Rejected!

There is a certain risk of rejection in being an author.  In traditional publishing I think you pretty much need to accept that you will be rejected tons of times before you will receive an acceptance.  I got to avoid that part of publishing.  I didn't send out my manuscript to every publisher I could think of only to have it sent back repeatedly with varying degrees of harshness in the letters accompanying it.  I just went ahead and published it myself.

I did send it to a writing competition before deciding to self-publish.  It was through Women of Faith and Westbow Publishing.  I did not make the top thirty and I have no idea how far under the top thirty I was.  I choose to believe that it just wasn't the type of book they were looking for and not for any other reason.  Wishful thinking, I know, but I'm fairly certain that I would never have taken the next step if I hadn't decided that was the reason.

Putting the book on Kindle, I was concerned about people not being interested or people writing negative reviews.  What I didn't know is that when someone returns it, I can see that.  When you buy a Kindle book you have a short window of time to say that it was a mistake and send it back.  When I look at my sales report it has a column for books sold, books returned and net books sold.  It's amazing how difficult it is not to take it personally when a book is returned.  There's always a feeling that they quickly read the first chapter or two and then decided that it wasn't good enough.  Again, I lie to myself and choose to believe that they had intended to buy another book called "Best Laid Plans" (because there are a million books with that title) and bought mine by mistake.

I've actually been rather blessed by this as well.  It's not often that I have a book returned.  I think maybe in the nine months it's been available, I may have had eight to ten books returned.  Yet each one sort of makes you wonder.  I have to remind myself that there have been lots more who haven't returned my book and be thankful for those.

On a side note, I've had a bit of a break from writing lately.  We were on vacation for a couple of weeks and last week was just really busy.  Today I finally got to sit down and write again.  It was so nice to get back to Georgia's story.  I have a feeling that my climax is coming soon!  I'm very excited about how this story is developing.  I'm hoping that I can have it available by September - my self-imposed deadline.

Best Laid Plans by Courtney Lyman