A fucking massive ramble about my frustrations with available publishing options and the potential solutions I crave
I'm going to ramble about publishing. This is going to be long. My views on this change constantly and they're my views, about me and my writing, nothing at all to do with what anyone else could or should do and not a commentary on self-publishing in general or as an industry.
I guess before I go any further, it's probably worth saying that I don't have strong feelings about whether or not people like what I create. I've said it before - with any creative output, some people will love it, some people will hate it and most people won't care.
Once you go beyond basic standards of readability, it's mostly down to personal taste. So I'm not coming from a place of I'll feel bad about myself if someone gives my book a low rating or a negative review. I won't, any more that a positive review would make me feel like the best writer in the world. They're just opinions. People are welcome to think what they like and it's all good. If they're not my audience, they're someone else's. If they are my audience, great.
I'm not motivated in the slightest by the act of publishing a book, seeing a book with my name on it for sale, or how that might cause people to view me as a 'real' writer or whatever. There's nothing wrong with being motivated by any of those things. They just don't matter to me personally. My motivation comes from loving writing, connecting with other people who love writing (and reading), being creative every day and obsessively crafting stories from ideas.
Also, ongoing health stuff means that it's not realistic for me to treat writing as a full-time or even a part-time job. I'm literally not physically able to put in the hours consistently or work to a medium- or long-term plan or schedule, however much I would love to be. I absolutely have days or weeks when I can go hardcore with it, but I also have lots of times when I can't go at all. It is what it is and I'm grateful that I get to write, but my body does what my body does and I've learned to accept those limits instead of fucking myself up over and over again forever in an attempt to deny reality (speaking from years of experience).
So. Publishing. I've never had any interest in traditional publishing and I still don't. For a whole bunch of reasons. I'm not saying it's bad or it's not right for anyone, but it doesn't interest me and it's not something I want to pursue.
I always assumed mainstream self-publishing would be what I'd do because it was the only other option, but the thing is...I sort of hate everything about it? The systems and structures around it, how platforms operate, the sheer amount of non-writing time and energy (and money tbh) that goes into being anything other than totally invisible, and still quite possibly being totally invisible.
And I've never in my life thought about my creative endeavours and hoped that the endgame would be maybe making a very small amount of money selling my work in a place that runs on a secret algorithm and requires paid advertising either on- or off- platform to have any chance of discoverability, and where the opinions of random people are vitally important to any chances of success. I don't even mean people having to approve of the thing. I mean the fact that the amount of reviews and ratings, and when they happen, is so hugely important.
I've never hoped to obsess over keywords and metadata and how to game the system. I used to work in marketing and I really don't want to work in marketing again. None of this is bad or wrong. It's just not what I hope to spend my time and energy engaging with.
Often when people talk about that stuff, if they aren't all like "Woo! Algorithm secrets, how to spam the world in the hope of getting randos to rate your books and using all negative feedback to change how you write in future!" about it, they're coming from a perspective of it being a necessary inconvenience, something you have to do without really caring about it, in order to achieve the greater goal of publishing a book. Because they care about having published a book and/or they're aiming to make an income from it (and are able to approach it that way) and are viewing it as a business. Again, all good. If that's what you want.
But every time I think about that being the final step in this process that I deeply, passionately LOVE every other part of (literally, I fucking adore every single thing about writing books, all of it, all the time), I end up in a state of creative paralysis. I've spent so long trying to talk myself into being OK with something that I actively do not want to do and every time I start to feel like alright, I guess I have to do this so I'm just going to suck it up and deal with it (because I'm well past the mental gymnastics involved in trying to make myself feel genuinely enthusiastic about it) my creative brain shuts down and I can't write. I start getting totally overwhelmed by shoulds, losing sight of my own values, which is horrible.
The practical considerations surrounding how much time and energy I have available to put into a writing 'career' (quick reminder, this is health-related and it's not a case of making time or trying harder or working smarter or anything like that) means that I'm very unlikely to make a significant income from it anyway. I'm not insecure. I don't think my writing is bad or unworthy. I don't need people to tell me they believe in me and like my stories (I mean, thank you, people who say that, but it's not the issue). It's just how it is and there's no emotional self-judgement happening there. But it's a valid point because it's not like engaging with the systems I don't want to engage with will result in an outcome that would make it worth doing in the grand scheme of things.
The more I think about it, the longer I spend writing, the more I feel like being a writer (FOR ME!) isn't about publishing and selling books at all. It's about creating and sharing and connecting. Yes, some money would be awesome, and yes, of course I have moments of am I even a real writer if I'm not trying to sell books in the big book-selling places?, but making it a priority to the point where I spend precious time focusing on areas of the publishing business that I actively dislike doesn't make sense for me. I can do that OR I can write. This is actually a choice I have to make. And I would rather write.
Yes, I could just put my books up on the 'zon or wherever and not do any of the keywordsalgorithmreviewsratingsmarketingetc stuff, but it's pretty much guaranteed that they're going to sink like little dark fiction stones and the only thing I'd get out of it would be being able to say I did a thing. And honestly, it's not a difficult thing to do. Writing books might be difficult, but just putting them up for sale? Follow a set of technical instructions and your book is for sale. The end. Not a huge achievement IMO.
I would be totally happy with sharing my work on a platform that looked lovely, worked well and was the kind of place I could direct people to so they could read my books. I accept it's unlikely that what I write is going to do well on any existing web publishing platforms simply because it doesn't fit with the vibe and target demographics of those platforms. That's cool. I get it. But I would love to be able to direct folks from Tumblr, Twitter etc to somewhere they could read my books comfortably and easily, and throw some money my way if they wanted to, either through the site itself or via Ko-fi or PayPal.
I'm frustrated that Wattpad offers such an abysmal user experience for anyone not logged in to the site or app and, honestly, for anyone not paying for a premium subscription. I had work on there for a couple of years and it did OK (thanks to a surprise feature shortly after I joined and also my activity on the forums which no longer exist), but it's basically impossible to bring anyone there who doesn't already use the platform for reasons that I completely understand. Even folks I know who are super into Wattpad and do really well there have agreed that it's not somewhere to bring people to. Even to read free books.
I'm very much not Brand Wattpad and I would never expect to be or expect to achieve any great level of visibility among an audience that realistically isn't my audience. But it would be so cool to be able to externally share work that I post there and not have the reading experience be so wildly disrupted by unskippable full-screen adverts or content-obscuring prompts to create an account and log in (I get it, no shade, they're a business, this is just my personal frustration and I don't expect anything to change for me).
None of the other web publishing platforms I've looked at are as slick and aesthetically appealing as Wattpad from a reading or writing perspective (yes, this matters to me) and other more independent posting options, like chapters on a Ko-fi or Patreon blog, or on my own website, don't make for a good novel-reading experience, with all the clicking around and lack of ability to bookmark. Short stories on a blog are great. Full novels not so much.
And as much as I'm aware that posting ANYTHING online opens it up to potential copyright violation, I'd prefer not to make that simple by putting an entire book somewhere it can be easily copy-and-pasted out.
Also, with web publishing platforms, they tend to be very focused around critique and feedback on works in progress, which isn't where I'm at. I have no interest in sharing drafts with the world (outside of little snippets on Tumblr) and would only be posting completed, edited books. So doing that in an environment that feels very geared towards encouraging WIP feedback feels weird. Whether people like what I've written or not isn't going to make me want to change what I've already written or inform what I write next. It's irrelevant.
I'm aware there are sites where I could sell ebooks that are more like having your own shop than using an ebook sales platform. Even those are limited because of the fucking EU variable VAT bullshit. I don't have the brainpower to get into that now, but believe me, it makes it prohibitively complicated to sell ebooks independently online and it doesn't matter where in the world you are as the writer/seller or whether you earn enough to be VAT registered. There are some platforms that handle that side of things for you, which is awesome, but those still involve someone having to buy a book before they can read any of it at all. Which I'm starting to think I maybe don't really want?
This post itself is turning into a book >.< If you've gotten this far, I salute you. Thank you for reading my massive braindump while I think out loud into Tumblr. What I really want from the process of publishing my books is to...
- share what I write once it's completed, edited and at a point where I'm happy to share it, in an environment that's geared towards sharing completed works rather than posting unedited WIPs for feedback.
- be able to direct people from different places on the internet to where my writing lives and for them to have an intuitive and pleasant reading experience once they get there (also to have them be able to share links to it easily if they want to!)
- make some money, but not as the sole focus of my efforts and not as a priority over any other part of the writing and publishing process.
- write! Not dedicate time and energy to algorithms, marketing, choosing the perfect categories and keywords, hounding people for ratings and reviews, competing with people who have a fuckload of money to throw at promoting everything they do etc. I want to write, first and foremost, above all else, and while I absolutely want to share my work and hopefully make even a small income from it, I want to always have the time and energy left over from those efforts to dedicate to writing. I'm a writer, not a marketer or a seller.
And I feel so lost. Part of me feels like the right platform is going to come along at some point. Part of me feels like maybe it never is and I'm going to have to do a whole heap of shit I don't care about in order to do the thing I do care about (which feels dreadful because, as I mentioned, it totally has the power to make me stop caring about the thing I do care about).
I don't have a massive audience. I have a small number of absolutely wonderful humans who are interested in what I'm creating and hopefully one day I will have a slightly larger number of absolutely wonderful humans who are interested in what I'm creating, but I definitely don't have a successful-Patreon size of audience and I don't work well in a constant state of produce-and-update, partly because it fucks with my process and partly because it fucks with my health. Also, realistically I don't have the output volume to justify expecting people to subscribe to my creative existence.
I have no conclusions to draw yet. I'm just massively frustrated and I don't know where to go from here with any of it other than to keep writing. Bleh.
(unless a gang of us all join Wattpad for the sole purpose of reading each other's books, even if those books aren't on-brand for the platform, in which case hit me up because I would legit seriously consider that if I knew for sure a bunch of folks from here were definitely going to do it and I could read all your amazing stuff as well as sharing my own with you and we could have links to our Ko-fi or PayPal accounts or whatever if we wanted because I would like to pay people for writing stuff I love but I don't know just a thought and it's probably never going to happen but I'm putting it out there anyway so)
