coming into focus

I’ve been reading a self-published series of thriller novels, and I just got to the sixth one.

I have to say the improvement along the way has been excellent. I would have rated the first one as “pretty OK” – the story was good, but the characters were somewhat like caricatures and the plot was slightly implausible. Nevertheless, the story was good enough that I kept reading, and by book six all these flaws were gone – the plot is tight and compelling, and the characters are sharply drawn and very human.

The author was pretty good to start with, and improved dramatically. Like a rough image in a telescope coming into focus.

And none of this would have been possible as recently as fifteen years ago – the writer would have gotten on the rejection carousel with various literary agents (many of whom were probably crooks) and the excellent later books in the series would never have been written.

The best anecdote on this topic I heard recently was from a retired FBI agent who decided to start writing thriller novels. During her career, she worked many cases of municipal corruption, and so decided to write about an agent investigating a fictional municipal corruption case. One of the rejections she got from an agent informed her that she needed to do more research, because the FBI never investigated municipal corruption cases.

Yes. The retired FBI agent needed to do more research on the FBI. Truly, the expertise of literary agents is deep and profound.

Needless to say, the retired FBI agent is self-published now.

To return to the original example, in the old days the first book would have been rejected a bunch of times and that would be that. Instead, it has made the author money, it has made Amazon money, and thousands of readers have enjoyed books that would otherwise never have existed.

It is a good time to be a writer!

-JM

Cover image by Ondřej Šponiar from Pixabay