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Forum
-> Hobbies, Crafts, and Collections
-> The Imamother Writing Club
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amother
OP
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 Thu, Aug 22 2019, 9:10 pm
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I’ve got this random idea in my head that I would love to self publish a book through amazon. I may have got the idea through one of the discussions on imamother. However I don’t know where to start as I’ve never published anything before. I’m a big reader and used to love creative writing in high school but that’s as far as it goes. Can anyone give me tips and pointers and how do I know if I’m good enough?
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amother
Seashell
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Thu, Aug 22 2019, 10:28 pm
Step 1 toward finding out if you're good enough is to write a book. When you have a finished product, you know you can do it.
But also know that self publishing doesn't make much money. Tons of people have been self publishing lately, so even if your book is good, it is likely to get lost in the crowd. Especially if you are catering to a frum crowd, which is a fraction of the size of a secular book's market.
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amother
OP
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Fri, Aug 23 2019, 5:14 am
| amother [ Seashell ] wrote: | Step 1 toward finding out if you're good enough is to write a book. When you have a finished product, you know you can do it.
But also know that self publishing doesn't make much money. Tons of people have been self publishing lately, so even if your book is good, it is likely to get lost in the crowd. Especially if you are catering to a frum crowd, which is a fraction of the size of a secular book's market. |
I was intending it for the secular market but I hear what you say about being lost in the crowd.
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ora_43
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Fri, Aug 23 2019, 7:15 am
First write the book, then worry about how to publish  .
In general, nobody's first draft of their first book is particularly good. But you don't get better without practice.
Part of the idea of self-publishing is that everyone is good enough to publish, by definition. There's no gatekeeping. If you mean good enough to make a career of it - it's not all about quality writing. There's also the question of what genre you're writing, how good your marketing is, and pure dumb luck. Just for starters. But if you work at your writing, the writing itself should be good enough.
To get started: decide what kind of story you want to write (romance? adventure? etc), create a specific story*, read up on aspects like description, characterization and plot building (there are a lot of bloggers and youtubers who talk about this stuff, eg Alexa Donne and the "advanced fiction writing" blog).
Then write the thing, put it aside for a few weeks, reread it (with an eye to things like "do I set the scene by describing where the characters are, how they move, etc? does the way each character talks reflect their unique personality? does the plot make sense?"), change the parts you realize need work, get other people to read it, make more changes based on their feedback as needed, then decide when/how to publish (<- you still may want a professional editor's help).
(*do decide first what your goal is with this thing - eg if you just want to write what you love and have the warm fuzzy feeling that comes with having published a book, you could write about the platonic love between a 15th-century monk and a 21st-century time-traveling human-dolphin hybrid for all it matters; if you want to try to make money, maybe go with a more straightforward romance involving a banker and a feisty-but-sweet dogwalker.)
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amother
OP
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Fri, Aug 23 2019, 7:21 am
| ora_43 wrote: | First write the book, then worry about how to publish .
In general, nobody's first draft of their first book is particularly good. But you don't get better without practice.
Part of the idea of self-publishing is that everyone is good enough to publish, by definition. There's no gatekeeping. If you mean good enough to make a career of it - it's not all about quality writing. There's also the question of what genre you're writing, how good your marketing is, and pure dumb luck. Just for starters. But if you work at your writing, the writing itself should be good enough.
To get started: decide what kind of story you want to write (romance? adventure? etc), create a specific story*, read up on aspects like description, characterization and plot building (there are a lot of bloggers and youtubers who talk about this stuff, eg Alexa Donne and the "advanced fiction writing" blog).
Then write the thing, put it aside for a few weeks, reread it (with an eye to things like "do I set the scene by describing where the characters are, how they move, etc? does the way each character talks reflect their unique personality? does the plot make sense?"), change the parts you realize need work, get other people to read it, make more changes based on their feedback as needed, then decide when/how to publish (<- you still may want a professional editor's help).
(*do decide first what your goal is with this thing - eg if you just want to write what you love and have the warm fuzzy feeling that comes with having published a book, you could write about the platonic love between a 15th-century monk and a 21st-century time-traveling human-dolphin hybrid for all it matters; if you want to try to make money, maybe go with a more straightforward romance involving a banker and a feisty-but-sweet dogwalker.) |
 thanks for that! Maybe it’s time I sat down and actually tried to write
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