Well, isn’t this something. Their “overnight success” is only “overnight” to those of us who haven’t slogged alongside them for the past decade or two.<\/p>\n
From a Guardian<\/em> story on Amanda Hocking — who btw is now 27 years old<\/a>:<\/p>\n [B]y the end of high school she estimates she had written 50 short stories and started countless novels. The first that she actually completed, Dreams I Can’t Remember, was written when she was 17. She was very excited by the accomplishment, and printed it out for friends and family, as well as sending it to several publishers.<\/p>\n “I got rejection letters back from all of them. I don’t blame them \u2013 it wasn’t very good,” Hocking says.<\/p>\n Hocking went on to develop an intimate relationship with rejection letters. She has somewhere in her new house a shoebox full of them.<\/p>\n Yet she would not give up. She wrote unpublished book after unpublished book. “Sometimes I’d say: ‘I’m done, I’m never going to write another book,’ but then a couple of months later I’d have another idea and I’d start again. This time it was bound to work.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n And here’s Mr. Konrath himself, he-who-has-made-$3500-per-DAY this January<\/a> via Kindle sales. He starts with stuff like this:<\/p>\n I wrote 9 novels and collected over 500 rejections during a 10 year period before I made a dime in this business. I sold my tenth novel in a three book deal for $110,000 back in 2002.<\/p>\n My publisher refused to tour me for my first book. They also refused to let me do any official book signings because they would have had to pay coop. So I began doing bookstore drop-ins and handselling my books. I’d stay anywhere from four to eight hours in bookstores. Have you ever sold one hundred $25 hardcovers in one place? I have. It’s hell.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n And sums up the whole thing a bit later with this:<\/p>\n I got my first rejection letter in 1988. I’ve worked hard for 24 years, waiting for this kind of success.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I’ve got two novels pubbed and am working now to finalize a third. And it seems sometimes like it’s taking a long time for my books to get any traction. I sometimes start to feel a bit discouraged.<\/p>\n So finding those two stories this morning came at a good time.<\/p>\n I’m going to keep pushing . . .<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Well, isn’t this something. Their “overnight success” is only “overnight” to those of us who haven’t slogged alongside them for the past decade or two. From a Guardian story on Amanda Hocking — who btw is now 27 years old: … Continue reading