May the Fourth is With Us

4th May is traditionally when I take stock of my writing career to date, looking back to 2008, which I consider the first year of me taking writing seriously as a career option, and trying to decide how I’m doing.

In the past year, huge things have happened. Not least of these was that I have published four novels! My Timesplash series – which was signed up by Pan Macmillan/Momentum in 2012 – was published in June and July 2013. Then, in January 2014, I self-published Heaven is a Place on Earth, and in April 2014, I self-published Cargo Cult. Other, less momentous things happened (short story sales, True Path shortlisted for an Aurealis Award, said goodbye to my agent) but the novels are what I consider the real landmarks in my career.

Why so many? I certainly don’t write four a year. More like one. But this year I finally got fed up of chasing Big 5 publishers and coming oh so close (or even succeeding and then having very disappointing sales) and decided to self-publish instead. Between 2010 and 2013, I had wasted 3 years with no publications, hoping that some editor at a Big 5 company would pick up one of my books. Those who have been following my amazing series of near misses will understand when I say that, while all this has given me the confidence to say unequivocally that my writing is good enough to be published by the world’s leading publishers (and that’s no small thing), it has also shown me what a precarious and uncertain path this is to building a career. A much more certain route to success these days is to self-publish. In fact, the only financial success I have ever had from my writing was in the period 2011-2012 when I was self-publishing Timesplash.

So, in the past four months, I have brought out two more novels and rid myself of a huge amount of stress and frustration.

And here’s another great wadge of stress and frustration I’ve dumped: I have stopped marketing my books. For Heaven and for Cargo Cult, I have done the absolute minimum. I mentioned them on Twitter and Facebook a few times – probably no more than half-a-dozen times each. I have their covers here on the blog with links to Amazon – and that’s it!

Let me tell you why. Marketing has never worked for me. Never. I’ve done blog tours and twitter tours, I’ve given interviews, I’ve done guest posts, I’ve set up websites and forums, I’ve done competitions and giveaways, sent out press releases and handed out business cards. The only thing that has ever worked was doing a free promotion on Amazon. (And by “worked”, I mean raised the level of my book sales to a point where I might be able to live on the income.) And that only worked a couple of times. Since Amazon changed its rules about how free promotions work, even that has become totally ineffective. So my conclusion is that I need not waste all my time and nervous energy to make a handful of sales here and there. There really is no point.

It’s true that my newly-released novels are hardly selling at all but most books – commercially published or self-published, marketed or not – sell similarly badly. I know I could raise the level of sales by a few extra books a month by going back to doing all that awful marketing but the difference between no sales and a few sales is a pocketful of change. It is not worth the effort.

Instead, I’m focusing all my effort on writing the best books I can, editing them well and providing them with good covers. If people discover them, fine. In fact, terrific! I love it when people find my books and read them. If not, so what? It’s the writing I enjoy and, since it makes so little difference, I will no longer blight my life with marketing. It’s a mug’s lark.

Of course, it’s disappointing that, literally, tens of thousands more people have read Timesplash than have read Heaven is a Place on Earth (which is a far better book), I can’t help that and it just goes to show how fickle and strange this business is.

So, it has been a truly enormous year for my career. And, because of all the things I’ve stopped doing, I feel I have taken a huge load off my back and can now stride forward as never before. I am finally getting my work out there and I am finally free to do what I love and nothing else. All because I have at last realised that my idea of being a writer isn’t about “being published” it’s about writing. I have a few loyal readers who love what I do, and understand and appreciate the care I take over it, and that is gratifying beyond all measure, but, even without them, even with no sales at all, I believe I would still feel I have found the right path at last.

So here’s to a year of solid progress in this new and exciting direction. I hope you’ll stick with me and see how it turns out.