Pushing that PUBLISH button is a big moment, and your life is different – for better or worse – from that moment on.
Writers need to get over the fear of publishing.
I was lucky, I started by writing family humor essays and my stuff was out there for a years on Facebook where friends read it and enjoyed it and shared it with strangers and encouraged me, so I knew what was funny and how to hook readers and how to get an audience to cry before I ever sat down to create a book. Still, pushing that PUBLISH button is a big moment, and your life is different – for better or worse – from that moment on.
I know each new story is better than the last one and believe it will be well received, but getting past that initial fear, worrying that I was about to humiliate myself, was hard for me and is hard for most writers.
What I can tell you is DO IT.
Publish book one and get book two out as soon as possible. There are very few Harper Lee’s. Most of us are going to have to write a few books to get good at it.
Here are the FOUR most important things every aspiring author needs to know:
- Don’t polish it forever, put it out there.
- At some point the changes aren’t improvements, they’re just changes.
- Believe in yourself and start achieving your dream. It waits for you on the other side of the publish button.
- Mobs do not show up with pitchforks and torches if your book is bad, and odds are you didn’t write something bad.
- From an interview with Cathleen Townsend in her blog The Beauty Of Words when she asked me “What has been the hardest thing about publishing for you?”
When chasing after your story, KEEP AFTER IT!
.
REBLOG me! Or SHARE this post on Facebook and Twitter! See those little buttons down below? Put on your glasses. There they are. Click them. The FOLLOW button is now in the lower right hand corner.
Got a QUESTION? ASK IT! Hit the Contact Me button and I’ll see what I can do. (I have lots of smart friends.)
Dan Alatorre is the author of several bestsellers and the hilarious upcoming novel “Poggibonsi: an italian misadventure.” Click HERE to check out his other works.
I am possibly an average writer, maybe quite good? But I am a hopeless promoter/marketer, so the world may never know what I am. You cannot expect to be good at everything, can you?
(but I still try…)
If you are good, then you start working on really good, and then great, right? Go for it!
I’m trying!
Your blog posts are helping me get through a rough writing patch. Thank you 🙂
Of course, if you keep saying that, then are they really???
Good point!
Thanks for this post. That’s what I did, so that much was correct- Not being on WordPress and reading up on marketing was my mistake…..But I’m trying to learn- Thanks again
We all are! Keep after it!
Will do- having too much fun to stop
I’m reading Patti Smith’s autobiography at the moment. What I love most is that she was not in a hurry to make it big. She got a ton of offers for poetry, music and writing and said no to all of them until she felt ready for it. I liked that!
What a shock, for somebody to not leap at it. Great thought.
You know what, a lot of the time we talk about how you have to be bold as a writer and go to the places that would make most people uncomfortable. You do that a lot on your blog. Would you want to do an interview and talk about that?
I’m trying to be like Patti Smith and say nah, but of course YES!!!
Cool! Use the Contact Me button to send me an email and we’ll get started! Put something like “Hey, you asked me to be interviewed.”
Awesome advice! I’m passing this around!
That’s all I ask!
It’s done and getting a lot of attention on Twitter and Facebook!
Thank you!
Important words–worth repeating.
I just published *tosses virtual confetti around* but by the end, I’d lost track of anything good on why I was doing this. I just wanted the pain to stop. It was that bad. I’m not proud of this, but it turned out I couldn’t do it sober. The fear and anxiety and anti-self-worth scripts were so strong that it took everything I had.
But I pushed that button and now the past two weeks have been reduced to a hiccup.
Don’t let fear keep you from publishing.
You ROCK!