Pushing a boulder for fun and fitness, but not profit

So, I’m kind of stuck on the revisions for Alice’s series, and I’m taking a three day weekend to regroup before starting over. While I’m happy with the direction of the main story, I feel like the narration is weak when it comes to descriptions of locations and characters. This means even more delays before I can get around to my editing list, and that I likely won’t be writing anything new for the rest of the year.

As I’m doing nothing today, I decided to clean up my Twitter stream to get rid of the anti-social folks who’ve automated a continuous feed of ads. I did this by going to profiles and seeing what they’d been tweeting for a few pages, and it’s because of this that I noticed a number of writers have given up recently. I don’t mean that they went quiet on Twitter. I mean they gave up writing because they couldn’t build a big enough audience to support their work. This follows an announcement a few days ago from a reviewer I know who’s given up on blogging book reviews because they can’t see it having any positive effects.

When I saw that announcement, I’d begun thinking about whether I should call it quits too. But I couldn’t see doing it, even if I have low sales and a low audience here on the blog. I just enjoy writing too much to give up. HOWEVER, I am giving serious thought to removing all of the Mystical World Wars books from my vendors and declaring it a failed experiment. Aside from the first two books of the Campaign Trilogy and Blood Relations, very few of the books have ever sold much. It’s been harder and harder to think about new stories in the series because of how poorly every title has sold over the last few years. My writing plans called for an additional 20-30 novels covering a global resurgence in mystical races. It was perhaps too ambitious a project, and while I’m a believer in writing for myself, the fact is, I really have been writing these books for myself. Even hubby gives me a wincing look when I ask him to read them.

Pulling those titles might give my other books a better chance of standing out, and it would free my mental palette to work on series that might have a better chance of one day picking up an audience. Plus, I have to admit it’s become an intimidating list for new readers. It’s much easier to sell someone a series with four or five books with a definite conclusion, and at this point, the series has spun out to so many tangents that I keep losing track of characters. War and Peace is less confusing.

I feel conflicted about this because I love many of these characters and want other people to get to know them. But I’d hate to write more books when I know they won’t sell. It’s a lot of work making a book beyond getting the words down. There’s months of revisions and editing, money spent on covers, and time invested in promoting links. For all that work, it’s soul crushing to spend so much time on a project and not see anything come out of it.

I’m still debating over whether to pull the books or leave them up in the hopes of one day returning to the series. If I do decide to pull the books, it will probably be in December. Then in 2014, I can take stock of what titles I want to promote, and what books in my editing queue will be released and in what order they’ll go out.

Like I said, I can’t see quitting writing altogether, but I’ve lost my drive on Mystical World Wars, and I’m having trouble planning for new books, or even for editing the two books still in the queue. I don’t think it’s fair to readers to push books that I won’t give them closure on, and I can’t deny I’m slowing down in my output. I’ll give this more thought, but you can probably expect another update before I yank those titles.

So that’s it for now. I should have another book review up in the next few days, and possibly a review of GTA V in the next month or so. Gab at y’all later.