A Massive Social Media Following
You do not need to have a million social media followers to publish a book. Your community will grow as you do. This is a marathon, not a sprint.
A Fat Bank Account
You do not need to spend your rent/mortgage money to publish a book. This is not to say you won’t have to spend any money to publish your book. But, there are ways of investing in your book projects without going broke. I remember setting up a GoFundMe to pay for a book cover years ago.
To Be an English Scholar
You do not need to be an English Scholar to publish a book. This is not to say you should not care about English. It is to say that you don’t have to be an expert at it to begin. That’s what editors and proofreaders are for. This is also not to say that there aren’t experts and scholars who became such before writing a book. This is to say that if everyone waited until they knew everything before publishing a book, there would be very few books to read.
An LLC
We talked about this already in another post. However, I include it here because everybody on the internet says you need an LLC. You don’t. Whether your business structure should be a Limited Liability Company depends on the kind of business you have, and self-publishing doesn’t require one to get started. (And this is not to say you won’t want to create a business structure around your writing later on. Click here to read up on that in a previous post.)
24 Hours a Day
Contrary to popular belief, you do not need to write all day to finish your book. You do not need to sacrifice time with your family or take days off work to write a book. You only need to manage your time wisely. A good 15-20mins a day dedicated to writing is enough to write a first draft manuscript. (Remember that your draft does not have to be 400 pages long).
You do not need more time. You need more discipline and consistency.
Remember…
Publishing the book is the easy part; the first step in a long process that gets better as you learn and grow.
Everyone’s journey is different, and the truth is the real work happens after the book is in print. Becoming an expert happens AFTER you have taken the first step, not before.
The PBS Blog 