Publicity.
Marketing.
Reviews.
Writing the damn thing in the first place.
Lord knows the road to a completed and successful project isn’t an easy one.
What’s the biggest challenge you face?
Footnote: I’m available for manuscript edits, query critiques, and consultations! More info here.
Art: The Storm on the Sea of Galilee by Rembrandt
Mine are a) time management and b) emails and phone calls because I tend to be shy about both and it's a struggle to force myself to do them. I had to cold send a couple of big requests for book endorsements, and I stewed over the emails for weeks before sending them. I REALLY need to overcome that and am looking for any way to cope with it effectively.
Writing the damn thing in the first place, although I think that might more appropriately fall under "time management." When everything is finished, and I've set it aside then revised and edited, my biggest challenge is finding the right home. Sometimes it feels as though I can only take so many rejections.
The first three are still in the future for me, but I have written the damn thing, all three books and 300,000 words of it, a YA Dieselpunk Trilogy no less. I'm nothing if not ambitious, some of the time, but I still can't walk on water…
Continuing to write after rejection. I can waste weeks of writing time wondering if I should be doing something else before remembering how subjective writing is and how many successful writers I know who have books on their computer that didn't sell.
My biggest challenge I think is going to be promoting my book when I finish it. I'm not the best public speaker and I hear you need to really 'get out there' to promote a book.
Other than making time to write when I have a full-time job and a part-time job, I'd say it's trying not to be jealous or resentful of published writers who are hugely successful but whose writing is not that great (cough, E.L. James, cough).
Self-doubt.
Without doubt, my biggest problem is marketing. I labor long and hard over a book, but once it is done, I'm a bit like those parents who delight to see sons and daughters come of age and go out on their own. Books should market themselves I (wrongly) think.
Call me an empty-nest writer. Once published, I'm like a pair of birds who have pushed their little birds out of the nest fo fend for themselves. I'm on to my next book. I'm trying my best to not do that with my latest, Embarrass Less, which has the potential to become a standard textbook for medical and nursing students.
My biggest questions right now focus on getting more reviews for my books, and keeping sales up after the post-launch slump sets in.
So far–killing my darlings.
Marketing and publicity of my fiction, damnit. The writing doesn't come easy, but it comes. To show you how bad marketing is for me, I have four complete novels plus another nearly done and a book-length's worth of linked short stories. But every time I vow to send out a ms, something else wants to get written. Setting aside one day a week to market hasn't worked for me because my mind is one-track in the story. I know, that's what agents are for, but that's marketing, finding that someone (good?), attending to his/her desires to change my work, then the editor's perceived needs to make changes (egos involved here; I am published in nonfiction, too much experience). There's something psychological at work here, probably, fear of failure, fear of success, challenging the gods. Think I'll go for a hot fudge sundae.
Discoverability. People simply don't know I've got books out there.
This may be due to issues of publicity and marketing (plus a dearth of reviews, though the few I have are overwhelmingly positive). I can't seem to hit the marketing sweet spot. And it is very much a hit-or-miss process.
My last foray on Netgalley netted me exactly one review. Several well-placed (or so I thought) ads brought me 0 sales. (This might be because the book was listed as full-price. Am trying this strategy again with a discounted book.) A freebie promo of one novel got 5k downloads, but no reviews. A three-book GoodReads giveaway returned 33% reviews.
Alas, when it comes to marketing, what works well for one person won't work for another.
Writing the book is easy. Getting people to buy the book… entirely another matter.
Finishing the MS!