Self-Publishing My First Book Was The Hardest Thing I’ve Ever Done — Here’s Why It’s Still Worth It

The satisfaction goes beyond the money.

Cover art for my first novel. Picture by author.

My first novel, “National Service: Confessions of a ‘Chao Keng’ soldier” is finally out!

Man, it’s been a wild ride. I took a break from Medium to write it last year. I wrote it in three months. And I thought that was it. I thought the hard work was over, that with the completion of my first novel, I have somehow succeeded and attained the holy grail of becoming a published author.

Little did I know that the hard work is just about to begin.

In this article, I’m going to talk about my experience with self-publishing, and walk you through the labyrinthian maze that is the publishing world at large. Read on if you’re an aspiring author and would like to avoid the pitfalls I fell into and the mistakes I made.

Let us begin!

It’s A Myth That Self-Publishing Is For Failed Authors

Let’s get this out of the way first.

There’s a stigma in the literary community that self-published authors aren’t “real” writers, that the only reason why they self-publish their books is that they couldn’t hack it in the world of…