Welcome to my website—take 2. I tried to start building my career as a writer back in 2019.
I’d been writing for years, probably more than I care to admit, but back in my day (yes, I just said “back in my day”, which is another clue to tell you how old I am) all self publishing was called “vanity publishing” and sorely looked down upon by the “real writers”. So, I just kept typing away, for myself, until my husband made me listen to the afterwards of xxx by xxx. In it the author discussed his self publishing journey and how he became a big time author from self publishing and I thought: “I can do that”.
So, in 2019 I started doing a TON of research, bought a bunch of URLs, and built this website for the first time, because you had to have a place for readers to find and follow you. I set up a MailChimp account, because I needed to manage my newsletters to keep my readers engaged between books. I started up my social media channels, which I am so bad at that I don’t even use them in my real life. I was doing the work to start my success…and then 2020 came and Covid 19 shut everything down.
Everyone’s got a Covid story, they’re all terrible and tragic. But you must be thinking: “wait, wouldn’t that give her more time to write and work on her books since everything was shut down and she was stuck”? And maybe that should have been right, except I was a digital marketer, and everything I did for my job I could do remotely from home. Also I had two kids, who were 5 and 8 at the time, and through a series of dramatic events, I will not go into right now, I ended up co-homeschooling my kids with my mother in-law. So, just because I was trapped didn’t mean I had no obligations.
Fast forward 4 years, the kids are back in school, I have an even more demanding job, but I am determined that this be the year that I get a book published…only there’s so much… Besides the fact that the website theme for my old site wasn’t supported anymore and I had to wipe the site clean and start again, besides the fact that MailChimp updated a bunch of stuff and I needed to redo all my forms and integrations, and the fact that my social media was set up all wrong from the get go (I said I was terrible), now I’m actually in the publishing process to boot.
Which brings us to this blog, on version 2-0 of BLMostyn.com. I’ll share with you stories of rewrites, of classes and courses, of publishing and rounds of editors. I’ll take you through my publishing journey so maybe you can skip a few of the steps I had to do and redo (and maybe they’ll even be a chuckle or two along the way).
So, let’s grab a cup of tea, a comfy chair, and get down to the realities of writing a book.
