Establishing a long term writing career from two agents.

Nice! This was really useful.

I have some good insight like this from several literary rejections. Years ago I wanted to try to get in with Harlequin's Love Inspired and I had a direct connection. Her acquisition editor read my first chapter and gave me tons of advice. I was approaching 30 and felt like if I didn't get something out there by my 30th birthday, I'd be a terrible failure. Not so, she said.

It's kind of like that whole cart-in-front-of-horse syndrome. One of the things I realized, since I'd already self-published a collection of short stories, is that I'd put out something I didn't really intend to market until I'd finished the first book in the series. But it affected my author rank and made me "look" like a bad seller. Amazon has since retired author rank, so I don't think that matters as much as it used to. But you still need to be ready to go all-in to the whole process (marketing, branding, etc.) before you commit to being a published author.

One of our conversations was about branding myself in a genre and seeing myself as a business. The truth was that even though it would have been an honor to write for Love Inspired, I'm more of a Gilmore Girls, Lorelai-sarcasm, quippy humor sort of gal, and being tied down to the Love Inspired guidelines would have cramped my style. The products I would have put out there would not have been the brand I wanted to sell. So it's like any job, really. Longevity depends heavily on being able to keep that regular focus. You have to be like Khaled Hossini, for example (The Kite Runner), who was a physician, but got up early every morning faithfully and dedicated the time to write.

Thank you for sharing!

Great Q&A, some nice stuff here especially about 2nd book syndrome. I’d love to have such but my only experience with agents so far is poor. I searched for agents accepting vampire stories, and found two. Followed their instructions to submit my Sundowners book, and submitted.
A month later one responded:
“Jeff, thank you for submitting Sundowners. I’m sorry to say I don’t do novellas.”

I responded back thanking her for her time and mentioned that SFWA considers any book over 40k words a novel.

Never heard back from her or the gentleman I submitted to. I’ve no idea if she read what was submitted or only checked the word count. I get it, it’s a business and they need to make money but shouldn’t she have a minimum book length on her bio?

On the good side, my space opera draft is 66k and my Sundowners sequel is at 42k and may reach 70k.