By now y'all know I sold my book Broken to Strange Chemistry. It was a two book deal, with no specified second book. Besides finally getting a sale (Yay! Huzzah! WOOT!) I was all excited thinking I had a second book and some wiggle room. I have a coupe completed YA novels, and a few promising WIPs. No problem nailing down that second title, right? We sold them one book, the next would be a piece of cake.
NOPE.
I'm here to tell you the Realities of After set in. Unless you pitch and sell that first book as part of a series, odds are no matter how much you love a particular story or idea, the next won't necessarily be a shoe-in. My agent pitched a second title shortly after the sale, and we waited. Between then and last week, we received a couple passes. (One was an idea I absolutely LOVED--hence the sad picture up there.) So, I gave a lot of thought to the types of books signed by Strange Chemistry so far and clawed together a couple more ideas, one I thought would be awesome and one I didn't dare hope for. Then, we waited some more.
The decision was a surprise, and one I'm not at liberty to share at the moment. But I will tell you it IS the one I wanted to write so badly I didn't even want to even think about it, let alone hope for it.
So... The Realities of After? Total roller coaster, people. Buckle your lap strap and grab the OhCrap bar. Authors with contracts can still receive rejections. Hopes rise and fall. Persistence can pay off. And sometimes, those secondary dreams and acceptances can feel just as awesome as the first!
I think that's the sad reality about our line of work -- art is subjective. It's not like how you get hired in the real world and get to keep that job (generally) until you screw it up. Here, we have to continually prove ourselves just to keep a job. So glad you are getting to write something you will love though!
ReplyDelete