At its core, fiction is about emotional experiences for the reader. Provide that and you’ll find that your readers will stick with you throughout your series and recommend your books to their friends.
Change is coming, but that’s nothing new for indie publishing. We learn, adapt, and iterate.
The future for New York, and the brick and mortar book store, doesn’t look bright, but they survived the great depression. The odds of them going away entirely are next to zero. They too will need to adapt, same as us, and it’s impossible to say with certainty what their new form will look like in five years, but it’s a good bet to say that at least one of the bigger publishers will go under. However, during the turmoil, there’s an excellent opportunity for new mid-sized publishers specialized into genres, to fill the void.
Learning from those that have come before us is the key to success in life. If you can save yourself the growth pains, you’ll place yourself in the position to capitalize on opportunities earlier, and thus experience a longer period of compound returns.
What’s more, learning from fellow artists in different disciplines helps clarify the fundamentals to focus on. As an independent author, you are a corporation, and it’s vital you learn to manage your assets (the books you produce) accordingly. That means learning to place the financial needs of the business above your personal desires.
Health is the core element of general life quality. There is obviously far more than health, such as self-actualization—a core reason I’m an author—and social network of friends and family, but health directly affects those elements.
“Our new research review, released today, shows that engagement with audiobooks can benefit children’s reading skills and enjoyment, as well as their mental well-being and emotional intelligence.”
Develop a growth mindset and ignore everything else.
Talent X Hard Work X Perseverance X Learning X Luck = SUCCESS
This led to another insight: writing is challenging, not hard. Webster defines challenging as, “arousing competitive interest, thought, or action”, and hard as, “difficult to bear or endure”.
Stop making assumptions about what you should do and instead focus on making data driven strategic decisions based upon your own experiences.
Set aside several hours for setting up your Dragon. Much of the time will be your PC working without you, but it will bog down your computer to where you won’t get much else done. This is not the project to start when you’re in the middle of that manuscript which is due to your editor in three days!
This post is a step by step guide, with screenshots of how to find your kindle book (.mobi file) page count, when enrolled in KDP Select.
Last updated March 5th, 2019.
Chapter 1 – Kick In The A$$
Chapter 2 – Fighting Through The Fear
Chapter 3 – The Process
Chapter 4 – Keeping It Original
Chapter 5 – Setting A Schedule
Chapter 6 – Discipline
Chapter 7 – Finding Time To Write
Chapter 8 – What’s The Deadline
Chapter 9 – Feedback
Chapter 10 – Keep Moving
Chapter 11 – Write To The End
Chapter 12 – Last Words… One More Time
