Write Good or Die

doesn’t interest me. Mercury Falls has been in the top 20 books in the “humor” category for Kindle for the past two months and is going to be stocked by Barnes & Noble. That’s the sort of thing I care about.
    I’m convinced that these days being “published” by a traditional publisher is a meaningless detour on the road to being a successful author. The only real advantage to going with a traditional publisher is that you’ll have an editor to help make your book as good (or at least as marketable) as possible. That was the main reason I attempted to go the traditional route before finally self-publishing Mercury Falls . Unfortunately, while I got some positive feedback from literary agents, I just couldn’t get any bites. So I started to float the idea of self-publishing it.
    The fascinating thing to me was that the people who screamed “NO! DON’T DO IT!” were themselves aspiring authors who had not yet been published. All of the published authors I knew said, “That’s a great idea. Go for it. Get your work in front of readers and show publishers that you can sell a few thousand books.”
    Published authors already know that being published ain’t all it’s cracked up to be. That’s not to say there aren’t challenges associated with self-publishing, but compared with the challenges facing any unknown author, the challenges of self-publishing are nothing.
    It’s true that the odds of a self-published book being successful are extremely small. But to say that self-publishing generally results in failure is to confuse cause and effect. The odds of any book being successful are extremely small. Books published by traditional publishers are more likely to succeed because publishers have the luxury of cherry-picking the one book out of a thousand that they think will sell (and they are still wrong most of the time!)
    Saying that publishers create bestsellers is like saying the NFL creates great football players. The NFL doesn’t create great players; all they do is try to predict which players will be great. Similarly, if a publisher decides to publish your book, it’s because your book has a good chance at success. The difference between writing and playing football is that writing is a solitary endeavor. While a professional football player would have a hard time succeeding outside the NFL, you don’t need the approval of a Big Publisher any more than a marathon runner needs the approval of the National Marathon Runners Association. If you have a book in you, write it.
    Again, I don’t want to give the impression that if you write a decent book and publish it through one of the many self-publishing companies out there, you’ll have an instant bestseller on your hands. Whether you’re published by Random House or Joe Smith Press, it’s an uphill battle to get your book noticed by book retailers and readers. Making Mercury Falls into the modest success that it has become took a tremendous amount of work. I essentially took two months off from work to spend time promoting my book. I’m a web developer by trade, so I was able to capitalize on my technical skill to get exposure for Mercury Falls . I promoted the book on my blog, created a separate website with information about the book, created a Facebook page for it, and much, much more. I also spent a fair amount of my own money to send over 200 copies of Mercury Falls to potential reviewers.
    So, to the question “How do I write a bestselling novel?” I can only answer that I have no more of an idea than anyone else. What I do know is that writing a novel that you’re excited about is a very good first step. If you’re excited about it, there’s a good chance other people will get excited about it–and if one of those people is a literary agent or an editor at a big publishing house, that’s a nice bonus. But don’t write for that faceless agent or editor. Write for yourself.

    Robert Kroese— http://mercuryfalls.net
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9. Persistence
    By M.J. Rose
    http://www.mjrose.com

    Like it or not, people say "no" more than they say “yes." But when I started out on my own in business I got paralyzed by the first few dozen "no's" that I heard. Rejection is tough on even the most self-confident person. Like a hammer, each "no" sunk me lower into a funk. My idea was good, was it? But would so many people say "no" if it had potential?
    What made it even worse was that I'm a writer and my business idea was based on my own writing, so