A lot of times, people fail at projects for one simple reason. They take on too much the first time. They think that they will dive right into it, and get great results without having ever tried it before. This is especially true for new writers. People think that they will learn to write books overnight, as if it is easy. They don’t try to tackle shorter forms, such as stories, poems, or essays, as an introduction to writing. As a result, they get discourage and give up on writing books forever.
This is even true of people who decide to write children’s books. People assume that it is easy to write books for kids. They don’t see how much work is going to be involved. The fact is, if you decide to write books, you have to be ready to do a lot of work. You might not be prepared if you have never even written a story before
Of course, all the vanity publishers out there just make the situation worse. There are literally thousands of websites that try to encourage you to become an author. They say that they will publish your first book. They will, in fact, but not in the way that you think. You can write a book and send it to these people, and then pay the money to have them publish it for you. This is not the way to succeed in writing books. If you want to write books and waste your money so that you can say you’re in print, by all means go for it. But if you publish books by yourself through one of these websites, you will never get the exposure that you need to be a success.
I have very simple advice for anyone starting out to write books. The most important thing you can do is start! Do not start on something big, but on something small. Almost everyone who writes books will agree that you can not dive right into it. You need to start with character sketches, plot outlines, and other pre-writing. Maybe you can write a short story or two to try to flush out the fictional world you are creating. Then, if you still want to write books, you will have done the planning that you need to make it doable. Remember that writing books, like any other major undertaking, is 9/10 planning and 1/10 execution. Before you start to write books, you must know just what you plan to write!
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