Good morning! I hope everyone has a great week.

Me? I struggled a little. Okay, more than a little. For a day, I gave into the hopeless insecurity that plagues every author. 

When sales are low, and you’ve done a push in promotion without any results, it’s hard. It becomes a real struggle to put words to paper on a work in progress. To chat with readers. Even to go on your favorite social media site and put up a status that doesn’t paint you as whiny or begging for sales. You begin to lose sight of why you started this process to begin with. You wonder, to yourself, what’s the point of writing when no one can be bothered to even read what you wrote.

You take the lack of sales personally. You see it as a reflection of who you are as not just an author, but a person. And you begin to wonder if you’re as bad as those voices who discouraged you for years have always said.

I was one of the lucky ones. I was able to shake the foul mood. I came up with something new to try this week as to promoting my work, I finished a chapter of ‘Wielder of Tiren’. I kept my positive public face. 

For other authors, they can’t work past this blackness. We’re an insecure bunch. We put our souls into our characters, strive towards presenting the best story we can create. All we ask is for someone to buy our work, see it worthy of a few dollars, and like it enough to take the time to review it. Months, sometimes years, go into crafting a book that readers will finish in a few hours (or days). To see sales plummet tests our resolve. It makes us question ourselves as storytellers. As people.

Every author I know has faced this point in their career. It can define us. We either give up because we can’t handle the bad months. Or we push through it, regain our hope, and keep trying. To quote Scarlett O’Hara, “Tomorrow is another day”.

May it be a better one than the one before.

BB