Starting Something From Nothing

2:00 pm - Written by Trent
Categories: Meta
Bookmarks: del.icio.us, reddit

I mentioned a while back that I had some big plans in place for 2012 with regards to some projects for The Simple Dollar. I thought I’d share part of these plans with you today.

One of my big goals for 2012 is to find a publisher for my fantasy novel. The novel is mostly written at this point and I’m pretty happy with it. I intend to pass the completed document along to some friends this winter for a round of editing, then start pursuing the process of getting it published.

Obviously, one big point of leverage I could use with getting it published is the presence of The Simple Dollar. I could mention it on here and some of the readers would buy the book, simply because my long-time readers know I’ve been working on this novel off and on for almost as long as I’ve been working on The Simple Dollar (some have already publicly pledged to do so, thank you). I also know that a lot of my readers are fans of fantasy novels, too.

At the same time, I also know that there are at least some of my readers who have considered writing a novel but discarded the idea because they don’t have their foot in the door at a publisher. They don’t have any reason to get the attention of a publisher other than their finished book (or partially finished book) and it feels like an insurmountable obstacle to them.

I know I felt that way for a long time. I’ve written two complete novels earlier in my life and dreamed of getting them published. All I ever got from them were rejection letters.

My experience with writing two additional books and having them published since then (365 Ways to Live Cheap and The Simple Dollar) has shown me that if you can demonstrate that you have an interested audience, publishers will most definitely listen. My experience with The Simple Dollar has shown me that anyone can build an audience if they take the time to do it.

Are you seeing where I’m going with this yet?

In the next month or so, I’m going to start trying to build an audience for this book online completely from scratch. I won’t mention it on The Simple Dollar until I’ve either given up on the project or I’ve secured a book deal completely independent of The Simple Dollar. Obviously, I’ll use a pseudonym so that searches for “Trent Hamm” won’t find it.

If this works – and I believe that it will – I’ll actually offer up a guide for doing this, because the techniques I intend to use won’t be all that different than what I did with The Simple Dollar and they’ll work for pretty much anything you want to do. It will be a recipe for building your own side business on a shoestring budget, no matter what that business is.

Obviously, this is going to take some time. How am I going to come up with that time? To put it simply, I’ve already been writing posts for 2012 so that next year, my writing load for The Simple Dollar will be lower and I can use that saved time for this project.

Will this work? Will this fail? I don’t know, but I do know it’ll be interesting to find out. If it does, it’s going to be the source for a lot of valuable information to share here.

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