#listen i have vague aspirations (barely a whisp of ambition) of writing a novel and watching your marketing agonies...#educational. mildly alarming. the vague aspiration is guttering like a candle in a breeze#i don't know if i'd have the strength o7 (via @kaasknot)
Ok jokes aside for a second, being sincere. Yes. It sucks. It sucks and it sucks and it never seems to get any easier. I've been a Serious Professional Author for nearly ten years now and it is still hard and tedious and the marketing/self-promo part is not much fun fun (maybe for some people it is fun but not so much for me), and it's a lot of work, and I feel a lot of the time like I'm spinning my wheels and shouting into the void and getting only a soft echo of a response back. Which... is crushingly disheartening, yes. It's even worse at the beginning, when no one knows who you are and you're not getting any echo back at all when you first start to sing into the dark.
But even though it doesn't get easier, it does get a little BETTER. It's only in the last year or two that I feel like I've become a Known Entity. Like, just look how this post started, with someone telling me they love my books. Look how many people in the notes are reblogging because they like my books. You do a good job, you put your heart into it every time, you keep trust-falling into the arms of the audience, and eventually they start to trust you back, and then when you sing into the dark, it does sing back a little--maybe not a shout to shake the dust off the rafters, but a little hum. And that is SO PRECIOUS. That is a precious thing, that is a sacred thing, and that's the thing that's going to save you. You just keep showing up and doing the job, and then people start to know that you'll show up and do the job. And when you sing to them, they slowly start to sing back.
Marketing does not get easier, but at a certain point of pushing the boulder up the hill, a few extra hands appear to help Sisyphus. You cannot take that for granted. You have to cherish that, even when it's small, even when it's just a whisper of a song in the dark.
Besides listening for when the singing starts to echo back to you, the other trick is to figure out what your strengths are and then lean into them. Maybe it does not cause you physical pain to make short form videos. My strengths are that i love talking to people on the internet, I'm VERY VERY VERY good at community-building (see: my discord server) and I'm fucking funny. Figure out your toolset and then figure out how to use your toolset so you don't drive yourself crazy trying to get yourself to do something the way "everyone else" does it.
Having a writing career is hard, but it's not *complicated* -- what I mean by that is that it is a game where you really only have one move, and no matter what happens and what moves other people make, you take your same one move. The move is, "Write another book." You clamp your jaws on it and you find a way to make that move and you don't let the bastards grind you down, you don't let them stop you. They cannot stop you. They cannot keep a bad bitch down.
Do NOT let my marketing agonies alarm you or blow out your candle. Your agonies will be different from mine, guaranteed, and you will figure out how to laugh about them and endure them with a heavy sigh, because when you sing into the dark and the dark sings back, it's all fucking worth it. It is worth it.
People used to say "You should only write for yourself, don't write for the audience!" and to some extent I agree, but I also disagree. It's true that you can't write to try to please the whole audience -- Aesop has fable about trying to please everyone, and it holds up as true. I got a hater about the book earlier today! Yes, already! Kickstarter isn't even launched yet and I got some hate mail! But i'm not trying to please that person, because that person was a TERF!
But at the same time... I don't know, man. I used to tell people that I'm writing for one specific person, and I don't know who they are or where they live -- fuck, I don't even know if they've been BORN yet. I don't know if we'll be alive at the same time. But I know how books work. I know that there is only one kind of real magic and serendipity in the world, and that's the fact that every goddamn person who reads books at all has experienced the miracle of coming across exactly the book they needed at exactly the moment in their life when they really, really, really needed a book like that to be there for them. You throw messages in bottles into the sea, and someone trips over the one they need -- that's the person I'm writing for. One day, someone is going to really, really, really need me, and I want to be there for them when that happens, even if I'm decades or centuries dead by that point.
But maybe I won't be. Maybe someone will come up to me one day at a booksigning and say, "Hey, I just wanted to let you know, your book saved my life." And I'll be able to take their hands and squeeze so hard and say, "It was for you, I wrote it for you, I didn't know who you would be or if I'd ever meet you, but I thought of you the whole time. It's yours. Every word of it was for you. I'm so glad that I could be there for you."
And so the marketing doesn't really matter in the end. How could it matter, compared to that miracle? The miracle that happens to EVERYONE, somehow, over and over, every day, and there's no explanation for it. The marketing doesn't matter. Fuck the marketing.
Go write your book, @kaasknot. Nobody can do it the way you can.
