Contemplating Writing a Book

Over the years, many people have told me I should write a book. Sometimes I considered it, sometimes  I decided against it immediately.

I probably could do it, if I put my mind to it. I would have to turn down other projects, of course. Here are the things that stop me from going forward –

Lack of self-confidence
Planning the book
Writing an outline
Actually writing the chapters
Rewriting
More rewriting
Finding people to proof read
Choosing between submitting it to publishers or self-publishing
Formatting it for publication
Getting a cover designed
Planning publicity
Actually doing the publicity

It looks very daunting.

I much prefer short projects, ones that can be done in a week or so and crossed off my to-do list. It raises my spirits so much to cross things off! I feel competent and accomplished and satisfied with myself. Sometimes I even cheat and break tasks down to minuscule steps so that I can have the fun of crossing off twenty things instead of just one.

It occurred to me that I could arrange my blog entries into small groups and make a series of pamphlets  – Satanic holidays, choosing a therapist, and safety, for starters.

Then my very knowledgeable son-in-law told me about an open-source site where you could make an e-book for free. You could then take the e-book and make it into a print-on-demand book, if you wanted. And you set the price and got 90% royalties. That’s unheard of! You could even set a price range, so that people could pay what they could. I found the idea very exciting.

I thought he had said it was called LeanPup.com so I Googled it. Unfortunately, all I got was companies selling diet dog food. Natch. I asked him to clarify and found it was https://leanpub.com/. Duh. And it is just as he described it. It’s even easy to format your book!

I started to format the Satanic holidays pamphlet and found it came out to a respectable 30 pages. I wrote an artist friend and asked her to design the cover. And I started daydreaming of donating my royalties to “Surviving Spirit: Healing the Heart through the Creative Arts” http://www.survivingspirit.com/

Looking back over my list of obstacles, the only barriers still standing are rewriting, finding proofreaders, and marketing/publicity. Not bad.

Oh, and self-confidence.

So…think I should do it?