My Name is Alice Orr, and I Have a Mission

My mission is to share with you what I have learned about the publishing world and to help you navigate that world more effectively. My mission is to help you take back power over your writing career and your interactions with the publishing business.

In publishing, acceptance is the exception, rejection the norm — which means you have to hustle. Are you ready to hustle on behalf of your writing career? If your answer to this crucial question is a resounding "Yes," then this Web site is exactly where you need to be.

The most important thing my long career in publishing has taught me is this: you must become a warrior on behalf of your writing career.

The race is to the swift. Slow and steady no longer make the grade, not in publishing anyway. Which means it is now time to Get Real. This Web site — and my seminars and my book and my CD and my consulting service — are about me Getting Real with you: telling you what it is really like in the publishing world, and what it really takes to make it there.

Which means speaking the bald and bold truth instead of spouting clichés. Clichés like, "What you have to write is a great [fill in the blank]" — the same old generalities that do not work for you, because they are precisely that: general, rather than specific. You need to know the specifics, and my mission is to tell you what they are.

This Web site is also about you Getting Real with yourself. Which means discovering and admitting, with brutal honesty, what you need to change about your writing work and your professional-writer self. Which means telling yourself such brutal truths about your own essential changes — instead of griping about the publishing business, which is not going to change, because griping does not and will not work for you either.

In Thinking Like Your Editor, long-time literary agent Susan Rabiner says:

Authors who want to write for the general interest reader [meaning, for a large audience] must start to think, not about the book they want to write, but about the book readers will want to read.... To make that transition, authors will need the help of editors. Unfortunately, many [I would say, most] editors are reluctant to come forward publicly with that advice. [They] fear that they will be seen as crass people who have lost their love of books and see publishing only in terms of sales.

But those same reluctant editors do talk about these things among themselves. The two major subject areas of their discussions are (1) what kind of books they are most likely to acquire or not acquire, and (2) what kind of authors (and agents) they most prefer to work with or not work with.

My mission is to make you privy to those conversations. Your mission is to lean a little closer — and make it your business not to miss a single word.