EYES OPEN

I'm pretty sure I have a lot of this information in other parts of my website, but it occurred to me that it would be a good idea to put all of it in one place as well. So, here it goes:

So you want to be a novelist. You put forth the effort, you wrote a book, and you want to see it, and your name, in print.
What's the next step?

Bad news: The next step is a big step back.
I'm not saying you need to start over, I'm saying you need to get objective. If you took the time to write an entire manuscript, if you edited it and reworked it, and fine tuned it and did everything that needed to be done to make a publishable work of fiction, then chances are you're passionate about your writing.
And that's good.
And bad.
Passion makes us move forward, it motivates us, it keeps us going when everything around us seems to be holding us back.
But it also makes us reckless. It makes us ignore our pain and fatigue and press on, sometimes even unto self destruction.
So again I say, take a step back. That isn't the same as saying that you need to stop, but this is the time for you to take a deep breath, and ask yourself some important questions.

Question 1: What exactly do I want?
Question 2: What am I willing to give up to accomplish what I want?
Question 3: What is the best path to acheiving what I want?
Question 4: What obstacles stand between me and what I want?
Question 5: What skills/objects/knowledge/people do I have/have access to that can give me an edge in this endeavor?
Question 6: Is there another path to what I'm trying to accomplish?
Question 7: Am I where I need to be to start down this road? If not, how do I get there?


What exactly do you want?

This might strike you as an odd question, after all, we already discussed that, didn't we? You wrote a book. You want to publish your book.
It's very rarely that simple.
I went to a writer's conference a few months back, and I met a man who was very frustrated with what he was learning about the publishing industry. After a lecture by a published author, he approached her and started talking. I stuck around to listen, and quickly found out that his interest in becoming published was not related to money. He was, I found out, a well paid professional, who wrote because he loved to write, and wanted to get published because he wanted people to read what he'd written. That was it. I talked to him after he was done talking with the author, and he confessed that if he could find someone willing to do it, he would gladly let someone else put their name on the book and let them have all of the money associated with the sales, and the only thing he really wanted was to have any fan mail forwarded to him.
Think what you might about the idea, but serves to highlight what we're addressing in this question: not every writer wants the same thing. So take a deep breath and ask yourself what you really, really want.
Do you want:
Wealth
Fame
To be a professional writer
To see a book of yours in print
To see THIS book in print
To share a story with the world
to share THIS story with the world
To make a living with your writing
Some combination of the above
Something not listed above

Each answer is different in an important way. For starters, if you're looking for wealth or fame, you're probably barking up the wrong tree. Sad to say, my friends, there aren't a lot of writers who become truly rich or truly famous through their writing. Sure, there are a few, but there are also people who got rich(ish) and famous(ish) playing Magic the Gathering professionally. Just not enough to think of it as a viable career path.
Do you want to be a professional writer? Keep in mind, being a professional writer and being able to make a living as a writer aren't quite the same thing. If you want to writer professionally, that is to say, have people pay you for your writing, good for you. I'd suggest starting small, write short stories and send them out. Find some good writing contests and compete in those. Getting published is about two things: writing well, and being persistent. You need to develop tough skin, because you're going to have to deal with a lot of rejection before you start seeing your work in print.
Do you just want to see a book of yours in print? Well, the easiest way to do that is a vanity press. Do you want to see a book of yours printed by a real publisher? Well, that may take some time.
Do you want to see THIS book in print? Again, a vanity publisher may be the way to go. If you don't think you more stories in you, or if you think that this is a story that needs to be told, and you aren't interested in a vanity publication, you have a lot of work ahead of you. The trick to getting a publisher to publish your book is the same as selling vacuum cleaners door to door: you need to find the houses that might buy, and you need to convince the owners that they want what you're selling. And most of all, you need to make sure to avoid the places that take the vacuum and give you a bogus check. We'll talk more about that when we get to 'obstacles.'
As I stated in the story about the man at the conference, some people just want to get their stories out there. If that's what you're shooting for, well, there are ways to do that without publishing. Printed books were, for a long time, one of the fastest, easiest ways to spread information in every direction all at once. The newspaper could do the same thing, but they were only interested in certain kinds of information. The internet has changed all of that. There are online communities, online magazines, online everything, and if you're willing to put the time in, you can get your story, not just 'out there', but directly to the people most interested in reading it in a matter of minutes, or hours.
Now, if you're like me, and you want to make a living with your writing, to actually make enough money that you don't need another job, well, you've picked a hard road indeed, my friends. A long, hard road with many trials and tribulations, mountains to claim, rivers to cross. Take a deep breath, buddy, because we haven't even gotten started.


What are you willing to give up to accomplish your goals?

Whatever your goals, they'll cost you. Maybe it'll only cost you an afternoon. Maybe it'll cost you twenty years and numerous job/romantic opportunities. I don't know. what I do know is that it will cost you.
Take me: As I write this, I'm thirty years old. I work at target, on the overnight team, unloading trucks and stocking shelves. I get less than ten dollars an hour, and not nearly enough hours. Why? Well, partly because of a bad economy, and partly because I'm not willing to do what I'd need to do to succeed in a corporate environment. I'm a writer. I write. Any other job I have, be it stocking shelves, playing the stockmarket, mayor of whereever, it's unfulfilling, it's depressing, because I'm not doing what I feel I have to do.
Is writing a part of your core identity? If it is, then you're probably willing to give up a lot of things to write. If, on the other hand, you are, at the core of your being, a mother, or a democrat, or a buddhist, or an electrician, or socialite, and you just happen to write as well, that's fine. I'm happy for you. And, for the record, no, I don't think less of you as a writer for putting something else first. Hell, you may be the best writer on the planet, that's not what we're discussing. The thing is, be sure you know who you are so you know which way you're going to go when something has to be cut. Do you want to start a family? Is that who you are? Great. Go for it. Be aware that you'll have less time for your writing, but don't look back. Don't put yourself in a position where you will be second guessing your decisions for the rest of your life, or even an afternoon.


What is the best path to achieving what you want?

I addressed this to an extent in dealing with the first question. There are a lot of different ways to go with your writing, and the route you take should be determined by where you want to end up. If you just want to put your writing out there, then I have to tell you that publishing may not be the path for you. Publishers (the good ones) offer three things if they accept your writing: they get you physical copies of your book, (the good ones) get you distribution for your book, and they set you up with the chance of making money on your book.
But with the internet being such a major part of the world today, making your writing available to people all over the world isn't nearly as hard as it used to be. To be clear, getting people all over the world to be aware that your book exists is very different than making it available, but that's a question of marketing, and publishing companies don't do nearly as much as you think in the way of marketing these days (we'll get to that later). So what publishing companies really offer then (if they accept you as a client), is physical copies of your book, and the chance to make money with it. And with POD publishers, you can make your own copies without having to buy 50,000 at a time. And that's assuming you WANT physical copies.
The important thing in this, in figuring out the best way to achieve what you want, is twofold: know what you want, and do the research to figure out how to get there. There are lots of different ways to get your material out into the world.
You can simply post your writing online.
You can publish through a traditional publishing company.
You can publish through a vanity press.
You can publish through a print on demand press.
You can publish through an e-publisher.
But whatever you do, be careful, and be aware that there are good guys and bad guys in the publishing and printing world. There are right ways and wrong ways to publish. Do your research. Oh, and here's a useful tidbit: if a company charges you to print your books, or insists that you have to buy a certain number of copies of your own book before they'll print it, they expect to get their money out of YOU, not the sales of your books.


What obstacles stand in the way of me achieving my goals?

Let me take a deep breath before I get started on this one.
Woo.
Okay, here we go. I still remember the first time I tried to get something published. In retrospect, what I'd written was crap, I'm man enough to admit that now, but at the time, I thought I'd hit gold. I thought my story was the cream of the crop, and I was ready to be a published, lauded, famous, rich writer. So I got online and looked up publishers.
For those of you who haven't tried getting published, let me share this secret with you: everyone thinks they have a book in them. Hell, maybe everyone does have a book in them, I don't know. What I do know is that the number of people who wake up in the morning, scratch their heads and say, 'hey, I think it's about time I write that novel' outnumber the number of people who wake up in the morning, scratch their heads and say, 'hey, I think it's about time I start a publishing house and publish a few novels that other people have written' by about . . . oh . . . ninety percent of the population of America.
And that's just the one who decide they have ONE book in them. People like me (and possibly you), who have twenty or thirty books in them, and will resubmit those bastards six hundred times to every publishing house in the country, well, there aren't quite as many of us, but we do make ourselves heard.
The point is, competition is fierce. And when I say 'competition is fierce' I don't mean like 'there are fifty well trained athletes racing across the football field, only the very best and the very fastest stand a chance'. No, I mean 'There are two million people racing across a bridge that's only eighty feet wide. Only the luckiest and the best prepared will SURVIVE long enough to reach the finish'.
One of my friends was telling me that someone he knew worked in a publishing house where, once a week, all of the low level editors would get together, drink beer, eat pizza, and go through the slush pile looking for stuff to throw out just to keep the stack small. Now, let me be clear, this was not one of those hurdles that a writer has to get past, and once they're past it they're one step closer. The manuscripts that were not rejected didn't get moved up the ladder. Manuscripts that weren't rejected were put BACK in the sluch pile. These editors got together and actively searched for reasons NOT to let manuscripts go farther. I don't know exactly what their standards were, if they tossed things aside for being in the wrong font, or if the writer hadn't put the information in their header in the right order. Maybe they just rejected stories that seemed stupid after a page and a half. Maybe they spilled beer on the floor, and tossed everything that got wet. I don't know. The point is that the first step of getting your work accepted by a publishing house is akin to a meat grinder, luck has as much, or more, to do with it than anything else.
And that's assuming you sent it to a GOOD publisher.
I mentioned, when addressing a previous questions, that if a publisher charges you money to print your work, or demands that you buy a certain number of copies of your own book, that they are looking to make money off of you, not the sales of your book to the general public. Well, that's true, and, quite frankly, there's nothing wrong with that. As I've said so many times, different people want different things out of publishing. Some people just want to send copies of their latest piece to all of their friends as a Christmas gift, and there's nothing wrong with that. The problem is that many publishing companies aren't forthright about how they make their money. I'm not saying that they lie, though some might, I'm saying that they simply don't present their business model to the people that come to them with hopes of becoming professional writers.
Oh, and by the way, if you are going the 'traditional publisher' route, it may not be as easy as you think to get into that slush pile. While there are certain conventions in the submission process (manuscript format bein a prime example), each publishing company has its own method for accepting submissions. Some of them just want you to send your entire manuscript, but most require you to jump through some hoops first. Some want query letters, some want synopses, some want cover letters, some don't. And even those have to be tailor made. Sometimes you'll find an editor who wants a brief outline in your query letter and a chapter by chapter synopsis, others only want basic information about who you are in your query letter, and will have a fit if your query letter is over a page.
Great, so you've jumped through all of those hoops, now what? Well, I hope you've done your research, because when your story eventually does make its way into the hands of an editor the big question isn't 'how good is it', so much as 'how well does it suit the needs of THAT editor?' Maybe whoever is looking at it will say, 'hmm, this isn't for me, but Marissa, down the hall, she might be interseted in this,' but then, maybe this editor and Marissa are still upset at each other over the 'who finished off the coffee' arguement from yesterday morning. So try to get your manuscript direclty into Marissa's hands. But how do you know which editor is interested in your kind of writing? Dude, I wish I knew. People keep on telling me to 'research it,' but I have to be honest, I have yet to findd the magic internet site that shows me which agent accepted which manuscript.
I know what you're thinking. 'All this stuff you're talking about, it may be a problem for you, but me? I'm a friggin' genius, and any editor who can READ will know it in the first five lines.' All I have to do is get past that giant slushpile you were talking about, and I'm golden.
Hey, maybe you are. I don't know, I haven't read your stuff. But I know where you're going. How do you get around the slushpile? That's easy, if you know someone in the publishing business. You don't? Well, that's a bit trickier. Now, some publishers try to get around having giant slushpiles, but the way they do that is by not accepting submissions. Well, not from writers, anyhow. How does that work? They only accept submissions from agents.
Ah, I see that gleam in your eye, Mr./Ms. supergenius writer. 'No Problem,' you say, 'I'll just get an agent, they can kick open that door, and voila, fame and fortune await!'
One problem. Agent's have slush piles too.
That's right, in order to get past the giant slush pile of the editor, you have to brave the giant slush pile of the agent. There is good news, if you can jump that hurdle, if you can get representation from an agent, you only have to jump once. An agent might make you wait nine months to a year before they spit in your face and tell you to head to the back of the line, but if you can get an agents attention, after the first publisher says 'get lost' your dearly beloved agent will escort you to the front of another line.
Well, that's what they tell you, frankly I think it depends on the agent you get. I've heard a few stories about agents who seem to sign people, then sit back and wait for you to get published on your own, so they can start collecting money. Frankly, it's something I know very little about.
Let's see, obstacles between the writer and their goal, what else, what else.
Oh, yeah. The good stuff.
So, let's have a hypothetical: Let's say you get published, with one of the big companies. They read your book, they say 'DAMN. Now that's a good read!" and they come knocking at your door. You're set, right? You've made it, right?
If only it were so. If only it were so.
It's common knowledge that publishing is a business. It's a cash oriented enterprise, and they're all about making money. We all know that, but what KIND of business is it?
Have you ever heard one of those stories about some little old lady who walked into an old thrift shop and bought, I don't know, a desk worth a hundred- thousand dollars, or bought a painting at an estate sale for a few cents, then found out it was worth millions? Have you ever read one of those stories, shook your head, and wondered out loud, 'why didn't the thrift shop have that appraised? The could have made a fortune. That's just bad business.'
Funny thing, it isn't bad business, it's just a different kind of business.
How does that work? Well, on its most fundamental level business is simple. A successful business in one which makes more money than it costs to run. But how do we calculate that? (I am about to get into some math here, but it's hypothetical math, so it shouldn't be too bad).
In any given business there are four basic kinds of expense, the first three are easy to understand, the fourth is a little odd. The first kind of expense is what we'll call a setup cost. This involves things like buying a building, or getting a license, it's the stuff you expend money on to put yourself in a position to have the kind of business you're trying to set up. We'll call that X. The second kind of expense you're looking at is a time related expense. Things like heating bills, employee paychecks, and advertising. You can control how much you invest in them to some extent, but you do HAVE to invest in them. We'll call that Y. The third kind expense is what we'll call an action oriented expense. In the thrift shop scenario this would be the purchase of new merchandise. These are the expenses that you pay every time you DO something. We'll call that Z. So, ignoring the fourth expense for the time being, determening whether a business is 'successful' or not requires us to figure out if the profit (call that A) at that time is higher than the total expenses associated with the business.
So, if T=Time and B=Behavior associated with type Z costs.
A>X+YT+ZB
That is to say, the profit must be higher than the initial startup cost of the company, plus the cost of the regular, recurring costs, times the amount of time those costs have been occuring, plus the expenses associated with actions on the part of the company, times the number of actions it performed.
That may be the worst formulae I've ever written in my life, and, obviously, if we were actually writing this formulae out with real numbers it would be a lot longer and a lot more complex.
Anyhow, let's take a look at the other side of the equation. Profit. What's the equation of the money coming in? Cost of an item, call that C, times the number of sales, N.
So now our equation looks like this:
CN>x+YT+ZB
Great, a lot of different letters and no numbers, right?
okay, so I'm no mathematician, but let me take a few seconds to try to simplify this, and being the clever chap that I am, I'm going to try to simplify it by adding information.
Datapoint 1: Publishing companies don't just want the left side of the equation to be higher than the right, they want it to be AS MUCH higher as they can get it.
Datapoint 2: Where setup costs and the costs over time can be manipulated, there are basic limits to how much they can be manipulated.
Datapoint 3: In most cases Z(action related costs) are DIRECTLY related to sales. There are exceptions, but we're talking about basics here, and in our very basic scenario, the reason why a store purchases new merchandise is because it has room on the floor where old merchandise used to be before it was sold.
So, for the sake of our massively oversimplified equation we can say that the number of actions equal the number of sales. N=B.
CB>X+YT+ZB
Okay, so what do we have? We have X, which is basically set in stone, unchanging, more or less ignorable. We have Y, which is basically set in stone, but constantly changing, because we're multiplying it by time, which is constantly changing, and we have the cost of dealing with merchandise, multiplied by the amount of merchandeise we sell. And all of that added together needs to be less than the amount of merchandise we sell multiplied by how much we charge.
The first thing that goes through most people's mind at this point is, "hmm, if I increase my sales, my cost goes up, but if I increase how much I make off of each item, only the profit side of the equation goes up."
True, which explains why books are so expensive. But there are a lot of book publishers in the world today, and every one of them is fighting tooth and nail to stay afloat. So there is a distinct limit to how high the Cost(C) can go. So let's treat that as a constant.
Wait a minute, wait a minute, what does this mean?
It means that we need to look at the equation a little differently.
CB>X+YT+ZB Becomes CB-ZB>X+YT which in turn becomes (c-Z)B>X+YT
Translate that back to English
The difference betweeen the cost of the item being sold, and the cost of obtaining the item to sell, must be greater than the initial setup of the business as a whole, plus the costs associated with keeping the business up and running over time.
So lets take another look at that dresser that the old woman bought at the thrift shop.
Let's plug in some meaningless numbers to replace our meaningless letters.
Our thrift shop, for the sake of argument, sells only dressers.
The cost of the dressers ($20) times the number of dressers it sells (N in a year) must be higher than the cost of building the store (50,000) divided by the number of years its been open (10) plus the monthly costs of the store (100) time the number of months in the scenario (12) plus the cost of buying a dresser ($5) times the number of dresser they sell (N in a year).
So 20N>(50000/10)+(100x12)+5N Or (20-5)N>(50000/10)+(100X12) Or 15N>5000+1200 or 15N>6500 or N>433.3. So, in order for the thrift store to be profitable in the course of a given year, they need to sell more than 433.3 dressers. That's a lot of dressers, man I suck at this.
Anyhow, the idea is that for a company to be profitable their chief concern is to move as much merchandise as they can as fast as they can. Now that little old lady who comes in and spots a dresser that just looks extra, super-dooper special, she can invest the time and money to get that one dresser appraised, it isn't a lot of money, and she's a little old lady, she has some time on her hands.
But the thrift store? They have at least 434 dressers going through every year. What would happen if they had each and every one of them appraised?
The appraisal would cost money, so every item would cost them that much more, a jump in Z. They'd have to keep the dresser off the floor while they had it appraised, so it would take longer for it to get sold, so the amount of time between sales would go up, call that a jump in T (or Y, I really am no good at math). The three dollars and twenty minutes that the little old woman spent to find out she had a fortune in her hands would have been a massive leap in price for the thrift store.
What does that unending parade of bizarre, poorly written, messed up math mean for you, though?
Publishing companies are notiriously aware of time. They are bastards about it. Do they want their author to succeed? Yes, yes they do. They want their authors to succeed, but if they don't succeed, and they don't succeed NOW, then publishing companies really want their NEXT author to succeed.
Time is money, and a publishing company will only invest so much time in you, and if you don't prove that you can sell in that time, then they'll drop you, and invest in someone new.
Why would they do that? Well, you remember that fourth cost, the one we skipped a while back? It's called opportunity cost. It states that whenever you invest time, energy, money, anything into one goal, that is time, energy, money, whatever that you could be investing in something else, but aren't. Maybe those dressers are only fifteen bucks of profit a piece, while a good bedframe would get them sixty. What you don't do is sometimes as important as what you do do.
(and if you think that was a lot to go through reading-wise, Holy crap, my wrists hurt. Stupid keyboard).


What do I have that gives me an edge?

If you haven't figured it out by now, let me spell this out: Being a good writer and being a successful writer are two very different things.
If you want to be a successful writer I have a bitter pill that you are going to HAVE to swallow. Being a successful writer will require you to develop business savvy. I know, I know, it doesn't make me any happier than you. I have about as much interest in selling things as I do in trying to pull a ball point pen out of a blender while it's running. Still, I would rather pull the pen out of the blender while simultaneously trying to handsell one of my books on a street corner than go through life knowing I missed my shot at being a professional writer, so I'm going to have to suck it up.
So, that said, let's take a look at what we have in front of us. Going back to the first question of this unending web page, you might not be trying to accomplish the same thing as I am with my writing, but whatever you're trying to accomplish, whatever goal you have, there are things standing in your way. You are trying to get your writing from point A to point B. Whether point B is published, or into the hands of the seventy five people on the planet smart enough to follow your story, you have a job to do. You've laid out the map of where you're going and how to get there, the problem is, there are a million other people on the same, or overlapping paths. So, look for shortcuts. If you're lucky you know someone standing at the finish line, whether it's someone else running the same race, or one of the judges, or someone who knows one of the judges. But we can't all be that lucky. So take a deep breath, calm your racing heart, and start thinking.
Who do you know? What organizations are you a part of? Do you have any skills that can be used, or subverted, to get you a step closer to where you want to be?
I'm not advocating success at any cost, but the publishing world, like the world in general, is unfair. It's massively unfair. Thinking of it as a game you hope to win is a mistake. I've heard that publishing is a marathon, not a spring, but it isn't either. It's like moving from one side of the country to the other, it's a goal, and while there are good ways and bad ways to move across the country, and there are laws that have to be followed, it isn't a competition with fairplay, and rules. It's just an objective. That isn't to say you should walk over other people, but don't think that just because you have a camper to put your stuff in, and most everyone else has to rent a truck, that you have an unfair advantage. I mean, you should definitely loan me your camper, but that's just because I'm such an frikkin' awesome guy. Not because there are rules involved.


Is there another path I can take?

After all this planning, I'm bringing up alternate routes? What's wrong with me. You're already invested, you've done all this work, come on! Move forward, right?
Take a look at all that planning. You think it was hard to make a map? You think it was a pain to figure out where you needed to go next? You're going to have to walk that path. You're going to have to do that work, contact those people, create that business plan, track that guy down, get past that lady.
Let me take a minute to tell you about my path:
I submitted my latest and best work to Baen Publishing about six months ago. Six months. They respond in nine months to a year. A woman who got pregnant on the day that I submitted my latest story, will give birth before I get a response. And statistically speaking that response will probably be something in the vein of 'Gee, that's pretty good, but it isn't what we're interested in right now.'
And it may be vanity on my part to think I'll get the 'Gee, that's pretty good' part.
Baen doesn't take simultaneous submissions, so for nine months to a year, I'm not sending my story to anyone else. A lot of writers I know don't believe in honoring the 'no simultaneous submissions' bit, but I'm a stickler for rules, so I am.
That isn't nine months of sitting on my hands. That isn't nine months of writing my next book (though I'm working on that too). That's nine months of working at a job I don't much care for and trying to scrape up enough money to keep a roof over my head and eat while I wait for some poor schmuck to work his way to my manuscript.
So, since I can't do much else with that manuscript right now, I may as well take another look at the plan. And the plan is frustrating. On the one hand, I'm helpless: I send my manuscript out into the meatgrinder and wait, I cannot speed up the process, or even know where I am in the process. My future is completely in the hands of someone I've never met whose behavior I can't predict. On the other hand, I have to be vigilant: Getting your writing to the people who would be interested in it requires you to go out and find them. Getting them to give you a chance often requires a personal touch. There are some people who use the shotgun approach, spamming community boards and sending out mass mailings, but that is usually worse than ineffective. It's offensive. If you want a community to give you a chance, you have to make sure that they know that you don't just see them as a market. They're your people. But while they are your people, you are also marketing to them, so you have to counterbalance the marketing, make sure that they know that you aren't JUST marketing to them. That means investing time. That means participating in their community, having real discussions. That doesn't sound too bad until you realize just how many different communities there are. The local communities, national, online. And you can't just join them when you have a book, that's in poor taste. You have to participate beforehand.
And you have to have a plan for after you get published. Not just the book release, the book release is easy, and fun. It's the dozen or so events after that which you need to be worried about. You have to look for opportunities to set up book signings at times and places where you can sell to more than just your immediate family. You have to try to set up interviews and book reviews. And you if you don't start planning long before your book is published, you're already two steps behind.
So before you even know if you'll be having a book coming out, you're working.
And that's the path I'm on.
So I have to ask myself, 'is there another way?'
Which is why I'm not considering the remote chance that I may one day start my own small press.
Would that be less work than my current path? Oh hell no. It would be more. Way more. Disturbingly more.
But it would take away my helplessness. I'd know that I was going to get the book out. I'd know when. I could make specific plans and make specific promises.
But it would be more work.
So take a look at your plan. Think about your plan. You know more now that you've planned it out than you did when you got started, so, knowing what you know now, do you still want to go down that same road, or do you want to look at other options?


Am I where I need to be to start down this path? If not, how do I get there?

I've said it before, chances are, I'll say it again: I don't know you. I haven't read your work. I haven't talked with you, or looked over your game plan. I don't know where you are. You may be the best writer in the world, or you might have trouble stringing two sentences together. You might have almost unlimited resources and all the time in the world, or you could be hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, and working two full time jobs while you juggle the schedules of five teenagers.
I don't know where you are, so I don't know if you're going to be able to pull off your current goals. That's something you'll have to figure out for yourself. I'm just going to take a moment to reiterate what I said at the beginning of this article: take a step back. It's time to be objective. We've all heard stories of writers who started out in obscurity and then, almost overnight, gained wealth and fame beyond anything they ever expected. And there is the chance, however remote, that it'll happen to you. But you can't make plans around that. I don't even suggest letting yourself think about that.
Assume that you'll have to take the long road. Assume you're going to have to climb every single figurative mountain. Assume you'll come across problems you haven't even thought of yet. Assume that this is not going to be an easy journey, and ask yourself if you're ready for it yet. If you are, great, start walking. If you aren't, ask yourself what you have to do to get there. Are you ready to face rejection after rejection? Are you ready to market your book, sell copy after copy by hand in a flea market or at a comic book convention? Are you ready to see your paycheck cut in half so you can put in all those hours you're planning to put in to your writing? Are you ready to spend all of that money buying booths or setting up websites?
Are you ready?
Are you?