I’ve been doing this whole author thing for five years now and one of the things that I have noticed is that I’ve moved through some pretty distinct stages in my career. I’ve never actually heard anybody else talk about this, and I don’t know if people don’t talk about it because it’s just not codified, or if it’s because it’s such a personal thing, but I find it incredibly helpful to understand where I am in the overall landscape of being an author. As far as I see it, being an author can be divided into three main stages. We’re going to be talking about these three stages this week and specifically the first stage today.
The first stage in being an author is getting started, and I divide it into two distinct phases.
The first phase is relatively simple. You need to know how to write a book, and actually do it. If you want to be a published author, you have to finish a manuscript. That is the single non-negotiable that cannot be overcome by anything else. If you want to publish a book, you have to write the book. That’s it. Learning how to write that book is a long and arduous process, and sure, you can just sit down and slap words down on a page, but nobody that I have ever encountered has been satisfied with just randomly throwing something together. There’s something about the process of writing that pushes us to try to do a better job, and this stage can take a varying amount of time. Some people spend years and years and years on their first manuscript. Other people write it out fairly quickly.
There are really two schools of thought. One, you want to perfect your work as much as possible before you release it, and the other is that you want to improve over time by releasing your work quicker and then improving in your next attempt. And either of those options are actually great. Neither one is necessarily superior to the other. They just produce different results. But this is the first half of the first stage, and this might be where you are today. If it is, then the action you need to take is incredibly simple. You need to finish your manuscript because that’s the beginning of everything.
The second phase of this first stage is understanding all of your options. If you’ve managed to make it through the first and most difficult hurdle of writing your novel, then you’re now left in a landscape of a million different kinds of paths that you can take to being an author. You could go the indie route, but even inside the indie route there are an endless number of options. You could go with serialized fiction. You could go with Amazon Exclusive. You could go wide. And if you go wide, you could go direct sale or you could go through any of the many platforms. There are just so many different options when it comes to self-publishing.
Then you add on top of that the traditional routes. Whether that’s small press or querying agents, there are tons of different avenues that you can use to approach the same problem. This stage is really about knowing what your options are. It’s about knowing how it is that you specifically want to pursue your author journey. There are advantages and disadvantages to each of these paths. There is no one perfect or right path. There’s only right for you. So instead of obsessing over what the perfect path is, it’s best in this stage to just get as much information as possible. You can get information by doing research online. You can get information by talking to people who are already authors. You can get information like I did by going to conferences or conventions and listening to what everybody says.
At the end of this stage, you want to make a decision. You want to decide and commit to the path you’re going to take. That doesn’t mean you’re going to stay on that path forever, but that you’ll follow it to the end of its usefulness. I switched from self-publishing, which I was initially doing, to working with a publisher when it was right for my career. Who knows, in the future that might change once more.
If finishing your novel is the key to the first part of this stage, then listening is the key to the second part of this stage. It’s awesome that you’ve written your novel, but you need to do something with it if you want to be an author.
YouTube Video Link: https://youtu.be/u33tYxbjqdg
Thanks for reading and watching.
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