Burnout

Since fantasycon, I’ve been thinking about square pegs and round holes.

In this situation my work is the square peg, and publishing is a round hole. Lost Talent is YA. Or so most people tell me. So that is my peg. And then you’ve got a series of holes, one for trad, one for self pub, one for small press. I’m trying to fit my work into one of those holes, and I don’t think it fits in any of them.

The metaphor is tortured. Publishing, marketing and selling a book is not an easy slot where you can slide something in and expect a perfect result. There are ways of getting that result, or at least making progress on each of those roads that I don’t think I can make.

The first problem is time: I can’t spend every weekend going around to book fairs selling my book. Every bit of time that I spend on myself is time that I am not spending on housework and boring stuff like that.

The second problem is quality: I don’t think that my work is a high enough standard to go into print. I can’t imagine people paying for my work in print when it hasn’t been professionally edited or proof read. I know people do it, but I can’t get over that.

Money: I can’t afford to pay some-one to get the work to a quality that I think would be publishable. I can’t afford to spend money on marketing unless I know I am going to see some kind of return. I can’t afford to just start pouring money into it, and it seems bottomless. The only thing that I am willing to spend money on is cover art, and if I’m honest, that is more like a personal treat than a business expense.

Effort: I’m working full time, I’m a single parent. If you add marketing and publishing on top of that, I think it’s just too much. I feel like I have barely done any writing this year if I’m honest. I’m at around 40K on book 3 and I don’t think I’ll be done with it before the end of the year.

I can continue to self-publish on amazon. I have been thinking about going wide onto Kobo or all of those other platforms, but that seems a little bit like leaning into Einstein’s apocryphal definition of madness. I am beginning to doubt that the audience for YA exists on ebook platforms. I mean, my daughter has a kindle but she’s reliant on sharing her mothers account.

So I am seriously considering publishing on Wattpad instead. That would most likely involve getting the trilogy finished first and then posting it week on week. I could continue to leave the books up on kindle, but if those sites work the way I think they do, I presume that it would be a matter of trying to make sure I get as many return viewers as possible. But the demands would be a lot lower from a personal perspective. I could just finish the job, schedule the posts and see what happens.

I guess we’ll see. I also don’t think that selling or trying to promote my books at places like FantasyCon and EasterCon is going to produce much traction. I don’t think there are any other YA authors at those cons, and very few people who are in my target audience (whatever that is). If I do go to a con in the future I think I’ll be better off going for the experience rather than any other kind of expectation that I will be able to market my book successfully or gather some secret piece of publishing wisdom about how to unlock the keys to success. Consciously I don’t go to cons looking for either of those things, but I think that unconsciously I do.

The advice always seems to change anyway. I don’t think there is anything to be gained by chasing a shifting target in the first place. A lot of this was triggered a little bit by the panel I moderated on ‘The changing face of publishing’ where Laura Bennet said that she believed that trad publishers were actively pursuing people with an established audiences rather than taking a chance on new authors. The time, effort and money that it would take me to build that audience is just something I don’t have.

There is also the issue of going to a con in the middle of term and exhausting myself during the busiest period of work. That isn’t doing anyone any favours, and what is the use in going on holiday, no matter how enjoyable and burning yourself out worse than you were before?

In any case, for now I am dialling back my ambitions. ‘A Covern for Outcasts’ is basically done. I need to give it another 10-15 editing passes, and the cover is in progress with the wonderful Eva I as we speak. I’ll try to put it out somewhere around easter, just like last year. What happens after that, we’ll see. I'm not giving up. Book 3 will be finished at some point, but I don't think a yearly release schedule is realistic at this point, but I need to recover from my burnout and see where I’m left.