What to do when book sales are down? : How to combat discouragement
Most of my books are on Amazon, which means I can check my sales daily. Hourly. Every fifteen minutes if I wanted to.
I fall into the trap: sales are great! I’m having a great day. Sales are low. Why do I even write? I suck. I’m horrible. I need to give up writing.
See how quickly I spiral from having a great day to having the worst writing career in history?
To combat this, I force myself to remember the days when I wrote and no one paid me a single cent. When I was a teenager, in my afternoon extra credit writing class, I wrote because I loved it. Because it made my heart sing.
I force myself to remember how proud I felt finishing a story. A story that maybe only my writing teacher, Mr. Halpern, would read.
I force myself to remember when I shared a published story in a lit magazine and my boyfriend at the time laughed at it and told me, “You should give up writing. I am an English Major from UNC Chapel Hill. I know what I’m talking about.”
I force myself to remember the very first book I ever wrote and published, “Baby Ylvie’s Special Heart.” I had no aspirations to even sell a single copy, but I wrote it as a way to help me with the pain of seeing my daughter go through a difficult open heart surgery at four-days-old to correct her heart defect, truncus arteriosus.
It is easy to measure my worth as a writer with a monetary sum, but that wasn’t why I started writing. Even as a small child, I loved to read and loved stories in any form: movies, television shows, and even the quick narratives in commercials.
Not until I moved to Berkeley, California from Goose Creek, South Carolina at fifteen did I discover that I could be a writer. Most of my literary education had been exclusively white writers.
Berkeley High School taught me writers of color. The first book I read of an Asian author was “Thousand Cranes” by Yasunari Kawabata. Never before did I think that I could also join the storytelling collective and write stories of my own as a Filipino American woman.
These are the reasons I write. On the days when sales are down, I must remember why I fell in love with storytelling to begin with.
