Good Enough is Not Good Enough

I always believed when I was unpublished, that my best strategy was to try to write a book that it was impossible for someone to turn down. The idea that you only have to write a book that is good enough to get published is wrong. If you are angry about a book that was published that you think is terrible, and you think—I can write something that good—that isn't good enough.

If you want to be published, my advice to you—my best advice—is that you write well enough that people will come to you to ask you for work to publish. You want to be writing so well that when an editor reads your manuscript, it makes him/her say “I have to publish this book.” You don't want to be the book an editor uses to fill a slot. You don't want to be the author who gets lost in the shuffle after publication. You don't want to have a career that is over after one book.

When I was a teenager, I had a swim coach who used to brag that he once beat Mark Spitz in a race. Well, it turned out he beat Mark Spitz ten years after Spitz was in the Olympics. Lots of people had beaten Mark Spitz at that point. He was no longer Olympic class. It was a low bar. And that's not the bar that gets you to the Olympics.

Set your sights to the writing Olympics. Don't just try to be published. Try to be the best book of this kind ever written. Try to be so unique and so incredible that you knock the socks off readers. You want to be in this for the long haul. You don't want to publish one book. You want a long string of great books. Don't you?