Hello! Welcome again on this Wednesday. I hope writing is finding you all well. I felt a small sense of victory the other day when I finished writing my short story collection, "Uncrossed Paths" now I just need to edit it. I've been told I need to finish a week before my birthday, so it's kind of interesting to have a deadline. Anyway let's get to writing stuff!
For this week's topic I want to look at things that are typically some of the most difficult to handle, or at least get through. The first is editing, this task that seems to be nearly impossible to complete, the second is marketing and handling reviews.
When it comes to editing, I personally like editing things that aren't my own, when it comes to my work I don't want to look at them anymore once I'm finished writing it, not because I think it's perfect and don't want to hack away at it, but because I know there are errors and I don't want to look at them. Editing is hard, it doesn't matter who you are, for your story and your precious ideas, it's like you're committing murder by cutting out and/or changing them. For some reason this takes longer than you think it actually should, and when you think you should have been done ages ago you look at the page number only to discover you're halfway through. This is normal. Just remember once you get finished with editing, you're well on your way to getting the story/novel/collection/what have you, out there for the world, so no giving up now!
Once you have your story ready to be thrown out there, it's time to decide if you want to go for an agent, or self publish. Both of these have their positives and negatives, today though we're going to look at self publishing since you need to do your own marketing (most of the time.) This is hard because you have to put yourself out there in such a way that would make anyone nervous. Luckily the Internet makes this a lot easier than it used to be due to things like Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Stumbled Upon, Digg, and the like, however when it comes to doing that outside of the Internet once again you're faced with the (somewhat embarrassing) task of telling people face to face about it. Business cards help with this, and there are many rather nice templates you can get for word processors that will only require you buying some perforated card stock rather than paying a company lots of money to print them out for you.
After this is finished, it's time to wait, not that you stop marketing, but it also becomes a waiting game. This is a hard game to play because it takes forever to actually sell anything, and it's not because no one wants to read it, it's still because no one knows it's out there, and if they do, you need to keep in mind that the human memory is a fickle thing. Other blogs out there are helpful, there are many that do things similar to my own when it comes to getting other books out on various days of the week. This brings me to reviews and the sorts, these can be a double-edged sword, because if you get a review it means someone is reading the book, which is good, but they might not have liked it, and felt it was necessary to show it publicly. This is going to make you angry, upset, sad, hurt, and defensive, the way I've combated this (though it's not like all those other things didn't happen) is by thinking 'Any publicity is good publicity'. We've all seen it happen before with movies, TV shows, things on the Internet, and other books, so just because you get one bad review, it's not the end of the world.
That was my post for today. I'm sorry if it was a bit ramble-y, but I figure it was important, and I promised myself I wasn't going to rant. Please come back on Friday where I have a review for another book up on the Internet! See you then!
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