Little over a year ago, I decided to become an author. Since then, I’ve been reading countless articles about writing stories and how to publish them. And what I could glean from all those articles were: there are immense expectations on the writer by the reader.

This is not by itself a bad thing. High expectations incentives you to do your very best.

However, it seems to me that no flaws are acceptable whatsoever when you publish your story, whether it’s free or for profit. For some reason, we are expected to spend hundreds of dollars on editors and professional artists to make our product perfect from the start.

“Don’t dare post or publish a flawed story, or your reputation will suffer,” they say. As if you could make a perfect your first time around…

Where did this idea come from? This idea that independent writers must have the same standards as a multimillion dollar publishing business?

Because frankly, we neither have the time nor resources to make it flawless and I have no inclination to spend a lot of money on something that will ultimately be free (or even 99 cents).

I think this idea of the flawless writer deters many to publish their works, even on their own blogs or other free sites. I know I had my hesitations.

But after browsing around the early works of other artists on DeviantArt and on Youtube, I began to wonder: they can put out free content without nearly as many expectations as writers; their early work being incredibly low quality.

But even if they did suck, they still had a certain charm to their content, a uniqueness that made them grow their audience, and slowly, they improved the quality of their work.

Meanwhile, writers hold on to their stories because they either cannot find a publisher or because they are too ashamed to publish a non-professionally edited story themselves.

Why should a typo, a badly written character and some pacing problems ruin an otherwise good story? For sure, it’s a shame that it isn’t perfect, but there will be other stories later made. And if the author is lucky, a publisher will notice him/her and correct all those mistakes in a printed edition.

What I’m saying is, publish your stuff. Make it available to the internet. Critiques be damned!

Amazon is our Youtube, our DeviantArt, the only difference is we cannot make it free on this platform. Which makes all the difference, unfortunately.

I highly recommend you read this article if you want to learn more about what demanding perfection can do to a creative. “When Perfection Goes Wrong“