Aaron gets interviewed and reviewed today over at The Book Tart. Here’s the review. Come join him.
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My Sales Numbers Reprise: My Scale is Broken
So last Tuesday I posted a blog post about my sales numbers not being of the “fly off the shelf” variety and I got some wonderful comments from a bunch of wonderful people because the world is good and I am lucky.
True dat.
However, I gotta come clean. I measure success versus failure in extremes because I grew up watching WAAAAYYYY too much TV. I don’t have a good grasp on reality. If I don’t post numbers like Stephenie Meyer, I’m a failure. If my fans aren’t Harry Potter crazy for me and my books, I’m a failure. If I don’t move millions of women ala Fifty Shades of Grey, yeah, you guessed it, total failure.
My numbers are pretty good, but for me, complete failure. When I gost B+’s in school, I thought that was the end of the world. To be better than average sucks, because I wanna be perfect. I want to be a god among men. I want to be adored by the masses. I want a stalker. But would I be able to handle all the fame and fortune at this stage? Prolly not.
A friend of mine said that the more I struggle, the more grounded I’ll be when I do become rich and famous. Like George Clooney.
My problem is that my scale is broken. Not one in a million is going to hit it big like Suzanne Collins. Ah, love that Katniss.
So I have ego problems. Yeah, who knew?
The punch line to all of this is that I have to claim my victories and celebrate even my smallest successes. Every day that I write, or sell, or market, or read the loops and try to contribute, that is a success for a guy like me. Guys like me quit and sit on bar stools and dream about doing wonderful things but then run away when it gets too hard.
Aaron signs a book for New York Times bestselling novelist Jeanne Stein
Once again, the secret is to enter into the struggle and enjoy what you can. But I do feel very lucky to have such nice writers around to support me.
My Sales Numbers
I found something more cutting and disheartening than getting rejection from literary agents. My book sales numbers. I just got my Q2 numbers back and yeah, um, not the fly-off-the-shelf numbers I would have liked to see. At first, I was laid low. But then, I got some perspective. Very few authors are ever going to get the Harry-Potter-Twilight experience. Very few even get the midlist, big-publishing house experience. Most writers write a book, several hundred people read it, and ten minutes later it’s at the Goodwill for 10 cents.
However, instead of getting a dozen donuts and watching Buffy The Vampire Slayer, I went mountain biking. And I haven’t mountain biked in months. So there I was, huffing and sweating and puffing and cursing the mile I rode up the mountain, climbing, climbing, climbing, when a walker came by and I stopped, er collapsed, to let him walk by. And we had a typical exchange.
Walker: Hard work, huh?
Me: Yeah. Brutal, but fun.
Walker: Good for you though.
He went on by, I clipped into my pedals and continued the climb and it struck me; the writing game is good for me. All life is a struggle. That’s one of the themes in my novel, The Never Prayer. Maybe you are one of the lucky hundred to have read it.
All life is struggle, and me struggling in the writing game is valuable to me, to those around me, to other writers. It’s brutal fun. And it’s good for me.
The story doesn’t end there. So I’ve been watching a lot of House M.D. I’m struggling through season 8 to get to the finale and God only knows why they didn’t keep House in prison for half the season. House in prison was delicious.
So while I’m biking, I’m conceding that the writing game is good for my psyche, however painful and however much of a struggle it is, and I think about House M.D. and happiness. House believes that only people who lie to themselves can be happy. That life is inherently too difficult to be enjoyed.
That may or may not be the case. However, having a dream, having a goal, believing the lie that maybe, maybe I’ll be one of the lucky writers to break through and make it, well, it keeps me going. It doesn’t keep me happy, but in the better moments, it keeps me satisfied.
And maybe satisfaction is enough no matter what my numbers are.