What are your self-publishing expectations?
Consciously or not, our expectations have an influence on a huge amount of our writing career. We might tell ourselves that we have no expectations going in, that we are self-publishing our books just to see what will happen, but there is generally a part of us – even if only a tiny part – that is hoping we will be successful; that our hopes and expectations will prove to be correct.
Expectations can cover a whole range of things, from the genre of book you intend to write to the sales you hope to achieve. When we’re sitting at home dreaming about what might happen to our writing careers, it can be easy to allow ourselves to get a bit carried away and for our dreams to start to take the more concrete form of an expectation.
There is nothing wrong with this, of course. If you have big goals for your writing, it might well give you the boost you need to put the work in to achieve those goals. However, especially when we are starting out in self-publishing, it’s worth taking a step back and checking that our expectations are based in reality.
For example, when you hear people talking about self-publishing, you can often get the sense that it isn’t that hard to do. In some ways, it really isn’t that hard to do. In other ways, however, it really is. Taking the time to do your research and learn how it all works is not important just for giving you the skills you need to do the job, but also in terms of managing your expectations – how much time it will take you to publish a book, what you are able to do yourself and what you will need to learn first.
Issues such as this are why it is so important to develop a plan for your self-publishing career. You plan might change; in fact, it’s likely that it will, as this is an industry that’s changing fast and we always need to be ready to try new things and adapt to change quickly. However, a plan that includes not just your hopes for your writing career but also a defined means of what you’re going to do to achieve that matters.
It also gives us a way to measure our expectations in practical terms; if, for instance, your expectation/goal for one month was to sell 10 copies of your book a day but you’ve fallen short of it, you’ll be able to look back and see where you might have gone wrong, as well as being able to see what more you need to do to achieve those goals.
Did you have any expectations about self-publishing when you first started out?
