Much of my writing has been on fighting. I found a niche in writing about Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and mixed martial arts, and the sport has been good to me. It’s given me a way of life, and it has supported me emotionally as well as financially. Living the sport has taught to me to view the world through a warrior lens, and I have realized that there are many fights outside of the cage worth writing about, and these are the sorts of fights we face every day.
These are the fights for rights, for business, for a better tomorrow.
An example of a fight outside of the cage: publishing a book. Thousands of people are aspiring writers, and agents and publishers are inundated with unsolicited manuscripts. This is the status quo, and this is why publishing a book is hard. When you submit a manuscript, you become just another stack of papers in an ever growing pile of papers. The trick is to get noticed. To get your one shot to prove to someone that matters that you have something worth publishing.
In my case, I sent out over 200 proposals to agents and publishers. Of 200 submitted proposals, I received zero rejection letters. Nothing. I was shoveling manuscripts into a black hole. With no feedback, I had no idea why my work was rejected. Was my writing sloppy? Was the story a bad fit for the publishers? Did I fail to clearly define the target market? I could not answer these questions, and thus, I could not intelligently readjust my strategy.
