Publishing is getting harder all the time. The author has to do so much that it can become utterly exhausting. And discouraging. Guest Deborah Raney shares what it takes now to have longevity in a publishing career.
Deborah Raney’s first novel, A Vow to Cherish, inspired the World Wide Pictures film of the same title and launched Deb’s writing career. Thirty years, forty-plus books, and numerous awards later, she’s still creating stories that touch hearts and lives. Her books have garnered multiple industry awards including the RITA® Award, HOLT Medallion, National Readers’ Choice Award, Carol Award, and have three times been Christy Award finalists. Deb served on the executive board of the 2500-member American Christian Fiction Writers for eighteen years and teaches at writers conferences around the country. Deb’s latest release is Playing for Keeps. Find out more about Deborah Raney at her website.
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Erin: Welcome, listeners. We’re so glad you’re here in the deep with us. We’re especially excited because we have a guest with us! It’s Deborah Raney, and Karen gets to introduce her!
Karen: I don’t even remember when Deb and I met. It feels as though I’ve known her from my beginning in publishing, low over 40 years ago.
We’ve known each other for a long time, and I’ve always been impressed by how everything that Deb does is so steeped in her faith in God. She always has a smile and always a sense of humor, and for somebody who’s been in publishing as long as she has, that either means she’s got a good grounding in faith or she’s nuts!
Her first novel, A Vow to Cherish, inspired the Worldwide Pictures film of the same title, and it launched Deb’s writing career. Now thirty years, forty-plus books, and numerous awards later, she’s still creating stories that touch hearts and lives. She, in fact, was given the 2024 ACFW Lifetime Achievement Award just a month or so ago for everything that she has done and has contributed to in publishing.
She has been on the executive board of the 2,500 member American Christian Fiction Writers, and she teaches at writers’ conferences all around the country. She’s a Missouri transplant having moved with her husband, Ken, from their native Kansas. They love road trips and they take all kinds of fun trips and share pictures on Facebook.
They also have Friday garage sale dates, which I love to watch on Facebook to see the goodies that they picked up. They love to spend time with their family and share breakfast on the screened porch overlooking their wooded backyard. Deb, thank you so much for joining us!
Deb: Thank you, Karen and Erin. It is so fun to be talking with you again.
Erin: It is fun! And I kind of wish we were on your screened porch overlooking your wooded backyard.
Karen: I know! That’s what I was just saying!
Deb: I wish so, too, except the birds make so much noise I don’t know if we could do a recording out here. But we love listening to them.
Karen, I think maybe we met in New Orleans at a writers’ retreat about twenty-five years ago.
Deb: Yeah, it’s been a while.
Karen: Well, I know it’s been a long time. You’ve been a part of my life forever, and I’ve been grateful for that.
Erin: Deb, let’s start off with what does the deep mean to you?
Deb: When I think of the deep, I think of God. The deepest place that I go is my faith.
I will never live long enough—I’ve been in this business thirty years and I’ve been on this earth sixty-nine years, but I will never live long enough to understand and even imagine everything that God is. All that he has meant to me in my life in my relationships, in my career, he is the deep.
Karen: I think that’s wonderful.
Deb: It is. There are other things, and again, it all ties back to him. For example, just this past weekend I was with some longtime writer friends. We had a retreat and our conversations went deep. I love that kind of deep, too, where you know each other so well. You love each other so well that you can say what’s on your heart, what’s truly the good things and the hard things, and you know that that won’t change how those people feel about you because your roots with each other go deep.
Deb: Lots of different ways to interpret that.
Erin: Wow. Yes. I love that. God has this way of binding us together in a deeper way than we could otherwise be because of his spirit. I think it just reaches out to others and we just, we are a body. That’s the thing, and it just, it shows. So yeah. That’s very cool.
One of the things that we wanted to talk about with you was: what do you do as a writer to deal with discouragement? We wanted to discuss that with you because you’ve had a long career. I can’t imagine that you didn’t run into some discouragement along the way. Yet here you still are winning the Lifetime Achievement Award.
Deb: That felt really good, given those thirty tough years.
Erin: Tell us a little bit about your journey. What kind of discouragements have you faced and what did you do about them?
Deb: I would have to say that right away in my writing career, I encountered discouragement. First of all, trying to submit that first manuscript and getting, I think, seventeen rejections before I was finally published.
Even then, I know that I did not work as hard or write as long as a lot of my writer friends who stuck with it years and years and years before they were published. Comparison is not a good thing usually, but if you’re comparing yourself to the right people, you understand how fortunate you are and you can kind of put things in perspective and realize that while that was hard waiting those five months, or however long it might have been, some people waited twenty years. So be grateful for those things.
Deb: But then even after I had a lovely contract for three books with Bethany House, there came a roadblock. I submitted a book to them, and I had not finished the book yet. I’m a seat-of-the-pants writer, and I didn’t know how that book would end.
They said, “We don’t see how it could possibly end well. You can submit it again once you’ve finished the book, but we’re going to reject it for now.”
Deb: Yes, that hurt. It hurts to get rejected, especially by a publishing house that had now become my home. You know, this was my first publisher, and I loved everybody there. But God had other plans for that manuscript, and it ended up with another publisher.
Another thing that’s happened—and my husband can tease me about it now—he says that I have shut down just about every publisher in the Christian publishing world.
That’s not literally true, but I have very often, I don’t know why, but very often in my career I have been on the very tail end of a publisher’s fiction program. Or a certain line.
I had the last book in the portrait series for Bethany House. I had the last book in Summerside Press before they shut down. I had the last book in Steeple Hill before they decided not to publish full length Christian fiction anymore. I had a wonderful five book contract with Abingdon Press, and after I had written three of the five books, they decided not to publish fiction any longer.
That has just kind of been the story of my life. Of my writing life anyway, I will say. And that’s hard. It’s hard not to think that it’s all because you’re such a terrible writer, that that’s why they decided to close their fiction program. I know in my heart that isn’t really true, but it feels that way sometimes.
Erin: Well, not only that, but I can see why that would be extremely discouraging because when they shut down that line, I mean, are they gonna promote that?
Erin: You feel like you’ve birthed this baby and nobody is going to even know about it. That can be career killer, because publishers ask, “Why didn’t that book sell?”
Deb: Yes, exactly. And that really is what happened. They did go ahead and publish all five books, but of course, their heart wasn’t in promoting fiction because they were on to other things. And that’s just the way. If I’ve learned anything, it’s just that that is the way that this business works.
Things are constantly changing. You get an editor you love and she moves to a different publisher. You get a contract you love and that publisher shuts down. I mean, that’s just the way of things are. But the longer I have written, the more I’m able to see that every time something like that happens, God has something else in waiting in the wings for me. There was always a reason for it.
Now, I may not know on this side of heaven what that reason is every single time, but when you walk with the Lord for as long as I have, you learn that whatever he’s doing is for my good and for his glory. That’s what I have always prayed that my writing world and life would be: to bring him glory.
There comes a point where I don’t have to know the answers, because I trust him. I know that whatever it is, there’s a reason for it, whether I ever know that or not.
Karen: That’s the biggest thing, Deb, that you know you can trust him and you can rely on him. I’ve seen a lot of conversations online, had some conversations in person lately, with writers who are just so discouraged because things haven’t happened the way that they’d hoped they would. They’ve been around for a long time and they’re just feeling like they’re struggling.
I was trying to find a support group of women on Facebook to recommend to some of my friends who’ve been struggling with discouragement, and yet the one group that I found, all of those women are incredibly discouraged and depressed. I don’t think we truly, and tell me if I’m wrong on this, but I don’t think we truly understand who God is, and who we are in him, and what it means to follow Jesus and to walk every step of the way with Jesus.
To become discouraged and depressed when we have Almighty God beside us? I mean, it’s hard for me to wrap my brain around that.
Deb: I agree. The other thing is that just because God gifted me as a writer doesn’t mean that God’s going to have me writing for the rest of my life.
Deb: I will write as long as God tells me to write. If he puts something else in my life and says that season is over, then it will be over. I might mourn it. I might be sad about it when that happens, but if he tells me, then how can I do anything else?
Erin: First, I want our listeners to be encouraged because they’ve heard it from Deb: God has a reason. I mean, you have come to that understanding through these years of walking and seeing and having something taken away from you over and over again, only to be handed something different from God. I hope our listeners can see from your experience that God is going to do that.
But take us back to your earlier journey. Before you had those years under your belt, were there maybe some practical things you did, or thought, to help you pick yourself up…or not? Or lean on God, or whatever you did to keep moving forward?
Deb: Well, first of all, please don’t think that I always handled it perfectly because I didn’t. And it’s okay to cry and weep and mourn and say, “God, why?”
He can handle that. It’s okay for us to ask him and plead with him, even, if it’s something we feel strongly about. Sometimes I think that he lets us long for something so that we appreciate it more when it does finally happen.
But no, sometimes my attitude in my younger years, well actually even in my older years, sometimes my attitude is not very God honoring. I’m ashamed of those times because every disappointment that I have had in this life is a first-world problem.
I’m here to tell you, I am very, very blessed. When I finally, you know, suck it up and say, “Okay, Lord, whatever you have,” I realize how very, very blessed I am. Sometimes the discouragement or the disappointment leads to something better. But sometimes it doesn’t.
Sometimes it leads to something a little less than what I thought I deserved and a little less than what I wanted. But even in that, there have been lessons to learn, and there have been reasons for that.
As a sixty-nine-year-old writer, one thing that I have seen is a whole new crop of young writers, just like I was when I first started out, coming in to take the place of the writers my age. The old guard that we have kind of become, and that’s fine. That’s okay. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt sometimes. It doesn’t mean that I don’t feel a little jealous sometimes that those younger writers are coming up, but they are following God’s call just exactly the way I was.
When I was a young writer, there was probably an older writer who felt a little jealous of me and the position that I was in. Again, this is just the way life is.
When my attitude is right, and I am following God and seeking his will and walking in his truth and staying in his word, and when my perspective is right, and I understand this is the way it is, this is the way life is and it’s good—when I’m doing all that, then life IS good. It’s not the way it was supposed to be in the garden, but we live in a fallen world, and when we walk with Jesus in a fallen world, it’s still a pretty wonderful world.
Karen: Yeah. I like those steps. Those are steps to take that can help you endure. Because the longer you walk with the Lord, the closer you become to him and the more you come to understand that, it’s like when you were with your group of friends, you can be honest. You can express every emotion.
When I go through one health issue after another, I’m not sitting there and saying, “Oh, this is so great. Jesus, thank you for this new health challenge and all this physical pain!”
I’ve been known to actually use obscenities from time to time. I always apologize to God and I apologize to whoever happened to hear me when I was going through that, but God is so gracious. He knows our limitations and he knows what we can endure, and everything that we face is meant to get us a step further in what we can endure, to strengthen us more and to refine us.
It’s like tempered steel or tempered glass. It will not shatter the way that untested steel and glass can shatter.
Deb: The other thing that I have come to recognize is that sometimes I think God allows me to walk through a certain type of disappointment so that I can walk along beside someone else in a few years who is going through that same thing.
When I was walking through that, there was nothing more comforting than having somebody else who had been through that very type of thing come alongside me and say, “It’ll be okay. I thought it was the end of the world when it happened to me, but God had something else in mind. It’ll be okay.”
Erin: You’ve touched on this idea of just crying. I think that sometimes as Christians we forget that lament is okay. It’s not just okay, it’s good and it’s healthy. Look at David’s lament when Saul and Jonathan died. Look at the book Lamentations. Lament is important.
I love what you’re saying, that somebody is walking with you and you can walk through things with others. I think one of the most powerful things we can say is, “It’s okay to be sad. It’s okay to lament the loss of that contract or the loss of those sales that you thought you were gonna get and instead something awful happened and the whole world did something different” or whatever.
Lament is just that we can grieve and we can pour out our sorrow. Jesus cried. It’s okay and good. It’s important, I think, to also remember that lament is not despair. Despair is a different story altogether.
But lament is grieving with hope. Grieving at what’s happened, but understanding that we aren’t people who have no hope. In some way, shape, or form, we still have hope for whatever God wants to do. And we know he wants to do things with us because that’s what he does. That’s why we’re here.
Karen: Yeah. The biggest difference is that there are people who fall into lament and that leads them into despair, and then they live there. They live there with that expectation of something terrible happening, or the other shoe dropping, or that God must not love them as much as X, Y, Z, or whatever lie the enemy is going to visit upon their minds and their hearts and spirits, and they stay in that place.
That’s why it’s so vital to be able to do as you said: to lament, but do it with hope because we know that we have hope in God no matter what happens to us. We have hope.
Deb: Yes. And sometimes, because God is a loving father and he disciplines the children he loves, sometimes he says to me, “Get over yourself.”
I mean, yes, it’s okay to lament and cry and whine and complain and go to the Psalms and all of that, but sometimes it’s time to be done lamenting and get on with the next thing.
Deb: I always have to learn that the hard way, it seems like.
Erin: I love that idea, too, because that’s humility. As writers, what better thing can we share with the world than humility? Because that’s where we’re learners. That’s where we’re growers. That’s what this world needs is a little bit more humility and a little less human pride.
Karen: I’ll never forget Robin Lee Hatcher, who we’ve had on the show a couple times, and she was talking about when she went through her divorces and she was just struggling and she was saying to the Lord, “Why me, Lord, why me?”
God spoke to her and said, “Why not you beloved?”
You know, it’s like, “Oh. Yeah. Okay. That’s true.”
Erin: It’s that cursed world we live in. It’s filled with futility until the whole restoration of the kingdom. That’s just where we live. But how wonderful and how good of God to allow us joy and peace, and the honor of working in a way that we love, and creativity, and the way that he chooses to use these words. It’s just, there’s nothing better out there, you guys.
Deb: Yes. You know, even if no one ever read the books that I have written, that wouldn’t change God’s goodness. That wouldn’t change the fact that he gave me a gift.
Now sure, I’m happier when a whole bunch of people read them. The more that do, the happier I am. But some of my books, I think I wrote for me. They were written for me to pour out something that was going on in my life, or to teach me a lesson, or that type of thing. That’s okay, too.
Deb: Another—I’ll call it a gift in quotes—that God has given me is that I play the piano by ear. Nobody else needs to hear that. That is a gift that he has given me purely for my own enjoyment, and maybe to play with my grandchildren sitting on the piano bench beside me and just having fun.
I am not going to be playing in any concert hall or even in any church anytime soon. So not always are the gifts that we are given meant to be used to do great and mighty things out in the world.
Erin: I love that you said that because so many writers struggle with, “Am I called to write, or is it okay for me to write, or should I be writing?”
My answer is always yes. You’re a creative person. You don’t need some kind of a gift card from God that says you need to write. But they think it’s a waste and they only want to write if it’s going to be read by hundreds of people because otherwise, why? That’s the wrong way to look at it. It’s the wrong question.
Deb: Right. If God wills, then the story will get out there. Every time I get a wonderful reader letter from somebody who I didn’t even know was reading my book, which usually you don’t, that’s a wonderful blessing. I can remind myself that for every person who does write and tell me what my story meant, there’s probably another hundred people who didn’t write.
That’s okay. I don’t need to know what happened to my story once it got out in the world. That’s between God and that person. But that doesn’t mean I’m not still thrilled when I do get to hear, every so often, and get that little bit of encouragement.
Erin: We’re coming to the end of our time already. Do you have any last words of wisdom you would want to leave our listeners with?
Deb: I guess if I could say anything to my younger self, I would say don’t worry about the little things. God will take care of them. Learn to trust him and to know that if something that is out of your control happens, just roll with the punches and wait.
God, he may show you. He may make it very clear to you later on what the reason was for that happening. But if he doesn’t, that doesn’t mean he’s not working in your life. He’s still working in your life. Trust him. Two words.
I think that’s kind of what this life on this earth is all about—just learning that our father loves us and he wants to give us good things. He also sometimes needs to discipline us because we’re naughty children sometimes. You know, we need a spanking. I know I do sometimes. But let him have his way with you and work in your life.
Karen: What I really like is recognizing that in light of eternity and in light of God’s purpose, it’s all small stuff. Even the things that feel like they’re going to end our careers, or ruin our lives, or whatever. In light of God, it’s all small stuff, so don’t worry about it, don’t fret about it. Feel your emotions and share those with God and with believers who’ll speak truth to you.
But in the long run, God’s got this. He’s got you. You’ve proven that, Deb, with what you’ve talked about today. You’ve reminded us of the fact that we don’t need to worry. We don’t need to be afraid. We don’t need to be discouraged. We can just rely on God and trust him. Like you said, those two words: Trust him.
Deb: I think one of the best things about getting older is that the longer you live, the more you see, you can look back and trace, God’s work in your life. I love that part of being old.
Guest @AuthorDebRaney shares two powerful words to help you have longevity in a publishing career. #amwriting #ChristianWriter
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