Blank page: two posts in as many days

Posted on by The Opening Sentence

This is what happens when you impose a moratorium on yourself. You end up sitting in a garden centre cafe with a laptop and nothing to write. I’ve just been making a list of things to do if I decide to extend the moratorium beyond twelve months. Give it up completely.

I could go back to doing the garden and spending my weekends in the mountains getting wet, infinitely preferable to thinking of more ways to sell a book now and again. I’m sure these moments affect every writer; the realisation that the enthusiasm to tell another tall tale will end up on a webpage and a folder on the hard drive and found in two thousand years time by aliens with metal detectors.

Maybe it’s the weather. Lancashire has nothing in common with Bermuda, doesn’t have the clear air of Switzerland. It doesn’t have giant hornets either, so I suppose it has some advantages. At work someone knows someone who is selling a canal boat, but the price is a shade over my budget. Buying a boat would be a project that could replace the writing.

I think I discovered the mystery of the free ebook on Amazon. Apparently it’s free in the .com Kindle Store, but for the life of me I still can’t replicate the conditions necessary to view this fictitious webpage. The people who can see it/have found it must have x-ray vision. There was a spike in downloads on March 1st. Don’t know what I did that day that brought attention to it, unless I sat on my own phone and accidentally downloaded multiple copies of my own book.

When I posted advanced copies of There Will Be Blood to various individuals, the woman in the post office had to type the addresses for the proof of postage receipts. She earned her money that day because some places in Germany, Holland and Finland have fiendishly long names. She’ll be glad to know I don’t plan sending out any more copies.

I’ve just had another look at Wattpad. Authors are advised to interact and follow other authors with similar books, but I couldn’t find anything that wasn’t a romance disguised as some other genre. Maybe the answer is staring me in the face. Should I introduce an erotic strand into the series: buffed up clowns, Jilly Cooper meets Noam Chomsky, sociologists getting intimate with each other’s isms.

I’m sure I could knock out a saucy novel in the next ten minutes. Let’s give it a go. . . .

 

18 thoughts on “Blank page: two posts in as many days”

  3. I’m arriving at your point of chucking in the towelness. Self-publishing only works if you spent money on advertising and almost every waking moment pumping money into the ads and frantically spamming every known social network. That’s not living. It’s not even writing. I don’t have the money so it’s not an option, and unless I can find a small publisher that actually has a budget for advertising and marketing the books I’ve written and haven’t done anything with yet will just fester on my hard drive. I like gardening.

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    1. I think proper returns only come from big advertising budgets. And I’ve seen some crazy amounts spent. What I’m not prepared to do is repeat what everyone else does or recommend because if it worked for them they’d be shouting about how many books they’ve shifted.

      I think come March 21st I’ll probably commit a real crime and then look forward to spending the money when I come out of prison!

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          1. I had a look at how to do a FB ad. I know lots of people swear by them, and since I don’t use FB I never see them, but I guess they’re there. I didn’t understand any of the explanation of how it works, and the cost seems to be as much as you’re willing to pay, but it starts at $5 a day… Personally, I get angry with people who say, come on, it’s nothing, the cost of a cup of coffee. I am one of that rare breed (not rare, but you’d think so) who can’t afford to buy cups of coffee ever. Paying the bills is hard enough. But it really gets up my nose to be singled out as some kind of a skinflint. Just another example of ‘to those who have, will be given more…’

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  4. “Jilly Cooper meets Noam Chomsky”, it is a concept which has merit. They could have a chance encounter while buying uni-cycles.
    I have a quite irresponsible attitude to making my work known: “I’ve written the book. I’ve edited and proof-read it. I’ve self-published. So all the hard work is done. It’s now up the public to find it and buy a copy”
    (This explains why my fantasy trilogy only ever sold 1 copy….. just one of Volume I that is. I gave a copy to the local library, I suspect they gave it to a Used Book dealer- )

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      1. I take hope from the example of the Robert Tressel’s “The Ragged Trousersed Phianthropists”; he died disappointed at the lack of sales…now its a classics.
        Sometimes you’ve got to play the long game.

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