Two things frustrate me when it comes to being a new author.
1: People assume I don’t know anything about writing because I’m self-published and just recently published my 1st book.
2: There are still some authors (emphasis on some) who whack a book on Amazon with little to no thought on the writing process. They’re only feedback was a friend or family member who said it was good.
I would like to think anyone who comes under number 2 learns from their experience. I certainly did when I shared my first messy draft on a critique site and had one hell of a wake-up call. Then again, thats what I went on there for, to know where I was at. Thank you, Critique Circle for getting me off to a great start.
I’ve been writing for 8 years, which may or may not be much these days. but I studied media with creative writing modules, so I wasn’t completely new to writing. I started writing and learned more as I went from online advice, books, and from what I loved about the books I read.
The crazy dream that started me on this journey was loose retelling of Sleeping Beauty. I thought it would be a fun short story or maybe a novella. It soon evolved into a full length story, and I still wasn’t done. By this point, I thought it would be a trilogy. Oh, how I was wrong. At the end of the first draft, it filled 5 books with half a million words in total.
During the draft of this series, I’d learned so much about writing by sharing the story with others and learning as I critiqued other writers’ work on a critique site. Unfortunately, there were a lot of writers who were very rigid with rules, and I found it too limiting for my voice. I wanted to be more creative, boarding on poetic at times, and I just got discouraged when others told me to keep in simple.
I’m not writing to be simple. I’m writing to be heard.
There were many projects after this until I decided, enough playing around. I’d found my voice, I had a good backlog of projects in various stages to work through, and I got to working on makin one publishable. Like with the writing, I researched all the ways to publish and tried to get an agent. After 6 months of rejections, I decided to self-publish, which I had already thought about.
After all the research, writing hours, and weighing up my options, I decided to go with Amazon and Barnes and Noble to avoid upfront costs. I posted the video below to make the point that just because I went for the easy option in publishing, it doesn’t meant I went for the easy option in writing.
Love Fantasy Novels 