So You Want to be a Published Author

 When I tell people I am a published novelist, a vast majority tell me they will write a novel when they have the time.  

Most firmly believe that anyone can write a novel since celebrity idiots write bestsellers.  (They are ghostwritten by someone else.)  All they need to do is sit down and write to the finish which should take a few weeks at most.  They believe that grammar, punctuation, and spelling will be taken care of by some editor so they won't need to learn those skills.  The novel will then be sold almost instantly to a big publisher for a huge amount of money, become a bestseller and a major motion picture.

Sadly, these people don't have a clue and are shocked when I explain how many years it takes to learn your craft to be publishable, how many hundreds or thousands of hours you will be sitting on your rear in front of the computer while everyone else is out having a life and fun, and the classes you will probably need to hone that craft.  

Once you have a well-crafted novel, you will spend a few years, if you are lucky—most aren’t, trying to get an agent or editor to actually read some of your work. You will discover that you are not only competing with other new writers for a slot in a publishing schedule, but with writers who have been published multiple times.  

If you finally make that sale, you will most likely be given a pittance as an advance, the book will be thrown into the market with no advertising, no book signings, and absolutely no glamor, and you will be lucky to sell any other book because your book will most likely sink like a stone into oblivion and you won't see another penny from it.  That is the fate of most first books.

Only a very few are able to escape that dismal ending to their dreams by making money and creating a true career as a writer, and the money is rarely enough to make a living so they need a supportive spouse with a lucrative job or a trust fund so they can afford to write full time.  

To be successfully self-published, you must hone your craft to the point that the traditionally published must achieve, then you must also develop the skills and soul of a used car salesman to shamelessly slog your books, and you must learn business skills since you are now your own business.

When I tell these would-be authors the truth of the matter, as I have learned being in and around the publishing business for over thirty years, they decide that they should buy a few more lottery tickets because they have a better chance at making big money doing that, and it's a lot less work.  

Life Experience and Writing

QUESTION:  Do I really need real world experiences to write fiction?  In other words, can I write a fight scene if I’ve never hit anyone or been hit?

Real life experiences can certainly inform your fiction and give it realism, but I don’t think it is absolutely necessary.

I have written space battles without being an astronaut, diving scenes and I can't swim, and fight scenes using swords, fists, and futuristic weapons, and I have never used any of them.  (I am a pretty good shot, though.)

I've never had the first reader tell me that I got any of my fight or action scenes wrong.

I have never been punched, but I used to ride.  I have had a horse smash her head into me. I've been kicked and knocked into a tree.  I’ve also had a six-hundred-pound horse fall on me then step on me when she was getting up.  

All that has given me more than enough visceral information about taking physical abuse to use in my writing.

I got my diving scene right through research, then I ran the scene past friends who do dive to check for accuracy.  

However, the more you write about something in particular, say your main character is a diver who spends much of the novel underwater looking for a treasure, the more important having personal experience is.  This is particularly true for a real-life task that readers may have experienced themselves.

As a non-swimmer who has never dived, I would never choose a main character who spends important parts of the book underwater because no amount of research will keep those scenes as authentic as they need to be.

Dissed Writers Fight Back

 QUESTION: I am so tired of being sneered at when I tell people I write. How should I handle this?

Artists have always been met with idiocy and blank looks. It's our lot. We ARE different, after all, but different is good! Without the artists and other creative people, the world would be a bleak place.

For some reason, especially in America, writers and other people with brains are treated with contempt. It's the dumb jocks who are the norm. Painting yourself blue in midwinter and rooting for your football team in an open stadium is normal, but you are weird if you write or read books, or go to sf conventions, or belong to the SCA. Personally, I beg to differ. 

I've discovered that my enthusiasm can win over those blank stares. The trick is to believe in what you are doing and who you are. If you give those people with sneers or blank stares the power to define who you are, then you've lost, and you are nothing. 

Instead, believe in yourself and what you are doing. Writing is one of the hardest jobs in the world, and if you succeed only a little, be that success a finished short story or a few chapters of a novel, then you are a success. Glow with it, and no one can belittle you. 

Writing the Same When We are Different

QUESTION: Why don't authors keep writing the same kind of book? Some of my favorite romance authors have switched to different genres, and I HATE it.

There isn't a simple answer. Here are a few possibilities.

* Failing markets. The writer's genre starts losing readers so publishers want fewer books, and fewer books are sold. An example is historical romances.  Its established authors branched out into contemporaries, paranormals, and suspense novels to continue making a profit at their writing. 

* Respect. Romance authors, in particular, get no respect from their non-romance peers, and this gets really old. Non-romances also have more professional cache. 

* Authorial control. Romance editors exert more control over the final product than in any other genre so the final product is often more of a collaborative effort. At a certain point in a writer's career, this can get really old, particularly when some kid in their first editorial job decides she knows better than an established writer.

* Boredom. An author spends months writing a book that takes you an evening to read, and she then starts another book. If every book is exactly like the last as some readers want, this process can become boring. The creative juices dry up. If the author doesn't change gears, the readers will be the next to be bored.

* Innovations. Genre, as a whole, doesn't stay the same. Romances have changed dramatically over the last twenty years, and woe unto the writer who doesn't change with it. 

* Bandwagon Syndrome. Some authors see a trend become popular, and they absolutely must write to this trend. 

* Changes in an author's life. Writing is an emotional process, and sometimes, things happening in an author's life make them change the direction of their writing. I have had friends going through an ugly divorce who could no longer write about everlasting love when their true love proved to be a cruel, manipulative jerk. One writer lost her young son to a sudden illness. When she started writing again, she turned to novels that expressed her faith in God. 

As much as writers want to please their readers, sometimes, they simply must change direction with their writing. 

Career Paths

Author career paths aren’t always the same.  Over the years, I've watched too many friends and authors I enjoy have their career, through no fault of their own, crash and burn over the idiocies within Big Publishing. (Dirty Big Publishing secret:  Everything is the author's fault even if the author had nothing to do with it.  A bad cover, a literal train wreck which wipes out most of the West Coast book deliveries for that month so sale numbers tank, a failed within-house promotion--all the author's fault.  Toss that author out.)

Most authors get back up, reinvent themselves with a new name, and start a new series, a new genre, or a new publisher.  I traded updates with a best-selling, award-winning friend at Christmas.  She's reinvented herself or started a new mystery series four times, and her newest very successful series has been cancelled because her publisher has decided to stop publishing fiction.  She's got her rights back so the next book will be self-published because she’s tired of publishers who can't get their own sh*t together.  

Other friends sold that first book that was their first book and blazed ahead like the golden children they were to finally hit a minor roadblock.  They got pissy and promptly quit writing.  

Sometimes, authors stagger up after yet another career hit because of bad luck or a publisher's ineptitude and walk away.  After over 30 years of being hit and yet another publisher destroying any chance for my new book’s success through their ineptitude, I walked away, and I'm okay with that. I decided I was too burned out to bother with self-publishing so I'm watching my publishers die, two in the last few years, and my books have disappeared off the virtual shelves. I'm fine with that, too.  

Publishing isn't for sissies, and it's okay to whine or walk away for your own sanity.   

What We Leave Behind

 The phone call woke me.

“You probably don’t remember me, but I’m (name removed).  I used to work for your parents.”

“Of course I remember you.”

“I dreamed about your parents’ store last night, and I wanted to tell you.”  She then proceeded to talk about the store, but she kept repeating the same sentence through the conversation.  “And your momma told me I could do anything well.”  

I’m sure over forty years has passed since my mother complimented her, but that one kind and generous comment had stuck with this woman through all those years.  

Our stories are like that.  Readers remember the emotional glow of a character who has achieved her positive goal, who chooses kindness over cruelty, who wins against darkness.  It’s what makes some stories memorable and others quickly forgotten.  

The light, not the darkness, is what many of us leave behind when our stories are finished.

When things are bad, remember that.  It is a wonderful legacy.

My Great Book Cull

If you’re a writer, you are surrounded by books.  It’s part of what we do as readers and writers.  Then, one day, for some reason like moving to a smaller space or a change in circumstances, some or all of those books must go.  For me, it was discovering that I was allergic to old books and book dust, and most of those book had to go.  This is how I did it.  

I was an English major through three degrees so I had easily a hundred hard cover and trade paperback novels from that part of my life. If these books were in public domain or I didn't care for them emotionally in the first place, into the library book sale pile they went.  As a specialist in the 19th Century, I pretty well cleared out my hard cover and trade paperback shelves.  

The more current fiction that could be bought as ebooks if I ever wanted to see it again went into the library book sale piles.

All those nonfiction research books I collected for a book I would write eventually about the States during WWII, the novel in Victorian England, etc., etc.  I knew deep in my heart that eventually would never come so those were given to the nonfiction librarian to keep or give to the library sale.  The book on the tunnels underneath London was the hardest because TUNNELS UNDER LONDON!  WITH MAPS! All the first editions of North Carolina writers and books on NC suffered the same fate, but the North Carolina Room librarian got those.  

The paperbacks were both harder and easier.  They were also the most toxic to my nose so I had to be brutal.  The books that remained went into plastic, air-tight bins.  After a hurricane destroyed the library in one of the state’s coastal towns and my library asked for popular books to stock the shelves of a large mobile home, I sighed as I realized that all but a few of those books would make others far happier during miserable times than they made me in plastic bins.  Off they went. 

What remained.  A really good, huge dictionary suitable for research and flattening things, books I refer to often in my writing blog, a few research resources I still look at, books of extreme sentimental value like the novel dedicated to me and signed by the author who died several years later, and the cookbooks my mom and I used for many family meals.  The cookbooks are coming apart so I'm slowly making copies of the favorite recipes to share with the siblings and their kids.  

Now, I’m down to one small bookshelf in a room I never use, a plastic bin for the paperbacks, and another small shelf of cookbooks and other resources.  

So, moral of the story.  If I can do this, you can, too.