This is a long article, but worth reading if you want to keep your sanity in the writing game. It highlights why books sell or don't sell (hint: it's all pretty random) and why it's good to let go of trying to control the uncontrollable:
http://julieannelong.typepad.com/ju...ou-can-do-about-it-the-tao-of-publishing.html
With perfectly good intentions, all of us look back over the recent publishing successes and disappointments and use that what we see to formulate “rules” to achieve future success. But we inevitably overlook the random factors at play because, as Leonard Mlodinow points out in The Drunkard’s Walk (whose title refers to a classic description of randomness), “people have a very poor conception of randomness; they do not recognize it when they see it.
But unless we can separate out those random factors which contributed to an author’s past success, anything we can say or predict about why she succeeded will invariably be way off-the-mark.
http://julieannelong.typepad.com/ju...ou-can-do-about-it-the-tao-of-publishing.html
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