Advice for a Friend Whose 1st Book MS Has Been Sent Out for Years – and Surviving Unpleasant Appointments

A friend of mine suggested I post an e-mail I sent to them encouraging them in a fairly common situation – discouragement from sending out their first book for years and not finding a publisher. This person admitted that they were so discouraged they had only sent out their book a couple of times in the last year.

To me, this is exactly the opposite strategy you should take with a book that’s been around a while. You should either shake it up – send it to new places, pay someone to put a new set of eyes on it and re-edit, re-title, and re-organize the manuscript, and do some research to see if there are some publishers you may have overlooked in the past that might now be good fits for your book. (Publishers change direction, editors, and readers all the time!) Here’s the remainder of my e-mail:

I think at this point I feel like you would be happy just having the book out there in the world, with an ISBN, so you can get past it and say “I have my first book!” and move on to other things. Am I wrong? If this is the case, you need to really go for it. I sent my first book out 65 times a year. That’s a lot of fees, but it was taken within a year and a half.
I wouldn’t talk to you about this if I hadn’t been watching you worry about this for several years. Don’t worry, just send it out. If you’re worried it’s not what it could be yet, get a trusted friend to take a look at it, or hire a stranger to give you a manuscript edit (I did! I hired Poet X to look at my first book—and Poet Y to look at this last book, The Robot Scientist’s Daughter—after those books didn’t get taken within six months. Both of them gave me valuable insights—and I paid them, and I felt they would be honest with me about what was working and what wasn’t. It was worth it!) And then put those suggestions into account, and mess around with your MS. If you think it’s as good as it’s going to get, then be fearless about putting it out into the world.”

In other news about discouragement, this week has sort of been an exercise in discouragement—appointments with two potential dentists that ended in disappointment and not fixing the problem, one of which took place with a woman weeping in the waiting room the whole time we waited, and a neurology appt. with good news—one of my problems was fixable with proper weird nerve protection (using a puffy thing over my elbow nerve) and bad news—that some of my ongoing neurological problems were caused by permanent spine nerve damage and would not be getting better. I try to keep a good attitude, but yesterday, even music, venting to a friend and my mom, and looking at cute animal pictures could not keep me from curling up in a fetal position on a bed and just feeling plain old miserable. Hey, a person can only go through so much, even a tough person! So I’m taking today as a “happiness” day—listening to upbeat music, going for a walk in the sun, maybe even doing some therapeutic shopping at the consignment store where I’m dropping off two boxes of things (hello, second-hand Tod’s handbag hanging in the window…). Glenn bought me some early Valentine’s flowers to cheer me up as well. All this dental and medical appointment takes a toll in time, energy, and money, that I’m not super excited about right now when I want to be putting energy into friends, my new book, new skill sets, and healthy practices like exercise and trying to add new foods to my now three-year-long elimination diet. (Next up: olives and pineapple—but not together!) Everyone has things that block them from doing what they want sometimes—it’s really a matter of not letting those things make you give up.

So, just like I said to my friend, I’m saying to myself, too: sometimes we have to redouble our efforts, do the extra work and give ourselves a push towards what we want from the universe.