I know, I know. But check out this graph:

For any of my fellow independent authors out there, if you've never looked at your sales rank at authorcentral.amazon.com, I highly recommend it. Along with viewing your books' current rankings, you can view your overall ranking in book sales, keeping track of data from as little as the past two weeks, to as long as you've been publishing. Or at least since September 28th, 2012. You'll forgive me for not researching that date further, but I think that's the date they started keeping track of sales in this format. I've actually been self-publishing on Amazon since 2001, and on the Kindle since 2008. So I don't know if the September date is arbitrary, or if the folks at Amazon actively decided against showing me number prior to 2012 as they were just that depressing.

On the other hand, it may simply have to do with the Mayan calendar. The world ended in 2012 and ever since we've been existing in some after-life illusion that makes us think we're carrying on as normal. The 2012 date is an oversight on some higher power's part, as my sales rank is a little too irrelevant to warrant masking the truth.

So let's take it all in. From the end of the old world to today. I actually love this graph. Not because it looks like polygraph results (that is pretty neat though). But because I can see the story it tells. The ups and downs of my life in recent years.

In 2012 I was a student, finishing up my certification in forensic investigation while taking chemistry and biology classes. I'd been offered a job to continue with the forensics program after graduation, shortly before this graph started. I wouldn't officially start the job for almost a year, so you can see a space where I'm still frequently writing, advertising, and little by little, losing focus on my fiction. I entered graduate school and was in a long distance relationship while -frankly- putting too much focus into every word of every lecture, desperately trying to convince myself I deserved the job I'd been given. You can see the lull in late 2013 to mid 2014 where I was barely writing. The following year tells a sad story.

The lowest points on the graph correspond to a particularly dark couple of years. My cat, Franny, had a tumor in her chest. For months I struggled to keep her fed, comfortable, and happy. My relationship at the time was in a bad place, and my anxiety really started to overwhelm. If I was selling the occasional book in that time, I hardly noticed.

In early, not long after Franny passed, 2015 I was diagnosed with a c-diff infection. I should say misdiagnosed for about a month, hospitalized, correctly diagnosed, and quarantined for a couple of days. I'm a bit of a hypochondriac, so after several months of battling c-diff with antibiotics, every little thing was a new symptom to some life ending disease. For almost a year, I was essentially the sort of person who takes webmd for its word, constantly dying of one thing or another. Without insurance, I was checking myself into the hospital about once a month, racking up debt, and driving everyone I knew insane. I broke off my relationship that year and was in a dark place for it.

I can look at this graph from 2015 to 2016 and see depression, the self loathing, and the constant anxiety. I'll never forget December 26th, 2015, when I left work and checked myself into the hospital after an old friend passed away from heart failure. Apparently my form of mourning him manifested as mimicking symptoms of a heart attack. At least that's what I told myself it was. While they were performing tests and I was stuck on a bed until five in the morning, I knew it was my last day on Earth and I was leaving it an empty, bitter, broken person with nobody at his bedside.

Obviously that didn't happen. Instead, a few conversations and conclusions later, it was determined that all these hospital visits and my year of convoluted symptoms were a steady blend of stress, anxiety, and depression. I wasn't diagnosed sooner because, well, at the ER they treat your current symptoms. If they can't find anything wrong, they can't treat it. It wasn't until they started looking at my medical history and realizing I had a long history of nothing that conclusion could finally be formed.


So I started treatment for depression. I was medicated. I tried a few things. I dealt an assault of side effects. On the graph you can see the faint beginnings of an upward trend in 2016 as I started to pull myself together. While I had published Necromantica and Whisper in late 2015, it really wasn't until mid 2016 when I started to feel like my old self again.


I say started to because it was still a long climb. And that climb is by far my favorite part of the graph. I can see the good days starting to outweigh the bad. I can see when I started to get back into my writing, when I said not to give up on myself. When I started opening up to people. When I started being more proactive and sharing my fiction. The failures are still there, but the graph shows the past few months, when I accepted that my previous methods of advertising and sharing weren't all that effective and took more business-like approaches to my work. When I formed my own publishing house, Blue Donut Books. I started paying for advertising. I started giving out books and doing occasional interviews. The graph shows this slow and steady increase, bringing me back to where I was in 2012. Even a little better. In February this year, I've had my highest ranking ever. 47,029. Not exactly a best seller. A far reach from #1. But looking at the past few years, such a lofty goal doesn't feel out of reach. Today if you go to your local bookstore and request one of my books, they're still not going to know who you're talking about. But as long as I keep writing, keep working, and keep getting my work out there, it'll happen. This graph isn't just showing me how far I have to climb, but how far I've come.

For more, be sure to check out and follow my author's page at Amazon.