I started taking writing seriously when I was about 9 or 10 years old. I was writing short stories and poetry. In my early 20s, I was writing skits for a Christian radio station. I dreamed of becoming a famous author one day. Writing came easily to me when I was younger. Now that I am in my 40s I face a few writing struggles as an author. So I asked myself, “What can I do about these writing challenges?” Here are some suggestions.
Blogging
When I first started blogging in 2015, I was bursting with so many ideas. I knew exactly what I wanted to write about. I wanted my blog to help and inspire people, not just with writing, but with all areas of their life. I also wanted to showcase my writing skills. My blog posts consisted of short stories, poetry, inspirational posts, and how-to blog posts about self-publishing, web designing, and book marketing. Organic traffic to my website grew to an average of 100 visits per week.
But I found that in the last couple of years, I have been struggling to come up with new material for my blog. It was my intention to post to my blog once a week. But blogging got harder and I was soon posting only once every two weeks and then once a month. I still loved writing, but for some reason, I ran out of things to write about on my blog.
There are a lot of websites and blogs that give plenty of advice on what topics you should blog about. But one of the ideas I had was to create a content calendar. I researched online all of the topics I wanted to write about and wrote them down. I searched on Pinterest, Answer the Public, and Quora.
I also visited other authors’ websites for inspiration such as The Creative Penn and Jane Friedman. I don’t always stick to the topics on my content calendar, but I know that when I get stuck and can’t think of a good topic, I will always turn to my content calendar as a backup.
Finding Book Ideas to Write About
The last book I wrote and published was The Beginner’s Guide to Book Marketing in 2021. Since then I have not started on a new book. I have been trying to come up with a new book title, but so far my efforts have been futile. I thought about writing a book of inspirational messages, creating a coloring book for adults, writing another romance novel, or a nonfiction book, but I have been struggling to focus and get started on one of these ideas. I also wasn’t sure if any of these ideas were profitable.
When I wrote Short Stories for Teenagers, some of the short stories came from some of my favorite songs. The idea for my novel Last Chance was inspired by the company I used to work for. You can also find novel ideas by keeping a journal, looking for inspiration in your dreams, taking a walk in the park, letting your mind wander, or letting the things you experienced in life be your inspiration. You may also get ideas from the experiences of your friends and family.
If you’re interested in writing nonfiction books like I am, one book idea is to write an instruction manual of a talent or skill you have. For example, I wrote the book The Beginner’s Guide to Self-Publishing since I had experience in self-publishing my own books. I also check Amazon’s Best Sellers list to find out which book titles are popular according to the genre that I’m interested in. Then I research topics similar to those best-selling books and I come up with my own book ideas. You can find more nonfiction writing prompts on the TCK Publishing website.
Sometimes I don’t always choose book topics that I think will be profitable. I choose certain book topics that I find interesting and that I want to write about. For example, I wrote the book How to Get the Job You Want because at the time when I was looking for a job I had to attend a lot of CV and cover letter writing workshops, read books about job interview preparation, and watched YouTube videos. With all this knowledge I had, I decided to write a book to help other people to get a job.
Book Marketing
I’m sure many authors struggle with book marketing as much as I do. I don’t have time to post to social media every day and trying to submit my books to various book submission sites can be very time-consuming. Because of this, I haven’t made that many sales for a few months.
Book marketing can seem overwhelming when you think of all the things you need to do to create awareness and to try to get your readers to buy your book. How did I overcome this challenge? By taking it one step at a time.
If you published your book on Amazon, the first thing you should do is create an Amazon author page. Go to Amazon Author Central at https://author.amazon.com/ to get started. The next step is to enroll your book in KDP Select. Choose how many days you will promote your book for free. This will help you to reach more readers worldwide through Amazon and KDP programs.
Another book marketing strategy is to submit your book to book promotion sites. There are plenty of sites that allow you to promote your book for free such as Awesome Gang, Book Goodies, and Pretty Hot, but manually submitting your book to each of these sites can be both frustrating and time-consuming.
But there is a way that you can submit your book to multiple sites for a small fee. You can use Book Marketing Tool’s eBook Submission Tool to submit your book to over 25 free eBook submission sites for just $29.
Another tool you can use is the KDRoi Promotional Tool which is a paid Google Chrome browser extension that allows you to submit your free, 0.99c, or permafree Kindle book to multiple book promotion sites in just a couple of minutes. You can purchase this software for $47. Instead of spending a few hours promoting your book which can become overwhelming, you can just spend a few minutes using these book promotional tools and you will be able to reach a wider audience.
You can get more book marketing tips by reading The Beginner’s Guide to Book Marketing.
Rejection
There are different ways your book might get rejected. You might receive a rejection letter from a literary agent or from magazines, or one of your readers might write a bad review of your book or you may see quite a few sales returns.
These things have happened to me and I struggled with rejection. I felt terrible and there were times when I wanted to give up writing. But I found a few ways to handle the rejection.
First, I stopped submitting my novels and nonfiction books to traditional publishers. I decided to self-publish my work instead. I made sure that my book covers looked professional and that I provided valuable information to my readers. I love self-publishing because it gives me full control of the whole publishing process and any royalties earned from book sales belonged to me.
Secondly, I forced myself to read the bad reviews of my books. It helps me to know what needs to be changed in my book to make it better. For example, if a reader complained that my book had a lot of spelling and grammatical mistakes, then I could make corrections to the manuscript and republish it. Or if my readers mentioned in their review that the images in my book were too small or blurry to see I can easily fix it.
But keep in mind that not everyone is going to like your book and you can’t please everyone either. But none of these things should have been an issue when you published your book. You should make sure that you proofread and edit your book and ensure that the images are clear before you publish your book.
But in most cases, there are usually more good reviews than bad so I would cheer myself up by reading all of the good reviews and not worrying too much about the bad reviews. Your writing skills will improve with every new book that you publish.
