Ink and Tears: The Raw Reality of a Struggling Indie Author
Ever since I was five years old, I wanted to be an author. As far back as I can remember, once I discovered that writing books was a job, I knew I wanted it to be mine. I have reports from school, starting in first grade and continuing upward, detailing how that was my dream: to become a famous author. As I grew up, I poured my heart and soul into it. That was all I ever thought about—writing. When I had free time, I was working on a story. Maybe it was an immature or terrible story—after all, I was only a kid when I started to write—but I was still doing it.
As I got older, I began to research what it took to become an author. Back then, there was no internet. This meant going to the library, reading books about it, and finding out the process the old-school way, which I worked hard at. I learned that to get published, you needed to send your manuscript to many, many publishers and hope for the best. To expect a lot of rejection. That many famous authors, as I knew them, were rejected multiple times before striking it big. I knew it wasn’t going to be easy, but I believed I could eventually write a book and find my footing in the publishing world that way.
The problem was that as things evolved and times changed, the internet came about. The early days weren’t a problem like they are now. Not only that, but more and more people who believed they could write wanted to be writers. Since the internet made accessing information so easy, people were sending manuscripts to publishers like never before, leading most publishing houses to say they no longer accept unsolicited manuscripts and will just trash them. That was no longer a way to get your foot in the door. Now you needed an agent. How do you get one? Well, the internet told too many people how to do this, and now most agents won’t accept query letters without a referral. Essentially, to get an agent, you need to know the right people or already be famous. It’s a conundrum.
Self-publishing became a thing. Then it was inundated with a bunch of crappy writers who thought they could slap together anything in a book and sell it. Once Amazon opened up the world of self-publishing to everyone, the market became oversaturated. Then, of course, thanks to the internet, people’s attention spans shrank to maybe 30 seconds long. They don’t want to read books or even watch videos longer than three minutes. To be a successful author now, you’re fighting against a sea of insanely poor writing and an epidemic of people with no attention span. If you don’t write trashy, cliché, and terrible young adult fiction, your chances of being noticed are even slimmer than that—especially if you’re an indie author.
People assume indie authors are self-published because they’re bad, that they couldn’t find anyone else to publish their work. They don’t consider that there’s a myriad of self-published authors who refused to compromise their artistic integrity and didn’t want to be censored. They don’t understand that people who get published traditionally often have to edit their books down to a fraction of what they once were to be deemed marketable—and even after that, they still have to do all the marketing themselves. Not to mention that they now have an agent and a publishing company taking a cut of their already meager sales.
I started out with a good idea of what to do and how to be successful. I ended up in a world that doesn’t care to read, doesn’t care about adult authors, and doesn’t appreciate the art, hard work, and dedication it takes to do what I’ve done—what many have done. Not all self-published books are bad, but sadly, plenty of them are, which leaves me branded as a bad author by default because I chose not to go with traditional publishing. In the end, technology has crushed my dreams to the fullest extent they can be crushed. Being 40, middle-aged, and female makes it even worse. My value to society is seen as nothing since I never accomplished anything before this point.
What do I do in this situation? What does anyone? Well, I attempt to continue writing, of course—not that I have much motivation or energy for it any longer. Gone are the days when I could delude myself into believing that people might read my book just because it was good, not based on gimmicks or trends. Yet I don’t know what else to do with my life because I’ve never wanted to be anything else. Like a bird instinctively knows how to fly, all I instinctively know how to do is write. Too bad it won’t mean anything to anyone, and my voice will forever be drowned out in an oversaturated market of self-published garbage.
