I don’t mean “behaving” badly because that’d put you in the category of being a problematic author and yikes! you don’t want that. I mean, you can do this indie author thing imperfectly.

You can do it and make mistakes and keep doing it.
You can do it with no sales, or low sales. You can do it with one book out or three. You can do it and not have fifty reviews on ‘Zon, you can do it and have zero street team, no hype people and you can do it, even if you’re not sure you’re going to write again.

Every time I start a new book, I don’t know if that’s actually going to be a book because it doesn’t feel like it.

I published Flame For You,  March 21 2022 and I’m going to skip all the stuff that got me to press “publish” because that’s a different post and I’ve talked about it before.
And I (and still am) kind of awful at graphics.
And I didn’t know about backmatter.
And my blurbs (and still can) be better.

But I wanted to connect with readers, share a great story I wrote and do this indie author thing and my mantra became, “I’m doing all of this badly.” Seriously. But that lowered my threshold for aiming for perfection. That kept me in my wheelhouse and it kept me focusing on things that I do well.

So my graphics improved, I upped my backmatter game and I am still playing with my blurbs.

And maybe this year, my mantra should be, “Doing it anyways.”
Because doing it badly is far better than not doing it.
Writing is way, way, less painful than not being able to write, even on it’s most frustrating, I-lost-my-edits-day and I am so grateful to be an indie author, with books out and I couldn’t have imagined how it would roll out, back there in March.

The other day, I posted a video on TikTok, where I said, “I don’t know how to message on this app.” It would have been more accurate to say, “I’m not the most comfortable on this app.” but whatever, it was honest and true and in saying that, people were like, “Oh! Here’s how. Try this.” and it wasn’t the first time I have tried for ARCs but this time, I connected new readers.

This year – or technically I guess, not even full year, has been amazing.
But if I hadn’t lowered the bar, hadn’t told myself that I am doing this very badly and kept going, I wouldn’t have seen it reach three books.

So I’m going to keep going. And keep improving, and growing and it’s not going to be perfect, it’s going to be messy and choatic and maybe even some of it will be bad, but I’m going to do it anyways.