Four Lessons From Eleven Years Of Self-Publishing

Someone asked for the absolute most basic writing advice I could give. Since this week I reached eleven years of self-publishing, it seems a good time to share it. So, here are four pieces of advice that I think all writers should keep in mind.

1.) Learn to finish things. Novels, short stories, whatever. You can’t do anything else until you learn to finish. Like Steve Jobs said (or quoted from someone else, accounts vary), real artists ship.

Learning to finish things can be a real psychological hurdle because the mid-book (or-mid story) slump is real. Like, you’ve got the interesting opening, and you’ve got the exciting conclusion in your head, but now you’ve got to slog through the middle to reach the end. CLOAK OF SHARDS will be my 130th novel, and I still feel the mid-book slog. There’s nothing to do but to grit your teeth and push on through to the end.

Because finishing your book/story is the foundation to everything else. You can’t sell anything until it’s finished. Even if you don’t want to sell it, no one’s really interested in reading unfinished stories.

If finishing a novel is too daunting of a thought, start with short stories and work your way up. And once you have enough short stories, you can bundle them together and sell them that way. 🙂

2.) Cultivate indifference to the opinions of others about your work.

This doesn’t come naturally to people, but it’s important for writers. If you do anything creative, you have to accept that not everyone is going to like your stuff, and indeed, some people will actively hate it. The Rudyard Kipling poem “If” has a great line – “If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster, And treat those two impostors just the same…” Much the same way, writers should treat both praise and criticism as impostors.

People like what they like, and no amount of arguing or persuasion will change their minds about their tastes. You could write the best mystery novel the world has ever seen, a sublime work of genius that could define the mystery genre for the rest of the 21st century, but if you ask someone who prefers Contemporary Western Romance to read it, they likely won’t like the book no matter how good it is, and might even flip to the back chapter first to see who the killer is. (That, incidentally, is the reason for marketing books – to match the books you have written with the readers who will enjoy them.)

The key is to understand that just as you have the right to write anything you want, people have the right to think whatever they want about it.

3.) Avoid comparison-itis.

“Comparison-itis” is the common term for constantly comparing yourself to other people and denigrating your achievements in light of their own. Of course, that’s just a fancy modern way of describing a very old concept – envy – and envy is very bad for people. Cain basically murdered Abel over envy. There’s a reason that medieval Catholicism described envy as one of the Seven Deadly Sins, because it really is very bad for you. Like crystal meth of the soul.

So don’t compare yourself as a writer to other writers, because other people’s success or failure doesn’t effect you, and you can’t know all the circumstances happening to other people. Like, a writer could have a book at #1 on Amazon US, and you could actually be making more because the #1 writer is spending everything on ads. Or the writer could be dealing with a bad family situation or a sick relative and just barely keeping it together.

No matter how good you are, there’s always going to be someone better.

And, no matter how bad you have it, there’s always going to be someone worse off.

4.) A little bit every day accumulates over time.

Letting the perfect be the enemy of the possible is a common fallacy that afflicts people in all areas of life. Like, you want to lose thirty pounds and you can’t, so you give up, overlooking the fact that with a bit of effort you could lose ten pounds and keep it off with the attendant benefits to blood pressure and joint strain. Or in writing, you want to write a thousand words a day but can’t fit in the time, so you give up entirely.

But a few hundred words a day adds up over time. And as you practice more, you get better and can write faster.

That’s the hardest part of starting out, I think – realizing that time and practice accumulate. But keep grinding away, and suddenly you’ll look back and you’re eleven years in and on novel #130. 🙂

So, I think those are four useful pieces of advice for any writer, regardless of experience.

-JM