All I have left to do is Work and Publish.

Today is the best time in history to be a novelist.

Back in the alternate reality of the past, Self-publishing fiction used to be frowned upon. It was seen as the only path to publication for someone with a book not 'good' enough to be selected by the gatekeepers at publishing houses and literary agencies. It was called Vanity Publishing.

It wasn't hard to do. There were no shortage of companies ready to charge you to source the printing, help you with editing, cover art, ISBN filings, and all the other things a person needed to take their heaps of words and turn them into physical hard or soft-cover book. It took tens of thousands of dollars, but you were a published author at the end of the process.

But no matter how many resources you threw at getting your book made, it still had to be sold.  You couldn't buy readers as easily as you could buy printed copies of your book. You'd invest a lot of money only to find that what you really bought was the right to be in direct competition to gain access to the market (bookstores) against all those publishers and their clients.

Today, self-publishing is no longer so much of a challenge. All the production work can be done alone, at a computer, for little or no up-front investment. An independent author taking a professional approach to their work can hire freelance or independent editors, copy-editors, cover-designers and marketing pros to replace much of what they lose by not being picked up by an existing, traditional publisher. And the final work can be published directly to your audience in marketplaces like Amazon, iTunes, Nook with no barriers or gatekeepers in the way. And authors today has direct access to an audience through social media and other person-to-person communications tools.

The only challenge that still can't be bought is the work of selling you novel. No matter how well you executed on your novel, you must have a strategy and tactical plan to sell their book to readers.

So here I am. Less than 30 days away from putting my first novel into the world, at the end of the production phase, ready to fight for my share of reader's attention. It's time to begin to build that foundation of contact with readers that will help me fulfill my dream.

I have a habit to put things off, to let the ambition slip, to loosen the grip on momentum that can see a project through to the end. I have four unpublished novels in my hard-drive that can attest to this. I will beat this habit this time.

I've set a deadline to publish, September 1st). Until then, I have a lot to still accomplish. I am expanding one character's role in the novel, changing a little of the outcome, and plan to read the entire book aloud as my final copy-edit. I need to scrub my website and social-media channels so they are focused on presenting me to the world as a novelist and novelist only. I need to start posting content to attract potential readers and influencers.

I have charted all these tasks out over the 30-days. I have no more thinking to do. No more planning. No more anticipating, No more putting it off. All I have left to do is work and publish. Work and publish

Work and publish.

Work and publish.

See you in 30 days.