The incredible
asked that I write a post about writing my book, The Activist Book One: The Inception. I agreed because I thought this could be a great launching point for a discussion on Substack. After all, there is a multitude of published authors on this platform. Many have published multiple books and have seen a large number of sales.Let’s go back to the beginning. My first impulse to write a novel hit me about 15 years ago. I started writing a semi-apocalyptic story about a kid fresh out of college trying to find his way home to check on his family. I always meant that effort to be nothing more than practice.
Fast-forward about three years, and the itch struck me again. I planned to write a book of short stories. I was unprepared for my fourth short story to span twenty-five thousand words and seem incomplete. It was clear to me that a new plan was in order. I changed my plans for a book to expand the short story into a novel. That was approximately two years ago.
I guess the message here is that your book will find you. Don’t think about it too hard.
Now, I had to learn how to write a novel rather than simply completing a book of short stories. I read the book Save the Cat! Writes a Novel. It’s a great book. It tells you the exact formula for writing a novel. It’s packed with information and may be the perfect book to help you write a novel.
There are two types of writers when it comes to books and stories: platters and pantsers. Save the Cat! is for plotters, but I am unequivocally a pantser.
I also knew that my book was different in that I was incorporating about 20 poems into the story, so I started writing.
I used Word to write my draft. Now, Word will help you with some edits, but you need more help. Several programs are available to help you with punctuation errors and other corrections. This is where you can choose how much money you want to spend on producing your first book. Do you plan to pay a few hundred or even a few thousand dollars to pay an editor, or will you self-edit and rely on your beta readers for help?
I was already paying for Grammarly because of my work with a local magazine. I figured that Grammarly would catch most of my mistakes, and my readers and I would catch the rest. It worked well except for a tiny issue. Grammarly does not work well with large documents. It will tell you that it can handle documents of 100,000 words. It cannot. Grammarly will note all changes that need to be made and then continue to find more once those are corrected. This will continue forever. Using Grammarly on a large document is the equivalent of using flesh-eating bacteria to cure a malady. It will help to an extent but will eventually drive you crazy by causing other issues.
I used five beta readers. Some people use one or two. Do what’s best for you. Mine all gave me great insight and suggestions for improving the story or things to think about.
Once the book is done, you have another decision to make. Do you want to hire an agent and find a publisher or self-publish? I queried two or three agents. I got one quick no and decided to self-publish before trying further. Was this the best decision? That’s for you to decide. Plenty of resources exist for you to reach out directly to agents. There are also multiple platforms suitable for self-publishing. This is a personal decision. I suggest researching this to see what you feel is best for you.
I ultimately went with Amazon for my self-published book. Amazon is free, and they have some great tools, including print-on-demand, so you don’t have to pay for a slew of books you may never sell. If you’re good with graphics, you can even do your cover on Amazon. I am not good at this, so I farmed it out to an account on Fiverr for about $100. Aside from my Grammarly subscription and approximately one million hours of my time, this is the only money I spent on publishing my book.
Amazon (KDP) is known to be a relatively easy publishing platform. However, it was not very easy for me. I had to format and reformat my book to make it available in three formats, and I had to learn things about Word that I never knew existed. It was frustrating and took me a long time. If you are good with Word or technology, your experience will improve.
I used Amazon tools to price my book fairly and appropriately. Once it was all set, I could order some author copies to review. I then made additional edits before my launch.
The one area that I still need to work on is marketing. Many who will see this will say, “Well, you sure marketed the crap out of me!” The truth is, I have about 25,000 followers on X in addition to Facebook friends and a few other people to mention this to. I thought it would be enough, but it hasn’t been. The other factor is that this is the first book in a trilogy. I intentionally haven’t pushed it too hard since the second one isn’t available yet. I want people to be able to read all three books if they want to.
This covers most of my journey in writing my first book. It was a challenge and frustrating at times, but in the end, it was one of the greatest experiences of my life.
If you’ve written a book and found an agent/publisher or self-publisher, how did your experiences differ? What advice would you give to anyone ready to embark on this journey?
Until next time,
Take care of yourself,’
Rod
Lots of insight on editing programs. Have you tried ones for specifically authors like Scrivener? I'm stunned to read that with such following there's still been difficult to reach out with the book. How is that possible?
Thank you Rod! I had a lot of problems with Grammarly. It usually serves me well when I write my articles here on Substack. I only feed one or two paragraphs into it at a time. After the punctuation, spelling and rewrite suggestions have been made. I leave that paragraph or two alone and go onto the next. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be able to properly correct an entire sub stack post of about 2000 to 3000 words. And sometimes Grammarly makes mistakes and if you don’t proofread it those mistakes will become apparent later after you’ve published it.
For a book I would definitely find a good editor. Thank you so much for the suggestions!