I Dreamed a Dream...

On King-sized author dreams, disappointments, getting older, and coping with the demise of Old Publishing.

Welcome to Missives from a Dark Wood, my personal blog subset of Through a Glass, Darkly! Here is where you’ll find musings on life, the universe and everything else that strikes my fancy. If this isn’t your thing, no worries — you can update your subscription preferences here to keep these Missives out of your inbox.

I wrote this post nearly two years ago and published it on the Substack that was supposed to be my personal blog, Missives from a Five-Acre Wood. It’s the only thing I posted there that’s worth keeping. I’m deleting that other blog so I can close that mental browser tab for good, but I wanted to share it here for posterity.

This is where I stood then, reflecting on my writing and publishing journey, the state of publishing in general, and what brought me to self-publishing and posting my fiction here on Substack. Since writing these words, I’ve settled into being satisfied with writing here and self-publishing as a way of life, even if it’s not a lucrative one. It’s a far cry from the dream I dreamed when I was starting out, but as dreams go, this one I’m living isn’t too bad.

As long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to be a writer. I’ve written stories since I was old enough to hold a pencil and string letters together to spell words phonetically (and I made them up even before that), but it wasn’t until some time in middle school that I really began to think of myself as a writer — more specifically, a fiction writer. Even so, I think it was reading Stephen King’s Danse Macabre in high school that firmly cemented my dream of someday being an author of dark fiction novels.

After various attempts, I completed my first full-length novel when I was 25, which I mostly wrote at my desk during lunch hours at my corporate administrative assistant job. After flirting with submissions and getting a couple of rejections, I threw it onto the internet, where it generally got good feedback from those who actually read it. Still, I felt it wasn’t really ready for prime time, so I packed it away and moved on.

This was way back in the year 2000, when publishing hadn’t yet gone through the seismic shift that would be brought about by Amazon, e-books and the advent of easy self-publishing. When it was still possible to have a story like Stephen King’s — wondering how you’ll pay the bills and afford medication for your kid one day, the next being handed a life-changing advance and suddenly being on your way to becoming a household name.

Nowadays, unless you’re already a celebrity, if publishers pay advances at all, they certainly aren’t life-changing. Most of them might cover a month’s worth of expenses, if you budget.

Back then, publishers also did most of the work of marketing and publicizing books so that writers could spend most of their time, y’know, writing. Visibility and sales were mostly on them. Now, it really doesn’t matter whether you’re traditionally published with a NY publisher, a small indie press or doing it yourself on KDP, sales and promotion are all on you, and that’s a full-time job. The actual writing largely gets done in the cracks.

To an extent, since I packed away that first novel, I’ve achieved my dream. I wrote my first “ready for primetime” novel in 2008 for NaNoWriMo, though it went through a few years’ worth of extensive editing and revisions before it was truly RFP. By this time, the Kindle was on the scene and already causing major disruptions to the publishing industry. Established authors were already complaining about shrinking advances and having to be their own publicists.

By the time my novel was ready, several authors already had some pretty amazing success stories from having published their own work through KDP and CreateSpace (as well as LuLu). After weighing a lot of different pros and cons, I decided to self-publish that first book. It was not a best-seller, but it sold in respectable numbers — not enough by any means to let me quit my day job, but enough to let me hold my head up and call myself an author.

In 2015, after I’d self-pubbed a few more books, an acquisitions editor from a midsized publishing house got in touch about that first book. She’d read it, wanted a sequel, saw that it was self-published, and offered me a contract to re-publish it through them and turn it into a series. I spent several days investigating this publishing company to make sure they were for real and not a vanity press or a scam, because this sounded too good to be true. But they were for real, and truth be told, there had always been this niggling voice deep down in my subconscious whispering that I wasn’t a REAL author unless a real publisher wanted to publish my work. So I signed.

They didn’t offer me an advance, but the royalties were a decent percentage. There were some things they promised that never materialized, like audio books (they still own the audio rights but have never done anything with them). They didn’t get my book into brick-and-mortar stores — I found out that if I wanted that to happen, I had to do the work of contacting the stores and convincing them to carry my book, and I didn’t have time for that. They also promised help with marketing and promotion, which was the biggest reason I had signed. That turned out mostly to be providing training and resources to help me get better at marketing myself.

A year after signing, Restless Spirits made its debut as a traditionally published novel, and in the following years it was followed up with a couple of sequels. That voice taunting me that I wasn’t a “real” author was silenced. But I was not living the dream. Sales were actually worse than when it had been indie, and that despite my often giving it away for free to gain new fans.

After that experience, I decided to stick with self-publishing, where I’m more in control and I don’t have to split royalties with a middle man. I’ve published a few more books since then, but I haven’t had the time or money to properly devote to marketing, and so they languish. Royalties and glowing reviews occasionally trickle in, but they’re not a significant income stream.

This is not the dream I signed up for. And I’ve been wrestling with that a lot over the last few years. In the midst of all of this, I’ve managed to carve out a pretty decent living as a freelance writer, writing mostly pet health and lifestyle content for major brands and publications. That’s not something I sought out — it just sort of fell into my lap, and I’m very grateful. I’m writing for a living, even if it’s not the kind of writing I wanted to do as my living.

But part of me still dreams those author dreams I dreamed as a young person. The dream of that runaway best-seller that will change my life. The dream of devoting all of my writing time to fiction instead of another article on how to tell if your puppy or kitten has diarrhea and what that might mean for their health. But I’m so burned out on the marketing side of it and the reality is that you can’t have one without the other.

Now that I’m in the middle of my life and looking down the ever-shortening road that is the second half, I’m figuring out that those dreams I dreamed at 17, 25, even 35 and 40 are no longer serving me. I’m not sure the kind of writing career I originally dreamed about and longed for is even possible. As I edge closer to retirement age (as if my generation will get to retire), new dreams are forming and new possibilities are opening up. And I’m wondering where writing fits in to all of that.

Over the last few years I’ve tried on not being a fiction writer. And there’s a lot to recommend that. It felt freeing, not having that pressure to write, or that guilt when I’m doing something else that I should be writing. Letting go of worrying about book sales and constantly checking my sales dashboards. Not having to bother with marketing or advertising. Realizing that I don’t really need to have a social media presence if I’m not trying to sell books, and boy howdy, is that refreshing.

But it never sticks, because being a writer is part of my core makeup. There’s a discontent in my spirit during these long periods of not writing any fiction that is only cured by doing so. Which answers the question, why do I write? But it doesn’t answer, why do I bother publishing? Why not just write for myself, when I feel like it, and not worry about being read?

I suppose that’s because it’s not really satisfying to create something and then not share it with anyone. Which is why I decided to start posting my fiction here on Substack.

Lately, I’ve been wondering if that’s enough. If I can let go of this idea that I need to publish books, which I then have to market and try to sell, and just let my writing organically live out its life here, being read by whoever happens to find it. And I can just write. That sounds really appealing, but I guess time will tell if I can be satisfied with that.

I haven’t been looking too closely at the state of publishing lately, either indie or traditional, mostly because it’s all too depressing. It’s not looking great on either front. From what I have seen, I’m wondering if this may be the better way to go, after all. It’s looking like the future of publishing is shaping up to look a lot like self-publishing under the subscription model, and small indie presses putting out books that cater to small niches.

I think I like that. And I think maybe, if I do decide to keep doing books, that’s the way I want to go — with one of those small niche publishers, if I can find one that’ll have me. And I’m probably far from the only self-pubber who’s burned out on self-promotion and trying to game Amazon’s algorithms who is pondering a move in that direction.

So I dreamed a dream when I was young, and to an extent I lived it. Now that dream is evolving and diminishing and making space for new dreams and new possibilities. That’s kind of an unsettling place to be. But it’s also kind of exciting.

Are you trying to hold onto any dreams that aren’t really serving you anymore? Have you thought about how they might adapt and evolve? Or is it time to lay them down and pick up a new dream?

Until next time.

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Thanks for reading! I’m taking a break from posting fiction this week, but keep an eye out later this week for an update on what I’ve been working on and what you can expect here this month.