I’m pretty sure as I write this, that nobody reads blogs anymore. I have the attention span of a hopped up hamster, and anything running longer than the average social media post has me scrolling on by. I don’t even have the patience to last through a TikTok longer than thirty seconds, which makes me definitely not my own audience to this.
Regardless (and very definitely never irregardless), I’ve decided to pen some of my thoughts as I go through what is a difficult point for me as a writer. I’ve been on my writing journey—what an overused and tired phrase—for around 15 years and 33 completed and published books. I now find myself floundering in the depths of an inability to write anything. Even this was an effort of will to fight against the impotence of putting words to page.
When I first became a writer, I had the classic slush-pile discovery dream of being plucked from obscurity and tossed into international fame by an eagle-eyed editor who had tripped over the next best thing in publishing. And that dream did, in fact, come true. Well, parts of it anyway. I did have an editor respond to my query, ask for more, and ultimately sign me to a book deal. I had three such discoveries with different editors.
My slush-pile discovery dream never went deep enough or long enough however, to admit the possibility that my glorious visions of fame and fortune stumbled on the craggy rocks of insufficient sales and only marginally less obscurity than I’d suffered before.
I then fell into that writer crevasse of being unable to “earn out” on an advance, so of no interest to any other publisher. And lest you believe I am unsympathetic or resentful of the traditional publishing industry, let me correct that right now. Publishing is a business, the margins are tight, and editors have to justify to their companies why a writer is worth risking money on to publish.
I turned to indie publishing rather than choose to toss in the towel. My take on indie publishing is that it is, at heart, a numbers game. For most of us clogging up the hundreds of thousands and millions rankings of the almighty Amazon, it’s a question of how much lead we can get in the air. How fast can we write and publish books in an effort to generate income. There are people who have tremendous skill at this, and hats off to them. The best I could manage was five books a year.
And whilst I admire their speed and efficiency, I have to state quite categorically that you cannot produce twenty quality books a year. You can, at best, produce twenty reasonable and readable books that feed the ever voracious reader appetite. I can already feel the breeze generated by feathers ruffling as several authors take umbrage to my last statement. I stand by it.
Surrounding the entire indie author mass churning machine is also a deep vortex of hangers on and opportunists. Those who swear they have the answer as to how to sell thousands of books a month. Thousands of magic formulas that “cannot fail” but, for the most part, do so spectacularly. Limitless opportunities to liberate you from your dollars as they dangle hope in front of you.
I have concluded, after much trial and error, that the fickle bitch luck has far more to do with the writing industry than any of us would choose to believe. Because luck is lawless and unpredictable, as unreliable as it is ephemeral. I would much rather live in a world where I had control over the course of my career. I would much rather believe that there is a carefully, aligned series of steps I could take toward my goals that would ultimately take me to my desired destination.
All of which leaves me exactly where? At time of writing this, I have no answer. It could mean more inane burbling.