When my father was about
five-years-old, his father picked him up and threw him in the river.
“He expected me to
save myself and learn to swim in the process,” he said.
My father was
telling me this story when I was five, too. We were standing at the side of the
White River in Anderson , Indiana
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Fortunately, my
father took my hand, and together we waded into the river. I felt the water
rushing around my knees,
and for a minute, my legs buckled. The swift current made me dizzy and
disoriented.
My father was
there to keep me from losing my balance. He taught me to swim that day in a
more practical way than
having me take a cold plunge into the deep end.
I’ve often thought
about that day and this sink or swim technique. Could it have its advantages
for want-a-be authors? Wading
into the shallow end to test the depth of the competition or the
temperature (what genre is
hot), is simply delaying the inevitable disorientation and fear that come from
swimming against the
current trends in publishing.
According to
http://www.worldometers.info/books/ there have been over 700,000 book titles
published in the first four
months of 2015. That number is up considerably from 2007, when there were
407,000 published during
the entire year. What this means to me is that thousands of writers are jumping
into the publishing
stream without a sense of the marketplace. They just don’t care. And they are
willing to swim against the tides of the massive competition. How about
you?
If I have one
regret, it is waiting so long to jump in, too. I’d be lying, if I told you I
hadn’t gone under a few times, trying to stay confident of my talent and
engage readers, at the same time. I have been fortunate to have called upon a
couple of excellent consultants, such as Lucia Zimmitti, Dan Blank and Geoff
Talbot, who have each helped me in different ways to become successful.
If you have been
standing on the side of the river with a story burning to be published, and
wishing and hoping for a rubber raft to float by, I would encourage you to
take the plunge now. You will have many fellow authors out there to pull
you back up, if you start hitting bottom. And I will be one of them.
Rebecca Jean Downey is a thriller author with her eyes on the U.S.-Mexico border. Inspiration for her novels are plucked right out of the headlines or from interviews with law enforcement sources, journalists and other experts on border crime. She and her husband, Mike, live in El Paso, Texas, with their two rescue dogs, Riley and Skye.
