Writers Ask: Should I self-publish?
A lot of people tend to agonize whether or not to self-publish; let me cure your agony. There are times when self-publishing a book is the appropriate path and other times when it’s not.
Writers Ask: I believe in myself. Why can’t others?
Everyone has to start somewhere. Nobody is born with a book already written and a publishing contract to boot. Every successful author had to experience exactly what you’re experiencing right now. Oftentimes, the only thing standing between publishing and not publishing is just whether or not the author is ready to give up on their work. There are thousands of editors, thousands of agents, thousands of publishers and literal billions of readers that all come with their own subjective tastes. You just need to convince one person at a time, and often the most important person to convince is yourself.
Writers Ask: How do I know when it’s time to move on?
At the time of your question, I had spent over four years with that book manuscript we spoke of. Four years and four major revisions and a year of querying and a year of full requests from agents and a year of requests for revisions from those agents, one of which came through an exciting and debilitating phone call, all of which resulted in painful passes. When you asked your question, I had gone a year without looking at that manuscript, without thinking about it, not because I just didn’t want to but because it was depressing and I needed to be in a state of not depressing for just a little bit.
Writers Ask: How do you muddle through the middle?
If we are writing, we are always in the middle of the book. And it’s always a slog. The wheels always spin but the point is they spin. Good stuff becomes shit stuff becomes good stuff again and you just have to show up and trust the process. Everything looks different from day to day because you are different from day to day. You are evolving with your story.