4 ms·
Forget all the tooling. There are two battles: 1. To write the best book you possibly can 2. To print, market and sell that book Far and away the most import
by scandox 10y ago
Forget all the tooling. There are two battles:
1. To write the best book you possibly can
2. To print, market and sell that book
Far and away the most important thing is No. 1, because No. 2 cannot happen effectively without that. And the bar is high - very high. So in many ways the battle is lost or won by the time you've put down your pen. Yes marketing and distribution are incredibly important. Design too. But none of it is going to do much good unless the book really works. And making a book work is not hit and miss. It's the product of a very exact type of knowledge and skill - this is especially true of genre work. Of course, there have been a few tremendous exceptions - but you'll know if you're one of those.
So with self-publishing, as with ordinary publishing: first write a great book.
For that the tools you need are:
1. Someone who can give you tough feedback and who knows what they're talking about
2. A writing group for softer, more regular feedback
3. Long practice in writing shorter work
4. Long practice in critical reading of other people's work, especially unpublished work. You'll never make a mistake once you see that mistake and understand it in someone else's work.
- j_s 10y agoThere is a danger that any nuance you've intended accompany your main point may be lost, since this is indeed how a lot of technical people think: "If you build it, they will come", meritocracy, etc. It is the reason there are a lot of great, undiscovered products out there. However, marketing is the biggest piece of financial success (this may not be the chosen goal). Pretty much all non-technical activity can be classified as marketing except for required business paperwork. Writing something is literally the starting line. Proof that "none of it is going to do much good unless the book really works" is not reliably true, by counter-example: https://www.google.com/#q=bad+books+bestsellers https://www.google.com/#q=bad+books+bestsellers Random technical example (fast NTFS filesystem metadata search) I almost lost because I forgot to bookmark it after reading the only HN comment I've ever seen mention it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13738309 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13738309 And further, I just found the child comment sharing another utility! Edit: Focusing more on preventing misinterpretation.
- scandox 10y agoFWIW I work as a fiction editor for a publishing house. I only mention that because I'm really not that a technical person. I'm more on the arts side. I accept that some bad books succeed, but this really is vanishingly rare. Subjectively even many so-called bad books have really excellent qualities - especially in narrative structure. So there are Bad Books and then there are BADly written books. I agree also with your point: build it and they will come doesn't work. Marketing is essential. But ask people to swallow an unreadable book - which is most books people write - and all the marketing in the world won't save you.
- zhubert 10y agoI definitely agree with your initial post, I'm just not able to offer advice on how to write a good book as I may, or may not, know how :) In the writing groups I've participated in, there seem to be a number of authors that are scared off by the process of getting their work out there. I'm hopeful that this post will help them overcome the technical hurdles in doing so.
- joeax 10y agoThere is a book out there called "Writing the Breakout Novel" by Donald Maass. The book was a tremendously help for me in deconstructing my plot and characters. I rewrote and even rearranged entire chapters. I had subplots that had no closure that I rewrote to provide an ending. I invite you to check out my novel's Amazon page and read some of the reviews. Even the negative reviews praise the story itself, while slamming my writing style :)