Making Your Life Easier as a Writer: 5 Tips

by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig

The writing life isn’t necessarily an easy one. For me, it’s a cycle of outlining, drafting, editing, and publishing with weekly business relating to promo. I enjoy a lot of aspects of being a writer, made a bit easier by a system I have in place for getting everything done (and for getting books sold).

Here are 5 tips for making your life easier as a writer:

Establish a writing routine. This is by far the most vital aspect of the process. My routine is a daily 5 a.m. thing, but yours might be at night, your lunch hour, or squeezed into carpool lines and waiting at doctors’ offices. It could be daily, weekly, or bi-weekly. The important thing is that it’s yours . . . and that, when you sit down to write, it’s almost like muscle memory.

Focus on finishing one book before starting another, if you’re a beginner. I wish someone had given me this advice in my early-twenties. Instead, it took me until my early-thirties to figure it out. If you’re completely soured on a project, of course you should end it. But if you can’t seem to finish any projects, make notes for whatever bright, shiny thing is distracting you . . . and then return to your original book.

Read lots of books, especially in your genre. The most important thing is to know your genre inside and out. Are there subgenres of your genre? What do those look like? What are reader expectations for your genre, so you can be sure to deliver them? I’ve also (in my case, rather grudgingly) found that it’s very, very helpful to read outside of my genre. It kickstarts my creativity in a different way, gives me a different perspective, and exposes me to lots of new ideas and approaches.

Set up a basic website in your name and include an email signup. This is a business-oriented task, but an important one. I’d have a lot more newsletter subscribers if I’d started earlier. I see lots of newer writers really reticent about websites and newsletters. You can set up both for free through both WordPress and MailerLite (you’ll have to pay once you get to 1,000 subscribers).  You need to have an online home (make sure it’s under your name, not your series or book name) and a way to, eventually, reach out to subscribers to let them know you have a book ready to publish.

Back up your work. This is a boring but oh-so-vital way to make your life easier as a writer.  You can do it many different ways: backing up to the cloud, backing up to a USB thumb-drive, or even backing up by sending yourself an emailed attachment of your document. The important thing is to back up often so you don’t lose your hard work.

How do you make your life easier as a writer?

Image by 11417994 from Pixabay