It sucks…but we love it anyway
Being Stephen King or Nora Roberts must be nice. Birds wake you with happy chirps, your butler serves you breakfast in bed, small, well-behaved children scatter rose petals wherever you put your feet… Okay, maybe not.
The odds are against us, yet many dream that one day we’ll be able to support ourselves with our writing. Some get there, most don’t.
Twist and turn it every which way, being an author is hard.
Not only do we have to learn how to write well, we must also put our butts in chairs to write the book, then edit it, ask others to criticize it, then edit again, and again, and again. We also prepare query letters and synopses to submit our work to agents and editors for almost guaranteed rejection, or we navigate the publishing landscape ourselves, with all its red tape. All the while we must establish connections with potential readers and supportive fellow authors.
Then the hard work starts. In no particular order, we build a website, write our author’s bio, think up intriguing book blurbs, make our own video trailers or hire someone to make them for us. We ask blog sites and individuals for reviews and endorsements, put up author pages on sites like Amazon and Goodreads, maintain a blog, keep our Twitter followers amused, update Facebook friends on our progress, find exciting pictures or quotes to share on Pinterest, and design banners for our website and social media accounts. With luck, we find beta readers and send out copies.
To remain friendly with other authors, and to kick back, we read their books and provide reviews. We advise fledgling writers. We have pens, bookmarks and sticky notes printed, and flyers for which we designed the layout. We pick our favorite excerpts and answer interview questions for blogs that are willing to feature us. We proofread our work and write press releases. We create events for readers and other authors on Facebook, and join yahoo loops and make new Google+ friends. And when we have a minute, we compile interesting extras to post on our websites, such as deleted scenes, origin stories or recipes.
We design and pay for ads. We keep up-to-date on all our memberships, maintain a newsletter, and we run giveaways for our existing and new readers. We enter and judge competitions, absorb constructive criticism and survive malicious reviews left by people who clearly have no friends. We bow before the writing greats and beg for endorsements that might never come. We send out bulletins, arrange and attend book signings and travel to conventions. In the meantime, we’re writing our next book, because we live for the day that someone tells us our book touched them or helped them escape from reality.
We do this while working a full-time job and/or looking after our children. To put the above into context, remember how long your last official email took to write? Five minutes? Ten? Now consider writing a blog that’s three times as long or ten emails a day just to chase an editor or arrange an interview.
With luck, we’ll sell between 30 to 100 books in the first month before interest wanes. So our only choice is to keep up our marketing efforts. Yup, the sleepy author doesn’t eat. But neither does the busy one.
In competition with authors who give their books away, we make do with between $0.10 and $1 per ebook sold. Of course at the higher end of this scale, you’re most likely to be a self-publishing author, which means you can add cover design, finding and paying for a good editor, purchasing a batch of ISBN numbers, and formatting for print, epub and mobi publication to the list. Oddly, we then have to justify to readers why we’re not handing out copies for free, or why we charge the normal retail rate for signed books, plus shipping.
And then, one day, you come home and find a pirated copy of your work offered for free on a website.
It breaks your heart.
