I started writing when I was 15 years old. Today, I'm 32. Never in my life had I attempted to write in English until my role-playing life. Yes, I am a role-player, a Game Master as a matter of fact, but kind of retired. That means my next post will talk about my online role-playing experience. But for now, I just want to explain what's going on between my international situation and my national progress.
The thing is, I love writing in Spanish, I can't leave it. However, I have been self-publishing in that language for almost 5 years and my reader fanbase has been growing extremely slow. The reason might be because I am from a country in which 80% of the population does NOT read at all. If we add that the fact that I am independent, hence unknown and with no grand marketing resources, it leaves me with a very small group of readers. Hundreds, fortunately, but that's still not enough to make a living out of my books.
So the question is...why and when did I decide to write in English?
I used to play an online game called Gaia Online, zOMG! was its MMORPG but it died. In any case, I mention that because there's where I made my first attempt to write in English; role-playing. As I mentioned earlier, I was a Game Master so I tried building up a story for a few participants to play their characters. This was around 2012 and I had never written anything in English before. But we'll leave that story for my next post.
In October 2013, several months after self-publishing my first book in Spanish (Prelude to Oblivion), I realized that I was technically going nowhere as an independent writer in Mexico. I had no opportunity at all in bookstores and I didn't know what to do. So I made the decision to leave for Canada. But I couldn't just show up there without at least one book in English, could I? So I wrote my very first novel in that language, Terra Gaiden and completed it around February 2014.
I never went to Canada...
Back then, Canada imposed a visa for Mexicans and it was extremely hard to get one just to at least being able to enter as a simple tourist. So my visa was denied and hence my dream frustrated. But alas, I didn't feel bad at all, because I found out that I could try my luck in Anime/Comic conventions in my city! In my country! I was so excited that I completely forgot about the Canada failure and wrote a third book, but also in Spanish.
So I started attending anime conventions as an independent artist throughout the entire year. And the following, and the following, etc...However, and as I expected, Terra Gaiden was yet another failure. The reason is very simple; the book is in English and not too many readers (that belong to the small 20% I mentioned before) understand that tongue. I attempted to sell it on Amazon worldwide but I noticed that I had to do reaaaallly good marketing, so that also failed.
I am not lying to you. I printed only 100 copies the 15th of June, 2014. Today it's 6th of January, 2018, and I still have, like, 40 copies left. Almost four years after its publication and I still have copies left from the first printing. Pathetic, huh? And also ironic since the very few readers it has, have given me extraordinary feedback. Turns out it is one of the best books I have ever written. But anyways... It failed in Mexico.
Next, I tried going digital. I wrote a short story (around 50 pages long) called The Shattered Sky, and published it in a blog in August, 2015 so readers worldwide could read it or download the .pdf file for FREE. Back then I had a few videos in YouTube, some mediocre top 10s with no commentary and no gameplay that, very ironically, went viral. So I took advantage of that to promote The Shattered Sky and oh, boy, it sure worked. So far it has over 4000 downloads! Yup, because it's free. Because once I attempted to sell all those readers Terra Gaiden...it.didn't.work.
Don't get me wrong, I don't hate the digital era, but it's just so DAMN hard to sell digital books, let alone your own.
I continued writing and publishing in Spanish.
If you have read my previous posts you probably have realized that exactly one year ago, I moved to Nottingham, UK and lived there for 5 months. That's right, from January to June. Then on September I finished the book I had been writing during my stay there. That book was my third attempt in English and currently my last hope. Please read my previous posts if you haven't for more information.
So this is my current situation: I am 100% sure that if I keep working, improving on my YouTube channel and uploading at least one or two videos per week, and if I offer my viewers original content with my own personal and honest opinion, I will eventually get more people interested in reading my books. But the majority of my subscribers are, of course, English native speakers. That means they would probably never buy something written in Spanish, right? But I can't just focus on writing in English, because I always do so well on sales in anime conventions. Sadly, there are only 6-7 per year and half of them suck (seriously, all artists complain about some of those). I only do very good on 3 of them. So what to do? Continue in Spanish or in English?
I guess my only way out of this is to keep writing BOTH in English and Spanish until one day, one language leads me to success.
