The Hardest Thing an Author will Ever be Faced With
When stuff just doesn't sell.
You spend hours writing, editing, designing book covers, formatting your books, contacting book bloogers, marketing, and promoting your books. Days go by and nothing sells. Sure, you gave away a decent amount of books with your KDP Select book promotion, but no one seems interested in spending actual money on your work. Things look grim, a small bit of depression sets in, and before you know it you're binge watching something on Netflix (currently Farscape for me, wonderful show by the way). Every author who isn't already established will deal with this. You are not alone.
My advice when this happens is very simple and goes as follows. Get up at the same time you normally do, eat breakfast the same time you normally do, or don't if you don't eat breakfast, go for a run or a walk or sit and sip your coffee, do whatever it is you normally do, and then sit down and write. You can't make people buy your book, you have limited control over that, but you have total control over your own actions. It would be easy to give it up, cuddle up on your couch in frumpy clothes with a pint of ice cream and turn on that Netflix, but the truth is... that certainly won't help your book sell.
What will help your books sell is writing more books and making sure they are the absolute best quality you can manage. At the end of the day their are a countless number of self published books on the market. The vast majority of them aren't very good (I make no claim that mine are special, in fact they aren't, they're right there with the rest of them struggling to find an audience). This causes a lot of readers to experience being burned by a bad self published book, it makes them timid about giving another one a shot, but if you've got a good cover design, a good book description, and you wrote a good book that has at the very least had a couple of other sets of eyes on it before you published it you can become part of the solution. So there you have it. Books aren't selling, write more books, the more books you have out, the more exposure you get and if they're good books readers will find your other books. If you write a good book, it will find an audience and good books don't write themselves, so quell that Netflix addiction and keep pressing forward.
I for one know I'll never stop writing, because it's a part of me, in a way it's my therapy. When I go long periods without writing my mind gets cluttered with all the doubts and insecurities that I usually heap on my characters so I can see how they deal with them. For a writer, it is a downward spiral and the best way to avoid it is to just not start going down. Keep climbing, everything you do for your books from writing them to publishing them is a step forward regardless of how well they're doing at the moment. You're only going backwards when you quit.
Keep up the good fight my friends.
You spend hours writing, editing, designing book covers, formatting your books, contacting book bloogers, marketing, and promoting your books. Days go by and nothing sells. Sure, you gave away a decent amount of books with your KDP Select book promotion, but no one seems interested in spending actual money on your work. Things look grim, a small bit of depression sets in, and before you know it you're binge watching something on Netflix (currently Farscape for me, wonderful show by the way). Every author who isn't already established will deal with this. You are not alone.
My advice when this happens is very simple and goes as follows. Get up at the same time you normally do, eat breakfast the same time you normally do, or don't if you don't eat breakfast, go for a run or a walk or sit and sip your coffee, do whatever it is you normally do, and then sit down and write. You can't make people buy your book, you have limited control over that, but you have total control over your own actions. It would be easy to give it up, cuddle up on your couch in frumpy clothes with a pint of ice cream and turn on that Netflix, but the truth is... that certainly won't help your book sell.
What will help your books sell is writing more books and making sure they are the absolute best quality you can manage. At the end of the day their are a countless number of self published books on the market. The vast majority of them aren't very good (I make no claim that mine are special, in fact they aren't, they're right there with the rest of them struggling to find an audience). This causes a lot of readers to experience being burned by a bad self published book, it makes them timid about giving another one a shot, but if you've got a good cover design, a good book description, and you wrote a good book that has at the very least had a couple of other sets of eyes on it before you published it you can become part of the solution. So there you have it. Books aren't selling, write more books, the more books you have out, the more exposure you get and if they're good books readers will find your other books. If you write a good book, it will find an audience and good books don't write themselves, so quell that Netflix addiction and keep pressing forward.
I for one know I'll never stop writing, because it's a part of me, in a way it's my therapy. When I go long periods without writing my mind gets cluttered with all the doubts and insecurities that I usually heap on my characters so I can see how they deal with them. For a writer, it is a downward spiral and the best way to avoid it is to just not start going down. Keep climbing, everything you do for your books from writing them to publishing them is a step forward regardless of how well they're doing at the moment. You're only going backwards when you quit.
Keep up the good fight my friends.
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