A little break

Ordinarily I spend a lot of time reading indie work, hoping to in return get people to read mine. It has worked in a limited way, but most of my readers, and reviewers, are other authors. I still haven't really succeeded in cracking the wider audience that I need to sustain myself.

But then recently a series of calamities at home - grown son taking off with family cars - caused great anguish and great expense. All of a sudden reading some indie fantasy seemed to be a ridculous enterprise, so I took a break. There was a while when all I could do was play online boggle, since it allowed a dead angry mind to swim in the world of words. My indie books just kind of sat there. I had actually done pretty well for myself in terms of kindle ratings - people are reading them, even if they are all other authors. I sometimes stare at my little chart of ratings, because I can do that also with a dead angry mind.

In the interim time, when I literally had trouble reading, and got no enjoyment out of it, I began checking in again with an excellent site, Self Publishing Support Group. This site is very well admin-ed (a requirement), and has all kinds of people asking advice and giving good advice, on a wide range of topics. I began to really appreciate it and learned a lot just from a few days checking in. I was a little amused by the beginners who would write in and say, I just wrote my book, what do I do to market it? I had to chuckle at the naivete. Three quarters of these people will be gone in a year, I imagine.

But, in not reading, I got to reflect a little on my own progress or lack of it. I'm actually somewhat inclined to start my own read-only site, having had enough exposure to these facebook sites to know what a good one could do for me and what the market will bear. People are actually clamoring for them, but they have to be well admin-ed and often they are not. It sounds like a huge amount of hassle to run the site, but I have enough books that constant exposure would actually do me good and I'm on Facebook almost every minute anyway. I'm reaching the point where I'd rather have something in my own hands than carry around frustration with some other poor person who has taken on a site but really doesn't have the time for it. The question is, do I really have the time for it? Because I'm not sure, I've stalled.

In writing, I'm mainly stalled by the lack of charger. Sometime back during the fuss of car-theft, my main charger walked away, for the dinosaur computer I use that has Word and that compiles my books. I can still write short stories, on this, my small macbook air, but I don't have Word, so I've been compiling and writing my main book, Harvardinates, on that one. And it's dead, as long as the charger is gone. It could have walked away into one of the other rooms of the house, but I've searched pretty thoroughly, and finally I just went and bought another one.

Sorry to give such a long and probably pointless report of a struggling writer. I will say that I have twenty-eight books, hundred percent indie, hanging in there, not paying for Amazon ads or anything else at the moment, doing my own graphics, doing my own proofreading, and checking in on fewer and fewer sites as I've kind of gotten tired of pointless facebook traveling. If they don't generate, and aren't productive, then I'm just checking in for no real reason. So I might as well find my favorite ones and stick with those. And make them, if need be.

I've always suspected that making for myself is better than waiting around, hoping something will come along that will just help me do it.