Aidan Rhiannon (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
bladespark) wrote2019-02-01 12:19 pm
bladespark) wrote2019-02-01 12:19 pm
So there's bad news, and then there's bad news.
Both my self-pub books are up and for sale now. I had wondered if self-pub might not be the way to go. I could write what I like, I could shill my patreon and maybe build an audience, and I could generally take it casually. It came with the (to me) massive down side of needing to market, because I hate marketing and I am bad at it, but I kept being told that there was a huge amount of readers looking for smut on Amazon, and so I figured that I wouldn't have to kill myself screaming "buy my book!" into the void, so it'd be great.
It was not great.
I've made six bucks so far. No, I'm not kidding. Six bucks. Two stories, about 20k total words, so 20-ish hours of writing, more hours editing, more hours formatting, finding bugs, uploading, finding keywords and filling out forms, plus the expense of two pieces of custom cover art (I won't even say how much. A lot more than what I've made so far, certainly,) and that's it. Six lousy bucks.
I don't want to just give up, so I intend to finish out the trilogy, put up the third story I'd written, and then call that done. I was then going to go back to submitting books to the publisher I'm with instead.
I have two published e-books with JMS, which is a gay romance small press. They've both been out for months, and today I got my quarterly royalties statement.
That was ten bucks.
Slightly less than ten bucks, in fact. And those were longer books too! Like 40k words total, and I had to format, go through the editing back and forth, and they wanted me to find stock photos to use for the cover art and figure out my own fucking Amazon keywords too.
I don't even know what the hell I paid them to do, to be honest, because they seem to have done jack squat as far as marketing goes. I guess the cover art was free to me, even if I did have to participate in making it.
That is not worth it. Nothing about that is worth dealing with any of it.
So... uh... What the fuck do I do with all the original fic I've written now? I have three novels and nearly a dozen short stories sitting around, that I'd been planning to either self-publish or send to JMS, but it is literally not worth my time to convert them from scrivener files and put together an e-mail to send them out/fill out the form to post them, let alone being worth the time it took to write them. What do I even do with them?????
It is frustrating.
And to be honest, it is also crushing.
I've loved writing all my life. I used to say I was just going to keep it a hobby, and never publish, but I kept getting encouraged to do so, and so I finally took the plunge and submitted something, and I was so excited when JMS accepted it. I knew I wouldn't be rolling in the dough, but it didn't even cross my mind that I might not even break single digits. On two books. Over a span of three months. I mean what the hell? Getting picked up by a startup, Australian furry e-book company that was so much a nobody that they approached me netted me like $25 in the first quarter.
The only thing I've ever had any real success with, as far as people being willing to pay money for it, has been fanfiction commissions. Other people's ideas, in other people's worlds. The thought that somebody might want, enjoy, value my ideas, my world was so good... And now that thought has been crushed. Squashed like Bambi being stepped on by Godzilla.
Four books, I can't even count the number of hours sunk in, all that money for cover art, and sixteen total dollars.
I just...heartbroken. At a loss. I'd say "ready to give up" but I think I've blogged here before, I can't stop writing. Writing is the sickness I have. Writing is what I do, who I am, how I cope. The writing will still happen. I guess I'll just...let it sit there, when it's done now. There's really no point in doing anything else.
It was not great.
I've made six bucks so far. No, I'm not kidding. Six bucks. Two stories, about 20k total words, so 20-ish hours of writing, more hours editing, more hours formatting, finding bugs, uploading, finding keywords and filling out forms, plus the expense of two pieces of custom cover art (I won't even say how much. A lot more than what I've made so far, certainly,) and that's it. Six lousy bucks.
I don't want to just give up, so I intend to finish out the trilogy, put up the third story I'd written, and then call that done. I was then going to go back to submitting books to the publisher I'm with instead.
I have two published e-books with JMS, which is a gay romance small press. They've both been out for months, and today I got my quarterly royalties statement.
That was ten bucks.
Slightly less than ten bucks, in fact. And those were longer books too! Like 40k words total, and I had to format, go through the editing back and forth, and they wanted me to find stock photos to use for the cover art and figure out my own fucking Amazon keywords too.
I don't even know what the hell I paid them to do, to be honest, because they seem to have done jack squat as far as marketing goes. I guess the cover art was free to me, even if I did have to participate in making it.
That is not worth it. Nothing about that is worth dealing with any of it.
So... uh... What the fuck do I do with all the original fic I've written now? I have three novels and nearly a dozen short stories sitting around, that I'd been planning to either self-publish or send to JMS, but it is literally not worth my time to convert them from scrivener files and put together an e-mail to send them out/fill out the form to post them, let alone being worth the time it took to write them. What do I even do with them?????
It is frustrating.
And to be honest, it is also crushing.
I've loved writing all my life. I used to say I was just going to keep it a hobby, and never publish, but I kept getting encouraged to do so, and so I finally took the plunge and submitted something, and I was so excited when JMS accepted it. I knew I wouldn't be rolling in the dough, but it didn't even cross my mind that I might not even break single digits. On two books. Over a span of three months. I mean what the hell? Getting picked up by a startup, Australian furry e-book company that was so much a nobody that they approached me netted me like $25 in the first quarter.
The only thing I've ever had any real success with, as far as people being willing to pay money for it, has been fanfiction commissions. Other people's ideas, in other people's worlds. The thought that somebody might want, enjoy, value my ideas, my world was so good... And now that thought has been crushed. Squashed like Bambi being stepped on by Godzilla.
Four books, I can't even count the number of hours sunk in, all that money for cover art, and sixteen total dollars.
I just...heartbroken. At a loss. I'd say "ready to give up" but I think I've blogged here before, I can't stop writing. Writing is the sickness I have. Writing is what I do, who I am, how I cope. The writing will still happen. I guess I'll just...let it sit there, when it's done now. There's really no point in doing anything else.
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Like, I'd rather make a living at this, but even as a hobby, I want to share what I've written, and it feels like pulling teeth to get people to even look at most of it.
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Since then, I've looked for forums that don't lose themselves as for critiques. I haven't going any active ones. I've barely found any inactive ones.
I hate AO3 and Wattpad (I'm not posting anywhere that has likes or view counts), but I wanted Readers outside of close personal friends, so I tried finding writing swap buddies on Nano. And as far as I can tell, neither of the people I found like my work.
I do not know where people are supposed to go with original work. When I wrote fan fic, people READ it. And I wasn't a better writer than I am now.
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I tried Wattpad, I couldn't make heads or tails of it, tbh. It's a super non-intuitive site. AO3 isn't perfect but I at least find it usable.
And yeah. The original vs. fanfic thing is so sad. Like Stallion Assassin, one of these stories, sold three copies. It's loosely inspired by Dark, my first Zelda fanfic, that has seven thousand hits! And over 400 kudos, so a lot of those people liked it. (I don't mind likes systems, I just loathe the use of dislikes, ugh.) But of course they like it because they like Zelda fandom, they like the Link/Dark Link pairing. It hasn't got anything to do with me, and that's a very sad feeling.
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They do like your writing. I could write popular pairings and they never got that many hits. To me, it's about finding a way in for the Reader. Like if a novel is a dark forest, fan fic you start on a path. And a lot of people like that. Especially if you don't have a friend recommending it - if you're going in cold. After that, it's how much they like your forest. But that path is what gets them in.
Likes mess me up. Do not let me quantify how popular I am. It will end in despair.
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And oh I have done that, with the never intending to publish! I used to say I would never submit anything, that if a publisher wanted me, they would have to come and find me, because I wasn't going looking. And then one kinda did? It was a very odd situation but it eventually convinced to give sending things in to somebody else a go, but I am kinda regretting that just now, to be honest.
But when you say "Oh, I just write as a hobby" people look at you like you're nuts. No, that's totally a thing one can do, not everybody needs to be trying for fame and fortune. (I still am not trying for fame and fortune, but I was trying for more than sixteen bucks. Alas.)
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I've been following the publishing industry for the last decade or so in the hopes of someday getting my own original work out there, and... unfortunately short of getting stupidly, spectacularly lucky (which of course is even less likely if you're writing for a niche audience), self-marketing is even more important than the writing. Which seems like a particularly cruel joke given how few writing-types are the kind of naturally gregarious personalities that lend itself well to that.
But you should keep sharing your work in some form, I think, if you get much good out of feedback. Maybe not jump through the hoops to publish in a monetized format (or use Patreon but keep your expectations low, maybe?)? I put some finished short fic on AO3 a while back as a personal housekeeping sort of thing, thinking *maybe* one or two people would read it if they wound up doing an archive-dive on me after really loving one of my fanfics, and have actually gotten some interaction on them, trickling in over time. Not much, mind you, but just the occasional confirmation that someone read it and gave a damn has been so nice.
Whatever you do or don't do with your work, though, I really sympathize with you on the let-down of your experience with publishing. I think it's awesome that you've written so much, and there really ought to be better systems for people who don't have the spoons to aggressively self-market to get their work to an audience.
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My first year I made about $6. Last year I brought in about $50 across 13 books. Terrible. I'm still not dead, so I keep writing.
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I have self-pubbed and not made much at all, mostly just to be able to say I'd done it, to be honest. So I don't have anything useful to add.
I am in a discord server with some other, more seriously aspiring writers than I feel like I am, who are making progress with publishing. Would you be interested in shop talk or do you have enough of that already?
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Feel free to circle back if you do, and I definitely don't take it personal! Sometimes it's just not the right time. <3
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I've been waffling about getting into self-publishing for quite awhile because I'm scared of that loooong wait period that many writers describe, where it can take so much time to build momentum.
An observation which you are 100% entitled to ignore if it's not helpful. But I went to poke around your Amazon page just now, thinking I might buy & read the first book in the series and leave a review for it, since obviously reviews can make a big difference on a person's decision to buy.
But when I opened up the link you just posted for "The Vampire's Return: The Magic Returns, Book Two," there doesn't seem to be any clear link to find the first book? I clicked on your author name to try and pull up your author page, thinking that would be the way, but then it showed me some other authors with names similar to yours rather than just pulling up your works. I then searched for "The Vampire's Return: Book One" and a book of yours is halfway down the page in the search results, but from the title I'm not sure if it's the same series or not?
I realize details like these are relatively small, but I was actively motivated to try and hunt down the first book, since I like to read a series in order, and if I were just a casual browser those kinds of technical barriers would have defeated me early on.
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Although I do know anecdotally from when I've browsed, some authors have dedicated author pages? And they've written their own bios, so I would think there's a method for achieving that, though I have no idea what it is.
Some light googling turned up these links, though I obviously can't vouch for their helpfulness/accuracy:
https://kindlepreneur.com/amazon-author-central-page/
https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G201757800
https://passthesourcream.com/amazon-series/
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I'm not sure if you want advice – I have some that you can ping me about if you want to. There's also a subreddit I know that might be useful. Please don't be discouraged! It's a tough business but it's not hopeless. <3