I remember when I first started thinking about self-publishing a couple years ago.  An online friend of mine, Annetta Ribken, was preparing to publish a collection of flash fiction and her first novel, titled Athena’s Promise, and she had decided to self-publish. When I asked her about her experiences, she pointed me in the direction of two blogs:

• J.A. Konrath’s A Newbie’s Guide To Publishing

• Dean Wesley Smith’s Writings and Opinions 

These two blogs were different in that they took different approaches to motivating writers and wannabe writers (like me).  Konrath’s blog was more inspirational, like, “Look at what I’ve done!  You can do it too!  Just learn how, put in the work, write a lot of books, and put in more work!”  Dean Wesley Smith’s blog took a more nuts-and-bolts approach with various blog series, like “Think Like A Publisher” and “Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing”.

Recently Konrath has been having a bunch of authors guest-post (if they make a donation to Alzheimer’s Disease research), and I’ve continued to be inspired and informed by many of these posts.

Smith has been doing an ongoing series of posts “Writing in Public” where he details exactly what he gets done on each day with respect to fiction writing, blog entries, email, non-fiction writing, and book covers.  I have found this series to be inspirational in its own way.  The way he writes is inspirational because it works for him, and it likely wouldn’t work for a LOT of other writers.  Yet he’s prolific and makes a good living from his writing and is somewhat of a role model for many writers in this new world of self-publishing.  It inspired me to begin tracking what I’m actually getting done.  Even if I don’t finish something, it’s cool to see that progress on some project or another is happening.

Thanks to both of these blogs (and to Annetta’s blog also!) for the inspiration they provided to me to get moving!

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