If you’re a writer, pay attention: there’s never a better time to start than now! Writing is the longest long game out there. 

“It is exceedingly rare for your book to take anything less than a year and a half to publish after the book deal is inked; two years or longer is the norm.”

Courtney Maum, Before and After the Book Deal. 

There’s a lot more non-writing involved in writing a book than I thought. To be clear, I never assumed you just wrote a book, got it published, and moved on to the next. Well, except for when I first began, at which point “just” writing and publishing a book seemed like a big enough task on its own. No, I gradually discovered there will be marketing and promoting after the fact (even during), and nowadays the writer is expected to shoulder any amount of that personally. A lot of this info came to me by way of podcasts, and when I say podcasts I mean mostly “The Creative Penn,” which I can’t recommend enough. 

But that podcast, as well as others (“Six Figure Authors,” discontinued now but whose episodes are still relevant) are most often by self-published writers interviewing other self-published authors, so their experiences—I thought—would be hugely different than traditionally published authors.

It turns out, as I discovered after reading Before and After the Book Deal by Courtney Maum, you’re not exempt from many of the non-writing things that go into the life of a book. 

Read the rest of this post on my Substack newsletter: Follow that story.