By Tom Kando
It is very
difficult to get published or to even get an agent to glance at your
work. Furthermore, it is not clear that what gets published and read is
better than what gets turned down or ignored. This is enough to make one
cry.
So I propose a support group for failed authors called Failed
Authors, Rejected and Turned Down (FART).Let's
create a blog, a web site, a national network. Local support groups
(chapters) will meet regularly. The potential membership is huge,
because everyone is now trying to write books, especially
autobiographies.We will meet every week and commiserate. We will model
ourselves after AA and Alanon.We get on the wagon, i.e. we quit wasting
our resources and ruining our health trying to peddle our writing to
agents and to publishers. We are addicts, just like gamblers and
alcoholics.
A typical confessional at one such meeting might go like
this: "I have been on the wagon for three months. I talk to my spouse
and to my children again. I exercise again and I return my friends'
e-mails and telephone calls.Or conversely, "I thought I had kicked my
addiction to sending out queries. However, I fell off the wagon last
week: I Sent out another query letter to an agent I found in the
Writers’ Market."
© Tom Kando 2014
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