Randy Ingermanson's Blog: Advanced Fiction Writing, page 15

How Much Should You Pay To Publish Your Novel?

So you’ve finished writing your novel and now you want to get it published. How much should you pay a publisher?

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

Hi Randy.

I am a first time writer who has just finished a novel. I am not sure where I go from here. A couple of publishers have contacted me but They are asking to much to Edit the novel. Can I edit this item myself. I always check your notes, but I am at aloss. Regards Joan.

Randy sez: Joan, you have several options, none of them good. The only consolation I have for you is that you aren’t alone here. You’re in the same boat as every other writer on the planet.

First, let me list the options for getting your novel published. Then I’ll write a paragraph or two on each one:

Sell your book to a traditional publisher
“Self-publish” your book with a custom publisher
“Self-publish” your book with a vanity publisher
Self-publish your book by acting as your own publisher
Self-publish your book as an e-book only through online retailers

There is a lot to be said about all of these options. I’ll say only a little here, trying to give you the main pluses and the main minuses. There are whole books written on some of these options and whole web sites devoted to warning you about others. I will be much briefer than that.

Option 1: Sell your book to a traditional publisher. Most professional novelists choose this route. Typically, you find an agent and the agent sends a proposal to various acquisition editors at publishing houses. If an acquisition editor likes the proposal, she’ll ask for the full manuscript. If she likes that, she’ll take the proposal to her publishing committee and try to persuade them to buy the rights to your book. If the committee agrees, the editor will negotiate a deal with you via your agent. You then sell the exclusive rights to publish the book in exchange for royalties. Almost always, you get an upfront advance on those royalties. Your agent only gets paid when you get paid–15% of whatever you earn.

The pros are that this is a good deal when you can get it. You pay nothing for editing, cover design, marketing, printing, warehousing, and distribution. You get paid up front. If the book doesn’t earn its advance, then you don’t have to pay back any losses. The publisher takes most of the risk (and most of the reward). What’s not to like about this deal?

The cons are that you give over quite a lot of control to the publishing house. They require you to make revisions and if your revisions aren’t up to snuff, then you’ll be in breach of contract. They design the cover and if you don’t like it, you may have very little voice. The publisher typically takes at least a year and often much longer to get the book into stores. If they screw up the marketing, you get the blame. Yes, really. If the book doesn’t sell, everybody will think it’s your fault, even if the publisher blundered. Finally, there’s no guarantee that you’ll ever find a publisher (or even an agent). You might slave for years on your novel and never sell it. That’s hard. That’s horrible. That’s reality.

Option 2: “Self-publish” your book with a custom publisher. I use the term “self-publish” in quotes here because the custom publisher is doing a lot of the work. They will generally provide editing, marketing, cover design, printing, warehousing, and distribution, just like with a traditional publisher. However, they aren’t paying for that work. You are.

The pros of self-pubbing with a custom publisher are that you are in control of the process. You don’t have to persuade an editor and committee to buy your book (because nobody is buying the rights from you.) You decide what services the custom publisher will provide you. You decide when the editing and cover design are done. You typically provide more of the marketing. You typically get paid a bigger cut of the pie (because you took more of the risk).

The cons are that you have to do more work and the onus is really on you to make the key decisions. No editor will tell you, “Sorry this is really a lousy book that will never sell.” If it’s a lousy book, that’s your problem. If it doesn’t sell, you eat the costs. If you don’t know how to market the book, then it dies.

Option 3: “Self-publish” your book with a vanity publisher. This generally looks exactly like Option 2 above, except that vanity publishers are crooks. They sell you services they aren’t competent to provide and they generally overcharge you.

The pros of this are . . . hmmm, can’t think of any. Don’t publish with a vanity publisher.

The cons are numerous. The final product will be inferior. You’ll spend a lot of money and probably will lose most of it. Worst of all, nobody will buy your book.

How do you spot a vanity publisher? You can ask professionals in the business and they’ll generally know the main offenders, but there are zillions of publishers. Many very small publishers are legit. Some big publishers aren’t. The web site Preditors & Editors is a well-known web site that can help you separate the sheep from the goats. It gives information on a large number of publishers, telling you which are recommended, which are not recommended, and which ones to avoid like fire ant infested underwear.

Option 4: Self-publish your book by acting as your own publisher. This option means that you hire your own freelance editor (or do the editing yourself). You hire your own freelance proofreader (or do it yourself). You hire the cover designer, the typesetter, the printer, the warehouse, the distribution system, the marketing (or you do them yourself). You take all the risks. You get all the glory.

The pros of this are that you are completely in control and stand to earn huge amounts of money if your book does enormously well. If you are knowledgable about publishing and have the skills to do most of the work and the ability to hire smart people to do what you can’t do, and if you can market yourself effectively, then this can be a very good option and you can do Xtremely well financially.

The cons are that you are completely in control. All the decisions are on you. All the financial risks are on you. And (for paper editions of books) the upfront costs can be quite a lot. If you work with a print-on-demand printer, then your production costs go down quite a bit. But you still need to pay for editing, cover design, marketing, shipping, and all that. It may be more headache and more cost than you can stomach. Go into this with your eyes open.

Option 5: Self-publish your book as an e-book-only edition through online retailers. This is a lot like Option 4. Again, you are responsible to hire or do the editing, proofreading, cover design, conversion to e-book formats, and marketing. You then upload the e-book directly to any online retailers you like (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Apple iBookStore, etc.) and/or to e-book distributors (like Smashwords, which can optionally get you into most of the online retailers for a share of the profits).

The pros of this are numerous, which is why many professional novelists are using this to republish their out-of-print novels they wrote years ago for traditional publishers. You’re in complete control of the process. If you’re republishing an out-of-print novel, it has already been edited and proofread, so you don’t have to pay for that again. You do still need to pay for a cover design, but that can be had fairly cheaply. Conversion to e-book formats is not hard, and it’s fairly cheap to hire out the process. The online retailers make it super simple to upload your e-book and it costs you nothing. You’re in control of your marketing. Your royalties can be amazingly high–65%, 70%, or even 85% of the retail price go to you.

The cons are that quality is on you. If your book is horrible, nobody will tell you that. If your cover is bad, nobody will tell you. If you have no marketing skills, that’s your problem. The costs may be fairly low–often a few hundred dollars–but they’re still on you.

Joan, you’re probably thinking right now, “Gack! Too many choices! Just tell me what to do!”

I wish I could tell you for sure what to do, but there is no best answer.

Until recently, the right answer was usually Option 1: sell to a traditional publisher. Most wannabe writers never sold a thing. But those who did sell their books got affirmation, got an advance, and had a chance at the gold ring.

For authors with a very strong marketing platform, Options 2 and 4 (legitimate self-publishing with or without a custom publisher) have been pretty good over the last couple of decades. The only problem is that most authors are terrible at marketing. (This is proof that the universe is unfair, because artists of all people need marketing the most desperately, but they’re the ones least likely to be able to market effectively.) But for those few artists who have great platforms, this is a strong ticket to the money.

Virtually everybody will tell you that Option 3 (vanity publishing) is horrible. The only people who disagree are the vanity publishers. Draw your own conclusions.

Option 5 is the new kid in town, and it’s become absolutely huge for professional writers. Authors with a large out-of-print backlist have put them back into print as e-books for little cost. Some of them have made huge money, hundreds of thousands of dollars. Many of them are earning tens of thousands of dollars per year. I would guess that most of them have at least paid back their initial investment.

HOWEVER, Option 5 is not necessarily that great of a plan for novice writers. A badly written book is not going to sell. Most books by authors at the Freshman or Sophomore level are not going to sell. (See my article Freshman, Sophomore, Junior, Author! for definitions of these terms.) A Junior or Senior level writer might do well. Then again, they might not. A lot depends on how good the cover is and how good the marketing copy is.

So Joan, back to you. Those are the options. None of them are drenched in gold. Every one of them has some potential hazards, (and Option 3 is the poison pill from hell). What’s a writer to do?

I have given this advice many times, but it’s worth saying again. Learn your craft. Master your craft. You do that by studying from the experts, writing your tail off, getting critiqued by somebody who knows how fiction works. And then do it again, over and over for the rest of your life. That’s how I got published. Stephen King did it the exact same way.

That’s how you’ll do it if you succeed. I wish you good luck, and I hope that the information you find on this site will move you a little closer to your dreams. Have fun!

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.

Defining the Category of Your Novel in the New Age of Publishing

How do you know the category or genre of that pesky novel you’re writing? Is there some infallible way to know your category?

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

Randy reading the question today about target audience got me thinking of another area I am having difficulty narrowing down. Genre/category.

It seems so simple on the surface, but in reality there are so many parts of a novel that it is difficult. I have even seem some authors call there book one thing while agents and editors call it another.

To make it even more difficult bookstores here have three sections Sci-Fi/Fantasy, Romance, and Fiction. So how is an aspiring author to learn where their book belongs if they never see categories on the book store shelves.

I think I am writing literary suspense (maybe action) because my book is character driven with a plot based around family relationships (so literary) but it is also driven by external events that put the characters in danger (so suspense/action) I think..but there are supernatural elements that could put it in fantasy as well so how is a writer to know?

I am yet to see a list of criteria for telling what genre is what but perhaps I am not looking in the right places please help!

Randy sez: Category is complicated. I discovered this when I was writing my book Writing Fiction for Dummies and got to Chapter 3, on “Finding Your Audience and Category.” I thought this chapter would be a breeze to write, but the more I thought about it, the more subtleties I saw.

I had to talk to a number of author, editor, and agent friends to get it all untangled in my mind. Uber-agent Chip MacGregor was probably the most helpful at getting it all sorted out. Chip was the acquisition editor of my first novel; later on he became my second agent; later on, he spent a couple of years as Publisher at Time-Warner. Now, he’s back to the agenting business and he’s one of my most-respected go-to guys when it comes to questions about the publishing world.

The main thing I realized after talking to Chip is that the primary category of a novel is sometimes defined by its content and sometimes by its target audience.

There are several categories that are defined by the target audience:

Children’s Fiction
Young Adult Fiction
Christian Fiction

If your book falls in one of these categories, then that is its primary category and your book will be shelved in that section of the bookstore.

I have a number of friends who write Christian fiction, and this drives them nuts. If they write mystery, they want it shelved with the other mysteries, not in the Christian section where they’ll be jumbled up with the Amish fiction, the sweet romances, the suspense novels, and what not.

Fact is, you’re not going to change the system by complaining about it. This is the way bookstores do it and they believe they can run their business without any help from the authors. So if you write in any of the above categories, that’s your primary category.

Most fiction will be categorized by its content, however. Here are some of the usual categories:

Romance
Thriller (or suspense)
Mystery/crime
Science Fiction & Fantasy
Horror
Literary
General

These are not fixed in stone. Different bookstores may break out Mystery from Crime, or Science Fiction from Fantasy.

You may also see a Women’s Fiction section, which is like the Children’s, Young Adult, and Christian categories in the sense that it is defined by its target audience. However, it’s unlike them because it generally has no subcategories.

Note that Literary fiction is not defined by its content but by its voice. In Literary fiction, style and theme often play a large role, and language is considered an artistic medium, rather than just a tool to get the job done.

If you really want to get confused, check out Amazon, where the classification scheme can go really deep, with a given category having numerous subcategories, each of which can have subcategories, and often subsubcategories. The paper book store is organized a bit differently from the e-book store. Barnes & Noble is organized differently, and Smashwords is different yet.

Lisa, you describe your book as literary suspense, with possible fantasy elements in it.

It’s not clear to me that the term “literary” applies. I’d need to read a bit to get a feel for your voice and use of language. Having a plot based on family relationships is not what would make it a literary novel (although plenty of literary novels do that). It might actually be women’s fiction, or general fiction. I can’t tell without more information. One thing an agent would do for you is to help you nail down whether the term “literary” applies to your fiction.

Also, it’s not entirely obvious whether the category “suspense” applies to your work. Many novels have an element of danger, but they are suspense novels only when the suspense is the primary aspect of the novel. (In the same way, many novels have a romance thread, but they are romance novels only when the romance is the main story.)

Finally, having supernatural elements doesn’t automatically make the book a fantasy novel, unless those are the primary driver for the story.

Ask yourself what’s the main thing that makes the story go? It sounds to me like it’s the family relationships. To me, that would make it either women’s fiction or general (or some people might use the term “mainstream”).

If you’re working with a traditional publisher, then you really need to nail down the primary category and be very sure that’s what it is. The reason is because the publisher will want to sell your book into bookstores, and the bookstore people really insist that they know what section of the store to shelve the book.

Things have become incredibly murky in this new age of publishing in which authors work directly with the online retailers to publish their fiction. There is no shelf in an online store. An e-book on Amazon can be listed under two categories, and they might be completely different. Barnes & Noble lets you define up to FIVE categories.

I spent quite a lot of time thinking about categories when I released the second editions of my novels OXYGEN and THE FIFTH MAN as e-books. Both of them are apparently science fiction novels (about the first manned mission to Mars).

But I’m a suspense writer, and the only reason I ever agreed to work with my coauthor John Olson on these books was because of the very high suspense content.

John particularly likes fiction with a strong romantic storyline and he absolutely loves fantasy.

Since there were no particular requirements to define only one main category, John and I finally decided to give the book the following categories (with subcategories in parentheses) on Amazon:

Science Fiction (Adventure)
Romance (Fantasy&Futuristic)

We assigned similar categories and subcategories on the other online retailers. It’s hard to know what to call a book, sometimes. The new world of online publishing makes it a lot easier to mix categories and have the best of several different worlds.

Lisa, I hope that answered your question. The bottom line is that assigning a category can be HARD. It’s often very confusing and sometimes can get messy.

Ultimately, the main thing that matters is that your readers know why they like your fiction and know what they get out of it.

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.

Defining the Target Audience for Your Novel

How do you define the target audience for your novel? After all, you want everybody to read your book, right?

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

Hey Randy,

I’m currently reading your “Writing Fiction for Dummies” book, and I’ve come across something which I’m having trouble dealing with.

I’m trying to find out who my ideal reader is, and I just don’t know. I try and relate it to what I like to write, for instance: I want to write a story in an action/adventure genre, with deep characters and an exciting and twisted plot, with a fantastical and/or sci-fi storyworld (Or at least elements of them added to our own world).

The problem is, I don’t know what my target audience is, I mean of course they’ll enjoy what I’ve mentioned above, but actually defining that group of people is what I’m finding hard.

Would they be like me? My interests, my view on life and the world, my kind of lifestyle and personality etc. Or would they be completely different?

Also as a side note, will your target audience and what you want to write stay the same for every novel and story you write or will that change? I have a few different ideas for novels which I really want to write, but as they may focus on the same idea as mentioned above, they do change in how involved the storyworld is and the theme etc.

If you could help me out I’d really appreciate it.

Randy sez: Let’s tackle the easy question first, which is whether your target audience will be different for different books. The answer is “Yes, but hopefully not very much.”

I like to distinguish between the General Target Audience (people who would be interested in your fiction as a whole) and your Specific Target Audience for each book (people who would be interested in that particular book).

You should expect that there is a lot of overlap between these two target audiences, but they generally aren’t identical.

As an example, the General Target Audience for this web site is “anyone who wants to write a novel”. My wildly popular Snowflake method page on this site has a smaller Specific Target Audience, “anyone who wants to plan their novel before they write it.”

Snowflakers are a subset of the people who want to write a novel. They’re a large subset, but there are plenty of novelists who prefer a seat-of-the-pants approach to writing their first draft (or an edit-as-you-go approach, or a detailed synopsis, or some other system).

Many novelists can define their General Target Audience in terms of the category and voice that their target readers prefer. Stephen King’s General Target Audience likes horror written with strong characters but without the stylistic trappings of a literary novel. This is a pretty big audience, but it obviously doesn’t include everyone. No book will appeal to everyone.

Sometimes, it’s relevant to narrow a target audience down further with demographic information, such as age, gender, income levels, or viewpoints on religion or politics.

Romance writers typically target women readers and often specialize to a particular age group (”twenty-somethings” or “empty-nesters” or whatever).

Literary novelists presumably target readers with quite a lot of education and sophistication.

Authors of Amish fiction target conservative Christians who yearn for a simpler, more wholesome way of life.

Ayn Rand targeted readers with a strong libertarian bent.

None of these ways of defining a target reader is always right or always wrong. They make sense when they make sense.

I recently got the cover art for a forthcoming e-book that I’m bringing back into print. (It was published years ago and went out of print). I love this cover. I think it’s my best cover ever. It makes me want to tweak the book just a wee bit so it fully lives up to the promise of the cover. I showed it to some friends of mine. One of them told me that she likes it, but she wanted to know who the target audience is.

I said, “The target audience is people who like this cover.”

Sometimes that’s all you need.

Rory, in your case, it probably makes sense to define your target audience in terms of the category and style of writing they like. I would assume you are part of your own target audience, so it’ll make sense if they look a bit like you. But you probably don’t need to define your target audience in demographic terms. I’d guess that there are some people of all ages and some people from most of the common genders who’ll like your book. But there will be plenty of people who don’t care for your book at all, even though they outwardly look exactly like someone in your target audience.

So in your case, you might want to pick five or six authors who do particular things in the same way you’re trying to do them. For example, you might say, “My target audience is composed of people who loved Orson Scott Card’s book ENDER’S GAME because of the intense action scenes. They are people who loved the epic storyworld of Frank Herbert’s DUNE. They are people who…”

You want to be cautious when you define a target audience this way. The fact is that you aren’t Orson Scott Card or Frank Herbert. If you define your target audience in a book proposal, you need to make it clear that you are targeting readers who like a particular type of fiction, without giving the impression that you imagine yourself to be in the same league as the authors who write that fiction.

Agents and editors see too many proposals that say, “I write like John Grisham (or J.K. Rowling, or Nora Roberts, or whoever), only I’m way better.” A proposal like that almost guarantees a rejection. It’s a sign of an amateur. Don’t act like an amateur.

Always be aware that there are people who will hate your book. No writer on the planet ever wrote a book that appealed to everybody. J.K. Rowling and James Patterson and Stephen King have all sold boatloads of books, but there are readers out there who have looked at the work of each of these authors and said, “Not for me.”

The important thing is that you know what it is your target reader is looking for. Then you can write a book especially for that target reader. It doesn’t matter if your book offends everybody else. As long as it delights your target reader, you will always have a market for your novel.

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 Author Name Should You Put On Your Cover?

When you’re writing a novel, how do you decide what author name to use on the cover?

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

Hi Randy, I love both your blog and e-zine!

My question is whether I should publish under a pseudonym or not. Unfortunately my name (Jessica Smith) is an incredibly common name and so I share it with at least one already published author, although she writes in a different genre to me and uses her middle name too. Does this mean I should publish under a pseudonym instead? Thank you for taking the time to answer my question!

Randy sez: This is a good question and it’s going to affect you for the rest of your publishing career, so it’s worth thinking about carefully.

When I started writing, I though you were “supposed to” use your legal name. So my first several books were all published under the name “Randall Ingermanson.” But NOBODY on the planet calls me “Randall” except telemarketers. Everybody calls me “Randy.” Furthermore, my name is long enough that it causes problems on the cover.

So I’ve recently switched to using the author name “Randy Ingermanson” which feels less formal and more right. Plus it saves two letters on the cover. This has caused me some hassle to make sure that online retailers know that “Randall” and “Randy” are the same person. In the long run, I think it’ll pay off.

It would have been smarter if I’d started off using the right name from the beginning.

Jessica, you have several options, each with advantages and disadvantages, and only you have enough information to decide which is right for you. I don’t know your middle name, so I made one up for you in the examples that follow:

Use your name: Jessica Smith
Use your full name: Jessica Gretchen Smith
Use your initials: J.G. Smith
Use a pseudonym

The advantage of using “Jessica Smith” is that it’s the name everybody already knows you by. When your friends and family search for you, they’ll find you easily. The disadvantage is that there’ll be a bit of confusion with that other Jessica Smith. However, she’s done you the favor of using her middle name, which leaves you free to not use yours.

The advantage of using “Jessica Gretchen Smith” is that it mostly removes the confusion with that other Jessica. Mostly, but not completely. However, this solution is less confusing than using “Jessica Smith” so it might be a good bet if your middle name isn’t too long. You do need your name to fit on the cover in a readable size font. That would be the main disadvantage I can see–if it makes your name too long.

The advantage of “J.G. Smith” is that you remove the ambiguity with the other Jessica. However, there might be another “J.G. Smith” out there, so this might just trade one ambiguity for another. Plenty of authors use initials. J.K. Rowling and J.D. Robb seem to have done OK that way. For sure, your name will be short enough so your publisher can put your name in giant letters on the cover. But you’ll always have to remind your family and friends to look for “J.G.” instead of “Jessica”.

The advantage of a pseudonym is that you have almost infinite freedom to choose a name that’s unique, cool, memorable, and short. The disadvantage of a pseudonym is that you have almost infinite freedom to choose a name that’s unique, cool, memorable, and short. Plus you have to constantly explain to people why you don’t use your real name. Plus, if you ever make it big, all those jerks who ignored you in high school will never know and won’t beat themselves up for being awful to you.

None of the above is a really bad option. If your middle name is short enough, then that option might be the best. But it’s up to you.

The really critical question is this: How important is it to avoid the ambiguity?

For example, if you were writing sweet Amish romances and the other Jessica were writing naughty erotica, then it would be Xtremely important and you should try as hard as possible to differentiate your name from hers.

However, if you were writing police procedural mysteries and she were writing category romances, it would probably be not much of a problem and you wouldn’t need to work quite so hard.

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 Kind of Training Do You Need to Publish a Novel?

So you’re writing a novel but you don’t have a degree in English literature. Are you out in the cold? What kind of training do you need to get your novel published?

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

Hi! My name is Elizabeth and I love your blog!

I am a first time writer working on the first book of a trilogy and my question is,

Do I have to take writing classes or be an English major to write a book?

I had an idea that came to me and have been writing it for over a year in between work and science classes. I only recently thought of trying to publish it but I am worried it won’t be good enough because I don’t have “academic” training but I really want to start pitching the book soon. (I almost completed the first draft).

Randy sez: I wasn’t an English major. I double-majored in math and physics and scratched through college in four years. The way I did that was by taking CLEP tests to get out of as many humanities courses as possible. So I wound up taking only one history class and one English class total.

My lack of training in history and English in college has never stopped me from writing historical suspense novels. The reason is simple:

Education is about learning how to learn. My training in math and physics taught me how to think and how to learn what I need.

So the short answer is “No, you don’t need to have a degree in English literature to write a novel.”

There is a longer answer that is not quite so cheerful. No matter what degree you have or don’t have, you need to learn the craft of fiction writing. And these days, because publishers only market the winners, you also need to learn how to market yourself effectively so that your publisher will perceive you as enough of a winner to put some marketing money behind you. And (because we all have limited time, energy, and money), you need a bit of organizational skill to get it all done.

So you do need to learn, somehow or another, quite a lot about craft, marketing, and organization.

Now would be a great time for me to make a self-serving comment about why I created this web site. After publishing several novels, winning a bunch of awards, and teaching at a fair number of conferences, I woke up one day and realized that I knew a lot of stuff that other writers thought was immensely valuable.

OK, that’s a bit of a fib there. I didn’t wake up and realize that. My friend Marcia Ramsland told me that every month for six straight months, until I finally realized she was right. That’s when I decided to create this site — to teach how it’s done, as best I can. I don’t know everything, but I do know quite a lot. I hear all the time from people who say my teaching is helpful.

Now if I can be REALLY self-serving, I’ll add one more thing. Quite a lot of what I know is packed into my book WRITING FICTION FOR DUMMIES. There is a limit to what you can put in 384 pages, but I did the best I could. The book is the #1 book in the fiction writing reference section on Amazon, and also has the highest customer ratings of any book in that section.

Gack, that’s probably enough self-advertisement for about a year. My main point here is that there is a lot to know about writing fiction, but you typically don’t learn it in school. You learn the craft in three ways:

Writing fiction
Getting critiqued
Studying the theory from excellent books and teachers

I will note that there are plenty of excellent schools with Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degrees, where you can do all of the above. I know a number of writers who hold MFA degrees, and I think getting an MFA is a fine way to learn the craft. It’s not the cheapest way, but it works perfectly well.

However, most working novelists I know don’t have an MFA and have done just fine. And I gather that MFA programs focus on craft but generally don’t teach you much about marketing and organizational skills. So even if you were to get formal training in the craft, you’d still need to learn some things on your own.

So Elizabeth, there are many roads to publishing nirvana. A formal education is one way to get there. An informal education is another. Pick the road that suits you best.

Remember also that getting published requires talent, training, and time. If you don’t have at least some talent, no amount of training or time will get you there. If you do have the talent, you still MUST get the training and you MUST put in the time.

Every year, hundreds of aspiring authors get published by traditional royalty-paying publishers. You can too, if you have the talent, get the training, and put in the time.

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 Can’t Produce a Novel Every Year?

What if you’re one of those slow-working novelists who just can’t produce a book every year? Are you totally out of luck?

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

Hi Randy I love your blog, e zine, software and books, your info has helped me develop as a writer.

I have a question about writing a series. I am writing a trilogy, but am a slow methodical writer. I read what you wrote about how quickly a publisher wants you to have any sequels written. So my question is this, if you are a slow writer, who takes more then a year to write a novel should you complete the series before trying to sell the first book? or at least be one book ahead?

I am a stay at home mom and my children come first making writing quickly quite challenging. I know if you can write a book that quickly that it is not recommended to write them all in case you can’t sell the first one, but would a slow writer need to write ahead in the hopes of the novel selling and the publisher wanting to publish a sequel?

Thanks for all the great resources for aspiring writers!

Randy sez: Good question, Lisa! Not every writer puts out a book every year. J.K. Rowling seems to have done OK releasing books on an irregular schedule, only releasing them when they were done. I doubt any of her fans would have wanted her to put out a half-baked novel just to hit a yearly schedule.

Since there’s no guarantee that you’ll sell the first book in a series, I don’t think it’s a good idea to try to get the whole series written before you start pitching it. If I were you, I’d write the first book, make it as good as possible, then find an agent and try to sell it.

While you’re looking for the agent, you can be working on Book 2. It might take a while. If you find an agent quickly, it can still take a long time to sell the book. Once the contract is signed, the publisher is usually going to take at least a year to bring it to market, and it can take a lot longer than that.

During all that time, you can be writing and editing Book 2, which will be much easier to sell than Book 1. In fact, when you sell Book 1, more likely than not you can make it a multi-book deal just by telling them that it’s the first of a three book series.

So for the short-term, that’s what I’d do.

What about long-term? What if you’re working with a good publisher and you just can’t maintain a pace of one book per year?

That’s a good problem to have. I think you can cross that bridge when you get to it. Plenty of successful authors don’t produce a novel every year. If you’re good enough, it’s not that big of a deal.

Note that some writers have the opposite problem — they write too much, and their publishers don’t want their books competing with each other. So the publisher limits the number of books it will publish by that author.

In that case, authors usually take on a pseudonym and publish their extra work under different names. The names Evan Hunter/Ed McBain come to mind. So do Nora Roberts/J.D. Robb. So do Stephen King/Richard Bachman.

My view is that your productivity level is a secondary problem. The main thing is to learn the craft of fiction writing well enough to sell a novel. Once you’ve solved that, you can deal with the “too little” or “too much” issues.

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 Know When Your Novel is Finished?

When do you quit editing your novel and start marketing it? Is there a foolproof way to know when your story is done?

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

Hi Randy,

I’m working on what I hope will be the last edit of my manuscript. My question is, how do you know when to stop editing? I read that at some point you stop making it better and just start making it different, but how do you know where that point is?

I have learned so much since beginning the story, and am still learning, so I try to incorperate that knowledge as I edit. I want to make my story the best it can be, but at this rate the editing process could go on forever. HELP!

Randy sez: This is a good question. The question is simple. The answer is complex. A lot depends on where you are in your career.

This might be a good time to read (or reread) my article, “Freshman, Sophomore, Junior, Author!” where I spell out the various stages in the career of a pre-published writer. There are several stages after getting published that I don’t cover in this article, but it’s a good start.

If you’re a Freshman or Sophomore, then I guarantee that your novel is not done yet. Period. This is true by definition. Being a Freshman or Sophomore means that you are not yet writing publishable work. Maybe you will one day, but not yet.

However, if you’ve chewed all the sugar out of the story you’re working on, if you’re just tired of the thing, it might be a good time to lay it aside and move on to another novel. You can always come back to it later, when you’re more advanced in your career.

I have a novel on my computer that I wrote when I was a Freshman/Sophomore. I suspect that it’s actually not bad, but I never sold it and I’m sure that if I read it today, the reasons would be obvious. At the time, I had a hard time letting it go and moving on to the next book.

That novel was a necessary stepping-stone along the way to getting published. That doesn’t mean that it has to be published someday in order to earn its keep. It already earned its keep by proving to me that I could write and finish a pretty good novel.

If you’re a Junior, then you should be looking for an agent and the main thing you need for getting an agent is a good manuscript. How do you know when to go looking for an agent with that manuscript?

I would say that your manuscript is done when you don’t know how to make it any better, even after considering the helpful advice of your critique group, your spouse, your sister who reads 7000 books per year, and the 92-year-old woman in your church who tells you it’s “brilliant, honey, brilliant.”

When you can’t improve the thing any more, go looking for an agent. While you’re working on that, start writing a new manuscript, because finding an agent could take a while. A long while.

If you can’t find an agent, then that manuscript just wasn’t what you needed. Maybe the one you’re working on now will be better. (It almost certainly will be.)

If you do find an agent, he’ll tell you whether your manuscript is ready to be published. It probably isn’t. Don’t feel bad if your agent asks you to rewrite your manuscript and sends you a detailed list of things to work on. This means he cares enough about you to make you improve.

If your agent never sells your manuscript (this happens quite a lot), then it probably wasn’t ready. There is no way to make this a happy event in your life. This is always painful. Novelists have to learn to accept that not everything they write is guaranteed to sell. If this is too much for you to bear, then you should try a less risky career, such as blind-folded lion-taming.

If your agent sells your manuscript, then your editor will have a go at your manuscript. Without a doubt, she’ll find a large number of problems. Then it’ll be on you to fix them. The manuscript isn’t done until your editor says it is.

Once you’ve been published, you’re operating on a higher plane than you were before. By now, you’ve got the experience to know when a manuscript is done. If you’re normal.

There are a few sick authors who are too darned humble and believe that nothing they do is ever good enough.

There are a few other insufferably egotistical authors who think that everything they do is golden, even in the first draft.

But most published authors develop an inner sense of rightness. They know that their book will generally be ready after the third draft, or the fifth, or the thirteenth, or however many drafts it usually takes.

The simple fact is that most authors reach a plateau in the quality of their writing after a few novels. They may be constantly striving to improve. They may be actually making small steps forward. But we’re talking about one percent effects here. Small improvements.

Once you’ve reached your natural level of fiction writing, you probably aren’t ever going to make any more quantum leaps. Just my observation of how things actually work for real writers in the real world.

When you reach your natural level, you’ll know when your story is done. You won’t be able to explain it, but you’ll know. You’ll know that your novel is as good as you can make it and you’ll know who to show it to in order to take it up a notch or two.

There is just no substitute for getting other eyes to look at your manuscript. No author on the planet is qualified to be their own editor. (Yes, some of us can be our own copyeditor, line editor, or proofreader. But none of us is able to be our own macro editor. You need an emotional detachment from the manuscript that you will never have.)

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.

Take Another Deep Breath…

[image error] A new release of my novel The Fifth Man is finally out in e-book form, joining the new paper version that was published a couple of months ago.

This is the sequel to Oxygen, a space adventure novel with a strong female lead character. Like Oxygen, The Fifth Man has a storyline that flies, full of suspense, humor, and romance.

About The Fifth Man:

Valkerie Jansen is tough, beautiful, and being pursued by every man on the planet. Literally. The planet in question is Mars, with a total population of four.

Days before a giant dust storm is projected to strike their camp, Valkerie is attacked by an unseen assailant.

Fortunately, there are only three suspects.

Unfortunately, all three of them . . . are innocent.

This is the second edition of The Fifth Man, released in May, 2012. This “Writer’s Journey” edition of The Fifth Man contains three bonus appendices (over 60 pages!) for fiction writers and anyone interested in getting the inside scoop on how John and Randy develop their stories. Learn some of their most powerful techniques, including story drivers, high concept, and scene structure.

About the Authors:

John and Randy have been collaborating on one crazy project after another for the past fifteen years.

Not only are they novelists, Ph.D. scientists, and entrepreneurs who’ve founded four different corporations between them, but rumor has it that they prowl the night wearing steampunk battle gear to rid the streets of vampires, werewolves, and ducks that poop on your front lawn after it rains.

John and Randy deny all such tales as “vicious exaggeration.”

Extras for Novelists

For writers (and for anyone who wants to know the story behind the story), John and I added some extras that I think my Loyal Blog Readers will find immensely valuable. We created three appendices for the novel, totaling more than 16,000 words:

Developing the Big Idea
Developing a Powerful High Concept
Every Scene is a Story

I think you’ll find that second appendix Xtremely interesting. John has this technique he’s been using for years to take “high concept” story ideas to the next level. Editors love John’s ideas, and I could never quite figure out what he was doing to make that happen.

I suspect he’s been trying to explain his technique to me for a long time and I’ve been too dense to get it. But now I do. I always wondered why his novels sell better than mine. I think this is part of the answer.

You might also find that third appendix to be pretty cool. I’ve been teaching for years on the theory of “Scenes and Sequels” or what I prefer to call “Proactive and Reactive Scenes.”

In the third appendix, I had unlimited room for examples of those pesky Proactive and Reactive Scenes, so I packed them in. I analyzed the first 31 scenes from The Fifth Man, showing what made them work. In a few annoying cases, I showed what we could have done better if I’d known 10 years ago what I know now.

Why Only $2.99?

That price won’t last forever. In fact, we intend to increase it this coming Sunday night, June 3, 2012, at midnight California time.

Caveats: Be aware that the online retailers don’t always charge exactly the price we want them to. Amazon sometimes charges a higher price to some customers outside the US and they don’t sell in absolutely every country on the planet. Barnes & Noble sells only to the US (and I think also to Canada). We don’t have any control over where these folks sell and what exact price they charge. We have given them full world-wide distribution rights and we told them the price we want. If they don’t do exactly that, there are reasons, but they’re above our pay grade to understand.

Fortunately, Smashwords can sell to most countries in the world at pretty much the same price, and they make e-books available in the ten most common electronic formats.

Where to Get The Fifth Man

Grab your e-book copy of The Fifth Man here on Amazon for $2.99.

Grab your e-book copy of The Fifth Man here on Barnes & Noble for $2.99.

Grab your e-book copy of The Fifth Man here on Smashwords for $2.99.

If you don’t have an e-reader, you can get free apps for your computer, iPad, or smart phone on Amazon to read Kindle e-books and on Barnes & Noble to read Nook e-books.

You can also get the PDF version fromSmashwords, and remember that a PDF file is readable on any computer.

If you prefer paper and you live in the US, you can order a paper copy here at Marcher Lord Press (the current price is $16.99, and I assume this is subject to change — again this is not under my control.)

The paper edition has the same content as the e-book, but it has a different cover because different publishers always have different covers for a given book.

Merging Storylines In Writing Your Novel

Can you have two independent storylines in your novel that only merge near the end? Or are you going to confuse readers if you do that?

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

I just found your blog while researching writing techniques, but I love what I’ve seen so far. Thanks for everything you do.

Now my question: I have been writing for a short time (approx. 7 mos) but have decided to undertake a huge fiction project that spans at least three novels, possibly four.

A pivitol part of the first two books is the translation of an ancient journal. This leads to the first book containing two storylines that merge into one as the story reaches its climax. The best way that I can think of to distinguish between them is to insert lumps of journal entries as alternating chapters. There wouldn’t be as many journal entry chapters as the regular story ones, but toward the end the journal entries would stop as the truth is revealed.

What is your opinion on doing it this way? Would this work successfully or Leave the reader too confused to continue? With little writting experience, I’m not sure how many assumptions we should make about the readers. Any insight would be greatly appreciated. Thank you for your time.

Randy sez: Mike, it sounds like you’ve taken on a pretty ambitious project here — a 3 or 4 book project for your first novel is quite an undertaking. But J.K. Rowling did OK with her 7-book first project, so it’s possible to do quite decently in a big project like this.

My rule of thumb is that readers are smart. If you give them enough information, they can deal with multiple storylines without any problem.

Tom Clancy tends to do this a lot. Several of his novels include characters (in one case a large tree) that don’t seem to have much to do with the rest of the story. Then, near the end of the book, the person (or tree) converges with the main storyline. I don’t recall ever being confused by this.

So Mike, I think you’re free to do what you want with these journal entries, as long as you make it clear that that’s what they are. You can do that using some sort of a dateline at the top of each journal entry. If I were doing it, I’d play it very straightforwardly, with a dateline something like this:

From the journal of Leonardo da Vinci, May 23, 1512

I assume Mike isn’t writing about Leonardo, but you get the idea.

Generally, your reader is smart and can handle radical changes in time, place, and point of view without any confusion — as long as you make it clear what each time, place, and POV actually is.

This does not mean your reader WANTS you to skip around willy-nilly. The grand illusion you are giving your reader is that she is in some particular time, at some particular place, and inside some particular person’s skin. Your reader wants to get comfortable and experience that time, place, and soul for at least a full scene. Once the scene is over, she doesn’t mind going somewhere else.

If you avoid jerking your reader around too often, she’ll be happy.

What does “too often” mean? That varies from one reader to the next. I shoot for an average scene length of about four pages. Some of my scenes go as long as ten or twelve pages. Some are as short as a paragraph (during a high-action sequence of scenes). But an average of four pages (1000 words) is what I feel comfortable with.

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.

Perfecting that Pesky Point of View

Can you write a story using both third-person and first-person point of view? Will the POV cops arrest you if you do? Will you confuse your readers?

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

Sir, I have recently written a short story christened ‘Remembered’. In this story I wrote initially in third person about a family with a missing mother, then after putting three asterisks I wrote about what actually happened to the mother in first person.

Critics say that since I was writing the fiction in third person, I should not have changed it to first person.

Is it necessary to write the whole story in either third or first person? I am now in a fix whether to change it to third person or not. Kindly help.

Also I have put the story about the mother in such a way that she, at first, tells how she left her home and why(in past tense) and then (in present tense) commits suicide. Some of the critics have commented that since she is dead she can’t be telling the story.

Kindly guide me whether and how to change the story. I would highly appreciate if you kindly spare a few minutes to read it. I will be awaiting your reply. Thanks.

Randy sez: I don’t know who your critics are, but they are wrong. There is no rule that says that all parts of a story must be written in the same POV.

Diana Gabaldon’s bestselling novel Dragonfly in Amber mixed first person and third person POV throughout the story. The reader was never confused.

And that’s what matters — you want your reader to never be confused. If you execute your story well, you can switch between first person and third person smoothly.

The second part of the question was whether a dead person can narrate a story. Sanhita’s critics say he can’t do that.

I say he can. Alice Sebold’s bestselling novel The Lovely Bones tells the story of a 14-year-old girl, Susie Salmon, who is raped and murdered in Chapter 1. The rest of the novel is narrated by Susie from heaven. Nobody is confused by this. Not one reader ever said, “Wow, that can’t happen because, you know, Susie’s dead.”

Readers are generally pretty smart. They aren’t confused by dead narrators, omniscient narrators, or for that matter, cat narrators.

This highlights an important question that all writers should constantly keep in mind: Should you take advice from just anyone?

I’ve phrased the question in a way that makes it obvious that the answer is no.

Be careful in taking advice. Not all critiquers are created equal. And some of them, even when they are giving sound advice, don’t know how to make it clear just how certain they are of being correct.

I often hear novice novelists complain about the “rules.” These “rules” are allegedly fixed in stone and nobody can violate them.

That just isn’t true. There are very few unbreakable rules in fiction writing. There are many rules of thumb. Some of them work so well and so often that you should be wary of ignoring them.

But most of these “rules” can be broken, if you know what you’re doing. You’ll know when you can break one of the “rules” after you’ve learned them so well that you can follow them without thinking.

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.