Here’s a lesson I have learned and am continuing to learn as an indie author: I can’t control my destiny, but I can control my direction.

I have a goal. I would one day love to write for a living, but I have no way of knowing if it will ever come true. There are too many things out of my control to say for sure what will happen. Here are the unknowns that an indie author has to live with:

There’s no way to know if …

… an influential website pick my book as a featured book.

… a literary agent will stumble across my writing and believe in what I am doing.

… a certain advertisement or promotional blitz will suddenly reap unexpected rewards.

… one excellent review will light up the blog-o-sphere with word of mouth about my books.

… that unexpected someone falls in love with one of your stories and wants to make it into a movie.

… my blog traffic will continue to increase the way it did in the past year.

… book sales will one day allow me to ponder if I should write full time.

All of the above are examples of destinies. I can’t say that any of these are my destiny as an indie writer, but that’s not what indie writers should be concerned with in the first place. Indie writers need to be concerned with direction, not destiny.

Choose the direction you want to go in – perhaps even aiming at one of those destinies above – and put your head down and plow towards it.

The progress may be leaps and bounds or it may be incrementally. The progress may even be one step backwards and 1.5 steps forward.

So how does an indie author practice direction in ones life? Easy.

An author who focuses on direction does things like …

… submitting books to influential websites.

… trying a variety of advertising and promotional blitzes to see what works.

… sending one’s work to a wide range of reviewers – both bloggers and professional sites.

… making your book widely available and accessible so that unexpected someone might read and fall in love with your story.

… continuing to blog with fresh, fun content.

… not focusing on the ups and downs of book sales but continuing to do the little things which puts one a step closer in your chosen direction.

Shoot for a goal but don’t worry and fret over it. Worry and fret over the little things like getting the next blog post ready and contacting that one blogger again. These are the directional duties which one day may take you to an unexpected destiny.