The Author Guy by Larry B. Gildersleeve (Sept 18, 2024)

 18 th September 2024

Hello out there,

Welcome back. I think we’ve all experienced the low hanging fruit of sports analogies to explain

or justify all manner of unrelated activity. I heard an interesting one just the other day from a

friend of mine – one I thought was worth sharing.

We met for coffee because he wanted my input on his first effort at writing then publishing a

work of fiction. The conversation, and reading the first draft of his manuscript, took me back

eleven years to when I was where he is now before I published four novels and have completed a

fifth one yet-to-be-published. The conversation inevitably turned to where he could get help

marketing and selling his book. I was as candid as I could be about the frustrations encountered

in this area by virtually every author, whether indie or mainstream, novice or established. And I

confessed significant commercial success for me remains elusive.

He responded with a sports analogy, saying that likely tens of thousands of Americans play golf

regularly to varying levels of proficiency, and precious few become sufficiently skilled to earn

any money, let alone enough to sustain a standard of living. Many do it for the love of the game.

The practice. The playing. The camaraderie with fellow players. Escapism from their myriad of

challenges that fill most of their waking hours every day.

Depending upon who’s doing the counting, there are anywhere from 700,000 to a million new

books of all stripes published each year. I understand less than twenty-percent of books from

mainstream publishing houses earn any profit after expenses, and less than one-percent of self-

published books sell more than a hundred copies (including author purchases). Why do we keep

at it? I can only answer for myself – the love of the game.

Until next week … Vaya con Dios

Larry B. Gildersleeve