I’m a terrible author and other things I’ve learned

Last week I signed the rights release for all my titles at Dreamspinner and soon my titles with them will start to disappear. It was a bittersweet moment. When I first stumbled across Dreamspinner a decade ago as a reader, it was amazing to realize there was actually a genre for the stories I was already spinning in my head. They bought my first (and still most successful) story, and that’s what encouraged me to go on and keep writing. Over the years though, we both changed. I have no hard feelings for the way things ended (although it would have been nice to have my missing royalties). The time was up—on both sides.

Being a writer and being an author are two different things I have learned. From a young age, I always thought of myself as a writer, but as it turns out I was woefully unprepared to be an author.

What’s the difference? A writer has the luxury of staying in their head. An author needs to get out there, hustle, market themselves and build a brand. It’s a business and that’s what I didn’t immediately understand. There are the rounds of editing, covers to vet, blog posts to write, tours to arrange, social media to post. And that’s all supposing they have a solid publisher backing them (harder to find these days). If you’re doing it yourself, it’s even more work. To do this job you have to have patience, stamina, commitment and drive. And I, as it turns out, have very little. No surprise to anyone reading this–it’s been 2 years since my last post. Maybe I didn’t want it badly enough. Maybe I didn’t need it enough.

The other thing I’ve learned is that if you are a lover of the written word, it’s best not to peer behind the curtain too closely. You see, I was a reader long before I was a writer, and as much as I found some great folks in this community, people to look up to, there is also a dark undercurrent that poisoned me as a reader, not just in this genre but across the industry in general. Amazon algorithms and fake reviews, street teams, plagiarism, shady publishers, royalties, authors behaving badly, Goodreads…  Those things were hard to see, and it’s only in the last year that I actually started enjoying reading again.

But there are some pretty awesome readers out there too. People who took the time to reach out, to leave a review and to support me with a kind word even when I went AWOL on them. When I think about my words disappearing from the ether, about Adam and Joe, Pete and Louie, Miles and Colton and all the other guys not existing anymore I get a little sad. But then I realize they won’t be entirely gone—they touched some reader somewhere even if only for a minute, and let’s face it—on the internet nothing is truly gone.

So, where do we go from here? Honestly, I’m not sure. I hate failing at anything. I don’t feel like I’m done, but neither do I feel ready to jump in again. There are still stories in my head. There are stories I’d like to rewrite now that I have them back. But I think they’ll have to wait just a bit longer.