Lucky Me

Sometimes, ignorance helps. I'm in the process of selling a book, my first sale, and it's the first book I wrote. Now I'm seeing everywhere that first books don't sell. Oh? Really? I can't count the blogs and websites where I've read the following:

1. First books don't sell, and
2. Sometimes, if a writer becomes famous and sells tons of subsequent books, she is finally able to brush the dust and cobwebs off her first manuscript, do some major editing and sell the thing, therefore
3. Don't even bother to shop your first book to agents and editors. Box it, stow it under the bed and forget it, then
4. Write several more novels, follow procedure in 3, and hopefully
5. The fourth or fifth book will be worth pimping.

Well, that's not the way it worked for me. And I owe it all to ignorance of the box-under-the-bed rule.

Disclaimer: I did not try to market the book hot off the disc drive. I wrote it, left it to cool off for a long time, came back, tugged and tweaked and polished, then finally got serious about shopping it. But it was the first and only spawn of my fingers at the time.

I still think I'm lucky. And you shouldn't always believe the myths...