Glacial progress…

Someone last night on Twitter was really very flattering in talking about my writing and my level of engagement with people. I mean, sure, you can't see it here, cause my conversations are all one-sided. But over on Twitter, I can actually be locked out for an hour or three near the end of the night because I've used up my quota of tweets. I din't even know we still had limits until just recently! Color me surprised!

But so something they said was, "I couldn't get anyone to look at me when I had my podcast going. You got something special." (I'm trying to quote from memory, not paraphrase, but I may had missed a word or two.) I downplayed it in my typical way by saying my podcast hadn't gone anywhere either. But then only a few minutes later, I really started thinking about it, and I realized, he's more right than I want to admit because of the pace of my progress.

Try to appreciate, I transitioned genders in a little under two years. I expected that to take me much longer, at least ten years. But I got lucky and in two years, I was past every hurdle and taking the final rolling stroll to the operating room in a Phucket hospital. Which has really set me up for disappointment with the writing world because fighting to have the surgery wasn't nearly as hard as convincing a new reader to get over their prejudices to read me. I don't mean prejudices like "I ain't reading no queers." (Although I'm sure some people do use that justification not to read me.) I mean things like "I won't read you because you don't have a print book."

Transition felt slow. God, my transition journey plodded along at what felt like the most awful creeping slowness, with nothing to show for my progress. Even looking back was depressing because I hadn't moved so far from my old self. That was the first year. Then in the second year, everything just fell into place. I walked into the office of a newly elected Republican judge and walked out five minutes later with a court order allowing me to change all my documents BEFORE surgery. And yes, a lot of my case is helped by the fact that I'm short, slight, and looked like a little like girl even without hormones. Yes, it helped that when I first called my therapist, they asked when I wanted testosterone because they thought I was an FtM transsexual just coming to terms with my masculinity. That I was just learning to accept my feminine nature floored my therapist, as well as all the members of my group therapy. So I was kinda cheating, I guess.

It helped that hubby's aunt decided to supply cash for my surgery. And that's just it. Cash is a great equalizer that for just a little while, I was given enough clout to muscle my way through the last of the legal hurdles. I could pay my lawyers and doctors, and then they could stand up for me and my rights. Without cash from others I wouldn't have been able to stay on hormones either, and I was ordering mine from overseas, making them very expensive. Without the kindness of strangers and help from close loved ones, I NEVER would have completed transition. And their cash, their financial support, was the only thing that helped balance the scales of justice in my favor on this one legal matter.

In theory, cash could do the same thing with my writing, but the cash needed to hire publicists is actually more than I paid my lawyer to change my gender, more than I paid my surgeon for one medical act of kindness. I'm not saying publicists aren't worth the prices they charge. I'm just saying, someone else had to give me the cash to overcome these obstacles, and they were smaller hurdles with a one-time goal. Publicists charge more, and it's a recurring fee. To afford their ongoing rates, I would have to sell a few hundred copies of my books a month. If I could sell a few hundred copies a month, obviously I wouldn't need to hire a publicist. So my sales are currently closer to a few…copies a month.

BUT (And it's a big but), even if I don't have a publicist or a great sales approach, people are still reading me. That might mean they bought a book, or they surf this blog, or they're following me on Twitter. Every once in a while someone new shows up and says, "I started following you cause I read your rant on ____." I gain more new people by being passionate about other stuff than I do waving my books around and begging people to look at them. So I figure, why bother going back to the book begging when it doesn't work anyway?

Well, I've only been at this writing thing for serious for about 4 years. Before that, I was submitting stories to the publishers and agents, but I don't consider myself serious or fully committed to the plan even if I was trying to court the pros. These days, I have no desire to be a pro. I used to, but listening to other writers talk about collecting their paychecks, even the good checks, made me feel less like working for Teh Man. Reading news releases about the antics of publishers makes me like them even less, and then I find out that some of them are insisting that their authors agree in writing to "behave professionally." Yo, you first, fuckers. And that includes you stopping the habit of handing million dollar advances to reality TV celebrities while telling fiction writers not to expect any advances at all. Then, after that, I'll think about signing a piece of paper agreeing to let you put polite words in my mouth. I still won't do it, but I will think about it.

But this alternative-indie path I'm taking means I have to expect longer delays for results. Two years was a fast run for a gender transition, but four years is just the start of any publishing journey from obscurity into some rank as a paid writer. This is true if I'm paid as an indie working directly with my readers, or if I lose my last tattered shreds of sanity and submitted to working for Teh Man. And what I have to recall is, I'm not so obscure as I used to be. Sure, the readers still don't know much about me. But there's a lot of writers along the small and mid-press level who know me, either because they picked up one of my books, or because I asked them to read it and give a verdict. (A private verdict, not the same thing as requesting a blurb.) There's others who know me from my braver days when I attempted to seek readers in forums. Total fucking disaster, every time. Forums folks often react to my opinions like diarrhea in a hot tub. They can't get far enough away to avoid it. I digress, there's still others who found me on Twitter, and who've been following me in morbid curiosity ever since, just to see when the next trainwreck is coming. (April is the only one "officially" scheduled, but weather shifts could throw in some surprise trainwrecks too.)

And yes, it's true that I still don't have any connection to casual readers. I have some avid readers, but almost all my regulars are other creative peoples. They've all got their own projects, even if it's some amateur art hour project like mine. So when I reach them, it's because they've "been there, done that." They're willing to give me a shot because of that empathy we have as fellow artists. They may still hate my stuff, but they try a little sample because that's what they'd want if I'd stumbled across their work. And I really try my best to get out there and try other indies. Which is why when I stumble over something I like, I try to offer y'all a review here. It's me saying, "Hey I like this" as a reader, but it's also my token efforts as a writer to offer proof that I'm not just talking shit and I can't practice what I preach. I mean, imagine if I was shouting "Support the indies," but all of my reviews were for best selling authors. Or if I chided you to make an effort at reading both genders, but it turned out I was only favoring one gender.

But despite me talking about the things I'm most passionate about, I don't know how to create that same kind of empathy in readers who don't already want to care to some degree. No one online has explained how to break down cynical armor in a way that I can understand and use, and most of the marketing advice I've used has resulted in less than stellar…results.

I see a lot of indie writers with pompoms talking up social media, but I note that almost none of those indies are having mega success. So, being nice, I think those people are full of shit and that even if their "services" are free, they're still ripping other people off by pretending to be experts in a field that they know jack shit about. (Yes, that was nice. Believe me, you don't want to know what I really think about them.)

I don't have any answers in the place of their bullshit either. I'm just not going to lie to you and pretend I'm an e-publishing expert. I can tell you how to get published on KDP, Smashwords, or Mobipocket. I won't charge you a dime for that. But if you ask me how you sell that book once it's published, I dunno what to tell you. When I figure out how to sell to lots of readers instead of handfuls of artists and other writers, maybe then I'll write a book about how to have success in publishing. But despite four years in this publishing pool, this bitch still only knows how to dog paddle in the kiddie pool.

But, in the last four years, I've released a LOT of books. If I just buckle down and keep working, in another four years, I'll double my number of published titles. So, should a miracle ever occur that readers notice me, I've got a lot to offer them. If I finally collect my 1,000 superfans in, say 2014, their commitment to buy every book and read them all would net me…roughly 7K. Which is not bad at all for an indie with no help from publishers or publicists.

So that's what I'm trying to do now, to keep myself focused on finishing all my current WIPs and get ready for a new crop of stories. I won't know how to sell them yet either, but when I finally figure out how to sell shit, I'm going to have a huge inventory of stock to offer.

I don't know what I have to do to sell stuff, because I don't know how to define what my stories have that makes them enjoyable. I just know that like me, there's "something special" about them. To be successful, I have to figure out how to convince people who aren't creative artists to believe it.