How’s the new book doing? Do you really want to know?

Do you want to know the worst part of being a self-published author?

Other self-published authors.

Facebook has a lot of groups started by self-published authors so that they can sit around and network and trade tips on promotion. Or at least, that’s what the stated goals are. That’s what they want you to believe.

But that’s not what these groups do. In reality, they sit around and beg other authors to make them feel like ‘real’ writers.

They’re not. They’re self-published. Writers get paid to write. Self-published authors write horrible things that nobody, including their own families most of the time, ever reads.

I know. I’M a self-published author. If run-on sentences were a crime I’d be doing 50 to life. Under no circumstances do I believe I’m a real writer or any better than the other hacks out there self-publishing. And, despite my earlier comments about self-published authors writing “horrible things”, I certainly don’t mean any offense to them.

I think everyone should publish a book once or twice. It can be a very healthy outlet.

My problem is the self-published authors that truly believe that they are the next Stephen King or Dan Brown. Spend two minutes on one of the Facebook sites where the deluded gather to commiserate their lack of commercial success and you’ll want to give up reading altogether. Read some of the descriptions of their books and you might want to give up breathing.

Why is it so hard for people to admit that they aren’t very good writers? It’s liberating! Admit to yourself that you’re not very good and then writing becomes fun again.

Everyone is so afraid of looking bad.

To whom?!

A bunch of faceless strangers?

Why would anyone care about the opinion of someone they will never meet?

So how is my new book doing you ask?

Well, I’ll tell you.

Horrible.

It joins my previous seven collections of odd short stories as some of the least-read literature to ever be published.

Let me put it this way. Yesterday a nice website called www.free-ebooks.net chose my book next to be an Editor’s Choice. Quite an honor. What that means is that they send an email blast to all of their subscribers suggesting it, along with eleven others, to be downloaded for free.

You want full transparency? (you say you do but you might change your mind in a few sentences… it gets sort of sad)

Since that email blast my book has been downloaded (as of this exact moment) 123 times.

Simply Keto: Your Essential 21-Day Full Plan With 125 Recipes, one of the other books recommended, has been downloaded 316 times.

I am losing to a ketogenic cookbook that promises the reader they will lose 20 pounds a month. Almost three times as many people looked at the two books and decided to download that one.

Still think I harbor hidden thoughts that I’m a brilliant writer?

Think I should change my book’s description to add a promise of weight loss?

Nope.

In fact, here is my book’s description; A collection of short stories isn’t really a book. It’s more like dozens of ideas that could have been books if they were thought of by someone with a better attention span. To put it another way; if you took an infinite number of Shakespeares and put them in front of an infinite number of typewriters with an infinite amount of time they still wouldn’t come up with the complete works of Lance Manion.

Do you have ANY clue what I’m talking about?

Of course you don’t. It’s not meant to make sense. If someone is looking for a book that makes sense there is nothing more duplicitous I could do than try to convince them to download my book.

They would hate it.

So I describe it in a way that would only appeal to someone in the mood to read the equivalent of a thousand-word Rorschach test.

That cookbook is sounding pretty good about now huh?

Would you really want to live in a world where my books were actually popular?

Not me.

So in conclusion, write your own book already! For the fun of it. It will probably suck but you should be the last person to care. And finally, please, I’m begging you, stay out of the Facebook self-published author groups.