Hope Springs...

Well, here it is, a new year. And even though the pandemic is still with us, making life miserable, I still keep hoping that Things Will Be Better This Year.

You know, that all my Loved Ones (including myself) will stay healthy, that Truth and Justice will win in the end, that I will get better at getting our books published On Time, and not have to keep delaying the publication date. Mostly, that we will sell more books. Or cosplay prosthetics. That we will sell more of something.

I seldom write about how we are doing, sales wise, because I'm embarrassed. Strangely, it never seems to matter that we get payments from our distributor regularly. They aren't for 1000s of dollars. And yet, everywhere I look, I see ads proclaiming things like, "Sell thousands of books overnight with no effort!", or "Learn from this fledgling author who hit #1 on the Best Seller Lists!", or something similar.

If it's too good to be true...

But hope springs eternal, right?

I've fallen for a couple of these, trying to learn how to market more effectively. I mean, if people don't know about our books, how can we hope to sell more of them? Alas, these programs all seem to call for skills I don't really have.

I mean, if I had an IT department I could go to and say, "Here are 3 pages I need added to my website. How long do you need to get them functional?" That would be one thing. I'd even give them exactly what the page should look like and what it should say. I can do that much. But it's the behind the scenes type of stuff that often leaves me confused and feeling inadequate. Where does this button link to? How do you set up a link between a file-sharing website and the buttons on this webpage? How do I include detailed instructions for doing something I've never done?

Okay, pity party is over. I am not my only resource. I have friends and family and groups who can help me figure out all those things I need to figure out in order to do what I want to do. No, I don't like marketing, but I can't afford to have somebody else do it for me. And, most of the marketing plans I've listened to are simply more of the same stuff I've already tried. So, time for new stuff. Time to get a little creative. That I can do. 

Surprise!

Even though I have plenty of projects I am currently trying to work on, the back of my mind has been entertaining itself fitting bits and pieces together into another. Over the last few days, I've caught a glimpse or two of what it was working on.

The setting is dystopian. Huge corporations do whatever they want to do, in order to make another buck. The rich higher officials of those corporations are hardly even aware of the workers who actually do the work, and don't give it a second thought when given the opportunity to cut jobs, ship jobs some place where they payroll would be cheaper, or even replace workers completely with automation. They own so many politicians that laws don't get passed without their approval first. In fact, politicians don't get elected without their help. Meanwhile, the middle class shrivels as prices go up and salaries stagnate or even shrink. It gets so bad, even those families who manage to keep two full-time jobs are homeless. City streets - and even small towns - become war zones because working hard and being good people doesn't get anybody anywhere. They have to fight to keep what they have, and fight even harder to get what they want.

What is going on? I don't like dystopian works; I find them depressing, and I fight my own depression every day, so why inflict more of it on myself? I don't like books/movies/tv shows with 'a cast of thousands', as I find it impossible to sort out who is whom. I don't like political intrigue; it all boils down to greed, and I like to think that some people have other motivations than that. I hate the idea that working hard gets you nowhere.

This plot had everything I hated. Why would my subconscious even consider such a story?

And then it dawned on me. It wasn't. I'd been paying some attention to the nightly news lately, and my subconscious was on overload: Welcome to the modern world.