The Three Ps: Patience, Perseverence and Passion

This will probably be a short post but it is one that I feel compelled to write, if for no other reason than to remind myself that there's a whole lot of writing, submitting, editing and finally publishing going on out there.

Today I took notice of a list of recently published books on the Jacketflap.com site. My interest was somewhat casual but focused because I wanted to see if my recently released book was on the list. I also wanted to get a sense of which and how many other recent works would be competing with my humble offering for the attention of the book buying/reading public.

As I began my scan of the list (most recent first) I thought it might be a relatively short list, maybe on the order of a couple hundred titles. I mean how many books could have been published in the last month anyway? Well, after scrolling through all 52 screens of books, just for children and young adults mind you, the end total was 1,279 titles published during the past 30 days. And if that number weren't eye-opening enough, my book wasn't even on the list.

That told me even more books had been released but hadn't yet been picked up by the Jacketflap detectors---a humbling experience to be sure. But it was a useful one in that it provided me some perspective and a likely explanation for the scant number of visits to my web site and the very few visits and comments on my various blogs.

The reality is that except for the small circle of people who know of the relatively recent appearance of my electronic footprint in cyber space, my existence is essentially unknown. Said another way, as a small sapling, it is easy to feel lost amidst all the trees in a large forest. The clear lesson for me is patience, perseverence and passion above all things will likely win out in the end.

Back to work....