What is the most Frustrating thing about being an Author by: K.M. Jenkins

What is the most frustrating thing about being an author?

There are a lot of frustrating things about being an author. I can probably name five to ten things off the top of my head that drive me nuts. But to keep things civil I will provide the top three things that drive me nuts.

#1: Social Media - It is there to help us interact with our reader base, make friends, and find new potential readers. But there are so many sites out there you don’t know which ones to focus on entirely. If you guess wrong then you end up wasting your entire time on a platform that is just a time suck. Which defeats the purpose of finding your readers and writing to get the next book out.

Therefore, I have narrowed my focus down to Facebook, Instagram, my blog/website, and Pinterest. My Pinterest is mainly for my business but I share a lot of author details and blog post over on there. I tried to do TikTok but wasted so much time making videos it didn’t give results for the time I put in.

#2: Reviews - The number one thing that helps authors sell their books is reviews on retailer sites, Bookbub, or even Goodreads. But getting the reviews is hard work and having an ARC team helps. I used to have an ARC team, but it got where I was sending out more books than reviews I was receiving. Then I got Book sprout for a while. But I wasn’t releasing enough books to outweigh the cost. This year I plan to release more books so we will see how I change about this.

The other bad thing about reviews is if you give so many away you might get excellent reviews or ratings that are bad. I’m not a fan of how Amazon allows readers to rate books even if they haven’t read them. This can lead to fans black balling an author for no reason and they don’t even have the balls to state why they didn’t like the book.

#3: Selling Books - There are so many ways to sell books nowadays. You can sell on the traditional retailers and have your own store on your website. I have opted to have my store, but it is complicated to get readers to buy direct. Most of my sales are on Amazon and that is frustrating in itself. I am a wide author. Which means I am trying to hit all store fronts with my books. But if they are all on Amazon I don’t want them to control my money flow. They have done so many things over the years that disrupt the money flow for authors. It would be nice to get where I make more on my store than on Amazon. They are getting too big and they don’t think about the little guy they are featuring.

These are the top three that come to my mind that make being an author frustrating. There are always more things but the good also outweighs the bad. Therefore, I still write and enjoy the look on readers’ faces when they enjoy one of my stories.

If you are an author what do you find frustrating with your journey? Share in the comments. Thank you.