It’s Cold, Ma, It’s Really Cold — Everything I Learned From Publishing My Novel

I know so much more than I did five years ago. This is the story you’ll want to bookmark if you’re looking to write or self-publish…

The novel’s front and back. Photo by author.

The 20th of January 2024 will be marked forever in my calendar as the day I have officially become a published author. It all started in 2019 in an Italian restaurant. Smack in the middle of Dublin, sipping wine we knew nothing about. The food was long gone, but that’s when the really good conversations usually start. The ones about life. Hopes, dreams, disappointments, and wins. The stuff that makes life worth living. The things that keep us curious about the next chapter. It was a date unlike any other. I said I wanted to write a book when I was 50. She asked me, why wait that long?

I love people who ask good questions. Questions that inspire others not just to think differently, but to act differently, to change or to make change happen. Later that night, on my way home, I knew I was going to write the book. I knew I was done waiting for the right moment, that arbitrary age of 50 to write about what it feels like to be a cleftie and do so in my own unique way. I even got the solitude I needed in the form of the 2020 pandemic lockdowns.

Writing can be extremely taxing when you’re so close to it all, when you find yourself pouring every single emotion you ever had into a story that wants to be told faster than you can physically type. And of all the genres, I chose auto-fiction. It’s like trying to be inside and outside one’s body at the same time. But it made sense. It still does. How the world saw me as a cleftie and how I saw myself reflected two different individuals, and I needed a space where they finally met.

She and I conceived a story that night, and that story has become a manuscript, then a revised draft and finally a published book. But… and here’s what no one told me. From writing the first words to going live on Amazon in paperback format, it took over four years. Not the writing. That took the least amount of time. Everything else took a lot longer, and it happened in 10 stages.

Writing

There’s no two ways about it. It takes effort and discipline to sit down day after day and write about as fast as your thoughts speed through your brain. I’ll be honest. I needed zero inspiration. It was all inside me, ready to go. But it was still effort because writing while you have a full-time job means you’re doing it in your spare time. I have had nights when I was exhausted after 1000 words, yet my brain still had a million things to say. So now I had the choice of going to sleep, so I can work the next day, keep my job and excel at it, or keep writing. I chose the former, as much as it pained me to do so.

I had to reconcile reality with my dream of writing a book.

It took about nine months to have the first draft done. About 100,000 words. Turns out that 295 pages of a 15×22 cm paperback (349 in Kindle format). I was going for 300. Close enough. Why 300? Computer said so. Doing very minimal research on what is considered a novel, apparently publishers like it to be around 300 pages to really consider it a novel. Otherwise, it might be classed as a novella, and well… I wanted to write a novel, not a novella.

Besides having to split my time between work and writing, I also had to deal with something far more taxing. You see, writing stories was easy. But this was auto-fiction, so every story had to be a wrapper around real events, real feelings and bringing three and a half decades back to the surface. Placing myself in the shoes of friends, family and other characters I interact with in the novel was everything between excruciatingly painful and incredibly hilarious. I felt every feeling on the feeling-spectrum for the main character, including love and hate, and the twisted part was… me. I was the main character.

I am well-aware that memoirs are pretty trendy these days, but I didn’t want to write one. Nor an autobiography. Nothing against either genres, I just felt that in doing so, I’d fall into a “narcissistic” trap.

I wanted to write a story inspired by my life without it being strictly about just me.

And that’s where auto-fiction made everything possible. It’s an interesting genre and — if you ask me — a technique. It allowed me to mix reality with fiction in a way anyone who reads the novel knows that what really matters has definitely happened in some shape or form, regardless of what the reader thinks that is. I am certain some readers will perhaps even reach out and ask: “Was this bit real? Did it really happen? Who is this or that character in the real world?”. To some I will be able to answer and even divulge some secrets, to others I won’t, but it won’t really matter as they will have — hopefully — still taken aboard the message of the book.

First round of editing

After nine months of writing, I was done. Just over 100,000 words. I wrote it in iA Writer, a nice little Mac app. Since then, I moved to Ulysses, but I would still recommend iA Writer as a fantastic alternative without being in any way affiliated to either.

Editing is about as big a job — or at least it was for me — as writing, though it did take less time. Very naively, I also thought that one round of editing was all I needed. Turned out I was completely off my rockers, but more on that a bit later. I reread everything. I found plenty of mistakes. Mostly missed words, typos by the bucketload, sentences that at second look didn’t make much sense.

I also found that as I was rereading the chapters, I needed to add sentences or paragraphs, even. I guess I still had stuff to say or dye to colour my stories. These usually weren’t things that were outright missing, but more along the lines of “Ooo, I could make this sound better or more interesting.” I spent another three months doing the first round of editing.

Beta readers

Believe it or not, I wasn’t even aware this was a thing. I’m a software engineer, and in software engineering you tend to beta test features and products, so I thought I may as well do the same and find some poor souls who’ll voluntarily go through what could potentially be a horrific experience of reading my manuscript.

I have an immense respect for editors. Reading a manuscript is far more exhausting than programming. By the third round of editing, I felt exhausted by my own book, and I’m someone who loves reading themselves. To find people who’ll just offer up their time and energy to read something that barely qualifies as literature… and do it for free, that’s just nuts. I wrote in a lot more detail about my beta readers and stats related to them in an earlier story.

There is, however, one thing I want to highlight here about my experience with them. I had to strike a balance between listening to what they had to say and ignoring their feedback. You see, beyond people just being opinionated, reading is a complex activity. Everyone reads differently and how they read seems to stem from their personality, life-style, interests, and their perception of what a story should read like, and it all matters and doesn’t at the same time.

If I had wanted to make happy every beta reader, I would have had to write at least ten versions of the same novel.

One of my beta readers loved just about everything about the novel, though didn’t necessarily agree with all points. This beta reader didn’t notice, for instance, a massive logical fallacy in the timeline of the events. Another beta reader, however, did. They had something in common, yet provided very different feedback. They both liked the manuscript, and they both read it in record time, but the latter had an insane amount of reading experience and an eye for a certain type of logical detail. The former, however, cared more about the individual stories, the feelings, the thoughts and the main character, and story flow, so their feedback was more around that.

I also had a beta reader who couldn’t get past the first chapter. This beta reader had an issue with the flow or the structure of the story — the very same thing my first beta reader loved (and still loves). While a perfectly valid comment, this one I had to ignore, as I had a clear idea of how I wanted the novel to be structured and the stories to flow.

The biggest lesson for me from using beta readers was learning to understand and interpret the feedback, even when there was none. Luckily, I did well, getting access to a wide range of volunteers with wildly different backgrounds.

The hiatus

Or the scratching of the butt, as I call it. And there was plenty of it. Once I had the manuscript written, edited once and read by my beta readers, I felt a sense of accomplishment. It almost felt like I’ve done it. Technically, I had a book. I wrote 300 or so pages, it had a title, a table of contents, decent, though basic formatting. Believe me, that’s already enough to feel like you’ve done it, especially if it’s your first book, which in my case it was.

The sense of achievement from finishing the manuscript wore off quickly and got replaced by excuses for holding off publishing.

The biggest excuse — that cost me over a year — was the perceived need to find a publisher. I got it into my head somehow that I must publish this novel through a publisher, and there is no way around it, though I knew very well about self-publishing. So I faffed about looking for publishers in Ireland, none of which I ever contacted. I was telling myself that I was in “research mode”. Heck, I was telling my friends that I was going to spend a year contacting publishers and see if any of them responds. It was a lie. To them and me.

The second excuse was that I needed an editor to look through my manuscript. I couldn’t trust myself to also be an editor (and no one should, I think). But I also didn’t spend much time looking for editors. I was just thinking about needing an editor and occasionally googling information about their hourly rates.

The final excuse was a tad more abstract. It was a type of fear. Nothing debilitating, but acute enough that I spent time sitting on the manuscript. I managed to convince myself for a while that what I wrote was silly, and while a great exercise in getting something off my chest, perhaps even a great literary effort, it was just that, and not an actual book. I felt that my beta readers didn’t give me enough confidence to just go for it and publish.

At one point, I even started misinterpreting my beta readers’ feedback, just to justify not publishing.

There is a God, however, and after two years of faffing about like an eejit, the last beta reader joined the pool out of nowhere and changed the course of events, which brings me to the second round of editing.

Second round of editing

In that same story I referenced before, you’ll see that Andi Nara and her infinite reading wisdom got me what I was desperately looking for — a fresh eye. Someone who knows books inside out and doesn’t mind asking tough questions and pointing out mistakes of any kind. I woke up within just days with a Google Docs document riddled with comments and questions. I’m pretty sure there were more than 100, and I needed to address them all in some shape or form.

Andi became my unofficial editor, though if you ask me (and I told her) she should turn this into a job, as she’s bloody good at it. She found far more issues — some major — than I did. It took her a good few days to annotate everything, and it took a few weeks to address them all. But it was absolutely necessary.

The second round of editing saved my book. In fact, that’s what made it a book. Before that, it was but a messy manuscript.

Once I addressed all that needed addressing, I knew I now had a book that I didn’t have to feel ashamed putting in front of readers. This was a pivotal moment.

Third round of editing

Once everything was addressed, Andi decided not to just review the changes and fixed I made, but to re-read the entire manuscript again. I wasn’t prepared for a full third round of edits, but she was. To paraphrase her, “we either do this right, or we don’t”.

As expected, she spotted a lot less issues reading the novel the third time, and everything she found was either minor, debatable or was a lot more along the lines of “think about your reader, man” or “I’m pretty sure Oprah wouldn’t think too kindly about this sweeping statement”. Funnily enough, it’s not the first time I was called out on sweeping statements. But these were all excellent observations that helped the writing and the stories feel a tad less rough around the edges.

The third round of edits took about six weeks, but I feel like it was very much worth it. Now it was time to get to that next stage of actually attempting to publish the book — something I obviously knew nothing about.

Getting professional help

My first beta reader said once, “there are no coincidences”, so let’s just assume the stars aligned in a certain way. It just so happened that I follow someone on Medium, Robin Nemesszeghy, who also has a YouTube channel that I subscribed to a while back. Suddenly, this video popped up on my AppleTV YouTube app. She introduced me to the concept of full-service self-publishing.

Very simply put, this is a service where in goes manuscript, out comes actual published book, and as an author, you worry about nothing.

Not sure about you, but, I love not having to worry about anything. It’s the best thing ever! Of course, this is a paid service, but I had a blast working with Robin on turning the manuscript into both a print and eBook. For my page-count it cost me $2750. Was it a large investment? I really don’t think so, as it was great value for money. She set up a Trello board for us where I could follow along all stages of the process:

Our Trello board set up by Robin Nemesszeghy. Screenshot (with permission) by author.

1. Editing. In my case, I only needed copy editing. Everything else was done either initially by me — very poorly I might add, and later by Andi. While I refer to her as my “unofficial” editor, honestly, I’d go back to her with my second book too. She has both the expertise and required amount of honesty to notice mistakes, suggest solutions, ask bloody good questions. Copy editing was done over the course of about a month, which could have taken less time, had I had all the chapters ready for final copy editing. I then re-read the entire thing, and in my case I found very few things I wanted changing, which I was able to do directly in the Google document we shared between us.
2. Interior. This is something Robin dealt with entirely. All I needed to do was choose a font from a list and decide if I wanted little design elements between sections in a chapter. I decided to go with sans-serif for the body text. The conclusion of this stage was a formatted PDF that I was given to review. This was also the stage where all the front and back-matter stuff was added. More on that a bit later.
3. Exterior. I was arrogant and naive enough to think I was able to design my own cover. Don’t. Just don’t. Not unless you’re a designer. Don’t get me wrong, I am actually miles better at design than the average Jane and Joe, but nowhere near good enough to pull off the cover of an actual book that I can feel proud of. My amazing and talented friend Matilde, whom I asked for an opinion, decided to pull a diplomatic move on me, and asked for the raw files, which then she turned into the cover you see today. One interesting challenge was making sure the colour accuracy is correct in print and the text is visible enough. She did a few test prints until both her and I were happy with it. Do not assume digital colours look the same as print. This was also the stage where Andi provided me with the back cover blurb about the novel.
4. Publishing details. Did you know that Amazon will provide you with free ISBNs, but then you’re tied to Amazon exclusively? I didn’t, but Robin very helpfully advised me on this, so I went and bought my own ISBNs from Nielsen. I bought a set of 10 prefixes because I needed 3 right off the bat for digital, paperback, and hardcover. And if I do an audiobook, which I might, then I need a fourth. Assuming there may also be 2nd editions coming, or I’ll write a second book, there was no harm getting 10. Buying 4 would have cost me a lot more — around 380 euros — as opposed to just 190 for 10. Oh, I also had to register as a publisher, and decide on cover finish (matte or glossy), a product description, keywords, DRM, etc., but more on that in step 5.
5. Amazon publishing. In my case, we combined stages 4 and 5. As I wanted to do the actual publishing step myself, we got on a call where Robin drove me through the steps via screen share. It took us a little over an hour to submit all three editions to Amazon KDP. Beforehand, I did, however, make sure that I had an account registered with bank and tax information added. That takes about 15 minutes. A surprisingly smooth process. I also ordered a proof copy of the paperback edition, which turned out to be quite a headache for those of us living in Ireland. Amazon blames Brexit, but it’s more of a bug that is indeed Brexit related, but could be easily fixed. Long story short, I had to send my author proof copy to Andrew Gribben, who then took a video and confirmed, and I quote “It’s a book. Feels like a book. Smells like a book.”
6. Post-publishing. At this stage, Robin was there more as a consultant. She advised me on the benefits of author copies, how to check sales, and what my ad and marketing options were. You’ll feel good getting to this point, though knowing your book is now live, is scary as hell.

Illustrating cream paper colour and sans-serif fonts. Photo by author.

It was incredibly helpful to see the entire process laid out. As a software engineer, a bit of a control-freak and a dude, this was a version of Heaven for me. Linear progression. No unexpected bullshit. I can’t thank Robin enough for creating a process like this. We communicated exclusively through Trello, so there were no ridiculously long email threads none of us could find or decipher. Quote and agreement were done and signed over email, everything else Trello or video call, but predominantly Trello.

The details that matter

While those stages provide a nice overview, there are however some details I think are worth knowing about, such as having the right front and back-matter, some Amazon-specific book details or even interior formatting and design.

I cannot stress this enough, but having a decent cover elevates the book in ways you can’t imagine. People say don’t judge a book by its cover, but the same will judge a book by its cover. One that looks unprofessional, will struggle to convince people to spend their hard-earned money on. Get a designer. One that has worked with print before. It matters a lot. Having had Matilde, my designer and friend, take on everything related to the design, was a huge help. Amazon provides templates that can be used in professional design software to guide. Initially, we had to design a draft version, as we didn’t yet know how many pages it will be exactly. You see, the thickness of the book will influence the exact measurements of the cover design. We had to design a variant for paperback and for hardcover. For digital, I only needed to crop the front cover from the paperback edition and upload it as an image.

The hardcover binding closeup. Photo by author.

Still on the topic of cover, I quickly realised I needed two blurbs on the back. One about me, a shorter one, and a longer one about the book itself by someone else. Having had Andi as my unofficial editor and trusting her as a friend as well, I felt she was the right person for the job. The only constraint was the number of characters we could use to fit them both on the back cover. Remember, you will need to leave space for the bar codes, which means you end up with about 80% usable real-estate.

If you check out all the things that one can add to the front and back-matter, the list is quite long. You probably don’t want to make use of everything, though. In my case, I made sure there was a dedication at the beginning of the book. I had that in since practically day one. Fun fact, she’s also a character in the book and was very touched when I handed her a signed copy.

I didn’t know what these were called before attempting to publish a book, but epigrams and epigraphs are a nice touch to add at the beginning of the book. For the latter, I went with “Mens sana in corpore sano. — Decimus Junius Juvenalis (Juvenal)” — a nice quote on its own, but as you’ll see it has a pretty deep connection to one of the chapters, in some ways to the entire book and being a cleftie. For the epigram, I went with a “saying” of my own I came up with at the age of 18: “Live life out of curiosity.” I won’t lie, I do like quoting myself sometimes. 🤣

The preface was also written ages ago, and that’s pretty common to have, but I also felt a foreword was necessary. I already know it’s a potentially controversial decision, especially to write one’s own foreword, but it has been done before, so I went with it. I’ll admit there is a bit of an overlap between the two, and I was aware of it from day one, but like Woody Allen, I decided not to chase perfection, and be content with “good enough”.

The acknowledgments section was an interesting one to write as I had to really think long and hard who contributed to the book, be that directly or indirectly. I chose to focus on the people who made the biggest impact, and that includes even people who are not in my life anymore. I tried to have fun with it, and made sure it sounded personal rather than dry and official.

Congratulations! I love your author bio. — a Reddit user

The final bit I added was the “About the author” page that I wrote myself and sanity-checked with Andi. I have already gotten compliments on Reddit for it. It’s not something might consider to be a selling point for a book, but as it turns out, it can be, and I found myself reusing it on both my Amazon author profile and Goodreads.

Actual publishing

Publishing on Amazon can be pretty straightforward if you have someone like Robin holding your hand through the process, and that says a lot. I am a software engineer, I am used to complexity, but when you publish a book, you’ll get with a lot of jargon you’re either not familiar with or don’t have the mental (or emotional) capacity to absorb right then and there. Yes, it’s a bunch of online forms where you set keywords, genre, book size, etc. But when you haven’t published a book before, dealing with all that can be debilitating.

Turns out, Amazon doesn’t know of the “auto-fiction” genre.

Nor does it have a very comprehensive list of genres, so, believe it or not, I chose non-categorisable. 🤷‍♂️

Pricing is another big decision to consider. While Amazon will help you calculate your profits per sale, what I found having to consider was what I felt the book was worth both to me as the author and the reader. After chatting with Robin and Andrew, I concluded that the following pricing was fair and in line with book prices of a similar length (figures are in Great British Pounds).

• £8.99 for the Kindle edition. I really don’t understand people selling books for two bucks. Many bloggers make that money with a single story in a single day, so how does ask the same for a 100+ page book? Maybe I’m wrong, but I think that’s borderline lack of self-respect. I feel that 8.99 for over 300 pages of a decent story, is more than fair to me as an author and the reader who values the effort and investment I poured into it. That gives me a roughly 6.5 euro royalty after conversion.
• £14 for the paperback edition. This is a roughly 300-pages book with a nicely designed cover and carefully crafted interior. 14 bucks sounds pretty fair to me and renders me with a 5.5 euro profit per sale.
• £20 for the hardcover edition. This was the last edition I went live with, once a few customers and I had the paperback in our hands. I’ll be honest. I don’t expect many people to buy hardcover. I prefer them personally, but many people don’t. Hardcover doesn’t play well with bags and rucksacks where a book’s rigidness gets in the way, so I consider this copy to be a premium, super-fan edition for those who care a lot about showcasing books on their shelves or just want to let me know they wanted a more exclusive edition. Given that hardcover costs more to print, I still end up with just about 5.5 euro profit per sale.

While the pricing decision is an important aspect, I’d say making sure that the covers are well aligned to Amazon’s templates, is even more so. Luckily, when you upload the covers for each sedition separately, the system will give you a preview, so there’s very little chance of things going wrong in actual print. There is one thing to consider, though. For Kindle, your cover needs to look OK in grayscale as well. I forgot about that, but thankfully, my designer chose good colour contrast. I might still want to bold the line under the title, or increase the font size a tiny bit, but apart from that, I’m thrilled with how mine turned out.

Going live

If you love being tortured, you’ll love this stage. You see, submitting the book for publishing doesn’t mean it’s live. Amazon gets to have say over it as well. In fairness, as Robin explained, they don’t reject submissions very frequently, but there is a 30% or so chance that they will do so over fairly minor issues. Amazon’s review can take a few days (around 72 hours). In my case, the paperback edition was reviewed and accepted under 48 hours, the Kindle edition within 2 hours and the hardcover under 24 hours, so I feel very fortunate.

The moment the book went live, I felt panic and happiness all at the same time.

The “Oh God, what have I just done?” hit me, and it hit me hard for a few minutes. It felt similar to buying an apartment eight years ago, but this time, it was all amplified. While I am used to being out in the wild with my Medium stories, getting reactions, both positive and negative, this felt 10 times more real and more pivotal. This was me saying to the world that I am an author, and my story is something I have so much faith in that others should also read it. Going live meant I finally achieved a life-goal of mine, but also tackling the topic of cleft lip and palate, a congenital condition, in a way that’s deeply personal to me, all the while hoping others might be inspired by it as well.

From a logistics perspective, once I was live, it took a while for things to propagate through Amazon’s systems. Quoting from Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDE) email:

Availability. It takes up to 3 days for Amazon.com and up to 5 days for other marketplaces to show as in stock.

Linking. The detail pages of your print book and eBook should link within 48 hours, but it can take up to 5 days. See requirements for linking.

Product description. It can take 24–48 hours to appear on the detail page.

Look Inside the Book. This feature will be available in 9–10 business days.

Book Details. Changes to contributor, series name, series number, page count, description, keywords, and browse categories take up to 72 hours to appear.

Paperback and hardcover editions. Photos by author.

In reality, and in my experience, those time-frames are worst-case scenarios. The book was in stock within a few hours across all of Amazon. I did, however, have to create an Author profile. Unexpectedly Amazon and Goodreads are connected and books published via KDE appear automatically on Goodreads, though not without any issues, so I had to contact a librarian on the platform to merge the various editions under my author profile.

Author copies are the single most amazing feature of Amazon KDE.

And this is something I only became aware of thanks to Robin. Turns out I can order author copies at print cost. This was very useful to me, as I have about 20 people to thank for either being beta readers, or just being wonderful, encouraging humans. They all deserve a free signed copy.

Did you know?

While working on publishing this book, I had a good few “Oh!” and “Aha!” moments. These are just a few really notable ones I think everyone should know about:

• Cream vs. white paper. The rule of thumb — though not an official standard — is, if it’s a novel, even if autobiographical, you probably want to stick to cream paper. White is more suited for non-fiction and textbooks. It does come down to personal preference. I went with cream. The paper is a tiny-tiny bit thicker, or at least it feels thicker.
• In many countries, you have to submit a copy for national archiving. I’ll have to do that here in Ireland as well. And there might even be some archaic law forcing me to send one to the UK archives as well.
• You can order as many as 999 author copies per order and can choose the store region you want the copies to be purchased through. I ordered some through both amazon.uk and amazon.de.
• The cover can be matte or glossy. Matte does become a bit of a fingerprint magnet, though, so keep that in mind. I still went with matte. 🤷‍♂️
• Amazon will auto-generate the barcode for you, all you need to give them, is an ISBN.
• The weight difference between the paperback and the hardcover is 120 grams. My paperback edition weighs 458 grams, while the hardcover 578. That’s a considerable difference.

What’s next?

I started getting the “So what’s the next book gonna be about?” question. I’m thinking, it might be about many things. Writing a novel is a massive undertaking. Keeping the storyline straight and engaging for 300 pages is no child’s play, so I’m not sure, I’d want to try my hand at another one. I am, however, considering writing a collection of short stories. A bit like “Modern Love” but not necessarily about love. But that’s in a more distant future. For now, I have other things to keep an eye on.

While I never intended to write this book to make money, I would love to see it sell well, so I am checking almost every day the reports tab on my KDE dashboard. For a couple of months I’ll let it grow legs organically, and then perhaps I’ll invest in some advertising.

I will also likely have to correct a couple of mistakes. For instance, I misremembered the name of a band, and one of my readers found a typo. I know that’s just one, and I should be super happy for that as many books have a lot more, but updating the manuscript on Amazon does not take a lot of effort. Amazon will have to re-review of course, but again, it takes 72 hours max.

I am considering an audiobook, but that’s largely dependent on whether the book sells well. I have also been encouraged on Reddit to submit the eBook to the Kobo store. Apparently in Canada, Kobo is the cool kid, Kindle not so much.

I may or may not release a second edition. Talking to a good friend of mine, Edina, made me consider the possibility. She had some really great insight and ideas I could use and incorporate into a revised edition. Does this mean, I should have waited with publishing? Hell, no! There’s always space for improvement, and if Woody Allen is happy functioning within the parameters of his mediocrity, so am I.

Finally, I’ll have to update the book’s website. There’s only 24 hours in a day, and I am desperately trying to have a personal life as well. The bottom line is, going live with the book means I am nowhere near finished, and the future could get very interesting, very quickly.

A note to the budding writer

If you feel like this is all daunting, let me be painfully clear, you feel that way, because it is, so allow me to offer one piece of advice: never assume writing and publishing a book will be smooth sailing or in any way easy. If you ask me, it’s not meant to be. You’re creating something from nothing. Rome wasn’t built in a day, nor was the Universe, regardless of which theory you support.

You can, however, offload some of the effort. Offload as much as you can afford time-wise and financially. Rely on family and friends. If writing a book is something that doesn’t let you sleep, then move mountains if you have to. It’s also fine to keep the manuscript to gather dust for a little while. Going from title to published book doesn’t have to be a rapid succession of events, nor does it have to be an expensive endeavour, but do rely on professionals whenever you can.

If writing is your thing, if you have something to say, a story to tell, don’t let anything stop you. Like I say on my website, writing for me:

Started out as a hobby. But if you write, you’re a writer. Good, mediocre, utter shite… Who cares? Keep writing. A professional blogger and author today.

It's Cold, Ma, It's Really Cold: A cleft lip and palate...

Attila Vago — Software Engineer improving the world one line of code at a time. Cool nerd since forever, writer of codes, blogs and books. Author. Web accessibility advocate, LEGO fan, vinyl record collector. Loves craft beer! Read my Hello story here!Subscribe for more stories about LEGO, tech, coding and accessibility! For my less regular readers, I also write about random bits and writing.