A Need to Eat

I never had any doubts about my abilities. I knew I could write. I just had to figure out how to eat while doing this. — Cormac McCarthy

It's time to go all-in, Ladies and Gentlemen.

In less than a week, it'll have been a whole month since Return to Neverend has been available on Amazon as a Kindle e-book. It's been a learning experience, filled with some moments of frustration, some moments of exhilaration, and lots and LOTS of sitting on my backside checking sales reports and seeing no change at all. Word to the wise: if you expect to go into this game and break sales records in your first month, you will almost certainly be disappointed.

That doesn't mean it's been a wasted month — on the contrary, it's been a long process with plenty of lessons learned and lots of tweaking to a finished product. In a way I feel very fortunate to be doing it this way. If this were a POD book or something I was doing on my own before the days of Amazon or Kindle books, just trying to imagine all of the costs in changes is enough to give me a headache. Technology can be a wonderful thing when it's used to your advantage.

I've also had to come to a decision about my own publishing future. Either I can use Amazon (or Smashwords, or B&N) as a "throwaway" for failed projects and stories I couldn't convince anyone to take, or I can focus all of my attention on this still-developing market and try to take my piece of the pie while it's in its infancy. And that's the beautiful thing about the ebook market: sales just keep going up. The pie keeps getting bigger, and everyone can still get their own piece if they work hard enough at it — capitalism at its finest, to be sure.

So I am, as I said, all-in. In the next couple of days, some horror short fiction I've had languishing and lying about will be receiving the Kindle treatment as well. I could tell you that I almost sold one of them, that one of them got to the last stage of an anthology contest before it got cut, but that's water under the bridge. These are stories that need to be shared, and have a market out there looking for them — horror fans need stuff to read too, right?

I'm not able to able to support myself solely on what I'm writing and trying to sell — that dream is still a long way away (I assume). This is just the next step on that long road ahead of me, and if you'll permit the marketing in the future, you're welcome to come along with me.