The Glorious Suffering of Publishing

So you want to be published? Congratulations on your decision to embrace rejection, crippling self-doubt, and the joy of seeing your beloved manuscript butchered by editors who “just have a few small suggestions.”

Publishing is much like dating that one impossible person in high school—you’ll spend months crafting the perfect approach, only to receive a two-sentence rejection that somehow both crushes your soul and tells you absolutely nothing useful. “We enjoyed reading your submission, but it’s not quite right for us at this time.” Translation: We didn’t read past page three.

First comes the writing, which everyone assumes is the hard part. How adorable. The real fun begins when you send your precious creation into the world, where it will be judged by overworked editors who’ve already read seventeen vampire romance manuscripts that morning. Your groundbreaking literary novel about existential dread? It’s sitting in a slush pile beneath three dystopian YA trilogies and something with wizards.

Should you succeed in catching an editor’s eye—perhaps they were delirious from caffeine overdose—prepare for revisions! This is the special time when you learn that your brilliant chapter three “doesn’t work,” your protagonist “lacks motivation,” and your carefully crafted subplot “should probably just be cut entirely.” You’ll make these changes with a smile while quietly wondering if you should have become an accountant instead.

Then comes the waiting. Publishing operates on a timeline that would make continental drift seem hasty. That urgent email from your editor? They need your response within 24 hours. Their response to your question? Expect it sometime between tomorrow and the heat death of the universe.

Let’s talk about advances, shall we? Unless you’re a celebrity with a ghostwriter or have blackmail material on the publisher, prepare for an amount that, when divided by the hours you spent writing, will make minimum wage look like winning the lottery. “But what about royalties?” you ask, eyes gleaming with hope. That’s adorable. Most books don’t earn out their advances, which is publishing speak for “don’t quit your day job.”

Marketing is another joy entirely. Surprise! It’s mostly your job now. Your publisher will helpfully suggest you “build your platform” and “engage with readers on social media.” This means spending your precious writing time creating TikTok dances about your historical fiction novel or tweeting witty responses to strangers at 3 AM.

Reviews are a special form of torture reserved for authors. Bad reviews will haunt your dreams. Good reviews will never feel like enough. And no matter how successful your book becomes, you’ll fixate on that one-star review that simply states, “Book arrived damaged,” which has nothing to do with your writing but will nonetheless send you spiraling into an existential crisis.

And after all this—after the rejections and revisions and waiting and marketing—there’s nothing quite like the moment when you hold your published book in your hands. For about fifteen glorious minutes, it all seems worth it. Then you start worrying about sales numbers, your next book, and whether that typo on page 194 is noticeable.

Remember: publishing isn’t just a process—it’s an adventure in patience, perseverance, and developing skin thick enough to deflect laser beams. But we do it anyway, because writers are, fundamentally, slightly unhinged. And would we have it any other way? Well, yes, obviously. But this is what we’ve got. Welcome to publishing!