A blog post ... from my blog

http://nmsilber.wordpress.com/

Learning the Ropes

When I decided that I wanted to become an author a year ago a friend, who was a well established indie author herself, took me under her wing and taught me quite a bit. I’ll always be grateful to her for being so patient and answering my myriad of questions. She was also the person who introduced me to my editor and my cover designer, both of whom I love and work very well with. While I had been an editor of a legal journal, and several of my nonfiction articles had been published, I knew virtually nothing about writing professionally. She was my first real teacher.

In law school professors are fond of saying that if you think that you understand it you don’t. Well, likewise, no matter how much you learn as an indie author there always seems to be more to learn. Recently, I learned that an author needs to launch on Tuesday because of the way that the New York Times figures book sales and that the “Big Five” publishing houses always launched on a Tuesday. Who knew? Certainly not me.

In any event, I learned two valuable lessons, that I needed to move my launch to a Tuesday and that the author services representative who offered me this tidbit for free was both more knowledgeable and more professional than anyone on the marketing end I had met to date. I suppose that I was also reminded of that old lesson from my law school days — if you think you understand it you don’t. There’s always more to learn. I’m thankful to the teachers I’ve met along the way, both those who have graciously taken the time to help and those who have been less helpful because they taught me something too.