Bloom Where You're Planted

Here's the deal with publishing these days. You gotta love it or it ain't worth doing...financially. Same thing with writing. If you're writing fiction, poetry, or even non-fiction books for money, you're in for a long uphill climb to the mountaintop of profitability. Every year, year after year, there are over 200,000 books published in the United States alone. For your book to make money, it has got to totally meet the needs of the reader, totally meet the needs of the reviewers, totally meet the needs of media, totally meet the needs of the bookstores, and totally meet your needs as an author while writing it. This sounds totally exhausting. But it can, and does, happen.

Rarely.

And when it does, everyone gets all twitterpated. Those rare success stories, like The Celestine Prophecy give all the rest of us hope for "giant" financial success, wide acclaim, and (to mention the most important, last) satisfied readers, millions and millions of them (hopefully).

In the "mean" time between when we write and publish, the day when we take the giant royalty check to the bank and go directly to the dealership to buy that brand new Prius Hybrid or Farrari (choose your poison, me Faather used to say), what do we do to get our needs met?

We keep finding the joy in writing. We keep finding the love of publishing. We keep connecting with readers one at a time. We contribute to the enrichment of life through sharing insights, publishing truths, and making readers happy, sad, dreamy, dreary, enlivened, or afraid (to name just a few).

And, after all is said and done, we know with confidence that we've pursued our passion and found our bliss and made a difference where we were planted. I think it was Teddy Roosevelt that said, "Do what you can with what you have where you are." Another saying I like is, "Bloom where you're planted."

"Full many a flower is born to "waste" its fragrance on the desert air."