Random Thoughts

You know, being a writer is a crazy world of mistaken expectations, cruel hard truths, lots of drama (and lets face it, most, of us make drama, it is literally what we do for a living), and trying to just express yourself without offending everyone in the known world.

I've found that my expectations, like many others, were wildly off  base. I knew the writing part was going to be the easy part. Promotion and marketing is the hard part. You see so many people claiming to be 'experts' on the subject and promising you they can sell thousands of copies of your book. You see people whose work makes you cringe becoming best sellers, and others whose work is infinitely of higher quality languishing in the shadows. The world of books is ghastly unfair, and it is to an extent a popularity contest. The popular ones get read, get noticed, get movie deals, and become rich. The unpopular ones, not so much. In many cases, the 'overnight success' stories are about people who knew the right people before they ever picked up a pen or opened a word document to write the first line of the first book. They knew the people with the right connections, the right resources to get their finished work in front of the right audience to make the most profit in the shortest period of time. The majority of us, don't know those people.

So what do you do? The only thing you can do, network. You keep plugging away, hoping that someday, the right someone will see your work and that magic will happen that will launch you into the stars. Or at least high orbit.

Personally, I'm learning to eat humble pie. I know there isn't much market for clean writing, aka no sex, but I just can't seem to write a sex scene to save my life. And for that I apologize. I know sex sells, but I just can't seem to do it without it being completely awkward and laughable. So I will continue to write the clean books I write, hoping that people who don't really want to read about other people having sex will find and enjoy my books. And I will market as best I can to reach those people so they know there ARE books out there where you don't need a score sheet to keep track of who is in bed with whom, and you don't have to ponder if you should take up yoga to be able to get into the unbelievable positions the characters you are reading about are getting their bodies contorted into. I hope some of you will follow me on this journey.