Publishing survival guide: dreams and goals
and telling them apart, as a treat
If you’re an author, everything to do with the publishing industry is an emotional rollercoaster. It’s not an overstatement; we know this.
It’s often a great ride, and it’s often a terrible one, but importantly: it’s always the wild west. Or the Wild West?
[I’m doing copyedits at the moment which means I’ve learnt to overthink every possible instance of punctuation, capitalisation, silly little phrase, etc. I’ve forgotten how to write, and that’s fine. Please continue reading.]
What you must do to survive the Wild West (capitalised) of Publishing is:
Figure out what’s in your control, and take care of that; and
Figure out what’s not in your control, and find a way to make your peace with it.
No one has ever said any version of this quote before. (Do NOT copyedit me on this.)
A way to conceptualise this is dividing it into Goals and Dreams. I didn’t come up with this distinction; I saw it on the internet.
Goals are things that you can accomplish if you set your mind to them. They are within your control.
Dreams are things that you long for but have absolutely no control over.
This is important because if your author goal is to sell one million copies and earn a bazillion pounds dollars and pence and become a no. 1 bestseller across the known world and then you DON’T do any of those— you’ll feel like shit. And this is bad. Because all those things have very little to do with whether you wrote a good book!!!!! I promise!!
This concept is ofc true always and applies everywhere, not just in publishing. We can compare ourselves to each other all over the place, whenever we want. We can make ourselves feel like shit at our leisure! That’s just one of the many great things about being a person right now.
But if your ability to achieve your goals, i.e. the things you use to judge your success, is outside your control, that means your ability to feel happy and content and satisfied is also outside your control. And that, my friends, is not rock and roll.
As an illustration, here are some examples of my author goals:
Write a good book that I’m proud of.
Build a writing community; see people in person and spend less time inside my own head or screen.
Be braver about interacting with people online and advocating for myself.
Keep going swimming regularly — an activity I’ve recently rediscovered and now find opportunities to shoehorn into every conversation because I looove it. This probably helps my writing in some way (?) so it counts as one of my author goals, thank you.
Here are some examples of dreams:
Sell a book in another country.
Do an author event and have it go well and not throw up on or near anyone.
Have my book made into a film.
Be a bestseller.
Just typing that last one gave me an itchy unpleasant feeling in my fingertips. I may have worked too hard on the goals part and don’t spend enough time on the dreams part. In combination with your classic British reticence and self-deprecation and what’s happened is we’ve gone too far the other way, lads. Time to claw it back.
We’ve got to dream. Dreams are important!
Just don’t let them be the thing that decides whether you think you’re an asshole failure person or not.
I encourage you to apply this throughout your life. What have you been setting as a goal that actually, if you think about it, has nothing to do with you and is therefore none of your business? How could you make this into something you can tangibly achieve and take pride in?
For extra points, do a Betty Corrello (beloved author of Summertime Punchline) and go big: write the dreams in the format of delusional affirmations, e.g.
My ideas and talent are so powerful that with the right exposure I will ruin (positive) the world.
My nemesis is seething with jealousy.
This combination of beauty and talent has never been seen before — not in decades!
Inspiring! Thank you Betty.
If you get stuck I invite you to print out and prominently display this image I found on Google as a reminder. Practical and beautiful.
P.S. I’m moving to a fortnightly newsletter schedule. We’ve tried quantity over quality. Now we’re trying half as much quantity for… twice as much quality? You’re welcome!