the vicious circle of the strange square
Oct. 24th, 2011 11:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
violetcheetahIt's not that I've been doing a lot of writing over the last couple of weeks, I've just been doing a lot of "selling myself." I don't know which makes me feel more emotionally nekkid: writing soul-bearing blog posts about self-mutilation, or trying to craft a letter that will entice an agent to adopt my novel or picture book. Part of the problem with the marketing side of things is that marketing is about making money, and I grew up poor and Baptist, so even now as an agnathiest, I have major hangups any time I do anything to try to make money, especially if I'm sullying the Pure White Innocence of My Arte with evil evil greed.
The memoir continues to sell, despite my doing basically nothing to promote it. I broke my record with a whopping 15 sales in August, and tied my previous record of 12 in September; for October, I'm already at 13. It's freaky, but it's not shameful because I haven't been actively trying to sell copies. Of course, I'm writing about it here, tooting my own horn in public, which is uncomfortable, but still.
So then I decided to set up an author page on Facebook. And then I even took out an ad, luring poor, unsuspecting people to the author page, where I have greedily posted links enticing them to buy the memoir, and where I've posted links to blog entries, which are of course written by me, so I'm further enticing them with my deathless prose.
Then I got an email from the company that makes my favorite nutrition bars; they were having an essay contest where you were supposed to write about something you dream of doing, and how 5,000 bucks would help you fulfill that dream. So I wrote about writing, and the difficulty of juggling a full-time job and writing, and no, I wouldn't go crazy and quit, but it'd be nice to take off a week every month or so to devote to writing. But the whole contest thing isn't shameful, even though it's about money, maybe because I'm not directly selling my writing. However...
In the short essay, I said that it's hard to even find the time and mental space to contact agents for the novel I've already finished. And that got me thinking guiltily that I'd had a plan to follow through with that, but it had been a few weeks since I'd dealt, so I should really get back to that. So I checked my sent email, and: not a few weeks, but five frickin' months. Oh. Well, then. So I started looking through the writing-related White List on LiveJournal, found an agency that had contacts for young adult novels and for picture books, and over the course of more than an hour on Friday night wrote up two letters with three extremely short paragraphs each, mostly recycled from the previous agent letter, trying to convince them that they should take me on. It isn't shameful — these people are in the business as a business, and it's not like they are paying me to read my stuff — but it still requires me to feign self-esteem, to act like I think I deserve to be published. Which I do believe. Sorta. I think the two manuscripts are good; I just don't feel like they are. Objective versus subjective. So it's nerve-wracking, and it leaves me feeling like I'm putting quarters in an emotional slot machine: there's the irrational hope of an acceptance payoff (acceptance not just of the manuscript, but of me as a writer, which is tied up with me as a person having value), but the dread of rejection after rejection, which will likely be hanging out there for up to 8 weeks, hope-dread, dread-hope, any time I think about it.
And then I sent another query on Saturday afternoon, or another difecta of picture book and novel. And another on Sunday morning for the novel. And another for the novel Sunday night, at which point I joked that I could take today off, right? But then I sent another novel query late this morning. Hey, I might as well feed all the quarters into the slot machine in one trip; it turns out the dread-hope angst isn't really even arithmetic, because I don't feel any more frazzy now than I did Friday. Of course the frazz from Friday would probably have decreased by now if I hadn't kept going, but it wouldn't be gone completely, so I win. Maybe it's just my inertia problem: hard to get started, but then hard to get stopped. But at least I'm finally doing something.
The memoir continues to sell, despite my doing basically nothing to promote it. I broke my record with a whopping 15 sales in August, and tied my previous record of 12 in September; for October, I'm already at 13. It's freaky, but it's not shameful because I haven't been actively trying to sell copies. Of course, I'm writing about it here, tooting my own horn in public, which is uncomfortable, but still.
So then I decided to set up an author page on Facebook. And then I even took out an ad, luring poor, unsuspecting people to the author page, where I have greedily posted links enticing them to buy the memoir, and where I've posted links to blog entries, which are of course written by me, so I'm further enticing them with my deathless prose.
Then I got an email from the company that makes my favorite nutrition bars; they were having an essay contest where you were supposed to write about something you dream of doing, and how 5,000 bucks would help you fulfill that dream. So I wrote about writing, and the difficulty of juggling a full-time job and writing, and no, I wouldn't go crazy and quit, but it'd be nice to take off a week every month or so to devote to writing. But the whole contest thing isn't shameful, even though it's about money, maybe because I'm not directly selling my writing. However...
In the short essay, I said that it's hard to even find the time and mental space to contact agents for the novel I've already finished. And that got me thinking guiltily that I'd had a plan to follow through with that, but it had been a few weeks since I'd dealt, so I should really get back to that. So I checked my sent email, and: not a few weeks, but five frickin' months. Oh. Well, then. So I started looking through the writing-related White List on LiveJournal, found an agency that had contacts for young adult novels and for picture books, and over the course of more than an hour on Friday night wrote up two letters with three extremely short paragraphs each, mostly recycled from the previous agent letter, trying to convince them that they should take me on. It isn't shameful — these people are in the business as a business, and it's not like they are paying me to read my stuff — but it still requires me to feign self-esteem, to act like I think I deserve to be published. Which I do believe. Sorta. I think the two manuscripts are good; I just don't feel like they are. Objective versus subjective. So it's nerve-wracking, and it leaves me feeling like I'm putting quarters in an emotional slot machine: there's the irrational hope of an acceptance payoff (acceptance not just of the manuscript, but of me as a writer, which is tied up with me as a person having value), but the dread of rejection after rejection, which will likely be hanging out there for up to 8 weeks, hope-dread, dread-hope, any time I think about it.
And then I sent another query on Saturday afternoon, or another difecta of picture book and novel. And another on Sunday morning for the novel. And another for the novel Sunday night, at which point I joked that I could take today off, right? But then I sent another novel query late this morning. Hey, I might as well feed all the quarters into the slot machine in one trip; it turns out the dread-hope angst isn't really even arithmetic, because I don't feel any more frazzy now than I did Friday. Of course the frazz from Friday would probably have decreased by now if I hadn't kept going, but it wouldn't be gone completely, so I win. Maybe it's just my inertia problem: hard to get started, but then hard to get stopped. But at least I'm finally doing something.
