The Pony Wish

Picture by Gato Azul

Anyone who has sent or is about to send their project or product out into the world has experienced the pony wish. The term pony wish comes from this blog post by entrepreneur advisor, Bernt Patak. This excerpt explains what I feel are the key points of the pony wish problem:

"You know the story...you bust your butt for weeks or months grinding out your minimal viable product, dealing with endless technical issues, raising money and keeping the lights on, finding, managing and motivating a kick-ass team and so on. Then suddenly the big day arrives and you launch your baby into the world. But eventually the beer and wine glasses are empty, you go back to your shared desks and realize that that moment of elation is gone and a bit of an unpleasant reality sets in...this is the start of the hard work, not the end! Four weeks later the hill you're climbing seems as steep as ever. What happened? 

You didn't get your pony wish, that's what happened. We all have them, especially if it's our first start-up. Like the little kid who wishes for a pony and doesn't see it under the Christmas tree, you secretly, immodestly, expected that your killer product would be the next Dropbox or Kik or whoever and just take off out of the starting gate, passing a million users at the end of the first month."

Don't we all have a secret hope that our book will be the pony under the tree? I sure do! We work very hard on our novels or screenplays and we want to believe that once it's out in the world, readers will love it and buy it and the money and acclaim will flow in.

That situation is extremely rare.

But what we don't appreciate, because we're so disappointed about the pony, are the riding lessons. Yes, there's more work to go into promoting and fine-tuning the masterpiece but we also get to interact with readers, agents, editors and other writers as well as learn about a whole new aspect of publishing.

The start-up analogy is even more apt for writers in these days of digital publishing. If we get feedback about a problem with the novel we can easily change it just by editing a document then uploading the new version of our masterpiece. Easy for us and makes readers happy with a quick response time.

I'm very interested in this idea of authors as entrepreneurs and running their book-writing-and-publishing business as a lean start-up. In future blogs I plan to investigate the topic in more detail.

To be honest, sometimes I feel I have been working on the novel for so long that I just want to get it out the door. Then I can get feedback from readers in the real world and move on to the next project. I hope it will be a pony but I know in my heart I need a few more years of riding lessons before the pony appears. But I won't make progress unless I take that first step of putting my work out there.

What have been your experiences with the pony wish?

Indie publishing here I come! Maybe.

Picture by George Eastman House

After two years, I woke up. Two years of writing a novel and always hearing in the back of my mind the little publisher's voice saying "When this is done you can work on your query letter then send it off to 500 agents and maybe get found in the slush pile. Or you can spend big bucks at conferences and maybe meet an agent there. And then wait another year for a publishing house to accept your book and maybe another year until it is in print."

I've lived with that voice ever since I've started writing. Even more annoying is the fact that the voice sounds like a bossy 3-year-old kid.

Last week, that voice was silenced, thanks to writers like Amanda Hocking and Kait Nolan who are not waiting around for someone else to control their creative works. Writers have the tools available to get our work out to readers. If you aren't a famous writer already, a publishing house is not going to give you a big marketing budget so you'll have to do a ton of book promoting yourself anyway. Why go through the process above when you can put your book out online, do the promoting and see if it sinks or swims? Not wait two or three years for a publisher to pick it up.

People may say that the quality isn't as good as if a writer polished and polished their novel until it shone enough that an agent picked it up. If no one is buying your book or writing good reviews, you'll know soon enough. Then you take the book off the internet and/or write another. Just a simple click of the mouse.

Fail fast, fail often. The entrepreneur's mantra. And get your product the heck out there!

Having just received an e-reader for my birthday, I now understand the draw of instant book gratification. And they are so cheap! Wow! I can buy more books now because they are cheaper. I'm way more willing to try new authors if their book is $2.99 and I can get it on my Kindle in less than 5 minutes.

This is not to say that I don't see the point of publishing houses. I am still going to query agents because of course getting my book on a bookshelf will help sales and also going through the query process will improve my writing skills. When my book is good enough to receive feedback from agents that is!

It's an exciting time to be a writer! What do you think?