What are you doing?

I’m finally mad I can’t make a passive income from my work, yet to do this, the part they always gloss over is marketing. I wouldn’t go along with someone else’s plan, who was trying to prove it was possible to go up an Amazon sales chart with your own books, I haven’t cracked any codes, if I want coverage I have to work harder than I would creating.

So I looked for places to sell Elysian, thinking I found one. I’ve not received any confirmation my query was received so I’m assuming this avenue is a dead one. Last thing I did was list on a website for free. It’s not generated anything, now it’s like once a year I get motivated to do something, fail at it then give up for another 12 months. I’m being as naive about it as I am I’ll be given a library job just being in one. I’m not even asking for a desk and a key pass, just give me something stupid and pay me a pittance I’ll shut up for now. I just want an income, so not being able to profit from my creativity pisses me off. I want someone to stand in for me, go and do marketing and just put in the legwork I’m unable (or let’s be honest, unwilling) to do. I’m that asshole who thinks they’re entitled to profit from their work without being more proactive. I feel like I could meet someone at the library, or someone will introduce me to someone who’ll elevate me or be willing to guide me through this. But I also don’t want it to be me in the spotlight so I need a stand-in, I need someone else to go by my pen name. The problem with that being people already know it’s not me and I’d have to ask them to be quiet about it. I’m the problem, really. I’m Taylor Swift only I have no confidence in myself or my talent so I’ll never sell out stadiums or force homeless people in Scotland to find alternative lodgings because my audience needs the hotel room for that weekend.

I wanted to outsource all that and they can take a cut of the profits. I thought about all the work I did for the publisher and decided I don’t regret the blogs I wrote, they were good, I made use of them anyway. I regret showing up for the damn Slack meetings and doing any recordings for her. Maybe if I’d let them design the cover it wouldn’t have looked so shitty, I really didn’t mean use the same colours etc. I put too much into everything to get so little back I wish I’d lowered my expectations entirely. Now I have a product it’s like I want someone to just fucking sell it, only it costs money to do it. So I thought if I sold one story I could say I’d sold something to someone and they put it up somewhere. 

I should’ve checked their FB page, they’ve not posted since 2020 and it’s roughly around the date when that thing that killed a lot of businesses kicked in. The FB messenger function is set to autoreply so whether a human gets back to me is another matter, but the lack of a confirmation email suggests this is all going into the ether, which is where I’ve been. And I used to be comfortable with that scenario since there was no pressure to make a profit, but feeling like I should be paid for this shit, that’s not a familiar feeling. That I should be paid for anything I’m doing right now, I actually think I should be and nobody else would stand for that.

I’m also doing the other dumb thing of looking for reviews. The sense that this will be another wasted effort on my part to get attention, I am approaching all of this with such a feeling of defeat and pessimism that it’s pointless to try. And I know I haven’t done half of what other people did but they were driven, even the people I hate had too much confidence and drive, had too big a point to make. And the luck factor hasn’t worked for me, so I keep asking myself what the fuck do I actually want now? Just give me fuckin’ money. Buy my shit, it’s right there. It’s just sitting on a table in the big Amazon marketplace gathering ether dust. One day I’ll take it down but for now, just buy it.

I say all this but if someone at the library was like, hey we can showcase your shit, I’ll want to kill myself so maybe not. My only excuse would be I was trying to raise money for one of them and even then I’d have to cough up a bunch of hard copies to sell at my expense.