Writing: the original long game
Writing: the original long game
You thought you “only” had to write a full, painstakingly edited novel and find an agent and publisher? Think again!
If you’re a writer, pay attention: there’s never a better time to start than now! Writing is the longest long game out there.
“It is exceedingly rare for your book to take anything less than a year and a half to publish after the book deal is inked; two years or longer is the norm.” - Courtney Maum, Before and After the Book Deal.
There’s a lot more non-writing involved in writing a book than I thought. To be clear, I never assumed you just wrote a book, got it published, and moved on to the next. Well, except for when I first began, at which point “just” writing and publishing a book seemed like a big enough task on its own. No, I gradually discovered there will be marketing and promoting after the fact (even during), and nowadays the writer is expected to shoulder any amount of that personally. A lot of this info came to me by way of podcasts, and when I say podcasts I mean mostly “The Creative Penn,” which I can’t recommend enough.
But that podcast, as well as others (“Six Figure Authors,” discontinued now but whose episodes are still relevant) are most often by self-published writers interviewing other self-published authors, so their experiences—I thought—would be hugely different than traditionally published authors.
It turns out, as I discovered after reading Before and After the Book Deal by Courtney Maum, you’re not exempt from many of the non-writing things that go into the life of a book. I once heard that self-published authors enjoy, or at least accept, the part of book-work that’s really owning and managing a business, which makes a lot of sense: they are, after all, essentially a one-person business and their own agent, editor, and publisher (to varying degrees). Which implies a traditionally published author likes these aspects less, and so avoids them by becoming traditionally published.
But guess what?! No matter how you publish, the birth of a book requires more than “just” writing the darn thing. That quote above about the timing of the final publication? Revisions, copy edits, marketing plans, call for blurbs, deciding the cover and title, and more all extend this time.
Surprises in publishing
I feel like I’m over-preparing myself for something that you can never be ready for until you’ve done it, and done it multiple times (hence birth of a book), but I’m a curious writer and reader, so I like to know what lies ahead of me (again, I’m getting ahead of myself, but I like to imagine all my dreams will come true and I publish lots of books, every year, until I’m 120).
Here are a few other things that surprised me while reading Before and After the Book Deal:
Even if you find an agent, it’s not a given that your book will be published. An agent does not guarantee this.
Once you find an agent, finding the right editor is the next hurdle before publication. Getting an editor isn’t easy, and can require just as much effort as it takes to find the right agent.
“In 2009, a New York Times article entitled ‘About That Book Advance…’ stated that ‘seven out of ten titles do not earn back their advance.’” This is not a widely announced fact, though it’s not totally taboo. Call it the baby elephant in the room.
It is expected that you write guest posts and essays about your book about six months before it comes out, to drum up excitement.
Only about a dozen debut books “break out,” meaning they sell 30,000 hardcovers or 50,000 ebooks, every year. In fact, debut authors should expect to sell 3-5,000 copies.
Stuff I Like
Before and After the Book Deal by Courtney Maum is detailed and humorous. It won’t tell you the exact steps of everything that will happen as you go about publishing a book—I don’t think anything can fully prepare you for that except having done it already—but it’s a great guidebook.
The Creative Penn podcast by Joanna Penn. I’m sure I’ll reference her a lot, moving forward; in fact, it was during one of her episodes (Different Ways Of Publishing Through Substack And NFTs With Elle Griffin) in which she talks to author Elle Griffin about starting a substack newsletter that inspired me to start this one!