Last Saturday I had the pleasure of attending KidLitCon, right here in my hometown of Baltimore, and presenting a session on “Connecting with Debut Authors” with Alyssa Susanna of The Eater of Books! blog.  I wanted to give attendees a sense of the particular neurosis that is being a debut author, and that means making one thing crystal clear: the waiting.

Oh, the waiting.

To that end, I polled my fellow Sweet Sixteens, and eleven authors graciously agreed to anonymously share the timelines of major developments in the publication of their debut novels.  You can find the entire PowerPoint linked at this post at Alyssa’s blog, but here are some of the averages from our completely unscientific sampling that might surprise you:

The moral is: if you wanted to be a published author, be prepared to do a lot of waiting.