deal”. It’s interesting how many kinds of different mad you can get entering a traditional deal. However, I have to say that the publisher that I’m with right now is outstanding and they are blowing away all of my expectations. And they are helping me solve my PTSD, which I’ve talked about for a long time, in which the P stands for publishing, the traditional publishing industry. 

11:09 So it’s hard. All of this is hard. It is hard when you’re published, but there is a special kind of lonely and discouragement that comes before you have that connection. And what exactly did you say here? “I feel like I’m investing so much in something that seems to bring me absolutely nothing in return”. It hasn’t brought you absolutely nothing, it’s brought you to us, it’s brought us to you. Make those connections, have a best girlfriend or two or three that you can sit down and talk about this with, I cannot emphasize it more. And if you have those friends and you’re still feeling a little bit parched, like you need more to keep going, tell them that. Build in a couple of reward systems, you know. If you want to go the traditional route, every 10 rejections from agents, you’re going to go get a mani-pedi with one of those friends, or something that pleases your heart. I am not into mani-pedies myself, but something that pleases you, that gives you a reward system. What you are looking for right now is that dopamine reward of somebody saying, “Yes, this is worthy”, and we have to give it to ourselves and we have to continue giving that to ourselves even when we are multi-published. And it’s amazing how we still have to keep loving ourselves and loving our work, and it’s hard, it’s really hard. 

12:37 So I love that you asked this. I hope that I said something a little bit hopeful. You are not alone, we all feel this with you and thank you for being inspiring to me, Leftie. And I believe, I don’t know if you want me to do this, but other people who might want to follow Leftie’s journey, I think if you just search Leftie Aube, A-U-B-E, on Instagram, you can follow her there, her posts are incredible. So there, Leftie, you just got some more community, I hope you don’t mind. All right you all, this was a little bit longer than a mini bonus episode, but no matter where you are, if you are in the United States, Thanksgiving, as I record this is tomorrow, good luck to you and family. Oh, what a holiday. So if you’re not, I just hope you get some good writing done and we will talk soon, my friends.

13:42 Thanks so much for joining me on this episode of How Do You Write. You can reach me on Twitter, Rachael Herron, or at my website, http://rachaelherron.com. You can also support me on Patreon, and get essays on living your creative life, for as little as a buck an essay, at http://www.patreon.com/rachael, spelled R-A-C-H-A-E-L. And do sign up for my free weekly newsletter of encouragement to writers at http://rachaelherron.com/write. Now, go to your desk and create your own process, and get to writing my friends.