Although my manuscript passed through direct submission to an editor, I was actually a mighty expert of the Five Rejections Realm (laughs).
As a new author with a new book, I had plenty of problems, and my writing skills weren't up to much either. The results were dismal: 500 bookmarks at 100,000 Chinese characters.
Back then, Qidian already had its new-book listing feature. On a certain Kong forum, I heard veterans say that books generally gained a few dozen bookmarks a day during the listing period. Someone even said he gained two hundred a day (he's now a big shot writing ten thousand characters a day with over ten thousand subscriptions). I practically drooled with envy, because I was getting something like a dozen or twenty a day during that period.
At the time, I even wondered whether my book had actually been listed, until my editor sent me a screenshot telling me, "Stop dreaming, kid."
Having no readers early on was truly hard to endure. The loneliness was nothing, and neither was getting insulted. The intense self-doubt was the most painful part.
Although I said I started writing because I'd run out of things to read, beyond my interest in it, I mostly wanted to make a quick buck.
With results that poor, spending so much time on it felt meaningless. I might as well give up.
But I couldn't quite accept that, so I went looking through new books by rookie authors on the new-book rankings. Their achievement records showed their bookmark counts, and by checking when they started publishing, I could roughly work out their early numbers.
I wanted to find a few rookie authors whose early results had been just as dismal but who had since made it onto the new-book rankings, to give myself some