As I am establishing myself as an independently published author, I had to learn some hard and valuable lessons. One of which is that writing for publication is not just putting words on a page and having them edited and ready to published.

Writing for publication is a business.

That’s the ugly part of it. What do I mean by that? When you write, you have the luxury of being friendly, letting things happened and just adapting to circumstances. When you write for publication, you cannot be as nice. I had to learn to say no, and I had to learn that even if I like people a lot, if they are not producing up to par, I had to move on to other people who would.

In other words, I had to fire people.

And that is NOT fun.

So I am growing myself a tougher skin, and it still isn’t as tough as it could be, and I had to learn a few new words: no, fired, next.

It’s hard, but to be successful, it has to be done.