My Life as a Writer: When I'm Not Writing, I'm Learning

Learning about the business side of being a professional writer, especially an author, is quite the experience for me. Not so much in that I find it difficult to comprehend, but that it has so many elements to it other than popping up Your Writing Tool Of Choice and putting words down. Lots of moving parts here, and now I see why the publishing business became what it is.

Naturally, in order to keep this to something that I can handle I do what a lot of people do: break it down into a series of smaller steps, then regroup them to summarize different stages of the process (which I usually annotate with relevant skills and tools). Since I'm not going the old way through a house, I'm learning as I go what I need to do and how I need to do it for every step.

So, to that end, I'm bookmarking sites, getting how-to guides, watching videos and podcasts, and studying as if I were back in university (moreso, as this has immediate and direct applicability). I'm doing it in small amounts on a daily basis--an hour here, another there--as part of pacing myself when I write so as to avoid burnout due to fatigue.

The payoff is a widely-expanded skillset, a body of demonstrated competence in those skills, and an anti-fragile independent revenue stream with multiple applications. The cost is time-to-competence development. Since I have an abundance of time, I am willing to pay this cost, and I look forward to enjoying the payoff down the road.