Newflash, becoming an author is NOT just writing a book!

It’s a (somewhat, kinda, very?) hard first step that I’ll make sure to talk about soon yes, but you know what’s harder?

Discovering your voice, learning to market, building your platform on your words 😀

For me personally, there’s definitely been a bit of a learning curve here cause… I think all of these things are interconnected?

Maybe I’m missing something here, but I’m pretty sure that in order to market, you’ve got to learn how to actually be incredible at what you do (or kind of fake it till you make it? Lol!), and learn how to be a consistent, real, authentic, and genuinely good person who’s actually worth that marketing effort.

To me? It’s kind of like building the aeroplane while you’re riding on it, though I do think it’s cool because I’m learning a lot 😛 It’s kind of like when you learn how to ride a bike, you learn how to pedal and how to steer? You can’t just pedal only or steer only – you’ve got to do everything everywhere all at once.

Wanna come along with me on that process?

Here’s what I’ve been thinking about as I run around like a headless chicken:

1. How do I get the book published into the right format?
2. How to make sure that people see you and get the chance to vibe with your work?
3. How to make sure that there’s a good mixture of people close by and far away who are constantly discovering your voice and are willing to give you a chance as you build it?
4. How to create value, market, and build a community?

I’m not necessarily doing things in a predetermined order at the moment and a lot of things that I guess I’m doing are what we call in Malaysia very “cowboy” type decisions cause they’re done on the spur of the moment and there isn’t necessarily a process, so if I evaluate myself, I’d definitely say that one way in which I’d like to grow is in terms of learning how to plan things properly.

To give you an example of why I think that things are chaotic sometimes, Daniel Cerventus posted an innocent Wednesday what-do-you-need-help-with post in Entrepreneurs and Startups Malaysia, so I spent a good bit of time today talking to one of my ARC reviewers, only to discover that The Little Robot That Could Paint made her cry 😱 

A little bit later though, I clarified with her, and it looks like… She was touched?!

…And with that, I’m pretty happy because it looks like the message I was trying to get across in this book managed to get across! I won’t reveal why that is yet as that’s a huge part of the surprise, but I’ll just say that it should be a pretty interesting reveal for those of you who think it’s a simple book about a robot.

I cite this incident as an example of the numerous types of chaos that I’ve been dealing with ever since I started marketing this book because it led to editing the book, refining it with feedback (thank you Je Qin, Devorah, and many others!), considering the experience of the reader and even the parent who will facilitate), then repeating the whole process again to improve the experience of the product far beyond where it currently is.

The result? A bit more of an integrated product, more conversations, more awareness that what I’m doing is better than not doing it, and a little bit more confidence that I can proceed forward knowing that what I’m doing is a good thing 🙂

Oh, and I also set up Amazon ads and FB ads over the past day or so. Not sure what’s going to happen, but I’ll be doing my best to let more people know about this – pretty happy about the direction that things are going so far…

Oh, and I have a Korean exam tomorrow, RIP.

Oh well – gotta rise to the challenge 🙂 Till later!

Uh, I’m just going to guess since you clicked a whole link and all, but uh…

…I guess you wanted to learn about The Little Robot That Could Paint?

Well you’re not alone, because at the outset, this wasn’t even a book that I thought I was going to release!

For one thing, the kinds of things I write are usually educationally tailored to students applying to college and tailored to teenagers and adults, catering to learning how to write – but when I started experimenting with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, I was inspired to start creating something that could teach the younger generation about artificial intelligence and what it’s all about because I think it’s incredibly important for children to learn about new technologies and what they can do.

While I do this in my English essay-writing classes, I thought to do this on a wider scale and to a larger platform for younger students as well – hence The Little Robot That Could Paint!

The story of Robo is about the journey of a super-intelligent farm robot that has the capacity to learn extremely rapidly with his computing power, and who has learned everything in the world – only to get bored!

Due to a magical accident* though, he decides that he will learn how to paint and embarks on an epic struggle to find out how!

The book itself was generated by the artificial intelligence software Midjourney, which allows you to create artificial intelligence art in response to prompts.

If you’re a parent or you’re involved in the artificial intelligence/machine learning industry, you perhaps can recognize here that there are some concepts at play here such as machine learning (whereby a computer learns how to do particular tasks without being explicitly programmed), artificial intelligence (whereby a computer learns how to perform tasks as a result of machine learning programs – or algorithms) that your child will learn about.

While these may be some difficult concepts when studied in depth, I’ve had no issues thus far with showing it to my students, some of whom are as young as 10 years old, and I think it’s worthwhile to expose your children to these ideas in preparation for a world where AI will become commonplace, technologies like ChatGPT will become ancient and outdated, and many other things 🙂

Thank you for reading, and if you find this meaningful and would be interested to pick up a copy of The Little Robot That Could Paint (on Kindle only, for now!), do feel free to visit this link.

*I won’t spoil you, but I will say that I did some physics research in order to understand how to depict the event in question, which is an actual physical event that can take place, but that has never actually taken place in the history of planet Earth before albeit I visualize it using AI.

Edit: I’ve been listening to lots of feedback from my wonderful ARC readers (thank you so much, and you know who you are!):

Since I know a lot of you will be reading the book along with your children and might have some difficulty explaining some of the concepts, I’ve included a little glossary along with the book that I hope will make it a bit easier if you need to explain anything:

Feel free to reference this as you explain the story, and I hope that you’ll enjoy the process of sharing in this lovely little tale that I’m very happy to have made!

– V

Here’s a thought that occurred to me sometime last year, but has always been a strange thought that I’ve never thought to share:

“Remember to write for real people”.

It seems a little strange, does it? Well, it’s true.

Every single piece of writing is a piece of communication that’s directed towards a real person and should be created with that in mind.

If it seems a little bit too commonsensical to you, then let me give you a bit more context that’s tied to this situation: The fact that I’m writing this blog post to serve you, a real person.

As far as I know, you’re not a robot (unless I’m mistaken!), and neither are you just a number on WordPress – you are a real living human being with your own goals, hopes and dreams, and you have limited time and energy.

As a reader of this blog, you could continue to read this blog, comment on it, and share it with others, which would be great for me as a writer and supremely encouraging – and as the writer who wants to build an audience, I would like you to read it, share it with your friends, and come back.

In other words… What you see here needs to be worth that time and energy!

But now, let’s step away from blog posts for a minute and generalize.

If you’re writing a school essay, you’re writing it for a teacher who is going to give you a good grade if they think that it’s well-reasoned or impressive; that is his or her job!

If you’re writing a story, you’re writing it for someone who wants to be entertained and to have something to talk about with their friends!

What this all means is that every single piece of writing that you ever create will be directed towards a real person!

That’s why when you write a school essay for a teacher, writing grammatically is a must, and writing logically is a plus!

It’s why we think about the order in which you present words, why punctuation matters, and why we care that your writing is well-researched and contains both facts as well as good reasoning!

That’s why when you write a story, you think about whether the premise is entertaining, the pacing is great, and whether the audience is suited for and connect with it!

When we write, we must consider the reader and what they want!

That is the absolute fundamental of good writing, and that’s where things like ‘show and do not tell’ and ‘use good grammar’ come into play – because these are respectively important for helping readers to not get caught up in word salad and to not be confused simply because they don’t understand the meaning that you’re trying to convey!

Of course, this sometimes can seem difficult to implement, and you might make the (valid!) argument that people may not even know what they want, what we think that people want does not actually align with what they do want, and what we personally want isn’t always something that can be compromised because we have our own thoughts, preferences, and things that we personally prefer to share and not.

I feel that there are certainly many things that as humans we share in wanting, though – the need to receive good and valuable information efficiently, the need (or the want?) to be entertained by what we read, the need to feel a sense of human connection with the author or a sense of relatability to the piece.

To understand these things, I believe that lifelong learning by looking at the world and immersing oneself within it is crucial – I believe all good writing comes from learning about people and from reading books extensively over time, learning about the world, and coming to observe things in such a way that we better understand them over time. 🙂

On my part, I’ll always be grateful for the people who are here, knowing that they are real people with real thoughts, wishes, and dreams; I think that I could have supported some of these dreams a little better during the time that I’ve had before, but hope that somehow or another, that will carry forward in this blog.

Please share this if you find it valuable, and I look forward to writing much more in the future!