Becoming an Author in South Africa

Starting Your Story

Writing a story is like planting a seed. Start with your simple idea and as you nurture it with imagination and detail,  it blooms into something more exciting, more engaging. You get to build your own universe, create characters, and make up your own rules that they live by.  As a South African, with eleven official languages, you might consider translations for your ultimate project. English and Afrikaans have the larger markets but the diversity of languages may offer a unique opportunity as well. There is a growing market for indigenous language publishing.

The Magic Wand

Think of your pen, or your keyboard, as a magic wand. With every sentence you write, you're creating something entirely new. Start writing and keep on writing until you begin to get comfortable with grammar, spelling, punctuation, sentence structure, and all that. No need to be concerned that it’s imperfect as you will evolve your style and the details will eventually work out. The more you read and write, the better you’ll get at storytelling.

The Secret to Success as an Author

The real secret to becoming an author is a combination of practice, persistence, and passion. You already have the passion so you simply have to follow through on the other two. Set yourself a time period to which you can devote your writing each day, or set a word limit you want to reach every time you write. This defines the practice and then don’t let anything distract you from your targeted production as a writer and you’ll soon find you look forward to hitting your targets each day, and then some.

Keep at it, even when it feels hard or frustrating. This is the persistence part, and possibly the most important. Dreams are great but without your dedication to plow forward toward your goal, no dream will ever come true.

Publish

Getting your book into the marketplace can be one of the easiest steps now that Amazon KDP and similar platforms are available for self-publishing. 

So, just get your book written by following the above steps, learn all the steps for uploading and creating a book on Kindle Direct Publishing on Amazon, and become a self-published author.