Go Ahead and Publish Before You Get All Serious About Writing
Why I tell people to become a published writer before they feel ready to write their first masterpiece.
Jitters. Nervousness. “Imposter Syndrome”.
I’ve got a cure for these. It’s called not taking yourself so seriously.
There are thousands of ways you can screw up royally in writing. And in fact, most authors have. Even Shakespeare wrote some plays that were flops. It’s all part of the flow of writing.
One author said, “you’ve only got so much crud in you” and recommended getting to work writing as method of getting that crud out of your system.
And people are afraid sometimes of gettins something out there with their name on it. That’s what psuedonyms are for. Pen names.
Look, you publish a simple book, then you’ve gone and done it. You’re now and forever a published author. Now you know how to publish something that you know is really valuable. Meanwhile, you have just become a published author.
Now you can get to work really learning your craft.
It’s just that simple. Even too simple.
Here’s the next lesson out of my Writerpreneur OS book that covers this:
Get Published
The First Lie Fed to Authors:
It Takes Lots Of Time And Money To Get Your Writing Published.
The truth is: a minimum viable book can be published in a single day or just a morning or an afternoon.
And it costs you nothing but your time.
Most people think writing and publishing is incredibly hard and difficult and expensive.
Writing is simple – and free.
You sit down and write until you're done, or do it over several days.
Publishing is also simple – and free:
You need 2500 words.
You need a cover.
You need 50 characters of a description.
Writing
Find something you've written that's at least 2500 words long. That's about 8-9 pages of single-spaced text (more or less.)
The minimum for publishing on Amazon KDP and Apple is 2500 words. So that's your target. Doesn't have to be formatted at all. It can actually be gibberish. 2500 words of anything at all.
A Cover
This is simply two things: Big Text and Big Image.
Hold your thumb up at arms length. You should be able to read and understand the cover on your thumb at that size. That's why they call those images “thumbnails.” When they shrink down to that size it still should be readable. Go to Amazon and look up some books and see what is “also recommended” lower on the page.
See what you find there? Small covers you can still read and understand. As well as everything else that you can't.
The simplest approach to make covers is to use Canva.com online – they've got a lot of book cover templates there, designed specifically for ebooks. Download the finished product to your computer. Or you could use any of the other free online book cover creators out there as well.
Description
When you get to this point, just type in a sentence that describes your book. As much or as little as you want. Has to be 50 characters. (That last sentence was 24 characters, as example.)
Now – Publish.
Set up your account with Draft2Digital.com or any of the various others, such as Streetlib, PublishDrive, Kobo, Barnes&Noble, Smashwords, or even Amazon KDP.
Then upload and plug in these three (text, cover, description) and let them do their magic of conversion for you. Hit publish and you're done. Sure, you'll see a lot of other things to pick out, like category and keywords, but the minimum you have to have is those first three.
You're now a published author. Cheers!
Why this simple approach? Why do this first?
Because once you've done these steps, you'll have your first book up there and you'll only get better from here on out.
One study says that most people (about 80%) have a book they want to write. But only about 10% ever do write it. And only about 10% of them actually get it published.
The whole point of this lesson is to simply get you over this learning curve of publishing your own book.
Look, if you don't like any part of it, Amazon and all ebook outlets will let you change what you put up there. At any time you want, today, tomorrow, or years from now.
The key point is to do it now and get it done.
Yes, it's that simple.
And just that free.
In just a half an hour, you proved to yourself that you can publish any time you feel like it.
Yes, the next books you write and publish will be better. Much better.
You just accomplished more than most. You're now in that elite group called published authors. Time to update your business card and online profiles.
So, take a break, go get your favorite beverage and celebrate!
The course itself is here: https://livingsensical.gumroad.com/l/AuthorFreedomCourse
The book is available everywhere: https://books2read.com/u/mYgxvG