GUEST AUTHOR POST: Get Rich Writing Books by Steven Novak

GET RICH WRITING BOOKS!


Heh.

Sorry. Let me rephrase that.

Ha!

Come on. Can we be serious for a moment? If you’re thinking about jumping into the publishing world and can’t see how incredibly silly the title of this post is I would suggest you invest in a therapist with an itchy prescription finger, because you’re in for a world of hurt.

Pills will make you hurt a whole heck of a lot less.

There’s a reason the term “starving artist” exists and it’s not because artists across the world are living it up on yachts with scantily clad members of the opposite sex lounging around the deck sipping fruity island drinks.

Writing books is not an easy path to riches. It never has been and it never will be. It doesn’t necessarily have to be an easy path to the poor house, but the chances are pretty good that the yacht/thong scenario described above is out of reach.

Write because you love to write.

If you can make enoughmoney with your writing to buy yourself a five dollar foot long at Subway and possibly a bag of chips, that’s awesome. If you can make enough money to pay a few bills every now and then, that’s even more awesome. If you can scrounge together enough money to pay your mortgage for a few months, consider yourself awesome with a healthy slather of awesomesauce. If you can manage to do even more than that with your earnings, you’re officially the most awesome thing since Hello Kitty fought Mr. T in a steel cage on the outskirts of Eternia with Pikachu as the referee.

You’re also in the minority.

My advice to anyone thinking about dipping their toes in the wacky world of literature is to have fun with it, keep a level head, and toss their expectations right out the window. Expectations will kill you. Goals are good – reasonable goals, anyway. There’s nothing wrong with goals. Everyone should have goals. Without goals you’re just a worthless lump of mostly water stuffed into a bag of ever-expanding human flesh.

Without goals you’re Snooki. Expectations are a different story entirely. Expectations will leave you crying on your bed at night. Expectations will lead to razor blades and self-mutilation, and an iTunes download of The Cure’s Greatest Hits.

Ten bucks to hear dough-faced Robert Smith moan for eighteen tracks? You’re better off using those razor blades to slice your ears off.

When you were a kid you made art because you loved making art, and because you felt better about yourself after you’d made it. That’s it. That’s why I did it. That’s all it was. Like so many things in life, we tend to lose that feeling as we get older. When the focus of art becomes the act of selling art, it’s sort of not really art anymore.

At least in my opinion.

When that happens it becomes a job, and jobs suck. They sucked when you were ten and they still suck when you’re thirty. Don’t let your art become your job. Enjoy the highs and try to understand the lows for exactly what they are – because they’re unavoidable. If that sounds like something you might hear in one of those awful after school specials from the eighties, let me close with this: THE MORE YOU KNOW.

ABOUT STEVEN NOVAK
 Born in Chicago Illinois, Steven Novak has spent the whole of his life creating. After attending The Columbus College of Art and Design for four years he moved to California where he married his wife. The pair have been together for nearly a decade. He likes pizza. He’s sort of a nerd. He has terrible luck and worse personal hygiene. He also hates having to write bios about himself. He thinks bios are stupid. His work can be found online at www.novakillustration.com