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.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
