I was reading about an experiment where makeup artists put a fake scar on face of women, showed them themselves in a mirror, and then did a few finishing touches before sending the women into a job interview. The women believed the experiment was to see how facial disfigurement negatively impacted interviewers. I believe they found it did. Some of them even complained about the interviewers talking about their scarring.

The catch is that the ‘finishing touch’ was actually to remove all trace of the fake scar. The experiment was on their expectations and not the reality. I read another about placebo testosterone – causing quite different effects to real testosterone believed to be a placebo. It might just be an internet tall tale… but I believe it reflects something real. Like the fortune teller’s prediction that we want to believe… we find ways to make it ‘true’ or at least to believe it.

I remember an encounter with a female sf writer, who had just had her book rejected by a publisher. She met the editor at a conference and asked him why. He told her – and this was about 15 years ago – that sf-readers wouldn’t buy books by women. She believed him implicitly. I read the book. Truthfully, it scraped into the top 50%, and failed to tick all the fashionable issues, and she had no contacts or advantages. To get a trad sale without those, you’d need to be in the top 0.001% of submissions… but over 75% of new authors entering sf at the time (I did the figures and showed them to her. She didn’t believe it) were female (and ticked all the fashionable issues). She’s spent her life hating male sf readers, ever since, believing her books beyond improvement.

Many of us fall in opposite camp. We believe our books are not good enough. We don’t realize much of trad’s buying in a supersaturated market comes down to pleasing the editor, not the readers.

And some of us believe we’re going to fail. And we make sure it happens.

YOU DON’T HAVE A SCAR. As far as most readers are concerned, it’s about your book, and how much they enjoy it. I didn’t know or care that Zenna Henderson was female, or that CS Lewis wasn’t. I just loved the stories.