Self publishing your writing is like starting a small business. And the product is you. Oh, the advice comes like a hurricane. Leave the author part aside, create a brand, learn how to be a marketer, find your audience. But it always feels like its personal, because its writing a novel and then trying to see if people like it, (rejection can really hurt in this context) not installing a muffler because the old one was not working properly. But, running a small business has its attractions, the most important of which is that it is your deal. All the way.
So, you hire people to create professional looking covers, others to edit and still others to format your work. Feeling like a boss. Until the book doesn’t sell and you are losing money. Like a failing business does. Feeling like a loser. And its your writing that people don’t want. A disturbingly personal failure. Not complaining mind you, just letting you all in.
Read a couple of articles this week that I thought were fascinating. One was about how brain scan technology still tells us so little of what is going on in there. Talking to people is, according to the most respected researchers, still the best way to find out what is happening when things aren’t working right. I have always been sceptical of the claims made about using scans to tell us how we are doing and what and why we think what we do. Too crude a measurement. If we judge intelligence by how much we know about intelligence, we aren’t very intelligent.
The other was about a survey done a month ago in the US. It tells a story about how most (75% at least) Americans of every demographic group and age do not like political correctness and the language and attitudes it requires. I would think that the same could be said for Canadians. But you could never tell from how the media, (entertainment and news) and the academics behave. It is reassuring to me to read this. I actually sighed in relief.