In the past year, I have self published three books. My current goal, as articulated yesterday evening, is to publish four more by the end of this year. It’s fair to ask — what’s the point of all this?
At this juncture, I have no solid evidence that anyone is reading my work, other than knowledge that there are RSS feeds connected to my blog, which at least create the opportunity for people to follow along. (Yes, there are pings, on some days torrents of them, that come to my site via AI and search engine bots and whatever SEO solutions are doing on the web. But watching that traffic doesn’t bring me comfort, it makes me feel slightly deranged for thinking there might be human thought behind machine randomness.)
My website receives almost no traffic. Sales data for my books is extraordinarily sparse. If anyone has read and completed any of my books, they have not written reviews or in any way indicated to me what they thought of the works.
So given this, why keep going? A couple reasons. First, I am building a catalog under the same operating theory that publishing houses take with authors they believe in. If you invest in an author and one book breaks through, then suddenly the entire catalog becomes valuable. I’m taking the same approach with me, I’m investing in the value of my catalog in hope that one will lead to value for all.
But second, and probably more important, I’m at a point in my life where I simply don’t care if there’s an audience for what I write about, I’m going to do it anyway. This is not the same thing as saying I don’t want readers, of course I do, but I would rather have a small number of the right kinds of readers than a large number of readers who push me in a direction I don’t want to go.
There are probably ways I could better monetize what I do, but I don’t particularly like public relations and marketing and don’t feel like spending my time on it. Does that make what I do purely a hobby? I would argue no, that what I’m doing is building a writer’s life, which is a serious calling, and if the only thing I have to show for it in the end is a bunch of unread books that you can’t buy in a bookstore, I’m ok with that too. The work itself is the reward.
UPDATE: On that last thought, it’s difficult for me to fully articulate without sounding insane, so I’ll keep some of it to myself. We all define success differently in life. My view of success is largely based on enlightenment. I believe that my success as a human being depends on the development of my soul above all else. It’s a project none of us complete, there are always new vistas to aspire toward. So, I no longer concern myself with who discovers or embraces me or my ideas. If you don’t know me, or don’t want to, it’s your loss.
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