How Many Authors Are Serious?

Fellow authors, please excuse my cynicism. Maybe I've spent too much time in online forums, but somewhere along the way, I came to view most self-published authors as non-serious. I know that sounds awful and I may be wrong, but hear me out. Somebody will publish a book, maybe a memoir, post about it, then you never hear from that person again. But it's not just non-fiction. A newly published author will be jazzed about his fantasy novel. He's ripe with questions about marketing and things like, "Should I publish a hardcover, too? How about an audiobook?" And then he's gone.

These folks start out with the best of intentions and loads of optimism, until reality creeps in. Can't say I blame them. The realities of selling books are harsh. I think this fact separates the writers from the strivers. When I was in the flow of writing, I published eight novellas in the span of about a year and a half. Combined, those books sold a total of 155 copies. And I didn't care, at least not until I was sternly admonished that I had to care. I never should have listened to those naggers. Caring about sales almost killed my joy of writing. Before I started paying attention to sales, I basked in the glow of every newly published book. I could look at its cover on Amazon and take pride in the fact that I did it. I wrote a book and it was out there for the world to see. I never looked at my sales report.

I haven't even addressed the fact that writing those stories was exhilarating. Not knowing in advance where the story would lead was three fourths of the fun. Inventing supporting characters, each with their own eccentricities, had me marveling at my creativity.

I probably did it the right way, in terms of having a writing career. Zero expectations, only writing because I loved it. Now, a newbie goes into it with delusions of fortune and fame. I won't claim these folks don't do their homework, but if you're barely out of your teens, how much homework could you have had time to do? I wrote two bad novels and one barely acceptable one just to learn how to write. That was approximately three years of my life. I made every possible mistake, from having a dull plot to writing way too much back story, to adding an irrelevant subplot, to...well, you name it. Failure to me wasn't a lack of sales; it was having a book I wasn't proud of. In fact, I was glad hardly anyone bought those novels.

Had I given up after the first or the second because they didn't sell, I would've missed out on a huge part of my life.  

Most first novels are bad. In fact, the prevailing wisdom is that a first novel should never be published. Most writers don't heed that advice. I didn't. In my naivete, I thought, well, maybe I'm being too hard on myself. Maybe the book is better than I think it is. To this day, it has zero reviews and I'm grateful for that. No reviews beats a page of bad ones. But regardless, I didn't let that first bad novel derail my writing. I fear that for a lot of first-time authors, it does. 

More prominently, I think that for a lot of first-time authors, their first published book not becoming a smash success causes them to give up. That's why we see no more trace of them on writer's forums.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with writing and even publishing one book. If you're keen on telling the story of your life, why not make that story available to relatives and friends? Or for a person who's had that one great idea floating around inside their head for years, finally writing it down is a means of exorcising it. If that's your only true idea, perhaps you publish it and you're done. 

But the mark of a serious writer is that they don't simply ask marketing questions. They question everything, especially how to improve their writing. They keep going, keep slogging through the bad prose and seeing the story through. Then they sit back, reread what they're written and see that "a-ha". "A-ha! That's where I went wrong! I won't do that again!" 

A serious writer doesn't give up. And all the "zero copies sold" in big bold letters on their sales report won't change that.