The Rush to Publish

We are living in a world now where it is very easy to publish a book. You can write almost anything, any length, with any degree of editing, and upload it as an eBook. Even the eBook vendor websites have means to automatically format your book into the correct file format (despite questionable formatting quality results) and even draft up a cover so you don’t have to recruit a designer, secure licenses for art, etc, to put it all together. Publishing a book right now is so simple!

But should you rush to publish?

When I started this year, I was hoping to start publishing my fiction via self-published eBook as well as query a novel to traditional publishers. I focused my time on my non-fiction early in the year and I encountered a duality I hadn’t expected to find in my writing career: my non-fiction writing style is enormously different from my fiction writing style. As a result of sending most of my time of upping the quality of my non-fiction work for publication over the summer (Novel Marketing), I let my fiction style drift, waiting for when I could go back and concentrate on it.

So while I was confident in my non-fiction for publication, my fiction skills had taken a back seat. I needed to build my plotting, style, setting, atmosphere, and character development skills before I could even think about publishing my first standalone fiction. Recognizing this disparity and need for improvement was a tough pill to swallow–I wanted to be an ambitious writer and start building my fiction author brand. But I had to face the truth: I wasn’t ready yet.

When I give lectures based on Novel Marketing, the first thing I mention is the pivotal first step of fiction marketing: writing a quality book. This means the prose is up to par, the book is edited, the formatting isn’t glitchy, and the cover doesn’t reek of amateur half-effort. I can handle covers, I can format a book, I know great editors–but my prose and story structure are not where I want them to be yet. As a result, I point to that section of the presentation and say, “With my fiction writing, this is where I am. I am putting off publishing my fiction until I improve this area of my work.”

Some of the audience may discredit my marketing advice given that my fiction brand isn’t strong at this point in time, despite the fact that I have a degree in marketing and have done my research. Others, though, tell me at the end, “I am so glad you mentioned that you aren’t ready to publish your fiction yet.”

Acknowledging weak areas in your writing to a crowd is a tough bite to swallow. But I really wanted it to resonate with the audience that just because you can publish quickly doesn’t mean you should.

Are you waiting to publish? Or do you finally think you’re prepared?

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