We’re about at the end of Nano and some will celebrating their victory of “winning” Nano, while others will be kicking themselves for failing to hit those 55,000 words. And even those who won nano will soon realize (one hopes) that putting those initial words on the page are just step one of a long process. (I think it took me nine drafts to finalize my first novel and the second draft was almost a complete rewrite.)
It’s easy to look around and see what others are doing and think you don’t have what it takes. Or to get defeated when things aren’t happening fast enough. And it’s normal. The key is to keep going. If you keep going AND keep striving, you will improve. You will get better. It will get easier and you will start to see little glimmers of success that pull you forward.
Let me share a little of my own journey on this one.
Often times in the indie world there’s a lot of “oh, well, obviously your problem is…” talk. Covers is one of the top targets of these kind of comments. Those who’ve been around a while can look at a cover and think “NO! That won’t work at all.” But for a newbie, that skill just isn’t there yet.
I had to buy a new computer last week because this current one has developed the habit of just turning itself off, and I figured before I transferred my files I would go through my GIMP files and delete all the many drafts that had led to each of my covers. (I’ll sometimes go through twenty iterations of a cover before I’m satisfied.) What this made me do is look at some of my oldest covers.
And, oh man, were they bad. The initial covers on Douchebag were hideous. I’d done enough research to figure out the basic color scheme for men’s dating books (black, white, red, yellow), but what I then did with those colors? Holy cannoli. Bad. Bad, bad, bad.
But I didn’t know. I put ’em out there without hesitation. And, surprisingly, a few copies sold. Why, when the covers were that bad, I will never know. Trust me, they were BAD.
But I learned and I experimented and I swapped out the covers more than once and I slowly improved. Is the cover perfect now? No. But it gets the job done. And maybe someday I pay someone who does this for a living to put a really flashy cover on it.
(Doubtful. This class I’m taking now has taught me that I have far more interest in the writing of things than in the marketing of things and that I may always be one of those folks who spend far more time on creating a product or thinking about how it all works than on trying to find my audience.)
Anyway. Back to the point. I didn’t know back then what I didn’t know. And I could’ve had millions of dollars to spend and still not done it “right”, because there was a lot I needed to learn. (Still is, but I think I’m further along now than I was then.)
This is a journey. With a lot of steps. And some of us are starting out in Australia with ten bucks in our pocket, trying to make it all the way to London, or in Idaho trying to make it to Russia.
It’s okay if it takes a while. It’s okay if you go off course for a bit. The key is to keep going and keep improving. And if someday your old covers or your old stories make you cringe? That’s okay, too. It just means you’ve learned enough to see the flaws in your early work.
So chin up and keep moving.
M.L. Humphrey 