Myth: To be a respected author, you must invest thousands of hours of time on your full-length book.

The reality is that people today want concise and useful information. You don't have to write a 200-page book to be a real author. Remember The One-Minute Manager and One-Minute Salesperson? Around one hundred pages. People want information fast and convenient. Create short information products you can sell online, even if you don't have your own Web site.

If you choose to print your book with Print Quantity Needed (PQN), your perfect bound books will look as good as any book on bookstore shelves.

Myth: Authors must spend a lot of money to publish themselves. The printing costs for 1500 copies of a 160-page book might cost $3000, about $2 a unit. Small runs cost even more per unit. That's a lot of cash for anyone to put out all at once, and it's not worth it to many of us to use our home equity or life savings to finance our book. The answer is a small run with Print on Demand (POD) where you can print only 500 for around $2.40 for 160 pages. Without high inventory, you can maintain a comfortable cash flow.

You save even more money if you don't print your book. Book publishing is going Internet. You can write small books in less time, market them easily and inexpensively on Web and reap profits sooner. Try an e-book. It can be downloaded, it takes no printing costs because your buyer prints or downloads it. You don't even have to have whole book finished to sell it. Just include your table of contents at end of each chapter and present it as an e-serial book.

That's not such a bad thing, though. Homecooked meals still taste better than six-minute frozen entrees. You see much more of world when you walk, or through windows of an automobile, than you do from a height of 20,000 feet. Similarly, satisfaction you will derive from a career cultivated on patience and perseverance will run much deeper and last much longer than if you could just add water and become an overnight success.

No, Rome wasn't built in a day, thank goodness--look at how long it has survived. Keep that in mind as you work to establish your own writing foundation, one building block at a time.

Here's to your writing success!

Mary Anne Hahn is editor and publisher of WriteSuccess, the free biweekly ezine of ideas, information and inspiration for writers. To subscribe, mailto:writesuccess-subscribe@yahoogroups.com .