Speculate to accumulate?

One of the things that keeps popping up in my head since I started writing books is whether paying and outsourcing to professional services would have made a huge difference to ultimate success. The biggest unknown at the beginning of my first project was, well absolutely all of it in all honesty!

I often hear the phrase ‘You’ve got to speculate to accumulate’. That may well be all fine and dandy IF you have something to speculate with in the first place!

As I mentioned in a previous blog, I have earned about £30 in book sales in two years, I have a modest income from my ordinary job.

I could easily have jumped on every advertisement and offer I saw pushing an editor, a proofreader, an agent to secure a publisher, a cover designer and illustrator. I could have so very easily spent thousands vanity printing a run of books, not to mention investing heavily in a digital marketing expert to run targeted ads and publicise my books in a much more proactive fashion that I have the skill set to do.

What price an expert and what value do they bring?

I think of the thousands it could have potentially cost if I had used professionals. The flipside and other imponderable is that just maybe all of the above services would have contributed significantly and generated far more sales and therefore a much higher income.

I am now of the thinking that all good things to those who wait. The book is out there forever now so who knows, maybe time for a bit of luck could still be just around the corner.

It is tempting to know for my own curiosity and if I ever win the lottery, I could explore the professional services route. It would be interesting to see if handing over control of everything to experts reaps greater benefits and the sales justify the added expenditure.

I am enjoying a break now. Of course, I have another work in progress on my computer; I have notes in various places like phone, notebooks and scraps of paper. These ideas will all end up being eventually collected then interwoven into the next story I would like to tell. For now though I am dipping my toes back into the blog I had forgotten about as well as trying to understand Facebook, Twitter platforms which allow GJ Leonard and the books to be promoted for free. I struggle to post regularly but am taking advice from the writing community who have made me aware just how important it is. Therefore, efforts have gone away from writing fiction to producing tweets and trying to grasp what best hashtags are!

The next book will come I’m sure in time but for now I am going to enjoy some time to reflect on my first three books. It is an enjoyable experience just allowing imagination to flow and just make up stories.

I love writing and am happy I started.