Something I learned pretty early on in life: the world doesn’t care about your desire to succeed.
It really doesn’t. It doesn’t give a fuck about how much you want something, or how hard you’ve worked, or how much you think you deserve that shiny prize. It very rarely gets impressed with what you had to overcome to get to where you are. At the end of the day, the world looks at results, looks at what you have, and then judges you then and there.
Self-publishing offers one of the biggest reality checks out there.
Like most authors, I dreamt of scoring it big with my debut early on. I always knew I didn’t have the most original or thought-provoking ideas, but I thought I had enough to say, that the care I took with telling my stories would work to my advantage. I have, after all, been doing this my whole life.
All that did was get me a few nice rejection notes.
And then I thought…hey, then it must just be the man getting in the way. How about we bypass them and just go straight to the readers?
*cue laughter*
If you’ve got any iota of self-awareness in you–which I think a person should, if they want to be a writer–then you’re going to realize that going straight to readers won’t make your work better than what it is. If it’s shit, it’s still shit. If reader reception is lukewarm…you’ve got issues. If they’re warm, but they could still be warmer, then you’ve still got a lot to work on. Maybe sometimes all you really need is to “find your audience” but more often than not, it’s simply because you’re not there yet.
I’ve been at this for nearly 26 years and I’ve barely scratched the surface of where I want to be.
The scariest part for me is understanding that I may never even get there. I have ideas about what I can improve on, but there’s so much guesswork, so much left up to chance, so much I can’t control because of who I am and what I like to write about that thinking about it is one of the fastest ways to make me go into a tailspin. Self-publishing has given me the opportunity to gauge reader reactions early on and to improve my shortcomings…I’m being told each book I’ve released is better than the last, which isn’t an accident; I do try. But trying isn’t good enough. It may never be good enough.
So I’m ending this series now, and looking forward to the next big series on my plate. The brainstorming sessions will soon end and I will formally begin to outline it. I will, once again, work through those same old patterns, that rhythm and beat of my own writing that I know better than anything on Earth. With any luck, I’ll finish it, and then it’ll be time again for the world to reject it, over and over again. And with any luck, I’ll be knee-deep in a new project by then to care very much. I do still care…learning not to is a work in progress.
Writing is for the brave, and the insane.
