A Last Goodbye to My Publisher

It’s getting real now.

With only four business days left until Booktrope closes its doors forever, books have started disappearing from distribution channels.

It’s a painful thing to watch, to feel, to experience.

Painful, too, is wrestling with the knowledge that my books won’t be back in print in a month, or a year, or ever. I’m not republishing them; they won’t be back.

My only comfort right now is knowing that they will live on, on Wattpad, where readers all over the world can explore them without money ever preventing them from doing so. Anyone who has internet access and wants to read my books will be able to. Full stop.

Aren’t readers the point, after all?

I’ve let it get too much inside my head, this idea of being a ‘published novelist’. Being a published poet, essayist, and artist didn’t have the same effect on me. I don’t know why the ability to say “Yes, my books are published,” felt like such a huge thing. Most people have still never heard of my books anyway, so why am I so hung up on this?

Ego, I suppose. Evil, vicious ego.

Well, no more.

Ego and his buddy Pride can go take a flying waltz... I've no use, or room for them in my life.

The important thing, I have to keep reminding myself, is reaching the readers. And I have already reached many, many more readers on Wattpad than I ever did selling books.

I’ve enjoyed interacting with them more than I’ve ever enjoyed the process of seeking reviews, promoting, marketing. More than I ever enjoyed the business of publishing.

Those things got so far inside my head that they shoved writing right out; and that is something I do not know how long it will take to fix.

I honestly don’t know if it’s still my medication that is interfering with my desire/ability to write, or if the whole Booktrope collapse was the final straw, but something is blocking me, and it’s persistent.

Still, even if I never write another novel, I’ve written several. Five of which were published; a couple more live in a trunk somewhere (and always will) and there are other bits and pieces of prose and poetry that I have written solely for myself. Those things live on. Those things make me a writer, still; even if I’m not cranking out novels. Not everyone does, after all.

And even if I never wrote ANYTHING ever again, that doesn’t take away what I’ve already done, either. I just need to keep reminding myself that I love the five novels that were published; each has its own reason to be special to me but none more than the first and the last. If I hadn’t written the ones in between, then I wouldn’t have come to the place where I was when I wrote the last one.

A last look at the Booktrope editions of my pretty novels...

So, life goes on.

It just feels like there should be something so much more to say than goodbye, but really, that is all that’s left to say.

Goodbye, Booktrope.

~bru

P.S. In my next post I’ll reveal the new cover design for Wishing Cross Station by Ida Jansson. It’s beautiful!