The future of my work

For stress-related reasons (and mostly also me questioning why I'm even still doing this) I decided to pull my work from Amazon and, once the Kindle Unlimited 3-month window runs out (which should be for most books in April or May, some in June), make it all available for free on Wattpad and here as downloads in all the ebook formats, assuming I figure out how to host them here in a neat way.

I'll keep writing, since it is my passion and I love it, but I'll probably be less fast with it, and that's a good thing. I put myself under horrible pressure to put out as much writing as possible in as short a time as I could do in a vain attempt at boosting sales and readership, and I think I burned myself out. And maybe if I continued on like this, I'd lose my love for writing altogether.

I want to say that this is a sad development, but honestly, screw publishing. I've taken a few days to think about this, and it feels increasingly like the correct decision. Constantly stressing over perfect quality and editing, sales and ads, wondering if people will like this project more than that one and why no one is reading what I wrote, even just figuring out stock image licenses was a headache, and all to make no money.... It all wore on me in ways I didn't even realize until now that it's all gone.

If I ever decide to give this another shot, I can, I guess, but right now it feels good to give up. The chances of me making any actual money were always super slim, I knew that, but it's certainly even harder than I thought it would be. The whole time I felt like I was grasping at straws.

So this is certainly an ending, but also a new beginning. And I feel really good about it.