Today’s reblog comes courtesy of the Lit Mag News Substack. Lev Raphael spins us a classic yarn of years of rejection finally turning into success. The secret: understanding why you write, and knowing who you’re writing for.
What eventually turned the tide? Distance and introspection. Away from New York and its toxic ideas of success, I asked myself a simple question: who might be my audience, given that I was writing so much about children of Holocaust survivors? The answer was obvious and should have hit me sooner: Jewish readers. As if by magic, once I started sending these Jewish-themed stories to Jewish magazines and newspapers, I was back on the publishing track and making money at it too.
Most writers are excited about writing, but many are deeply unexcited about marketing themselves or figuring out the commercial niches that their work fits into. Unfortunately for most of us, it’s a necessary skill to learn to sell our work, whether that be sending out short stories to the right publications, or seeking agents and publishers (or self-publishing) for books.
As Raphael says,
The main thing I learned from being accepted by publishers is that a book and its author are commodities that need to be sold, and the author has to work hard to sell both. You need to push aside any embarrassment and pull up your cyber sleeves.
Words Deferred 