I’m working on a Stargate Atlantis fan-fic that I’m totally stuck on. I was releasing it one chapter at a time on a couple large facebook sci-fi pages. The first two chapters were very well received, then for the first time in years, I fell victim to the dreaded writer’s block. I haven’t even written this blog in a few weeks. I’m going to try and figure out why while I tell the story to you.

My first ebook; Deep Space Endeavor has sold almost 6000 copies. It’s a pretty good story, but if I’m being honest, not really well written. Read some of the reviews and they will tell you as much. I feel like it was a bit of beginners luck that I sold as many copies as I did. I actually wrote the entire four book series at the same time and had no idea what I was doing, so the writing doesn’t get significantly better throughout the series as evidenced by the fourth book selling only 2500 copies. Instead of gaining readers, I lost a significant portion of my readership somewhere along the way.

My next ebook: The Dunamis Covenant has sold over 5200 copies and I’m working on the sequel to that one now, but I made a huge mistake. I let my early moderate success, none of which I know how to duplicate by the way, get me off track. I thought to myself, If only I could start another series, I could have a good revenue stream coming in from two books instead of one. It seemed like a solid plan, but it didn’t quite work out.

Two things happened that I didn’t see coming. The first was that the new book I wrote called Cadogan’s Gamble, has yet to take off. I had not experienced failure, and I didn’t see it coming. The second was the previously mentioned writer’s block. I wrote seven novels and a couple fan-fics in just over two years and the words never stopped flowing. Then all of a sudden, they did. Now, It’s been almost Ten months since I released the Dunamis Covenant and I’m wondering if the readership will still be there by the time I finish the second installment.

What’s the moral of the story? I wish I knew. Maybe some of you could help me out with that one. I have learned that if you have a successful book (even a moderately successful one), you should not start working on other projects. I’ve also learned that just because a marketing strategy worked once, doesn’t mean it will work again. Lastly I’ve learned that writing three or four books a year is not sustainable if you are not taking breaks along the way to do other things and let the creative reservoir refill. Please let me know if there are some other take aways here because I’d hate to hit another speed bump like this unprepared again.