Time to write?
I have been working on getting my new website up and running. My son David was wonderful in helping me understand the ins and out of WordPress. I now have about a third of Surviving Higgins World: Change is the Only Option posted for your reading enjoyment. It is a tedious process. However, I have found several small errors, mostly formatting, and an occasional duplicate word. Nothing that really changes the story. Now if I can just get people to read it!
That is my main goal. David grilled me on this. What exactly did I want out of this book? Recovering the amount of money I have spent on it is a fool’s errand. Even the big-name authors struggle with royalty payments. Steven King and James Patterson are well known, but they too have to produce yearly if they want to keep the lights on.
There are literally thousands of authors trying to get their stories before your eyes. The traditional publishing industry has been totally disrupted by the advent of digital publishing. Anyone who has the software, and most of it is free, can throw together thousands of words, convince themselves it is a major contribution to English literature, and offer it for sale on Amazon, Barnes & Nobel, and other outlets. There are companies that will promise you the moon for a price and publish what every you provide, no matter how awful. (Just an aside, Amazon Digital Publishing does a grammar check on your manuscript and struggles with dialog.)
So, what does that have to do with how to spend your time? When you are self-publishing, you do all the work. You write, you edit, you proof, you format, you upload, and you promote. If you are fortunate, you have beta readers who point out your errors and turgid prose. All the while, you struggle to work on the next volume of the series or your next book. Of course there is a next book! No one has just one story in their head.
Time to write, what a precious thing! Book three is about half done and the story points to a book four. Yes, I write like I talk, lots of words, lots of details, lots of sidetracks to explains the why, but what else does an eighty-year-old woman have to do?
