Now What? Don’t Give Up on Your Goal

During January of our “Now What?” Months, we’re talking to Wrimos who’ve published their NaNoWriMo projects and asking them how they got there. Today,  Beth Revis, best-selling author of the Across the Universe series and A World Without You , shares her story about the long, long process of getting published:

Ten. 

Ten is an important number to me. 

It took me ten novels before I wrote one worth publishing. Those ten novels took me ten years collectively to write. And there were rejections. More than ten. More than a thousand. 

Here’s the most important thing I learned in that decade of trying—and failing—to be published: 

Have a goal. 

That sounds so trite. (Although not, perhaps, as trite as “Never give up!” which may have been the more obvious thing to write. But I’m not writing that. Because if you want to be an author, that’s a given.) 

But here’s the thing. Having a goal—a very specific goal that I could either reach or not—helped more than anything else. For me, my goal was the traditional path: agent, publisher, book deal. Having that goal helped me to move on. If I couldn’t get an agent with the first book, I’d write another. And another and another. There were other options—self publishing, smaller presses, quitting. But those options were not my goal. 

I learned other things. Tricks of the trade that you pick up as you go: 

Copy and paste the first five pages into the bottom of your query in order to give the agent a sample of your writing. Query in batches—if you get nothing but form rejections, then your query needs work; if you’re getting rejected after the sample, then your pages need work. Join the community—writers love to help writers (or at least the decent ones do). 

But I learned one other things that’s really important: 

Failure is not your enemy.

Failure is, in fact, a good thing. Failures makes you work harder. It makes you give a damn. It forces you to learn, to grow. 

If your goal is clear and strong enough, failure cannot break it. If you fail long enough, and you don’t let that failure stop you, then nothing can stop you.  

Beth Revis is the author of the NY Times bestselling Across the Universe series, The Body Electric, the Paper Hearts series and A World Without You! Never miss a thing: sign up for Beth’s monthly newsletter or visit her website at www.bethrevis.com.