Chasing Your Dreams

I’ve wanted to be an author since I was small, from the moment I realized people wrote those wonderful books my older sister read to me.  That was before I could read or write a word myself.  To me, there has never been a bigger honor the world can bestow than the title “writer” or “author.”

            Then life got in the way.  Although my father never stopped assuring me that my dream was within my grasp, the world was filled with people who scoffed at my aspirations as unrealistic and unattainable. But I never stopped writing.  To this day, I sometimes open hard cover books to find loose pages of some story I’d begun longhand and never finished, as I would use the books to lean on, then tuck the pages in them when I was done.  The strange thing is I regard those years as fallow, yet I am constantly stumbling over evidence they were anything but. 

            My problem was consistency.  I wrote when the mood took me, which was whenever.  I started stories and novels but never finished them, never got beyond the first couple of pages, because then the mood passed, my muse departed, and I forgot that I’d been writing something.  And often, I would get ten pages into a story and think I didn’t like the way it was headed, so I needed to start over, and just never did.

            That all changed when I wrote The Playground over the Fourth of July weekend, shortly before my forty-second birthday.  Yup, I binge wrote it over a weekend.  When completed, it was one hundred twenty pages and my hands hurt.  I knew it was going to need a rewrite, or several.  But that was when things changed.  When I realized that, in order to be a writer, I had to write every day, whether my muse decided to sing or not.  So, I wrote that book, and revised it, and wrote it again, and it became a mini-obsession.  And when I was done, I wrote another book.  And another.  I worried that I would run out of ideas, but they kept coming.  And if I ran out, there was always some fragment tucked into a yearbook, or an unfinished file in my Word documents, that I could resume writing.

            Like most authors, I wrote my first book thinking it was going to be a Pulitzer Prize winning novel.  It was going to make me famous, put me on the map, fulfill all my dreams.

             It hasn’t happened that way.  What has happened is WORK.  Hard work.  Nonstop, endless work. 

            I have highs.  When I get a five-star review, especially from a stranger.  It makes my day.  Because as wonderful as it is when my friends say they loved my book, the real test is when a stranger who doesn’t care about my feelings loved it too.  I also get a high when I sell a lot of books in one day.  Unfortunately, that’s when I pay for advertising, and it’s rare that I make a profit.  Having people read my book is supposed to be its own reward. 

            I have lows.  This occurs when I ponder just how much money I’m spending in advertising versus the rate of return.  Or when one of my fellow Indie authors laments being an author as really “just an expensive hobby.”  Or when I know there are people out there mocking me and laughing at me, because anytime you put yourself out there, you open yourself up to ridicule. Or when I hear how little money some authors who are considered “successful” by the industry are making, not enough to quit their day job.  Or when I get a bad review, which thus far has been from trolls, whom I believe to be two former coworkers.  I did get a bad rating on Just an Ordinary Girl, which was probably legit, but oh well.  There’s always people out there who aren’t going to like your work.  If everyone gives you five stars, that’s a sign your distribution isn’t wide enough.

            I keep telling myself that there will be a reward for my hard work, and one day I’ll get it.  Except, what if there isn’t any reward?  What if, I am going to just go on publishing my books, and selling at the same rate (which is already higher than most authors; and isn’t that a scary thought)?  And never getting anywhere? 

            This is the dark side of chasing your dream.  I think we all have this idea, in the back of our minds, that when we finally get the courage and the stamina to go for it, we’ll make it.  After all, we’ve watched too many inspirational eighties movies for success not to be a foregone conclusion.

            Somehow, those inspirational stories failed to mention the unglamorous, unfun side of working towards success.  The loneliness.  The sacrifices.  The fact that after thousands of hours of work, you literally will have no profit to show for it.  That you will work and work and work, and not get paid.  That you will have to endure rejection, and mockery, and people thinking you’re delusional.  That some of these people may be part of your own family, the very ones who should be encouraging you.

            No one told me that after thousands of hours of exhaustively writing and editing and re-writing my books, then would come the hard part.  Selling it.  That despite being able to craft lovely turns of phrases, coming up with a blurb to get people interested in buying my novel is inordinately, tremendously hard.  That having to hustle for sales like a telemarketer is distasteful.  That after learning how to write a book, correctly edit it, buy a cover, format it, upload it, etc., now I need to market it.  Writing was the easy part.  While I wrote, I dreamed.  Publishing was when I faced reality.

            We are experiencing a revolution in the publishing industry.  For the first time, indie writers are serious contenders.  We are no longer slaves to the rejection notice.  We don’t have to first get accepted by an agent, then a publisher, who will then take most of our profit and make us do the lion’s share of the marketing anyway.   There are tons of wonderful authors who have written wonderful stories that deserve to see the light of day, and instead have been rejected over and over.  Now their time has come.

            But there’s a dark side.

            Readers will not buy a book from an indie author unless it’s free or close to it.  My books are all regularly priced at 2.99, but it’s rare they move at that price.  They only sell when I drop the price to .99.   I would have to sell hundreds of books to make a profit, after deducting the price of advertising.  And most of my “sales” are loans, which means an Amazon Prime or KU Member allowed to borrow the book for free.  This isn’t bad news for me per se; I get paid per page in that case making more of a profit than a paltry 99 cents.

            Here’s the problem:  consumers are starting to think they should be able to read full length novels for free or close to it, and that’s not going to be good for any of us in the industry in the long run, traditional or independent.  Writing books may eventually become just an expensive hobby, and not a profession, or a way to make money.

            This is a major problem.

            A second issue is many indie novels being sold should never have seen the light of day.  They are first drafts, complete with typos and misspellings and glaring grammatical errors.  Some of them are decent; I just read one where the story was good, but it was not a finished product.  I considered emailing the author to discuss this with her (this is considered good etiquette from one indie to another) but I decided against it, because I didn’t know how she would react.  Problem is, books like that give the indie authors who bleed for their work a bad name.  There are a lot of readers who won’t even consider purchasing a self-published work because they equate that with failure.

            The third issue is an entire industry has sprung up catering to indie authors, charging them fees for everything from blog tours to being put on reading lists.  Hundreds of dollars in some cases, depending on how successful and well known the product.  Basically, there is an industry taking advantage of our dreams.  But what can you do?  It’s the only way to get your name out there.

            So here is the question: More than a year after publishing my first novel, as I prepare to publish my sixth (shortly after my fifth; I wrote those two switching off) book, do I feel chasing my dream was worth it?

            To answer, I remember that five-year- old child, who decided the minute she knew someone wrote her favorite story that she wanted to write a story too.  She didn’t dream of buying a house on Cape Cod, or having enough money to travel the world, or staying home and writing for a living.  No, her dreams were much simpler.  She wanted people to read her stories. Nothing more.

             As a society we tend to measure success in monetary gain, and that’s where we fall short.  There is more to life than making money, or being rich, or having a nice house.  My original dream was to tell people stories.  I’ve achieved that.  For many of us, achieving our dreams may not mean a big house or expensive car.  It means starting out with something humble-writing stories that people read-and making that dream a reality.  So chase your dreams.  Success is guaranteed.