So what changed when I started publishing my work?
I decided to write a list of ten reasons why I joined all the myriad sites I seem to be a silent member of, in the hope of preventing someone else from going ever so slightly insane spending their life typing...without producing a single chapter of their novel.
1. Well, for starters, it’s a pretty isolating experience. You write by yourself, figuratively even if you can’t manage it literally. Yes the children were climbing the curtains, but you were happily ensconced in a fantasy world or stuck in a hotel with a pair of love birds. You saw what your offspring were doing, but only stopped typing when you heard the ripping sounds and were forced to grumpily tear yourself away from the keyboard. If you weren’t a loner before you started writing, you soon will be. I’ve agreed to all sorts of stupid, random things, just to get a bit of peace and quiet to finish a chapter or two. Writing makes you lousy company. You join sites, pages and groups to find kindred spirits.
2. We are told as authors that social media is our friend.
Who told us this? Well, people on social media of course. So we grab as many sites as we can, setting up pages for this and blogs for that. Then we fail to remember what we actually signed up to and definitely didn’t anticipate the hours of work that maintaining the monster would take. It eats at our writing time like a page eating dinosaur and ensures that the kids get beans on toast for their tea for the fourth night running. That’s ok. They haven’t bathed for a week so you don’t recognise them anyway.
3. Our own sense of creative inferiority means that we have to obtain everything that other authors have. If they have an account with a book site and claim to have made a sale through it; we have to join. We forgot to put it in our favourites, cringed at the number of immediate messages asking us to join this or that forum on the site and two weeks later will try to join it again, bemused when the site tells us that it recognises our email address and would we please enter a password - which we now can’t remember.
4. We want sales obviously, but what we also need is the lifeblood of authorship - reviews. Anything that promises ‘honest reviews’, we will join. We set off after them in the spirit of Indiana Jones searching for the Holy Grail and return battered and broken having acquired none - or none that we ever want to read again anyway.
5. Like the silly children who skipped gaily after the Pied Piper, we follow other authors into hell and back, because we once struck up a conversation with them online and assumed that they knew what they were doing. We end up in forums where we and our work are horrifically tortured by ghouls who lurk in the shadows waiting for suckers like us to just show up, with our wide eyed innocence and pretty copies of our nice book to give away for free. What's your problem, you joined it, didn't you?
6. Joining becomes as addictive as checking our sales on the KDP reports page. It’s like we actually believe that the more we check, the likelier it is that someone will have hopped on and made a purchase in the last two minutes while you were stirring the baked beans. If we are online and ever present, that same anonymous someone will see us, like us and buy something, especially if we put our best foot forward and smile, smile, smile. Hunt them down and join where they're joined.
7. A hint of the dollar sign and we’re there, like flies around a cow pat, jockeying and jostling to be first to join, even though there is no such thing as a free lunch and any offer that is too good to be true, probably is a big fat con. We might have to part with a little something up front and we agonise and worry, but hand the money over anyway, justifying it to ourselves as we raid the biscuit tin where we were saving up for school shoes. It will be ok, our books will pay us back. Won’t they?
8. Instead of giving ourselves a break and enjoying flexing our creative muscles, we put ourselves under pressure, berating our partners for the lovely meal they took us out for to soothe our frazzled nerves - because we weren’t online for a whole two hours (if you don’t count taking your phone to the toilet for a quick peek at Facebook.) It’s not just that we haven’t joined anything in two days, we’ve actually run out of things to join. We’re everywhere, like a bad smell, waving our book and shrieking, ‘Buy this, buy mine...please...anybody?’
9. We suddenly discover that we are ‘all joined out’. The task is too massive for a single human being. We physically can’t do all the unrealistic tasks we have set ourselves. We can’t fulfil our obligations to post, tweet, blog, comment and message. There just aren’t enough hours in a day, even if we don’t change out of our pyjamas and get a shower. We join a different site and automate it, thinking that we’ve found the solution. But then we have to monitor the autobots, who email us just as regularly as all the other sites we joined earlier, telling us who followed and unfollowed us and giving us something else to worry about.
10. After a miserable bout of self-doubt, during which time, we realised that we hadn’t written a single chapter all week, we go back to the keyboard and try and undo the damage. We spend hours trying to remember what we joined so that we can un-join ourselves, tying our brains up in knots as we reset thirty different passwords in one sitting and try and sort out the mess. As we fall into bed feeling marginally satisfied, we just allow ourselves one little peek at our sales reports and hey, what the heck, we sold a book...on Thursday. Oh crap, I think to myself. I bet they saw it on that site with the funny logo. I should probably rejoin...
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