First Sunday Q&A: Sometimes You Just Have to Quit (to Get a Second Chance)
Bummer decisions, missed opportunities, failed ideas? A few thoughts on second chances and what they require--and when it's better to just hang up your hat
Welcome, all you new paid subscribers! I’m thrilled you’ve joined us—so many in the last month. Thanks for your support. In my “First Sunday” newsletter, we discuss your most gnarly writing and publishing questions. If you missed past topics, as a paid subscriber you can access the archives.
If you’re not yet subscribed to First Sunday, a yearly subscription is only $45 or $5 a month. My wish is to create a safe space to ask questions and discuss the writing and publishing dilemmas we all face.
Q: I’ve had a rough year, with my writing. I don’t like to think about the mistakes I made, all the opportunities I should’ve said yes to. I was afraid—of looking stupid, of getting stuck in something that turned out worse than I thought. I played it safe, which is not always the best move. It worked, but it also stifled me. And I see now what I could’ve done, achieved. The regrets are piling up. For one, I wish I’d spent much more time learning about podcasts and setting them up for my new book, way in advance. But my launch has come and gone, and the book feels a bit dead in the water.
Do we get a second chances in publishing? Can I still reach for my dreams, even now?
A: What a terrifically honest question —one that took courage to even send me. Takes a lot to admit mistakes like this. So many of us have them.
Publishing is never predictable, and rarely easy. Efforts are never guaranteed to succeed. But worse, I feel, is to end up with more regrets than satisfaction after your book is in the world. Regrets eat at you. For a long time. And books are out there a long time.
This is one reason I advise writers to never hurry the process. Ten years from now, you still want to be proud of your book and what you achieved, right? But sometimes it’s not that easy. There are pressures all over—financially, socially, in your writing career—that push you to produce. How many books a year? How many social media platforms? How many followers?
It’s not about the numbers, though, when it comes to looking back and feeling those regrets. It’s about the satisfaction of your process, your decisions, your sense of accomplishment. Whether what you had in your heart and mind actually got received by the world, by your readers. That’s what counts, in my view. That’s what nullifies the regrets.
I want to applaud this writer for doing something so many of us wish for: finish a manuscript, get an agent, get the book in reader’s hands. That’s no small feat today. Yes, this writer wanted a lot more from the process. Yet there was a lot achieved, and that’s worth noting.
But we have these war stories, and we make mistakes because we don’t know better. Or we depend on someone or some aspect of publishing we trust that doesn’t turn out to be 100 percent what we wanted. We pass through terrible times, when hopes turn sour. It’s all very hard. (Fear of this happening—all that for naught—causes some writers never to begin.)
This is not going to be an entirely downer post, by the way, because there are ways out. There are second chances. And I think this is what my questioner is asking about: can you go back for a redo?
Second chances in publishing
We’re told the window of publishing is short. If you don’t fly through it within six weeks or six months, your book dies. Yes, that’s true in a certain arena. But some books are slow burners (mine have mostly been, and they are still selling decades later).
Books are around for a long time. I feel, from my own experience, we get many second chances with books we’ve already released. I believe there’s never a time when we lose the opportunity to find new readers.
One of my colleagues spoke of the same regrets as the questioner, wondering if it was too late (a year after her pub date) to get on podcasts. I asked my podcast publicist who said emphatically, no! Never too late. This week, I spoke on a wonderful podcast where the host asked me about all my novels, and we spoke at length about the first one, published in 2009. I’m guessing there will be a few new readers for it, because of her keen interest.
If your books are still in print, they can still be finding those readers.
Another book release can also pump up your backlist—that’s happened to me twice, where a current novel excites interest (and sales) for an earlier one. Maybe the best scenario to sell another book is to make a big splash with the current one, granted. But your readers are still out there, even if your book doesn’t break out.
That’s the short answer to this great question—and I’d encourage this writer to keep supporting the new book. Don’t give up on it! It’s got a lotta life left.
But the question sent me down a different rabbit hole this week. I thought about the psychology of defeat. Why these periods of deep regret happen and is there a pattern, do the bottoming-out times in our larger learning curve generate new progress. I believe they do. And here’s why.
This Sunday’s newsletter will address passages of regret from two perspectives: why they happen and if there’s any predictable sense to the timing, and whether we can indeed repair what’s been broken—get a second chance.
And finally, when it is indeed time to hang up the hat on a writing project.