Writing for Passion

By Ruth Ann Nordin

In the writing community, writing to market has become a huge sensation. A lot of authors are so busy focusing on making money that the idea of writing for passion has fallen to the wayside. Many authors are writing books they don't really love as fast as they can in order to maximize their income. The result? They are facing burn out. Some more so than others, but there is a good number of authors who are physically and mentally exhausted. And, on top of that, they are losing the joy in writing.

Ruth Ann Nordin has been through this. She began publishing romances in 2009. In the beginning, she wrote for passion, but eventually, she ended up embracing the writing-to-market mindset. She faced serious burn out in 2018. She was a wreck. There were two options she faced at this time. One she could stop writing completely, or two, she could learn how to get her passion back. Today, she's writing for passion, and she's much happier. In this book, she shares the pitfalls of writing to market and why writing for passion is ultimately the better option.

Included in this book are these topics:

1. How writing to market replaced writing for passion in the indie community
2. A comparison of writing to market and writing for passion
3. Why writing to market kills creativity in the long run
4. Why the pursuit of money will never make you happy
5. Why seeking outside validation for happiness can be dangerous
6. How to find your passion (if you don't already know what it is)
7. Why focusing on storytelling is important
8. Why perfection is a myth
9. How to overcome your fear of failure
10. What to do if others want you to write a book but you don't
11. A quick look at building a financially solid foundation so you can keep writing in the future

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ruth Ann Nordin
• Release date: Mar 4, 2020
• ISBN: 9780463609347

Ruth Ann Nordin

Ruth Ann Nordin has written almost 100 romances, ranging from Regencies to historical westerns to contemporaries. She plays with other genres from time to time, but her first love is romance. She has been happily married for twenty-two years to a sweet and funny guy, and they have four sons, who are all taller than Ruth now that they're 16, 17, 19, and 20. The good thing is she doesn't need a ladder. She considers herself very lucky to have led such a charmed life. Being able to play with characters and create stories is just icing on the cake. Hopefully, she'll get to keep doing this many years to come.

Book preview

Writing Tips: Book 3

Writing

For

Passion

Ruth Ann Nordin

Writing For Passion

All Rights Reserved.

Copyright 2020 Ruth Ann Nordin

V1.0

This book may not be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in whole or in part by any means including graphic, electronic, or mechanical without expressed written consent of the publisher/author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Brief History of How Writing for Passion Fizzled Out

Chapter 2: Writing to Market Vs Writing for Passion

Chapter 3: Writing to Market Kills Creativity in the Long Run

Chapter 4: If Money Is Your Goal, You’ll Never Have Enough

Chapter 5: The Danger of Relying on Outside Validation for Success

Chapter 6: Defining Your Passion

Chapter 7: Focus on the Story

Chapter 8: Perfection is a Myth

Chapter 9: Overcoming the Fear of Failure

Chapter 10: When Others Want You to Write the Book But You Don’t

Chapter 11: Finances and Freedom

Other Books in the Writing Tips Series

Dedicated to all of the writers who love to write for the sole purpose of writing itself. The goal of this book is to provide encouragement as you find and embrace your passion.

Chapter One

A Brief History of How Writing for Passion Fizzled Out in Popularity

Among the Writing Community

In 2016, I got some criticism for writing a blog post about losing income. Other authors said if I had only done (insert favorite marketing tactic here), then I would never have lost income. Since writing that blog post, other authors have come forward and admitted to losing income, too. Granted, some authors gained, but a lot of us who started out around the 2009-2012 time period, have seen our sales tank.

The ironic thing is that a lot of us weren’t even thinking of making money when we began publishing our own books. Money wasn’t our primary reason for writing. We were writing and publishing our books for the sheer joy of seeing our stories put into something tangible. I remember how excited I was to hold a paperback copy of my own story. This became cost effective when Amazon rolled out CreateSpace. I was so happy with this that I wrote even more. Then, when Amazon introduced the Kindle, I realized that I didn’t have to lug paperbacks everywhere. Now I could have all of my books in ebook form, and I could read any of them at any time while I was away from home.

Writing for passion back then was easy. A lot of authors who didn’t feel like going through a publisher finally had an easy and cheap option to publish the books on their own. And not only did we have the opportunity to get our books into the world, but we could keep our stories exactly the way we wanted them. No publisher was going to come in and tell us what to do. We had full creative control.

It was a very liberating time. We were like children playing in a sandbox. We didn’t have a strategic plan to earn a six-figure income. We wrote what was in our hearts and put it out there. If someone else read it and liked it, that was icing on the cake. Yes, the covers might have been subpar and the formatting awkward, but what we were doing represented passion.

Then money came on to the scene. Suddenly, self-published authors were selling their books. This was largely because e-Readers were becoming popular and we were offering books much cheaper than traditional publishing houses were. Word of our sales got out, and a lot of other writers jumped into self-publishing. Success stories of money were all over the place. This became the golden age of self-publishing.

As a result, it became mandatory to write what readers wanted. The notion of writing for passion quickly fell to the wayside. In came the birth of writing to market. Writers were now taking on the mindset of the traditional publisher. Writers began to focus on writing books that appealed to the widest group of readers in an attempt to maximize income. Podcasts, videos, books, and online courses that told authors how to better their chances of sales by writing to market started popping up all over the place.

If you weren’t bringing in a six-figure income, you weren’t worth listening to. Your advice was moot. The true stars of self-publishing were those who were bringing in the money. So if you were in favor of writing for passion, you were pretty much ignored or told, "Well, I’m running a business. This isn’t a hobby for