Recently I haven’t been inspired for blogging, which is, under normal circumstances, one of my favourite things to do.

Perhaps I suffer from post-publishing sadness.

It should be a happy moment; it’s not a small thing to publish a book. Even if it’s not the best novel ever written, still it’s a great achievement. Alas.

Photo by Daniele Levis Pelusi on Unsplash

Once Upon a Night is a small book, the size of a novella, yet still it’d been almost a two-year-long journey, from the first word I wrote until I published it. And then — the roadblocks. Amazon doesn’t want to publish legitimate reviews. It’s been taking my library forever to purchase an e-copy… My book is invisible, and soon, when the 30-day Amazon ‘promotion’ is over (yes, it’s laughable), it will end up on the bottom of the Amazon waste sea.

I did everything that everybody says should be done: I had a good story, a great cover, a title that fits the story and the genre, good blurbs… I’d tried my best to chose the right categories and keywords… Still, the Amazon algorithm doesn’t like me.

Oh, well.

I’ve been curing my blues with reading (my remedy for many other things). After several not-so-good reads (one of which I wrote about last time), I ‘discovered’ Sylvia Day’s Crossfire novels. Loved them! The comparison with their predecessors, the Fifty Shades series is inevitable since they belong to the same genre, and have similar story lines. Fortunately, the rest is like Day and night. Like some serious writing and some silly writing. Like some great heroine and hero, whose every act comes out of their characters and their past, versus annoying, whining, weak, unmotivated, absurd Anastasia Steel (steel, really?), an English major with the vocabulary of a high-school drop out, and her even more absurd and emotionally, mentally and physically abusive lover-stalker. Like some super-interesting subplot vs. no plot or subplot… And so on. The list is long.

I’m glad Sylvia Day wrote her books and had a chance to publish them. But I can’t help not to think about many great stories that haven’t gotten published and will never get a chance to find their readers.

Which brings my melancholy back.

But, there is J. R. Ward’s Black Dagger Brotherhood, book 5, to heal me.