Yesterday I posted some thoughts about self publishing, formatting, and building Kindle ebooks at the welcoming writing community over on reddit.

Tonight I was wondering what I should write in my first post on this blog. It took a while, but I decided to go with a few recent thoughts on craft, motivation, and publishing on the KDP platform.  Then I realized I've already written that post...  

The following is my inaugural post both to r/writing and this blog.  Enjoy!

For a long while I've been hoping to find a book about how to go about building an empire. I thought it would be a fun, chilling, and interesting read. I looked high and low for such a book, and while I found plenty of discussions about how empires worked, I never found anything like a how-to manual for aspiring world rulers.

A few month ago I decided to write one, and the result was How To Take Over The World, which I put up on the Kindle store a few days ago. Finishing the project and finally clicking publish was unbelievably satisfying.

I had a blast writing it too, and learned way more actually writing it than I could have if I'd spent another year or two just reading about writing.

I thought I'd share some of the things I've learned so far with the r/writing community.

• Write about what you love. It sounds weird coming from someone who wrote what I wrote, but I never would've finished my project if I didn't enjoy the subject. I've always been curious about how imperialists were educated and how empowered megalomaniacs thought, so writing this was fun (even if I got tons of weird looks from people I told about it).
• If you haven't written in a while, your grasp of grammar and style might be rusty. Holy cow, I was rusty. I studied journalism and polisci in college, but since graduation I had barely written at all (just a few short stories and essays, and nothing publishable). Grammar and style are like muscles, if you don't use them you lose them. For the last few months I've been reviewing things like indirect objects and the proper way to format book titles. I have a long way to go, but it has paid off already.
• Know your tools. That whole time I was in college I was pumping out 20 page papers and properly formatted articles in... wait for it... Google Docs. I have no idea what I was thinking, at the very least I should have gotten my hands on Libre Office and learned how to use it. I've finally re-learned how to use a modern word processor (for the first time since 2003) and it's changed my writing world. Now I'm learning Scrivener. Brothers and sisters, I'm in from the cold.
• If you're not artistic, outsource the cover. A month or so ago I saw a post here about self publishing, and the redditor recommended using Fiverr to find cheap designers. I bookmarked the recommended provider, used her myself, and couldn't be happier with the result. This is her, and for what I paid, I'm thrilled with what I got. Also, since I'm using a pen name (I've always wanted a pen name) I got another Fiverr provider to make me a portrait for my amazon profile, which I think is hilarious. Just look at that dapper, thin lipped New Englander.

I'd like to add more about promotion, but I'm just starting to work on that. So far I've really only made a few submissions in appropriate, self promotion friendly subreddits. Even then, only posting after being absolutely sure I was following the rules of the subreddit. If you want to see what those posts look like, just check out this account's submission history.

Also, finishing this project seems to have given me some momentum. I'm well into my next book, and still loving it.

For anyone who wants to check out How To Take Over The World, its free through the 23rd. I'm pretty proud of it. (that promo is over, but more are coming!)

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