Publishing is getting harder all the time. The author has to do so much that it can become utterly exhausting. And discouraging. Guest Deborah Raney shares what it takes now to have longevity in a publishing career.

Deborah Raney’s first novel, A Vow to Cherish, inspired the World Wide Pictures film of the same title and launched Deb’s writing career. Thirty years, forty-plus books, and numerous awards later, she’s still creating stories that touch hearts and lives. Her books have garnered multiple industry awards including the RITA® Award, HOLT Medallion, National Readers’ Choice Award, Carol Award, and have three times been Christy Award finalists. Deb served on the executive board of the 2500-member American Christian Fiction Writers for eighteen years and teaches at writers conferences around the country. Deb’s latest release is Playing for Keeps. Find out more about Deborah Raney at her website.

Erin: Welcome, listeners. We’re so glad you’re here in the deep with us. We’re especially excited because we have a guest with us! It’s Deborah Raney, and Karen gets to introduce her!

Karen: I don’t even remember when Deb and I met. It feels as though I’ve known her from my beginning in publishing, low over 40 years ago.

We’ve known each other for a long time, and I’ve always been impressed by how everything that Deb does is so steeped in her faith in God. She always has a smile and always a sense of humor, and for somebody who’s been in publishing as long as she has, that either means she’s got a good grounding in faith or she’s nuts!

Her first novel, A Vow to Cherish, inspired the Worldwide Pictures film of the same title, and it launched Deb’s writing career. Now thirty years, forty-plus books, and numerous awards later, she’s still creating stories that touch hearts and lives. She, in fact, was given the 2024 ACFW Lifetime Achievement Award just a month or so ago for everything that she has done and has contributed to in publishing.

She has been on the executive board of the 2,500 member American Christian Fiction Writers, and she teaches at writers’ conferences all around the country. She’s a Missouri transplant having moved with her husband, Ken, from their native Kansas. They love road trips and they take all kinds of fun trips and share pictures on Facebook.

They also have Friday garage sale dates, which I love to watch on Facebook to see the goodies that they picked up. They love to spend time with their family and share breakfast on the screened porch overlooking their wooded backyard. Deb, thank you so much for joining us! 

Deb: Thank you, Karen and Erin. It is so fun to be talking with you again.

Erin: It is fun! And I kind of wish we were on your screened porch overlooking your wooded backyard. 

Karen: I know! That’s what I was just saying!

Deb: I wish so, too, except the birds make so much noise I don’t know if we could do a recording out here. But we love listening to them.

Karen, I think maybe we met in New Orleans at a writers’ retreat about twenty-five years ago.

Karen: Holy cow!

Deb: Yeah, it’s been a while. 

Karen: Well, I know it’s been a long time. You’ve been a part of my life forever, and I’ve been grateful for that. 

Deb: Same here.

Erin: Deb, let’s start off with what does the deep mean to you? 

Deb: When I think of the deep, I think of God. The deepest place that I go is my faith.

I will never live long enough—I’ve been in this business thirty years and I’ve been on this earth sixty-nine years, but I will never live long enough to understand and even imagine everything that God is. All that he has meant to me in my life in my relationships, in my career, he is the deep.

Karen: I think that’s wonderful.

Deb: It is. There are other things, and again, it all ties back to him. For example, just this past weekend I was with some longtime writer friends. We had a retreat and our conversations went deep. I love that kind of deep, too, where you know each other so well. You love each other so well that you can say what’s on your heart, what’s truly the good things and the hard things, and you know that that won’t change how those people feel about you because your roots with each other go deep. 

Erin: Yeah.  

Deb:  Lots of different ways to interpret that. 

Erin: Wow. Yes. I love that. God has this way of binding us together in a deeper way than we could otherwise be because of his spirit. I think it just reaches out to others and we just, we are a body. That’s the thing, and it just, it shows. So yeah. That’s very cool.

One of the things that we wanted to talk about with you was: what do you do as a writer to deal with discouragement? We wanted to discuss that with you because you’ve had a long career. I can’t imagine that you didn’t run into some discouragement along the way. Yet here you still are winning the Lifetime Achievement Award. 

Deb: That felt really good, given those thirty tough years.

Karen: Right!

Erin: Tell us a little bit about your journey. What kind of discouragements have you faced and what did you do about them?

Deb: I would have to say that right away in my writing career, I encountered discouragement. First of all, trying to submit that first manuscript and getting, I think, seventeen rejections before I was finally published.

Even then, I know that I did not work as hard or write as long as a lot of my writer friends who stuck with it years and years and years before they were published. Comparison is not a good thing usually, but if you’re comparing yourself to the right people, you understand how fortunate you are and you can kind of put things in perspective and realize that while that was hard waiting those five months, or however long it might have been, some people waited twenty years. So be grateful for those things. 

Erin: Right. 

Deb: But then even after I had a lovely contract for three books with Bethany House, there came a roadblock. I submitted a book to them, and I had not finished the book yet. I’m a seat-of-the-pants writer, and I didn’t know how that book would end.

They said, “We don’t see how it could possibly end well. You can submit it again once you’ve finished the book, but we’re going to reject it for now.” 

Erin: Ouch.

Deb: Yes, that hurt. It hurts to get rejected, especially by a publishing house that had now become my home. You know, this was my first publisher, and I loved everybody there. But God had other plans for that manuscript, and it ended up with another publisher.

Another thing that’s happened—and my husband can tease me about it now—he says that I have shut down just about every publisher in the Christian publishing world.

That’s not literally true, but I have very often, I don’t know why, but very oft