Stop me if you've heard this one before.
It's a joke about a poor sap who thinks he has what it takes to maintain a weekly (or even monthly) live-feed of his thoughts via the blog medium. He first sets out, eager to make his writing known by means of his writing about things other than his writing. It goes well for the first couple of weeks, but then he runs out of ideas, knocks his wife up (again!), gets a job in the movies, gets sidetracked by miniatures games and ultimately buries his nose in the follow-up book. Bazinga!
Hilarious, I know. And not at all cliche.
Most people who have written an eBook (and who also have a life) probably experience the same thing I have: The initial euphoria of finally finishing a novel, the massive influx of rejection letters from agents and publishers, the one ray of hope to be seen in the electronic self-pub world, the initial excitement generated by massive sales (to friends and relatives, ha) and the eventual return to reality. They probably have started blogs, gotten a twitter account despite swearing to the cosmos that they would never invest themselves in something so banal as telling people everything they were doing all the time, even set up holdings elsewhere on the internet--Good Reads, Reddit, et al.
At first, the campaign is aggressive and thorough. But then, it starts to plateau. When the monthly sales stabilize then dwindle to single digits, and the conundrum of what to do next ramps up, everything sort of stops. You start taking pictures of your baby again. You start going out with friends. It's in this purgatory between excitement and the sense of utter failure that the proverbial "men" are separated from the "boys". Who on earth has time for it all? What if I simply hate how the internet makes my head hurt? eMarketing is solid gold for some folks, but for the rest of us?
What now?
The Gift of the Traveler Guard is coming along alright. In fact, I'll soon post a preview chapter for those of you interested in the series. Writing is easy. It is, as the saying goes, 99% rewriting, anyway. Getting people to actually notice, let alone read your writing, that's the real challenge. It's no wonder that Hollywood depictions of writers make them out to be either absurd or insane. You practically have to be to make a decent go of it. That's all for now. The internet is making my head hurt already.
