Writing a book is such an intense and personal experience that it’s hard to be objectively critical about your own work. No matter how hard you try to make it a great work of literature there may be fundamental reasons why it will never sell. What I’m about to say is going to sound harsh, but it’s true.
An autobiography, if you are not famous
If you’ve written your autobiography and you’re not famous then it’s unlikely to sell.
Poems or short stories
If it’s a book of your poems or short stories it’s likely to be harder to sell than other genres.
Fiction with no conflict, non-fiction with no authority
Your efforts to bring fictional characters to life in a novel may fail despite your opinion that they succeeded. Perhaps you write fiction with no sense of conflict or drama, or you write non fiction with no sense of authority. Publishers see these weaknesses but you don’t because you’re too close to your pride and joy.
I’ve seen it happen far too often and it’s a shame that some writers reach a skills plateau beyond which they do not progress, or they put an enormous amount of effort into writing books that fundamentally have no market.
If you are aware of any such shortcomings in your writing then you are in a position to do something about it.
The paradox is that if you are aware of any such shortcomings in your writing then you are in a position to do something about it. There’s no need to give up your dreams if you can recognise what needs to be fixed in your work, even if it means starting a brand new book in another genre altogether — a marketable one this time. It is only those who are not aware of the problems who should give up, but they won’t stop trying to get their book published because they don’t realise they have no chance of success.
Self-publishing is not giving up
There is another way out of this situation, however. Self publishing is a means for books with insufficient commercial market to get into print. Your autobiography, poems and short stories can only be self published. Don’t waste your energy trying to get someone else to pay for getting them into print. Do it yourself so that you can enjoy seeing your name on the front cover, and sell it to friends and family. You won’t make a profit but it doesn’t cost much more than the price of a holiday to get a few hundred copies printed and it’s a fun process.
Self publishing is also a way for books to show their potential. An author with just one book to sell can achieve better sales figures than a publisher trying to promote fifty books at once. All you need is the time and energy to travel and meet bookshop staff plus the courage to ask them to buy it and to remind them to reorder when it sells.
If you self publish genres of books that could potentially be taken on by other publishers, this isn’t giving up: it’s giving your book a leg-up to the point where you can impress those publishers with genuine sales figures that might entice them to sign you up.