If you’re gonna write, you’re gonna have to read.

There are a lot of things to read. You want to absorb your own genre. You’ll likely be best at writing things that you enjoy reading, so get reading. Thankfully for me that involves reading a lot of fantasy and science fiction. I can handle that!

You’ll probably need to do some research. That can be fun and a lot of work, too. One story I’ve been hacking at for a while involves a mage who “bakes” spells. I know a little about modern baking, but what about baking in a medieval society? Ah, the internet is my friend!

But if you’re going to jump into the author thing, you’ll need to research not just how to write, but how to be an author. In the last couple weeks, I’ve read three books to further my journey. I started with Craig Martelle’s Become a Successful Indie Author and Successful Indie Author: Pricing Strategies 2020. Then I read Andrew Peterson’s Adorning the Dark.

You might guess by the titles that the two authors had very different goals in mind.