This week’s writing prompt is, Worst writing advice I’ve gotten.
Honestly, I can’t say that I’ve gotten bad writing advice. I didn’t study “writing” specifically, and I’ve never been part of a critique group or anything like that. I studied literature in college, so I learned to write by spending years just writing, and also by reading and studying the masters. I think I learned to write in a really organic way, if that is possible and makes sense. I actually did sign up for a writing class late last year, and the woman teaching the course told me, “you don’t need writing classes. You need marketing classes.” And I think that is true.
I have over the years gotten bad marketing and publishing advice. I wrote my first book nearly a decade ago, but it took me over 7 years to publish it – and even then I completely fubared it up. I’ve learned a lot about writing and marketing in the last two years. Enough that I now write full-time and support my family with it, but I made A LOT of mistakes along the way. But I also – finally – met the right people to help me. Especially Nicole Moore of Love Kissed Books and Rebecca Hamilton of OTOH Books (formerly GenreCrave). These two women changed my life in ways I’ll never be able to pay back. If you are an author struggling to figure out the marketing aspect of your career, check out their FB groups.
What do you think? What is the worse writing advice you’ve ever gotten? Let me know in the comments.
This post is part of the 2018 MFRW Weekly Blog Post Challenge. You can read all my posts in the challenge for 2018 here.