Love Your Work

I come to you today with another bit of writing advice: love your work.

Let's not kid ourselves; I don't mean that you must love everything you produce. Nor should you. A mark of an experienced author is learning to recognize when you've put crap on a page, and how to fix it. Like most things, writing is a process.

What I do mean by my initial statement is: love the work that you make public.

If you're posting it in serial format on a site, then be sure you're proud of the work you make available to the internet, because it will follow you forever. Even if no one else knows it's you, you will know. If you're publishing traditionally, it's not only important that you love it, but that you get a team of people to love it with you right out of the gate. Alas, if you self-publish, you must love your work the absolute most.

Why? Because you are your work's first champion, and its last defender.

The world of publishing can be a hard guantlet to run. If you're lucky enough to find your first 'professional' audience in an agent, you've already won in life. That agent will typically know how best to reach others in that same audience. They will hype your work, because they feel excited and invested in the story that you're telling, and they'll want to share that with the world. (Also, because they're financially dependent on your success as much as you are. If you get a legit agent whose pay is based upon your own earnings.) Despite the rising popularity of self-publishing, please never discount those that braved the trenches and came out with the roses. They deserve praise and admiration as much as the next (legitimate*) author.

In the machine of traditional publishing, it's your agent's job to sell your book to a publisher. That means they're selling the idea of your story to those whose profits depend on good sales. Publishers don't pick up books they think won't sell. (That doesn't necessarily mean that they love it, but it does mean they're interested. Again: they become invested.) As usual, the greatest advantage of landing your story in a publishing house is the investment they put into your books via marketing strategies. Poor/improper marketing = poor performing sales = no money, honey.

Take away: in traditional publishing, you have to love your book just enough to make sure others love it, too. Then you can form a fellowship of people willing to see to your book's success.

Everything about self-publishing is equally as difficult, and it is to those that go this route that I need to stress it even more: LOVE YOUR WORK.

Love of the story may be the only reason any book is published. If an author is so enamored with their own book, it's easier to champion it. To talk about it. To engage with potential readers regarding it. Loving your work out loud is probably the purest form of marketing you will have to do.

It's not the only marketing you will have to do. Traditionally published or self-published, you are equally as responsible for getting the word out there. (Traditionally published authors may just have more custom artwork to share, and experts to tell them how to maximize the effort.)

The hardest part of traditional publishing is convincing a small community of critical people (who all know/talk to each other–keep that in mind!!) that your story isn't just compelling, but that it's profitable. The rest is also hard work, don't get me wrong, but you at least have a team at your back taking some of the burden off your shoulders.

Self-published authors rarely have that experience. From the moment the first draft is written, it's a scramble to get a cover, do the rewrites, find an editor, do the first round of solo editing, have it professionally edited, then edited again, and another proofread by trusted individuals. In the meantime, you're running your own marketing campaign. This includes artwork, snippets, graphics, sometimes a book trailer, or booktok content. Any and all of the above. Everything has to visually make sense as well as be engaging.

In the midst of all of that, there's planning the release day. Potential goodies for loyal supporters. Organizing Arc readers as well as preorder options. Don't forget the legal holes to jump through such as copyright. Plus, whatever else comes up that you also have to juggle with your everyday life.

At last, you finally get to publish the book. And the marketing train just keeps running. This time, you're calling in all the ARC reviewers to make sure good things are flooding your release day. You're making sure all of the links work, that the websites are all updated, and that orders are going off without a hitch. At this point, you'll be lucky if you've got an audiobook in the works, but it very rarely releases at the same time as paperback and ebook.

All of this to say that the gauntlet is run by every legitimate* author, no matter which route you take. The difference is the amount of experience versus the amount of passion put into each project. Only the truly luckiest authors will receive both in their traditional publishing adventure. It's especially more rare in the case of self-published authors. However, even a great marketing campaign can flounder if the creators of it slip up and reveal they had no real passion for the project.

That's why I say you have to love every project you create for public consumption. If you love what you put out there, you're going to find those that love it just as much. But if you're throwing out a half-hearted idea that you threw together and have no real stake in its future... Yeah, the reading community will take note. (If you're lucky, that's all they'll do. If not, you could always be the next star on Booktok Author Drama.)

So what does this all boil down to?

Write for love of the material. Sell for love of the book's success. Profit in the emotions of the readers.

If you don't love it, who will? If you won't sell it, who will? If you won't gush about it, why should others want to?

Always be your biggest fan. Even more important: always be your book's strongest champion. And if you ever think that you're not that proud of this book, then don't publish it until you are.

That's your name. Your reputation. Your honor. Fight for it. Live for it. Protect it.

You worked this hard to create something this special. It's okay to tell everyone about it.

Now get back to work. Only you know how that story is supposed to shine.

*Legitimate = an author who sits down and writes out an entire story purely from their imagination; not applicable to individuals who type a prompt into an AI generator and steal the carefully woven words and ideas of another, or those who blatantly steal from an author the old-fashioned way. (Yes, the AI rant is still coming. Yes, I'm still too agitated to finish it right now. Yes, I am team SHAME EVERYONE who uses AI to pretend to be a writer.)