Want to hear a bit of backstory about a story? So in 2015 I had written a novel that I felt was the best book I'd ever produced. I had worked hard on this thing for about 4 years. It had gone through copious drafts and even a literary agent or two. For some reason it was the book that came the hardest to me, but also the story I couldn't let go. The book goes out to every publisher in North America and the UK and ..... horror of horrors! REJECTED. Done. End of story. My career was now dead in the water. I sulk. Do the self-pity and self-doubt trip. I am convinced I will never write again. And then over a year later my agent tells me that Amazon's Lake Union wants to buy the novel because they LOVE it. I'd never really heard much about digital publishing, given this is only 2017. But hey, no one else was wanting to publish it, so what did I have to lose? When the book came out I had pretty low expectations of it selling. But then.... the book shoots to #2 in the entire US Kindle Store and #1 in the Uk and Australia! It's selling in droves, sometimes thousands of copies in a day. It becomes and Amazon Charts bestseller and is one of the top 100 bestselling Kindle novels of 2017. My career is reinvented, my belief in myself restored!
And so my message to you... If you are following a dream, or pursuing something a little outside of normal, maybe something others don't understand, maybe something where the chance of success are very low but you WANT it, you want it more than anything in the world... then never accept failure. Never let anything or anyone put those sneaky self-sabotaging doubts in you - at least not for too long. Do it. Make it happen. Believe it can. Because sometimes things just have a way of finding a way.....
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