The Grind

So your going to write a book, sell a whole bunch of copies, and move to an island to live forever in happiness. Cool, good for you, have fun. But if that's your expectation going in, it might be just slightly less painful to step back a few feet and ram your head into a brick wall, and keep doing that over and over again until blood is flowing profusely, your eyes are about to pop out of your skull, and your knees finally give way to the stupidity of your actions. The reality of writing is success isn't something that happens overnight. For every JK Rowling or Stephen King, who themselves were not overnight successes, there are millions of people with names like Bob or Sue that jump into the writing profession with huge dreams, only to have them crushed.

Am I saying stop, don't write that book, move on to a different dream? Absolutely not! But what I am saying is go in with your eyes wide open. Amazon, Smashwords, and many other outlets give everyone the opportunity to self-publish an e-book, or through Creatspace a physical book. I know, I've self published four books so far. And I did that because I'm not a very patient person, I sent out 30 or 40 query letters to various agents and was roundly rejected across the board. Honestly I can understand why, because I was sending out The Rock Star and it's a complex book that takes a second to get into, and most agents are either thrilled inimically or they move on, so they moved on, and so did I.

But self publishing costs money! If you didn't know that, you should! If you research you'll argue with me that Amazon and Smashwords don't cost a thing to publish books, and you'd be right. The costs are in editing, in cover art, and in formatting, all of which are an absolutely necessary to get your book to market in a professional manner. Skip those steps and everyone who reads your book, if they read it at all, will know. So those are built in costs you need to budget for.

Then you publish your book and the real grind starts. There are hundreds of thousands of books that are published every year, and to get your books sold at all you need to get your book in front of readers. To do this you go through the options that are available to you, Twitter, Facebook, Youtube or Goodreads, all of which you can access for free. But heres the grind. Getting followers on each of the sites takes time. You don't throw up a profile and get thousands of followers over night. You get them one follower at a time, and most times it's not as easy as following someone and they'll just automatically follow you back, most times they need a reason to follow you. So that means you have to start providing them with content that they want to see. And content takes time. You never know who is going to respond to which content, so you have to do a lot of it. And here's a little piece of advice…if you say the same thing over and over again, most people will just ignore you, and some will just drop you all together. So if you want to keep your followers you need to switch things up and keep people interested. Which takes time.

You can do a blog, like this one, but guess what, that takes time too.

My point in all this is I want you to realize that if you want to be a successful self-published author you need to manage your expectations, realize it's going to take some money, and know that there is an awful lot of work that goes into it. It's a grind. You get readers one at a time. Followers one at a time. Appreciate every one of them and go out of your way to keep them entertained. You never know who's going to say what, to who, or for what reason, and what might spiral out of control, become viral, and send your sales through the stratosphere. That might never happen, but what will happen is that if you keep at it, you keep writing, you keep promoting, you keep gathering followers you should get to the point that when you publish a book you have fans who will buy it without question.

I'm working towards that now… and I can't wait to get there.