A favorite indie bookstore in my community called Bookmiser was damaged recently by smoke and soot when an adjacent store caught fire. When the bookstore owner put out a call for volunteers to help them sanitize their stock of hardbacks and paperbacks, my wife—author Kim Conrey—and I signed up to assist. We were joined that day by several other local authors. Our task was simple: clean the exterior of the books and box them for storage while the shop underwent renovation.

What was interesting about our morning of volunteering was that all of us writers experienced the same loop of thoughts while cleaning hundreds of volumes: There are already so many books for sale, maybe too many, and perhaps I’m wasting my time trying to put more out into the world.

Bookmiser sells new and used books. I was assigned to the used book section, cleaning suspense novels of old—John Dunning, Frederick Forsyth, and the like. Over the last forty years, I’d read many of the novels I sanitized, but I wondered whether anyone else was still reading them. I considered the hundreds or thousands of hours of effort and creativity each book represented and how many people in addition to the author had added their talents to the publishing process. These books all had their moment of popularity; some had even been made into movies.

But now here they sat, side by side by side, shelf after shelf, price discounted but still no longer selling, no longer being read. All around me were thousands of other books representing time and toil, inspiration and perspiration. And this was but one bookstore in a region with dozens of them—all of which were stocked with volumes that by and large no one was buying let alone reading.

What was I thinking, adding to this already-oversaturated marketplace?

The funny thing was that, when I compared notes afterward with Kim and the other authors volunteering that day, I learned that they too were thinking the same things. Having the same feelings of futility.

On our own and collectively, though, we also reached the same conclusions. Yes, there are already too many authors publishing too many books, with seemingly fewer people than ever buying and reading. But we don’t write to achieve fame or fortune. We write because it feeds our soul. The creative process delights us, entrances us, compels us. It makes us whole. We’re driven to write, to create and to share, just as others are inspired to make their own art, to craft something from nothing.

If we hold on to that belief, then it doesn’t matter that there are hundreds of millions of other books already in the world and thousands more are being published daily. The book we’re writing isn’t out there yet. And it needs to be.

So get back to work.

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