Over at Seekerville today, Janet Dean is blogging about her experiences with promoting her first book, Courting Miss Adelaide, a Steeple Hill Love Inspired Historical.
And on Editorial Ass, Moonrat has announced her November bookclub selection.
These two posts got me thinking.
I've been targeting Silhouette Desire. These are series (6 per month) that hit the bookshelves for a single month. That's not a lot of time to build a following. But in the case of short contemporary, an author can write 3-4 books in a year and build momentum that way. But there's not much backlist potential.
But what if you spend a long time writing one book and it makes a huge splash because of Oprah or some controversy surrounding it. Or what if you become like JK Rowling and write 7 books that become huger than huge and you make tons of money. What do you do for an encore?
If Monty Hall stood in front of me right now and asked me if I would prefer door number one with its years of hard work and gradually increasing paychecks or door number two with its huge advance, publicist and book tour, I would choose the current path I'm on. A slow building of readership rather than a huge splash of success. Isn't that strange? Why wouldn't I want to be the next BIG THING? Am I thinking too small? Is there too much pressure having your books made into movies and having tons of crazed, adoring fans? Or, am I just enjoying being a writer? And is that enough?
How about you? Would you like your career to start with a bang, or are you happy just writing what you love and being a small fish in a big pond?
Today's goal: Read
Yesterday's achievement: Bending is in the mail
What I'm grateful for: see above
Quote: "If we are to learn to improve the quality of the decisions we make, we need to accept the mysterious nature of our snap judgments." -Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, 2005
