My Journey to Becoming a Published Author
To publish or not to publish, that is the question! (And if so, Traditional or Indie?)
With a background consisting of nothing more than A level English Literature, with no training to write other than being an avid reader my whole life, who did I think I was to believe I could create something good enough for other people to enjoy? I did have some writing experience - having a few articles published in magazines and, I am told, an uplifting, creative daily account of the first Covid lockdown on Facebook when various people encouragingly told me I should write a book. Easy for them to say!
Yet write it I did. Initially it was just for my own satisfaction and I had no desire to publish my novel. It was only later that I felt I had created something worth reading and that it deserved a wider audience.
How did I go about writing a full-length novel?
Apparently, there are two types of writer - method and seat of your pants. I’m definitely in the latter camp!
I started in October 2021 with a large notebook, filling it with longhand scribble - writing, writing, writing, with no clear direction other than a beginning and an end. Transferring it to my PC and giving it some order but without worrying about chapters, grammar, punctuation etc., I had a total of 30,000 words. I gave it to my friend, Sue Forsdike and asked her if it had the legs to write a full story and she said yes.
In 2022, I changed the title from Misunderstandings to Finding Carla and, referring to my travel journals, which I had religiously recorded during our USA trips, I extended it to 65,000 words, finishing at the end of Carla’s Route 66 road trip. I tidied up the grammar and punctuation, etc., and consulted with my American friends, Karen and Monte Strand, to make sure that my use of American speech did not inadvertently include idioms they wouldn’t use.
Then I looked up how to write a book on the internet! I hadn’t wanted to do it before as I was afraid I would lose my voice and end up with something formulaic. That was an eye opener, from which I learnt some hard lessons. Cue a major rewrite. Throughout the process, I was always happy with the story, but I wanted it to be the best it could be and when I thought it was, I spoke to Peter, the owner of Bedford’s Eagle Bookshop, who told me it wasn’t long enough; it needed to be at least 85,000 words. Yikes, where was I going to find an extra 20,000 words without it being just filler? I ran it by my friends and they told me they wanted to know more about some of the characters and this proved to be a sound observation. By expanding the story, it gave me the opportunity to explore Carla and Tom’s relationship further and give other characters more depth.
What surprised me about my writing?
As an A level student, I always used to grumble about having to analyse a book and see what the author meant by this, that and the other. I thought talking about themes was pointless. I didn’t think authors thought things through like that and just wrote. Turns out I was right and wrong. After the basic storyline was there, I weaved some things in afterwards, but mostly there was no conscious idea of how my characters and themes would develop and so much of the story seemed to write itself.
I wouldn’t recommend my method of writing a book. It was more time consuming than it needed to be, but for me, scribbling down what was essentially a number of real-life events, expanding them to make a complete story and then finding out how it should be done, worked for me. Next time, it will be so much easier unless I get writer’s block – something I never suffered this time having so much material to work with.
2023 arrived and I sat on it for several months while I decided what to do next. Eventually, I knew I wanted to publish. The big question was how to go about it. The simplest way seemed to be:
Going it alone
Easy and cheap to do, but I didn’t want to do this. I have read too many self-published books where the story is fundamentally sound, but the writing is terrible. I thought my story was good, but it needed tidying up grammatically and I felt it needed an independent person to filter/improve it. For all I knew I might have been delusional about the book’s content.
Traditional publishing
I abandoned this idea without even trying. After doing online research, I felt that:
Unless you are a celebrity, it is very difficult to get a contract.
If you are lucky enough to get a contract, you might get an advance, but they may just leave it gathering dust until they decide if/when to publish. My main ambition was always to hold a copy of my book (I even manifested the cover, which the talented Rachel Middleton turned into reality) and I didn’t want that to happen.
You lose control over your book – choice of cover, editing process and so on. This wouldn’t work for me.
The royalties are measly.
Assisted self-publishing/author services
This is where you pay for the services of a professional editor and publisher, who suggests ideas for improvement, checks the grammar, continuity and research, and pushes you to write to the best of your ability. Ultimately, it’s up to you whether you listen to their advice. For me, I took on board most of the recommendations, which involved quite a bit of rewriting on my part. If I felt strongly about something, I pushed back, but even so it occasionally needed some tweaking so that the reader would fully understand where I was going with the point I was making. I was really lucky to find Danielle Wrate, who having met me in the London Transport Museum in Covent Garden in June of 2023, really understood me and what I wanted for the book. Using her suggestions, I was able to elevate my writing skills. Best of all, she made the whole process really simple.
Once we were satisfied with the story, attention to detail came into play and in the end you go boss-eyed trying to make sure everything is correct. The rewriting/editing stage is challenging and exciting. You know you’re on to something, but it’s hard work getting there. Continuity is tricky. You add up your characters’ ages and see if it works. You check that things you knew existed between 2008 and 2014 are still there in 2018, and sometimes they’re not. When you are both satisfied, there is a collective sigh of relief.
Not only is Danielle an editor, she’s a publisher too and so she handled all that pesky stuff you have to do at the business end of things. All the deadlines we set ourselves along the way were met and I took delivery of a pallet of books from the printers right on time.
The money you spend is a leap of faith and there is no guarantee that the returns on your sales will get that money back, let alone turn a profit, but you keep control and for that alone, for me, it was worth every penny of the risk. Once your books start to sell, all the profits on the book sales are yours for the books you physically sell yourself. The royalties on Amazon are not great, but you don’t have to do much work to get them.
I thoroughly enjoyed the whole process and would recommend it to anyone with the desire to have a go. There is no such thing as failure. You set yourself one goal at a time and see how far you get. So, for me:
Write a novel – mission accomplished.
Publish a novel – done.
Sell the books – task in progress.
Raise public awareness – ongoing.
The only failure is not to try.
Once you have got this far, you can sit back and watch the sales roll in…if only! Marketing is another ball game, which I will discuss another time.
