I never thought of myself as naïve before, but I find it’s true; when it comes to writing a novel and how being a published author would affect me emotionally, I realize now that I never had a clue.
It has been both one of the most rewarding and one of the most agonizing experiences of my life.
I was convinced that I would be able to write it, edit it, design the cover, write the back cover blurb and publish it, all with very little help and then I would sit back without a care in the world.
I believed I could impassively watch as my friends, family and of course the public either chose to read my beautiful baby or ignore it completely, without suffering horribly in the event it turned out to be the latter.
Of course, I knew publishing success was a longshot, but I stubbornly persisted in believing that if it was a good book and enjoyable to read, somehow it would prosper even in the incredibly competitive, independently published fiction book market.
Well, live and learn as they say. It turns out that my tuff, gruff, façade is just that and nothing more.
It turns out that I do care—a lot!
It was a lot of work to get set up with Amazon as an author/publisher and I have to say it has been quite a ride. Their incredible system reports sales of physical books (or lack of them) almost instantly. It also shows Kindle book sales as well as Kindle Unlimited pages read each day, including which country the reader is located in.
I can’t adequately express how it warms the heart to see someone begin to read your book and to see them read not just a few pages but to power through it like a book they just can’t put down! Today I basked in the glow of seeing someone in France reading several hundred pages over the course of the day and it made me very happy.
Long gone is the notion that I can maintain a placid attitude towards my book’s sales figures; not because I care much for the money that may come in but simply for the joy of knowing that someone somewhere is reading and hopefully enjoying my book.
I can't speak for other writers of course, but I write because I believe that I have something useful to say, and even if that's my own personal delusion, perhaps what I write might at least be entertaining to the reader and that's no small thing.
It is gratifying to think that readers are learning about how an Albertan may think and act in the kind of situation that arises in the novel and maybe they may even learn something useful from my own experience and research.
I know I learned a lot as I wrote the book, and it has been fun to put what I learned into action as I worked to make our family as safe and secure as possible in very uncertain times.
So if that's all that comes of it—my own family and a few friends are more aware of the dangers our society faces and better prepared to face them successfully, I'm ok with that.
Meanwhile I’m trying hard to resist the temptation to visit my Kindle sales dashboard for the twelfth time today in the hope that the reader in France has picked up my book to once again journey to that beautiful place that exists only in “The Republic of Dan” and in the reader’s mind.
I'm just going to pop over there to check, I'll be right back...
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| Graphic of pages read in France |
