Ah, the fulltime Indie-Writer Cycle…it’s always the same. You lay your egg, raise it into a fine bird, dress it up and send it off into the cruel world. You’re full of worry that it will tank or get slammed…but you always dare to hope.

Wickedly slow during those first few days, it begins to catch on and rises up and up. Finally, briefly, you start to feel good.

Then it begins to hover, still floating. You entertain fantasies it will break through or stay up there for longer than the usual 2 weeks. A few good reviews come in, and it pushes up a little higher still. Now it’s at the peak, but you dare indulge yet more fantasies: This book will be different. This book will hang on forever!

It begins to drop about a month in. At first, you don’t believe it. Maybe it teases you, jumping back up the charts for a day or two. But inevitably, the evil system does its work. Like a movie at the local theater, after a month your book is old news. Age sinks in its teeth, and the vampire begins to feed. Your best customers have long ago come and gone. Every day it falls earthward. You don’t even want to look at the rank anymore, it’s too upsetting. The readers are still coming in, but the main crowd has moved on. They’re all talking about some pretty, cheap little package elsewhere–not your tired two-month-old fossil.

At last, you admit the ride is over, and you have to remind yourself it’s not such a bad way to live. 

Time for a new book…

-BVL