Here's how it works, folks.
You realize one day when you're about ten years old that what you want to do with your life is write fiction. Books and short stories and plays and sketch comedy and political articles and blog posts and poetry and even the occasional academic paper - the world of the written word is suddenly your oyster.
So, you spend the next ten to twenty years of your life honing your craft. At the beginning, you suck. You write oozy, goofy schlock that is highly reflective of everything you've read so far and want to emulate. Then, one day, it begins to suck a little less. And as time goes on, your work begins to occasionally show glimmers of promise.
So you begin submitting short stories to magazines, hoping against hope that you'll get something published as the first step on this journey toward ultimate super-stardom in the literary world. You've written a novel, so you edit the hell out of that and send it off to a bevy of agents. And you wait. And wait. And wait.
Then, they begin to slowly trickle in, day by day. These wonderful letters from all over the place, each bearing the return address of a place you're not going to need to write back to. These are the rejection letters, and the weight they place upon your heart is every bit as heavy as the name suggests. In your mounting frustration, you do at least keep one thing in perspective most of the time: every time you send something out, you're literally competing against thousands of other people, many of whom are as good or better than you are at your chosen craft.
Time marches on, and you begin to get busier. Life inserts itself into the space which your art previously had mostly to itself, and you begin to have less and less time for the failing marketing side of the game. You still write - God knows that will never be driven out of you - but you no longer spend so much time sending things off to publishers and agents...there's just so little time these days.
Then you discover the wonderful world of Amazon Kindle publishing. Unlike the early vanity press publishing - which carried with it a weird stigma that could haunt a writer's career forever - publishing on Amazon for the Kindle has its own eclectic charm among readers. It also frees you up to not worry about publishing costs, agents, or most of the other nonsense. You can just focus on telling a good story and getting it out there.
The one thing that doesn't change, though, is the competition. If anything, it's fiercer in the world of Kindle publishing, for the very fact that it's so easy to do. You try launching a few things over the course of several years, and every time you meet with the same dismal failure to succeed. In the end, you begin to question not only the approach itself, but indeed whether you're wasting your time altogether or not.
Well, I have good news: you're not wasting your time.
You realize one day when you're about ten years old that what you want to do with your life is write fiction. Books and short stories and plays and sketch comedy and political articles and blog posts and poetry and even the occasional academic paper - the world of the written word is suddenly your oyster.
So, you spend the next ten to twenty years of your life honing your craft. At the beginning, you suck. You write oozy, goofy schlock that is highly reflective of everything you've read so far and want to emulate. Then, one day, it begins to suck a little less. And as time goes on, your work begins to occasionally show glimmers of promise.
So you begin submitting short stories to magazines, hoping against hope that you'll get something published as the first step on this journey toward ultimate super-stardom in the literary world. You've written a novel, so you edit the hell out of that and send it off to a bevy of agents. And you wait. And wait. And wait.
Then, they begin to slowly trickle in, day by day. These wonderful letters from all over the place, each bearing the return address of a place you're not going to need to write back to. These are the rejection letters, and the weight they place upon your heart is every bit as heavy as the name suggests. In your mounting frustration, you do at least keep one thing in perspective most of the time: every time you send something out, you're literally competing against thousands of other people, many of whom are as good or better than you are at your chosen craft.
Time marches on, and you begin to get busier. Life inserts itself into the space which your art previously had mostly to itself, and you begin to have less and less time for the failing marketing side of the game. You still write - God knows that will never be driven out of you - but you no longer spend so much time sending things off to publishers and agents...there's just so little time these days.
Then you discover the wonderful world of Amazon Kindle publishing. Unlike the early vanity press publishing - which carried with it a weird stigma that could haunt a writer's career forever - publishing on Amazon for the Kindle has its own eclectic charm among readers. It also frees you up to not worry about publishing costs, agents, or most of the other nonsense. You can just focus on telling a good story and getting it out there.
The one thing that doesn't change, though, is the competition. If anything, it's fiercer in the world of Kindle publishing, for the very fact that it's so easy to do. You try launching a few things over the course of several years, and every time you meet with the same dismal failure to succeed. In the end, you begin to question not only the approach itself, but indeed whether you're wasting your time altogether or not.
Well, I have good news: you're not wasting your time.
* * *
The way you play the game is simple, folks. You know I'm a writer; if you're reading this (at least, shortly after I'm posting it), you're probably my Facebook friend. Or a friend of my Facebook friend. You're probably not very far down the chain of separation, and you're probably reading this because Facebook so very kindly informed you that I had posted something.
In order to succeed at this business, I need something from you. I need your business, first and foremost. I've posted, in the last week, ten short stories of mine to Amazon. They're there for your consumption, just waiting on the digital shelf to be read and enjoyed. Each one of them is (I think, at least) reasonably priced: you'll only pay $0.99, less than the price of a bottle of Coca-Cola, and for your dough you'll get a story that you can keep forever and ever. And if you don't have a Kindle? No big deal. Amazon lets you download the Kindle app for free to your computer or phone, no sweat. You could be reading my stories (and others) in no time.
So yeah, I really need your business. If you buy everything I'm offering, you're going to spend less than ten bucks, and I'm not suggesting you do even that (actually I am, but let's pretend I'm not getting greedy here).
Here's the other - and probably MUCH more important - thing I need from you: I need you to share this with other people.
I'm going to repeat that, because it's so very vital. I need you to share this with other people. This blog, my stories, my posts to Facebook...especially those. Some of you saw the other day when I uploaded my short stories that I posted each one on Facebook individually. I'll be doing that again soon, and shortly after that I'll be uploading some of my novels. Those of you who hit the "Like" button, thank you. Those of you who bought my stuff, thank you doubly. These are wonderful, helpful things, and I appreciate them from you. But the main thing that I'm asking you to do is, when you see something like that, don't just hit Like. Hit Share, and get that thing out to as many people as you possibly can. It's the easiest and yet the most effective way you have of helping me out. If it's a choice between you giving me $0.99 of your hard-earned money, and you sharing the opportunity to do so with four hundred other people...well, I'm going to take both, because surely you don't really NEED that $0.99, right?
Kidding aside (not kidding), I need your help, collectively, if I'm ever going to make a go of this as a career. It takes minimal effort to hit Like and Share on Facebook. Please, do me the solid favor of hitting both as often as you can. In return, I promise I'll keep writing all the wonderful and weird things that I write, and putting them on the digital shelf for you to check out when you have a little spare time, and a little spare cash.
With Love,
- J.M. Jennings
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