Agent in Your Pocket: Not Every Book Is The One

A writer emailed me last month about a manuscript she'd been revising for nine years. She called it the book of her heart. In the same paragraph she said that if it didn’t sell, she was done writing. 

I wanted to both encourage her but discourage her at the same time, because those two sentences are a big problem. 

The thing I know to be true is careers are built out of so many books while writers are built from one or two experiences in the trad space. Take Madeline Martin as an example. Long before she was a New York Timesand USA Today–bestselling author, she wrote historical romances.  

She had a corporate job doing data analysis but still managed to have eight romance series. At her fastest, Madeline was putting out seven or eight books a year. Then in 2021, The Last Bookshop in London came out and everything changed. 

Most people hear that story wrong. They think her romances were her warm-up. Practice rounds before the “real” thing. 

But those romances were her career. Every one of them taught her how to write on deadline, how to push forward, and how to start on the next in one continual loop. So when she sat down to write a WWII novel about a bookshop, she’d already written and published more books than most writers will in a lifetime.  

She didn’t get good because of Bookshop. She was already good. Bookshop was just the book where the market finally caught up to her. 

That’s what I mean when I say a career is built from many books. The writer, on the other hand, gets made somewhere else entirely. It usually takes two experiences, not 50.  

It’s the first time an agent tells you the thing you love most about the book is what’s making it not work. It’s the book you trunked for years. The one that got triple-digit rejections that you refused to rework but then when you did, the book got better.  

[Read more from Jessica Berg: Measuring Your Success Against the Highlight Reel Will Get You Nowhere.] 

These are the moments where a person stops being someone who writes and becomes a writer. 

So come back to that email I got last month. 

This person had spent nine whole years asking one manuscript to do both jobs. She’s waiting for that one project to make her both a writer and a career in one shot. But no book can carry that. Not hers, not Madeline’s. Not even mine. The weight of it is why the book has been stalled for nearly a decade.  

I wanted to tell her that she might already be halfway there. She might’ve had those experiences that have shaped her from a person who writes into one who is a writer. Nine years of revision isn’t nothing. But what she doesn’t have, because she’s been stuck on this one project for so long, is a career. Think about Madeline. Seven or eight books a year while working full time and being a parent means that she didn’t have time to slow down and decide any one of them was the book of her heart. 

That pace teaches a writer that a book is done when it’s due. Not when it’s perfect. It teaches you the thing you couldn’t do in this book is something you can do in the next. Now, I’m not saying go write eight books a year. That’s not the lesson here. 

The lesson is what happens when a writer only has one book. That makes every rejection (self-imposed or otherwise) a verdict on your career. Year over year, you’re no longer revising. You’re protecting. Send the book out. Even if it’s not perfect. Then start on the next one before you hear back. The second book is the one that turns you from a person with a manuscript to a person with a career. Madeline’s shelf didn’t come from one book she loved the most. It came from her refusing to stop after any of them.  

The book of your heart is real. Just don’t make it the only one you’ve got.   

*Join Rosecliff Literary Founder & Agent Jessica Berg and WD Editor-in-Chief Amy Jones in April 2027 for a weeklong writing retreat in the heart of Tuscany.]