Beware this is a bit of a random post. It would be more coherent if I had time to edit it! 😉

Longview Asylum, Cincinnati.

The publishing industry is in a state of flux. My take on this situation is in the title of this post. If a writer focuses too much on what is happening to publishing, their latest book ranking, and promoting, they will likely go crazy. Not that authors aren’t already by their very nature a little crazy. But focusing on the day to day details in publishing is about as bad as watching your daily stocks rise and fall.

I admit, I spend too much time looking at my statistics and reading about the latest thing to lift a book out of obscurity. But, I do believe the only way out is time. As i mentioned in a comment today on google+, I’m on year 22 of a 25 year Overnight success plan. I’m glad I started submitting fiction back in 1993.

So, how do I fight the urge to check the data every day? Mostly, sadly, adverbly, I don’t As the data gets less interesting, I pay less attention. I also fall back on my habits when I submitted short fiction. The more irons you have in the fire, the less important each individual one is to success.

One of the irons I put in the fire today was SELF-e. I uploaded Toils and Snares to it. SELF-e is a ebook service for public libraries. It is marketed as a discovery service. If your book is offered free and people read it, the more likely they will buy it or request the next one at their library.  It will be months before I see any feedback and then it will not be in sales, but the more I offer myself out there, the more likely people will find me.

When offering myself out there, I do my very best to limit my cries of “buy my books,” to cries of “buy it now on sale.” And the rest of the time, I’ll talk about process or share a bit of advice. I want to be that ‘cool bald writer’ who is very eclectic rather than that annoying bald writer whose record player is stuck in the same track endlessly begging for people to buy his books!

I’m off to Sucia Island in the Salish Sea with a bunch of high schoolers and some college folks. I’ll be taking word processor 1.2–a Write in the rain notebook, a comp book and pens and pencils.

Don’t let it kill you baby. Don’t let it get to you. The waiting is the hardest part. ~Tom Petty