Lessons I Learned Submitting My First Book

Practical takeaways for your maiden voyage

I often think of Zadie Smith’s remark about editing in her brilliant essay “The Crafty Feeling.” What you need, she argued, is “the head of a smart stranger who picks it [the book] off a bookshelf and begins to read. You need to get the head of that smart stranger somehow. You need to forget you ever wrote that book.”

Here are three additional lessons fr…