Welcome back to Austen Promises and the Writer’s Journal!
As a writer, and one who has chosen writing as her career, I have found that there are times when I must make choices that I do not want to make. These choices are about many things, prices for my books, plots, titles, marketing choices, etc. Just like in the rest of my life, things have to be considered and the pros and cons weighed.
Take, for example, my recent choice to write a series of Regency novellas. I, personally, do not like series. Give me a good long novel and I’m happy, but I do not want to read a series and possibly be left hanging when the author, for whatever reason, does not or cannot finish it, or waits months between books. (This is, by the way, why I try to avoid works in progress in general. One of my favorite non-published JAFF writers has been something like a year between updates. I hate being left hanging. This is also why I generally post on forums as posts in progress, rather than works in progress.) However, in looking at my sales and my budget, and in speaking with other authors who have series out there, it seems that readers prefer series. So, write a series I shall. With practice, I’m certain I’ll get better at it and maybe one day have a series of novels instead of only novellas. 🙂
Another recent example is book title choices. I named my racing book, Darcy’s Race to Love. I hate that title. But, “Darcy” in the title sells more books, so I went with the best I could come up with at the time. The longer I see it out there, the more I dislike it. But, maybe it’s not that I hate the title so much as I hate another choice I have had to make. That racing themed book did not sell well at all. Not even my die-hard fans were willing to try it. Their reasons are not important for my purpose today, so I won’t go into them. What is germane is the choice I have had to make because of it, and that is that Book 2 of that series must be put off for now. One month with not enough income was all it took for me to make that decision!
All this does not mean that every choice is hateful. I have greatly enjoyed choosing the paths that some of the characters in my books have taken. In my admittedly biased opinion, Colonel Fitzwilliam’s dispatch of Wickham at the end of The Essence of Love was brilliantly done. Bingley’s plan to arrange the compromises of two people at his ball was fun to write, and not something that I think most others would have considered him capable of doing. And dedicating that book, Matches Made at Netherfield, to my mom, who passed away almost exactly eight years before it was published, was not only easy, it was cathartic.
The easiest choice of all, though, was the one I made where I gave up teaching to write. 🙂
Come back next Wednesday for another peek into my journal! <3
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