: Please keep this in mind first: Many well-known, respected, successful, prolific authors still (need to) keep a day job to live comfortably. Many of them have related careers like writing coach,

Please keep this in mind first: Many well-known, respected, successful, prolific authors still (need to) keep a day job to live comfortably. Many of them have related careers like writing coach, or professor of English, but it's still a day job. Most people who write do it out of the love for it.

If you want to be a success as a self-publisher, my best advice, based on personal experience, is expect to make your money as a salesperson. Your books are your products, and if they're well-written and well-produced, you'll be able to sell exactly as many as you're willing to personally sell. If you do book tours, and speaking engagements, and meet-the-author events, and conventions, and social media, and networking, and interview, and you don't have any shyness about relentless self-promotion, you can actually do very well financially. But you'll be primarily making your money selling, not writing. You also won't be able to make this work financially through a service like Lulu. You'll have to break out on your own, and make your own contracts with a printing press, which will mean a lot more up-front costs, but also a much higher margin on everything you sell. Read the Self-Publishing Manual for everything you need to go this route.

If you just want to write, write, write (not sell), and you think you can maintain a pace of four books a year DO NOT, for the love of all that is holy, self-publish. A consistent author is a traditional publisher's dream. Save your money, avoid the headaches, and keep writing until you produce a book good enough for a traditional publisher to snap it up. Being a self-publisher is a full time job IN ADDITION to writing, and selling is another one on top of that. Unless you are sure you can do all three jobs well AT THE SAME TIME, you're just looking to waste your time and money with your current plan.

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: Please keep this in mind first: Many well-known, respected, successful, prolific authors still (need to) keep a day job to live comfortably. Many of them have related careers like writing coach,

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: How to show that a character cares for another, but is also clumsy? This is about a father who returns after a particularly long journey. Typically, he's not available very often anyway, but

: Switching tense and point of view between the chapters I'm writing a story told mostly in first person point of view in present tense where the narrator alternates between two characters from

: If I have an idea for an animated series how do I write it out? So basically Iâ€™ve come up with a story that I believe could be an interesting animated series, but Iâ€™m not in the stages

: Is a lack of character descriptions a problem? I have written a novel in which none of the characters are ever described. It started out by accident (3 chapters in when I realized). Question:

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