Adventures of a New Writer

I am inherently a planner. I need to know what comes next or I start to get a little anxious. As I started writing, I realized I really wanted to figure out what my next steps should be. A friend told me about GoHighBrow, a site that encourages people to learn something new every day by signing up for “courses” that are delivered by email (every morning) for a quick, 5 minute read. They also only allow you to sign up for one course at a time, as they want to encourage productive daily habits and don’t want to tire out your brain from too much information at once.

I found they had a number of options to choose from and through their free trial, I ultimately ended up signing up for two courses: “How to Self-Publish” and “How to Market Your Book Online.” Both were actually really helpful and included more resources for additional information. What I basically learned was I needed to build a whole brand as an author. This needed to include a website, blog and social media presence. Great, I already had a full-time job, how was I going to make time to figure out how to build a brand, oh and also write my story?!

I decided I wanted to see if I could go the traditional publishing route. But doing this meant I would need to try and find a book agent. I know that’s a competitive field, and if I wanted to try and find an agent, I would need to make sure my book was as good as I could make it, which would also mean finding an editor.

I started to explain all of this to my husband and he told me to just focus on my writing and finishing it first. While he has always been supportive of me, the way he said it made it sound like he was questioning that I would actually finish this project. I was still going through the outlining stages in The Novel Factory, but I knew deep down that I was going to finish this story. It was hard for me to explain to my husband that I needed to figure out these next steps to feel excited and keep pushing myself forward.

Initially, I started doing some research on how to find a good editor, and went down a lot of rabbit holes in the process. I found myself getting overwhelmed by all the options. Ultimately, I decided to take my husband’s advice and just focus on writing my book. But I was glad that I had done this initial research, because it helped me understand additional areas I needed to focus on and I was excited that I now had my next steps.

No Comments