Your Opinions Matter

I have a confession to make and that confession is that I experience a lot of self-doubt when it comes to my writing. It's been bad lately. I received a lot of feedback from critique partners. I don't know about other authors, but I agreed with almost all of it. I'm afraid that I can't fix my book. I'm afraid I will have to move on and work on other stories, even though I've been working on these two for a long time and already announced that I will be publishing them.

I used to have a second pen name, but I wound up deleting all the stories I self-published under that pen name recently. This was also how I found out that you can't officially "unpublish" anything on Amazon. It won't be sold anymore, but records of its existence will always be there. I decided those stories weren't written well enough anymore.

I think I experience this self-doubt partly because I'm not as emotionally attached to books that I've already written as most authors are. Sometimes after I finish writing and editing a book, I wind up absolutely hating it.

To tell you the truth, when I self-published Pandora's Mistake, I hated it a little bit. I like my Medusa's Desire story, but feel a lot of times like it might not be the kind of story most people would like to read. I was wanting to write according to formulas more. And I tried to tweak the way I write a bit in the stories I've been working on lately. I want to experiment and give people more of what they would like.

But then I started getting a bunch of awesome and encouraging reviews. At the time, I was thinking about quitting writing the Fate of Eros series or at least putting it on hold for a long time. But when I read those reviews, they encouraged me. People were enjoying my writing. I was motivated suddenly to want to work on the next book about Sisyphus.

With indie authors, we don't have publishers telling us what to write. All we have is our readers, so your reviews actually mean a lot to us. I'm not saying that we will get angry if you write bad reviews. I am saying though that sometimes, if you really like a story, and tell an indie author about it, they might be encouraged to work on that series more, just for your sake. We want our readers to be happy.

Authors are more accessible than ever, especially indie authors. As readers you have more power than you think. In the past, it was publishing companies deciding what should be published and advertised to make popular. Now, it's you deciding what should be popular. I like that readers have power.