Have you ever typed “No one wants to read my book” into Google while you’re in a writing slump?
You’ve spent months or years perfecting your book, and then absolutely nobody on this planet seems to care. You can’t get your own mother to read your book. You honestly believe your friends are rolling their eyes at you behind your back.
Suppose you decide you’re a hard worker who’s not afraid to try to beat the odds. “My writing is worth the effort!” you think. So you scour the internet and find plenty of advice from marketing gurus, self-publishing companies, and other authors that appear to have made it big. They tell you that you should build a website, grow your social media presence, make sure your cover is awesome, hire an editor, sink a truckload of money into advertising. Suppose you do all that.
What they don’t tell you is that there is a massive amount of work that you need to do that will make writing a book look like a walk in the park. And that’s saying something since writing a book can be a big snarly, frustrating mess sometimes (a lot of times). The learning curve is insanely steep and what worked last year probably won’t work today.
It just seems so impossible. You can’t seem to get anybody to read your book no matter what you do. So you turn to Google to see if there are any other lost writer souls floundering like you.
I’ve done that. I’ve found plenty of articles and Reddit threads of people saying the same thing: Nobody cares. Nobody wants to read your book. Your book doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things.
The Odds are Against Us
And they’re right. There are literally centuries worth of classics and veritable mountains of modern genre novels. In 2022, 4 million books were published, both traditionally and self-published. Your book (and mine) is a tiny molecule of water in an ocean. No matter how awesome that molecule of water is, the chances of anybody at all finding it are vanishingly slim.
Many of these articles then proclaim that there’s no point to writing a book: if no one will read it, there’s no chance that you’ll become famous or hit it big. After all, no sales means no glory. Why spend all that effort on a book no one will read?
Why Write When No One Wants to Read Your Book
This past year, I’ve been really having a hard time reconciling my life-long dream of being a successful author with reality. I loved writing stories and still had faith in my stories, but the gargantuan task of trying to market my books to an uncaring world was crushing my desire to continue. I eventually stumbled upon this wonderful video that Brandon Sanderson recorded during the pandemic.
I love how he says, “I realized I can control my journey even if I can’t always control my destination. The journey is what makes the destination worthwhile.”
I can’t control whether or not I become a famous author. No one can. But I can enjoy the writing journey and continue to improve my writing skills.
Conclusion
I firmly believe that if you love writing, then you can be a writer and an author without being hugely successful. I believe there is value in writing books that no one will ever read because it makes you a more thoughtful, empathetic person to have to put yourself into other peoples’ heads to write their stories. I believe that writing fantasy and science fiction allows us to rekindle our sense of wonder at the world and the universe. I also believe that writing and reading stories that challenge us, scare us, and feel all sorts of wonderful and frightening emotions can help us understand the world around us better.
There are probably a host of other reasons why writing is good for us. So even if you never become a famous or rich author, whether you decide to pursue publishing or not, no matter how many times you think to yourself, “No one wants to read my book,” keep writing for yourself.
**If you’d like some tips and tools for getting started with writing fantasy or science fiction, check out my page on Writing Resources**
