I quit! And it feels so good!!!

On a spur of whimsy, an offhand comment on twitter today, I made the decision to quit trying to market my books. And more importantly, to quit caring. It was directly linked to the impending release of Sims 4, and this makes perfect nerdy sense, lol! Let me explain…

This time next year, Sims 4 will release. And I realized that in the four years Sims 3 has been out, I’ve hardly even had a chance to play it yet. I even have an in-progress recreation of my fictional town, Lakeside Heights to play in, and I’m only just getting around to finishing that. Where has the time gone? Not all on writing, I know that for sure. A lot of it has gone to freaking out over sales and marketing and how to sell ebooks. I’m not going to pretend that all of that time could have gone straight into writing books instead, because I know I don’t quite work like that, but that might have been the time I decompressed by playing with my little pixel people. In a more decompressed and less neurotic headspace, I might even be closer to finished with my next releases by now.

So I quit. I don’t have enough books out to worry about marketing them effectively anyway. My two books, being a singular novel and singular short story, aren’t going to sell without any great feat. Especially as awkward and cross-genre as they are. It’s not worth the trouble right now. Whee! I quit, and it feels so great!!! I will not concern myself with selling books again until I release my next two books: Leila’s novel, and Corbin’s book of girlfriends, likely next summer or fall. Then I will have four releases to market and it will make more sense to spend time on that. But for now, I need to immerse myself in a creative space. And trying to sell books — caring if I do or if I don’t — infects my creative energy and eats it alive.

So I’m quitting book-selling news and blogs. Quitting Kboards, as informative as that place has been in the past six months. Quitting trying to find book blogs to submit review copies to. Quitting everything that doesn’t take less than five minutes a month. I quit! I may even quit checking my sales, because I don’t want to psych myself out about needing to worry about marketing again when I see that my meager sales start to tank even worse.

I will, however:
– write in my blogs about things other than publishing
– work on my next novel and story collection
– play lots of sims
– write and share a short illustrated story, to see if I can
– tweet whatever I want
– read and review books when I want
– make art, if I feel like it
– make some new things for my Etsy shop
– upload multitudes of unsorted travel photos from this summer
– clean my house and get ahead of my laundry situation
– help my son learn addition and subtraction
– get away from the internet sometimes
– experience daylight

Between now and next fall, that’s what I will be doing. And it will be glorious. There will be words and art and creation, and when I emerge from this cocoon, I will have a couple new book babies.