Every morning after checking email and other sites, I go to my book sale pages to see if anything has sold since the previous morning. And every morning, I wonder if this is it, if this will be the day that my books have taken off, if they will finally start selling in more than dribs and drabs.
It's been eight+ years since I've published Magic Most Deadly, and that day has not yet come, but hope springs eternal, and I continue to check.
I used to suffer crushing disappointment each morning when the stats showed that I had sold nothing, or at best one or two books (so much so that for a time I stopped making it a daily habit, and only checked once a week), but something has shifted in my thinking over the few years, and now it's more like a game. I think the shift started when I began working at the library in Cambridge, and continued when, after moving back to the States, I started working as a freelance editor. Now that writing books isn't my main source of personal income, I'm freed from the crushing weight of feeling like I have failed as an author if I don't sell enough books to justify writing and publishing them. Now I am free to write more from joy and a desire for creative expression than to try to earn money.
I mean, let's be real, I'd still like to see my books start selling more, I'd still like to be a moderately successful author, but I don't feel like a failure anymore because that hasn't happened. I think that shift is what allowed me to write While Shepherds Watch in 2020, and polish it and publish it in 2021, because I gave myself permission to just have fun with the characters and the story, rather than feeling like I had to write something that would be "successful".
The only new thing I wrote in 2021 was my Inklings Challenge story--all my other writing stuff was working on projects I had begun previously. And while on the one hand that makes me sad, because it shows I'm still suffering from a creative block of sorts, on the other hand, it really says something that the one thing I was able to write was a story that was never meant for publication on anything other than Tumblr, a story that I didn't need to worry about making saleable and "perfect" for publication.
I'm rambling more than a little here--but I think the point I'm trying to make is this: while I still care about publishing books, not just writing stories for my own amusement, my mindset has shifted enough over the last couple of years that now my goal for publishing is less about making enough money to justify continuing to write, and is more about hoping my stories can find their way to the right audience. Which doesn't mean that I'm going to quite doing basic marketing and trying to make the stories as polished as possible, because the stories aren't going to magically drop into the laps of the people who will love them, and my own standards won't let me publish sloppy work--but does free me from the crushing weight of never being good enough at what I'm doing.
I'm mostly writing this for myself, because it helps me to get these nebulous thoughts down in black and white (hey, I am a writer, after all), but I hope maybe it helps bring encouragement to other people who might be struggling with that balance between creating for joy and creating for work. And that's going to be my main writing goal for 2022--create for joy.
(And also finish up the third Pauline Gray novella and the third Whitney & Davies novel, because I do have certain responsibilities to readers who have committed to these series, but mostly to create for joy. I'm hoping I can manage to combine those goals to a certain degree, because creating for joy will also make those stories much stronger than if I'm simply writing them out of duty.)
