It really is a myth that you need to know people to get ahead in publishing.
I'd like to second this. Anecdotally—I am a newbie to the publishing world and really have no contacts. My agent picked my book from the slush, not because I knew people.
It really is a myth that you need to know people to get ahead in publishing.
I'd like to second this. Anecdotally—I am a newbie to the publishing world and really have no contacts. My agent picked my book from the slush, not because I knew people.
However you begin, the aim should always be reader empathy. Dear Reader should cry, laugh, swear, etc. If you don't write to touch it will most def be boring.
I'll second the role of hard work--and how brutal rejection is. Absolutely.
On the other hand, I do feel that bad books get published. It depends on what your standard of "good" is; if selling is the ultimate goal, who are we to question anything that sells? But I think for all of us it's only one of the goals--if the hardest one.
I don't want to go on and on, but one specific example so you understand the level of it. This was Christian Holocaust fiction. It contained a Polish farmer who had a gun and a pickup truck and who, suddenly presented with Jews who'd escaped from Auschwitz, hid them and explained it was because Jesus was Jewish and wanted him to. And I mean he said it like it was obvious. Also! Pickup truck! In 1940s Poland!
We had a Peugeot pick up truck with a radio(not much use on the run). We had to go South before we could go West, to avoid being overrun. We had a lot of attacks by Stukas. As soon as we heard them, we stopped and ran for the ditches. Our driver had a narrow escape in one of these attacks, so next time he tried to distance himself further by running towards some woods, but he was killed. We had to bury him quickly & then decide who was going to drive.
I don't doubt this author works hard. Has a ton of thrillers to his name. I looked and looked at his opening, which did everything they say not to do--it did nothing but declare the main character's thoughts for several pages--and it was effective.
Being successful because you happened to have the right skills in the right place around the right people seems to be true of life in general, not just publishing. However, I don't see this as a reason to wring our hands in dismay and try and estimate what percentage of luck is required in order to get published, unless that's also what you do with everything else in your life.
If you want to be published it doesn't matter what your standard of "good" is: what's important is if an agent, and then a publisher, thinks they can sell it.
Some very wise people on this very board have said that the only thing you can do is focus on those things over which you have control.
Actually, that's excellent advice for life in general, not just writing.
Some very wise people on this very board have said that the only thing you can do is focus on those things over which you have control.
Actually, that's excellent advice for life in general, not just writing.
I'm confused. If I'm already published, does it then matter what my standard of “good” is?
Your story has a Peugeot pickup truck being used by the Allied armies in France near the end of the war. That's extremely believable despite how (relatively) uncommon pickup trucks are in Europe. A poor-to-modest Polish farmer owning one with gas in it in occupied Poland stretches my credulity a little more.
I think we can drive ourselves nuts trying to quantify what percentage of success is luck vs. hard work and skill/talent. This goes for other professions besides writing too.
I suspect that luck and timing are somewhat more than 10% of the formula but somewhat less than 90%. That's a huge range, and it may well be situational or genre/market-dependent too. Quality is very subjective, and most published work falls short of being literary masterpieces but is still quite a lot better than something one could dash off without any skill (or editing). I've certainly read trade-published books that were not that great from wither a technical or plot-related standpoint, in my opinion, not to mention stories I think are good but could have benefited from another round of editing. Then there are the ones that make me itch to rework sentences into greater smoothness and eliminating annoyingly repeated words or names and that
This is my opinion, of course, and in the interest of RYFW (and editors), I realize that no work is perfect, tastes are subjective, and even big five presses and pro rate short fiction markets have to make hard choices about deadlines, production costs, and which readership they are targeting and which sorts of stories and worlds and characters they think might be "hot" in the current market (or which kinds they hope they can create a market for).
I'm guessing that good craft skills and rigorous editing probably won't hurt one's chances, but they're not everything.
As I already said, I used to think that once you sold something to a respectable market, you'd have it made, or at least that success would banish lingering self doubts about the quality of your work. Enough published writers have told me otherwise that I now realize that this view was hopelessly naive.
What's your point?
Others have said similar things to this, so sorry if I'm just repeating here. There are so many factors involved in making a story good, that a story that appears "bad" on the surface might also be succeeding largely because of all the other right things the author did.
Yup, being boring just makes books well boring!
It just makes it feel like maybe we're wasting time doing research and making sure we get those little details right.
Yes, big-name authors do sometimes get a free pass when it comes to rule-breaking. But when we're getting started it's best to observe them, because they are there for a purpose.
Once we're more skilled, we get a lot more freedom.
It really is a myth that you need to know people to get ahead in publishing. Good work trumps almost everything; bad work won't get you published no matter who you know.
If you are invited to submit your work through a workshop you don't get ahead of the rest of the writers who submitted through the usual way: you just get added to the rest of the queue.
Your options are only limited because you won't get to meet other writers, or learn the advice being given at the workshops. You won't have any less a chance of publication because you don't go to these events.