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[Disclosure: I used to write for a living.]

You definitely need marketing to close the loop and get your writing to the readers, and it's a totally different skill set.

I'd there's another stage between writing and distribution, which is the editing/rewriting loop. The only kind of writing is rewriting, as a great (re)writer once said.[0] That means writing will probably take much longer than you expect, if you want it to strike the right tone and be true.

Another probably important point for aspiring writers is that in order to have something worth saying, you have to live something big, or learn something valuable, and generally observe things keenly if you want to have something new. (And if you don't plan to write something new, why are you writing at all?) So there's work to do before writing happens. You need to read and learn and ask questions of people who know more than you, so that you can distill everything you've read and bring it to the reader.

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1025221-the-only-kind-of-wr...




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