Living in the Fray
Blog #3
CIVIL: True North got a Kirkus starred review. Huh, True North got a star—only 3% of indie books receive one. It named my book in the same breath as Kosiński and O'Brien, which is the kind of sentence you read three times to make sure it's not a typo. That happened. I get to breathe that in.
Here is the part nobody prepared me for: the star didn't sell a single book by itself. (Sad, but true.) It sat there, gleaming, while I spent a week staring at Amazon's ad dashboard trying to figure out why my campaigns had impressions and then, abruptly, didn't. Turns out the algorithm had throttled delivery, not judged my content. A diagnosis, not a verdict. Small comfort at 11pm.
That's the rhythm right now. Mild panic and small wins (okay, sometimes big wins), back to back, no transition, no slack in the pace. A Kirkus starred review, an Amazon ad no one clicks on, local bookshop picks it up. Nobody tells you about the whiplash you have to deal with at 90mph.
And, oh yeah, there's Book 2. Twenty thousand words in, which sounds like a lot until you remember it's a fraction of a fraction. I write it in scraps — the twenty minutes before a full-time job starts, two hours after it ends. Trying to keep track of all the precise logistics of the reality I’ve created in between. Rachel and Chet don't care that I have a day job. Neither does the war I put them in.
Is this sustainable? If by sustainable you mean "I keep doing it anyway"—then yes. Some days the ad spend makes no sense and the manuscript makes even less. I do it anyway. There is an engine inside me that won’t let me stop. It reminds me every day, it would loathe sitting in a comfy chair watching TV.
So here I am—struggling, creating, learning, and trying to fit in some living. It's a status update from the middle of the siege (and what led to my new tattoo). If you're trying to create and build something with what’s left after a full time job, you know this particular math. It doesn't add up cleanly. You do it anyway.
More soon. The Raven isn't finished yet, and neither am I.
And I’ve got to go check on that algorithm…