Here I am at the edge

My decade of writing short stories Writers rarely tell you how much they earn, other than the well-known authors we never break even. I will give you a ballpark estimate of what my decade has cost me, I can't do any better as I never kept an account book as it is hard to keep accounts; when you earn less than $1 a month it is not worth the trouble. I would estimate that taking into account the price of the editing software and the cost of running my blog on Weebly , plus the cost of my only book cover. I must have paid out close to $1,000 dollars, and what was my return, less than 5% of my outlay, is it any wonder I am giving up this year?

What the buyer doesn't take into consideration I've said at each turn, that being an Indie writer I need to weigh outgoings against the possible income - that's why until last week I'd never bought a cover. My  luxury  item   I knew in my heart when I bought this cover that it would not pay for itself, but I wanted a nice cover in my stock.  You'd think with eleven sales platforms on  Draft2Digital   www.draft2digital.com/book/235628 , the various aspects of  Smashwords   www.smashwords.com/books/view/719595   and the mighty site at  Amazon   www.amazon.com/dp/B071CSVHFD   that selling a measly ten copies would be easy, but no book outside the  Forgestriker  series has sold even five copies in over a decade on Draft2Digital. Another aspect of my costs is that I sent hard copies, printed, of The Chronicles of Mark Johnson t o three sites in the USA.

If only others valued my work If you've read my blogs recently, you would get the impression I don't value my work. That is wrong, I do value my work greatly. The cause of my displeasure is that for the time I put in, I get little - if anything - in return. If you were getting $0.10c a day for hours of work, would care what you did?

I want to be alone The immortal quote from Greta Garbo exemplifies how I feel about my writing. I've been asked to write a semi-biographical piece on my time as a  writer . My hopes and dreams against the reality of seven years of struggle to make enough to pay for a cup of coffee a week.    Hope    I hoped that I'd  be able to make a little money from story telling, as I'd been told by many people that I am good at it.    Reality   You write for weeks, and if you see $1 a week, you ARE doing well. Oh, people will read blogs because they are  FREE . You soon learn blog readers do NOT mean sales.   Reality    I knew the time I put into writing the stories would never pay off. In the beginning I didn't mind as I thought people cared; now I know differently and I don't care about the standard of my work from now on, as my rep is worth $0.10c a day.

When you're down, you're down I admit to being a sinner, and it has lead to my downfall. Sin A is envy. I was jealous of the times I read about writers boasting of sales, money and best sellers - all I wanted was a small crumb off the table. Sin B is arrogance. I was arrogant enough to think people would buy my work, outside the early success of my sci-fi series, nothing has sold. Sin C is sloth. The sloth has been brought on by the lack of interest in the books on sale, I now no longer care if I go weeks/ months without writing, soon I won't be blogging either. My life is so dull there is nothing to write about