A week and a day to the official launch of my new pamphlet, ‘Lust for Death’ and one can’t help but wonder how it will be received. Standard writer’s wrorries, I’m sure. But when you’re going it alone with a self-published work, and a piece that’s actually involved a degree of financial risk to it really does hit home that there’s much scope for failure, and if it does prove disastrous, you’ve only got yourself to blame.
One reason I like to keep busy, other than working on the premise that if I have enough material out in the public domain I have a better chance of people accidentally discovering ymy work and actually liking it, is that fear of failure. The flops can be buried amongst the successes, or at least swept along by the blizzard of output and forgotten about. Well, that’s the theory.
I’m learning the hard way that while the Internet may be the medium where it’s at, and that it’s an amazing way of connecting with a global market that it would have previously been impossible to tap into, the sheer volume of material on the Internet – not to mention the volume of free material available on the Internet – makes it increasingly difficult to convince punters to part with their money. They expect free music. Hell, I expect free music. And they expect free writing. And yes, I expect free writing too. But I also do my level best to support independent writers I admire, and to buy their stuff when it comes to print.
So, only 25 copies of ‘Lust for Death.’ I’m not going to get rich off it, that’s for sure. But while my site and my MySpace blog receive hundreds of hits per week, there’s no guarantee of those hits translating to sales. There have been advance orders, which is pleasing. But how long it will take to empty the box containing all the copies ever produced…. well that remains to be seen, and is a cause of some anxiety. Think it’s time for a large Laphroaig. Cheers!
CN
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