Building Inventory

A post that made me laugh (wryly, but sincerely) at Ann R Allen’s blog: You’re not Failing as a Writer. You’re Building Inventory! 

Ann says: A lot of us will realize, after we learn to write better, that the first novel was just a practice piece. But others write excellent beginning novels that don’t get picked up—mostly because they aren’t the high-concept, breakout, hits-the-current-trend-at-the-perfect-spot-in-the-curve material publishers require these days. So what you need to do after that first round of rejections is put the first novel in a drawer and write another. And another. 

A drawer full of manuscripts is a fine, fine thing to have, declares Ann R Allen, and she is absolutely right. She wrote the first part of that post about a million years ago, before self-publishing became a thing. She stands by this advice now with regard to self-publishing, and did I say she was absolutely right? I can’t think of any way to say that strongly enough. Let me allow a wide-eyed puppy to say it for me:

You can self-publish a series even if book #1 doesn’t rock the publishing world. You can build interest as you release more titles. But you’ll get much more traction if you publish them in quick succession, which will be a lot easier if you have already written several titles in that series.

That’s what Ann says. That’s basically it. It’s a short post. I had a strong reaction to it because I’m REALLY SORRY that I don’t have any more complete novels sitting around, ready to be revised with a relatively trivial amount of work. Instead, I have partial novels that probably won’t work as the basis for anything, and a complete long SF novel that would take a non-trivial amount of work to revise, and that’s it. I’m weeping, I tell you, and this is because Ann is totally one hundred percent right: unpublished finished novels that are in pretty decent shape are WONDERFUL to have in inventory.

When I self-published Tuyo, that’s when I decided to take self-publishing seriously. And what complete, basically fine novels did I have sitting around at that moment? I thinkI had these:

The Sphere of the Winds for sure; I’d had it polished and waiting for years by then.

The Tenai Trilogy (The Year’s Midnight; Of Absence, Darkness; As Shadow, A light). Again, I’d had that ready to go for years.

No Foreign Sky. Same thing. I had over-revised it and had to do more work than I should have to get it back to where it should have been, but it was finished and not in dire shape.

Eight Doors.

Some Black Dog novel or other, I forget which.

Maybe the Invictus duology, though maybe not, I can’t remember when I started it. Though it wasn’t finished, so maybe it doesn’t count.

Still, that’s six to nine novels that were finished at the time, and that’s one reason I could bring out a bunch of books every year. I regret very much that I don’t have another six to nine novels sitting around. I suppose I will concede that the giant SF thing could probably be revised into decent shape and would certainly be at least a duology, so I’m not totally out. But it would take a significant amount of time, and I have other things to do.

***

You will indeed get more traction if you can release books rather quickly. If I were going to begin self-publishing in 2026; if I intended to release my first book in January, then here is what I would want to do:

1) Have five books in this series finished, plus a couple books in a different series.

I’m serious. Having a good number of novels finished, with no more than final polishing left to do, would be so, so helpful. You wouldn’t need covers for all of them, and you wouldn’t really need all of them to be polished to a high gloss, but you would want them basically ready. Establishing yourself as an author would be so much faster and so much lower stress if you had six books lined up behind your debut novel.

Then you could —

2) Create a website with a blog and an associated newsletter.

3) Get or make decent covers for your debut novel and at least two more and put the debut book up for preorder.

4) Do some sort of promotion to get preorders, and this is hard to even think about. If it’s going to be your debut novel and you don’t have readers waiting for it, then how do you do this? I’ve never looked at this very much.

How about writing a long short story or short novella that is a direct prequel and giving that away on your blog, and doing as much as possible with social media to get readers to download that story and read it? We’ll specify that the story is great and your debut novel is great. Book Funnel is supposed to be good for giveaways.

5) Set up preorders for the next two books, a month or six weeks apart, even eight weeks, and this is why you want to have multiple books written at the time your first book goes live. I think this would be super useful in a lot of ways.

First, having multiple books up for preorder would reassure your prospective readers that you’re not going to end the first book on a cliffhanger and then stop. You’re not going to get them engaged with your characters and then stop.

Second, you would be able to actually bring out novels in quick succession without going crazy. You could schedule a promotion of the first book to occur simultaneously with the release of the third. Amazon would do some of the heavy lifting for you, as long as you had preorders.

Third, with those books already written, you would be able to focus on Newsletter content and maybe dip a toe into more serious promotion, such as figuring out Amazon ads, while also writing another book at a sane pace. By the time you ran low on “inventory” — the books that were ready to go at the time you published your first book — you would have several more books ready plus you would have had time to figure out some things that worked for you — promotion strategies, blogging schedule, newsletter — lots of things.

Fourth, by the time you’ve brought out the original seven novels plus three or so that you’ve written as you’ve moved ahead, you should have some sort of readership willing to follow you and keep an eye out for future books, and I think you would then be positioned to move forward with a secondary or even primary career as a novelist without going nuts. And the ability to do all this without going nuts owes a lot to having multiple books, mroe than a couple, basically finished before moving ahead.

MEANWHILE

I bet practically everyone who sticks with traditional publishing for a decade has multiple books that did not go anywhere, and this would be super helpful for transitioning from traditional to self-publishing. Or lots of people write multiple novels while querying the first (I mean the first they thought was good enough to query).

Just as Ann R Allen says, those books are wonderful to have in a drawer. You might not use all of them, or any of them. But maybe you will, so never, ever get disheartened and throw them away. I’m one hundred percent on board with Allen on that one.

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