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My turn again with BlogRoll Tag! – On Publishing….

books

I was tagged by author Hiram Crespo who wrote the fascinating book  Tending the Epicurean Garden’, who asked me the following question:

What motivated you to write and then self publish your first book ‘The Kalarthri’?  

All my life I have wanted to write books and stories.  But I have never had the courage to actually pursue it.  I had written a lot of stories and had a quite a few manuscripts under my belt – one of which was The Kalarthri.  And then one day (well, a couple of days),  I sat down and really thought about what I really wanted to do with it.

I thought long and hard about whether I wanted to be traditionally published or self-published and then thought about the pros and cons about what would happen to me if I did bring out my very own book.  And here is what I came up with:

1)     I don’t have to slave over my work until I have the next ‘War and Peace’.  I am not writing to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.  I am writing because I have these stories running around in my head that want to come out.  Stories that I would like to read and have other people read.  And they can’t do that if it has not been published.

2)    I don’t have to write to a ‘word count’ because the industry says so.  I wanted to be able to write my stories to the length they need to be and no more.  I have heard some editors and agents tell their clients that manuscripts need to be ‘bulked out’.  I did not want to do this.

3)    What if people do not like it?  Then people do not have to read it.  Simple – I could not use this excuse anymore for not publishing.

4)    The time is not right.  But then I ended up thinking ‘The time is never right’  and if I kept on thinking that then nothing will ever happen and my stories would languish in their dusty box forever.

5)    And this was the decider for me to publish – If I don’t do it now, then most probably I would never do it and I did not want to look back on my life and regret that I didn’t do this when I had the chance.  I already have a small list of things that I regret not doing (and doing) in my life – I did not want to add to them.

So, to answer Hiram’s question on what motivated me to publish The Kalarthri’… To be honest, it was the fear that when I am near the end of my life, that I look back and regret that I did not conquer my fear and publish.

And with this post ends this round of BlogRoll Tag….

I hope you’ve all had fun ‘playing tag’ and seeing what everyone had to say!

The link for seeing all of the collected Tags!

-HMC

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