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Today’s post of mine is over at SFNovelists. It’s about what makes a successful writer, and when you should give up if you never manage to get published.

As Satima has pointed out over there on that blog, there is something to being appreciated too – not that people who read a writer’s work are always appreciative! The ideal situation is to have a paying audience, but one of the nice things about today’s technology is that it is possible to have an audience without publication. And I don’t mean necessarily self-publishing or PoD on a large scale, although that is a possibility. It’s so easy to print your own books for friends and family, or just email them digital versions. Or read to the kids/grandkids. Or post the story on your blog in episodes. There are so many options out there if you can’t get your work published.

I am perhaps really, really odd. I stopped showing my work to others aged about 13. And with a few exceptions, I wrote for more than 30 years without showing anyone anything. I did read a kid’s book of mine to my children. And a couple of times – when I could afford it, which wasn’t often – I sent something off to a publisher. Seems strange to think of that now, but it was once a major expense to both print and to post a MS off overseas, with a SAE. My solitary life as a writer was more or less a secret only my immediate family knew. All my friends fell over backwards when I produced my first book, already published. No one had ever had the slightest idea of what I was doing.