Category Archives: Publishing

What I learn about publishing,

Publishing, Revising

When is a project done?

I recently had a bit of a crisis of confidence in regards to my work.  While a large chunk of my 3rd draft is new and in need of extensive revisions, the first thirteen chapters have been written, revised, rewritten and revised again.  They’re pretty solid chapters.  But I still found things to change.

I’ve been working to publish for years, and I’m close enough I can almost taste it.  I would love to be able to finish this and move on to the next project, but I don’t want to wrap this up just for the sake of moving on.  This needs to be a good attempt, not just throwing it at the wall and hoping it sticks.

The question is: how will I know it’s ready?

I expect that every author has this crisis at some point, so I can’t believe I’m unique in this feeling.  But it’s hard to imagine Hemingway sitting at a typewriter and not knowing exactly what he was going to say.   That King or Clancy didn’t just write out a book and say ‘Done, what’s next,’ that they had to revise and consider and research.  I’m so used to the final product I have to remind myself each book starts with a simple idea.

In response to my own question, I don’t believe I will know it’s ready.  I could spend years revising and always find something wrong, something I want to work on, something to defer the next step again.  Maybe that’s why an editor is such an important part of the process, so that an author can take a step back and say ‘this is it.’

But for now, I still have a lot of work to do.

Publishing

What to Publish?

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What to publish?

With all the options available to writers for publishing, it is not all that difficult to ask myself: why am I unpublished? I could be published, if all I wanted to do was publish something and be done with it. But I do not want to just be done with it. I want to make something of it, something more than a hobby. That means I have two questions to consider: what to publish and now? This post is about the what.

The first book you publish is important. I have done a lot of research on this topic, and the lessons I’ve learned are that the first book should be one that follows all the rules. Use this to generate some name recognition before the books get large. The Harry Potter series is an example of starting small and getting larger as the series progressed, when people wanted the next book regardless of the length.

I have a book that is written. I am revising the second draft. But it is almost 160,000 words, which is very long. I could split it in two, or cut out everything not from the main character’s view point, or I could try to publish it as it is. But editing a book that long is an immense and expensive undertaking. I am mostly tempted to hold on and publish it later, if and when I have a following of readers.

So what else would I publish?

I have a fantasy book I’m writing that I could wrap up pretty quickly. I have a historical fiction book that will probably be a series, but I have not started writing it. I’ve got a number of ideas, prologues, scenes written out or planned, but nothing that is really ready now.

For now, I’ll just keep writing until I have something.  🙂

-Michael