Occasionally, I offer moral support and solutions that worked for me in the comments section of other writing blogs, but I don’t do a lot of it here. What works for me might not work for you, and vice versa. That being said, I’m seeing certain things come up over and over again in certain places on the web, and I feel like I have to put my oar in. Since nobody asked me, I can’t call them “Frequently Asked Questions,” but I feel comfortable calling this “Frequently Seen Questions…”
First Off: Do Not Quit The Day Job
Authors who can make a full time living from writing are…uncommon. They might be extremely disciplined and prolific (and probably got that way by practicing their writing as a side-hustle for a long time). Or they wrote exactly the right book at the right time and got it in front of the right readers. Most of us want to be the second kind, and virtually none of us are. I know I’m not. I think you can probably safely assume that you are not either. It’s okay to have that little fantasy in the back of your heart that somehow This Next One will set the world on fire and you’ll never work 8-5 again. It’s a hard fantasy to crush. I know. But if you encourage it, if you give it more room than that little place at the back of your heart, it just hurts worse every time it doesn’t come true. And because that little fantasy is a liar to practically all of us, do not quit the day job.
Traditional Publication?
In general, traditional publishers acquire books that their editors think are interesting, which today means “interesting to New York hipsters” (or possibly the equivalent flavor of Londoners). If you find yourself in tune with most new books from new or newish authors that New York or London publishers have put out, especially if you have a strong social media presence or know the right people, by all means, give it a shot. I’m not cut out for it, so I self-publish on Amazon.
Independent Publishing
Stay away from any outfit that says they can make you a star if you pay them money to print off 500+ copies of your book. Those are vanity presses, all they do is take your money. Go to Amazon, where they pay you for any copy of your book sold, but you have to do the design and setup yourself. Self-publishing is a hassle, and the less money you have to throw at it, the more of a hassle it is. You can make a cover for free on Amazon or Canva uploading images you own. You can get friends or family members or struggling fellow writers to beta read and proofread your work (the struggling fellow writers will probably need you to do the same for them.) You can download a print template document from Amazon in the size you have in mind, copy paste your book into it chapter by chapter, set the chapter names/numbers as “Heading 1” in Word, and then generate a linked table of contents. From there, you can upload the same file both for your print and ebook.
What to Write About?
What interests you? What sparks joy? Sharing what you’ve learned about science, engineering, history, your hobbies? Reviewing what you’ve watched and read? Do characters and images come to you out of the blue (“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit….”) or do you sit there arguing with things you’ve read or watched until you go away and try to “fix” it? Whatever interests you enough to keep you writing, that’s what you write about.
What About Writing to Market? What’s That?
I…am not very good at doing this but I have read some books that did a good job at explaining the process. Basically, take a type of book you enjoy reading and feel like you could probably write. Figure out what categories Amazon uses to list those books you like to read. Look at the top 100 ebooks, especially the ones that are not discounted, not five books in a series all ranking high at once (usually a sign that there’s a new release in the series and some advertising money behind it) and don’t have a traditional publisher attached to them (because traditional publishers have enough money to push a book to the top of the lists). What are those books about? How does their content line up with what you like to write? What do their covers look like?
There used to be a formula where you could sort of tell how competitive a genre was by looking at the top 100 and seeing where they ranked overall in the store. Basically, if even the lowest Top 100 ebooks (#99, #100) in a category ranked above 5,000 or 10,000 in the store, it was a highly competitive genre where you might have trouble getting visibility. If even the highest Top 100 ebooks (#1, #2) in the category were below 20,000, then you could break into the top 100 comparatively easily, but it wouldn’t do anything for you because relatively few people were interested in that category. The sweet spot was considered to be a category where the top fifteen or twenty books in the Top 100 in that category ranked above 10,000 in the store overall, and the bottom fifty of the Top 100 in that category ranked above 25,000 in the store, suggesting a demand that was outstripping the available supply. However, I’m told it’s not nearly as reliable a metric as it used to be.
This kind of market research matters more for the kind of genre book that people read by the dozen: romances and mysteries and thrillers of whatever subtype, and maybe certain forms of military science fiction. If you tend to write things that straddle genre lines and don’t fit comfortably into Amazon’s categories, you may find this kind of genre research more depressing than helpful. It’s still worth doing, to help manage your expectations of what your book is likely to sell once you put it out there.
Now How Do I Write It?
Having a clear idea of what you’re going to write is key. If stories come to you as disjointed scenes or images, write those down as clearly as you can, and start extrapolating the parts that came before and after you’ve written. (In my experience, writing nonlinearly makes piecing everything together afterwards more difficult, but sometimes it’s all you can do.) If stories come to you as a more abstract concept (“X meets Y”) then you will need to do more thinking about what X is, what Y is, and how they connect. Scribbling ideas in a notebook can help.
I Meant Actual Productivity
I did too. Knowing your story, at least the parts you’re currently working on, is the first step to writing it down. Joining a writer’s space on Facebook or Discord or whatever can be helpful. Do sprints, share your progress with others – any kind of accountability is helpful. If you don’t like typing, or can’t do it for very long, blurting it out into a microphone and then taking the results from your word processor to an online AI for cleanup is now an option.
I Don’t Know Where I’m Going Or How To End It
This is pretty straightforward. Unless you are writing a tragedy or deliberately ending on a cliffhanger, your ending needs the following: 1). a good outcome for the protagonist(s) and at least some of the people they care about, 2). a resolution to whatever danger/obstacle/challenge the protagonist(s) and their allies were dealing with, 3). a bad outcome for any antagonists with enough agency and personality to matter to the author and the reader. Given what you already know about your story, what would that look like?
I sometimes find it helpful to outline backwards from the ending: what needs to happen to achieve that ending? What needs to happen to achieve the leadup to that ending? What needs to happen to achieve the leadup to the leadup to that ending? I’ve never outlined all the way back from ending to beginning, but I’ve found it helpful in bridging the middle of the story. People tend to look at me funny when I describe this process, so don’t feel like you have to do this if it doesn’t speak to you. It’s just a weird thing I’ve rarely seen other people talk about online, and I offer it here as an alternative tool for when nothing else works.
When all else fails, try feeding the last thing you’ve written to an AI, and ask it what comes next. DO NOT use the actual prose it gives you, because it’s usually cliched and terrible and it’s not really yours. But because the AI output tends to be cliched, it will either have you going “hmm, yeah, I overlooked something obvious here” or it will annoy you so much that you will come up with something better. Win-win, right?
I Don’t Have Time To Write
I don’t have useful advice here. If you’re in bad health, if you have a day job or dependents to look after, those things must come first. You will need to carve your writing time out of the space between healing yourself, justifying your paycheck, and looking after others. If you’d rather play videogames or watch your favorite movies/tv shows, or read, that’s okay too. You’re the only person you’re disappointing when you do that instead of writing. And sometimes, maybe even a lot of times, it’s necessary, and you shouldn’t be disappointed with yourself. Maybe you needed the mental break, or maybe what you were watching/playing/reading was somehow relevant to what you were writing. If you get disappointed enough in yourself, eventually you’ll get back to writing, and you will feel that much better for going back to it.
Editing
This is not my strong suit. Find someone to read your stuff and tell you what they honestly think. Don’t throw money at it if you don’t have it. Of the two family members who mostly pre-read my novels, one tends to focus on typos/character stuff and the other on tech/plot holes. If you can’t catch typos and clunky prose any other way, have Word read chunks of your book back to you out loud.
Covers
Getting attractive cover art that’s on-point for the subgenre and doesn’t look amateurish can be a challenge, and to my mind it’s the one thing worth spending money on. I wasn’t really happy with mine until I discovered and subscribed to the image AI Midjourney. No, Amazon doesn’t seem to care if you use AI art on your cover. They want you to document whether you use it, but they won’t stop you from using it. From a legal and ethical point of view, it is important a). to only use public domain artists and literary/film references in the prompts you feed to your image AI and b). avoid name-checking celebrities and other public figures from the 20th and 21st centuries in your prompts. Nobody’s going to sue you for recreating the likenesses of Nefertiti, Cardinal Richelieu or Prince Albert, but I’m 99.9% sure that Bela Lugosi Jr. will sue you if you recreate his father’s likeness for commercial purposes without permission, and if you lean into his father’s Dracula, Universal might sue you as well.
If you don’t like AI art, but have an art hobby (photoshopping, digital painting, Daz Studio/Poser) that can be made to work for your genre, go for it! Otherwise, you’re going to have to pay someone for a cover. Just don’t spend money that you don’t have.
Blurbs
Try to distill the central conflict of the story into 150-200 words tops. Do not include world-building beyond the most basic aspects of the setting. Do not name-check characters other than the protagonist(s) and maybe antagonist. If you have a Motley Crew of Whatevers, refer to the main POV character by name, and the others by whatever quirky trait sets them apart. If it sounds dull, run it through an AI. You will usually get a lot of blah-blah, but you might get a nugget or two that you can build a better, more dramatic blurb around. No, Amazon doesn’t care if you use AI for this. It’s not even part of their pre-publication questionnaire.
Marketing Is Awful and Expensive
This is something I am bad at, so I’m relaying impressions of what seems to work for other people. Do not bother with Amazon Ads or similar marketing unless you or someone close to you already has a good grasp on data science or online marketing (plus the money to spend). Try to find and coordinate with more successful authors with amazon affiliate accounts who promote other authors, and who either line up with you in terms of genre or in terms of story-telling philosophy. If you’re comfortable with social media, pick one platform, stick to it, and try to blog about stuff that’s both interesting to you and relevant to your books without just saying “buy my book” over and over. Broadly speaking, your best marketing tool is a large backlist of books you have written, that are as good as you can make them, with blurbs and covers as good as you can make/buy them, in one genre. If you keep switching genres, it’s going to take you that much longer to build up a large set of books that will appeal to any specific group of people. Trust me. I’ve done it, I am doing it, I will continue to do it. I’ve accepted it as one of the things I cannot change. If you are the same way, you will need to do so as well.
Ebook Sellers/Consumers Are Discriminating Against Me Because of My Beliefs, Race, Subject Matter or Politics
I regret to say that if you are vocal about your beliefs, politics, or ethnic background online, there are probably people who will be prejudiced against you, and it is theoretically possible that they could make your life difficult by one-starring your books on Amazon, to take one of the least-worst examples. However, unless you’ve really built up a name for yourself on social media, or had drama going on with someone more famous, I think it’s unlikely to happen to you. This is the flipside of the idea that your next book is going to be the one to set the world on fire. You might not be able to shake the sense that people are against you, but try to confine that idea to that tiny dark place at the bottom of your heart – don’t let it grow. The main exception would be if you can find some obvious reason why the keyboard warriors would be gunning for you rather than making trouble for one of several dozen other writers of the same level of competence and non-fame. In which case, your best ally is like-minded writers who’ve been through the same thing, and might be willing to champion you. Good luck!
Jaglion Press 