Tips, Tricks and Tales: What an Indie Writer Should Know

It is all good and well for me to have Time Management as a theme for my blog this year, but what do I actually want to accomplish? It took me a few moments, a writers’ group meeting and an email from Jeff Goins to realise that while I really do need to manage my time better, there was something else I needed first: goals.

Sure I can write 500 words everyday, in fact I can and often do write well over a thousand words everyday. But what do I want to do with all those words?

Not the fluffy kind that says - finish my next novel, or write five short stories. I work full time and have a hectic year ahead to get my vehicle through a complicated set of tests and firing trials. But those goals are work related.

How do I set personal goals that I can plan towards achieving them, even with a full time job and all its stress?

You might think that as a published author the answer would be more books, but to be honest it is not that simple for me. Yes, I do want to publish more short stories and my next novel this year, but that is not all that I want to do.

I have been threatening to develop an Indie Writer’s Course for the past year or so, and have made a good start on the “manual”. Then I asked myself: but what if my idea of the contents of the course is not what people actually want or need to know?

Should I continue to develop this course only to find out at the end I have wasted my time on insignificant things, or worse not teaching people things that they do need to know?

Should I include writing advice? Plotting and characterization? The answer there is a definite No. You don’t have to be an experienced writer, with loads of books to your name, to know that there are lots of books and courses on fiction and non-fiction writing available.

You have only to type in the words ‘writing tools’, or ‘plotting a book’ and thousands of hits appear on the Google page.

So if I have nothing to add to those good books, what does an indie writer need to know?

What frustrated you? What could have helped you when you started out and yet had to learn the hard way because no one told you about it.

Please leave a comment and help me develop a course that could be of real help to new, and maybe even published, indie authors to help make their lives easier.