When it comes to writing, most of the beginning of this decade, I was mainly focusing on regularly writing: simply putting in the time. That’s where I worked to write 20 minutes a day, every day (with occasional time off for good behavior).
For the past year or two, I have been tracking pages written and finishing drafts — not simply time writing. This year, the logical continuation is to understand what to do when those finished drafts amount to a novel. I’ve done research on this in the past… but that’s far enough in the past that it’s probably a good idea to check again (the research was also focused more on magazine articles and short stories).
I’ll certainly check out Writer’s Digest, a resource I’ve used before, both as a writer and, briefly in the 90s as a publisher. And readers may remember my post from last summer about Russell Nohelty and his company, Wannabe Press.
I was also interested in the “traditional” route — knowing that the traditional route has changed a tad in the past few decades. So I was happy to stumble across Jane Friedman’s one-stop post on the steps to get traditionally published.
Naturally, it links to additional information about the various steps and sub-steps, but if you read through the entirety, she has some good summaries of both the pros and cons of self-publishing as well as pros and cons of traditional publishing. She has some great questions about what a creative wants out of their creative work that might help direct said creativity.
I’ll post more about book publishing later this week.