Visions of a Dark Horizon

It is estimated that each year about 4 million books are published in the United States alone, between traditional publishing and self-published authors.  4 Million.  Doing some quick back of the napkin math, that is about 77,000 books per week, on average.  That’s 11,000 books per DAY.  And we, as writers, want to climb to the top of that heap and fly our flag saying ‘Hey, here are my books, my stories, my characters, my world that I have worked tirelessly to create and refine and polish.  These are my children, writ large on the page, and I am giving them to you! Love them as I have!’ 

It sounds kind of crazy, doesn’t it?  To want to stand out in such an OCEAN of books and stories and writers. I know many writers say ‘I just write to get my stories out there’ or ‘These are stories I have to tell, I don’t really care if anyone reads them…’ 

I know I’ve said that, and I know that every time I’ve said it, it was a lie. Yup. I WANT people to read my stuff, I don’t know a writer who doesn’t. I want people to smile and laugh and cry and be terrified because of the pictures I create in their head as they read my stories.  I’d like to make a few bucks off it, too, if we’re being REALLY honest, but that’s not what this is about.   

I’ve been fortunate, I’ve had a lot of minor successes over the past year or so in my writing – I’ve signed a contract for a publisher for my Urban Fantasy series of novels, I’ve had a number short stories published in a variety of anthologies across multiple publishers, I’m a guest speaker at a huge convention next month, and most recently I updated my first ever published work, my children’s supernatural mystery novel ‘The Midnight Tree’.  I’ve always been very proud of that book, but as my first novel, self-published back before I actually knew what I was doing, it was definitely rough around the edges, and I knew it.  

That was fine 15 years ago, it didn’t really matter because I never expected it to go anywhere – I only published it because I wanted a copy for my bookshelf, wanted to send a copy to my mom, a kind of ‘Hey, remember when you wrote a book?’ kind of memento.  What it did, though, was rekindle that creative fire inside me, and so I kept creating, kept writing, and eventually got to where I am today, all because of that story, inspired by a picture my son drew for me in preschool.  

I promise there’s a point to all this… 

As readers of this website know, I updated ‘The Midnight Tree’ recently, fixed all those little issues that always annoyed me when I re-read the book, and the most important thing – I was able to create a digital Kindle version, something I wasn’t able to do 15 years ago. So I re-released the book, plus the new kindle version, and I put the Kindle version on sale as part of the re-release…

And then I annoyed every single person I have ever known on social media for five straight days.  Multiple posts a day saying the same thing – ‘Hey there, here is my book, I would love for you to read it!’ across Facebook, Twitter, Threads, Instagram, Imgur, TikTok…  I wrote posts, I created videos of me reading excerpts, participated in writers lifts, anything I could think of – this was literally the first time I had tried anything like book promotion, I didn’t actually know what I was doing, but this is what writers want, right?  To be noticed, to be seen, to get their books and characters out there for people to read and enjoy, so I spend the week just doing that. I didn’t write anything new, I just posted about ‘The Midnight Tree’…

It worked.  

Somehow, it worked – at least it worked enough that I hit #1 on the Amazon Best Sellers list for ‘Scary Children’s Stories’ and #3 and #7 in supernatural and mystery YA categories, for a book I wrote 15 years ago, a book that in 15 years had only sold about 26 copies total before the re-release.  

So yes – being a writer is crazy.  Sitting there night after night with your laptop, dreaming up ways of describing an alien sky, or creating dialog between a murderous clown and a hard-boiled private eye, or imagining what it would be like if the Roman Empire had dragons…  We sit there and we dream, and we write, and we edit, and we rewrite, and we all hope that someday we will rise up above all those thousands of other books and, for one shining moment, readers will find us, people will read our stories, and they will fall in love with our characters and our worlds and our words like we have.  So to all the other writers out there – keep dreaming, and keep writing.

Maybe we’ll make enough money for a nice dinner out… Who knows?  

Is it crazy?  Yeah, I think it is – but that’s just part of being a writer, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.