Tammy Letherer 
It’s been a long-time dream of mine to have a team of people supporting my publishing career. Maybe it’s common to every writer who spends years down the rabbit hole churning out words that may never be read. The idea of having someone else believe in you enough to say “let’s share this with the world” has got to be the best feeling ever.
I’m about to find out.
I had to choose a publicist for the October release of my memoir, so I interviewed two women from two different companies. The first conversation started with a string of questions about how many of my family members had read my book, if they were upset by it, and how prepared I was to publish despite their objections.
We weren’t two minutes into the conversation and she had already repeated “I don’t mean to scare you but….” twice. This was followed by a story of a memoirist who spent thousands on a campaign, only to scrap it at the eleventh hour because her teenage son threatened to disown her.
Well. this did scare me, and being scared was not part of my dream.
She went on to tell me that they divide authors into three buckets based on their goals and the cost of the campaign—a sort of small, medium, large approach to publicity. It was all cut and dried. To be honest, I came out feeling like my sweet but crumbly creative dream was about to be mashed into shape by a cookie cutter. It would look good but would it be me?
Compare that to my conversation with the second publicist, who, rather than scaring me with what-if scenarios or asking me to explain my book, enthusiastically announced that she had “disappeared” into my website and gotten lost in reading my blogs. She had obviously made an effort to get to know me and my book. She had specific ideas about how to share ME, not just my book, with the world.
There was no mention of any buckets.
Of course, I chose her. Because the last thing I want after spending countless hours writing, rewriting, editing, submitting, worrying, and dreaming about a book is to feel like a drop in a bucket.
I want to believe what the poet Rumi tells me:
You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop.
Yes! Because that’s why we create in the first place. We want to feel the thrill of boundless possibilities and the excitement of doing something that’s never been done.
I don’t want to be constricted with fear before I’ve even had the chance to be bold and daring. I don’t want stories of other author’s failures crashing in my ears as I’m about to take flight.
I’m sure you wouldn’t want that either. No matter what your dream is, it should feel exciting and expansive. Can it also feel scary? Of course, but when you know that you’re the entire ocean in a drop, you can trust that you have everything you need to achieve your dreams.
It’s that trust that allows you to believe in yourself.
And that is the best feeling ever.
