Publishing Online with Erik Hanberg

Destiel

Would I say I know a thing or two about publishing online? No, absolutely not. However, I cant argue with the fact that I have published a few books online and they have received their fair share of a few thousand views. Would I consider myself an author from these forum publication? No, definitely not. Not like I'd consider our guest speaker Erik Hanberg to be. I absolutely loved his talk with our class. It was so inspiring. Erik is someone I would consider an author, yet not in a traditional way. Erik publishes all his novels online, but makes money from it! A feat my stories have yet to do. But it isn't all in the money that makes a person a legitimate author. Erik puts in a lot of work to his books, through cover art and receiving reviews, he can even send physical copies of his book if someone asks for it. I was blown away by what I had learned about online publishing. I figured the little world I knew about fan-fictions (stories written by fans of existing works, example above: Destiel) was all there was too online publishing. I knew some people were making money from it, by publishing on a website with ads, but I didn't know anything about Amazon Bookstore, using E-books to really sell your work. You can make a legitimate career from simply publishing online, and that fact quite excites me! I learned quite a bit from Mr. Hanberg, but he gave me some excellent advice that I know will stick with me. He talked about how putting yourself out there online, doesn't take physical energy, yet people are still reluctant to do it. He explained this is because it spends a lot of emotional energy, and people fear putting in that kind of work. I could very much relate to this, making all of my publications anonymous. I fear putting in all that effort for nothing. But listen to Eriks speech, I could see hes made a name for himself and has a loyal group of fans and made many friends, from putting his stories out there. I was very inspired by his words, maybe one day I'll be able to put more works out there, but for now I think I'll stick to writing Destiel fan-fiction under false aliases.