Profession or Hobby?

You’re writing a book. Are you approaching this as a profession or is it a hobby?

Given how difficult it is to be successful, it might be healthier to approach writing and self-publishing as a hobby, something you do for fun.  However, are you approaching it seriously enough you don’t harm others?

Self-publishing is gaining respect because of writers who are approaching writing and publishing professionally. They make sure their books are edited. They pay attention to genre and industry standards for formatting. The hobbyist who publishes a rough draft rife with errors and formatted poorly hurts every serious self-publisher, not only by putting a dent in the self-publishing image, but by making it that much harder for a reader to find the good books.

You can approach writing and self-publishing as a hobby and still produce a well-written, professionally-produced book. It doesn’t have to cost a lot of money.

A good critique group can help you polish the writing. Your library, book clubs, and English teachers at a local college may be able to suggest good editors and proof-readers. When it comes to formatting, you can buy templates or do it yourself using your word processor—if you know how to use styles, show all formatting marks, paragraphing, and other tools. If you don’t, head back to the library and local college and ask for a word processing guru. In any case, make sure you have copies of traditionally published books in the same genre to use as examples of how it should look. Pay attention to details.

This takes more time and effort than throwing up a rough draft, but friends who buy it may actually read it, and you won’t be hurting other writers.

www.sherimcguinn.com www.amazon.com/author/sherimcguinn

#professionorhobby #genre #selfpublishing #editing #formatting #critique #Writing

Read Your Work – Out Loud

I work with several critique groups. Some of them have us email pages ahead of the meeting and we come prepared to dive right into discussion. Others, we each bring a (usually smaller) number of pages to be read on the spot—often out loud. While it’s possible to get more work critiqued with the mail-ahead groups, I really like reading a story out loud. As I read, I often make my own corrections as I hear a word repeated unnecessarily or realize I missed writing a word. I also read pieces aloud before I submit them. It’s amazing how many times I’ll catch one last typo in a work that’s been polished.

It makes sense, though. Teachers are encouraged to use multi-modality instruction because we learn through all of our senses. While we write, we’re using primarily vision, along with the tactile and kinesthetic senses used with the keyboard or pen. If we only use our vision to edit the work, we’re more likely to miss errors. By reading aloud, we add our auditory sense and move the kinesthetic experience from hand to mouth. Because we’re changing the senses used, errors stand out more vividly. Especially if a sentence is worded awkwardly, or meaning is not clear, or the wrong word has been used, it will be heard more readily than seen.

Especially if you are a new writer, read your work out loud before you submit it to a critique group, contest, or publisher.

www.sherimcguinn.com www.amazon.com/author/sherimcguinn

#critiquegroups #editing #readingyourworkoutloud #Writing

Writers Revise

Last week I wrote about not getting ripped off when you self-publish. My favorite resource for this is the free annotated list of companies you get when you sign up for Carla King’s mailing list for Tools & Services at authorfriendly.com. This is a marketing strategy for her 4th edition of Self-Publishing Boot Camp and for her services, but she has NOT buried me in promotional emails and she DOES send updates. This is an excellent tool for any self-publisher, but if you’re new the knowledge is essential.

www.sherimcguinn.com www.amazon.com/author/sherimcguinn

#toolsforselfpublishers #selfediting #tellingmystory #authorfriendly #revising #CarlaKing #Howtolearntowrite #Iwanttowrite #rewriting #Selfpublishingbootcamp #editing #firstdrafts #storytelling #critique #Writing #Howtostartwriting