The week after I published Karma Ledger, it felt like my mother was texting me every other day: “How are book sales going?”
Truthfully, she only asked me twice—but that’s maybe because after the second time I answered: “I’ll never sell as many copies as I want to sell, and every time you ask me it makes me a little more sad.”
Possibly that response was a little aggressive, but it was true to how I felt.
Expectations and Disappointment
Intellectually my expectations were low for the release of Karma Ledger. While this is more or less my official debut science fiction novel, I have put self-published works out into the world before, and so I was prepared for the lukewarm response. The problem is that I was also harboring a secret hope that the book would inexplicably go viral and become an immediate success. When that didn’t happen, despite having known how unlikely it was, I still felt disappointed. Maybe more than disappointed—I felt despair and angst, if I’m properly dramatic about it.
I see similar responses from indie authors again and again on social media. They spend long hours for days, weeks, months, and even years writing their novel. They are overjoyed to finally finish it until they are met with a resounding wall of silence: nobody gives a shit.
I see it at book fairs, where indie authors spend half to all of their Saturday trying to get people to buy a copy of their book. On a fantastic day they might sell ten books. But on an average day they might sell three or four. Some days they might sell none. Even on a good day, maybe one out of ten of those book sales will translate into somebody reviewing or recommending their book.
If you don’t manage to land a contract with one of the Big Five publishers and be lucky enough to have your book be one of their featured titles, selling your work can be a slog. Again and again, you ask yourself, “What’s the point?”
For Buddhists, the second noble truth tells us that suffering is the result of craving and desire. It seems pretty obvious that I am craving the recognition, validation, and the financial gains of selling a lot of books. That expectation will ultimately lead to suffering—namely, that I’m disappointed when very few people are interested in buying my book: despair, angst, and sadness arise. I think, “What’s the point?”
It’s easy for me to jump to the conclusion, philosophically speaking, that I just ought not want or expect things at all, and then I wouldn’t suffer, right?
That is actually contrary to the point—maybe it’s even what Buddhism often calls a “near enemy” of the point. For example, the near enemy of equanimity is indifference. It can easily seem like “not caring” is how one can be even-minded, but indifference is counterproductive to cultivating even-mindedness. Equanimity isn’t about not caring; it’s about caring and accepting the natural consequences of caring.
The reality is that I’ll always have that hope that my book will sell well. I’ll always want people to enjoy it, and I’ll always be disappointed when those things don’t happen. The desire inherent in all of those things isn’t what causes my suffering; it’s the attachment to the outcome. In Buddhist thought, that distinction is between what’s called chanda, or healthy wanting, and taṇhā, which is craving. Taṇhā, or craving, is when I fixate on the notion that things should be the way I want. I start to reason why shit didn’t work out that way, and it results in suffering. My inner monologue says, “Is it because the novel isn’t good?” “Is it because nobody reads science fiction anymore?” “Is it because there isn’t enough sex or violence or action?” “Is it because I don’t have enough social media followers?”
This spiraling out is captured in another Buddhist term known as papañca. In Buddhist thought, papañca is one of the things that meditation aims to develop an awareness around. None of the things that I’m thinking are necessarily true, but when I begin to obsess that “shit’s not working out,” I reinforce conditioning that leads me to believe that maybe some of those things are true.
What is true is that I have no control over how people will react to me or my work, and there is absolutely nothing I can do about it. That doesn’t mean I should tamp down my desire to write fiction, that I should stop doing it altogether, or that publishing my novels doesn’t have a point. Expressing myself through characters, world-building, and narrative not only provides me with a psychological and intellectual outlet, but it legitimately has the potential to significantly affect others. I know, through my own experience, that I have been affected by stories in profound ways. Plenty of other people have been profoundly affected by stories in the same way. Storytelling is fundamentally a human tool for making sense of complex circumstances and emotions, and by that definition it’s difficult to see how there could be any completely pointless storytelling.
Whether it is to amuse and distract or to de-obfuscate psychological and emotional abstraction, the stories I write help me to better understand existence whether people read them or not, and if someone does choose to read them, they have the potential to do the same for them. That’s the point.
Doing Something About It
Meditation is by far the best tool that I have found to help quiet the papañca, or inward spiraling, when “shit’s not working out.” But I think there is also something to be said for the agency you can feel by encouraging other writers or through recommending their work.
When we promote our own work on social media, pitch it to someone at a book fair, or try to convince a bookshop to start carrying it, the self-promotion can often make us feel even more like a desperate failure—especially when we bump up against additional rejection. But if you’re feeling low about the success of your own work, I challenge you to try promoting someone else’s work to see how it makes you feel.
For me, when I’m frustrated about the success of my own work, promoting others feels good. Not only because I’m helping a fellow writer, but because I am legitimately doing something about the problem that’s bothering me! While it may not have a direct impact on my own book sales, I still feel a sense of satisfaction in the act of sharing a good story with other people who may find it entertaining or insightful. This is the point, and it’s what I’ve done through my new site, readindie.work, which allows indie writers to promote their books without buying into the ads, star ratings, and rankings of the traditional platforms.
The Second Arrow
There is a greater lesson here about disappointment and attachment to outcomes that I think carries over to many other areas of our lives—careers, relationships, personal goals—and so I think it’s worth putting in a more general context.
Buddhists will be very familiar with the teaching of “the two arrows” (or two darts), in which the Buddha describes the initial pain of an event like an arrow to the body. There is nothing we can do about that first arrow, but as we linger in our obsession over spiraling questions like “Why me? Why now?” here comes the second arrow to our body, which we could have prevented.
The second arrow is our reaction to the first: the aversion and the ruminating. It’s the obsessive thoughts regarding why we haven’t gotten what we wanted. It’s not our fault that we obsess over it—we’re conditioned to try and place blame—but nevertheless we find ourselves there.
So it has happened: we aren’t selected for the perfect job, a person we’re attracted to doesn’t feel the same way, or we weren’t able to lose that twenty pounds we wanted to shed this year; these things are going to disappoint us, and we shouldn’t try to convince ourselves otherwise. We aren’t going to be able to help that we feel disappointment, but what we can help is that we’re OK with being disappointed. Disappointment isn’t the end; it’s just one of the many stops on the way to the next thing.
It has taken a couple of weeks of sitting—that is, meditating—and reflecting on it, but I’m starting to get to a place where I am OK. And in taking all of this into consideration for myself, maybe next time my mother texts me asking about book sales for Karma Ledger, I’ll say something along the lines of: “They could be better, but I’m OK with that.”