discouragement

I see an incredible number of writers giving up - stating publicly that it just wasn't what they'd hoped, and they were turning away. Most of them have a lot more invested, in terms of pure money, than I do. They bought a thousand of their own books. They paid a cover designer or an editor/proofreader. They invested heavily.

I on the other hand have invested mostly time and energy. As I've become obsessed with marketing, I've sprayed every possible free avenue with marketing until my twitter friends, facebook people, etc. are probably sick of it. I've kept up an unrelenting barrage of marketing of what I have and mostly to no avail. Sure I get a few sales here and there. On the paperback front which is especially bleak, I've resorted to buying my own to keep my ratings below ten million or below about fifteen, which is the level at which they stop even showing your rating. This is especially true of haiku, which simply doesn't sell, or at least mine doesn't sell. But I have used my marketing time to get Amazon gift cards so I'm not taking it out of the family budget.

In a sense this is an admission of failure and I know it. With the short stories I know that I have a few readers and will have more if I can crank out another collection of them, which should happen soon. My novel was a success but I also know that I've been virtually unable to write the second one, which is dying to be finished but just needs some attention to its organization.

In general I have about eight projects half done and a couple I even forgot about for a few months in the lead up to the big move from New Mexico to Illinois. A lot of these are close enough to being done that a little spurt of writing would just finish them. Instead I feel somewhat paralyzed by futility.

In my household a kid lives on McDonald's. That means twenty, thirty, forty bucks slips out the door every time we turn around because he likes to include his friends. I'm sitting here making maybe a buck on a survey, getting a book and giving it to a library, and he's out there slurping up frappes on our retirement account because he literally doesn't have a clue and feels like he absolutely needs it, and we have not effectively established a good limit. We are enabling him, I agree, so it's on us, but it piles up the futility. My ultimate goal is to be able to sit back, and let book sales and reads just kind of fill up the account whether I crank it out or not. For now, though, it will be necessary to crank some out. So it's back to work for me.