Tag Archives: motivation

In 1650, Spanish painter Diego Velázquez was commissioned by Pope Innocent X to paint a portrait of his.

Three centuries later, another artist would attempt to recreate it. Despite never having seen this painting in person, the Irish artist Francis Bacon would repaint it, over and over again, completing a total of 50 paintings during the 1950s and 1960s.

During the summer of 1957, another famous artist, Pablo Picasso, was inspired by Velázquez’s masterpiece, Las Meninas.

The first thing I wrote that actually got me quite a bit of exposure was a novella called “An Emperor’s Will.” I wrote it when I was 16 years old, and I won a National Literary Contest. And a lot of published writers read it and loved it. On an online workshop frequented by some of the best SF and Fantasy writers in Romania, it received mostly positive reviews.

The problem?

It was written…

Whenever we submit a part of our soul that we translated into words, we do so armed with nothing but the hope that the person reading our work will understand it.

Sometimes they do. Most times they don’t.

Rejection scrapes the heart. But, well, there’s nothing to do about it. In fact, rejection is as much a part of being a writer as punching those damn keys. It’s as much a part of being a writer as the edits and the rewrites and the social media marketing.

So, you have a finished manuscript, and now you’re ready to share it with as many readers as possible.

In order to do that, you must choose one of two paths: either self-publish your book yourself, or go the traditional route and try to find a publisher.

Deciding on which route to take means that you’ve got to figure out a couple of things about yourself first, about your book, and about your ability to effectively market (and enjoy the process) both yourself as an author and your book.

Now, let’s discuss the essential questions to ask yourself if you’re trying to decide if self-publishing your book is the best available option for you.

Almost a decade ago I interviewed David Gaughran, a name that surely stands out from the crowd through the sheer plethora of self-publishing resources that he has made available for free on his blog.

While the full interview has been lost, I did manage to recover some interesting fragments, which can easily form the basis of a self-publishing framework even to this day.

So, without further ado, let’s go through this fantastic list of self-publishing tips.

You will want to create something of your own. You will want to do what you can, with whatever’s at your disposal at that moment. Right there, right then. If you have to write your story on a piece of napkin, so be it. If you have to sketch on your phone, fine.

When you find your muse, you will feel yourself becoming addicted to the promise of doing work you hope could last forever…

How much are you willing to pay?

Okay, all jokes aside, “how much” depends on a lot of factors such as:

1. Your particular set of skills (can you design your own cover/interior formatting?)
2. The quality you’re aiming for.
3. Whether or not you’re planning on having both an e-book version and a print version of your book.
4. The emphasis you want to place on marketing and advertising your book.

All in all, there are two main considerations: how much you’re willing to pay in terms of money or effort in order to produce quality.

Writing is a simple process. It’s writers who make it seem so terrifying.

After all, we stare at a blank page long enough that we feel this inexplicable urge to transform it, and we do so through sheer power of will.

But what if the will isn’t strong enough? What if we get lost along the way? What if we somehow succumb to the critic within, or worse, to friendly advice, and we’re tempted to give it all up?

The following frameworks will be more than enough to help you punch those damn keys and never worry about going creatively bankrupt.