Obscurity and Indifference

Writers worry about a lot of things, but oftentimes we end up worrying about the wrong things. We minutely agonize over word choices when we need to consider whether we're telling an interesting story. We worry about writing the perfect cover letter for the market when we should be considering whether the markets we're looking at are even worth bothering with. We worry about piracy when we should be thinking about the problems of promotion. And we fear a hostile reception when we should be concerning ourselves with obscurity and indifference.

Recently I began serializing a short novel, A Separate War, at JukePop Serials. When I took that first chapter live, I felt more than a little trepidation. I'd heard all the horror stories about writers offending someone and having their e-mail inboxes fill with angry messages, even outright death threats. And I could see all the possible things that could set someone off: would someone accuse me of spitting on the graves of the Apollo 1 astronauts because I portrayed a world where they escaped in the nick of time as one with a more expansive and advanced space program, including a moonbase by the 1980's and at least one trip to Mars? Would someone find my portrayal of the Muslim police officer as less than perfectly deft and accuse me of racism?

Instead, I got nothing. No angry diatribes, no nasty accusations of hidden wickedness revealed through my prose. It was almost as if my novel were invisible -- in fact, even a sharp criticism would've been welcome because it would've showed that someone cared.

It got to the point that I had to really struggle to keep writing further chapters, when the initial few +votes were not followed up with subsequent +votes on new chapters. I wondered why I was getting so little response, so little evidence that anybody was even reading my novel. Was it falling under their radar, and if so, what could I do to increase its visibility without becoming shrill and turning people off? Or were people finding it and deciding it wasn't something they wanted to read -- or something they didn't want to make an issue of, lest the Streisand Effect make it a success? With no response, I was operating in a vacuum, so I began to second-guess myself.

After much struggle and toil I finally completed A Separate War, and moved on to another novel, Holovideo. I'd chosen it specifically because it would be similar to several other novels that were enjoying success there, so I was hoping to see interest pick up on it fairly quickly.

However, it too has been slow to attract attention, and I have no idea whether it's staying under the radar of potential readers, or if they're finding it and not liking it. It's a very frustrating situation to be in, but it's a very real proof of the problem of obscurity, and the need to break into people's awareness -- but without turning them off in the process.