The horror of self publishing.
In 2017 I pressed the send button on my work and committed it to an audience.
I couldn’t afford an editor, didn’t know anything about proof readers, relying entirely on the Microsoft word spell checker. Formatting was very much a black art so it was mainly trial and error using Amazon, and kindle direct, to do the heavy lifting. I knocked up a front and back cover using ‘GIMP’, and gave breath to my baby.
Very often people will tell you well meaning lies, because they think it’s what you want to hear. Imagine your wife or girlfriend trying on a new outfit and asking for your opinion, “makes your arse look big”, “It’s to short” “colour doesn’t suit you”, we’ve all done it because nobody wants to hear criticism.
So people tell you lies “it’s good”, “I enjoyed it”, all the things I wanted to hear, until I got the one honest review. However for three or four years it sat on Amazon doing nothing, but I was now officially a published author.
The reality was I had actually written a good story littered with grammatical errors, seasoned with spelling mistakes and spiced with too much punctuation. In short it was fucking awful.
Retirement came and went. So at 67 years of age, if I am going to be taken seriously, do it properly. So it was unpublished and I went back to the word processor.
I am very fortunate to have a girlfriend who is a pedant with OCD, about writing. She has encouraged and argued, offered unbridled criticism and suggestions and is probably sick of me saying how do you spell? ‘Insert word of choice’.
Add into the mix a touch of imposter syndrome, and self doubt, 3am keyboard clattering, too much coffee, red wine, or both, and you start to get some idea of how much fun writing is. I am so glad I gave up smoking twenty years earlier…
If you do it for the money, you need to be very lucky, very talented, or both. Being neither I write for the pure enjoyment of telling a story.