. . .or you'll plummet straight down and smash hard against the unforgiving ground.
When I wrote my first novel, Rusty , I was forced by the pulbishing market to create my own publishing company. A kind literary agent told me a hard truth: Trying to sell a publisher non-genre fiction was a no-go. Either my book had to be in a defined category -- romance, Western, mystery -- or as the author I had to be a celebrity or at least know a celebrity. Alternately, I had to have a remarkable and compelling life story which involved, oh, falling out of an airplane and living to tell about it or something like that. Speaking of falling from great heights, the quote from Norman Vincent Peale about landing among the stars just drives me crazy. It does . I think it's cruel to encourage people to take big risks without considering the tremendous smash-up that might follow. A few foolhardy. . . well, fools -- somehow do risk everything on a whim and succeed brilliantly, but most just don't. I opened this post by saying that I'd had to start a publishin...