My author website started getting a ton of re-directs from my old blog address recently, so I of course looked into it. Bots, I thought, or maybe someone following up on old contact information.
Nope! The activity on all come from search term hits that once led to writing process posts.
What a total blast from the past.
Back in the day, I wrote a lot of process posts, sharing discoveries I made while writing books and then about all the work that came after writing them. I wrote a LOT about all the issues that have to be tackled before and after hitting “publish.” Book design. Marketing. Merchandising. Publicity. Finances. Distribution channels. ALL THE THINGS.
Basically I wrote little guides to all the different facets of working as an independent author as I came across them.
Here’s one I re-read and updated Monday: Little Details: font choice
Another of my favorites: Books are pyramids
I wrote process posts like those because writing things down is how I process everything. When I need to learn new skills, methodologies and systems, I researching how other people do them, then test by trial and error (and error and error) then analyze the successes and failures until I know exactly how and why I ended up choosing one over all others.
Even if I’m only explaining things to myself, writing out the facts helps me codify, clarify, and set in practice whatever personal system I’ve cobbled together. And it made sense to me, back then, to share what i was learning in case it might help someone else.
Somewhere along the line I stopped writing those posts. Not because I stopped learning, no. Life got complicated, and I ran out of energy needed to put private thoughts into a sharable, coherent public format. When that little voice in my head convinced me I wasn’t saying anything other people couldn’t say better, well, it was easy to drop writing about writing.
(I know, it’s a liar, that voice, but it was loud, and I was tired, and it was easier to curl up in my shell and cling to story writing instead.)
I want to get back into sharing opinions about this indie authoring gig. Recent experiences have convinced me anew that I have plenty to contribute. First I’ll do some posts with links to updated older posts on perennial topics. (There’s one earlier in this post, even!) And when I think of a new interesting topic, or someone suggests one, I’ll write about that.
It’s a start, and that brings us to the end of this post. In a way I suppose this was a process post about process posts. A very meta way to begin.
Until later.