Building an author image from nothing.

I have spent years writing stories but never showing them to anyone. As a teenager I would sit at my grandad dinning room table with a pen and a sheets of paper and write my debut book 'Last to Survive'. It was not until I got to college and university that I really dived into my writing where I started to learn many things and I am still learning as I carry on down the road to becoming a full time self published author.

Writing for me has always been a escape from the real world and I can delve into other worlds. Before I wrote my stories to be published as books I wrote them in the the form of a script while I was attending college and university. Some of my scripts made it into performances , watching my writing come to life is truly a remarkable and sometimes terrifying. Once in University I became a beta reader/editor for a friend who is also a author. Reading through others peoples works in my opinion is so much easy the reading your own work and I will explain why. When you are reading your own work it can be very easy to overlook mistakes in the text as you are seeing what you want to see where as if someone else reads through your work they can pick out mistakes however big or small it may be, when I have read through my fellow authors work through the years I had picked up on gaps in storyline and some mistakes in the spelling and grammar that were fixed before the books were published. With the same author I worked on two projects with them, I translated the book in a script version for screen and I also became a co - author on one of their latest books before embarking on publishing my own books as a solo author.

When I wrote my debut book 'Last to Survive' I didn't know very much about the industry and I admit I made a few mistakes the first time I published the book. One lesson I learned is that you also have to make your book look appealing as well as having a good story underneath the cover. The first version of the book had a plain cover I choose on the KDP website, when I uploaded part of me wasn't very happy with the cover but I just wanted to get my story out into the world. That was a mistake when I look back I should of waited and made a decent cover. After learning this lesson I redid the cover to something I was more happy with and republished 'Last to Survive' when I released the sequel 'Last to Survive The Final Battle'.

One common and the second lesson I learned that just because you write a book, it does not mean you are going to become a successful as people like J.K Rowling overnight or in a few short months. I was getting a down in dumps because I wasn't getting many sales or much interest in my book. I thought publishing my book on Amazon would give me and my book exposure but it turned into another lesson and that was to look into how Amazon works when it comes to getting your book discovered more. When you publish a book you need to do a lot of leg work in order to get the sales and exposure your book needs, this was the next lesson I learnt and to give my books the more exposure: 1. I set up a Facebook page to advertise my books and other pieces of work. 2. I have a website that has a link to my books and also has a portfolio of my script work. 3. I did the research and sent out emails letting people know that my book was out there, I realised that I needed to speak about my book because the only person that can get the 'ball rolling' as they say was me.

I could list many things that I have learnt and am still learning but there is one lesson that I have learnt and sometime I have to learn it again sometimes. This lesson is the most important one to me as even though I am an Author now I didn't think that I would be able call myself several years ago when I was diagnosed with dyslexia. But what I remembered was that this is what I always wanted to write and create different worlds filled with adventures. The last lesson I am passing on for now is that you can do anything you want to do in life if you work hard and don't give up, aspire to what and who you want to be? As I have always said you don't get where you want by taking the easy road. I am now doing a lot better and my career as a Author is slowly taking off. Even if its not a writer you want to be my last lesson is the main advice I can give you.