Morgan Strehlow on The Ghost

[Morgan Strehlow]

A lot of wisdom here. There are so many factors at play when we consider what projects we will and won't take on---and they are a little bit different from agent to agent---but rejections don't always reflect a book's quality or market potential. Rejections more or less reflect our lack of vision for it (which, frankly, would not make us a good agent for the project) and lack of belief that we can sell it to a publisher. As an agent, I know that when an author gets a rejection from me, they still have so many great options for publishing available to them. I'm not a gatekeeper to publishing; I'm a wayfinder for one particular particular publishing pathway---and that happens to be the traditional pathway. But there are so many other pathways to publishing, and traditional publishing is not the only pathway that leads to profitable publishing. It's a shame to see a writer's ego (I'm a writer too, so I'm including myself when I say this) value a particular kind of publishing more than they value their own work. (Of note, a third of my current author list are previously self-published authors now pursuing traditional publishing. Just because you go a different route for one project doesn't mean you can't try again on the traditional path for another project.)

[Jeff Goins]

Thanks for sharing, Morgan.