Six Months In (part 2)

This is the second installment in a three part series on what I’ve learned in my first six months of self-publishing on KDP. Last time, I talked about the first three things on my list of ten items. Picking up where I left off...

4. You will go nuts if you check your numbers all the time.

It’s tempting to do so. You can track sales, and royalties, and ranking in genres and subgenres and on Amazon overall in the US or the UK or anywhere else. You can take a deep dive into ad campaigns and pre orders and average customer ratings anytime you want.

And if you go down that rabbit hole, it takes away time from writing. If numbers are up, it tempts one to take the foot off the gas for the rest of the day. “What I have out already is doing great, so I’ll do something else.” If numbers are down, the amygdala wakes up and says, “What’s going on?! We’ve got to figure this out right away!!”

But you can’t figure it out, not over short lengths of time. Book sales are like stocks, to my eye. A good book will sell more over time just like shares of a good company will go up over time. But how will they do hour to hour? No one knows. At all.

I check sales numbers once a day in the evening when I’m not going to write anymore that day and try to keep it to 15 minutes. I do a deeper dive once a week and look at trends a little bit. That’s it.

My advice to anyone new to the game is to spend as much time as possible writing and as little time as is reasonable checking the background stuff.

5. Writing fiction is difficult.

I’ve written and ghost written a fair number of textbooks over the years, and while those are much longer than novels (at least on average), they are easier to put down on paper because they’re tied to specific things. If you want a textbook chapter on law or ethics or government or public policy I can probably turn it around in a few days, because I probably already know a lot about the issues you want to cover with your students, and I can research the rest.

But fiction? Different deal. There’s no opening blueprint, there is no obvious starting point, and there are no rules. There’s nothing. You have to build it all, and sometimes, the blinking cursor seems to taunt you. Sometimes, it makes me think, “You know, if I were a smarter man, I would have settled on how the next part goes by now.”

But then sometimes, that blinking cursor dances and simply glides across the screen, which leads me to my next point.

6. Writing fiction is marvelous.

I am not aware of any professional activity that is as fulfilling as creating a story out of nothing and having it mean something to someone else.

I’ve gotten tastes of it lecturing over the last twenty nine years. I always figure that if you give students a definition, they’ll memorize it for your next exam and then forget it, but if you tell them a story, they might actually remember it. So I’m a storyteller in the classroom when it is reasonable.

But writing novels is 100% storytelling, all the time. It’s amazing.

I bet I’ll teach for a long time yet, but I’m pretty clearly more than halfway through my teaching career. I can’t imagine I’ll still be at the podium when I’m 81. But I bet I’ll still be writing fiction at 81, and if everything holds together, longer still. Some authors do that.

Now that I see how it is writing everyday, I don’t think I’ll ever go back to not doing so. I really don’t.

I’ll finish this series off in my next post mid-month, and then I’ll have one more post at the end of the month that will preview my December releases.

Thank you for taking an interest in my writing.