Don’t believe everything you hear. It sounds simple enough, but I think we all fall into the trap sometimes. It’s especially easy to trip over it in the publishing industry, where a lot of what happens does so behind closed doors. We get glimpses, but even then, it’s only what someone allows us to see.  There are some people who do provide transparency, but even then it’s sometimes hard to tell true openness from select truth. I’m not saying some people aren’t totally open — I’m sure they are — it’s just that we don’t always know who is doing that altruistically and who isn’t.

This really came to mind this past week when I was watching the twitter threads about YA fantasy being dead (or not). (Spoiler: It’s not)

The thing is, a lot of people think they are being honest, and they are…from their perspective. I don’t think any agent or publishing professional made that statement with the intent to deceive. From their perspective, they were sharing the truth. The thing is, in a subjective business, there is no objective truth.

Here’s an example from my own life. Back when I was querying Planetside, I heard from more than one agent that adult sci-fi was dead, or that it was impossible to break in a debut…bottom line, I heard a lot of things, and none of them were encouraging. I queried 32 agents and got 5 requests, so my own experience was corroborating those things I heard. But here’s what happened when I talked to my now agent (Lisa Rodgers) on the phone for the first time. This isn’t a quote, because I didn’t record it and this was more than 3 years ago, but it’s pretty close, because I remember it very well. When I mentioned that books like mine were a tough sell, she said ‘That’s ridiculous. I’ve been looking for this book for the last three years.’

So while other agents were sharing their idea of the truth, my agent had her own. Obviously time proved her right, as she sold the book to Harper Voyager, and while we’re not breaking any records, both the publisher and I are quite happy with how we’ve sold and continue to sell (I may delve into that particular bit of truth in another post).

Sometimes it’s easier to determine the objective truth than others. If one or two agents say something, that’s one thing. If you start to hear it repeated over and over again by agents everywhere, there’s a better chance that it’s true. But here’s the thing…even then it’s not complete objective truth. My friend and critique partner Rebecca Enzor was querying a book about killer mermaids around the same time I queried Planetside. Everyone told her that it was really well written and a great story, but mermaid books don’t sell. One agent disagreed (Eric Smith). That book, titled Speak The Ocean, comes out in about a month. I read it, and it’s wonderful, and I touched an ARC of it at ConCarolinas last week.

A lot of times, it’s well meaning. When someone says to you ‘this is a hard sell,’ they are trying to do you a favor. If you’re a good writer, maybe they want to see you succeed, and they think you’d have a better chance if you wrote a different thing. But sometimes you can’t. A lot of times you have to write the book that’s in your brain. Maybe you need to learn from it. Maybe you need to get it out of your head to make way for the next thing.  Yes, you can train yourself out of it…you can sit down and write the thing you have to write (authors under contract do it all the time)…but if that sucks the fun out of it, or sucks the life out of you, is it the right thing to do? I don’t know. Maybe? But I think it reflects in the writing. When you’re writing your story, I feel like often that comes across on the page (and I don’t mean your life story, I mean the story that you have to write at that time).

A lot of things can happen. Maybe you aren’t ready to write your story, so the natural truth in it doesn’t come through. Maybe you have more work to do before you get there. Maybe there’s another story you have to write first, and you don’t know it yet.

Please don’t take any of this as me saying to blindly stick to what you’re doing, even if people are telling you that it’s not working, or that it’s not working now. What I am saying is that they might be wrong. What I am saying is that while something might truly be a tough sell, you might be the one. What I am saying is don’t self reject because you read a tweet or a single rejection that said your book won’t work.

Make them tell you no. You. Specifically. Your book. Not a category of books, not a general subject. You. It’s a subjective business, and therefore the only no must also be subjective.

In the end, you won’t know until you write it. And in the end, they won’t know until they read it.