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!
I just ran into this, so let me know what you think. Someone just got on a Facebook group, specifically for publishing, and got pissed off because someone else dared to suggest that people who can’t write a coherent book, they need help in the form of an editor.
And this crazy person started yelling that it was somehow an attack on the disabled. The amount of stupidity in this is just ridiculous, but what else is new?
This is going to be a quick one, I’m dealing with a lot of real-life problems at the moment and have very little time for blogging, but here we go anyhow because this comes up a lot. I’m talking about it in reference to writing, but it comes up in other things as well. Apply what I say as you will.
I’m really upset right now, not at anyone else but at myself. I screwed up. Now I have to try to fix it. It happens to the best of us but this is the first time that I remember doing it this badly when I should have known better, at least not in a very long time.
It’s all my fault. I just want to vent.
