Did I Do This Wrong?

I self-published my first book, but my sales are slow

Dear Sonal,

I self-published my first book and sales have slowed down significantly.

I think I had maybe 50 people buy it total. I had a surge of 300 downloads when I had it available for free, but it cost so much to create, I really don’t want to make it free permanently.

I’m feeling really discouraged, like I didn’t try hard enough to promote it or that people aren’t interested in it. And yeah, overall super-deflated. It’s a really good story and I believe in it wholeheartedly. And I want to make this my full-time job, writing.

Am I being too sensitive? Too cynical? I’m already on my second book and writing on substack regularly.

Sincerely,
Cynical Sally

Dear Cynical Sally,

My heart breaks reading this letter, because you truly deserve to have the story you wrote out there in the world being read widely, and you truly deserve to live a decent life while writing full-time.

In a perfect world, this would be easy, but we do not live in that world.

And the fact that you are not able to do this has very little to do with how hard you tried or how many people are interested in your book, or the choices you’ve made during this book’s journey, and so you are blaming yourself and your book for the world’s deficiencies.

I’m going to channel Robin Williams in Good Will Hunting for a moment: It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault.

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Let’s talk about writing full-time, although I kind of did already, but that was from the perspective of a somewhat more established writer, i.e., me, who does not have a day job, does write ‘full-time’ and gets money from it, but also does not make anywhere near enough money from writing or writing-related stuff (teaching, paid reading, grants, etc) to live on consistently.

Let me be blunt: the goal of writing for a living is wildly unrealistic.

But: that it’s unrealistic is no reason not to pursue it.

The money part of being a writer is very hard, and affected by many, many things outside of your control, and it’s so very easy to get worn down and discouraged. It happens to new writers trying to publish their first story. It happens to established writers who are several books into a career. It happens to traditionally published authors and to indie authors. It happens to genre writers and literary writers and pretty much everyone who has this dream of writing, except possibly poets because poets can’t pretend like there’s any money in poetry. (We will not discuss Rupi Kaur.)

Still, that the money part is hard is no reason why you should not write. The fact of the matter is, because you are a writer, this is the thing you do that feeds your soul and makes things feel right in your world, so you have to write.

But you will probably have to approach how you make this work very differently, because yes, it’s going to be discouraging, it’s going to take a long time, and finding something resembling some sort of success is probably going to look very different than you think it will.

I don’t think you are too cynical, or too sensitive, but I do think that perhaps you need to reassess what a writing life (as opposed to writing for a living) looks like, because contrary to what non-writers and newer writers think, it’s not write a book, sell a book, pay rent from book sale profits, repeat, repeat, repeat.

Now, if you look on the internet, it seems like there are tons of people with that kind of a writing life, but let’s break down how this can happen:

They are lying

Or at least, lying by omission by not talking about the money part of it. Maybe they have a large social media following unrelated to their books that gave them a leg up in being able to earn income from writing. Maybe they are being financially supported by a partner so their ability to write “full-time” is unrelated to their writing income.

Maybe they’re eking by on writing and teaching and grants and readings but it’s a precarious and debt-filled existence, but they aren’t talking about the hard bits on social media.

Maybe they aren’t actually “full-time” writers at all. Writers don’t often talk about their day jobs, not unless it’s somehow relevant to their books, but very few writers earn their living solely from writing.

Sometimes it’s like this dirty secret, that they cannot support themselves through writing alone. Sometimes there’s a lot of shame attached to that idea, because this world is very stupid and measures the worth of creative work by whether or not you can feed and shelter yourself doing it and then further rigs the system by making it harder and harder to actually make any money from it.

It’s as if the world tells us, here is a thing that you only deserve to do if you can make money from it, except we’re only going to give you peanuts and then tell you it’s your fault for not being good enough.

It’s a scam

This one particularly applies to self-publishing right now, in that there’s a lot of writers on the internet slamming traditional publishing and telling people to go indie and also telling people that they are making so much more this way over trad publishing, and it’s way better for authors… and at least some of these people are scammers who want to be paid to show you how to do it.

Not to say that there aren’t also scammers pretending to be legit agents or traditional publishers; those have been around a long while. But this is a new flavour of scam, the pretending that there is a way to beat the (very flawed) traditional system but not being honest about the difficulties of going indie—as you found, it’s harder than it sounds.

I have more to say about indie vs trad publishing next month, but for now, remember that success in going indie isn’t so much about whether or not you wrote a good book—although you need to have written something at least kind of good—but also in your ability to create a community and following. Most indie authors don’t simply blow up overnight, but have to keep actively marketing themselves and growing slowly over a number of years. It’s very, very rare to go from nothing to a sustainable income overnight, although the internet will often make it seem like this happens. But the reality is, most of the thousands and thousands of indie authors aren’t making anything.

This isn’t to say that traditional publishing is a big money maker either, but if you are able to surmount all the difficulties in getting a book traditionally published, you’ll generally get an advance in the low four figures at least.

There are a lot of people like you, Cynical Sally, who want to write for a living in a world that is not built for doing that, but pretends that it is. The reality is that it’s not impossible, but it’s also not predictable. And a lot of it is not within your control to make happen. But many writers end up chasing this idea that they can make it happen if they do everything right, and then blaming themselves for failing at something that was mostly outside of their control.

And people will prey on that.

There are also, of course, many people who are lying to themselves too, talking about how awesome everything is and how well they are doing but are doing the thing were they are boosting themselves to keep going, even though they are struggling hard.

You are not alone in feeling discouraged. Far from it.

They are a very established writer with multiple books and have been lucky

Some people online who write full time are legitimately supporting themselves through writing. Typically, they have been doing this for many, many years, and eventually one or more of their books make it really big, or at least, big enough to sell with some consistency, (or perhaps these days, gets optioned for really good TV deal) and so everything after that is primarily writing books.

Note that there are many, many, many established authors (probably most of them) with multiple books who are not able to make a living solely from books, although some number of them have managed to cobble together income to sustain a writing life that does not include a day job—and that might be made up of everything from book sales to selling translation rights to freelance writing to teaching creative writing to paid readings to artist grants to paid residencies and probably more things.

Getting to this established place used to be much easier; there was a time when writers could eke out a living selling short stories to magazines (that was like 50 years ago) and there was a time when many authors could make a comfortable living on the midlist: i.e., no big breakout bestselling hits but every book did fine. Publishers would nurture these authors along in the hopes both for the solid mid-list income and also in the hopes there would be huge bestseller one day, but that kind of commitment to authors started to rapidly shrink about 30 years ago. It’s genuinely harder now.

The trouble is, these kind of long-established well-known writers are still around and people will look to their careers as guides for what writing full-time looks like and how to get there, but like, this is as vastly out of touch with today’s reality as boomers telling Gen Z that they could afford a house if they stopped buying avocado toast.

They are the exception

The trouble with exceptions is that they get a lot of attention, so if we look at the case of the famous transphobe JK Rowling and the Harry Potter books, sure, it sounds like she just wrote the thing and boom! and therefore, that’s how you do it. But that’s not how it happens for the vast, vast, vast majority of writers.

More to the point, that boom! covers up a lot of time: it took her about 5 years to finish the novel. She did land an agent, and after a number of rejections got a publishing contract, but then had to get a grant from the Arts Council of Scotland to pay for her life while she was revising it for publication and writing the next book. Eventually, the first Harry Potter book made £2,800 in royalties. This is not a liveable income, and in fact, she expected to make her living as a teacher.

Had everything stopped right there, this would be a good but not unusual writing career compared to most writers: she got picked up for her first book, and it sold reasonably well, and she was under contract for the next book and possibly more of the series. She’d still have to keep her day job, but this is what writing success looks like for most writers.

However, the next thing that happened is an exception: the US rights to the book sold for over $100,000. That’s a lot for a debut children’s author with meh UK sales. The next-next thing is a huge exception: after the book came out in the US (a year later than the UK) it began to sell wildly well, the movie rights sold for mucho dinero, translation rights sold all over the world... we know the rest.

(I feel a little dirty now having written so much about this famous transphobe.)

But yes, in order to keep the system rigged against you and keep you convinced that your lack of success is your fault, we have these rare lucky exceptions, except we won’t tell you that it’s luck…. we’ll pretend it’s some combination of talent and savvy so that you can keep blaming yourself instead.

Take a moment to go back to Robin Williams in Good Will Hunting. It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault.

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So where do you go from here?

First of all, no, you don’t have to make your book free permanently. It may make sense to do so as part of a long-term marketing strategy, but on the other hand, it may also make sense not to.

I have a tiny bit of marketing experience, but book marketing isn’t really my area of expertise. But don’t feel like the only way forward is for you to give away the book for free hope that you get tons of people interested in you and your work.

That said, I think you need to somehow temper what seems to be the underlying expectation that this will all happen quickly. It will not.

And again, it’s not because you don’t deserve it, or because you’re not good enough, or you didn’t start promoting the book early enough, or anything to do with you. The reason it will not happen is that the world is stupid. The world makes it unnecessarily hard to be an artist or writer.

You might have to do some unpacking of what’s driving the urgency. Yes, you wrote a book, but this is only your first book. I’m sure it feels like you’ve been at this a long time, but you have a lot of writing life ahead of you. As challenging as it is to put together a financially sustainable writing life, it’s almost unheard of to do it on your first book.

Yes, it’s deeply unfair that the famous transphobe made it huge on her first book, but these are things outside your control. Publication, and also book sales, depends on taste, talent, timing and tenacity. You have talent. For traditional publishing, you can do nothing about a publisher’s taste or timing over what books they choose or how they market it and who buys it. You have no control over that at all. You indie publishing, you cannot control the ever-changing algorithm to make yourself somehow go viral, magically appearing in the feeds of everyone who would love your book on a day that they need to do a little retail book therapy.

For you, it’s a question of tenacity, and you may have to be tenacious for a long, long time. Granted, it’s hard to stay tenacious about a writing full-time, when so much of being able to do that is out of your control, and so I suggest reframing the idea of writing full-time as a having a writing-centred life.

Doing this might still have to be financially supported by a job of some kind for a long while still. But what would a writing-centred life look like to you? What shift would you need to make in your priorities to do this, and is that something you can begin to do now, or will you have to start sometime in the future? Is there a way to eventually evolve into part-time employment that will still support you, and give you more time to write?

It took me a long time to understand how to put writing first when I had a job, because I was so well-ingrained in the habit of eating dessert last, so to speak. Do all the responsible adulting things before allowing myself to write. That took me a long while to stop doing, and still, it’s tricky not to fall into the trap of attending to the legitimate distractions. Ultimately, there’s no single answer here.

This one particular book may not lift you out of your day job into full-time writing. That’s a lot to ask of one book, especially your first book. It may be that you need to stay tenacious about writing many books, and slowly building up a following over many years. It may be that writing is something that only provides minimal financial benefit throughout your life—and again, this is not because of your talent or worth, but because the world is deeply stupid—but on the other hand, this isn’t something you can easily predict.

I’m not normally a look on the bright side person, but what if, instead of focusing on who isn’t buying your book, you focus on writing the next one. And the next one. And the next one. What if the joy and frustration and satisfaction in telling a story beautifully, and being able to keep doing that, is what a writing life looks like, even if the financial considerations of this life must be covered by some non-writing work?

I don’t want to make writing sound like it’s something that should only pastime or a hobby. It isn’t. I think it’s a calling, even if so many writers feel a little ridiculous saying that out loud. But the trick is understanding the separation between honouring that calling and that creative soul in you, and being able financially support yourself in a world build upon capitalism which makes no room for callings, no room for play and experimentation, no room for creativity and beauty and demands market success from the jump or else it’s entirely your fault.

The whole thing sucks, yes. But understanding that separation, and finding ways to focus on the joy in the actual writing, in the doing the work itself, can help you let go of personal responsibility for the parts you can’t anything about.

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Oh, I know…. you asked if you should have promoted more.

Let me back up a little here.

I’m not sure how much effort you put into traditional publishing before deciding to go the indie route, but unless you have a very specific niche or a very large platform, traditional publishing still has advantages that indies can’t easily match. I have something coming up about that next month.

Still, if you choose to publish independently, you have to think of sales over the long, long haul. It’s been described to me as a hockey stick… a long, long straight line before it eventually turns sharply upward, assuming you keep putting in the efforts but also knowing that a sharp upturn is not guaranteed. It’s going to be a long, slow trickle in while you build community and (if you continue to be indie) put out new books. This isn’t because you didn’t promote things early enough; it’s because that’s how indie sales go: many years of not much, and hoping that something eventually takes.

You may also have to go out and handsell the book everywhere you possibly can, but again, don’t burn yourself out trying to succeed on handselling. This is a long-haul task. Consider handselling a chance to meet your readers and build up your own community, and hopefully gain fans who will check back to see what you have to offer in the future.

If you do consider going to traditional publishing again there is also more to it finding an agent and publishing with the Big 5. There are a lot of small press publishers out there willing to take risks on newer authors and stories that need telling that the Big 5 won’t look at, and hey, bonus, many of them welcome unagented submissions. There’s also looking internationally; one of my writing friends, who is American, finds she gets better traction in the UK. This can be tricky though, since publishers from other countries often prioritize their own residents.

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You are probably going to have to rethink what a successful writing life looks like, and how it can evolve. It may include a day job, one that hopefully fulfils you, or at least, is not too draining, since it’s not easy to write while gainfully employed. But one day, it may be a part-time day job, or self-employment of some sort, or something less challenging (and possibly paying less) so that your mind is clear to write. Maybe it’s a nomadic lifestyle of housesits. Or maybe it’s a lot of binge writing on weekends and days off, or creatively re-arranging your hours so that your Wednesdays are mostly free to write, or any number of things.

It may one day involve no job, but instead a lot of residencies and grants and teaching workshops and giving readings and hustle to keep eking out enough income to eat. It may not get to that place until you’ve written more books.

But it’s almost certainly going to need community. This shit is hard. Very, very hard. You need other writers who get it to lean on, and yes, network with to find those opportunities, although hopefully networking isn’t the sole reason you connect with other writers. Sure, there are some bitter people among all those other writers—this shit is hard, bitterness is understandable—but there are also some people who are pretty okay, or even kind of great. Find your people.

People who do not write do not understand how extremely shitty and difficult and unfair the whole system is. They think the hard part is writing a good book. Ha! Hahaha!

Don’t get me wrong, writing the novel in the first place is a major challenge and you deserve many kudos for that, but the world is too dumb to give you those kudos in the form of cash money, and instead expects you to take it as personal satisfaction, which is nice but doesn’t pay the electric bill.

This is a grind, Cynical Sally, but you didn’t fail here. You were failed.

The world lied to you about what your beautiful, amazing book was supposed to do, and said it was your fault. Don’t take the blame for something you have little control over. Everyone gets discouraged. Everyone wonders if they should have done something differently.

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In the biographical film “Tick, Tick…. Boom!”, we watch Jonathan Larson slowly destroy all of his relationships and opportunities in the pursuit of getting his first show, Superbia, workshopped in order to launch his career in theatre. The workshop is a success; his friends, who he has pissed off, see how brilliant his show is and realize that this is what he needs to be doing. His idol, Stephen Sondheim, shows up despite everyone having told him that he was being ridiculous about expecting him to come. And the workshop is amazing, it’s everything, he has applause, he has raves. But he has zero offers to produce the show.

His agent tells him, it’s never going to happen with this one.

For everything he’s put into this show over the years, and the sacrifices he’s made, and all the relationships he’s ruined in pursuit of making it in his career, he’s gotten no where. He feels like a failure. And he asks his agent, what he’s supposed to do now.

And his agent says, “You start writing the next one. And after you finish that one, you start on the next. And on. And on. And that’s what it is to be a writer, honey. You just keep throwing them against the wall and hoping against hope that eventually, something sticks.”

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In the movie, this kind of destroys him and his dream, at least for a while. Eventually, a friend convinces him that he has to keep going. Eventually, he writes the musical Rent. (Eventually, he dies way too young but let’s not think too much about that because the whole issue of book sales is bleak enough.)

I can understand, Cynical Sally, if you’re reading this and thinking, oh fuck, no no no, I cannot, it’s too much, it’s too hard, I can’t keep waiting anymore.

Because you’re right, it’s too much and it’s too hard, and it’s deeply unfair to keep waiting and waiting for something that may or may not happen, that you have no control over. And you’re allowed to grieve and be cynical and wonder if this is worth it at all.

But then, you write the next one. And then the next one. And keep throwing them at the wall and hoping something sticks.

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Readers, how have you dealt with the discouragement that comes from the long, hard slog of publishing and book sales? Leave a comment below.