“It's like pushing a boulder uphill with your face.”

(Quick note: This email should have reached you sooner, but I got locked out of my email account.) 

The Self Publishing Live conference in London last week* was sooo good. Exhausting. But good. 

*well, the week before last as it is now. No thanks to my computer. 

I chatted with the likes of Craig Martell, Steven Higgs, Damon Courtney - the founder of Bookfunnel, and a whole bunch of industry pros. Not to mention all the other incredible authors I met. 

Now the dust has settled, I’ve had some time to reflect. I thought I’d share my key takeaways from the conference. I’ve distilled them into two themes. 

This email is about the act of writing. Part two is all the business stuff - including AI - I’ll send that on Friday. 

Let's start with a key insight from multi-genre, multi-millionaire, self-published author Steve Higgs:

“Writing a book is like pushing a boulder up a hill with your face.”

I loved this analogy because it's true. Steve’s core message was to believe in your success. Hold on to the belief in yourself, even when it’s hard and you’re hanging on by a thin thread, and even when those around you are skeptical. He said it can feel like pushing a boulder uphill with your face, but it does get easier. So keep going.

Writing can be a lonely business, but Steve made £3 million in sales last year, so I know it can be done. His talk gave me a boost to getting writing fiction again. 

Up next:

“Write the story you want to read.”   

This is an oldie but goodie, and both E.L. James and Lucy Score took this approach to writing their bestsellers. Guess it worked out pretty well for them. 

Erika James started writing fan-fiction based on the Vampire diaries. When her story started getting popular on a fan-fiction website, she decided she'd better take it down and see if anyone would publish it. It was eventually taken up by an Australian publishing house, and the rest is history. 

In a separate panel talk, Sacha Black, Hannah Lynn, and Clare Lydon all had and have very different approaches to writing. How do they decide which story to write? 

Sacha Black looks at market trends and finds where it overlaps with what she loves to write. She’s very open about it being a business-first decision, whereas Clare and Hannah both followed the ‘write the story you want to read’ path. 

My main point here—I think—is that there really isn't a right or wrong way to go about writing and deciding which story to tell. Just so long as you enjoy doing it. 

And finally, one of the many things I’ve beaten myself up about before is that the story in my head never seems as good when it’s on the page. 

Like when you look in cook book and see a delicious cake, but it never quite looks as good when you try and bake it. (It never does in my case, anyway.)

Refreshingly, Clare Lydon said that “the book you start is often not the book you finish with.”

So all in all, these talks gave me a spark of hope, a smidge of reassurance, reignited my belief, and gave me the boost I needed to start editing the techno-thriller that’s been sitting in my drawer for the last four years. 

 Don’t get me wrong, I love copywriting, but I love stories more. 

Hope that was helpful. Speak to you Friday with some business and AI takeways. 

Angie

If you spot any typos or run on sentences or dangling thingamies, please be kind and let it slide. Save your energy for something better.

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