What advice would you give to your younger "aspiring author" self?

[Anarchist]

Most of us have been doing this for years. We have plenty of experience and likely a few regrets.

Imagine you could travel back in time and advise your younger self who is about to start their "indie author" adventure. What advice would you give regarding craft, production, marketing, packaging, etc.?

[Eric Thomson]

Give up and become an accountant -- which is exactly what I did back then 

[Post-Crisis D]

Take that class in small engine repair.

[R. C.]

Posts here are pointing to doing something other than being a writer. I go in the other direction... I should have started earlier. 

Waiting until I was in the second half of my lifespan was to deny myself the gift of doing what I enjoy.

Being good at writing is a tuned muscle, it gets better with time. Monetary success would be nice but secondary to a happy life.

Advice: Stop lamenting the "what if" and "go do."

R.C.

[idontknowyet]

Start slower with lower expectations.
No matter how many times I remind myself this is a long game not a short one and that I am actively making what many would consider self inflicted mistakes, I still expect instantaneous results.

[Eric Thomson]

Posts here are pointing to doing something other than being a writer. I go in the other direction... I should have started earlier. 

In all fairness, I was only half joking. But, while I wrote five novels in my late twenties and shopped two of them around, KDP wasn't even in a glimmer in Bezos' eye, because Amazon didn't even exist back then. I only discovered KDP in 2014, when I was fifty-one years old, but the two novels I'd shopped around, and polished every year for almost twenty years, were instant successes. By then, I'd wrapped up a successful military career, become a Chartered Professional Accountant and was a senior IT executive. All that life experience and accrued knowledge helped make me a better writer and able to launch a successful writing and publishing career. I've more than made up time since then, with my 23rd novel published two weeks ago.

[Lynn]

Worry less, write more!

I would tell myself to get medicated and stop self-sabotaging my writing career. I wouldn't have listened so it would be a waste of time but I'd try anyway.

The single biggest thing holding me back is the fact that I cannot be consistent with my production. I do not write regularly. (Although I have times when I write every day for xxx number of days, I inevitably stop, take a long break, then have to start all over again.) Regular writing (and publishing, as a result) would have made a world of difference to where I am at now in my career.

[Writer]

I'd tell my younger self to stockpile novel length works in connected series, so that when KDP is invented, I'm first on board with dozens of books to release in the first couple years. I'd tell myself to be less of a perfectionist and just focus on finishing things. And not to waste time looking for agents and publishers because soon I wouldn't need them. Just spend that time writing and saving my manuscripts. Also, to buy stock in Amazon.

[Vijaya]

Remember all those games you played as a kid, making up stories as you watched people? Write them down.
Remember your dream of becoming a physician-turned-writer just like AJ Cronin? Begin writing.
How I wish I'd started earlier and not in mid-life.

[R. C.]

...
In all fairness, I was only half joking.
...

Yes, I took it a such.

R.C.

[JRTomlin]

Most of us have been doing this for years. We have plenty of experience and likely a few regrets.

Imagine you could travel back in time and advise your younger self who is about to start their "indie author" adventure. What advice would you give regarding craft, production, marketing, packaging, etc.?

I'd tell myself (like plenty of other people did) to start a mailing list. 🙄

[Hopscotch]

I'd say "Please yourself."  Perhaps travel the world for a stock of adventures and characters to work into novels.  Maybe find one brutally honest critic to read your drafts.  Possibly read a lot to expand your writerly thinking.  But consider that money and success (and being indie), sweet as they are, mean nothing when you're dead.  So please yourself while you're aboveground.

[angela]

I'm okay with how things worked out because humans only learn through pain anyway, but I have two regrets:

I wish I'd invested in more real estate.
I wish I'd gotten better at story structure sooner.

[notthatamanda]

I wish I had gotten my website going from day 1. I tried, and tried and tried, but I just couldn't figure it out back then.

[Lorri Moulton]

Try writing dialogue!  It's easier and more fun than you think. 

Journalism is not the only way to have a career as a writer.

[LilyBLily]

Great question. I've already answered it several times and deleted my answers without posting them. It appears I will keep doing so. I've enjoyed thinking about this.

[Pemry Janes]

Don't worry so much about getting it right. Just write and worry about improving it afterwards.

[cecilia_writer]

Even if you're naturally good at writing, you still have a lot to learn.

(I thought at first about some irrelevant life advice but looking back I would probably make the same mistakes again in these other areas)

[littleauthor]

Become a librarian and write on the side.

[Al Stevens]

I traveled a lot back then as a lecturer and road musician. I wish I'd taken detailed notes about the places I'd been so I wouldn't be counting on a fading memory to the extent I had to in the years that followed..

[LilyBLily]

I traveled a lot back then as a lecturer and road musician. I wish I'd taken detailed notes about the places I'd been so I wouldn't be counting on a fading memory to the extent I had to in the years that followed..

Fading memory really is a problem. I've tried to keep travel diaries but am usually so exhausted at the end of the day during trips that I don't have the energy to write more than a sentence or two, if that. It's one reason I keep souvenirs and guidebooks and maps. I did write the first draft of a novel based on one of my trips, and I wrote it while the trip was very fresh in my memory so it's chock full of details. But I've never finished that novel because it's a mystery and I don't write mysteries, which means I'd have to write two more just to sell one. Argh.   

[The Bass Bagwhan]

Devise a business plan and stick to it. A regime, a schedule, performance targets ...

[RiverRun]

Self: What you write is not who you are.

I did a lot of worrying early on about whether my work was good enough or whether I'd chosen the right genre or whether I ought to write a certain way - and figured out that I was pinning my identity on my early books. I was imagining some sort of stamp of approval if I wrote the 'right' book the right way. I felt like a rejection of my book was a rejection of myself. (I still feel that way, but now I can remind myself it isn't true. Most of the time.) Writing changes with you and takes you to different places. It doesn't have to be the final definitive word on who I am.

I mean, I say that knowing that I am super particular about what goes in my books and what that says about me personally, because I have to be that way. I think honesty is vital to writing. So, I guess I would also tell myself - keep being honest. The road less traveled is there for you to take.

[ashleycapes]

This will sound odd, but it's ultimately meant to be a positive, like, a comment on freedom of expression etc - but I'd say something like "no-one cares, so write whatever you want"

[TimothyEllis]

Hey you.

You know those ideas you have in your head that keep popping back in there all the time, driving you nuts? I mean, how often are you going to hear 'Freeze Motherbitch!' before you take it seriously?

Who am I?

I'm you in 2021, telling you in 2006 to start writing all this sh*t down, because in 2008 digital books take off, and by 2013, those riding that wave will do really really well.

I know, I know, you've got spiritual stuff in your head, and the publisher didn't want it, but your future income is writing the space stuff you love so much.

I know, because it's 2021 and I started writing novels in 2014, and that 6 book idea in your head is now 50 plus and still going strong after 7 years.

Yes, your first million words will be crap, but if you start now, by the time you get that written, the wave will begin, and you'll have a dozen novels to use as a surfboard, and two years writing to go back and edit the hell out of them before you release them 1 month apart.

And yes, you're going to be good at this, even though you think no-one will ever read whatever you write.

Okay, so I know you're having a WTF moment, seriously, I am too telling you this, but if you'd started writing novels after the first 2 non-fiction failed to interest the publisher, I wouldn't have gone through a lot of sh*t, and spent so long living on subsistence level income.

Then again, the journey made me who I was when I finally did start writing, and admittedly there was a lot of X3 game playing during that time which helped writing space combat, and maybe without that, the spark wasn't, isn't there yet.

So.....

Forget it. I guess I needed to vent, and who better to vent at than younger me.

Yeah, I know.

WTF?

[lea_owens]

To younger me: Don't wait until your 50s to publish your first book. You always were and always will be a writer - just do it. Stop listening to that negative self talk and stop thinking 'things will happen' just because everyone outside your mind tells you that you're talented, gifted, and brilliant - their praise doesn't make anything happen. Things take place because you stop the negative self talk and make them happen - you wrote the formula on your school books when you were 14: Dream. Plan. Work. Achieve. Then, when you publish, don't get disheartened because, really, you are such a wuss when it comes to giving up easily - keep going. You know that group about publishing 20 books to reach 50k a year? You'll get there in ten books - but bloody well sit down and write them.

To 62 year old me today: you still haven't stopped listening to that negative self talk, have you? Twit. You don't even see yourself as an author even though your books are selling really well. Take some of the advice you're so handy at scattering like birdseed to pigeons - focus on writing and get that 11th book published, then do another four in 2022. You can do this. Imagine what you could be earning at the end of 2022! Stop procrastinating, stop hanging out on Facebook and on writer forums and just write, edit, publish, repeat. You know the formula.