A publisher in France wrote to me last week about a manuscript I had sent her in April: she wouldn't be able to get back to me until mid-September. She apologized for the delay. I wrote back to thank her for it.

I meant it. The books that have done the best for our authors are almost never the ones that moved fastest. They are the ones that found the right reader at the right desk on the right unhurried afternoon — the editor who had the room to fall for them rather than the bandwidth to merely process them.

Let me be clear: speed itself is not the enemy. A fast yes from an editor who has genuinely fallen for a book is a gift, and I'll take it every time. The trouble is speed that comes at the cost of fit. A quick yes from the wrong house is just a slower no, arriving eighteen months later as a book that was published rather than championed.

‍I have learned to be a little suspicious of the deal that comes together in a week — not because it was quick, but because quickness so often stands in for conviction — and a little hopeful about the one that takes a season.

‍There is a second kind of slowness that matters just as much: most books take time to catch on after they are published. The Alchemist sold so poorly on its first Brazilian printing that the publisher dropped it; Paulo Coelho found another house willing to stay the course, and the book went on, over years of word of mouth, to become one of the most translated novels by a living author. Catch-22 sold a modest thirty thousand copies in hardcover, and its publisher largely stopped pushing it — but one editor, Robert Gottlieb, kept championing it anyway, and when the paperback met the mood of the sixties, the book caught fire. Neither book changed. The world simply took its time arriving. Which is why the question is never just "who will say yes fastest" but "who will still be pushing this book in year three" — whether that's the house, or one believer inside it.

This is hard to hold onto when you are an author waiting. Silence feels like rejection. It usually isn't. It is, more often, a manuscript sitting on a nightstand, being read the way it deserves to be read — in the margins of a busy life, by someone deciding whether to give it years of theirs.

So when I tell you that patience is part of the work, I am not asking you to settle. I am asking you to trust that the right slow yes is worth more than ten fast maybes.

‍The book that travels furthest is rarely the one in a hurry.

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‍Warmly,

Montse