PROJECT failure
What do you do when a project fails through no fault of your own? Simon Whaley asks three writers how they pick up the pieces.
Simon Whaley
I was convinced the commission was mine. A publisher wanted a book about banking for their humorous, multi-million-copy selling series. I’d pitched the outline. The publisher loved it. All I had to do was write the opening chapter, demonstrating I could write it in their house style, and the job was mine. I submitted the sample within a week. 24 hours later, I had the decision: No.
What had I done wrong? Nothing. The publisher loved my sample chapter. However, another author, who’d pitched that topic several months earlier but had not been in touch with the publisher since, submitted their sample chapter on the same day as me. The publisher felt obligated to commission the other author.
In the business of writing, projects can fail through no fault of our own, and it’s gut-wrenching when the rug gets pulled like this. But today’s failure can become tomorrow’s success.
Waste nothing
Author and short story writer Linda Priestley, who also writes as Linda Gruchy, knows how important it is to hang on to projects that fail. A few years ago, with an agent working hard to place three of Linda’s crime novels, Linda investigated other potential fiction markets and came across My Weekly’s pocket novels. At the time, these were 30,000 words.
‘I had a short story,’ says Linda, ‘which could be expanded into a 30,000-word novella, so I wrote it out and sent it off to Maggie Seed (now Swinburn) at My Weekly.’
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June 2017
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