"Everyone has at least one good book in them"

The problem is that most people never get around to writing it because they hamper progress by cluttering their minds with blocks. Could you produce a niche-carving bestseller in your spare time? With professional guidance you could. I never suspected I would but I have managed to produce several over years on a part time basis, and so too could you if you set about matters with conviction.

SO YOU'VE NEVER EVER WRITTEN ANYTHING CREATIVE?

You have, you know, and you've been doing it all of your life.

When you were sitting exams at school, you were engaging in creative writing process, addressing questions and providing answers with well reasoned argument. When you sit down to compose a letter, produce a thesis or develop a business proposal, you are in creative mode. All of these exercises have something common: they are works of non-fiction, and so it follows that creation of a full-length book in that genre is any and all of these activities writ large.

You are adept at creative writing but so far you have only skimmed surface of your latent ability.

SO YOU'VE TRIED AND TRIED AGAIN WITHOUT SUCCESS?

Perhaps on other hand you have been activating your innate skills for years and all you have to show for it is a never-ending stream of rejection slips. Perhaps too you have been focusing your energies on fiction, most notoriously difficult of genres to break into as a writer aspiring to achieve recognition that leads to publication. Could it be you have now decided that only way you'll ever see your work in print is to become a self-publisher?

You wouldn't be first. These famous masters of fiction were all obliged to take route of shelling out hard cash to have their debut novels printed.

Alexandre Dumas, D.H. Lawrence, Edgar Allan Poe, Edgar Rice Burroughs, George Bernard Shaw, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, John Grisham, Mark Twain, Mary Baker Eddy, Rudyard Kipling, Stephen Crane, Upton Sinclair, Virginia Woolf, Walt Whitman, William Blake, Zane Grey

Busy though I was in early days of my new enterprise I set about my extra income idea by drawing up a plan of action to transcribe recorded research into a how-to or self-help manual for benefit of others about to embark upon what I had just achieved. This inspiration to earn extra income at home could only be accomplished in my spare time (what there was of it) but because material was in both date and chronological order I started out with a valuable edge. How to structure text though, how to convert my expertise into a meaningful volume, how to develop its presentation into a format that would appeal to publishing industry, how in fact to locate a publisher: these were some of my dilemmas in my plan to earn extra income at home.