Suspicious: This Week Has Been Too Good

You know me; you know what an utter failure I am as an author. If you've followed my blog for a while, you've read about my excitement over a newly published work; then watched as I finally reached the final stage of grief ~ acceptance. 

It hasn't always been true that I fell in love with one of my stories. Far from it. I knew right away that one of my novellas was only so-so, but I either didn't know enough to make it work. But I thought a few of them were pretty great. That's a fatal mistake. I got into marketing with my first "great" story, only to find that hardly anyone wanted it; and some clod actually gave it two stars (without any explanation). Instead of being philosophical about my marketing failures, I allowed them to color my perception. "Maybe those books really are bad."

So, while I really, really wished that Running From Herself would at last be "my hit", deep down I knew it would suffer the same fate as all my other work. Still, I tried, harder than I ever tried with any of my others. This is my last novel, and thus I decided to go for broke. ("Broke" being the key word here. I spent far too much money trying to publicize it.)

You name it; I tried it. As you know, once I exhausted every promo site I could afford, I tried writing competitions, book bloggers, social media, begging. I even offered ARCs, which weren't ARCs at all, since the novel was already published, but I would have been glad to send anyone a free copy for review, had they been interested. (No one was.)

I don't know about other authors, but my memory of one of my books starts to fade rather quickly. Running From Herself was only published on March 1, not quite three months ago, and I'm already feeling indifferent towards it. How does it go again? I forgot.

When I was contacted by a well known book reviewer yesterday, I hardly believed it. Why me? And how, exactly? She sure didn't find me through a promo site. I can only deduce that my social media frenzy somehow caught her eye.

Now today when I pulled up Instagram, my notifications told me that someone had mentioned me in a post. Oh, shit. What did I do wrong now? Which of my posts managed to offend someone? Actually, all my posts are pretty innocuous. But no. The person mentioned that, among other books, she just started reading Running From Herself! What? Again, how did that happen? 

I'm suspicious of good news. Good news is a trap that lures you in. I refuse to accept good news. She'll later post how much she hated it, and that'll be the end of my Instagram participation. How could I keep plugging my terrible book?

But you know, so be it. I'm still going to be happy today. 

I think I deserve that.