By all accounts Victoria Aveyard is both an outlier and also as close to the Hollywood version of becoming an author as it gets. 

While the average age for a debut novelist is around 36, Victoria’s debut novel—Red Queen—was published shortly after graduating from college and went on to become a massive, runaway success. And so did all of the rest of her novels. In fact, every one of Victoria’s novels has been a New York Times bestseller, and she even made it onto the coveted Bestseller Series list which is rareified air indeed. 

So it came as quite a shock to her readers when, earlier this year, she talked about having to go back out on submission this year with what will be her debut adult novel. They were even more shocked to learn that she received a number of rejections, thinking, of course, that past performance meant that every future book would automatically receive the green light from any future publisher. 

I sat down with Victoria to have a long discussion about the actual job of being an author, what readers and prospective authors alike get right and wrong about the labor of a creative career, and how to reframe rejection for yourself as just another part of the job. 

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