The Balancing Act

We all need balance in our lives.

I know, from years of working the hotel business, that it's easy to get away from that. Now, as a writer, I face the same balancing act - the same challenges that I did as a young professional working in a thankless, sixty hour a week job that barley scraped the bills by. The challenges are just coming from a different direction now - and I have to manage them a different way.

Years ago, writers had a lot more hurdles to scale before seeing their beloved masterpiece in print. They had to toil over a manuscript, sometimes for years, print it out (or worse yet, type it page at a time), and send it off (snail mail, remember that?) and wait for six weeks to several months or more to get a form rejection letter in the mail. Then, the process would start all over again until a publisher decided to accept the story. And that could be years.

After a publisher accepts the story, another year or two could pass before seeing the book on the shelves. Rewrites, reformats, etc... all would happen during that time. A proof would be made of the book, which the author would need to approve, etc etc etc...it eats away at time.

The rewards, of course, of going with traditional publishing, can be tremendous. As those publishers invest a substantial amount of money in the promotion of the newly accepted novel, it can pretty much expect to be a best seller. Or at least a decent seller. A writer could say, if their novel is accepted by Doubleday, they have crossed a major hurdle as a novelist. Publishers like Doubleday rarely accept anything that doesn't have best-seller written all over it. Of course, they are missing out on many fantastic stories that could be best sellers by being so selective.

But today, we have the beauty of the internet, online print-on-demand publishers, and social networking. Authors now have avenues to get their books in print - actual, physical books - and out to the public while bypassing the traditional publishers. The years long process of the past is now a thing of the past. The joy that authors feel - when they see their masterpiece listed on Amazon, Barnes and Noble...or better yet...in their hands for the first time...is a feeling that all authors can now experience, thanks to online self-publishing.

So that presents the new challenge to today's authors - otherwise known as "the balancing act". Today, we have the beauty of Facebook, and Twitter, and YouTube and all the other social networks to market our writing, to scream from the mountaintops that we wrote a novel! Please, please, please read it! And in some cases, the online networking leads to publishing house where the streets are paved with milk and honey....the New York Big Boys. But again, it's a balancing act. Those same engines distract a writer from exactly what they have been trying to do in the first place: write more books.

So, the balancing act. Each of us new authors scale the edge of that cliff; we tiptoe across that balancing wire to find our "zen zone" where we go back and forth between researching, writing new material, editing, and marketing what we already have finished. But the rewards come, as self fulfillment for the author and some fresh, fantastic stories for the reader.

So those that don't buy self-published works, those that don't take them as seriously, must keep in mind the passion that has gone into these self-published novels. Skipping over them for a more well-known name, like the big publishers do, could mean missing a fantastic story....written by a new, fresh-faced author - with a new vision - that could very well become the Anne Rice, Stephen King or John Grisham of tomorrow.

Everyone has to start somewhere. Please support the start up authors. The self-published novels of today are the best-sellers of the future; the same books that are being passed over will fuel tomorrow's films. Please support new authors for the art of the future!

Photo Credit: Rudicil Photography