Wanting More

If you're an author, you can be inundated with people who will tell you the best way to spend your marketing budget to guarantee you'll make boatloads of money in royalties.

The problem is, everyone offers different advice, and, if you send them money and buy their how-to books or videos, chances are the only ones who will see those boatloads of money are the ones giving the advice. The rest of us will continue to throw darts and hope for the best.

Most every author, after the initial euphoria of seeing their name in print, wants to make enough money to be able to quit the day job and spend their days in their heads, creating new, awesome stories for their readers' voracious appetites. But the hard truth of being a writer is this is a very hard business to figure out. And the odds of making the big time are long. A Huffington Post article stated recently that barely 2 percent of the total books published sold more than 5,000 copies. The average is less than 500 copies.

So why do we do it? Continue to bang our foreheads on the wall, trying to figure out how to get folks to find your precious book and read it? And after they read it, leave a positive review of it in the hopes it may catch the attention of another reader?

The reason is very simple. The voices in our heads need to have a mouthpiece. If we didn't have the creative outlet that publishing a book provides, we'd probably all end up in the loony bin with multiple personality disorder. Marketing of those precious books will continue to be a mystery, a moving target. Some of us will figure it out, but most of us will be in that less than 500 copies area.

We may want more, but we'll continue to do what we do best. Write the next story. Maybe it will be the one that has the magic juice and makes it to the big time.