Dear Brand-New Baby Author and Former Tash,
It's been one year since I published my first book! This year, I've failed a lot and learned a lot too. So, I want to share some advice for brand-new baby authors and my former self:
- Keep going.
After pushing “publish” you’re going to feel depressed for a while and lost as to what to do next. Once you reach your childhood dream, which you spent over a decade dreaming about, you will inevitably face the void and the death of all the former versions of yourself that made your book happen. You will be confused. Is it burnout? When should you start the next project? Don't sit around once one project is finished. Sometimes, you must keep going and start something new because it's the only thing you can do.
- Be very attuned to which projects you want to do.
If you want to write a novel, don’t squash that feeling, and try to write what you think you “should” be writing. You will worry whether people still read novels, and then you will decide that it doesn’t matter if they do or not. Once you allow yourself to write the story that you want to, suddenly instead of feeling stifled, all your creative energy will happen at once, and you will have ten projects in the making. So, as much as possible, know which project you want to do and then do that because that will solve everything.
- Find ways to enjoy the things you suck at.
Marketing is not your strong suit. You will want to fire yourself as your marketer many times. But half of being bad at stuff means accepting where you are without being mean to yourself and looking for ways to make the work more enjoyable. You will slowly get a process down for editing TikTok’s in iMovie that you don't loathe. You'll learn in a podcast somewhere that enjoying things is about internal work, not external work.
- You will learn the simplest things last.
You will not reach your goal of selling 10,000 copies of your book in your first year. You will try Amazon ads and not waste that much money, but you will also get no sales. A year after publishing your book, you will run an A/B test on the book covers you should’ve done over a year ago. Like in the poem "Maximus, to himself" by Charles Olsen, you will have to learn the simplest things last. You are late in a slow time. You grew up many, and the single is not easily known. And that's okay.
- Compete with yourself.
You will finish the first draft of the manuscript of your second book about a year after you published your first. After much of a year of flailing, you will find the strength to keep going. Once you start competing with yourself, you will enter a completely different league. And that momentum will be insatiable. When you reflect on this in one year, you will still be writing, and that is all that matters.
That’s about it for now! I hope any of that resonated with you and the aspiring authors here. I'll be back with more exciting updates soon, as I am working on a third book! Lol.
Love,
Tash
p.s. Check out my favorite things I've published on this website:
Ojos Del Sol Lyrics Translation
A Peyote Ceremony: What It Is and What To Expect
