(ooooof it’s a chonker but do give it a read!)

Reading time: 10.41

2,539 words

Hey Reader,

Skinny little 12-year-old me desperately wanted to be on the netball team. I was small, I was fast, I was fighty. Good for darting around the defenders and passing to the attackers. Not averse to the odd elbow to the face.

But I never got picked. Not by the other girls and not by the games teachers.

Because I wasn’t one of the Cool Girls. I was the speccy little weirdo who hung out alone in the library at lunchtime with a pile of “unsolved mysteries” books, Marmite sandwiches cut into squares and squashed, an apple, and a Penguin biscuit. I so wanted to be included but I lived on the fringes, mostly unnoticed.

So instead of team games I threw myself into athletics. And reading, of course. Solitary pursuits that came with their own joys.

I didn’t get that Cool Girl validation then and I don’t get it now. And that’s okay because waiting around for someone to pick us is a recipe for inertia.

It’s a common scenario: I’m not going to do the thing — finish writing the book — until I’m chosen. So the manuscript stays unfinished, endlessly tweaked, for when a publisher finally says “yes.”

The secret fantasy is alluring: one of the Big Five hears about the book idea and swoops in with a huge advance, the perfect eye-catching cover, a glamorous book tour, and all that credibility we crave. We’ve finally made it! Our ideas are worthwhile! We matter!

But there are people who did get a book deal… and they discovered it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. The well-known copywriter whose book (while still great) became an echo of what she hoped it would be because the publisher wanted to go in a different direction from her original idea.

The internet-famous writer who hates her book cover because the publishers insisted on using her least-favourite colour.

The client whose publisher did a fantastic job of editing and producing the book — but she STILL had to bust a gut promoting and marketing the book herself because that’s how publishing works, despite common beliefs. (And boy did she step up. I’ve never seen anyone work so hard to promote a book as Sophie Jane Lee did for Beyond Palatable.)

Meanwhile, years pass. Years. Waiting for the call that never came. The manuscript languishes there, unfinished. It could have been written and published several times over if only the author had picked themselves.

It just looks like hope and patience, right? Waiting for a publisher to choose your idea? Harmless.

But it’s not.

“Pick me” energy is actually a powerful form of self-silencing.

Instead, I propose this: stop waiting to be picked like 12-year-old me trying to join the netball team, and start acting like the person who’s already chosen themselves.

It’s tough, though, because waiting to be chosen is ingrained.

Where “pick me” conditioning comes from

We’re socialised from the womb to wait to be picked. Especially women and girls. At school, we’re rewarded for good-girl behaviour: put your hand up if you know the answer. Wait your turn. Get a gold star. Debutante balls are literally there to put girls on display to be chosen as wives for rich husbands. And yeah, maybe they’ve mostly faded out of existence (thankfully) but it still shows up in how girls present themselves on social media and at social events.

“Look at me! I’m pretty and good and I’ll make a great wife/partner/mother!”

As adults, it translates to “work hard, work quietly, and wait to be noticed.” Meanwhile, Chad and Tiffany are stomping all over everyone and they’re getting picked anyway.

Sophie Lee writes in depth about this phenomen in her phenomenal book Beyond Palatable and you should definitely check it out.

In the publishing industry, pick me conditioning rises partly from the romanticised idea of being discovered by an agent in a slush pile or via a viral tweet or TikTok video. The literary equivalent of a future supermodel walking down the street and stunning an agent with their ethereal beauty. These stories make headlines precisely because they’re so rare and they hide the years of hard work behind people’s success underneath a fairytale myth that makes it seem easy.

The prestige hierarchy doesn’t help: the Big Five are at the top, then indie publishers, and finally self-publishing right at the bottom with people still sneering at it and calling it “vanity” — while “proper author” status sits right at the top. I’ve written before about why this simply isn’t true, but the belief persists.

And then, of course, there’s intersectionality to consider: women, and especially Black and brown women, are pushed to soften or dilute their voices to make them more comfortable or at least more familiar to the (usually) white and wealthy gatekeepers of the publishing industry. And authors from other backgrounds — LGBTQ, disabled, poverty — are told they’re “too niche”, “too angry”, or “too political” to sell, which has the same effect: silencing and marginalising. If those people want to be published at the top of the prestige pyramid, they have to warp their voices to even be considered. And then they’re only picked if there’s room for their particular flavour of “difference.”

It’s a powerful call. Nobody wants to dilute their voice or their story, but we do it anyway in order to fit in, be accepted, and bask in a little of the success that’s been open to the establishment since forever. Things are changing, but slowly… and we don’t have to wait for them to change in order to pick ourselves.

How “pick me” energy shows up in publishing

I define “pick me” energy as orienting decisions around external gatekeepers instead of your reader and your own creative vision. It shows up a lot when we’re writing online — for the algorithm, for our peers, for our fear of judgement.

In publishing, it shows itself through obsessing over what agents and publishers want rather than what your reader needs. Watering down your idea because it doesn’t fit in with a publisher’s agenda. Rewriting and sanitising your voice to sound more “acceptable”, “commercial”, or “professional.”

And, ultimately, sticking the manuscript in a drawer until you have a publisher who’s chosen you “because otherwise it doesn’t count.”

Here’s a quick quiz for you: have you ever thunk any of these thoughts?

• “I’ll start properly writing this book once a publisher offers me a deal.”
• “People only self-publish when they can’t get a proper book deal. It’s vanity and it’s embarrassing.”
• “If a real publisher wanted this, I’d know my idea is good.”
• “If I was a good, worthwhile writer, someone would offer me a book deal.”

I get it. I’ve had these thoughts too. But they are not a reflection of reality.

Publishers choose the books they publish based on their business goals. Here’s a selection:

• What else have they got coming out this year?
• How does your idea fit in (if at all)?
• Can it piggyback off a trend or a fad?
• Does the author have a huge platform and social media following? (If they don’t, they’ll struggle to get published.)
• Is the author famous? (Why do you think David Walliams gets such good book deals? It’s not because he’s the best kids’ author out there, I can tell you that.)

There are plenty of mediocre and even bad books published by “proper” publishers. And there are many many many brilliant books independently published by authors who couldn’t get a book deal with a publisher,

Getting picked often has very little to do with the quality of your idea or the quality of your writing. It’s a whole host of stuff you can’t control at all.

But I get it. We all want to be picked for something, right? So we wait.

But that waiting game has a huge cost to it.

The real costs of waiting to be picked

I’ve been doing what I do for more than 12 years and over that time I’ve identified four major costs:

1. Time. We can lose years to inertia while manuscripts sit in the corner of a hard drive waiting for responses from query letters, or simply waiting to be noticed. Whole seasons drift by with no eyeballs on our work, which means it’s not helping anyone else and it’s not helping us. The book could have been out there, finding readers and opening doors to speaking gigs, workshops, and great new clients and opportunities.
2. Creativity. When we wait to be picked, we edit ourselves pre-emptively, before anyone else has ever seen our work, based on what we imagine an editor might want. The only version of ourselves that arrives on the page is the diet version. The delicious salty rich version of ourselves stays buried just in case a faceless gatekeeper doesn’t like it. And every moment we wait, every rejection we get, confirms our story that we’re not ready or not good enough. neither of those are true. And while your book is hiding, you can’t learn from it. All feedback is data and we use it to learn and grow and improve the next time. Scary? Yes. But absolutely essential to any creative growth.
3. Business. Your book is an amazing asset, whether you’re writing it to support your business or career or not. If you are supporting your business, the longer you wait the more your setup is missing a powerful trust-building piece of work. Clients who would love to work with you after reading your book never even find you, because it’s not out there. And you’re missing something deep and thoughtful that could feed so many other areas of your life and business, and lead to so many other ideas.
4. Emotional. “I’ve been talking about this book for years but I never finish anything.” I heard this just the other day and I heard the undercurrent of shame beneath it and it broke my heart a little bit. Because I know that feeling. I’m very familiar with it. And I also know it’s a simple fix: you do the thing that you want to do and you break the cycle, rather than feeding into that circular story that you “never finish anything”. And we become resentful: towards the people who are getting published (and it’s probably not that they’re “better” than you, they just did what they needed to do AND had a healthy dose of luck — right place, right time, right idea, right agent, etc.) And towards the publishers themselves for blocking us… when actually, we’re blocking ourselves by waiting for them to pick us.

All of that goes away when we pick ourselves first.

What changes when you pick yourself first?

Action is magical. I’m not even exaggerating. In anything we do, inertia is death and begets more inertia, but action changes everything. It energises us, it excites us, and it feeds into itself.

We can choose not to wait for someone else to choose us. We can choose a different path without abandoning a traditional publishing dream.

That gives us back our agency: you decide when your book is real and ready. You decide how personal, how bold, how political, or how niche it is. And you’ll find plenty of people want exactly that, not a homogenised version that fits into a neat little publishing box.

And it gives us back our time.

Speed is powerful: getting even a scrappy first edition out can start conversations and bring in new clients, or attract collaborators and open doors to fun new opportunities.

We do more honest work when we choose ourselves first. There are no publishers to impress. No external business goals to consider. I’m not saying other people’s opinions don’t matter; they absolutely do and they can help us write better books. But when we start from a position of choosing ourselves first, we get to tell the story we truly want to tell and write the book we genuinely believe in.

And we stay true to ourselves. When we keep telling ourselves we’re going to write that book, but we don’t do it, we make ourselves liars. We’re not in integrity with our intentions. We say one thing but do another and that erodes our confidence and belief in ourselves. Just as when we stop trusting another person who keeps breaking their word to us, we stop trusting ourselves when we don’t do what we say we’re going to do. Choosing ourselves helps to build back that trust, making us stronger.

And we discover something really cool: publishing is a menu, not a hierarchy, despite the way it looks and is presented (and ask yourself who has the vested interest in presenting publishing as a hierarchy). You can self-publish this book and STILL traditionally publish the next one. In fact, if this book does well, it will be easier to pitch the next one. That’s what Hugh Howey did with his self-published novel Wool, and it’s now a major TV series. Just sayin’. Or you could choose an indie press and sell the rights later. There are many options and never just one path.

How does that sound?

Start ditching “pick me” energy right now

Let’s start now, with a few small steps. Because you might not even realise you’ve been waiting to be picked.

Here are 5 practical actions you can take now:

1. Name the problem. Write down the specific places you’re waiting to be chosen. (Agent query letters, approval from peers, being discovered, waiting to go viral, etc.)
2. Make a commitment to do one thing on your own terms. (I will finish my first draft by October 24, 2026, par exemple — regardless of publishing pathway.)
3. Create your own roadmap. (Draft a mini publishing plan as if you are the publisher. You can DM me if you’d like my template — I’ll gift it to you and you can fill it in.)
4. Tell someone what you’re doing. (Find a real human to share your progress with and stay accountable — a coach, friend, or peer. This truly helps.)
5. Change your language. (“I’m trying to get a book deal” becomes “I’m writing and publishing a book and I’m figuring out how to get it into the hands of people who need it.”)

Advocate for yourself because nobody will do it for you

I’m not saying don’t try for a publisher if you want to do that. I’m saying don’t let that stop you from writing a potentially brilliant book. Choose yourself. There will always be other books, other ideas, and publishers to query.

You have to be your own best cheerleader. Your work is too important to sit on your hard-drive or in a slush pile for the rest of eternity. You do not need permission to become the author you already are.

If you recognise yourself in any of this, and you’re ready to choose yourself, my Book Breakthrough Lab is built exactly for this moment. We’ll get your book moving, regardless of how you choose to publish it.

And then I’ll advocate for you too.

I have one spot for the summer — let’s get your first draft done by October!

TTFN,

Vicky 🫡

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