In the last two years, I have published two books 500 Miles and Blind Alley. Both books are a collection of short stories. One reason I prefer writing short stories is because of the fast-paced nature of our current lives where attention is the most important currency. I will be describing 5 things I learned from self-publishing a book.
Short stories help my writing to get feedback faster. Short stories are different in nature than writing a full-length novel. My current work-in-progress is a novel, but once I finish it, I will go back to short story writing.
1. Writing is hard, selling is harder
Both my books are self-published. And I was able to sell the first book to most of my friends and families. For the second book, I wanted to diversify my audience, so I tried different ideas to sell. Advertising, social media, email list etc. Most important thing is to convince people to buy. Most family and friends are excited for the first time, not the second time. A lot of my friends still support my writing. They have critiqued it, given me valuable feedback. Whether your goal is to become a best-seller writer or earn money, nobody will care about your writing, if it is just lying there on amazon and nobody notices it. So you have to go out of your way to put the word out to people know about your book.
For the next book, I am entirely focusing on the professional front for selling. Once I finish the draft, I will pitch to an agent to see if I can get a deal. Even if that’s not the case, I will be covering different elements of social media, advertising, finding the right audience for marketing and selling. If your goal is to make money from writing, then make sure that you take writing and publishing with a pinch of salt. It’s a lot of efforts.
2. Self-Publishing is not bad after all
When I finished 500 Miles, I was wondering how I can pitch it to agents and after a few rejections, I decided to go ahead with the self-publishing option. There are a lot of scammy publications out there who will be ready to publish for you, but will ask you money. If a publication asks money from an author, that’s not right. As an author, you are a creative individual. You don’t have to pay money to get your work published. Here comes self-publishing to rescue. With Amazon being the big player, self-publishing has become even easier. Few things to remember if you want to go through a self-publishing route, hire a professional editor to edit your writing and get a professional book cover designer. This will give your work a professional edge and it is the most important thing in the self-publishing world.
3. Write, write and Edit multiple times
With self-publishing, anyone can write and publish their work. There is a lot of crap writing that has been published with self-publishing. This made writing better even more important. If you want to write better, then write and edit multiple times. Every draft you write, it will improve with each iteration. Also once you finish editing, hire a professional editor to go over the writing to find any other issues.
4. You are doing everything
In traditional publishing, the publisher would have done most of the marketing and sales. But with self-publishing, you as a writer will have to wear many hats. Write, market, sell and all other administrative things. This makes self-publishing even more difficult. But there are a lot of success stories. Self-publishing gets better with each work you publish. So don’t give up easily. You have to continue to publish some work, so readers will find you. Publishing on amazon is like taking chances and you never know which will become viral.
5. Find out why you do what you do
In all these efforts, one thing you will have to find out why you are doing what you are doing. Writing is great. Money can be a motivation. Books and names can give you status. But are you doing this for status? Are you doing this to become rich? Are you doing this to impress your girlfriend? Find out that reason. You will struggle, will feel frustrated. You will also feel like giving up. If your motivation for writing comes from external things, it won’t last long. So you must look inside yourself. You will find the right reason inside and that reason will motivate you for life long. Personally, I write because writing allows me to live life multiple times, it brings me joy of imagination, it gives me pleasure to discover things on my own.
If you are looking for some fun stories to read for this holiday season, you can buy my books 500 Miles and Blind Alley or read my post about Science in Science-Fiction.