Sometimes my everyday research into self publishing reinforces how cataclysmic the commercial forces operating in 2018 are. One the one hand, nearly everyone around me, in my age group, sees writers as these tortured beasts sporadically spitting out masterworks: just witness the media frenzy over “Bridge of Clay”, the upcoming release by Markus Zusak, who unexpectedly took the world by storm with “The Book Thief,” and then spent thirteen years on the follow-up. At the other extreme, I’m in a closed Facebook group called 20BooksTo50K, based around the concept that if you author twenty books, an annual income of $50,000 should be achievable. Today, I was fascinated by a writer wondering aloud on 20BooksTo50K what she should expect from her first Amazon ebook (hey, just like me!), and receiving the message that “you should expect nothing at all, no attention,” with one commenter exciting me by suggesting this: “I’d be focusing on writing a shit ton more.”
What am I? The endless laborer or the prolific deliverer? Right now, I’m the former but hey, I could be the latter!