“You don’t know what you don’t know.”
We’ve all likely heard that phrase before and nodded along—it sounds fairly straightforward, if a little redundant. But every once in a while, there comes a point in life where it truly clicks. There is so much to learn, and there are so many questions you need answered, that you don’t even know where to start asking them.
That was how I felt when I started my author career. And I’d venture to bet that’s far from a unique experience.
Even once you’re an established author, the feeling doesn’t quite go away. We talk in the pages of this magazine about best practices around launch day, strategies for social media and marketing, the pros and cons of various distribution methods or plotting versus pantsing or various platforms in your technology toolkit. But the beauty and immense challenge of this industry is that those strategies and practices are all constantly shifting, and the benefit-drawback scales are forever rebalancing themselves.
At every stage of the process, we are all learning how to write, edit, publish, market, manage … then we are learning how to do it better. We attend workshops or conference sessions, collaborate with other authors in writing groups, sign up for online courses, or, yes, even read trade publications focused on the industry. Even for the seven-figure titans among us, education is a must.
Our sister site, Indie Author Training, was built with exactly that purpose in mind: to create a library of author-tailored courses, workshops, webinars, and product tours that provide the guidance and support you need in your career, in any area and at any stage. This month, Indie Author Magazine is shining a spotlight on education as well. How do you know what classes, workshops, or sessions to take? How can you make sure you get the most out of them? How do you balance it all with the rest of your responsibilities?
The list of questions is endless, but the answers are out there—and we hope that you’ll find some of them, at least, in these pages.
Nicole Schroeder
Editor in Chief
