Failure

I was watching Bert Kreischer, The Cabin on Netflix. He said something very significant during his conversation with Caitlyn Jenner. They were talking about failure and how they learnt more from failure. He said, try 1000 times, and if that doesn’t work, try it again for the 1001st time.
After I published my first novel, gather the weeds, published I struggled to get more people to buy my book after my friends and relatives bought it. The first book signing ended up being humiliating. I described the event in the for adults only video that I had posted in You Tube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YupQI.... I have only sold around 75 copies of my book. Also I lost a lot of money paying for tables at conventions and printing about 150 more books. They are still gently rotting away in the guest bedroom of my house.
I would have been content with selling copies of my book for the rest of my life if not for a review that exposed my book as very flawed: ‘All of the above might be surmounted if Kilgallon wasn’t addicted to padding. He’s wordy and imprecise. “His hand rests on the cool knob of the door and turns, the door clicking open.” Why not just, “He opened the door.”? Or “So, alone he wept and wept hard, clean tears from his eyes flowing, nostrils leaving trails of snot on his tattered and tear-stained pillow.”’ https://www.goodreads.com/.../1810341......
What was worse was I agreed with him. What was worst was I did not do anything about it. I spent most of the last ten years feeling like an imposter as a writer. Meanwhile I desperately wrote and rewrote my 408 pages second novel, Kantywhare, an extension of my first novel. I rewrote that novel word for word six times before I felt somewhat satisfied with it.
I decided this year to rewrite gather the weeds for the fourth time and to take the novel off the grid. I planned to use Lulu as an independent publisher and their printing services. Since my career working in a social justice organization got canceled in the summertime because of polarized political issues, I am going to put up my first novel for sale again this week to generate some income.
Hope you all will like the upgraded copy.