Seth Godin: You can’t become attached to the outcome.
Publishing is a weird business. It’s more of a hobby, and it has all these signals in it that don’t make sense. Great books don’t sell that well. Lousy books sell a lot of copies.
Good people spend their lives promoting books that’s not what you need to do.
My friend Asimov, who I used to work with, he was one of the most successful science fiction authors ever. I’m sitting in his apartment near Lincoln Center in New York and I said, “So Isaac, you’ve written some of the most important books of all time, and you’ve done 400 books.
How did you do that?” He walks me over to this little tiny table with a manual typewriter and says, “What I do is I wake up in the morning and I walk over to this typewriter and I type from 6:30 to noon every day.
It doesn’t matter if it’s good — I just have to type.
” But we’re not going to get attached to whether it’s a bestseller. We’re going to get focused on did this book be what I wanted?