Randy Ingermanson's Blog: Advanced Fiction Writing, page 14

What If You Hate Your Own Writing?

So you’ve been writing a novel for a while and you suddenly realize that you hate everything you write. Is that normal? Is that bad? Are you going to die? Or are you a Great Suffering Artiste facing the customary doubts of all great Artistes?

Autumn posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

Hi Randy.

I’ve been following your blog for just under a year now and your advice has really benefited me and helped me grow a lot as a writer in that time. So thank you very much for that!

My question is: what happens if you reach a point when you just hate everything you write? I’ve been working on my novel for a long time and I can’t get even five chapter in. Not for a lack of ideas or writers block. I can sit down and write for an hour or more and walk away feeling darn proud of myself. Then I come back to it later and I just hate it! It’s a complete 180. And recently I’ve been doing that with everything I write, not just stuff for my novel. Short stories that I write just for fun I’ve felt like crumpling them up and tossing them.

Is this a phase that all writers go through? I can’t give up writing, it’s in my blood and I have to do it. But I just don’t know how to handle this…

Thank you very much for your time.

Randy sez: This is an excellent question, Autumn. It’s one most writers ask at some point in their career.

I’ve met only a few narcissistic writers who never questioned the dazzling brilliance of their work. About half of them were extraordinary geniuses and the other half were irretrievably awful.

So are you really good or are you really awful?

There are several possible answers:

You might be a terrific writer suffering from the usual “my writing sucks” doldrums that many terrific writers wallow in all their lives. (This is the price of writing that some very good novelists must pay and they never, ever get over it. They think they’re awful but they’re massively wrong.)
Your editing skills may have outpaced your creative skills for the moment. This is not unusual and it passes with time, if you’re lucky. If you’re unlucky, you might always be a better editor than creator. That’s one of the hazards you face in writing. It might just mean you’re a perfectionist.
Your writing might actually be awful. Again, this is one of the hazards of writing. If you’ve got some talent as a writer, the solution to this is to get some training and some good critiques from people you trust and just keep developing your craft. In a year or five or a hundred, you’ll reach the level of craft you need to make yourself happy. Let’s remember that not everybody has talent, so there are no guarantees here, but hard work does tend to pay off.

Now which of the above is the real answer for you, Autumn?

There’s absolutely no way for me to know, because I don’t have a sample of your writing in front of me. Because of the extraordinary demands in other areas of my life, I only do critiques at writing conferences and in my local critique group. So I’m not the guy to tell you if your writing is any good or not.

But there are hundreds or maybe even thousands of good freelance editors out there who can tell you. And there are thousands of published novelists who could also tell you. (It usually only takes a page or two to know if a writer is really good. It only takes a paragraph or two to know if they’re awful.)

So Autumn, your homework assignment is to find somebody who can give you a good objective opinion of your work. If you’ve got a community college in your area that teaches creative writing, the teacher could probably do this. Most writing conferences have many faculty and staff members who can do a great evaluation. There are any number of freelance editors available online (a very few are listed in my blogroll).

If the only question you have is, “Is my writing any good?” then just about any of these folks could give you an answer pretty quickly.

If your question also includes, “How can I make my writing better?” then you would need to pick your evaluator with a little more caution, because not all critiquers are equally adept at all categories, so you’d want to look for somebody who “gets” your kind of fiction. (For example, I’m not all that good at critiquing romance or women’s fiction, but I know the suspense category cold and I can almost always pinpoint exactly how to fix a thriller.)

So get an expert opinion, Autumn, and keep writing. Good luck!

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer them in the order they come in.

Liars and Outliers In The Publishing World

“There are three kinds of lies: Lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

Mark Twain made this saying famous in the US and he attributed it to Disraeli, but it’s not clear who said it first.

And why should we novelists care about statistics? That’s simple. Because the publishing world thrives on statistics. Print runs. Sell-in. Sell-through. Amazon ranks. Dollars earned. Royalty rates.

Last weekend I was at the Novelists Inc. (Ninc) conference in White Plains, New York and had a great time meeting a number of authors, editors, and agents.

One of the words I heard most was this one: “outlier”.

Bella Andre, a self-published romance novelist who has hit the New York Times bestseller list is said to be an “outlier.” (Bella recently sold the rights to the paper editions of her novels to Harlequin MIRA, while retaining the e-book rights.)

Barbara Freethy, who has sold over 2.7 million e-books of her self-published titles is said to be another “outlier.”

Julie Ortolon, who is selling boatloads of self-published e-books, is supposed to be yet another “outlier.”

These authors join a cast of other “outliers” who’ve sold massive numbers of e-books in the last couple of years: Amanda Hocking, John Locke, and Bob Mayer all come to mind.

What is an outlier and why are there so many of them lately?

Malcolm Gladwell popularized the term “outlier” with his book, Outliers: The Story of Success,” published in 2008. As Gladwell explains on his web site:

“Outlier” is a scientific term to describe things or phenomena that lie outside normal experience. In the summer, in Paris, we expect most days to be somewhere between warm and very hot. But imagine if you had a day in the middle of August where the temperature fell below freezing. That day would be outlier. In this book I’m interested in people who are outliers—in men and women who, for one reason or another, are so accomplished and so extraordinary and so outside of ordinary experience that they are as puzzling to the rest of us as a cold day in August.

Let me put on my physicist hat for a minute. In science, an “outlier” is anything that is so improbable that it demands an explanation. Some examples:

A basketball player’s height is listed as 68 feet. This is in fact impossible. No human could be 68 feet tall. The most likely explanation is that the player’s height is 6′8″ and somebody made a typo when recording it. This kind of outlier is a simple mistake.
In 1610, Galileo pointed his telescope at Jupiter and noticed four moons circling it. The current theory of astronomers then was that all the heavenly bodies — the sun, the moon, the planets, the stars — circled the earth. By this theory, it was impossible for moons to be orbiting Jupiter. But there they were. It took a few decades, but eventually it became clear that the existing theory was wrong. This began a revolution in science that continues to this day. This kind of outlier is a sign of a wrong theory.
In 1982, an experiment at Stanford University detected an event which appeared to match the signature of a magnetic monopole. According to current physics theories, magnetic monopoles can possibly exist, but none had ever been seen before. None has ever been seen since, although a number of experiments have searched for more monopoles. There is no obvious interpretation for the event. This kind of outlier has to be classified as an unsolved mystery. It could be a mistake. It could be a Nobel-prize-worthy discovery awaiting confirmation. Nobody knows.
Every so often, one of the major lotteries has a jackpot that goes up into the hundreds of millions of dollars. Eventually somebody wins it. The odds against winning are fantastically high, and the winner appears to be an “outlier”. However, the explanation for these “outliers” is simple: Somebody has to win the lottery. If you continue running the lottery long enough, somebody always does. It’s a statistical certainty.

So now back to the many so-called “outliers” in the publishing world. What’s going on here? Are they simply mistakes? Harbingers of a faulty theory? Unsolved mysteries? Or statistical certainties?

I think it’s obvious that these authors aren’t simply mistakes. Nobody added a couple of extra zeroes to these people’s sales numbers. The top self-published authors really are selling millions of copies.

There has been a lot of talk about the “e-book revolution” and some people believe that this means that the world is changing to one in which all authors will be rich. I believe there may be some truth to this, but it’s exaggerated. I believe that MORE authors will be rich in the future (because more money will be going direct to authors and less will be going to large corporations and to agents). But I don’t think that all authors will ever be rich. There will always be bad books that don’t sell. Always.

Are the new “outlier authors” unsolved mysteries that can be ignored because they’re not repeatable? This seems to be the view of some agents and editors I’ve talked to. In my view, they’re wrong. There are just too many authors selling millions of copies of self-published e-books. There needs to be a simple explanation. And there is . . .

Are these best-selling self-published authors merely statistical certainties? Are they like the lottery winners — somebody has to win, but whoever does is just plain lucky? The answer, I believe, is “partly yes and partly no.”

Yes, it’s a statistical certainty that there will be a few big winners among self-published authors.

No, they aren’t “just lucky.”

Here’s what’s going on, and in my view, it’s pretty exciting:

People often assume that there is some sort of “bell-shaped curve” that tells you how much authors are going to earn. According to this notion, there ought to be a few big winners, a few authors who earn almost nothing, and most of the authors are “in the middle” and earning a moderate amount.

That idea is completely wrong. That has never been true in publishing. There have always been a tiny number of gigantic-earning authors, a few high-earning authors, a fair number of moderate-earning authors, and a very large number of poorly-earning authors. That’s not a bell-shaped curve. It’s the 80-20 rule. 20% of the authors earn 80% of the money. Mathematicians call this a “Pareto distribution.” It’s not fair, but it’s the way things have always been in traditional publishing.

Exactly the same thing is happening in the new class of self-published authors. There are a tiny number of gigantic winners. A few big winners. A fair number of moderate-earning authors. And a huge number of authors who earn very little. And let’s be clear, the big winners aren’t merely “lucky.” They’re reaping the rewards of talent plus hard work.

Only a couple of things have changed, but they’re highly significant.

First, with traditional publishing, most of the money paid to the publisher didn’t go to the author. Some of the money went to the printer, some to the truck driver, some to the warehouse guy, some to the editorial staff, some to the sales team, some to the marketing people, some to the publicity people, some to the janitor, and some to the stockholders. By dribs and drabs, a lot of money leaked out, and the author ended up with 5% or 10% or possibly as much as 15%.

Second, with self-publishing, authors tend to price their e-books lower than the trad-publishers and those low prices tend to earn much more money.

In a nutshell, a self-pubbed author prices e-books smarter and gets all the money. These two facts make a huge difference.

A novice author who might have not sold at all to a trad publisher now earns a few bucks or a few hundred by self-publishing. Not much, but enough to get on the board.

A good debut author who might have earned $3k to $5k from a trad publisher now earns that much or more by self-publishing. Still not much, but the remarkable thing is that it’s sometimes a whole lot more than they’d have earned with a trad publisher.

A more seasoned author who might have earned $20k to $50k from a trad publisher now earns (in some cases) six figures.

An author with a strong brand and a good following who might have earned $100k from a trad publisher now earns (in some cases) seven figures.

Let’s be clear that there are no guarantees here. I know trad-published authors who’ve tried self-pubbing and have hardly earned anything. But I’ve also heard from a lot of formerly trad-published authors who are now doing MUCH better by self-publishing.

Something is going on here, and it’s lame to call successful self-pubbers “outliers”. Once an outlier is explained, it’s no longer an outlier. And I’ve given the explanation above.

Just to summarize it all, the explanation is in three parts:

The Pareto distribution guarantees that there will be some big winners, a fair number of moderate winners, and a large number of low-earners. Just like with trad-publishing.
With digital self-publishing, more of the money goes to authors than with trad-publishing.
Self-pubbers tend to price their e-books smarter than trad publishers.

Given all this, does it make sense for authors to still have agents and to still work with trad-publishers?

Of course it does. Trad-publishers do paper books at a scale that beats what an individual author can do. This is why superstar Bella Andre sold the paper rights to her books to Harlequin MIRA. But she kept the e-rights. Why? Because she believed she could market her e-books better than any publisher. A lot of authors I’ve talked to believe they can do this better.

This week, Penguin and Random House announced plans to merge. The obvious reason is that a merger will let them get more efficient at producing and selling paper books. It’s not clear that a merger will make them a dime’s worth more efficient at producing and selling e-books. Paper books need scale. E-books don’t.

One last thing that I should be clear on: Some authors are not entrepreneurs and will do better by trad-publishing. The self-pubbed authors who do best appear to me to all have a strong entrepreneurial spirit. There is no reason for trad-published authors and self-pubbers to look down on each other. Many authors choose a hybrid model, where they trad-publish some of their books and self-publish others. Whatever works is fine.

But let’s have no more dismissing the most successful self-pubbers as “outliers.” An outlier ceases to be an outlier when you know the explanation.

And now you do.

My #1 Tip For Teen Novelists

At least a couple of times per week, I hear from young novelists. They all have the same two basic concerns:

“I’m only 12 years old [or 15 or 17 or whatever]. Will anyone take me seriously?”
“Do you have any tips for me?”

Randy sez: Since these two questions seem to be universal with writers under the age of 20, I’ll deal with them today.

First, is it possible for a 12 year old fiction writer to be taken seriously?

Yes, of course. IF the writing is good. The same is true if you’re 22, 42, or 102. Age doesn’t matter. What matters is quality. If you have great writing, you’ll be taken seriously. If your writing is really lame, then you won’t. Simple as that.

Now the problem is that the average amount of time it takes to become a good writer is five to ten years. One of my friends took 26 years to get published. I took 11. I have some friends who got their very first book published within a couple of years of starting writing. (Grrrrrr!)

Quality takes time. If you’re only 12 years old, then the odds are pretty high that you just haven’t put in enough time yet to become a good writer. (The usual estimate is that it takes an average of 2000 hours of writing time to get good enough to be published. Of course, some super-talented writers take fewer hours, and some writers just plain don’t have the talent and will never get published no matter how many hours they put in.)

If you’re 12 now and start writing consistently, you’ll probably get published at a much earlier age than the guy who starts writing seriously at age 29 (which is the age I started). A head start is a head start.

There’s one other issue with young writers, of course, which is that a 12 year old just doesn’t have as much of that pesky “life experience” as someone in their thirties or forties. And life experience is one of the main ingredients that go into fiction writing.

Bottom line, if you’re 12 years old, go ahead and write fiction with the expectation that you have a chance at getting published someday. The key word here is “someday.” Probably won’t happen this year. Or next year. Probably won’t happen before you graduate from high school. Could happen sometime during your college years (and how cool would that be, to be already published when you graduate from college?)

There’s just no reason to put off learning to write fiction. The sooner the better. Start today. If you have talent, never give up. If you don’t have talent, then that’ll become clear eventually and you’ll naturally turn to something else for which you do have talent.

Now on to that second question, about “tips” for writers. I’m not sure why, but this request seems to come only from teens. I can’t remember an adult ever asking for “tips” on fiction writing. I won’t speculate on the reasons for that — it’s just my observation.

And the simple answer is, “No.”

Writing fiction is a complex task that nobody ever fully masters. It’s like being a chess grandmaster or a brain surgeon or a fighter pilot. A few tips just aren’t going to cut it. You’ll never do brain surgery with a couple of tips on slicing open a head. You just won’t.

Tips won’t make you a novelist. Here are the four things that will:

Talent.
Training.
Practice.
Critiques.

Talent is what you’re born with. If you have talent, then be grateful to God or your parents or the blind shuffling of DNA, whichever you think most appropriate to thank. Talent is required, but it’s also overrated, in my opinion. Lots of people have talent. Most of them don’t do much with it.

Training is what you get from teachers like me, from web sites like this one, and from books. Training massively speeds up your learning process, because it gives you a thousand rules of thumb for what usually works and what usually doesn’t. There is no substitute for training. The day I discovered Dwight Swain’s classic book TECHNIQUES OF THE SELLING WRITER was the day I started making real progress. Part of the reason I wrote my book WRITING FICTION FOR DUMMIES was as payback to the writing community for the years of training I got.

Practice is the hard work you put in, day after day, year after year. Millions of writers have talent. Hundreds of thousands of them get training. But only tens of thousands of them ever put in the practice time that it takes to become a publishable novelist. If you want to be a writer, then write. A million words is usually enough.

Critiques are the feedback you get from other writers and from editors. Getting critiqued is painful. So is running hills, but hills make you strong. Getting critiqued makes you strong. You need to be careful about who you get critiques from. You have to find somebody who knows what they’re talking about and who also gets your writing. You may find a critique group with several other writers. You may find a critique buddy. You may find a professional freelance editor. Every writer is different, so the group or buddy or editor that works for other people may not work for you.

So that’s my tip on fiction writing — there are no tips. There are no easy roads to glory. If there were, everybody would be a bestselling author earning a fabulous living while lounging around the pool.

I don’t know the exact number, but I would guess there are maybe a thousand authors in the US who earn a full-time living writing fiction. There are tens of thousands more who earn a part-time living.

But just about all published authors have plenty of talent and work their tails off. Most of them, early in their careers, got the training they needed and found a critique group or critique buddy or freelance editor who really got them.

If a teen writer has talent, there is no reason he or she can’t someday get published. Not right away, but someday. Just add training, practice, and critiques.

And by the way, NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) is coming up in November. If you want to have some fun and get a bit of group discipline to write a 50,000+ word novel, there may be no better way than by doing NaNoWriMo.

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer them in the order they come in.

Should You Self-publish Your Novel?

Writers these days have two roads to fame and glory — self-publish or go with a traditional publisher. How do you decide which road to take? Will self-publishing ruin your reputation? Will traditional publishers cheat you out of your hard-earned money?

Despan posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

I need help and advise.

I was planning to self publish, hoping to evaluate the performance of the book in terms of sales and readership before trying to use the traditional publishers. then while i was doing my research, i realised that you have traveled both routes - published by traditional publishers - Zondervan and also by Bookbaby (self-publishing.) I would like to be advised on the best route for a beginner like me.

I would be happy to be assisted please.

Thank you and God bless you and your team

Randy sez: You’ve put your finger on the question that many writers are asking these days, Despan.

I should clarify one point, however. I’ve published with several traditional publishers, but my self-publishing has been with Amazon/Barnes&Noble/Smashwords/Apple, rather than with Book Baby. I have nothing against Book Baby, but I haven’t worked with them. The two books that I’ve self-published have been second editions of books that were originally published with traditional publishers.

A large number of my published author friends have done exactly what I’ve done with their out-of-print novels — they’ve edited them, paid a graphic designer to create cover art, packaged it up as an e-book, and posted it for sale on the major online retailers.

Some of my author friends report no luck with these ventures. Some of them report very good results. I’d classify my results so far as fairly good. I think that as I release more e-books, they’ll all do better. One of the best ways to promote an e-book is with another e-book (since all your books should list all the others).

In the case of out-of-print novels, it’s a no-brainer to self-publish it. The cost is pretty minimal. The potential revenue is huge. Few traditional publishers are willing to republish your out-of-print novel, so that’s rarely an option.

But what if you’ve got a novel that has not yet been published? Should you self-publish it or go with a traditional publisher?

I suppose the answer to that depends on your goals.

If the main thing you want is to see your name on the cover of a book and you really don’t care if it earns any money, then your quickest way to get there is to self-publish it.

If the main thing you want is to get the ego boost that comes from being validated by a traditional publisher, then you can rule out self-publishing. You have to go with a traditional publisher.

Being a selfish guy, my main priority is to earn the most money for each book.

Let’s all remember, of course, that publishing a book is a very low-probability way to earn a lot of money. So let’s be clear on this — I didn’t decide to become a writer for the money. I became a writer because writing is in my blood and I can’t help myself. Having made that decision to become a writer, I want to maximize the money that I’ll earn. It just seems dumb to make decisions that would minimize my earnings.

I hope we’re clear on that, but just in case we’re not, I’ll repeat it. Writing will probably not make you rich. But if you know that and still want to be a writer, you should at least try to earn the most you can from it.

Here is my #1 piece of advice on self-publishing: Never self-publish a book unless you believe that it’s good enough that you could sell it to a traditional publisher.

Why? Because if your book is so bad that you couldn’t ever hope to sell it to any traditional publisher on the planet, that probably means that readers are going to hate it. Yes, there are a few rare exceptions to this, but mostly it’s true. Would you read a book that every traditional publisher thought was terrible? I didn’t think so. Treat readers the way you want to be treated.

So let’s assume that you’ve got a manuscript and you’re pretty sure it’s good enough to sell to a traditional publisher. How do you proceed?

That leads to my #2 piece of advice on self-publishing: Never self-publish a book unless you believe that you could market it at least 20% as well as a traditional publisher.

The reason for that rule is simple. Traditional publishers typically pay royalty rates of 25% of net revenues on e-books. Your agent will take 15% of that 25%, leaving you with about 21% of net revenues. I rounded that 21% down to 20% for simplicity. So if your publisher can sell 10,000 copies of your novel, then you only need to sell about 2,100 self-published copies at that same price point to generate the same amount of revenue. Of course, you might lower the price and then you’d need to move more copies, but you get the picture.

What if you know you’re horrible at marketing? I’d say in that case you’ve got no choice but to go with a traditional publisher. Of course, most traditional publishers these days expect their authors to do the lion’s share of the marketing. So being horrible at marketing is a bad idea these days. Don’t be horrible at marketing. Learn how to be an effective marketer.

What if you know your book could never sell to a traditional publisher? I’d say in that case you should work on your craft. Writing a novel is easy. Writing a good novel is hard. Give yourself the time and training to become excellent. You wouldn’t try to become a brain surgeon with 50 hours of training. Nor a fighter pilot. Nor a chess grandmaster.

Learning to write fiction well takes hundreds or thousands of hours of work. That may sound like bad news, but the flip side is that it’s also bad news for all those other wannabes you’re competing with. If you put in the time and they don’t, then who’s going to win?

I have a few other bits of advice if you want to self-publish your novel:

Get your novel edited by a professional freelance editor. I believe that no novelist on the planet should be his own editor. You need an objective hard-eyed critique of your fiction. I don’t do freelance editing, by the way, so please nobody ask me what my rates are because I’m not available at any price. And yes, I follow this advice myself. I always hire talented editors to critique my work.
Pay a graphic designer to create the cover art for your book. Very few authors have graphic design skills. Find somebody who does.
Don’t spend massive amounts of time and money trying to do social marketing. This is merely my opinion. I’m aware that the vast majority of writers believe that social media will take us all to nirvana. Being a numbers guy, I’m skeptical. But I don’t have time to elaborate here. I often teach marketing at conferences, and it takes a few hours to lay out my vision of how to do marketing right. Social media is a small sliver of that, and should not suck huge amounts of time out of your life.

Well, Despan, I hope that helps. I talk to editors and agents all the time, and if I can distill what they tell me down to one thing, it’s this: “Be a brilliant writer.”

Easy to say. Horribly hard to do. But if you become a brilliant writer, you have a lot better chance of succeeding in the wild and crazy world of publishing. There is no certainty, ever. But brilliant writers have the odds in their favor.

Good luck!

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer them in the order they come in.

What If You’re Writing A Novel But Don’t Have A Story?

So you want to write a novel, but you don’t have a story yet. Everything you think of has been done before. What do you do?

Gavin posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

Hi Randy

I’m halfway through reading your ‘writing fiction for dummies’ book and I felt the urge to contact you for advice on what I hope is a common issue for many aspiring writers.

I say ‘hope’ because I hope you have the answer [image error]

Essentially I want to write a novel, but I have no storyline. Anytime I concoct a storyline in my head it feels stereotypical / not unique. On my computer I have Snoflake Pro open and an MS word document open. Both empty but for a blinking cursor.

I suspect i am suffering from having not discovered my creative paradigm as you describe. I purchased your Snowflake Pro with the belief it underpinned the logical approach I take to nearly everything I do. I seem to be drawing a blank though.

It may be an impossible question to answer, but do you have any tips or methods to share in terms of how does one decide on what story they want to tell.

Not unreasonably, your book and software probably assumes the reader has a storyline, so the more I progress through the book the more I feel I am not ready to progress. Sometimes I feel there are concepts in the book where it would be infinitaley easier had I nailed my storyline already.

I guess the one-liner here is “you know you want to write, but you don’t know what to write about”. Is there a method to even narrow it down?

The genres that interest me are Spy, Thriller, Military, Private Eye stuff. I feel this where I belong based on my own interests and fairly average military background.

The story-world time period also seems to present a challenge. Modern day stuff feels so saturated and unless you are Tom Clancy probably difficult to research. World War II era would be easier to research and I already have alot of foundation knowledge in that area, but I am bit skeptical on the market demand for WWII Fiction. My childhood fantasy world consisted of a private eye scenario with a dingy office and a hot assistant, and whilst I get a surge of creativity down this line, it feels so overdone. In some ways it is all a bit intimidating. Perhaps it is just a state of mind I need to get into whereby it doesn’t matter?

I don’t know, is the answer that ‘overdone’ is OK? There is always a market for the overdone as long as you can do it well? If I went down this path is it recommended to at least identify and implement a differentiator or variation?

In any event, I hope these questions are not inappropriately soliciting free consulting but I have grown to view your book as my early mentor and as a result felt comfortable enough to pose the question. Ironically, writing this email has helped me somewhat but I would truly value your insight.

Thanks and Best Regards.

Randy sez: Wow, that’s a long question, Gavin. Actually, at least two questions, if I’m not mistaken. Fortunately, both of them have short answers.

The first question has to do with originality. What if the story you want to write has been done before? The answer to that is, welcome to reality. Every story idea has been done before at some level. Your problem is to find a way to do a story that’s been done before in a way that hasn’t been done before. That’s the problem every author has every time they sit down to write a new novel.

I wouldn’t worry about this too much. Even if it’s been done before, take it and run with it and see what you come up with. An old story can seem very different if it’s got a fresh new character or a different storyworld or some new spark that makes it unique. Sometimes, that new spark only comes as you write. This is especially true for seat-of-the-pants writers, but I think it’s true for all of us. Most of my ideas come to me while I’m actually writing the first draft. Yes, even when I’ve got the high-level plan for the book mapped out. That’s not a bad thing, it’s a good thing.

The second question is this one, which I quote: “you know you want to write, but you don’t know what to write about”. Gavin, I think the solution to this is to read more. You know in general the sort of story you want to write, but you don’t know exactly what yet. You have no story burning a hole in your brain begging to get out.

So go read a bunch more books. Nothing inspires me like reading a new author or a new genre. If writing fiction is in your blood, then at some point you’ll find a book or an author and you’ll say, “Man, I’d like to write a story kind of like that, only way different.” And then you’ve got something you can run with.

But what if that never happens? What if you never get obsessed with an idea for a story? In that case, my guess is that writing fiction is not in your blood, and it might be best to try something else. There are many other ways to be happy in life than by writing fiction.

At some point while I was in graduate school working on my Ph.D. in physics, I realized that I’d never be really happy unless I gave myself the chance to write one particular story. It’s a long story that has so far spanned several novels and still isn’t complete, but it will be someday.

If that never happens to you, Gavin, it doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. But it might mean that you aren’t cut out to be a fiction writer. If that’s the case, then there’s some other thing you can do with your life that you’ll love far more than writing fiction.

If you’re a novelist, the one thing you can’t do without is passion for your story. Without passion, nothing you write will be good. With it, you won’t be able to keep yourself from writing.

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer them in the order they come in.

Composting Your Story Idea Before You Start Writing

How do you develop your idea for your novel in the earliest stages when it’s horribly unfocused and vague? Are there any steps you can take to speed up the “composting” phase?

Sarah posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

I am planning my first ever writing project - a fiction novel for teens/young adults. I stumbled across your snowflake article which has been an excellent starting point, and having read that article, I can see that my idea is still “composting “. I have ideas for characters and mental glimpses of scenes, and a theme that will underpin the whole story.

As keen as I am to get started on my snowflake, I am not ready yet, and I am wondering if you have any tips to help with composting? Any tips on character development or the story pre-snowflake stage? If so, I would love to hear them.

Randy sez: A little background first on what I’ve been up to lately: I was at the ACFW conference in Dallas last week where I had a chance to hang out with about 700 novelists, editors, and agents. It was great fun and some friends of mine even cajoled me into going swing dancing with them. I also had a chance to reconnect with one of my college roommates whom I hadn’t seen in 32 years. That was really cool.

One thing that I was reminded of at the conference is this: Every writer has a different process for developing story ideas. Sarah’s question is about what to do before starting my widely used Snowflake method of designing a novel.

I should make it clear here that many writers don’t Snowflake. If you’re a seat-of-the-pants writer, you just sit down and start writing, without doing any planning, any composting. That’s OK if that’s the way your brain is wired.

I’m a slow starter, so I take forever to get started on a project. Here’s the way I do it when I’m working on a novel without any coauthors. When I think of an idea for a novel, I write down the basic idea on a pad of paper and put it in my filing cabinet under “Ideas for Novels”. Then I let it sit for years. Whenever I get more ideas for the book, I’ll take out the pad and write them down. I may discuss the idea with friends and write down their suggestions. But I don’t have a very orderly process for this phase of the project, which I call “composting.” It’s what happens in the cracks while I’m working on other projects.

Composting this way is really just slow-motion brainstorming. Sarah, if you’re not as slow as I am, you might prefer to just make time to do real brainstorming. You can do this with a group or alone.

To brainstorm in a group, get a bunch of writer friends together and tell them your basic idea for your story. Then ask them for ideas. Let them talk. You just write it all down as fast as you can scribble. You’ll get all sorts of crazy ideas. You won’t be able to use most of them. That’s OK. The idea here is to jiggle your neurons. It may be that NONE of the things your friends suggest are usable — and yet hearing them all will get your own creative juices rolling. That’s the goal.

To brainstorm by yourself, open up a document in your favorite word processor tool and give yourself a fixed amount of time — say five minutes or fifteen minutes or whatever. Then just start “freewriting”. The rule is that you have to type as fast as you can, typing whatever comes into your head without censoring. Don’t fix spelling errors. Don’t delete anything. Write like a demon, whether it makes sense or not. Fast, fast, fast, no stopping. Again, a lot of it will be completely useless. But the goal is to pick out the golden nuggets. You can do this every day or every week until you’ve got enough nuggets in place that you think you’re ready to move on to the next stage.

I’ve coauthored two novels with John Olson, and the composting we did was in a series of very intense conversations we had, either on the phone or while walking around the lake near his house. John usually set the stage by framing a question about the story that we needed to answer. I’m pretty good at generating all sorts of random and crazy and useless thoughts, most of them incoherent. John is good at synthesizing all that random nonsense into an actual idea. This usually takes quite a while. It’s not uncommon for us to talk for an hour or two and come up with only a few good ideas.

Compost is wherever you find it, Sarah. Don’t be afraid to come up with bad ideas. They’re often stepping stones to good ideas. You can compost ideas slowly, as they come to you over months or years. Or you can compost them quickly, by setting aside time specifically to compost.

As a little side note, John and I recently came up with an idea for a software tool that will help novelists compost their ideas more effectively. We’re going to build it for ourselves and then if it works well we’ll make it available to the world on our web site at a reasonable cost. This tool is still in the planning stage so I don’t have any information yet on when it might be available. But it’s something I desperately need for myself, because I’m awfully slow at composting and this tool would speed things up massively.

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer them in the order they come in.

How Do You Make A Living As A Novelist?

How do you earn a decent living as a novelist? How do you get started? Who pays you and when does it happen?

Brennan posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

You’ve probably already answered this question, but here it goes.

I’m in my second year of High School, and love writing fanfiction, so much so that I plan on making writing my career.

I’m wondering, how can I begin doing such a thing? Do I start as a freelancer and write blog posts and such, or write a series of short stories into one large collection, or move straight ahead onto the path of writing a novel (my big goal).

Also, while I’m in the process of writing this novel, how will I make income? I’m not entirely sure how all of this works; if a publisher will pay you as you’re writing, or if they only pay you when copies start selling, or what.

I know if you won’t be able to answer this, I understand.

Randy sez: These are good questions, Brennan, and plenty of older writers don’t think about them soon enough.

Your question came in while I was in New Zealand teaching at the delightful Romance Writers of New Zealand annual conference. My wife and I had a great time at the conference and also touring New Zealand both before and after the conference. I got to see Hobbiton! My wife conned me into taking a mud bath in the sulfur springs at a place called Hell’s Gate in Rotorua. We went sea-kayaking in Motoeka. We were out of the country for 15 days and it’s taken me almost that many days to get caught up on things.

Let me be blunt: Earning a living as a novelist is hard. I just sent out the September issue of my Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine this morning (only 9 days late!) and there I talked about the economics of fiction writing. A very few writers do stupendously well, earning millions of dollars per year. The top 1000 novelists make quite a good living at fiction writing. Everyone else struggles. They have a day job or a working spouse or an inheritance or they live in poverty.

There is no way to change that, because the market for fiction is a free market, and free markets reward only the top performers Xtremely well. There are fields where you can earn excellent money for mediocre performance. Fiction writing is not one of them.

All of that is the bad news. The good news is that fiction writing is immensely rewarding to you personally. If writing fiction is in your blood, then it’s in your blood and you won’t be able to stop yourself from writing. If writing fiction is not in your blood, then my comments above may steer you away from it into something safer and more lucrative, such as whipless lion taming or blindfolded skydiving.

OK, so let’s assume writing fiction is in your blood. What’s your career strategy? How do you break in? Who pays you and when?

Brennan, since you’re in high school, you’ve got plenty of time to develop the fundamentals. Fan fiction is not a bad place to start. It normally doesn’t take you anywhere moneywise (with rare exceptions like the Fifty Shades of Grey author). But you can get your feet wet using other people’s storyworlds and characters to learn how to write.

But fan fiction is not real fiction. If you’re going to write fiction, at some point you need to be an original. You can write short stories, but there isn’t a lot of money in them right now. (Short fiction may make a comeback with the rise of self-published e-books, but I’d say the jury is still out on how this is going to work out for short stories. Definitely novellas seem to be on the rise.)

So I’d say that eventually you’ll want to write a novel. A novel is a complex project and it takes a lifetime to master this art form. You won’t get paid until you sell your work to a traditional royalty-paying publisher or until you self-publish it. Either way, you MUST have a strong story before you’re going to get paid a dime. Let’s look at those two avenues for payment:

If you decide to publish with a trad publisher, then you’ll need an agent to help you sell your book. Your agent will expect that your story is strong, fully developed, and well-polished. Some agents have the patience to work with an author who is 90% of the way there, but most agents have hundreds of wannabes submitting stuff that is 90% of the way there. If you get an agent, he or she will try to sell your work to a trad publisher. There is no guarantee this will succeed. If it does, you’ll sign a contract that sets up a payment schedule. You normally get paid in stages: maybe 25% on signing, 25% on delivery of the manuscript, 25% on acceptance of a polished manuscript, and 25% on publication. Right now, publishers play all sorts of games to prolong the payment cycle, so don’t expect these terms. Your agent gets paid 15% of what your earnings, and he doesn’t get paid until you get paid. A trad publisher will pay all the costs of editing, cover art graphic design, marketing, sales, production, and distribution. They also take the lion’s share of the money. High risk, high reward for them. Low risk, low reward for you.

If you decide to self-publish, then you have some upfront costs. You have to pay an artist to design you a cover. You really need an editor. (Every novelist needs an editor. I pay a freelance editor to review my work.) You may need to pay somebody to create the e-book files. Then you just upload those to Amazon, B&N, and the other online retailers and start earning money. If you take this route, all the responsibility is on you. If you have a crappy cover, bad editing, lousy marketing, or anything else goes wrong, it’s your fault. It’s high risk, high reward for you.

One of your questions was how you get paid while you’re writing. The answer is that you don’t. This is one of the horrible truths of writing fiction. Income is backloaded. Nobody is going to pay you during the early years when you’re learning to write. The big rewards, if they ever come at all, will come to you after years and years of unpaid labor. There is no way to make this sound cool. It’s not cool. When everybody wants to be a rock star, it naturally makes it hard to become a rock star. This is one reason why it makes sense to start working hard now while you’re still in high school and still have free room and board.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the fact is that it’s hard to become a novelist. It’s even harder to get rich at it. You need talent–loads of it. You need training (people like me are here to provide that). You need persistence–this is the main ingredient. Keep persisting and in five or ten years, you’ll reach whatever your potential is as a novelist. If that’s good enough to get published by a trad publisher, then you’ll probably sell your work for an advance. If it’s good enough to reach your market, then you could also do pretty well as a self-publisher in the exploding e-book market.

But there are no guarantees. None. It’s quite possible to work for five or ten years and never earn a dime from your writing. I spent ten years writing fiction and in the tenth year, I finally sold a short story to a local magazine for $150. This worked out to $15 per year, or 3 cents per hour of effort. In the eleventh year, I sold my first nonfiction book and then my first novel, and I was launched. But I didn’t know that would happen when I began my eleventh year of writing. I was going on faith that someday I’d sell something.

What it all comes down to is how much you believe in yourself as a writer and whether that belief is well-founded. If you have talent and if you get the training you need, and if you believe in yourself enough to keep at it for years, then you can get published. Tens of thousands of writers have done that. Probably hundreds of thousands. But only a few of them ever become millionaires, so be careful of setting unrealistic expectations.

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer them in the order they come in.

Is Writing Fiction From A News Story Plagiarism?

Suppose you see a news story and you think, “Wow, that would make a terrific novel!” Are you a plagiarist if you base your novel on that story?

Chloe posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

I have an idea for a novel that was inspired by a news story that was published a couple of years ago. The only thing I’d like to use is the plot, because in my novel the setting will be changed to some imagined future (instead of a historical event) and none of the characters in the news story will be recognizable (I will be creating my own characters).

Here are my questions:

a) Is using a plot in that manner considered plagiarism?

b) Should I be concerned about about getting into any legal trouble for using a plot I’ve read in the news?

c) Do I have to give credit to the source of my idea, and say that the novel is “inspired by real events”?

Thanks! I look forward to your reply.

Randy sez: A fascinating question. Since it’s essentially a legal question, I first have to give you the standard disclaimer that I’m not a lawyer, I am not giving legal advice, and you should consult a qualified lawyer for all legal opinions.

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, on to the question. As I understand it, plagiarism is not about reusing a plot you’ve seen somewhere else. There just aren’t that many plot ideas out there. People reuse plot ideas all the time.

Plagiarism is about reusing another person’s words. If you are using somebody else’s expression of a concept, then you need to at least give them credit (if your usage falls within the “fair use” guidelines). If you want to use more than “fair use” allows, then you need to get permission. You can look up the rules online for what constitutes “fair use.”

Taking over the basic sequence of events from a news event is not plagiarism (assuming you’re not planning to use the news report verbatim, which you apparently aren’t). It may be a few other things, if you’re not careful:

It might conceivably be invasion of privacy, if the news story didn’t reveal the identities of the characters, and if your presentation of the characters might reveal their true identity. But that’s not the case here.
It might possibly be so close to the real events that it isn’t really fiction, it’s actually non-fiction. But that’s not the case here either.
If the news story was broadcast widely enough, and if it was sensational enough, it might already be the storyline of numerous other novels and movies, in which case yours would be considered nothing new. But it sounds like this wasn’t a widely-publicized story and you’re changing the setting and characters enough that this probably isn’t an issue.

I have many novelist friends on various e-mail loops, and sometimes when there’s a bizarre story in the news, one of them will post it on a loop with the comment, “This would make a great novel.” It’s not uncommon for one of the other writers to immediately call dibs on it. Which is not actually possible, because a news story is fair game for anyone, so long as you don’t invade anyone’s privacy.

Given all that, Chloe, I’d say you’ve got nothing to worry about except the quality of your writing, which is the same thing all writers worry about. So get working on it and have fun!

You asked if you should say in your novel that it’s “inspired by real events.” It depends how closely it tracks with reality. If you intended your novel to be a novelization of a real-life story (in which case you might need to buy the rights to the story from one of the people who were in it), then it would make sense to include the tag about being inspired by real events. But if you change the characters and the setting, as you intend to do, then I don’t see any reason to draw attention to the source of your inspiration.

Bear in mind that many historical novelists write entire series of novels based on real historical events with at least some real historical characters. This has never been considered plagiarism (unless the author were to quote entire long sections from ancient historians, which would be too boring for words, because ancient historians didn’t know how modern fiction works). In this case, it’s always assumed that the story is inspired at least partly by reality. Authors rarely say so, unless the events are so unbelievable that readers might say, “No way, that could never happen!”

My own CITY OF GOD series is set in ancient Jerusalem and brings in several real characters from history, such as the apostle Paul and James the brother of Jesus of Nazareth. Like all historical novelists, I have my own vision for who these characters were. My vision is different from every other novelist’s vision, so I don’t worry much about other novelists who might use these same characters. (I hope to release this series in e-book form later this year and then add a few more books to the series.)

In RETRIBUTION, the third book in this series, I felt it necessary to explain that the most horribly shocking sequence of scenes in the novel actually happened. In the spring of AD 66, certain young Jewish rabble-rousers in Jerusalem publicly mocked Caesar and the Roman governor, Gessius Florus. The governor retaliated by sending out soldiers onto the streets of Jerusalem to arrest hundreds of innocent people and crucify them on the spot without a trial. According to the historian Josephus, who was there, Florus had about 3600 men, women, children, and even infants crucified in one day. The number is probably an exaggeration, but no historian doubts that a large number of innocent people were tortured and killed all in one day. However, this incident isn’t commonly known, and it’s so horrific that I included a note at the beginning of the novel to make it clear that this actually happened. As retribution. For an insult.

Bottom line, Chloe, is that the only reason I can think of for adding a note that your story is based on real events would be if the story is so massively unbelievable that you need to remind people that truth really is stranger than fiction.

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer them in the order they come in.

NASA’s Billion Dollar Thriller on Mars

Sunday night at 10:31 California time, NASA will be running a high-stakes thriller, live from Mars, with billions of dollars at stake.

There’s no room for error. The one-ton Mars rover Curiosity is traveling right now toward Mars at 13,000 miles per hour. Within a seven minute window of time, it has to come to a clean stop, exactly on the surface of Mars, at a precisely determined spot inside the Gale Crater.

How do you go from 13,000 to zero in seven minutes? It’s complicated.

The ship doesn’t carry enough fuel to slow it down, so it’s going to fly through the thin Martian atmosphere, using a heat-shield as a giant brake. At 13,000 mph, a ship flies like a brick, but it does fly — if you steer it on a needle-sharp course.

If you go in too steep, the atmosphere doesn’t bleed off enough speed and you go splat on the ground.

If you go in too shallow, you bounce off the atmosphere and skitter off into space, with no way to turn around and try again.

You must fly at exactly the right angle, letting the atmosphere bleed off your speed, using your heat shield to keep you from frying to a crisp.

But that only slows you down to 1000 mph. Seven miles above the ground, you open your parachute. The atmosphere of Mars is less than one percent the density of earth’s atmosphere, so the parachute has to be huge. Even so, it can only slow you down to about 200 mph. Still way too fast to land.

Now you release your parachute and fire off your rocket engines. You don’t have much fuel here, but you have enough to slow you down to 2 mph.

Can you land safely at 2 mph? Yes, if you happen to be inches above the planet when you reach that speed. But there’s a catch.

Those pesky rocket engines are blasting out hot gases to slow you down. If you’re a few inches above the ground, those hot gases are going to blow up a massive cloud of dust that will mess with your rover’s instruments. You can’t safely get inches away from the ground with your rockets.

Here’s where it gets crazy. You use your rocket engines to hold you steady a couple of dozen feet off the ground while you lower your rover on a cable down to the surface.

As soon as the rover touches down, you cut the cable and zoom your landing ship away to crash land somewhere safely far from the rover.

It’s never been done before. NASA has spent over $2 billion on this project, and now we get to find out if it succeeds. If everything goes right, the rover will be sending back photos and scientific data for the next decade.

And if it fails? Don’t even talk about failing. There was a mission planned in 2016, but it’s been cancelled. There was a mission planned in 2018, but that’s been cancelled too.

If the Curiosity mission fails, it’s going to be a long, long time before NASA gets the money to try again.

Here is a YouTube video, “7 Minutes of Terror,” showing how it’ll all play out:

And why spend all that money going to Mars?

It’s good science, for one thing. It’s great science, in fact. I’m a physicist, so don’t get me going on that or we’ll be here all day.

For another, the challenge of exploration always has unexpected benefits — from the 15th century exploration of the New World up to the Apollo missions to the moon that began in the 1960s.

More importantly, taking on difficult challenges gives mankind a vision. Yes, $2 billion is a lot of money. But the US government spends $2 billion every 4 hours and 52 minutes of every day. Vision is a precious commodity, and we need all we can get.

The rover Curiosity is a robot. Why send a robot? Why not send humans?

If a robotic mission fails, that’s bad but nobody dies.

With humans on board, everything changes. As Dave Akin noted many years ago, “Space is a completely unforgiving environment. If you screw up the engineering, somebody dies (and there’s no partial credit because most of the analysis was right … ).”

Someday, we should send humans to Mars. It costs more, because humans need to take life-support systems with them and they need to return home. Every life-critical system needs a backup and a fail-operational option. That adds weight, and every pound you send to Mars costs money. Every extra system costs money and adds complexity.

As my Loyal Blog Readers know, back in 2001 and 2002, my buddy John Olson and I published a couple of novels about the first human mission to Mars. We set those missions during 2014 and 2015, the earliest time-point that we could envision for a human mission to Mars. But the first novel OXYGEN actually begins on August 14, 2012 — just a couple of weeks from now.

Why 2012? Because when you’re sending humans to Mars, one of the hardest tasks is finding people with the right psychological makeup. You’re sending people on a three year mission in which they might die, they might see their friends die, or they might have to make an agonizing decision using “the calculus of suffering.”

Not everybody’s head is screwed on right for that kind of a mission. If you send the wrong people, if you make just one mistake, you could kill everybody.

[image error]In our novel OXYGEN, things go horribly wrong and it’s up to the humans to make the hard choices about who gets to breathe. That is doubly hard when two of the four crew members are in love. Read more about OXYGEN on Amazon.

[image error]In the sequel THE FIFTH MAN, an unexpected hazard is waiting on Mars. NASA thought it sent a crew of four — but is it possible that a “fifth man” has come to Mars? How is that possible and what is his mission? Read more about THE FIFTH MAN on Amazon.

The virtue of sending humans to Mars is that humans are still much smarter than robots. If you have to make a split-second judgment call that weighs human values against each other or calls for imagination, then a human is still far better than a computer.

The virtue of sending a robot to Mars is that a robot doesn’t need oxygen, water, or toilet paper. Robotic brains are fast and never get tired. A robot is tough. Just don’t expect it to use imagination or make human value judgments.

Sunday night’s mission belongs to a robot named Curiosity. Good luck, Red Rover! May you arrive safely, make great discoveries, and pave the way for some of us to join you someday!

Self-Editing For Self-Published Fiction

How do you go about editing your self-published novel? Are there some steps you can take to make sure your fiction is ready to go before you push the button to upload to the online retailers?

David posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

I saw your blog about knowing when your book is finished, and you seemed to gear your response towards those who are seeking to be published via the traditional route. But for those of us that are considering the self-pub route, how would you recommend we decide when our book is finished and ready for publishing?

Randy sez: Good question, David! As recently as three years ago, most professional authors felt that self-publishing didn’t make good financial success. (That was the advice I gave in my book WRITING FICTION FOR DUMMIES. It was good advice at the time, but things have changed radically in three years.)

Today it can make all kinds of financial sense to self-publish a novel in e-book format, with one caveat.

A self-published novel should be just as well-written and well-edited as a traditionally-published novel.

There are actually two issues in your question, David. First, you have to decide if your level of craft is good enough to justify publishing anything yet. Second, you have to decide if the actual book you’ve written is ready to be published. Both of them have the same solution:

You need a second opinion from a qualified editor. I need to expand on this, because there are at least four major steps in editing a novel: the “macro edit”, the copy edit, the line-edit, and the proofreading.

I’m not saying that you need somebody to do the copyediting, line-editing, and proofreading. You might well be able to do these yourself. Some authors do these tasks for a living and many authors are competent to do them. (Some authors are incompetent in one of these areas, and if that’s you, then you know it and you should hire somebody to do these jobs.)

There’s one task no author is qualified to do. You can’t objectively do a “macro edit” on your own work. You’re too close to it. You are always going to see your novel subjectively. You need a qualified editor to read your novel and tell you whether the story is working–the concept, the story structure, the characters, the theme, the voice.

Here’s the procedure I’m using for a couple of novels that I’m working on which I plan to self-publish:

Write the first draft.
Pay a professional freelance editor to do a macro edit and produce an analysis of the story.
Revise the manuscript, either following the advice of my editor or (on careful consideration) rejecting that advice.
Copy edit, line-edit, and proofread the novel.
Hire a graphic designer to do the cover art.
Prepare the novel in the standard e-book formats. (To do this, I style the manuscript in Microsoft Word, export it to HTML, clean up Microsoft’s horrible HTML using my own custom software, and package the HTML in epub and Kindle formats using the free software Calibre.)
Upload to the online retailers–Amazon, B&N, Smashwords, and the Apple store. Smashwords is also a distributor and they take care of getting my work into other online retailers, such as Kobo, Diesel, etc. Note that Smashwords does its own e-book conversion direct from Microsoft Word format, which is handy and can produce quite good results but you have to create the Table of Contents manually, which is a hassle.

Most of these steps are obvious ones that anybody would take, with the exception of Step 2. Amateurs don’t get their work macro edited. Professionals do.

And where do you get this magical macro editor?

You may get good results by having a writer friend do your macro edits. Some writers are brilliant analysts and can produce an excellent report for you, detailing the issues you have in your concept, your structure, your characters, your theme, your voice, and so on. But some writers are terrible at this, so don’t trust your macro edit to just anybody.

A good macro editor doesn’t have to be a writer. She doesn’t even have to be a professional in the industry. She just needs to get your writing, know how to tell you what’s right with your fiction, and know how to tell you what’s wrong. Each of those points is important.

Your editor must get your writing. I once had a professional editor at a major publisher who didn’t get my novel. He hated it, in fact. Thought it was drivel. (Another editor at that same publisher thought it was my best stuff ever, and other editors who’ve seen it agree. But this one editor just didn’t like it.) Fortunately, the project crashed and burned and neither I nor the editor had to suffer the injustice of him editing my work.

Your editor must know how to tell you what you’re doing right. She is going to give you a report detailing all the things wrong with your novel. If she doesn’t also point out the many things right with it, then she’s going to crush your ego and possibly kill your novel. Don’t let this happen. Make it clear that you desperately need to know what’s good in your work.

Your editor must know how to explain what’s wrong. She needs to be sensitive here, but firm. She does not need to know how to fix the problem. Fixing your fiction is your job. Pointing out what needs to be fixed is your editor’s problem. She may point out that your craft simply isn’t at a publishable level yet. If so, then get a third opinion to confirm that. If your craft really isn’t there yet, then go get some more training (that’s what this web site is for) and then rewrite your novel and have your macro editor look at it again.

Every writer is different. Every editor is different. When you find an editor who gets your work and who can distinguish the good from the bad in your work, hang on to her forever, because she’ll be gold for you. If an editor fails in any of these areas, never use her again. She may be great for somebody else, but if she’s not right for you, then that’s a showstopper.

A macro edit will generally cost you. If you’re very lucky, you might have a friend who will do it for free. Typically, it’s going to cost hundreds of dollars and sometimes as much as a few thousand dollars for a high-end professional editor. You don’t always get what you pay for, so be wary here.

I don’t do macro edits myself, so please nobody ask me for my rates. When I need macro editing, I work with Meredith Efken at FictionFixitShop.com. She gets what I’m trying to do with my fiction and she knows how to tell me what’s good and what’s bad. She may or may not be the right editor for you, but there are plenty of other fish in the sea.

As I noted above, after you make revisions in response to the report of your macro editor, you still need to copy edit, line-edit, and proofread your work. These are mechanical tasks that you can do yourself or hire out. It’s up to you.

When those tasks are done, you’re ready for cover art, file conversion, and uploading.

Don’t try to make it too complicated by spending forever on the editing.

Don’t try to make it too simple by skipping the macro edit stage.

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer them in the order they come in.