I know someone very well who has tried, and failed, repeatedly, to make money writing on KDP. Why? Because he doesn’t actually want to earn any success, he expects instant and unlimited wealth and if he doesn’t get it, he turns to something else entirely.
It doesn’t work that way. He’s been told that it doesn’t work that way. His entire life, I have been telling him, my wife has been telling him, why he fails, yet he’s too lazy to do anything else.
Let’s consider this a cautionary tale.
I think all writers recognize this one, but I had a really hard morning because something really terrible happened.
I had to kill a major character in a series of books and I feel really bad about it.
Let’s talk about it.
I’ve seen this too much lately and I just had to say something about it. Tons of people seem to think that writing for publication, it’s just something that you can do on a whim, that you don’t have to put in any effort or cost, everyone owes you automatic success, so there!
It just doesn’t work that way. I’m here to set the record straight.
I ran into this today, although it isn’t at all uncommon, and I thought I’d write about it because it does come up so often. An author on Facebook decided to whine that “nobody likes my books!”
Okay… what’s your marketing like? That’s where all of these things fall apart. If you’re not doing any marketing, then of course you’re going to fail.
That’s where it all started to go wrong.
Today, I finished up another book. It was the third book in the third trilogy of a series that’s going to go fifteen by the end. It came in around 140k, which was completely fair and about as expected. Now, I set it aside to breathe while I start working on a new book, this time, another series where I’m on book four of a thirteen book series.
I decided, perhaps foolishly, to read through the other three books first, just to get myself in the right mindset and I’m having a huge problem!
Right now, I’m kicking myself. I’m getting close to finishing the ninth book in a series that will ultimately be fifteen books long. It’s been going really well, everything is coming along as I’d hoped and, if nothing went wrong, I’d be done by the end of next week, somewhere between 130-135k words.
Yeah, that’s until I entirely screwed the pooch and I have no idea how to fix it!
I really, really, really hate writing out of sequence!
I’ve officially given up trying to help most people with writing because they don’t want any help. They just want comforting platitudes and I’m not going to blow smoke up anyone’s skirt.
So, effective immediately, I’m retiring from online writing forums. It’s just not worth my time.
You’ll notice that I haven’t written a lot about my writing this year. I’ve talked about the writing community and how disappointed I am in it, but my own work, not so much.
Mostly, that’s because I haven’t been doing it much this year. I have gotten 3 books written, which is a massive step down from the 8 that I completed last year, and I haven’t even completed 3 to be honest.
That’s changing though and this is how I did it.
This is not going to go well.
In my apparently ongoing attempt to explain why amateur writers get it all so terribly wrong, we take a look at why so many go so completely wrong because they don’t have the slightest clue what they’re writing or why.
It really brings us to a dichotomy. Do you want to write to entertain yourself or do you want to write to entertain an audience?
Pick one!
