People sometimes ask why I built my own website, learnt the publishing process, worked through formatting and spent so much time teaching myself skills that I could easily have paid someone else to do. The answer has very little to do with saving money. It's simply the way I've always approached life.
Looking back, I think I've always been more comfortable with the unknown than many people seem to be. Whenever I come across something I don't understand, I rarely see it as something to avoid. I see it as something I haven't learnt yet. Once I understand it, it stops feeling intimidating and simply becomes another tool I can carry with me. That way of thinking has quietly shaped much of my life. As a child I learnt to communicate in a world I couldn't properly hear. Years later I learnt how to backpack through countries I'd never visited, sail across an ocean I'd never crossed and, more recently, write, publish and market a book I never imagined producing. None of those things felt natural in the beginning, but they all became less intimidating once I understood them. The unknown slowly became familiar, and once it became familiar it lost much of its power.
That same mindset followed me into publishing. Many authors quite sensibly outsource large parts of the process, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. I simply found myself asking a different question. If I don't learn this now, what happens the next time something changes? Publishing never stands still. Websites evolve, search engines change, reader habits shift and new technology appears every year. I realised that if I outsourced everything from the beginning, I'd always be relying on somebody else every time the world changed. I'd much rather understand enough to adapt myself, even if I occasionally decide to ask for help along the way.
The same thing happened while I was writing No, I Won't Buy You a Drink!. Early drafts were read by people with editing experience, and their suggestions were thoughtful and generous. Quite naturally, many encouraged me to make the writing more polished, the descriptions more vivid and the dramatic moments even bigger. In many books that would almost certainly have improved them. The difficulty was that I slowly realised I wasn't trying to write that sort of memoir. The moments that stayed with me over the years were rarely the obvious ones. They were the conversations, the misunderstandings, the quiet observations and the ordinary experiences that only revealed their importance long after they had happened. If I polished every sentence until it demanded attention, I worried readers might begin admiring the writing instead of noticing the people. That was never the story I wanted to tell.
Perhaps that's why I enjoyed learning the publishing process instead of handing all of it to somebody else. Every new skill felt surprisingly familiar because it wasn't really about websites, formatting or search engines. It was simply another unknown waiting to become known. The same curiosity that had once encouraged me to travel was now encouraging me to keep learning, and I realised the process itself had become just as rewarding as the destination. Building the website, understanding how books are discovered, learning about search engines and continuing to improve my writing all became part of the same journey rather than distractions from it.
Looking back now, I don't think the greatest value of learning is that it solves today's problem. I think its real value is that it prepares us for tomorrow's. The world will always create new unknowns. New technology will appear, different opportunities will present themselves and challenges we can't yet imagine will eventually arrive. I can't possibly learn everything, nor would I want to. But I do hope I never lose the curiosity to keep learning the next thing.
Looking back, I realise that most of the things which changed my life began as something I didn't understand. Whether it was learning to communicate with hearing loss, travelling through unfamiliar countries, writing a memoir or teaching myself how to publish it, every new chapter started in exactly the same place. I simply didn't know how yet.
Perhaps that's why the unknown has never felt like something to fear. More often than not, it's simply where I've done most of my growing.
Topics:
#Curiosity #LifelongLearning #BehindTheBook #MemoirWriting #AustralianAuthor #SelfPublishing #WritingLife #DJGifford #Authenticity #NoIWontBuyYouADrink