Why?

Sometimes I wonder why I’ve chosen writing as a career. Okay, so I haven’t exactly ‘chosen’ it, I’ve been writing for most of my life, I believe I’m better than average at it, and I have been out of work for a while so it seems sensible to try and make a living out of a hobby that does have a potential income attached to it.

Days like today, though, make me wonder if I’m really cut out for it. I had a writing career previously under another name, it was only a hobbyist kind of thing then, and circumstances forced me to give it up, but before they did I was starting to do well enough that I was making enough money to believe I could do it full time.

Now I am back at the beginning, trying to get my books ready for release, and trying to promote the novella I have already released. My novella is free on Kindle today and tomorrow to try and generate some interest and I have been looking around for places to promote and let people know about my freebie; one of the places I visited is the Amazon discussion boards, where I made one post before getting discouraged and deciding not to bother.

The rules of the discussion boards have changed since I was last there, several years ago, and apparently you are no longer allowed to promote your own books there, as was pointed out to me almost straight away – that’s fine, I can live with that, I wasn’t aware of it but am now; my problem is that the person who pointed it out to me spotted one typo in my post, which was written quickly, and immediately declared that if my post is anything to go by my book must be unreadable.

I don’t mind that I was told what I posted was against the rules, I don’t mind either that my spelling mistake was pointed out to me, what I mind is the pretty rude way my book is declared bad – without it even being looked at – on the basis of 1 post on a forum. This has reminded me of why I didn’t much like the amazon discussion boards when I was using them before, there’s a lot of rude people on there, people who feel they can be insulting just because they can; as I remember, the behaviour tripped over into trolling on a few occasions, which gets to me.

This kind of thing does nothing to help me with my issues surrounding socialising and interacting with people; I’m already struggling with them. I don’t do well at dealing with people, and encountering rude or inconsiderate people makes me want to withdraw and avoid the entire social media world, whichever corner of it I might be trying.

My first full-length novel is due out in January, and I know I’m going to have to work something out before then. Right now I’m thinking I will be doing very little with social media, it’s just not me, and sticking with paid advertising, at least until I can afford to hire someone to handle the social media stuff for me.

If anyone has good suggestions on how to handle this stuff without making my brain go into meltdown and giving me panic attacks that send me running for the hills, I’d really appreciate it.