How exactly do you become an author, part-time or full time?
- By Prasenjeet
- April 15, 2014
- No Comments
Beginning As An Author At The Very Beginning…..
As the mindboggling material available on the worldwide web would indicate, the path to becoming an author would be as different as there are writers.
I’m a voracious reader, and I think it would certainly help if you too can decide on a strategy that suits YOU after some exhaustive, and exhausting, research.
In my case, I decided that before writing a full book, I should start sharing my ideas through a blog. Then assess the feedback I’d get and decide on the next step.
So I first taught myself some basics of website designing (I’ll share the “tricks” a little later). I then needed an idea that won’t cost much. After some brainstorming, I decided to share my mom’s recipes on a website registered as www.cookinginajiffy.com. This happened in April 2013.
After some four months of bumbling about, and after getting some interesting reader feedback and encouragement, I started jotting down my thoughts for my first book “How To Cook In A Jiffy Even If You Have Never Boiled An Egg Before” in August 2013. As the title suggests, this book was meant for the complete newbie (like myself) who was just starting out in the kitchen with no previous cooking experience. I could self-publish the eBook version on all platforms like Kindle, Nook, Kobo, Sony, Apple etc. by mid-September 2013. Its paperback version could, however, be published only on my 29th birthday (8 October 2013).
I certainly couldn’t have wished for a better birthday gift.
As to why I decided NOT to approach a traditional publisher, please dear Reader wait a while for that story.
Enthused that I could write and publish a BOOK totally on my own, I immediately started writing my second tome “Home Style Indian Cooking In A Jiffy” in mid-October. With an amazing compilation of over 100 delectable Indian dishes, many of which you can’t get in any Indian restaurant for love or for money, this is, I believe, unlike any other Indian Cook book available in the market. What this book quite uniquely focuses on is what Indians eat every day in their homes. It then in an easy step-by-step manner makes this mysterious, never disclosed, “Home Style” Indian cooking accessible to anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of cooking and a stomach for adventure.
This book was published in December 2013, simultaneously in both its Kindle and Paperback avatars. I also enrolled in the KDP Select programme which meant that I couldn’t go onto any other platform. (As to why, that’d again be another story.)
Like any other young person of my generation, I have always been interested in healthy foods, diets and exercises. I had, however, a strong sense of discomfort with the current eating and cooking practices that were oscillating from low fat diets one day to low carb high protein diet the other, with vegan diets, crash diets, etc. sprinkled in between. I suspected that these fad diets did more harm to you than good. I wondered if it was possible to have a healthy lifestyle by not following any of these confusing advices. So I started researching and writing my third book “Healthy Cooking In A Jiffy: The Complete No Fad, No Diet Handbook” in January 2014. This book (in both Kindle and Paperback versions) could be “published” and put out on Amazon in March 2014.
So far I have crossed over 100,000 words in six months with my three books. You may have noticed that August 2013 to March 2014 is actually 8 months, and not 6. The missing months were actually spent on marketing the books. The actual time taken minus the time spent on promotion, therefore, remains at six months, for three books, which may be a world record!
To be sure, I have just started out, on a really long journey of being an author-entrepreneur. There has been a lot of learning, and unlearning, in this voyage, which I don’t think will ever end.
More on this soon, I promise.
Prasenjeet
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