A. Yamina Collins Skids in Sideways: Stroke of Confidence

Author A. Yamina Collins runs the popular literary blog Yaminatoday.com. She has been featured on About.com for women in business. The Blueberry Miller Files, a short story collection is her first published book. You can find her book on Amazon, Scribd, Barnes and Noble and Smashwords.

Please welcome A. Yamina Collins, blogger at YaminaToday and author of The Blueberry Miller Files , a collection of eclectic short stories now available online. Yamina invited me on her blog last summer, and now I get to host her here! Welcome, Yamina!

Why Publishing Your Short story Is Just the Boost You Need 

Ever hear of writers who don’t write? I’m sure you have. You might be one of them. After all, we writers are notorious for standing in our own way of productivity.

Ever wonder why?

Sometimes, this can be due to laziness. But more often I think we stand in our own way out of fear; a fear that we’re just not good enough.

I, for one, was unnerved for years by the feeling that “no publisher will accept me” after receiving 25 rejection letters from publishing houses 12 years ago on a manuscript my agent had submitted for me.

I even lost the will to write for a while.

First loves gone wrong. Southern belles. Black anglophiles. And mice that nibble at the face. These are just some of the characters, and the tales, in author A. Yamina Collins’s vibrant new short story collection, The Blueberry Miller Files.

Then self-publishing arrived and I decided to jump into the indie/self-pubbing fray by starting a literary blog, Yaminatoday.com, and legally setting up my own publishing company, DeeBooks Publishing, named after my beloved mother, Dee Collins.  The first book I published has been a short story collection called, The Blueberry Miller Files, which debuted in July of 2012.

Why short stories? The easy answer is that it provided a quick boost to my confidence, giving me the right to declare “I’m a writer!” and mean it. Now I can tell people I’m an author without fear of dreadful follow up questions like, “A writer? Really? Anything published?”

Being published also makes the idea of finishing my new novel less like a fantasy and more like an undeniable reality; more like a job I must complete rather than a task I doubt I’ll finish.

Now, to back up a bit, when I said that publishing gave me “a quick boost” of confidence I don’t mean to imply I that took the lazy, unconcerned route in publishing.

I didn’t.

Indeed, after starting my blog and setting up the publishing company, I then dusted off a number of stories I’d worked hard on years ago, and treated my publishing adventure with as much vigor as I would a novel: I hired a professional editor who’d done editing work with Scholastic books, (Jessie Leaman), hired a professional book cover designer, Rebecca Swift, and asked Guido Henkel to take on the frustrating task of converting my 111 page manuscript into a format that was suitable for publication on such sites as Amazon Barnes and Noble and Smashwords.

Yes, my efforts have hit me in the pocket book nicely thus far, but I don’t regret it for a minute.

After all, the novel I’m working on will probably take years to complete because I’m such a slow writer. But just because I’m slow doesn’t mean I should lose “fertile publishing time.”

Now, here is the fun part about publishing shorter works: from the time I really got serious about producing The Blueberry Miller Files until the time I actually published the book, a total of 4 months passed.

4 months!

I didn’t have to worry about doing the practical thing either. You see, so far I’ve lost money on this little venture, but the book has only been out for about a month, and in the new digital age of publishing books can be on the “shelf” for years to come – so there’s a huge chance I’ll recoup my money and then some. And even if I don’t recoup the money, I am reminded of what Mark Twain once declared about us writers: “literary persons are flighty, romantic, unpractical, and in business matters do not know enough to come in when it rains or any other time.”

Yes, we writers probably do tend to be flighty, romantic and unpractical, so why not get unpractical with short stories? After all, writers have been “unpractical” with novels for centuries, haven’t they?

As for sales and recouping my money, well, I don’t buy into the hype that short stories don’t sell – I just have to learn ways to market my work more effectively.

After all, remember when F. Scott Fitzgerald was making the majority of his income off stories he sold to the Saturday Evening Post in the 1920s? Who says we can’t return to a time like that?

Yes, it’s true that we live in post-MTV, twitter generation. And, yes, people have the attention span of a fly. But I say, give readers a good short read and they might become some of our biggest fans.

Besides, even if I do sell only a handful of  short stories, so what? I’m self-published. I don’t have to worry about my publishing company dropping me. I can indulge my inner artist and produce stories based merely on the notion of art.

And so can you!

So to you budding, would-be and established writers out there, I say give it whirl! Dust off those short ditties and put your best foot forward.

You have absolutely nothing to lose, but all the confidence in the world to gain.