As a would-be writer, I am one of many who has a burning passion to write, but suffers from a disconnect between passion and print.
In the past, this has meant that I allowed myself to be distracted by the struggles of the real world. Very recently, I was in the quintessential stages of burn out, which included cutting off the things I liked to do: mainly writing. However, I made a promise to myself at the beginning of the year that this year would be different. This year I wouldn’t get distracted, or at least not on the scale as the last time (in the last instance, for a total of nearly seven years between working to do any editing and/or publishing).
Well, I’ve done my best to stick to this goal. And today, with Q3 numbers to be reported, I went back over the last nine months. I came away with the impression that not only is writing hard, it can very quickly become very expensive.
Now, I’m not the sort of person with enough money to just shell out on someone to design my cover, to format my book, or to fully edit. Instead, I have to do a majority of these things myself (and the learning curve can be STEEP). However, I wanted to do even that better this year. I bought my own ISBNs so that I could theoretically get my books into libraries instead of being limited to Amazon. I bought the domain to my website. The list goes on, but the moral of the story is that even small ticket items become a significant amount quickly.
In no way, shape, or form do I wish to discourage fellow would-be writers. Quite the opposite! But the main purpose of this blog is to try and share my struggles with others. Hopefully if you have stumbled upon my ramblings, you can find what I’ve done wrong and avoid similar hiccups. So today, I just want to say, if you want to be an author like I am, even if it’s just to feel the satisfaction of selling one book, just keep an up to date tracker like Quickbooks on where your expenses are. Avoid the sticker shock that I have had. And if this is your vision, then do everything you can, but avoid going broke LOL.
Next up on the blog listing will be about formatting woes and making eBook friendly formats.
Until next time –
L.E.
Ramblings of a Would-Be Writer 