The CTDA sale continues for another few hours, and I will have my price stick for another few days, as I originally noted. I want to thank the organizers and volunteers who put the sale together; they’ve been unflaggingly kind and patient with this noob and their questions. And I heartily endorse the sale as a reader. I got a ridiculous haul of books the first time, and a few more this time around (going light because I haven’t finished the first batch yet).
It has been a humbling experience, trying to reach the level of the other, more successful authors in the sale. I will point out that they have allowed me to participate, which they did not have to do, and for that I’m grateful. But after today, I don’t think I’ll try again. It did not work out. I don’t think this has anything to do with the sale; the other authors did much, much better. The more charitable reading of the situation is that I’m just not a good fit for this audience.
I’m saying all of this in the spirit of transparency, I think, and also to explain why I’ll probably promote the sale as a reader going forward, but not submit my books for it. It’s not a judgement of the sale itself. I continue to recommend it if you write in that genre. It looks like it will continue to be tweaked and improved, and they’re hoping for huge turnouts for fall. I wish them all the best.
This does give me serious pause about continuing the Therapist series. This was its big chance to find an audience, and it did not do so. So I don’t think there is one out there for it. I love it dearly and have had a wonderful time writing it, and after all this time, who knows — maybe the Healers audience has evaporated as well. Maybe the takeaway is to let go of the hope of finding an audience at all, and keep sailing messages in bottles out into the void, the way I started. There are worse ways to spend your time.
I certainly won’t stop writing entirely, because it’s too much a part of me. But how much energy I spend in trying to get it out to people is something worth examining. I had been fired up about learning about newsletters, learning about advertising, learning about ways to give my work the best chance it can have. But this experience brings up another possibility. Maybe this is as good as it gets.
People push back against negativity, and that’s understandable. I think it’s easy to misinterpret why I dive into it: to pull apart a bad situation and see what I can learn from it. To figure out the takeaway for next time, rather than running away.
There’s a lot to pull apart, and some of it is private: what writing means to me, what it’s done to take something so close to my core identity (considering that I’ve been doing it consistently since I was ten) and hold it up for external validation. But I’ll also consider that I might be wasting my time trying to keep up with my betters. That just because I’ve been writing for a long time doesn’t make me any good at it. To have some humility.
Three months ago, when the last sale was going on, I was standing in line at the closing weekend of a beloved local ice cream shop, watching numbers tick up. I was still waiting for a chance to get the medical stuff resolved. I’d only published my last novella a couple of weeks prior, and didn’t know yet that it would slowly amass a small audience of people who hadn’t read the rest of the series (thank y’all <3).
Who knows where I’ll be three months from now, but I hope to come back as a reader. Having finished my backlog (lolsob) and ready to cheerlead. There’s always something that can be learned.