In the Indie Publishing world, you should welcome it!
After many sleepless nights, months and sometimes years of working, writing and publishing your amazing books, engaging your fans on all of your social media platforms, building many great friendships online and in real life thanks to your creative work, suddenly you feel like you have nothing else to say to the world.
You exhausted all your ideas and you probably thought your books were a fluke, a one off wonder, and that you’re sorry you’ve invested so many years of your life writing. Because… Well, maybe you are not a writer after all.
Your muse has been gone for too long. She’s simply vanished.
Well, all I can say is don’t worry; we’ve all been there.
When it first happened to me I felt not only trapped but awfully lonely, too. And so I turned to myself, at first only to scold and talk derisively and then I went further, deep inside my head. (You see, I do that often – go into extremes.) After quite a bit of suffering, fighting self-depreciating thoughts, I managed to effectively break through to the other side.
I’ve come to realize that it’s more than OK to have a writer’s block. Now I could do all the other things I wanted to do but never had the time because I was … Guess what? Writing!
And as I started doing them, I promise you, in the back of my head when I was focusing on everything but writing, my muse woke up, cross with me that I was not standing there, waiting for her with open arms. She was nagging and bothering me until I sat down, opened my MacBook and started writing. Again.
My advice? Don’t despair, there’s plenty of work for the indie author.
Mwah!
Alexandra
Check out some of the things I was doing (and you could do, too) if you have writer’s block:
- Work on your website
- Expand your online presence, open any of the following accounts that you currently don’t have (Instagram, Pinterest, Tumbrl, Twitter, Facebook)
- Create marketing strategy for your social media
- Amend your work, the bits that have been bugging you since you pressed that publish button months ago
- Read a few “How to” books on writing/creating, anything to do with publishing, and implement it. I bet you have a draft text that has been gathering virtual dust particles on some lonely hard drive, or on a memory stick. Open it and apply your new-found knowledge. You’ll be proud of yourself when you do.
- Connect with your friends again. See what they are up to. Go to your facebook messages and, one by one, send your friends a personal message. Get in touch again. You’ll be surprised how long ago it was that you talked to some people.
- Change your author media pack / change the way blogs access your media pack
- Make more teasers, or change the style of the existing ones
- Research the authors in your genre, see what they have and you don’t
- Do a photo shoot, people love to see your face
What have I not mentioned? What other things we could do when our muse is not around?
Feel free to add to this list as you wish.