For your consideration.

At some point, after you've done your best, you release your efforts to the world.

You don't know if it's good or bad, but there is something there and it's worth sharing.  If you didn't believe that, you wouldn't do it.

Maybe all that is there is a story you've written, populated by ideas and characters and events that come out of your head and take shape in a book.  So it exists.  Even if no one reads it.

So you just have to release your books "For Your Consideration" and let it happen and maybe everyone will hate it or maybe everyone will like it; or a few will like it and most will hate it; or everyone will just go "meh."  But it's the result of your best creative effort and worth doing for that and worth sharing for that.

Chances are, nothing will happen.  There is a whole lot of understandable inertia out there.  So much stuff available that most people don't have the time and energy to expend on something that they have no assurance is any good.

That's if they hear about you at all.

Writing and exposing are too different things.  I'm not interested in the latter.  I want to write my stuff and hope it speaks for itself.  Which I know is naive. 

I'm being told there are things I can do.  I'll try some of them, as long as they don't require too much bending my natural karma.  I really don't like doing that.  Exploring my own karma is why I write, so it would be pretty counter productive to then bend my karma in order to get others to notice. 

My store sells things that people are interested in, but I find it nearly impossible to sell stuff they aren't already interested in.

A good word from a friend is worth a 10, 000 words from me, a good word from someone already tapped in probably worth multiples of that.  But again, I have no control over that.

I've asked nicely of a couple of professionals, and at least one was helpful, but it didn't budge the needle much.

I'm kind of skeptical of a lot of the online advice I'm hearing.  I think there is a whole industry that has arisen who's purpose it is to make you believe that if you just do such and such, success will follow. 

The same industry existed 30 years ago in magazines -- and they were so much bullshit back then, too.

I'm not all that put out by it.   I understand it.  At this point, I'm just hoping to get lucky, I suppose.  The traditional route is ridiculous right now, that that isn't the answer for someone who writes as much as I do.

I fall back on my stoic philosophy:  do those things you can do, and know that some things are beyond your control.