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Michael Sherer's avatar

I remember reading about The Warehouse and feeling envious. Because I've gotten dropped so many times I wonder if it's brain damage that keeps me writing. I sold my first book to an editor because her sales manager had seen it at another house and had fought for it and lost. But the publisher went out of business six months after my novel was published (and 153 years after its founding). Got a three-book deal with another big NYC publisher that passed on the option for a fourth after seeing three weeks of sales data on the first one; they didn't bother waiting to see how books 2 and 3 did. Published my next four books with a small house just to keep my name in print. Went to the publisher you write about in The Warehouse with a new series, and thought I might finally have found a home. But that publisher, too, passed on the second book in the series three days before the first was nominated for a major award. Five agents have dropped me along the way, too. I've self-published another eight novels, many of which received starred reviews in trade mags like PW. A film/tv creative development group expressed interest in my YA thriller series, but is now ghosting me. Have never quit my day job, but still dream of it. Don't know why I still write, but persistence is why I have 16 novels in print. Tom Clancy once said that writing novels is like digging ditches. It's hard work. But some of us can't not do it.

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John Skipp's avatar

Dear Rob -- SO PROUD OF YOU, MAN! Thanks for talking about the way things actually work (and don't) in publishing and Hollywood, especially now that publishing is basically Hollywood, Jr. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but writing from love is the only things that matters.

And writers -- who ostensibly work to illuminate the true -- need to know the truth about the business they aspire to. The dream is a carrot. The truth is a stick. And the journey is a road that goes on forever, with occasional blinking "Vacancy" signs on the garishly-overlit roadside motels we call "success". Where very few get to stay for long. And most don't last a week.

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