When you stop to look at this business you might struggle not to panic. All the young prospective publishers, and people looking to leave a job behind to pursue it, they look at what this is and baulk. There is pride in being this bloody minded, this resilient, but should there be? It’s very easy to be annoyed at people taking easy ways in, cashing in an audience built with pedagogy and peanut gallery content, or being moneyed, or coming from a place of connections and marketing, or so on. It’s too hard doing it any other way, so how can you blame them. There is a reward, sneaking up from the basement, and that’s in people being very kind to you. It’s been a significant source of consolation in all honestly, but I’m a big boy, I think I could handle the scorn which comes with earning a living without constant fear of backsliding into destitution.
Yes, yes, I am aware the faults lay with me. You should be active in the community, you should plan way ahead, you should make connections, you should outsource, you should do more newsletters, you should make a killer app, you should write more, you should learn how Google marketing works, you should send those books to Amazon US, you should put your files on bits and mortar, you should chase those invoices, you should contact those youtubers, you should write more, you should make a youtube channel, you should post more on every social media platform, you should join mastodon, you should spend less on production quality, you should expect less, you should be happy that anyone cares, you should ignore how much money people are making, you should get someone else yo do the fulfilment for you, you should get someone else to answer emails, you should get someone else to contact retailers, you should get someone else to do accounting, you should organise events, you should conduct interviews, you should beg interviews, you should plan this next kickstarter, you should accept this is hard but for you not me, you should do more, but you should rest more, you should. On it. Being a writer, right?
This is overblown. This is borrowing grief from the future. The next book is one that, in the right hands would make a lot of money (and bring peace and security, for a while) and I am horrified at the probability that it might not. I’ll rip off the monsters mask to find it was me all along. No great revelation but who wants to deal with that? Yes yes, it’s my fault I don’t need to hear it, yea yes see above. The mind is willing but the body is weak, the hours in a day just suddenly stop, I already just work I don’t know where the other time can come from.
Message in a bottle, land on the shore of a benevolent general manager. Save me from this desert island for I will starve.