I spend my days trying to write – I have to work around small children, big children, housework, appointments… nothing all that unusual really. There are authors who have full time jobs and still manage to publish books (whether trad or indie, it doesn’t matter) at least once a year.
I frequently come back to this question: What is the point of me busting a gut to get a book finished, edited, covered and published, if no one is going to buy it?
I’m nothing in the publishing world, a nobody, yet my work still gets used as bait for pirate sites.
I’ve run promotions, freebies, have a patreon page… yet I never see an uptick in sales that other authors see.
I’ve had various social media accounts, I have a FB fan page and I interact with everyone who bothers to talk to me on social media.
I’ve pared my publishing costs down to the nub and I still have no money to pay for them, because I have no sales. I put free stories up on my blog and put patron only content out on my patreon page. I see little return for the effort…
What is the Point?
I’m a lone voice shouting into a football stadium… an olympic sized athletics stadium… a world of other creators, some of whom are better at what we do than I am, some who are different to what I do… each one having their place in the din.
Many are louder than others, having had a boost from lots of fans finding their work or from being traditional to start and becoming hybrid.
Some of them are loud because they have a publishing house behind them – something that everyone in the stadium could have if they measured up to the exacting standards that the publishing houses have and can guarantee sales of their work so that the publishing houses can make money to pay for the things that make that author loud.
Against this I shout… and I help others to shout, recommending their work because I love their writing and characters and stories. I join my voice to theirs because we are all in this together, a community of people who have the same passion for words and stories.
What is the point though?
Is there a point?
Is it to be a best seller and be rich enough to write for a living?
Is it to express yourself?
Is it to tell stories for others to enjoy?
Whatever it is, you have to decide for yourself…
…and then you have to decide if that point is enough to cover all the heartache and soul searching that publishing brings, if the money from each book is enough to pay for the next one to be produced.
The Point?
What is the point?
The World of The Teigr Princess 
yes, my trajectory is similar to your own. Millions of books. Millions of authors. All of us shouting and crying, ‘look at me, look at me’. Invisible me. I wrote a post about it, about three years ago. And it’s galling when you pick up a newspaper and read about some author that has lucked into selling their first novel to …whoever and they’re so …whatever. Fill in your own blanks here. Jealousy. Yep. But also an awareness that the exception to the rule is a kind of propaganda that the status-quo works and is the only measure of value. I write because I write. To make sense of the world. And to have a voice, however feeble.