Is it Worth It?
2018 has been a very busy year for me. It’s also been a very stressful year. For the last month, with the exception of releasing my 4th book, Eternal Darkness, I feel like things have finally calmed down. And yet instead of feeling relieved or excited, I’ve been feeling down lately.
There’s a lot of things going on in my life and a lot of pressure, and the biggest is financial. And when I look about what cost me the most money this year, it would be my books. Everything from the editing, cover art, paying for tables, ads, supplies, hosting, etc, all added up and was a huge expense this year. I’ve found that prices across the board are going up. On top of that, I’ve not sold as many books I would have liked. It’s almost been nine years and across all platforms: ebook, print, audio, I’ve only sold a few thousand books.
That’s just not cutting it. I’m still hugely in the red. Now that wouldn’t be so bad if I was in the red for the next book and had paid everything off from my previous books. But I haven’t.
I was a little disillusioned when I first started publishing. I tried to stay away from all the noise other authors do. They do the hard sell. Me, I’m more of a soft sell kind of guy. Their mind is always selling and they always push people to buy their books. They’re always thinking about marketing and how they can get people to buy their books. If I thought about marketing and promotion, it would take away from writing. So I focused on that instead. I did so because I always believed that with my third book, Reawakening, that I would break out and gain some traction.
I was wrong.
I always told myself, and others, that sales didn’t matter to me. That it was the story that mattered. And it does. But I’ve come to realize that money also matters. Not that I necessarily wanted to ever make a living off my writing as I thought when I was a kid. But it would be nice if the expenses that it costs to produce a book were bankrolled by my book sales.
As 2019 comes around the corner and the financial pressure starts to get to me, I have to seriously consider what I want to do with my writing future. I need to look deeply inside myself and ask, “Is it worth it?”
Yes.
Marc Johnson
