This Indie Author’s Life

Hi. Yeah. It’s been a long time since I’ve actually talked about what I’m doing. Okay. What am I doing these days? I just finished work on the third Erica Jensen mystery, which I hope will come out on May, whenever Memorial Day is. Don’t even know. Yeah, end of May, sometime around then. Around Memorial Day. And what else am I doing? Oh yeah, I’m trying to get a production meeting together for the second film that I’m going to be directing because as you may know, those of you who might actually pay attention to what I’m saying or read what I write, I do screenwriting now and have been doing that for quite a while, it feels like. Actually, it feels like a short time, but it’s been quite a while actually. I shudder to think of how much time has passed while I’ve been doing this because I got to tell you, screenwriting is no easy path to take and has become even less easy with the passage of time and the contraction of the industry.

Yes, contraction, indeed. Sales, tough stuff. And when you become a screenwriter, you become a salesperson. Yeah, that’s the long and the short of it. So good luck to everybody who’s trying to get started as a screenwriter these days. Me, I’m going to be 70 in July. So the things I do at this point have to be … They have to enrich me as well as enrich the world in whatever way I can do. And I think I’ve reached the point where I need to say something about what has happened to me over the past 10 or 20 years. And people are not going to like hearing what I have to say, unfortunately, because being an indie author has been a wonderful experience in many ways, but it has been a terrible experience in other ways. And part of it is listening to the bullshit people spread around about this stuff, about how awesome everything is. “Oh, I have so much control.” Yes, you have so much control over (only) so much.

And you have to make wise decisions as far as how you are going to reach readers, what you’re going to do, how you present yourself, all of these things. All of these things are true no matter what sort of writing you do. So having said all that, I will just say at this point, my health comes before anything else. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned from being online, it’s that you can do a little too much online and depend on it a little too much. And it is much better for your health when you do things out there in the world and meet people and just take a chance and make a friend, reach out to somebody, go somewhere, visit a state park, anything, do something other than writing, and do something other than marketing. Just live, take some time to live. If anybody is interested in enjoying a community that supports writers that support one another, whatever that support may be, whether it’s learning how to set up a Shopify store or how to promote your books better, I would love to know.

Please email me or hit me up on Instagram or whatever or leave a comment under this video because we need to do something. I mean, ask yourself honestly, is your life better now than it was 10 or 15 years ago? And I direct this to all authors, let alone indie authors who I can just imagine. I mean, all I can say is, I made the New York Times bestseller list in 2011 twice. I now make poverty level income from my books, period. And a lot of that is due to the fact that I’ve been focusing so much on screenwriting. This may have to change. All right, then. I’ll be seeing you. Take care.

Oh, by the way, to that guy who made number one on Amazon and took a screenshot of it, I have a collage I should probably make of the many screenshots I took when I made the top 10 or top 100 of wherever, whether it was the US or the UK, I was doing great in both markets and then [pfft!] nothing.

So yeah, it’s so very meaningful, that screenshot. Yeah. Okay. That’s how meaningful that is. But I lied when I said that I made poverty level income. I make well below poverty level income. It’s just wretched.

That’s it. So I’ll be seeing you. Take care.