I learnt a few things on the way to writing by first book, most have been re-hashed by every author out there, and even if you haven’t got past the first chapter in your book you probably know most already. I am still learning these lessons, and some are hard. Anyway let me share my five cents worth, because writing your blockbuster is just the start of the Journey.
I wrote most of The Summer of Reasoning on my Chromebook in Google docs. In full screen mode it is an amazing distraction free writing environment. Open the Chromebook, write something, close it, I unfortunately had to do it in three parts as Google docs (in 2023 at least) becomes painful to use over 100K words. Like it or hate it, most publishers (or epub conversion software) expect docx source files, so for the 370,000 word novel I combined the 3 parts in LibreOffice, which also has its faults, but it is fast and can work in docx and also export to Epub format though there are lots of superfluous “<Span>” declarations and your cover needs to be a .jpg not .jpeg.
If you are doing this for pleasure and that feel good factor (like me) then sweet, you’ve cracked it, it’s all pretty easy.
- Knock up your masterpiece. No tips here, just keep writing it will happen eventually.
- Proof-read it and re-edit. For me this was emailing it to my kindle or Kobo in Epub format.
- Unless it is about a specific character, remove any rants, personal politics, biases etc and go back to step 2. (I may be a little guilty here)
- Go back to step 2. I did this four times, each update fixing dozens of problems, and of course probably adding some new ones, very like programming really! Hot tip here is if you change something, go back a few paragraphs before re-reading it. Feel free to email me any errors, I’m certainly not perfect.
- By now you will be sick of reading your masterpiece so get someone critical to read it and take their advice carefully, then go back to step 2 if necessary.
- (Optionally) Get an ISBN number. In NZ this is free from the National Library, you just have to email them your finished eBook. Amazon Kindle doesn’t need one and Draft2Digital will give you one.
- Create an account on the Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) page, if you already have a kindle account this is quick, but you do need to upload some bank details for all those mega-dollars you are obviously going to rake in. (trying to keep a straight face writing this bit!) Then upload and publish your book. Ta-Da! 70% of the eBook market can now buy your book.
- If you want to also include the other 30% (Apple, Smashwords, Barnes and Noble, etc.) then the easiest way I found was to create an account on Draft2Digital. They are an aggregator and will publish it everywhere including Amazon. Their service costs nothing but they take 10% of your royalties. (10% of nothing is still nothing!). The only gotcha I could see with these guys was that you cannot enroll in the Amazon Kindle unlimited or Prime, but if you do this then you cannot release your book on the other platforms anyway. The DOCX to ePub converter in Draft2Digital is also pretty good and its output file can be downloaded and used as the source for your Kindle KDP book.
- Again, really, really work on your cover, blurb and keep the category generic and cover/blurb as close to the subject of the book as possible. I cannot emphasise this enough.
Note that eBooks are only around 10% of the book market so making the next step to printed book is a good idea and again there is no cost, they just print on demand and take the printing cost out of the sale price, I will do another few editing passes before I go this option as the book might make good Christmas present when I’m much older!
On whatever publishing you use, you are going to have to think up your short blurb, keywords and categories you want the book to appear in. Best to do this early as doing it at the last possible moment will ultimately lead you to pick some last-minute rubbish with silly search terms and half cut off description like I did. Luckily as an eBook I was able to edit it later when my brain started working again.
Optional also, (but cool!) add publisher to the list of services your business offers. It’s only a few changes to your web site and voila you are a publisher; makes you look bigger and more professional!
Don’t Give Up Your Day Job!
Then comes reality. Nobody is going to ever read your book as they are never going to find your book on amazon.com or any of the other platforms out there. I think the statistic I saw was that almost seven thousand new books are published every day, and your masterpiece will probably languish on page four hundred of your target eBook buyers search list forever unless you are an established author or pay money to promote it.
I wonder how many authors start writing before finding this out and I now wonder how many awesome novels I have missed because of stupid algorithms forever excluding them. (Please Amazon, B&N, Smashwords etc. Add a search filter for books that have not been rated yet!). I did not promote my book nor mention it much except in passing comments to friends and family. Don’t get me wrong, I really want people to read it, I just don’t want them all to be friends and family.
Even when I searched for my title or author (Boz – Yeah Just me and Charles Dickens!) my book was still on page two or three of the search results.
Then how do you price it? Free and well people may think its trash (it may be!) but too expensive and nobody is going to ever buy it (assuming they can find it of course!) anyway it is priced at $3.99 $0.99 (Note hot tip, if a book is $0.99 on Kindle it might be free on the other sites as Kindle charges $0.99 minimum).
A few more observations/tips:
- Get your categories correct. Genre readers are really finicky (as I found out the hard way) and err on the side of caution.
- Put some action at the beginning. All the book sellers have the equivalent of the Kindle “send a sample” which lots of people use to judge if it’s a good book. Unfortunately, mine doesn’t really get going until about fifteen percent in, it’s more setting up and character building up until then.
- Don’t, don’t, don’t ever use the real name of someone you know, and even if the name is different and the character is 90% based on someone, they will think it is them. So no, nobody I know is a character in my book nor will they ever be.
- Shout out to Dall-e for the ability to make a book cover and making the use of the pictures it generates freeware. (and a big boo to Microsoft Bing for not allowing this!)
- I really wish I had set it in a completely separate universe. The plot feels perfect as of today, but I dread to think how dated and laughable it will look in a few years.
So, has it put me off writing another book? definitely not, but it will stay a part time endeavor and it looks like I won’t be giving up my day job and will still be programming for a few more years.
I am also happy to discus my mistakes with any fellow writer who will listen over a beer or a coffee, I know you’re out there.. 🙂
External links
Don’t give up your day job to become an author | Hacker News (ycombinator.com)
NaNoWriMo: National Novel Writing Month | Hacker News (ycombinator.com)
Pen Pinery – Home – More good information for aspiring Authors
