Not the easiest transition there is… and it comes with a lot of learning; a lot of rethinking; a lot of research.
I jumped in with both feet… well after the books:)
I wrote a series of 3 books for children. I did a series on the Sonoran Desert Animals. 3 books, 2 animals each, and come with information, pictures and coloring pages for young children.
Curious? You can check them out here: https://amzn.to/4xDz5wD
I did do a rewrite on those first 3 books; you can still see the originals but not purchase them.
You can also see other books that I have published for children.
Being an indie writer I went for using KDP on amazon to do self-publishing. I like it. There are so many things you can do. Don’t want to write children’s books? There are so many other options out there to choose from.
From there I have been learning about social media and what can be the best for what I do. Again, there are so many choices.
I settled on Facebook (my personal one) and also created a business Facebook, I am on TikTok, Instagram, and Pinterest. I believe Pinterest is my strongest one, but I do get a fair amount of response on my personal FB.
I have tried Substack, and while it is a cool social media, it wasn’t for me. And I didn’t want to overwhelm myself, keep that in mind if you are thinking of or starting your own journey. Pick the ones that work for you and don’t overload yourself. You have other things to do also:)
I have always known what I wanted to do but I have to admit that at the beginning I had more dreams and ideas then I had time.
I opened an Etsy store and created a boatload of products… and sold nothing. They were all cute:) well to me they were.
While doing all of this I was still learning to verbally define what I wanted to AI for images. That was fun:) And that is when Pinky started getting her friends (mascots). And over the past year or so they have grown and developed from flat paper images to Pixar 3D images. That is where AI really becomes your best artistic friend. I would upload an image then tell the AI what I wanted done with the image. Want to see one?
This is Tibbet. The plain flat version of her.
The Second one is Tibbet in her Pixar 3D remake/upgrade. This gives her more life and character.
And here we have Tibbet happily breaking through a brick wall (one of my favorite images of Tibbet).
She is magnificent.
So using AI can be so much fun:)
But AI is also great for editing writing. It is nice to get those words in the right order. But no, I don’t let AI write everything, I love the option of help but want things in my own words.
There are a lot of AI apps out there to choose from. At the start they were free to use but time and more of them on the market tends to create a cost. Use the free versions if you can and then decide which one works for what you are doing the best.
Some of the ones I tried were ChatGPT, CoPilot (this one comes with my Microsoft 365) and Gemini from google. All are good, you just need to figure out your choice. One other program I use that is even more versatile, depending on what you want to do, is Artistly.
I hope this encourages you to step out and try things — whether you want to write, create, design, or start a blog. Maybe there’s something else you’ve been dreaming about. My encouragement is simple: Take that first step. Every other step follows when you’re chasing your dream.