Archives for May 2018

There is always something that needs to be done. There are chores and jobs and the demands of family. These are all legitimate and part of life. We choose what to prioritize every day. We can’t devote ourselves wholeheartedly to job or family, or writing. Everything is competing for time and attention and energy. If writing is a low priority, it won’t get done.

I physically leave my house to write. Other writers leave temporally. They find a quiet time when the kids are asleep to do their thing. You can get up early or stay up late. I have my desk.

The important thing is to get and maintain the separation necessary for creativity. Perhaps you can’t do it for more than an hour at a time, but you can get a lot done in an hour. An hour a day will get you a novel in a few months.

The main thing is to make the time to write and stick to it. Something else won’t get done. If you want to write badly enough, that’s a sacrifice you can make.

Additionally, once you land a publisher, you lose the rights to sell your book. You can also lose control of the end product. You have to accept what the editor says when its time to make the book ready for publication. The book cover is often entirely out of your hands, as is the title. The publisher takes most of the book’s sales as payment, leaving you with a per-copy percentage that’s less than half of what you would get from publishing yourself.

Why bother with the aggravation? Self-publishing is quick and easy. It’s a matter of minutes to get an ebook onto Amazon. Why not do that instead?

The answer is simple. Ask yourself, what was the last self-published book you read? Successful self-publishing stories exist (“The Martian” is a good example). I’m not saying people should not self-publish, especially if they’ve already tried the traditional route. However, it’s a lot harder to have a successful book when you self-publish. There are millions of books out there, and consumers can filter through them by ignoring the self-published titles. They can, and they do.

This dynamic is changing, and indie publishers are blurring the line between big publishers and the rest. It’s not the same publishing world it was twenty years ago, or even five. But the advantage of being published still exists.

For your royalty money, you also get an editor, a cover, and some promotion of your work. You have a team of people working with you to finish and market your book. You are much more likely to put out a quality book with other, experienced, people watching out for you. That’s good for you and your readers.

However, here’s the thing: every other writer knows this. Competition is fierce. Big publishers are inundated with submissions. The chances are low that any particular one will get published. By that I mean yours.

There’s also the chance you aren’t writing a book for the masses.

If you are submitting, say, a book about some Persians on a planet in the far future who fight with tanks and planes, and there’s this “seed storm” that comes and sets things on fire, and oh, there’s ballroom dancing… your idea may not have enough mass-market appeal to attract a Big 5 publisher. That doesn’t mean you wrote a bad book. As Spinal Tap said, your appeal is more selective. That’s OK.

I went looking for smaller publishers that printed books like mine. I didn’t dismiss any out of hand because they were small, or had a bad looking website. The customer is going to almost certainly be buying the book from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or some other online portal. I don’t care about the publisher website except so far as I need to be able to find the submission requirements.

There is some branding by the publisher. People do care if your book is printed by a publisher they’ve heard of. The effect is becoming less pronounced with the arrival of Amazon.com. People are going to brand you as an author. If you change publishers, most readers won’t notice or care. You are the brand. If you have a professional looking book cover, write well, and keep on producing books, you’ll have readers.

The lesson is to be open to possibilities that you wouldn’t consider at first. Maybe the book you wrote isn’t going to make you rich. And, hopefully, you will write more books. It isn’t the end of the world to be published by an indie press. I like it a lot.

What this means is that most of what ends up being read in the published novel didn’t start out in the first draft. It was added later. Much of what was initially written is gone.

That doesn’t mean the first draft was unnecessary. I had to start somewhere. Nor does it mean I wrote a bad draft. The first draft is the start of a process. The book wasn’t finished at the end of the first draft, except for a few changes. The book was just beginning.

I know some writers who write and edit as they go along, so their first drafts are a lot more complete, but my process is to keep revising over and over. If you got an early draft to read, you know this.

For me, it’s best not to get too attached to what’s already been written. Often, I can’t come up with the perfect word or phrase, so I write down something to get the idea across, knowing that I will change it later. I use the process to keep the writing coming. That works better for me than getting stumped trying to summon precisely what I want at the moment. There’s also the chance that whatever I write is going to be cut, so it’s best not to spend too much time on it.

No word I write is sacred, and there’s nothing special about a first draft. It’s only a first step.