Writing isn't as easy as you may think...

In the past I never listened to talk radio, but within the past six months I've found that I enjoy listening to the John J and Rich morning show on my way to school. This morning they were talking about this woman who has made over 5 million dollars on YouTube for just opening up packages of toys. They thought the idea of the channel was silly and asked for people to call in and talk about people they knew who made a profit for doing something silly or something simple. The first caller was a woman who said she knew a former school teacher who earned enough money to quit his job and support his family by writing erotica. She then went on to say that his main audience was in Europe, and her tone of voice let on that she didn't take writers seriously. Maybe it was the type of book he wrote, or maybe she just wasn't an avid reader. Maybe she has no idea what it's like to write, or maybe she only considers manual labor to be work. It doesn't matter what her reasoning was for thinking writing isn't a good career choice, it's a view that seems to be widely shared. I usually don't even tell the people in my daily life that I'm working on self publishing a novel. They seem to have the idea that it's a hobby. For me, writing is not a hobby, it's what I want to do with my life. It also isn't easy. Aside from just thinking up the story and putting everything together to see how to works on the page, you also have to know how to self edit. If you self publish, like I am planning to do, you do all the marketing, I'm pretty sure that school teacher she was talking about was a self published author. You have to read through your own book so many times that there comes a point where you almost grow sick of your own beloved characters. You're constantly changing things in your novel, you have to know at least the basic rules of grammar. If you self publish then you have to seek out someone to draw your cover. There are a lot of things you have to do that I'm sure I haven't even run into because I haven't published yet, but I know that writing isn't easy. I knew that when I decided to take on the job of self publishing a novel.