How to Keep Writing When Your Books Keep Flopping

There’s only one surefire way for a writer to achieve zero sales, and that’s to write and publish precisely nothing.

Nothing fails quite like failing to produce anything to get out there in the public domain.

But what if you have published works and are still seeing a line of stubborn goose eggs on your sales dashboard? A novel that registers no sales. A short story collection you can’t even give away via a freebie offer?

The temptation to give up, throw in the towel, call it a day will be strong. I know this because I’ve been there, and for many of my books, I’m still there.

Maybe I should take a hint and flip close the lid of my laptop, shut down my desktop and admit it’s not happening. It ain’t gonna be. Go and do something else instead.

Well, that’s precisely what I do go and do. For a while, at least.

I’ve been lucky enough to make a living through copywriting – harder these days, of course, with the advent of I’m sure you know what. I’ve won awards, pitches, praise, pay rises etc. But it’s for my fiction writing that I really yearn to get recognition in terms of sales.

But no matter the depths of the disappointments I experience when I make a new book available for pre-order only to receive zero pre-orders, or I release a new work into the wild that’s so roundly ignored it must surely be camouflaged, I still come back for more.

Sure, I might sulk for a few weeks, wondering if there’s some big scheme of things that’s stopping my audience from finding my work. Whether an ancestor of mine sinned so bad, their lineage was cursed for evermore to wallow in mediocrity of failure.

Of course, there’s a distinct possibility that there simply isn’t an audience for my books. That I write for people who don’t read books. Or that people simply don’t want to read what I write.

But what brings me back to my screen and notepad time after time us, I believe, the (forlorn) hope, the outside chance that one of my stories will resonate. A character will connect. A plot will captivate. All it takes is one, I keep telling myself. And if I keep on writing, I’m giving myself a better chance of achieving finding what that one is.

I also write because I enjoy it, I suppose. It’s better than sitting around feeling sorry for myself, or ruminating on past failures, such as why my first and longest book, The Diamond Rush never captured the imagination of more than a few readers via Barnes & Noble who gave it glowing reviews. Their life-affirming feedback is now 9 years old. The book hasn’t attracted a single review since, or, I suspect a full read. No idea why.

Indeed, none of my other works has received a single review on Barnes & Noble since. But still I plough on, farming my mind for ideas that will interest me enough to stick with them for long enough to finish writing about them.

There’s got to be an element of luck involved in achieving success. Most people who’ve made a success of themselves often say lady luck has played a role, but she seems to look the other way when I come along.

Before this descends into something morbid, let me wrap things up with a call to anyone who feels like it’s not worth keeping writing to keep writing. Even if you don’t feel like publishing, keep writing. But get your work out there alongside the rest of us.

There are only a finite amount of readers out there, each with a limited amount of spare time to escape into the worlds we create. So cherish every single page read or freebie download or book sale you get.

And know that if you’re regularly staring at a line of goose eggs on your sales dashboard, there are millions of us doing exactly the same thing. But still we keep writing.

Jon Lymon writes novels, the vast majority of which don’t sell at levels that are worth writing home about - or anywhere else for that matter.