Why You Should Keep Writing After Self-Publishing

Instead of stopping like I did

Photo by Kai Pilger on Unsplash

I self-published my first 80K word novel when I was 21. I poured time, love, and money into it, lured by the promise that as soon as the book hit the shelves, it would be an overnight sensation. I would be rich and famous.

Surely you know what comes next. Unfortunately, I didn’t.

I hit publish. Ordered a box of books. Gave one to everyone I knew. And then I waited for the day in the near future when I could quit my day job.

But nothing happened. Well, almost nothing. The first year, I made a few hundred dollars, mostly as my grandma and a few other people I knew bought the book.

The second year, I didn’t even break triple digits — it seemed like my marketing plan of “Do Nothing” and “Don’t Tell People You Wrote a Book” wasn’t working. I started to lose my interest in writing. After all, if it wasn’t going to make me money, I didn’t want to do it.

The third year, when tax time rolled around, I didn’t get an Amazon tax form for my royalties. Confused, I looked into it and found out why. You don’t have to pay taxes on royalties if you made less than $10 in that tax year.

The night I made that discovery, I plummeted into despair and promised my husband, Curtis…