I've not written anything in this blog for a month. We are in process of moving to Florida and I have been super busy. For an update, my novel Consenting Adults Only was not chosen for publication by Amazon's Scout campaign, and I am now publishing it with CreateSpace; the book should be out in October. I have hired an illustrator for my children's book Gravity is Always With You...Unless You're an Astronaut, and I hope to publish it by the end of the year. My other two recently-published books, The Wall: Chronicle of a Scuba Trial and Out of Time: An alternative outcome of the Civil War, are both doing well, with positive reviews on Amazon.
I was recently invited to give a brief talk at a book club, on my writing experience. Below is an outline of what I plan to tell the club members.
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4 Steps to Writing a Book for Publication
1. Get an idea
Everyone has
ideas. Ideas are free, plentiful. The author Warren Murphy once said to
would-be novelists, “If you could read [the gossip columns] of the New York
Post or The New York Daily News every day for a week and not come up with a
dozen ideas for a novel, you might consider findings a new hobby.” (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/18/books/warren-murphy-writer-and-creator-of-remo-williams-dies-at-82.html?_r=0)
So true.
Ideas
are everywhere. Your family history is a
book idea. Lots of people write
memoirs.
I wrote a story
about extra-terrestrials visiting a retirement community; while the world went
gaga over the visit, the retirees were not impressed, as it messed up their
daily routines.
How about murder on
the golf course? A short story with that
theme won top prize in a recent writing contest. And it could be the first chapter of a
novel. So your idea doesn’t have to fill
a book. A short piece is a good way to
start. Florida Writers Association has a
contest category called Flash Fiction: 1000 words maximum. That could be your first chapter.
Check out my web
site of fictional reviews – the reviewed works don’t really exist. I just wrote reviews as if they did – my ideas
of what might make a good book or play or movie.
You
can take one of these ideas and run with it.
2. Write obsessively
There is no one
best way to write a novel. Some authors
use a detailed outline, some plot out the story on index cards or writing
software, and some write free style, not even knowing where the book will take
them. There are many web sites on ‘How to Write a Novel’. Mostly drivel. I prefer the web site, ‘How Not to Write a
Novel’ (http://www.writersdigest.com/whats-new/7-things-that-will-doom-your-novel-how-to-avoid-them)
For me, the
free-style approach works best. Once you
have an idea, vomit your words on the page.
Don’t waste time trying to figure out how to write – just start
writing. You can learn rules of the
craft as you go along, or after the first draft (and then once learned, you can
break them). But get something down. For
the first draft you can ignore grammar and punctuation. If it’s a choice between writing “She cant
sea the stars becase of the brite mune,” and not writing anything because you’re
unsure of spelling or anything else, always do the writing. You
should write obsessively. If you
don’t look forward to putting words on paper or the computer screen, then
writing is probably not for you. For my new novel Consenting Adults Only I sat several hours daily over one month typing out a first
draft. I couldn’t stop. It was a labor
of love. Writers write. (After that first draft I made lots of
changes, based on feedback, reading about the craft, etc.)
3. Review and edit – over and over
No matter how many
times you review your work, you will miss things. Enlist friends to read for you. Beta readers abound, and they will often do
it for free; you can find them on the internet.
Try https://www.goodreads.com/. Goodreads has a discussion group "Authors Seeking Betas." Also, in any urban area or large retirement community you should be able to join a writing club, where members will help
critique excerpts of your writing.
Consenting Adults Only is 76000 words
and 353,000 characters.
Think about that: 353,000 chances to screw up, and you will. And that doesn’t even consider the
arrangement of words, paragraphs and chapters, or if what you write makes any
sense. If your prose is perfect
(whatever that means), the simple placement of 353,000 characters is bound to
create some typos. Review and edit, over
and over. Before publication, Consenting Adults Only was read by half
a dozen people, all of whom made useful comments and pointed out typos.
Then, just before uploading
the book for publication (in progress), I reread it, probably my fourth of
fifth time since finishing the first draft.
I came upon this sentence, referring to a conversation between the young
doctor and his date, Barbara.
Barbara
laughed, a totally disaffected laugh that made me feel I had conquered her soul.
For the first time since writing that sentence I
questioned my use of “disaffected.” Of course I meant that
Barbara’s laugh was without affectation, honest and sincere. Now, unsure, I looked it up. Oh, oh!
Disaffected really means discontented
and disloyal toward authority. The word
I meant was unaffected, obviously not
disaffected. What a blooper that would have been. Why didn’t anyone else find this mistake?
The number one problem with self-published books is poor editing. One reason is because many authors don't take the time to review and edit their own work. Another reason is that professional editing is very expensive, typically $1500 or more for a moderate-length novel (80K to 100K words). Most self-published authors don't want to spend that amount for a book that will almost certainly not recoup the expense. So we rely on friends, relatives, our own editing skills. That may be OK, but you've got to do it over and over, compulsively.
The number one problem with self-published books is poor editing. One reason is because many authors don't take the time to review and edit their own work. Another reason is that professional editing is very expensive, typically $1500 or more for a moderate-length novel (80K to 100K words). Most self-published authors don't want to spend that amount for a book that will almost certainly not recoup the expense. So we rely on friends, relatives, our own editing skills. That may be OK, but you've got to do it over and over, compulsively.
Unless you are famous or know someone in the publishing
business, your chances of finding a royalty publisher range from slim to none. Royalty publishers don’t want to hear from
any unknown author, so plan to self-publish. (Here’s a book idea: all the successful authors who
were initially turned down by publishers. Start
with John Grisham, Agatha Christie, Dr. Seuss and, yes, J.K. Rowling. http://www.literaryrejections.com/best-sellers-initially-rejected/)
If along the way you manage to find an interested agent or
publisher, you might still want to self-publish, for reasons of autonomy and
speed. Self-publishing has upended the
publishing world, with many high quality and successful books. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-publishing.) Unfortunately, since it's so easy to do, there's a lot of self-published junk. Item #5 of David Carnoy's 25 Things You Need To Know About Self Publishing states:
"5. Good self-published books are few and far between.
Again, because the barrier to entry is so low, the majority of self-published books are pretty bad. If I had to put a number on it, I'd say less than 5 percent are decent and less than 1 percent are really good. A tiny fraction become monster success stories, but every every few months, you'll hear about someone hitting it big (for those who don't know already the "Fifty Shades of Grey" trilogy was initially self-published)."
http://www.cnet.com/news/self-publishing-a-book-25-things-you-need-to-know/
http://www.cnet.com/news/self-publishing-a-book-25-things-you-need-to-know/
Self-publishing is now easier than ever. For my first 4 self-published books, back in the early 90s, I had to hire a printer and then take delivery of hundreds of physical books. No longer. You can publish on Amazon with the click of a key. You don’t need to take delivery of any books. Books are now ‘print-on-demand’ – nothing printed until someone wants a copy. There are dozens of services out there to help you self-publish, but I would caution the new author to be wary. Some “publishing” companies are nothing more than marketers for expensive services, with zero interest in helping you sell your book. (See item #13 in Carnoy's "25 Things You Need to Know.")
If you’re just beginning I would go with CreateSpace, Amazon’s self-publishing arm (https://www.createspace.com/); it’s probably the cheapest and safest. Avoid “hybrid” publishers that charge big upfront fees – their only interest is in selling you services, NOT in selling your book.
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Recommended Reading
There are dozens, if not hundreds, of books
on writing. Some are very good. Many others are a waste of time. Here’s just three books I highly recommend if
you plan to write a novel.
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