So, this is going to be a blog post about the art of writing when no one is reading you.
Taking Stock: A Decade of Stories
I have been writing short stories in the Shade of the Morning Sun universe since 2010. I just checked yesterday and I have about 183 stories, all in all, which are in various degrees of publication, I suppose I could say.
The majority are published, but there are also a lot that have been published and then unpublished so I could work more on them. And then there are, of course, some that are in draft form. I also know that I have about 20 or 30 pure drafts on my computer which are not saved on the site. So, that’s about 200 stories, give or take.
I have published a couple of e-books: two or three of them 12 years ago, I believe. I did the same thing about five years ago, which was about four or five e-books, something like that. And recently, I published my first print collection.
I think I have sold maybe no more than 20 copies in total of all these publications. I haven’t done anything to market them, so … yeah, that’s something worth mentioning. They might conceivably had done better if I had thrown some dollars after ads, for example.
The Audience by the Numbers
Then there is the blog itself, which hardly got any traffic for about 10 years or so until I started a site called Depending on the Morning Sun, where I posted a new story every week for about a year. I think it got a couple of thousand hits and maybe three, four, or five hundred visitors and about 50 subscribers. Then I switched back to this site and lost half of my subs and my traffic tanked but also because I didn’t have the energy to network much in the blogosphere this year.
Currently, there are about 350 comments. Most of them are my replies to other people’s comments, but I would say maybe 25 to 30 people have left comments over the years, some more than others.
So, what is the takeaway from this? Well, I guess one takeaway is that I’m hardly being read at all. Another is that I should do more to market my material, and a third is that I should produce new material more often.
The Realities of My Writer’s Life
If we take the two latter things first, it’s not possible for me to produce material more often because of my life situation. I’ll also say that the niche I’m writing in is not one where it’s easy to be prolific. It’s very personal, and it’s not something where I write with the goal of producing a lot, because that’s not how the genre—literary fiction, not market fiction—works. It’s something you do to give a part of yourself. But even if I wanted to produce a lot, it would hardly be possible for me, given circumstances that I’ve described at nauseam elsewhere in other blog posts—my family situation, most of all.
As for marketing, you have to have something worth marketing, and in this case, I would say that means books. Either collections, like my first and only collection, which is relatively coherent, or a series. I would say that my first collection is probably something you could describe as a composite novel. It’s more than linked short stories, certainly more than a short story cycle. We shouldn’t get into the specifics of these rather esoteric literary terms, but it’s basically short stories that can be read individually but also as part of a whole, and some are more linked together than others. That’s the really brief definition of what I do. And I would say my first collection is probably one of the more coherent ones, so the correct term for it would probably be a “composite novel” if it were ever to fall into the hands of a literary professor.
That’s something you can have success with. Elizabeth Strout, whom I admire quite a lot, her Olive Kitteridge books are certainly linked short stories. Her more recent offerings, the Lucy Barton series, are more of a hybrid between what I would call a true novel and a bunch of loosely connected, slices-of-life chapters. She’s a very strong writer who creates characters that you can empathize with almost immediately.
But what I want to say with all that is, one, what I’m doing is not unique, but it is very niche. And two, yes, you can have success if you’re lucky and good, but it’s rare compared to success in genre fiction like romance or science fiction.
The Hard Math of Marketing
This brings me neatly back to the advertising issue. I don’t really have any money; I’m deeply in debt and using all my spare money buying food for myself and things for my special-needs child. But of course, you can always find a few dollars here and there. I could probably scrape together maybe $50 per month without going into too much panic. I’d just have to save it from other spontaneous purchases, like a cup of coffee. With some discipline, I could probably do that.
But that’s not a very big marketing budget. And the thing with marketing is, conventional wisdom says you have to have a series. Otherwise, you just throw a lot of money after one book, and they rarely earn out unless, of course, that book is so insanely good that it just goes viral. But that’s a rarity.
What I hear from my friends in the genre fiction business—romance especially, but also from trawling writing and self-publishing threads on Reddit—is that you have to have a series. Even if you have a great series with the right covers, reviews, and metadata, the market is so saturated that it can be an uphill struggle. You can spend a lot on advertising before you really get the ball rolling.
Writing for the Story, Not the Market
I have enough stories to create more collections, but they wouldn’t be a series; they would be all over the place, timeline-wise. Remember, I’m writing a family saga about a family in three generations, spanning from 1967 to a projected 2068.
This scattered approach is how it’s best for me to write. It’s been like that for the past 15 years, even before we had our son and things got sucked into the big hole of special needs and 24/7 caretaking. One week, I might write a story about Carrie in high school in the 1990s. The next, I might write about her family in Yuma in the 2010s. Recently, I started a novel project about Deborah’s time in Paris, but I discovered it was just too big for me, so I had to go back to writing short stories.
The best way for me to write is to let myself write what I want to write at any given moment. The length, setting, time, characters—it all has to come from the heart, from something spontaneous, and it has to match whatever resources I have available. Otherwise, I’ll crash, like I did this summer when I was extremely stressed and tried to write that novel.
To make a long story short, all of this is to say that my tempo of writing and the kind of stuff I’m writing leave me very little room to do anything else but accept that I will have very few readers, at least in the foreseeable future.
Finding Meaning Beyond an Audience
So, can I live with that? Can I continue to write?
The answer is very subjective; it depends a lot on your psyche, your context, and what you want to do with your writing. If you want to have a writing business, this is obviously not good enough.
But if, like me, you’re doing it for more personal reasons—to express yourself and to leave something behind that other people might enjoy down the line—then perhaps it is. I intend to make provisions so that when I’m no longer here, the stories can be preserved online.
My overall goal when people read my stories is to give them a little bit of hope. I realize not all my stories have a happy ending, and some are really dark. I don’t want to write according to a formula. But that’s my guiding star. If you read more than a few of my stories, you will hopefully—no pun intended—experience that. Even when I write about something dark like depression, suicide, divorce, or not being able to hold a job, I try to instill a hopeful note. My hope is that you, as a reader, can see yourself in that and find some strength.
For me, that is a really meaningful guiding star. I write not just for self-expression, but also to leave something behind that is hopeful.
I guess you could sum it up like this: because I have these very strong inner drives, I have to keep writing, even if almost nobody is reading. The first reason is that I can’t not write; I have to express myself. The second is that if I don’t continue, then there won’t be anything for people to eventually find and read. And the third reason is that when I’m not stressed about it, writing gives me energy and sanity in a life that has very little of either.
The Writer’s Lottery: A Final Word
Are those reasons enough for everyone? No. I once had a friend who said, “I’m just creating for myself. I don’t need anyone to read me.” I don’t believe him. I believe that everyone who creates stories needs someone to read them. If you’re writing books, on some level, you want other people to read your stuff and hopefully enjoy it.
That’s the big difficulty for me when I feel that so few people are reading, and my chances of reaching more are so slim. But I guess it comes down to this: if I should boil everything down to the one single thing that keeps me going, it is that if I give up, then people will definitely not find my stuff and enjoy it. Then it’s over.
Many people liken modern book publishing to a lottery. The chances of getting read by many people are very slim, but they’re not zero. However, if you don’t play—if you don’t put your tickets in the lottery—then your chances automatically drop to zero.
And that is not going to happen. I will keep going. So you’re going to have to stick with me for a while.
I hope that for those of you struggling with either creative writing or a blog, and you feel like you have no readers, you can use something from these considerations. So hang in there. If you hang in there long enough, maybe you’ll find that, as they say, the biggest ingredient in success is persistence. Even if things look dire and it seems like you haven’t accomplished anything in years, you have to keep going. Otherwise, it all stops.
So keep going. Promise me that.
-Chris
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PS. This newsletter’s forgotten story pick which might resonate with you. A little piece about dreams and ambitions that may or may never be, so yeah … very apropos. And one of the best short stories I have ever written, if I do say so myself.
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