Things I've Learnt as An Indie Author (Part 2)

Hello everyone, and welcome (possibly back)! I’m picking up more or less where I left off last time… Except this time I’ll focus more on what I’ve learnt about writing and try and give some writing advice, instead of talking about marketing.

I wrote a lot before I became a independently published author. I started out writing fanfiction when I was a child, and progressed to original works after I began getting a lot of positive reviews on fanfiction.net. Once I had completed an original story idea, I decided to put it out in the world for people to read. And this was the first lesson. There is a massive difference between fanfiction that’s just for fun and a work you’re aiming to publish. Yes, I got a lot of great reviews, praise for my writing style and so on while I was writing fanfic, but standards are different. It’s almost a ‘come as you are’ world of writing, where fans are quite relaxed about errors so long as, overall, they enjoy the story. I never did any editing before posting. I just wrote and clicked ‘post’ when the chapter came to a natural end. If I spotted spelling errors, I might fix them afterwards. But no one ever complained if I didn’t.

For a publishable work, you have to edit, polish, proof read, and edit again. Sometimes you need to completely re-write. The first draft is usually rubbish. Why is it so much harder? One, completely different expectations. Fanfiction is free and is usually a hobby, read and written just for fun. Published work, on the other hand, readers usually have to pay for and they come hoping for something new and amazing to knock their socks off, not an entertaining little ramble with old favourite characters.

Which leads me to point number two: In fanfiction, your characters, relationships, sometimes settings and so on, are already established. You only have to come up with the plot, and some of the more casual, just for fun fics don’t even have much of that. And still, no one minds, because you already have a pre-established audience who know they love these characters and everything about them. Yet in a published work, you need to create great characters, figure out their relationships to one another, do some world-building or setting description, put all this together, introduce it to the reader, and still get the plot in there before the reader gets bored and goes to sleep.

So, I’ve learnt that writing to publish is a world away from writing for fun. What else?

The main other piece of advice I have is that it is hugely important to actually write. That’s dumb and obvious, right? Wrong. Because all of a sudden, in the indie world, you have so much more to do. Edit, polish, tweak, proof-read, make a cover, market your work… There’s less time to write, and you have to come up with ways around it. Some people try schedules, writing at certain times, or challenges like NaNoWriMo. These haven’t ever worked for me. The only rule I have is to try and write every single day. Whether its 100 words or 1000, so long as I get words on the page.

All well and good but what about when you’re away from your WIP for days at a time? I’ve recently been working on finding ways around anything that might get in the way of writing. I don’t have a laptop or a smartphone. I do everything from my PC. So what do I do when I’m not able to be where it is? Notebooks. I have no end of notebooks, notebooks by my bed for late night ideas, notebooks in my bags for when I go away. I make sure I still write, even though I have to type it out again when I get the chance. It’s still better than not writing at all. To be able to continue where I left off, I either print work or email it to my early generation Kindle. Kindles have their own send-to email and while mine, being only designed as an e-reader back in the early days, is a little slow and clunky, it works well enough for me to keep writing. Because that’s always the best writing advice: No matter how you have to do it or what else happens, keep writing.

Alright! Those are my best little tips for writing. It’s harder than it looks, but always keep writing. I’ll sign off here for this week! If you’d like to share tips of your own or see more tips related to writing, marketing and being an author, like or comment!?