Some of you have been asking me recently what it’s like to write books. Well, this morning I had a non-writing-victory (that I’ll bore all my new author friends to death with shortly) and was feeling proud of myself for making slight progress on something I don’t find easy – so I thought I’d share. It started off as a Facebook post, but has graduated to blog-post, because I didn’t wanna break The Facebook.

This time last year I was committing to Nanowrimo. I hadn’t put finger-to-keyboard and I was only doing the 50k challenge to shut up my best friend Amber cause she’s been harping at me for about 14 years (give or take) to do it. Now I’m an Indie published author, with 2 books behind me, 2 books immediately in front and hopefully making a career out of telling my stories.

What I didn’t know was all the non-writing STUFF that would be required in the self-pub industry. You don’t just write the stories. You have to put together your team. Yourself. From scratch. While being green, wet behind the ears, a total noob – or how ever else you’d like to define it.

You need a good story, which I like to think I have.

Ideally you need a supportive household environment – which I’ve learned that lots of authors don’t actually have. Friends and family can often view your career as a hobby, and not understand the value and necessity of protected writing time, or the work you need to do. Thankfully, I’ve got the support. Both the big and the little respect my work ethic and compensate accordingly to ensure our world stays turning.

You need a solid editor (that also falls within your price range, which can, realistically, be “Broke-AF” when you’re starting out) to make sure that not only your story is solid, but that you can spell basic English and to re-correct your manuscript when word auto-changes all your American spelling back to English while you’re sleeping. Depending on your editor you may also long-distance drink tequila together and plan your midlife crises over Facebook chat – or, so I’ve heard anyway.

You need on-genre covers. You need a reliable cover designer, who knows your genre, who you work well with and who doesn’t have a year long waiting list or cost your first born to work with.

You need beta readers, ARC readers and you need confidence in spades because some days you’ll sit and stare at the screen and wonder what in the ever living hell you got yourself into.

You need to trust your gut – a conference came up in a group I was long-time-lurking in. The people intimidated me, their success made me hopeful and when the tickets went on sale I jumped. A week in Edinburgh surrounded by strangers, turned into one of the most educational, enlightening and enjoyable times of my life. And I came away with real friends who I talk to every day and many whose strengths lie where my weaknesses are.

But, it doesn’t stop there. Now you need to level-up. You need to go ‘pro’.

A team is only as strong as its weakest player. And, for many indies starting out, that weakest player? It’s you, yourself.

So there’s homework.

How can you possibly know where an editor’s strengths lie, in which genres, unless you research them? Engage with them. Have them work on samples of your work. Talk to people about their editors. Or, randomly meet one on a group for expat women and cold-approach her about looking at your stuff?

How do you know if a cover artist is on-genre, if you have no idea what your genre actually IS, other than, “it’s a love story”. Do you know how many genres within romance there are? No? I didn’t either. And some days I wish I still didn’t!

Once the book is done, the story written, the blurb sharp, the cover on point, you’ve sent it to your editor, to the betas, to the arc readers and everyone’s raving about your book you think, ‘phew’, now for the next one – wrong.

You have a great book, but you need to get it to people. You need it in front of people who aren’t the 25 best friends waiting with eager and supportive anticipation to snag your book when it goes live.

You need marketing.

You need advertising.

You need a plan.

But you didn’t study any of these things in school and you just want to write.

Tough shit. You gotta figure it out, and fast. Because your next book release is going to be coming up fast. And in order to sell books, you gotta keep writing.

So, there’s homework!

I KNOW, RIGHT?

I had no idea that being an author wasn’t just writing and delegating to the experts. I had no idea that I’d need to be an expert on ALL before I could efficiently and correctly delegate to any.

So, homework.

I’m doing the Goodreads 52 books challenge for 2019 and my year started off beautifully with fiction. I was chowing through books every day and getting caught up in the story. Then as my Non-Fic release loomed, I did some non-fic research in my genre.

Now? I’m all up in the business end of Authoring. The non-writing shit. Now when I read fiction it’s with a much more critical eye. What are these authors doing to rope me in? What are they doing that I don’t like?

My recently reads are books like, “How to be a successful indie author”, “Release strategies”, “Help! My Facebook ads suck”, “Newsletter Ninja”, “Take off your pants. Outline your books for faster, better writing”.

My current reads are “Amazon ads for authors” and “Girl, stop apologizing”.

My fiction ‘to be read’ books are gathering dust and in my new queue, I have things like “collaborations”, “the authors guide to cover design” and “mastering amazon ads”.

I read them like it’s for my finals in Queens. I highlight, I annotate, I rewrite notes. I talk to people about what I’ve learned and ask if they know something better. I look at what I’ve been doing and see if it lines up with what the professionals say to do and if it doesn’t, I change it.

I read more amazon reviews than I care to admit. What people love and hate about other books in my genre. What people want more of, sure, but mostly what the hell not to do.

Once you master the ads and the social media power of influencing (which, can truly take some of us a millennia), your book is in front of people, they read it, they love it, you’ve bugged them to leave rave reviews about it and now they have to wait for book two.

You get to nap, right?

Wrong.

This is where you gotta hook people in. During all of this, you gotta be putting together a newsletter in the background. An onboarding system when people sign up and a place for them to wait for you between books. You gotta send them enough reminders about who you are and what you do, while simultaneously trying not to piss the world off by flooding their inbox with emails that make them click spam on your newsletter.

You sign up to newsletter swaps but you gotta check you’re not sending erotica to your sweet romance fans. You gotta get your name out there as much as possible. The more people who see your books, the more people who read your books, the more people talk about your books and the more of your books they’ll want.  But putting yourself out there doesn’t exactly come easily to people and self-promo can be hard, man. Trust me.

And then you get up and do it all over again.

I think the one thing I didn’t realise was so important throughout this, is that you have to believe in yourself. You have to believe you have something that someone else would part with their hard-earned cash for, and throw everything you have, at it. And for the moments where you think ‘What the hell am I doing?’ you’ve gotta surround yourself with people who remind you how much of a badass you are.

Yesterday I was running ads through my head, talking myself out of them. They’re daunting, scary and, if you don’t do them right they can be like setting fire to money. And that’s money I don’t have. My boss, unbeknownst to her, engaged me in a conversation that made me go home and kick-off an Amazon ad. An ad which, without having been running for even 24 hours, has been my best performing ad yet.

From one of my oldest friends, (who recently got married and I haven’t even made the time to send her a damn card!) I cried when I opened it.