What does it feel like when you've taken a crash-course in HTML so you can finally finish formatting the manuscript that's taken you half your life to write, gone through all the necessary steps on the various eReader dashboards and then finally clicked the "Publish" button at the very bottom? Well, if you're anything like me and have cut off the tip of your right index finger within the last 3 years, the first thing you feel is a sort of dull numbness. This is quickly overshadowed, however, by the kind of abject terror that nestles itself neatly into the folds of your stomach lining and stays there until you either eat something or perform the action opposite.
It's out there. It's available. It's for sale. People--some of whom I've never even met, and therefore haven't had the good fortune of priming with my usual self-deprecation--are spending their hard-earned money (not to mention their valuable time) on this thing that I've created, that I'm solely responsible for. That's pressure. A few reviews have come in, and so far none of them have been particularly scathing, which makes awaiting that eventual critic-with-a-bone-to-pick all the more agonizing. I feel as though I can do little more than sit and wait.
Right, so now what?
It's long since been known (at least by anyone with a remotely up-to-date copy of the Writer's Market) that even well-known, published authors get little to no help on the backside of their print run. They're almost always left to do their own marketing, and as any self-respecting writer can tell you... that's hard. Perhaps it's doubly so for a person who spends their days in solitude, nit-picking for hours over the right way to say "Bill sat down," and who view the world through a hazy lens that only half pays attention to it.
Writers are artists, in every sense of the word. Some of us are perpetually aloof, almost all of us are dreamers, and most of us are wholly incompetent at the business side of writing. Compounded by the ease and accessibility of eBook self-publishing, this presents a unique challenge for authors, but also a unique opportunity for those with the wherewithal to take advantage of all that electronic self-pub has to offer.
I, for instance, scoffed, scolded and shunned the idea of something so narcissistically asinine as Twitter, an even more useless version of Facebook that allowed you to do nothing more than tell people what you're doing at any given point in time. "Who the hell would care?" I thought. Turns out, the answer to that question is... a lot of people. I still don't buy the idea that a website built entirely around people telling me where they are and what they're doing should be a multimillion dollar business, but I have to give credence to what so many other eBook authors have said about the immediate access to hundreds of thousands of potential fans.
Apart from the obvious benefits of social networking, I have learned much in the past two weeks about creating "virtual breadcrumb trails" that lead from all of the websites and communities that I help populate to my eBook's Amazon and Barnes and Noble pages. You probably know them as "hyperlinks," but until recently I only knew them as "blue underlined thingies." Each time you create one, and each time it's clicked, you are broadening the path of information leading from the entire worldwide web to your book's little front doorstep. Google "The Wizard of Roaming Hall," for instance, and you'll find that my book occupies something like the first 6 or 7 results. By comparison, before I began hyper-hyperlinking everything I could imagine, I hadn't the time or patience to scroll through all of the pages of results to see if I even made the list.
My quest now is, ironically, to promote my book via all of these channels without seeming narcissistically asinine myself. My quest is to provide my readers with content of merit and weight, but to also do so at a rate that's consistent with the rather short attention span of the modern cyber-consumer. Not easy. If there is a nugget of wisdom to be taken away from today's rather rambling entry, I suppose it's that we must be cautious not to drive the artistry of our culture to the brink of extinction by demanding that it move with the speed of youtube videos or funny pictures of cats, and that artists must be cautious of using such a massive, filth-clogged channel of distribution as the internet, for they run the risk of damaging the integrity of their craft.
Such is the plight of the eBook writer, a microcosm of the publishing world that has only within the last 3 or so years really become prominent: we are old souls working with an ancient craft, trying to make a living on the cutting edge of modern technology. With a grin and a tingle in my stomach I say that the next several years are going to be pretty interesting.
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