Today
marks six months since I self-published my very first novel, Deferred Consumption. So, I thought I'd mark the occasion with a quick blog post about
what it's been like as an African-American author. To put it mildly, it’s
been one of the hardest things I’ve ever done in my life. But, it’s also been
one of the most rewarding and most exciting. When I first
set out to write Deferred Consumption, I really had no idea what I was getting
myself into. I just assumed that
everyone loved me and they would buy my book in record numbers. Boy was I wrong. Not that everyone doesn’t love me J, but that
they cared enough to buy my book the moment I said it was available for
purchase.
There
I was around 11:00pm on a Sunday night, hands all shaking, as a hit "publish" at
Amazon dot com, then proceeded to publish elsewhere around the internet (Barnes
and Noble, Google Books, Smashwords, etc.).
Hell, I had such a high opinion of myself, I thought I’d wake up the
next morning to find that hundreds, if not thousands, of random strangers who
had never even heard of me had purchased my book. I mean, why not? I had already made a great living writing just
about everything else, so why wouldn’t my books sell? Oh, foolish, foolish girl. I guess I figured some magical fairy was
going to sprinkle some dust into the eyes and ears of every potential buyer out
there and convince them that my book was the one they should get as they
tinkered around on some website looking for a book to buy.
