5 Things I Wish I knew Before Writing My Book

Happy September 5th and Day 5 of my 14 Day book launch! I wanted to share some writing wisdom I learned throughout this process in a post called 5 Things I Wish I knew Before Writing My Book.

The Princess Center is set to come out in less than 10 days! I’m down to single digit days! September 14 can’t come fast enough.

I wanted to share with you all just little words of wisdom from my very inexperienced writing life. Take these with a grain of salt because obviously I’m no seasoned writer and I enjoy entertaining people.

Without further ado, here are my 5 Things I Wish I knew Before Writing My Book

1. Editing is HARD.
I MEAN HARD! Unfortunately, I am not financially able to dish out on a full-time editor, yet. So editing my book has been the HARDEST thing for me to do. It took me the longest to do with many months of crying. And still, I feel like I find errors. So if you happen to see errors in my novel, I apologize in advance. But also please tell me so I can improve. Hopefully, sometime in the near future, I will be able to hire an actual editor to make sure my stuff makes sense and is grammatically correct.

2. Your story can completely shift and it’s okay.
I had some trouble with this. I wrote my first draft in about a month and was very proud of it. But as I was reading it and editing the storyline, I started to not like it as much and wanted to shift it. It was really hard for me to part with my original draft, but it turned out for the better. I was very happy with how things shifted and couldn’t be more proud of my final product. Plus, my first draft might stem a future novella idea 😉

3. Your book won’t be for everyone.
I did already know this going in. But in my fantasy head, I still wish everyone would read and love it. And having that mindset can kind of shift your focus in writing. You start writing with everyone in mind and that’s not good. What you need to do is focus on your characters and let them eventually write the story for you. Think about everyone else in your marketing phase, but write the story that was meant for your characters and the storyline you want to be written.

4. Having a daily word count does help if you’re on a deadline.
Now I didn’t really have a deadline when I was writing. I prefer to write when the inspiration hits me. But when I was working on my 2nd book (oh yeah, did I mention I already have the second book in the works 🙂 I kept a daily word count to help guide me. And my advice to any writers, try it. It may not be your best work, but at least you wrote. First and foremost you are a writer, you need to actually write in order to continue on with that title.

5. Your book won’t ever be perfect in your eyes.
This is one I struggle with on a daily. As perfect as I want to make my book, it won’t ever be perfect in my eyes. Every time I re-read a line in my book I want to tweak it somehow. But sometimes you need to leave it alone. I’m learning this the hard way because I want to keep updating my book. But with every update, means a new line edit. Every update means I need to make sure I’m still on the right timeline. A new update means I need to reformat and re-upload my book. As perfect as I want it to be, it will never be perfect. Sometimes the story just needs to be told as best as you can write it and that is perfect in its own right. Now don’t get this confused with me not thinking I’m not proud of my work because it’s not perfect in my eyes. But I spent some nights worrying that it’s not perfect when I should be celebrating it instead.

And there you go! These were 5 things that I wish I KNEW before I started writing my book. It’s been a wild ride and I wish I knew more things that I could teach and bestow wisdom down to you. But that will happen in due time. That will happen when I have more works written. But for now, here are the 5 things I wish I knew before I started to write my first novel.

I hope you enjoyed this as much as I enjoyed writing this. And in just 9 days my book will be released. My little YA Sports romance novel will be released and I couldn’t be happier!

For now, I hope you’re enjoying all this content running on my blog these past few days! Keep watching out for more and more as my book release gets closer and closer!

Thanks again for the support and don’t forget to listen to my last podcast where I talked all about my book! You can check it out here!

XOXO

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