If at first you don't succeed, appear on a podcast

The other week I tweeted about my experience working with my agent to sell my second novel—and how our efforts had not succeeded. Despite the fact that we both fought hard for it, despite the fact that the editors we sent it to had nothing but kind things to say about it, nobody bought the novel.

When this happened with my first novel, it hurt—but I handled it better than I thought I would. I figured, it was a first try. Try, try again. But this time around, I felt worse. How could this happen again? Even though I knew exactly how this could happen again: personal preferences, a terrible market, not wanting to take a chance on a debut author, the nightmare that was 2020 in general.

I wanted to share my experience with other authors, since we’re normally inundated only with success stories. Failing to sell a novel—or two, or three—is a common part of the process, and we should talk about it more.

And apparently people wanted to talk! That thread is easily the most popular thing I’ve ever tweeted, although a few thousand likes is hardly viral. I spent about two days taking time to respond to people—since I’d made myself vulnerable, I didn’t want their vulnerability in return to go unrecognized.

One of the responses I received was an invitation to appear on the Joined Up Writing Podcast—and the episode I recorded is out today! We talked about my thread and more generally about my writing process—it was lots of fun. I’d love it if you listened.

Like I said in the thread, I’m certainly not giving up. If you’re having similar luck with your work, you shouldn’t give up, either.