Focus, motivation, determination, and disillusionment
What happens when the gradient of the uphill climb gets so steep that it feels impossible.
I hope you don’t mind my starting by stating the obvious. Life is not always smooth sailing; it is more like a roller coaster where highs and lows follow one another, often at breakneck speed. It is easy to stay focused and motivated during a high. However, when disillusionment sets in, staying focused and determined can be a problem.
I already discussed how I work in time slots; each time slot is different. My fiction writing time slots are seldom a problem. There is no lack of focus or determination when I work on my next novel, a historical crime fiction story set in Venice in 1932, or on a romantic comedy I am ghostwriting. Motivation may take some time to wake up, but in the end, it does, and I manage daily progress on both.
Promotion and looking for paid work need more determination before motivation, and focus can wake up. That is a real uphill struggle. From time to time, I think of another way to look for work. I never found a job from an advert; I always found opportunities through contacts, people who knew me and referred me somewhere. Going to events, conferences, etc., was my way to stay in touch with my network of contacts or make new ones.
Now I am in a new field, writing or book formatting, and attending events is complicated because of my physical limitations in walking/standing. When people congregate standing, those who must sit are invisible. When people congregate sitting down, the table you select (or are assigned to) and your seat at that table are often a matter of luck.
Online networking is complicated. First of all, it is more difficult to cut through the smokescreen of positivity and verbal descriptions of your successes. You lack the non-verbal signals that help to tell the difference between bragging and describing. For instance, the best-selling title in my author’s portfolio (The Dressmaker’s Parcels) has just surpassed 500 total sales/downloads. This is only what is reported by Amazon, but… although I do not count the sales through Ingram Spark (I don’t think they get to thirty in total), I count the number of pages read using Kindle Unlimited, divide them by the number of pages in the ebook and add the number of copies read to the number of copies sold. Also, I include the books I bought from Amazon as author’s copies and sold at ‘Meet the Author’ events.
I could have been ‘flexible’ with the truth, saying
I sold 10,000 books (all sales, all my titles, including self-publishing mini-guides, since May 2023)
I sold 800 books this year (all the titles in my author portfolio sold since January 2026).
Both statements are correct, but they represent different realities from the 500 books for one title.
Standing out in a crowded environment is difficult. It takes time, and it doesn’t happen to everybody. I don’t like promotion; promoting my books with a non-existent budget is a chore I hate. The motivation engine takes a long time to start, and sometimes doesn’t start at all.
The search for paid work is the worst. It shouldn’t be. I have an extensive track record of what I have written (books, white papers, articles, blog posts, etc.), and I have formatted thirty books. Books I wrote, books friends wrote, and books clients wrote. My most complicated book design job was a bilingual book, English-Japanese, where I had to keep the text flow in sync (I don’t speak Japanese, but the client was very helpful and cooperative) with a lot of images and some pages with their own unique background.
It shouldn’t be a problem, right? Wrong! There is a lot of competition on platforms where people post opportunities for freelancers. Two things make it difficult to maintain motivation and determination to keep looking:
You need to pay to improve your competitiveness. For instance, Upwork has a sort of currency called Connects. You need to pay connects to apply. You also need to reach a paid tier to have marketing information, like how many people have applied and what the average rate is. That is essential information because if the average is too low, or too low for me, and there are already a lot of applicants, I don’t apply.
Fixed-price contracts, priced ridiculously low. Expecting anybody to proofread 50,000 words for $10 is beyond cheap. It is disrespectful. I have done it for free for friends. Clients who are prepared to pay such pitiful amounts also insist on very detailed feedback, grammar, consistency, continuity, and flow. That means working (for a stranger) for less than $1 an hour. I understand a low budget (what about no budget?), but I would never ask a stranger to work for less than $1 unless I am asking for help and $10 is token compensation. It is not the environment promoted by Upwork. The freelancer would get $10 minus the Upwork fee and minus the number of Connects spent to apply (one Connect costs $.15, and in that case, you needed 8 Connects, i.e. $1.20). Your net income before taxes would have been $7.40.
However, I still want to work because I like to add life to my days. This ruin needs money to add life to his days. Because the essential component of any outing is a taxi or an Uber, unless where I am going is within a few minutes’ walk from a bus stop. So I need to pull myself up, dust myself off, start all over again, and find other ways to promote myself. Unfortunately, no budget means no advertising, so I have to keep shouting “I’m here, hire me” (metaphorically speaking, of course).
I am happy I can work in time slots. I can plan them to have one upward slope of the roller coaster after a steep downward incline, so I never lose hope. The confidence that it will get better, or that you will get there, is essential to climb back from a dip that, at times, can reach as low as the Mariana Trench, the deepest known part of the ocean in the Western Pacific, near the Philippines.
New video
I have prepared book trailers for the first and third book of the series Rachele Modiano Mendes investigates (stories set after World War II), so I decided to create a book trailer for the second book, Murders and Masterpieces – A Venetian mystery, just to complete the set.
New videos are published most Wednesday. Here is the link to the channel, please like, comment and subscribe it helps with the algorithm.
Self-Publishing mini guides.
I am working at a number of mini-guides covering specific aspects of self-publishing.
The first one is a free pdf that details some of the basic aspects of self-publishing.
https://buymeacoffee.com/silvanoauthor/e/509051
The second is also free and discusses why you need to buy your own ISBN.
https://buymeacoffee.com/silvanoauthor/e/509760
The third is not free, it is a 20 pages guide sharing what I learnt in the past three years. It allows you to turn a manuscript into a book on a shoestring budget. It costs USD 4 to download
https://buymeacoffee.com/silvanoauthor/e/516067
It is also available as an ebook from Amazon at a slightly higher price (USD 5)
Where to find my books
I don’t just publish on Amazon. My book are available directly from me (i.e. Perpetuum Mobile Publishing) if you live in the UK or the US, or via a number of other places if you are elsewhere. Go to this page to find all the links (including Amazon).
If you always wanted to write a memoir, but don’t think you know how, check my promotional offer here.
I have decided to keep my Substack free. However, if you decide to support my work, you can ‘buy me a coffee’ a one-off tip by clicking on this link, or you could buy one of my books (the link is in the caption of the last image below) or keep reading my posts, it is entirely up to you.
Click here to see my Author Portfolio