I just read a post on Shannon Hale's blog about her reasons for not self-publishing. Most of them have to do with the fact that she's a writer and self-publishing involves so many other tasks in addition to writing - editing, sales, etc.
All absolutely true. And the crazy thing is that even though we writers are working with a traditional publisher who edit and sell for us, we still find ourselves doing all these other "non-writing" sorts of tasks.
Yesterday, for example I received my recently purchased copy of Dummies for Photoshop Elements 5 in the mail. Now, don't get me wrong - I love those Dummies books and when it comes to a new computer program, I need them!
But why do I have to learn Photoshop elements in the first place?
Well, I have all these pics in my computer - scattered willy nilly in strange files. I need to manage them. I have a website so I need to manipulate photos for that. And then there's this blogspot which would be so much more interesting if I were better at uploading pictures. But uh, where did I put that picture of that school visit anyway? And if I find it, will it be too large to upload to my blog?
Something has to be done about my photos so I WILL learn this program.
I probably didn't need anything quite so powerful as Photoshop Elements except that I have this friend who has offered to help me with some marketing materials and well she's really, really good and has all this fabulous software and well, I wanted a bit of software that is compatible with hers (so we can coordinate our efforts). Consequently, here I sit with a trial version of PS on my computer and I am LOST!
The point of this particular rant is simply that on any given day I can find lots of seemingly non-writing tasks to distract me from putting words on a page! (Not the least of which is this blogspot). There are a million, trillion, billion things to focus on already - without trying to self-publish a book.
Blogspots, websites, PowerPoint programs, flyers, bookmarks - they all seem to involve photographs or images of book covers! See why I wanna know how to use Photoshop like a pro? Right now?!
But, I'd rather be writing....
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