Getting published is like dating

[stacer]

I've decided that the topic of my keynote address at Life, the Universe and Everything next month will be Collaboration: The Editor's Role in Making Your Book the Best Book You Could Ever Write. It's big and clunky on purpose—to be charming, of course.

But it being a BYU conference, I thought it would be fun to throw out a few of the more common comparisons of getting published with dating as a part of my talk. Things such as "it's not you, it's me" turning into "it's not you, it's your writing," that sort of thing. Okay, that one’s a little rude, and I won’t use it, but you get the idea. How submitting is like learning to handle rejection, how to learn when it’s really your writing and when it’s just not a good fit, that sort of thing.

Anybody have any pithy one-liners I might twist to my advantage for this talk?

[Spriggan]

Sadly anything I have to offer isn't very BYU friendly.

[precious-jules]

love that concept. There are lots of possibilities with such a topic. The whole point of dating is to find your perfect compliment . . . to find that one person that completes you in every way. A publisher/author relationship needs to be compatible so that when the newness wears off and they are stuck seeing eachother in their unmentionables and dealing with morning breath, they still like eachother enough to ignore the blemishes and stay together.

To find such a soul mate one needs to ask themselves: what kind of date do I like? Am I the dinner and movie sort of date-the typical, predictable, SAFE evening out? Am I the hockey game and hot dogs kind of date? Or maybe I'm the kind of date that wants an adventure. If I like the predictability of a dinner and movie, I need to be going out with  someone who isn't trying to drag me down black diamond ski runs.

It'll be fun hearing your presentation.