Pushing the Stone Upwards · 6:48pm Aug 3rd, 2023
Writing and selling books is an interesting experience. Some days things look fantastic, like you’ve reached new heights. Other days you look at the numbers for a week and wonder what happened, and if it was something you did or just the fickleness of the market.
Then there are the days when you wake up to see you have an email from an advertiser discussing a “fast and easy” way to improve your ads, and the only ‘solution’ they give you as a ‘fix’ is ‘spend more money.’
Brings to mind an old Pink Floyd song. But still, one has to keep pushing. Shoving that stone upwards in the hope that each new plateau sticks and sticks solidly. Speaking of shoving the stone upward, I figure Axtara – Magic and Mayhem has about another 30,000 words to go. Work was a little slow on it the last two writing days, largely because the story is moving through quite bumpy waters, emotionally, for the protagonist, and making sure everything fit together properly was a priority.
Since I’m mentioning Axtara, I should note that Axtara – Banking and Finance can now be ordered from Barnes & Noble. So if you’re the kind of reader who needs their paperback from a specific store—and I have encountered this type of reader before—then that’s good news for you! You can finally read Axtara! Just walk into your local Barnes & Noble, and make the order.
In other news, lately I’ve been thinking about time. Time investment, time return, and just time in general. I’ve got something like a dozen or so books waiting to be written at this point, and they aren’t going unwritten because of a lack of effort on my part. I wrote over 80,000 words in July, for example. That’s a good chunk of a novel.
Clearly, my pace isn’t a problem. Nor, I think, is my output. A few people have pointed a critical finger at my “year to book” output being eight books in ten years, but when a number of those books are 3-4 times the size of a “normal” book or in one case more like 4-5 (Yay Epics!) I don’t feel like I’ve been slacking in my efforts at all to get good books into the hands of readers.
Honestly, I’m not sure why I’m thinking about it, outside of a wish that I could write even faster and get more of these books out. I am well aware that releasing “a book a year” on average is now considered the improper way to sell books (you’re “supposed” to cut one book into 3-5 books in the same timespan so you both make more money and have your name out there 3-5 times a year). Maybe I’m just lamenting that my pile of projects seems never-ending (for example, I’ve yet to get to making Fireteam Freelance paperbacks, or working to see if paperbacks for the UNSEC Space Trilogy are even feasible). After all, part of the challenge of being an independent author is that you have to handle everything yourself. Advertising, writing, editing, promotion, word-of-mouth, and more … all of it comes out of the same budget. And that budget can feel pretty stretched when it’s put up against the everyday of “You need to eat, and exercise, and deal with day to day living, and …”
You: "I wrote over 80,000 words in July!"
Me: Stares at his measly 39,000 words and tries not to weep.
To a certain degree, this all sounds familiar. I recall eight or so years ago when I was churning out material like crazy and always had the feeling that it was never enough because the ideas keep coming so I need to keep writing because I need to put it all down and share it but I have more ideas and I can't write enough and why won't the ideas stop keep writing get it all down keep writing more ideas I'm gonna die before I can tell all my stories somebody make time stop flowing! Granted, I wasn't being melancholy at the time, but I get how it would make someone feel that way. You have my sympathies.