Maintaining Perspective:
By Thio Isobel Moss
This is going to be a bit of an odds-and-ends post because I’m dealing with some post-viral fatigue. I feel normal for a few hours each day, get some work done, then — Bam! — I feel like I have the flu. It isn’t pretty.
I was very excited early last week because one of the bookseller reviewers for Blind Spot requested the ARC for Bump. Not only that, but there are currently twice the number of preorders for Bump as there were for Blind Spot.
If you guessed two, you would be correct.
Admittedly, both of these are small signals, but they are massively encouraging, nonetheless. It is going to take longer to find my audience than, in the starry-eyed haze of my pre-publishing author brain, I originally imagined.
Oddly enough, I’m okay with that.
I watched a content creator on Instagram who creates these incredible Rococo-era dresses. A friend criticized how one of them looked on her, and she can no longer enjoy wearing the dress.
This reminded me of my retail days. I was super excited one day because I had purchased a new camera to celebrate my birthday. At that time, finances were even tighter than they are now. Shelling out $100 for the camera was not just a splurge, but borderline irresponsible. One of my coworkers, who was involved in dog shows and had professional camera equipment, expressed disappointment with my purchase. She’d thought I was going to get a real camera.
Although I did use my camera, even garnering some academic praise for a series of butterfly photos I took, I always felt ashamed of my camera after that.
This week, I also saw an author with 6,000+ views on her video, expressing discouragement about finding her audience. This was just after I had checked how many views my posts were getting. Now, I have not attempted any videos, nor do I intend to, and I am still struggling with social media in general.
This author may have been professionally published, which could alter how we view success. I don’t know if it was her first book or her fifteenth, or really anything about her situation. But I started to compare our situations with a tinge of masochistic humor.
It was very tempting to feel discouraged. March, despite my one-star rating, was my best sales month. That’s also the month when I spend the most on advertising. April was a slow month for royalties and spending. For May, I am trying to spend modestly because advertising two books, once Bump arrives, will obviously cost more than one. So, it’s just a slow period right now — predictably so.
I also saw a post from a very successful author that was at once both out of character and yet in character. I don’t know what had prompted it, but it was obviously an emotional response to something. It was…more colorful than I would have expected; I’d love to know what it was a reaction to.
In any case, it struck me how much I let external things influence, or even dictate, my emotions. It’s a rough way to live and unfair to everyone involved. In this age, we share more than ever, and it’s easy to forget that joy, inspiration, and interest are typically found in those things that make us and our journey unique.
Let's make a pact to appreciate the experiences that make us individuals and focus less on the noise around us — the offhand comments, the comparisons, the metrics that only tell part of the story.
Because at the end of the day, the dress was still beautiful, the camera still took those photos, and the book was still worth writing. That noise never created anything worthwhile; we do.
