Goodreads asked R.R. Adams:

What’s your advice for aspiring writers?

R.R. Adams I've considered writing a blog, but I think it will be more impactful to answer questions like this one. Especially since a few aspiring writers have reached out to me.

Picking up a pen or setting up your keyboard is easy.

Breathing life into a story, whether through meticulous planning or inspiration driven writing sprints, is challenging. But then you push beyond that limit by taking a completed manuscript, picking up a red pen and reading and re-reading the same text too many times to count.

You aren't quite ready to take a chance with an agent and a publisher, and who knows if they are interested in taking a chance with your work. You don't want to spend months at the bottom of a pile; you want to publish your work on your own time. But self-published books are a costly upfront investment with no guarantee of return on investment.

So, sometimes you teach yourself:
- How to format.
- How to leverage one type of editing
- How to work with people new to cover design, editing or formatting

Finally, you publish.
People purchase your work.
Then they leave reviews, some positive, some negative.

Then you start the process all over again.
People's reviews won't always be kind.
And, your first few books will have very few reads.
But, you keep writing, and you continue to publish your work because it's your dream.

My dream is to write and publish books to make readers happy. And, even if it's challenging and I can't make every reader happy, for the ones that enjoy my work, I will keep writing.

And you should too. Always remember, there was a reason you picked up that pen or set up your keyboard.

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