. . . be glad that you have added something glorious to our human world.
Thanks, but sales levels often don't make it feel that way.
Some people think that all art is priceless, but it always comes down to the fact that things are only worth what someone is willing to pay for them. And if no one is willing to pay, well, that seems to be a public statement on your work that says more than any number of reviews.
I used to think that at least my work would survive in the Library of Congress. You send in two copies when you register your copyright, so they must have a huge collection. So, there was always hope that one day your work might be seen and appreciated. But, did you know they may eventually throw those copies out? They only keep what they feel is worthy of being kept. Other stuff gets tossed. If you want them to actually keep them, they will but for an additional fee. And how long will they keep it if you pay? I don't know; I didn't check that fine print.
Years ago, there was a local poet in town. He wrote poems and would make copies and hand them out to people. I think he visited nursing homes, for example, and gave them poems. He had different poems to cover different life situations and if he felt you were in need of some particular sentiment, he'd give you a copy of a poem he'd written for that occasion. He had had an interesting life too, full of stories. He always wanted to see his poems published in his own book. Sadly, he passed away before that happened (so far as I know). That was before Kindle and Lulu and CreateSpace and all that. Had he lived a few years longer, he might have been able to self-publish his poems.
But what happened to all his poems? Did his family keep them? I've looked from time to time just to see if maybe someone in his family published them after his death, but I've never come across such a book. Maybe they kept them. Maybe they tossed them. I don't know. I hope someone kept them.
Too often people seem perhaps too eager to move on after a family member's death, by selling, donating or tossing everything owned by that person. And then it's like they were never there. I've seen this happen more than once. People die and the surviving spouse remodels the house, makes it like the other person had never been there. Often, a short time later and that surviving spouse will have remarried. Sometimes so quickly you wonder if they even ever mourned the dead. The famous get statues, biographical movies, museum displays and whatnot; the rest of us are just replaceable pegs no one notices are even gone.
At least with a book, some small part of the person lives on.
But if that art is deemed worthless and tossed, it's somewhat akin to saying that person's life was a waste because you're throwing away something of that person, not simply something they owned or bought in a store, but something they themselves created--a little piece of their soul, if you will.
I used to believe that there were people that valued what came before. I don't know about that anymore. People seem too eager to toss history by the wayside. Old building? Tear it down and build a new one! Old tools? Sell them for scrap metal. Old books? Recycle them. Just seems sad to me.
Sometimes I think about Atlantis. Some people doubt a civilization as advanced as Atlantis supposedly was could vanish without a trace. But think of floods and disasters that have happened in recent years. If neighboring states and communities hadn't been around to help, how many of those communities would have never been rebuilt and simply lost to nature? Or, what if everything old was scrapped, torn, recycled or otherwise gotten rid of continually? What if all your historical records were stored on magnetic media in the "cloud" somewhere? One big disaster and everything could be lost. It would all be gone. Whether Atlantis is true or a myth, there's a lesson to be learned there. Everything can be lost and forgotten, especially if there is no one who cares.
Do people care? I don't know. Seems too often people are more interested in getting their hands on the latest gizmo to care about a dusty book or a rusty tool or whatever. Put the blankets grandma made up on eBay and sell grandpa's tools to the metal recycling all to get a few bucks toward buying the next iPhone and toss their manuscripts and drawings and whatnot to make space for a charging dock. The dead are dead and the living need the latest smartphones to like all those cat memes on Twinstagrambook.
So, that's the realization that if you're not Hemingway or Stephen King or a big name, no one's going to care about anything you did. When you die, your stuff--bought or created--will all end up in the same trash or recycling bin and within a few years no one will even know you ever lived. Do we all become stories in the end? Nope. We're just dust in the windstorm.
Maybe that's why some writers quit. Why go through the effort of building a sand castle if it's just going to be washed away and forgotten minutes later? Might as well relax in a chair and watch the waves come in. Less work and the end result is exactly the same.