Managing Expectations

I started out, as many authors do, sending query after query to agent after agent after agent. I received a great number of those uniform rejection notices that are popular enough to trend on Twitter. Some agents never bothered to write back. Still, I had great expectations for my product, and indeed I still do. It has a great deal going for it (as do countless other books out there, and I do not speak poorly of any of them). I mean to say writing a sci-fi Snow White as though the evil stepmother was Darth Vader is probably gold in the right hands. But every author struggles to build a platform initially. And as a middle-grade author of products that cannot be found in an actual store where kids can ogle them, I’m sure this will take a while.

It’s a tougher game when you’re independently published. There is a stigma about independently published authors. Anyone and her grandma are indie authors! And someone can go to Shutterfly and put together a photo album and feel like an indie author. But the reality is, no one outside of your closest friends and your immediate family want to see pictures of that cruise you just went on. (Some of them don’t even want to see it. Can you blame them? It’s not like they had money burning a hole in their wallet to travel around the world in 80 days.)

But being a true indie author is different. You have a legitimate story that requires just as much effort for you to write as it did New York Times’ best seller of the day. And you then must put it through the paces of an editor because someone with a few pennies to his name to start with doesn’t have the thousands of dollars to spend on an editor. So at the least, we get beta readers, and most of the time the ones so eager to read our story aren’t the sort who are willing to tell us what’s wrong with it. Not only that but we are expecting a handful of people to really know what everyone feels about our story.

But here’s the cool thing. (You may not think it’s so wonderful, but believe me, it is.) When NYT’s best seller of the week realizes he’s no longer #1 next week, and when he puts an extra load of pressure on himself to make his publisher enough money so they are willing to publish his next book, sooner or later those feelings will catch up with him. He’s inexperienced because it’s his debut novel and he’s being set up for a crash. He’s further being told that someone wants those movie rights but wants to cut the heart out of the story he wrote. And he doesn’t know how to feel.

When we start out at the bottom and build up our product line and build a platform of loyal folks, even if we know every last one of them by name, even if we affectionately call them mom, we know what it feels like to carry a secret treasure just waiting to blow minds. We know what the bottom feels like, and when the story hits the big time, we get the full experience. We can enjoy the elation of a successful product while knowing what it felt like to be at the bottom. There’s no tripping over egos.

I’ve been told this past week that the way I wrote descriptions in Impulse seemed like a brilliant approach. I was told this week that my descriptions were terrible and my sense of humor is ridiculous. And to reply to such cynicism I released a comedy short story. (Ironic, isn’t it?) I even found an agent this week only to discover the agent wanted an unpublished product and I didn’t qualify. So life works in interesting ways. I’m learning that if I keep my expectations low and  learn to laugh at myself even when no one else will I will be a much happier author and enjoy the ride a whole lot more.

I usually write advice about writing in my blog. The advice I hope to share in this post is this: keep your hopes high and your expectations in check. When the others finally discover our gold, and they will in time if we don’t give up, they’ll join us on the journey if we keep our sanity. No one wants to worry about a crazy tour guide tripping them into an active volcano. Pull for others, let them pull for you, and somehow together we’ll all make it through. (Sorry. Too much Seuss juice.)

Because I believe we learn best from the experience of others who’ve been there too: how do you manage expectations?

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