I follow Kristen Lamb’s blog religiously. It’s a very helpful blog for aspiring writers like me. When the business side of publishing gets me down sometimes I have to remember why I write in the first place. It’s very easy to lose sight of that reason while doing daily tasks, going to the day job, checking twitter and/or Facebook and determining what in the world I’m going to blog about! But when you know why you’re writing it’s a lot easier to brave the publishing storms and simply just write.

Kristen Lamb's Blog

Happy Monday! Okay, last week, upon my return from Thrillerfest, we explored what I felt were the 5 top mistakes that are killing traditional publishing. Then, on Friday, we talked about how self-publishing can help writers as a whole, even traditional writers. It is a wonderful time to be a writer, but I want to make myself crystal clear.

This business is hard work. There are no shortcuts.

I Don’t Take Sides

I feel that traditional publishing has a lot to offer the industry. If I didn’t believe that, I wouldn’t spend so much time and effort challenging them to innovate to remain competitive. Self-publishing is not a panacea, and, since I spent last week focusing on the traditional end of the industry, today we are going to talk about the top five mistakes I feel are killing self-publishing authors.

Mistake #1 Publishing Before We Are Ready

The problem…

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