This is mostly just a long rant. Feel free to question or criticize anything I write here.

I have self-published books, books published by a small publisher, and I also have an agent (whom I haven't spoken with in years...). The promotion aspect of writing is by far my greatest weakness. I gave up on promoting my books back in 2018. At the time I was spending several hours each day basically using amazon ads, trying to find the right keywords and the right amount of money to spend. I still had the liberal mindset that with enough smart and hard work, anything could be accomplished. "This is a problem, and every problem has a solution." But the struggle ultimately burned me out. I worked so hard on making everything as perfect as possible—honing my craft, spending a few hundred dollars on a cover artist who had proven results, buying software that would hunt down trending keywords, reworking descriptions, begging for reviews, building an email list, asking many other writers (including some very successful ones) for advice, and on and on. And, oh yeah, I did my best to write good novels. I read all kinds of books and joined internet communities dedicated to the (incredibly important) business side of self-publishing. And despite all this work, despite making it my full-time job for months, I could never do better than break even.

In retrospect I can see a couple of areas where I stumbled. Even back when I was a lib, the SF novels I self-published were too political. (One mentioned Trump and Hilldawg by name, yikes!) SF, like all genres, is highly reactionary, and the people who actually spend money on this stuff want an escape from the real world, not a reminder that the real world actually exists. Every single negative review I got complained about the politics.

After I radicalized (right around the time I was giving up on promotion), I managed, after hundreds of submissions over the course of many years, to get an agent and a small publisher. The small publisher released my Marxist SF trilogy two years ago. I think I ended up making a few hundred dollars, definitely less than a thousand dollars total, after like two years of working probably about six hours a day on that trilogy. (My spouse has a union job, my extended family has some money, this is how we afford this.) And the publisher actually has signed some famous writers and, in my opinion, they did what they could to promote my books. The first one has about seventy reviews with a rating of maybe 3.7/5 stars, the other two books only have a few reviews total. All the negative reviews of course mentioned the politics, even though I worked very hard to remove every kind of trigger word you could imagine. The books were still about a workers' state exploring the galaxy, so there was only so much I could do. I don't see any point in writing liberal or fascist novels. I write because I have always loved it, and I would hate writing if I had to write the political equivalent of a Marvel movie. At that point, if I'm after wealth and status and success, I could just go to law school and help giant corporations sue each other. Why bother with writing at all? I have to wonder if writing communist novels in this political environment really is totally futile, if one is hoping to pay the bills with that writing.

So anyway, it's two years later, and I'm finishing a Marxist litrpg fantasy trilogy that's going to be more than two thousand pages long when it's done. I'm planning a freemium release, where readers get a chapter per day for free but can toss me a few bucks per month to read a few chapters ahead. This is also really the only way I can see myself making any kind of money from my writing at this point—to avoid releasing this trilogy in ebook form until every chapter has already been posted. (My Marxist SF trilogy is on libgen, which I use constantly and fully support.) There's a few litrpg forums I know of where I'll mention that my work is out there. Aside from having a nice cover, that's all the promotion I'm planning on doing.

And of course I'm worried that no one is going to read it. If I release a chapter a day, I'll have about eight months of material until I run out. At that point, hopefully I'll have another book ready! But what's the point if nobody reads any of this shit? I guess if a month goes by and the release is going nowhere, I could delete it and submit it to the small publisher and make a few hundred dollars?

I'm writing this because of yesterday's post about shitty critique circles. I ended up reading The Pursuit of Perfection by Kristine Rusch, which is very short and only took me a couple of hours (it's also on libgen). I strongly recommend it. The author is a lib but a good lib. She basically uncovers the fact that the modern writers' critique circle is an invention of the Iowa Writers' Workshop (and the CIA). How many times do you think these writers' circles have told writers not to get political in their work? How many times have they told working class writers to shut the fuck up and stick to their day jobs? (All the fucking time!)

Rusch believes that once you've reached a certain point in your craft, where you know that you can crank out a good story with decent character and plot and style in a reasonable time, she says that you don't need to worry about the haters too much, regardless of who they are. Your focus, as a working writer, should be on pumping out as many books as possible. Having a lot of books out there is a kind of promotion in itself. Because when you think about it, every writer who at least pays the bills with their work is really a writing machine. Every one of them can fill shelves, sometimes entire bookcases with their work, even if only a few books they've written are well-known or considered classics. Even Billy Shakespeare was cranking out two of his plays each year for year after year after year (and also acting in them and managing them with his partners at the Globe). (Shakespeare's first few plays are really not as good as his later ones, either.) One of the few biographical details we have about him is that he didn't like to party because he was too busy working.

I know that not every writer here on hexbear has the goal of paying the bills with their writing, but I wanted to put this out there in case that does actually interest you. Because, man oh man, does the world need more communist writers. And as quiet as c/writing is, this is also the only writing forum I'm aware of that isn't overrun with liberals.

Rusch and her husband have other books about writing, including a guide for cranking out an entire novel in ten days. I've thought about doing shit like that, but I don't want to release material that I don't believe in. I want to make sure it's as good as it can be, and ten days is way too short to put out a good full-length novel! But I'm still going to see what they have to say about this.