I've had it: Giving up to maintain my sanity

After having had two publishers fold, I decided to go the self-pub route. About two years later, I'm giving up. I quit. I have had it. I can no longer maintain any interest in something that's draining my strength and creative desire to continue writing. I've done everything in my limited power but over the years, I've put much, much more money into maintaining my two books than I've gotten back. The return on investment includes a serious depression that my writing career has contributed to so I'm just going to start bailing out. I'm throwing in the night and calling it a towel. That's a wrap, kids. It's done. It's over. It's Casper. The paperbacks are no longer available for sale as of yesterday and I'll be pulling the e-books before the end of 2017. It's been a long, slow, painful ride and I can't do this to myself any longer. Godspeed to all of you who can and have made it work; I'm admitting defeat before I fall apart completely and so I can try to reclaim the joy that I once experienced when sitting down to the keyboard.

Thanks, everybody. I want to clarify I am NOT giving up writing. Just the self pub. That's going to be phased out but I could never quit writing entirely. It is my one true passion, the talent that I was given. I'm just done with the worry of doing things right or what more do I need to do for a business I'm running to become more fruitful. Self pub is not working and from a personal standpoint, it's what needs to go first.

JFC[sup]10[/sup]. Unpublishing is going to be as much work as publishing...

Continued thanks for the kind words of encouragement. Finally admitting I need to move away from the self publishing plunged me deeper into my depression. I felt/feel like such an abject failure at everything. I'm just one more statistic in the game and it only goes to show that I honestly don't have the skills necessary to succeed.

However.

Some very good friends and family have basically taken rocks to my cranium to remind me it's just this one thing that didn't work out, and I need to separate myself from it. It's too easy to say this is Who I Am™ and it's my whole being, but they've pointed out I've recognized it's weighing down on my psyche to the point I know I need to walk away from it. Luckily, I'm giving myself the time to grieve the loss (yes, it's a grieving process for me) and even more time to build myself back up from it. It's going to take a while but I think I'll pull through and continue to poop rainbows e'er long.

Again, thank you, everybody. You've been great.

Quite honestly, I can't. I got off easy on releasing the two books I have because they'd been published before so the editing had already been done. Once the rights reverted, it was just a matter of getting new ISBNs for them, getting new cover art, formatting them for release, and sending them out into the wild. I no longer have neither the time nor the resources to continue the endeavor; it's drained too much from me and my soul and even if I wanted to, the finances aren't there without amassing a huge amount of debt I'm trying to avoid. In the end, I'm not cut out for self-pub so I'd rather admit that than continue to beat myself about the head and shoulders to make something that isn't working somehow and miraculously turn around.

TMI WARNING:
My two books were released on various self-pub formats in 2014-2015. It's nearly three years and almost $10,000 (mostly in promotion opportunities and yearly appearances at a convention) later to claim less than $200 in royalties. I can't keep that up. And the pressure I'd been putting on myself has all but sapped my creative desire to continue writing (since I went to RT Booklovers Convention in April 2016 and this year in May, it's taken that long for me to squeeze one chapter out of my system. ONE chapter. Even then, it has to wait for edits because it's still not really what I want). I may sound a little hyperbolic or laying on the drama a bit too thick but the biggest worry in my life has been this self-pub effort. It's contributed to my recent bout of depression (upgraded from clinical to severe) and I can't write around it; I have to face it head on and like many sources of my life's challenges, it needs to be completely excised. There's no way for me to work with it any longer. I'd thought about it and the first thing that occurred to me is what my accounting workbooks look like. Then I looked at the return on the investment and while many don't recoup anything for their efforts, I finally said to myself "this is fucking NUTS".

When I finally made the decision about two weeks ago to begin the process of shutting everything down, it really, really hurt. It hurt because I had to admit I wasn't successful at something (again) and the roots began to dig a little further into my creative desires. I shut down for about 24 to 48 hours but finally pulled out of it when I reminded myself the self-pub isn't who I am. I knew I wasn't going to make a metric shit tonne of money from it and I knew the ROI would be infinitesimal but I hadn't realized how microscopic it was going to be. Because it's been eating at me so much for so long, it has to be shut down. I can't find a compromise to keep it going without it further destroying me and my desire to keep writing. Since I'd decided to stop, there have been some brief flashes of creativity but I need to get back into that pattern again. It's going to take me a while but it's going to happen.