Perseverance - as someone once said, that's the main difference between those who make it and those who don't. Those who do, are those who never gave up.

I'd really like to track down who said it. It was someone who made it, and was asked how it was. Was he a genius? What trick did he have up his sleeve? What did he know about the public that he could teach us?

The reason I need this wisdom is that I have come to doubt that I have that much more than anyone else in any of the other great writing categories. Skill, ability to craft a story, genius, overriding ability to see it the way the reader would see it - and then that's not to mention the formal teaching of such things as novels (I've had none) which many of my fellow writers have had but which I have pretty much spurned over the years. I'm playing with an untutored mindset and I'm in the pro leagues but I'm looking at shutout scores and somehow I'm surprised, why, because it's hard to make people see you out there? It's taken me a long time to figure out that starting from the bottom really makes a long journey.

Marketing by reading is really kind of limited. It's a lot of work to get one ratings bump, if you're not a big fan of fantasy, or romance, or whatever is out there. I'm finding it's slogging on me. And yet, also, I'm somewhat drained when it comes to what I'm actually producing. Nothing I've done lately has made it all the way to the edge of being publishable.

Hard marketing has at least given me some good numbers right before the buying season, and that's something to be proud of - I'm not sure I can keep them right through December, but at least I look a little more like an up-and-coming writer, and that's something to be grateful for.

More than that I'm grateful for the fact that I've made a lot of friends out there. If I quit today I at least have a lot of people I can count as genuine friends, spread literally around the world. They are like me, slogging out the novels, cranking out something or other, trying to maintain some semblance of marketing with what they have. I'm sure they can relate to my anguish.

Persevere! What choice is there, give up?

So lately I've been using this site to complain bitterly about the situation I'm in. But I have to admit, overall, my situation isn't so bad. I'm getting page-reads. I'm even getting a few sales. What I can't get right away, I get eventually. This is especially true of my new book which started out a little slowly but is doing ok now.

But here's today's bitter complaint: I got 212 page-reads today, but it only amounted to 29 cents. That's terrible!

Now I have to admit, the pennies are themselves no longer an issue. If 212 page-reads amounted to 40 or 50 cents, how would that change my life? Not much. I have kids who spend twenty or thirty bucks just in the process of breathing. So the difference here of 28 cents is not really that big a deal.

But here's my conclusion about what happened. Amazon pays us about .45, that's right, almost half a cent, for a page read. You read one page of my book, and that's what it gives me. So, if you read 212 pages, it should have given me about 50 cents. So why didn't it? Because most of those pages were read in India.

I am not sure why Amazon.com would give us .45 of a cent, whereas Amazon.in would give us more like .2 of a cent. It probably has something to do with dividing total revenue into total page-reads, meaning that perhaps KU is much more popular in India, and they have much more in the way of page reads to distribute, or, perhaps they sell KU for less than $10/mo. in India. It seems from what i'm seeing that amazon.in somehow has a different formula (it's definitely not .45/page). For whatever reason.

In fact, .45 itself is quite low, if you map out what's happening. Even for amazon.com, it's a formula that is made directly out of certain revenues divided by total page-reads, and they are very clear about not asserting total control to stabilize it whatsoever. That is, if the bottom drops out of the revenue, they'll simply pay us less and not worry about it, or if, conversely, KU becomes extremely popular and there are unexpectedly millions of page-reads appearing out of nowhere. I am, in a sense, competing against all other authors on KU for those reads that elusive as they are, someone is doing somewhere: reading some page of a book, taking a minimum amount of time on it, etc. I of course am giving some author some of these as I read their books.

I sometimes think that if I got 60 in a day I did pretty well. Lately I've been doing better: a hundred, two hundred. But at .45 a page it'll take well over 200 just to make a dollar. And I'm trying to get a dollar a day just to keep over my $30/month income goal. $30 is peanuts. I might as well be walking dogs for a living.

Fortunately people do buy my books, sometimes. Not often. Not even daily.

And fortunately I'm retired, I'm not living off of these peanuts.