All on Me.

Just so you don't think self-publishing is all happy faces and balloons, because it's not, let's talk about a less than stellar aspect of it...

It's all on you.

There's no one else to motivate your butt.  If you get up in the morning feeling like something someone scraped off their shoe, you can take the day off, but the work still needs to be done.  If other commitments crop up, the deadlines are still there.  Sure, they're self-imposed deadlines, but once you mention them out loud and in public, they're set in stone deadlines.  Mostly readers don't give two hoots in hell whether you had a rough time of it.  They care that you moved your publication date and now they'll have to wait however long to get the book you promised would be available to them on X date.

If your editing is poor, you can't point to a publisher and say 'they did this to me'.  (Same goes with cover art.)  You did it.  Or didn't do it, as the case may be.  All of the shit is, and should be, heaped upon your shoulders.

With all the control comes all the responsibilities of making sure all of this works.  And sometimes it sucks.

Way back in 2015, I had a craptastic cover.  I was kind of backed into a corner because I'd paid all that money and I had already promised the book would be out on a certain day so no time to put together a new cover.  (I really would've been better off with a brown paper bag than what I had.)  But as much as I am wont to whine about it, I chose the artist, I chose to pay him upfront, and I chose not to delay the book's release until I could give it a cover that didn't suck.  All on me.

Sometimes I wish I could hand all this off to someone else and say 'here, you be responsible for it', but that's only when I'm really tired*.  And there are days when I feel like a charcoal briquet I'm so burned out.

But there really isn't time for that either.  It's all on me - success or failure, hitting a deadline or missing a deadline, thrilling readers or disappointing them.  Personally, I prefer the former to all of those, so I quit whining and keep working.


*I am not really tired right now.  I wrote this post this morning as a balance to Monday's post. Okay, so I'm a little tired.  But there's always coffee.  I will hit this deadline if I have to stay up nights doing it.