Who is AuthorDad?
First things first, a brief introduction:
Hi, my name is Travis and I am AuthorDad. This blog is my chronicle of my transition from working full time and supporting my family of five through that income to the goal of being able to provide the same level of support from an income as a fiction writer. Oh, and I intend to remain a good father and husband in the meantime. I do not want to make my family suffer from a sharp decline in resources and also do not want my kids to grow up thinking of dad as that guy who’s always in his writing cave and never engaged.
Yeah, it’s a pretty tall order to make the transition under those circumstances, but that’s my whole purpose here: To prove it can be done. Of course, I should also say that I’m in this as a (very) long-term game.
As I start this blog, I am still completely reliant on my corporate income. I have been trying to write for nearly 10 years and have four novels in various states of crappiness trunked at the moment. Over the years, I have also been consistently learning, both craft and and the marketing and business side of being a self-publisher. At least, I have learned enough to know where those previous novels went wrong.
Why would you follow someone with no experience?
So much of the writing advice I listen to out there is from people with years of success under their belt already. By the time they started thinking about advising other authors, they were so far removed from the starting point that I find that they don’t seem to be able to relate to first-time writers anymore.
Not only that, but as far as I have found <em>nobody</em> out there made the transition to full-time writing with a family and a consistent job. They had to make the jump because they were fired. They had a spouse supporting them. Or they had no kids or other serious financial obligations. That doesn’t speak to me.
I wanted to record my progress from the trenches for people like me. If you’re right here with me, then I hope this will help motivate you (let me know what you’re up to, so we can support each other!) If you’re reading this in the future and just starting out, I hope it will offer some perspective on what the beginning looked like for me.
The Book 1 Project
As I mentioned above, I have a few trunked novels. But I am starting over with a book that I mean to bring to market.
I recently completed the How to Write a Bestseller course from the folks at Self-Publishing Formula and Suzy Quinn. The title sounds absurdly pretentious, but if you know the SPF team, you know it’s down-to-earth advice. Basically, it’s about making sure you have a focus, target audience and market for your book, and a consistent idea (even writing the back cover copy and pitch in advance!) in place before you start. I have lacked all of those in my previous efforts, which directly connected to their failures to satisfy on a story level. So this course was brilliant for my planning.
During the Book 1 Project, I will be chronicling my writing progress each day. I’ve skipped over some of the stuff that I already did as part of the course “homework”, but in essence, you’re going to see my progress each and every day as I go through this, from the very beginning of testing my premise, all the way through launch.
Ever get frustrated by those people who say, “If you write 1000 words per day, you can finish a 90k book in three months.”? Me too. Where’s the prewriting and outlining in there? Where’s the editing and production? If you’re only talking about the time to write a first draft, that seems like less than half of the work to me.
The Book 1 Project is going to put all of that to rest. You’ll be able to see just how much time I spend on every stage of the process.
Join Me!
I’m very interested to know if anyone else is also starting their writing career and wants to group together to support each other.
You can join my mailing list below to get daily updates on the Book 1 Project. I don’t have a proper newsletter with regular updates yet (that’s a little farther down the priority list), but you’ll get the daily post updates.
Shoot me a reply or leave a comment on any of the posts about your writing journey. Are you trying to get that first book out there, too? Where are you in the process? I look forward to hearing from you.