HK Arnold

As I dip my toes into the pool of self publishing, testing the waters before I dive in, a strange pressure builds over me. You've got to publish at least four books a year to be successful. If you don't, your readers will forget about you. Amazon will forget about you. You'll vanish off the edge of the four second attention span, like the name of the cashier at the fuel station who pointed you back to the highway you got lost from. The flip happened fast. One moment I'm curiously dipping into opinions between KDP and IngramSpark, the next I'm clutching my phone, on the edge of panic because I'm not sitting at my desk writing more novels (I need three, finished, and a free short story, before I start publishing, or I hit the Amazon game over screen at the three month mark!). And it struck me. The race for more. The panic to finish. The AI generated content wave. The “skip the dive, just watch the shorts, same thing” (I suppose the view is the same, from one angle). No one wants to be forgotten, no one wants to fade away. Certainly, no one wants to labour over something for years just for it to be swept beneath the next hype and remain unseen. It makes sense to want the treasure at the end, without all the safety training and the effort and anxiety that comes with deep sea diving. But there's something lonely about skipping to the results (there's probably an indie movie, made by some obscure actor, about that). When you skip to the finish line you miss out on the experience. Experience fosters connection Something I've noticed these conversations ignore, or maybe miss, is that experience is crucial to your well being. Yes, your well being. Your mental health. Your intrinsic sense of self worth. You need experience in order to deeply connect with yourself and others. It's the experience the book provides that has always stuck with me. Not the author names or book titles. Not the constant peripheral view of quarterly releases nagging at my subconscious. Experience gives new perspectives, moments of being understood and understanding something once nameless. I'm still yet to forget books that have given me those moments; decades later and despite the flaws of book and author alike. I practiced reading with Enid Blyton novels when I was young (my mother's childhood treasures). I was reading and I experienced the stickiness of candy, tacking my teeth together. The sweetness coating my tongue. I bolted into the kitchen, and I asked my mum “what's this word?” - toffee, she told me, and no, I haven't had toffee before. It was the first moment of vivid experience I'd gained wholly from words. A love of writing born in an instant. I read about a character compartmentalising, something I had no concept of and no word for at the time. But I'd done exactly what the character had, when I'd gone through some traumatic experiences. Just, turned off the parts of myself that were in too much pain. I'd never felt so seen and understood. That was Terry Goodkind. I learned I could be whole again when I chose it. I read the perspective of a perpetrator. I've always been naive, and never cared to hate the fact, but the concept of someone acting on opportunity with no preconceived intention of committing crimes had never occurred to me. I'm wiser now (mostly), thanks to Stephen Donaldson. Those experiences aren't exhaustive, but they are among the most formative in my life. These books came into my hands because people wanted to share the experience of reading them with me. Connection is natural wastage in the current landscape. The experience of doing and struggling isn't as celebrated as the gold medal at the end. Plus, it's uncomfortable and tedious. The point of the hard work is buried beneath the accolades of others' successes and the sinking feeling that you're too far to find your own spot to break through. But if you don't go through the effort, you can't really relate to success. It just is. Another thing that happened. Another way your life is now. Paying your dues An old adage, but poignant here. I always hated that saying. It annoyed me to think there was an arbitrary amount of work to put into something before you actually became decent at it. I understand now that it's not an arbitrary effort. It's the accumulation of mistakes, pain, frustration, knowing something is wrong and seeking, seeking, seeking until you find the answer, or the solution (but somehow never both at once). Paying your dues is the experience of the work that can and should go into things. It's important, so that you, the mind behind it all, can form a connection between yourself and the results. You need the connection to what you've done before you can extend it to others. I think that's why that obscure movie I mentioned ended with so much pain. And why no one stayed to acknowledge the hare's effort in the race; he didn't try his best or work hard, so there really wasn't anything to admire or commiserate with. He simply flaunted his windfalls. In all honesty though, I respect a good hustle. I'm not out here hating on the hares who're racing to the finish line, pumping out four books a year and getting their popcorn stories read. Those stories are very much needed and treasured. But to the hares who pause to gloat about their faster feet; the tortoise ended the race with more to show for it. You reap what you sow I'm not so arrogant to believe I'm the only person left with an attention span longer than the time it takes to drop off Amazon's radar. Those readers seeking the four book a year payout would be disappointed by my stories anyway. I understand the market. I like chicken pops too, but I also grew up raising the chickens that ended up plucked in the laundry sink. It's messy, it's hard and visceral. Those stories are the type of stories I get invested in and connect with. If it's not worth the time and effort it takes to form the words and string them together, then it's not going to yield much from me. It's nothing personal. It's basic return on investment. If an author takes 900 hours to write 65,000 words, and another generates that in 12 hours, they've invested about 1% of the time. If the book is sold at $12.00, then an equivalent financial value for generated work is 0.12c. If a reader takes five hours to read 65,000 words, an equivalent time investment would be around three minutes. In one hundred books I'll have accumulated a semblance of authorship. Is this the end goal of the novel writing race? I think I've missed the incentive of generating the most, the fastest. I don't write for the numbers. I don't read for the numbers. I do it for the connection. I need sweat in a story, the experiences of getting there, from conception to struggle in making it coherent on the page. It provides as much as it took to create. The story is the goal. A book is just a vessel. And a hundred books with my name on them is still just a pile of things; like cupping water in my hands. Lost the moment I stop watching my fingers, forgotten in the ocean beneath. At the end of the day, who wins the race? I've decided to take it all in stride. The experiences authors share about their publishing journeys are all invaluable. I'm happy to connect with their endeavours, to cheer them on, even as I consider the pace and path best suited to me. Despite the overwhelming push, I'm still dipping into the publishing pool, testing all the options against my goals. Do I want an industrial experience, steering a deep diving submarine, illuminating dark waters? Or do I want to drift about the surface, snorkel clenched between my teeth, holding my breath whenever I want to delve a little deeper? We'll all reach the end if we want to, hare and tortoise alike, but I won't sleep on the journey and I'm hard pressed to rush. It's unrealistic for me to write four books a year. The emotional and cognitive toll it takes me to pile together a draft is not a three month penance. Plus, the sacrifice of real life experience and connection in order to fulfill that pace is a tall order. I'd have nothing left to put into a story if I neglected experience in favour of output. And what's the point of stories if they're devoid of connection?