After nine years of working on my manuscript about my childhood in a bizarre, apocalyptic cult (tentatively titled The Angels Never Came), after the manuscript has won a nomination in an unpublished manuscript contest (2010 Doris Bakwin Award), after I have started a website for it (alexaara.com), I finally feel ready in my soul to send it to agents. Part of the book proposal, as many of us know, contains a section on promotion, and it is this part that has me pausing to consider what being a writer actually means to me.

In many of the posts I have been reading on She Writes, I see my fellow lady writers commiserating on getting an agent and/or publisher and how much it would mean to them if only they could be published. Of course, I too have struggled with this wish. I dropped my radio producer career (The Lia Show, The Alan Kabel Show, The BJ Shea Show) to pursue writing. I attended lectures, classes, and read books on the topic of getting an agent. The big idea, it seems to me, is how to sell myself and my work. I’ve got to have a good handle on doing this myself, I have learned, since the publishing world is in an uproar and can’t afford to devote a publicist to the likes of a little-old-nobody like me. And if that’s true, the bottom line is not really even if I can secure an agent, but if I can SELL.

If I can sell, well, then it would be presumed it would be much easier to get an agent. I recall at one lecture I attended by nonfiction agents here in Boulder, CO, where I live, the agent said, “What difference, in the grand scheme, would it make to take two years off from soliciting agents in order to create your platform and initiate a plan for marketing?”  If a lack of such things means I am less likely to get an agent’s attention, indeed, why wouldn’t I take the time?  

Why do I shake in my Ugg boots, then, when approaching this part of the job? Because I live in my own, personal fantasy land of Alexa The Great. In this world, people read my works and want to talk to me about them. I get to spend a huge amount of my life focused on the trappings of my own mind translated on screen, because I am a bona fide writer. I even make a living at it, in this twilight zone.

But wait a minute…if I never get an agent or a contract, does that suddenly mean I will never secure the sheer joy and fulfillment of being a bona fide writer? Does that mean the hours I spend tapping on my computer keys, so enraptured by the scenes I am creating that I don’t want to eat, don’t want to stop for the bathroom, continually rub my hands together excitedly from the energy flowing through me—that all this is worth nothing?

For me, I am now accepting that even as I am doing all I can think of to learn how to market myself, I need to constantly remind myself that no agent, no publisher, no contract, no book signing at Barnes and Nobles, no interview on the radio, no check in the mail that will ultimately make up for what I’ve spent to earn it, can take that thing away from me. I will always have the most important thing in the world: those hours spent tapping on the computer keys, absorbed into my own mind, thrilled with having captured the attention of my greatest fan—myself. There is a saying that we all die alone. Let me remind my fellow lady writes, but most of all let me remind myself, that we all write alone. That’s the most important prize of all. You don’t need the validation of millions to be a bona fide writer. All you need to do is need to write.

And here’s to hoping that kind of attitude creates the product that agents dream of securing.