Mindfulness is about being fully awake in our lives.
Hi, everyone. Today I’m going to talk a little bit about self-publishing, because I keep running into situations now where people will put things on lists or someplace—emails, whatever—commenting about, how to get started in self publishing.
Hi, everyone! Today, I’m going to talk a little bit about the power of habit, because having the habit of creating things is the secret to succeeding with creating them.
Hi, I have another book review today: The Eight Characters of Comedy.
Now, this book. The thing is, I think even though it’s geared towards acting, there’s a lot in here for writers. It is a guide to sitcom acting and writing. And that tells you how important it is to when you’re writing screenplays to think about the characters.
The following is something I wrote about self-publishing back in 2009 or 2010. Somewhere in there. I’ve had to update the material to reflect current publishing realities. But the point is that you can do this! It’s not always easy and/or fun, but you can! Anyway, here’s what I had to say:
When I first ventured into fiction writing, conventional wisdom was to never self-publish one’s work. This amounted to nothing less than professional suicide. Writers who self-published were looked down upon as poor, pathetic, desperate souls who didn’t have the talent or persistence to impress agents and/or publishers (especially the ones in New York, aka, “real ones”).
I followed this advice and ended up signing a contract for a three-book mystery series with a small press, which went under nine months later. My debut novel went out of print. So much for that. But I kept writing and querying agents and small presses, anyway. Over the years, I revised one novel, wrote a sequel and completed two standalone novels. Meanwhile, I still had this out-of-print novel just sitting and burning a hole in my computer. Finally, I took matters into my own hands. I decided I’d flout conventional wisdom and self-publish the book.