Writing and Publishing a Book As a Millennial

Many millennials grew up hearing that we could be anything we wanted as long as we worked hard enough for it. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but much of what we want isn’t as easy to obtain as we thought. Big projects – like being a successful author, finding fame in Hollywood, discovering a cure for cancer, solving world hunger, and creating world peace – are significantly harder to achieve than they seemed to us when we were growing up. And if we set our value by realizing them at all, let alone by a certain age, we set ourselves up for failure and disappointment.

That is, if we go about them in the “traditional” way.

See, one key reason millennials are awesome is our resourcefulness. It’s no longer about finding success, however we define it, the same way as those before us. We grew up with technology and by and large know how to think outside the box in a different way than our counterparts. So it makes total sense that self-publishing has taken off the way that it is.

Ten or fifteen years ago, the only way someone could publish a book was by sending manuscripts off to publishing houses or agents and hoping that someone liked it enough to want to do something with it. But that has little chance of success – J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter was denied multiple times. That’s right, one the most popular series of the past fifty years was turned down; that’s how difficult the publishing industry can be.

But that’s not the only way to publish, and it’s not the only way to make money from writing. There are now thousands of people turning to self-publishing to get their writing seen and enjoyed by readers. Like most things, it’s not as easy as it sounds. The downside to self-publishing’s popularity rising is the increasingly saturated market. If you want to make a profit, let alone a large enough one to live off of, you have to put in hundreds of hours working to pull it together and to market it, and that’s ignoring the time you put into writing it in the first place.

At the end of the day, though, it is possible and self-publishing is significantly easier than the traditional route. Plus, there is the added bonus that it’s the only way to guarantee that your book will be published. Many millennials know that if you want something done, you better take it into your own hands. Publishing a book is no different.

Of course, before you can publish it you need to write it. There will be people who say that we haven’t lived life enough to write a novel that changes the world or to create a unique story line or to write anything at all. There are always naysayers, and in this case they will just settle on your age. So get yourself a nice hot beverage, open your notebook or your computer, and start writing. Millennials are more than capable of writing a book – as long as you are aware of what you don’t know and do research to supplement your knowledge, you’re on the right path.

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