Social media, SEO, marketing and writingAre You a Budding Novelist?
People who have never put a pen to paper, for any long work, think they can turn out a work of fiction. You meet them at parties and banquets and hear them say, “I’m thinking of starting a novel over the weekend.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald said it well: “A novel takes time.” Any book does. It also takes advance thinking, planning, research, and years of investigation. Robert Benchley, the famous and beloved humorist, once remarked on the time needed to develop writing ability: “It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous.”
Whatever type of book you’re thinking of writing, consistent daily work is a must. Most authors have daily goals of so many words or pages to be written, and they are very serious about it.
Writing for a living also means plenty of revision, bouncing ideas off editors, planning, writing, and selling new proposals (or outlines and chapters), promoting your books after they are published, getting publicity for them, hopefully media attention via radio and television interviews, and going to bat for your books in every way possible.
Discipline is important because a writer must be able to continually coordinate all the above activities and provide time for them.
