Please Stop Asking Your Writer Friends for Free Copies of Their Work

When people think of children authors, big names are the ones immediately conjured in their minds. J.K. Rowling, Holly Black, John Green, Suzanne Collins.  But the publishing industry is huge, highly competitive, and full of authors you’ve likely never heard of before. Included in those are indie authors, like myself.

As an indie author, we often don’t have the same amenities popular authors have nor the luxury of an influential marketing staff. More often than not, we have to do much of the marketing and promotions ourselves. And that takes money. We’re not talking pocket change either. We’re talking about actually financial investments. This includes shelling out money to be a sponsor at conventions to get your name out, hosting book giveaways where you not only lose income on the book itself but also have to pay for mailing it out, as well as buying ads on various websites. It adds up and it takes a huge hit to our wallets. We do NOT make the income that those big name authors receive. Not even close. Most authors, in fact, make less than $10,000 a year. This isn’t something we do as a full time job. We work day jobs and do our writing careers on our “free time”. And when I say free time, I mean the fleeting hours we have between when we get home from our day jobs and go to bed, and the weekends when our friends are going out and we have to stay inside to continue our work. Pursuing a writing career means sacrificing a lot of money and social time. 

The amount an author invests in their careers and promoting their books can be upward of $1,000. It’s not cheap, but it is a necessity. So when you turn to your author friend and say “Oh hey, can I get a copy of your book?” and then balk when we state the price, you're essentially delivering a slap in the face to us. You’re disregarding the time, effort, and money we’ve put into creating our works and cultivating our careers. You’re saying that we’re not worthy as artists. Additionally, just think if we gave free copies to all our friends - we would barely make any profit from it at all. Friends and family often are our primary buyers. And if we’re being totally honest, I use the term “profit” with a grain of salt, because more often than not we still only just break even after everything else… if we’re lucky.

Have I given out free copies of Ashwood outside of promotional giveaways? Yes, I have. Two copies. One to my mother, the other to my cover artist. One because she gave birth to me, and the other because she was kind enough to design my cover for free (and no, I didn’t ask – she offered because she believed in me and wanted to give Ashwood the best chance it could in the market).

So here’s the deal, people. Unless you’ve played a significant role in the birth of said author or the book itself, don’t expect to get a copy for free. In fact, don’t even ask. It’s nothing less than an insult to us. No one is going to blame you if you don’t have the means to purchase a copy. If you can, great… but we don’t expect it. There are other ways you can support your writer friends than buying a copy – you can share information about it on social media. You can attend events your friend hosts. You can use your contacts to help them network and boost their careers. Things like that only costs your time and they truly do matter. But asking for a free copy? That only causes hurt feelings and bruised hearts, so please, please, please… just don’t do it.

Dyscalculia and the Imaginative Mind

I’ve always hated math. It’s not that I’m “just bad at math” – I straight up don’t understand it! No matter how many times I go through calculations or study the formulas, nothing about it makes sense to me. Nothing clicks in place. But it’s not just math that I struggle with. There are other little issues I have too – I have difficulty reading analog clocks, I’m always highly anxious about being late, I have no concept of distance and measurement and I have to hold up my index and thumb on each hand to see which one forms the “L” so I know which is left and which is right. This is how it has always been with me. It’s just a part of my reality.

When I was a little girl it was chalked up to the age-old “she’s just bad at math” and “she just has to study harder”. But I did study hard. I even had tutoring sessions. Nothing worked. Then one day, when I was in 7^th grade, I went to up my math teacher’s desk to get help figuring out a problem. She looked it over and a scowl formed on her face. This was followed by her hastily correcting my work before shoving it back in my hands before loudly berating me in front of the class for being “stupid” and needing to “get my head out of the clouds.”

I went numb. My head lowered while my face burnt with humiliation. I managed to trudge back to my desk but I couldn’t bring myself to lift my head again. The damage had been done. If a teacher said I was stupid, then I assumed that is just what I was. There was no reason for me to try ever again. It didn’t matter – I was just stupid and nothing could change that. From that day forward I didn’t even bother to apply myself with math because it was clear to me at the time that I was a lost cause.

Later, well after I managed to graduate from college, I learned about dyscalculia and it changed my entire perspective. Much like how dyslexia is with letters and words, dyscalculia is a learning disability which effects a person’s ability to comprehend numbers. Every single bullet point of the symptoms matched me to the core. When faced with this revelation, I burst into tears and felt a wave of relief crash over me. I wasn’t stupid. I wasn’t a lost cause. My mind just worked differently.

It’s estimated that between 3-6% of the population is affected by dyscalculia and yet it is still under-diagnosed and not well understood even by educators, who are still only now just learning about this disability. The other fascinating thing I learned about it was that many dyscalculic people score high when tested on language and reading, and tend to be highly creative. So while dyscalculia may have hindered me in mathematics, it allowed me to fully embrace this other wonderful part of my brain. This thing, which I had always viewed as a weakness, had contributed to one of my greatest strengths – my imagination and love for literature. And it is those strengths that have helped me find success and happiness in my life. So if being bad at math is the price for that – I’ll take it!

The struggle to deal with feeling of inadequacies can be suffocating at time, but it’s vital to look beyond perceived shortcomings, be it in ourselves or others, and learn to focus on our talents. I’ve come to accept that I can’t be good at everything and that’s okay! All any of us can do is to try our best and love all the parts of ourselves that make us the people who we are.