This is our choice in every moment.
Do we relate to our circumstances
with bitterness or with openness?
Pema Chodron
The words are on the top of my calendar for February. Good advice but not always easy to live. February is a month that often can be hard as it's not quite spring but winter is almost gone-- or so we hope. The days are lighter for longer-- unless they aren't due to storms and constant fog. Buds are beginning to burst-- unless a hard freeze comes along.
Listening to the news can be so depressing that many decide to avoid it except don't we all need to know? Or can we help anything with the knowing when we often only know part of a story?
My writing is moving along well; this story is long enough now to qualify for a long historic romance but the writing of it isn't done. It has two important pieces yet to cover. The writing has been very rewarding except... it's still an uncertainty what I will do with it.
Soon I will have written five historical romances; but with the uncertainty of how I can get them seen, I am unsure if I want to go the ePub route right now. I also though don't want to submit any of them to a paper publishing house. It isn't because I fear rejection, it's because I don't really see how they'd have any better way of getting them seen. I'd lose the ability to pick my own covers, and they would take a bigger piece of whatever sales there might be when they put them into ePub. They would also dictate what my story had to be because it's what they do. I can understand that-- especially after a year of marketing myself, but I still don't want it. I want my story to be true to itself.
It's not an easy time whenever I think of marketing. From the writing end, winter has been rewarding for me. This particular story has flowed right along even though it's more complex than many I have written. It takes a time in history, in an area I very much like, and sets two people as they begin on the adventure of life and love. It has been all I could have hoped when I began.
I write by writing anywhere from a thousand to five thousand words in a day. Then I think about what I wrote. There are days I might not write the next day while I think about these characters and where they are going. What would logically happen next? I debate how their relationship might grow or roadblocks along the way. Secondary characters enter the story and questions about them are part of the equation. For an historic, I do research as new elements come into play. I do all that knowing that what I write may not be what is wanted by the romance novel reader of today.
I do not think my romances are typical romances, but I know there are other writers out there also writing those that are not. It's a question of how to get them seen, and it's what will hold me off from putting out this one or the one before it because I think as it stands, it would just disappear in the massive pile of all those out already with more coming in every day.
Some say the mass of ePubbed books will ruin this whole thing, especially with no kind of critical oversight. Except Amazon, Nook, Kobo, etc. are providing a service, more of a huge warehouse than a publishing house. You present to them books that are ready to go or they reject them.
Yes, what they do makes them money, at least on some of the books, but it also helps the writer get their books out at least where they can be found-- if the writer finds the way. If these houses started doing critical reviews, they'd be the publishing companies who have set limits and rules for what they want to see in their line. It would be the end of the Wild West time for ePub and maybe that will yet come. How many books can they really hold in their system?
I suppose some of my funk is coming because this month there has only been one sale of a book. Amazon has this system where you see your sales, but each month it starts over. Now last month there were enough sales to make me feel okay, but this month just one-- at this point, that's the least I have ever had.
And I might add that the books I never put out for free never really got many sales. That tells me several things. One that all those books I gave away didn't really help sales in the long run either because those readers only want free books-- or because what I write doesn't interest them enough to buy another by me.
Now that might be my funk... It could also be over a week of a publishing glitch on one of the books when I changed a cover but it hung up and eventually had to be resubmitted (it wasn't the sole sale for sure), Or it might just be one more gray day in a row. They claim it'll be sunny on Sunday. I can only hope.
We got our first lambs (also two new calves). That's definitely uplifting.
The image on the top was put together from one of our Navajo kachina type figures and the background of Pusch Ridge in the country around Tucson where the book I've been writing has been set.
