by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
There seems to be a cottage industry of people who actively go out of their way to scare the shit out of people exactly like me — that is, people who are aspiring novelist — to make them think that if they don’t do this or that specific thing it is “impossible” for them to get a book contract. And these people usually say these things in such breathless, authoritative tones that you can’t help but at least, for a moment, wonder if they’re right. Take this, for instance:
This is just the type of thing I’m talking about. I have about 5,000 Twitter followers, but the average really good aspiring novelist can have almost no Twitter followers. So passages like that seen above — which apparently is promoting being a Kindle author — definitely seems real to your average insecure writer.
And, yet, even within the Twitter thread where I found that passage, someone said this was not true — you can get a book contract and have less than 25,000 Twitter followers. It’s a testament to how much grit you have to have when it comes to going the harder route of trying to get traditionally published that there is so much fucking bullshit that is designed to make you feel bad that you want you aspire to get traditionally published in the first place.
A lot of it is that people are trying to sell insecure would-be novelists this or that bullshit thing given that they’re already invested in trying to get a novel published in some way in the first place.
I have nothing against self-publishing and may grit my teeth and use it in the end, but I refuse to self-limit myself by assuming I can’t get published if I just have 5,000 and not 25,000 Twitter followers.
