That's pretty discouraging. It makes you think back and ask yourself what are you doing wrong. Depression starts to creep up on you. You have put your heart and soul into this effort, and only one person gets to read it. Only one person took a chance on you, and no matter how much work you put out there, to get people's attention...well short of streaking through #Occupy Wallstreet, you won't get any attention.
It's easy to place the blame on yourself and take credit for the failure that you are perceiving. You start to think that maybe you aren't as great of a writer as you thought you were. You start to doubt yourself and all the work that you have accomplished up till now.
Don't.
Seriously. Don't.
I mean it. Seriously. Don't!
Writing isn't just a passion. It's serious business, and like any serious business it is much easier to succeed when you have a serious driving force behind you, and a strong support crew to prop you up. A writer is his best and worst promoter. This has always been true. No one knows the writers work, like the writer. Very true. The problem is, the author of any book is most often not used to the work required to get a book out there. I mean seriously out there. Out there on shelves, on eBook, on people's lips and in people's hands. It's a lot of hard work that the noob author that most of us are, simply cannot be prepared for.
We read the works and encouragements of other authors, other more successful (at least more successful than us) authors and try to emulate what they do. We try to walk in their footsteps as a measure to capture that sliver of luck that they found. That doesn't work out to well, and we soon discover ourselves lost, having walked in their footsteps without paying attention to our own direction.
When you are at the bottom and have to do so much of the leg work yourself, you often fail to realize how freaking difficult it is. That's why the heavy hitters in the literary fields have people to do most of this work for them. Publicist and personal assistants handle issues of booking and promotion. As a bottom dweller, you don't have that option.
The point?
Just because your book languishes on shelves or remains unpurchased, doesn't reflect on you as a writer or your efforts to get people to read your book. The assumed measure of failure for a writer or author is ultimately decided by how many people don't buy your book.
How can that be true?
If you were to put my name versus J.K. Rowling or Stephanie Mayer or R.A. Salvatore, you would immediately get more books sold for them, than for me. People know them, and they employ people to make sure that they are known. You can't compete against that sort of fame and success (at least not yet) but that doesn't make you a terrible writer. That my friends is subjective to the opinion of the critic.
Just because you haven't sold ten million copies, or made it to the NY Times best seller list, doesn't mean you aren't a good writer. You might be a shitty promoter (a jab at myself mostly) but it doesn't make you a bad writer.
Happy Holidays
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