Robin Farella asked Anne Easter Smith:

Thank you for all your wonderful work. I completely understand about "hanging up your pen" you deserve it. I will be sad that there will be no more books, but at least I have the ones you've already written which have been read many times and will in the future. I am just beginning my career as an author. Both my kids are grown, so I decided it was time to take the leap. Thank you again. ?

Anne Easter Smith All the best with your writing, Robin! May you be as fortunate I was to land on the right editor's desk with my first attempt--A Rose for the Crown. Publishing is not the easiest industry to break into now, and it is one of the reasons I have stopped writing. At 79, I am loath to wade into self-publishing and all the marketing that goes with it. After Royal Mistress, my agent could not sell This Son of York even though I was a 5-time Simon & Schuster published author. They didn't like that I had a male protagonist, that it was more than the requisite 350 pages, and set in the now unfashionable medieval period. Three strikes and you're out! Had I written a WWII book with a female resistance worker, they would have snapped me up! I found a small new publishing house in western Mass (not far from my eastern MA home) who did a bang up job on producing the book, but there was no marketing component attached. It came out in December 2019 and COVID hit two months later before I could really take it on the road. It's my best book (IMHO!) but it had the least legs. Now that publisher has had to shut down, and so we (mostly my husband) spent several months getting the returned MS converted to my newly minted EasterSmith Press so that it didn't go out of print. Don't suppose you needed all of this, and you need encouragement and not negativity, but this is what publishing is doing to perfectly good authors today. They are looking for a best-seller, no matter the quality, and if you aren't right on top of writing what's selling in your genre, you are turned away.

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