6 ms·

I'm writing German science fiction novels as a hobby that are around 700-800 norm pages each and learned the hard way that at least in the German publishing mar

I'm writing German science fiction novels as a hobby that are around 700-800 norm pages each and learned the hard way that at least in the German publishing market there are virtually no program places for science fiction, very few agencies accept manuscripts in that genre at all, and publishers rarely accept novels larger than 400 norm pages from a first-time writer. I'm currently sitting on 8 manuscripts - two of them are actually 1400 norm pages each. I'm writing on my ninth novel now and will one day give away all of them for free. The problem is that correcting and finalizing them into book form (e.g. typsetting in LaTeX) takes too much of my spare time. I'm just writing this as a friendly advise. At least for smaller markets like the German one, do not ever expect to be able to make any substantial amounts of money from your writing hobby. The trend is against it, and it's much cheaper and less risky for publishers to get a successful US writer translated than to accept a new local one. People are also reading way more English originals than they used to. Besides, agencies are looking for urban fiction, "novels for young women", gift books, etc. (Before you ask, agencies have attested me that the quality of my writing is fine, but what they say and what they think are two things and this may also play a major role.) Of course, it's still my favourite hobby. Once you start you cannot stop. I don't think that any particular lessons can be learned, because everybody writes in a different way and under different circumstances. The bottomline is that it's not hard to write a lot. ;)

restalis 8y ago
Here's a market strategy: write off-shots of your long novels as teasers. Make them tasty (as their primary reason is to give the readers a taste for the main piece), make them as close in style as possible to the main work, although you may focus on different aspects in each of them, and lastly - make them convergent (towards something that "happens" to be missing). Let's say shorter stories around some independent characters which at some point get in contact with one main work character somewhere at the end of the novel. Make that interaction stand out and the main work character larger than life in some way. The shorter novels should be easier to push onto market, maybe even independently, and should provide the necessary ground for rolling out the main work. Heck, that should be THE publishers' advice for first-time writers out there.
- meuk 8y ago
  Sounds like excellent advice. In the Netherlands, we have spaces where you can leave and take books. You could always bind some books yourself (google 'DIY book binding'), or buy a small batch of books, and leave them at such a place. I also remember there are companies that allow you to publish and sell your work, and handle the printing and shipping. I don't remember the exact companies, but that sounds like a good fit for the poster.
  - nestorD 8y ago
    lulu.com is such a company (not affiliated but I have friend that have used it).
- Cthulhu_ 8y ago
  I'm not a writer, but I don't get why first-time writers - as in, first time they're trying to get their works published, not that they've only now tried to write a book - try to do too much as their first project. I think they should really force themselves to start with short stories first; focus on finishing a story. That avoids a sunk cost, avoids people beating themselves up for what they believe is their life's work getting rejected by publishers (for e.g. being too long), etc. Same with software development; it's easy to write big chunks of code, it's hard to get that to production.
  - kbenson 8y ago
    I've always heard that writing a good short story is actually quite a bit harder than a novel, since you have to be fairly ruthless about what you include and leave out to have enough room for the essential components. A novel's plot can meander for a while, and it still might be good or okay. A short story's plot that meanders either isn't short anymore or doesn't go anywhere in the space it has.
  - restalis 8y ago
    That's because (at least in my case) starting something out of creative desire and finishing a project are stimulating different parts of the brain. First is that mind itch associated to problem solving, the second is the satisfaction of managing to walk the necessary path and do what had to be done. Those don't necessarily come together. What the average artists do is to follow their passion. Trying to "augment" that way into a more pragmatic one may lead to a loss of motivation. I've come to the conclusion that the best strategy is to tap into whatever gives me energy and let myself do as much as can be done "for free", then take that result and enter "the soldier mode" for the last part, which requires discipline. Ultimately, it boils down to considering the personal strengths and limitations when devising plans of actions, and pushing too many constraints for a first project may result in failure on exactly that planning.
akuji1993 8y ago
As a german, I think the biggest market in fiction by far is the fantasy market. And there are also a lot of German authors included in that market that don't get translated but are rather picked from local. But I agree with the rest of your post, if you want to live by writing fiction, good luck, because it's going to be the steepest of mountains to climb.
- stewbrew 8y ago
  I'd say crime, thrillers and such. There are many German writing authors.
  - akuji1993 8y ago
    Hm, you might be right yeah.. I forgot about the slightly older, middle aged demographic. We surely love our crime series and books.
akuji1993 8y ago
Also, have you ever thought about writing your stuff in Markdown? I've made pretty good experiences with it regarding converting to epub, mobi and pdf. I'm not sure of norm page formatting though, so that might be a good reason to use LaTex instead.
- jonathanstrange 8y ago
  I'm writing with Papyrus Autor [1], which is pretty expensive proprietary software that, at least for the German language, has many advantages over other writing programs available. Especially the Duden spell-checking integration is much better than in any other software. IMHO, it's worth the money for that alone. If it weren't for this software, I'd definitely use Markdown and Emacs. [1] https://www.papyrus.de/ https://www.papyrus.de/
  - akuji1993 8y ago
    Thanks for the link, I'll definitely try it out :) I'm still figuring out what works best for me, since I've written a lot of fan fiction / rpg's with other people together but have yet to write a bigger piece of fiction by myself (working on a big fantasy project right now). So I might take Papyrus up down the line when I feel the need for it.
  - ahaferburg 8y ago
    I'm curious. If you're using a special software for authors, why is it necessary to convert to LaTeX manually? Isn't this software capable of exporting to formats for publishing? I would imagine not a lot of authors bother with LaTeX.
    - jonathanstrange 8y ago
      It doesn't convert to LaTeX, it's intended for creative writing, not for academic writing, and LaTeX plays no role in this market. LaTeX is really just used in academic writing.
barry-cotter 8y ago
Why are you typesetting them if it’s a hobby? Why not just write? I commend you for your dedication to your craft but I presume some readers would please you so have you considered self-publishing, writing short stories or serial publishing, like Scott Alexander did for Unsong with http://unsongbook.com/ http://unsongbook.com/ or Wildbow did with Worm? https://parahumans.wordpress.com https://parahumans.wordpress.com
- jonathanstrange 8y ago
  > Why are you typesetting them if it’s a hobby? Why not just write? Long answer: Good question. I typeset the print version of the one book I've self-published in LaTeX, because I love books and didn't want to contribute to the abysmal typesetting of KDP and bulk self-publishers. Converting to LaTeX is not that hard, the problem is that unless you write everything in Markdown or Orgmode in the first place, you'll you have to maintain two sources - one for the ebook and a LaTeX version. I'm using some special word processing software, though, so I cannot write in Markdown. My biggest conundrum is that of many hobby authors, I presume. I don't like Amazon and don't want to aid them in destroying the print book market. At the same time, for German self-publishers there are not many realistic alternatives to Amazon. So thanks a lot for the links. I am definitely looking for ways to distribute my works (for free) in alternative ways. Short answer: Yes, in the future I'll probably not typeset my books by hand if I self-publish them. It's too much work. But the decline in typesetting quality caused by self-publishers bothers me a lot. And don't even get me started on book binding, cover design, etc.
  - MakeUsersWant 8y ago
    Lyx can produce both latex and ebooks from the same source document. You don't have to worry about latex technicalities while writing, and you can version it with git. (I'm not affiliated with www.Lyx.org. But I wrote my PhD and masters with it.)
  - pasabagi 8y ago
    I can't really see Amazon as anything but a boon for obscure writers, to be honest. I don't like them as a company, but as publishers, they beat traditional houses on every scale. Getting published via traditional means essentially works through networking, luck, and a bit of skill - and the amount of support the book receives is also predicated mostly on the first two. Amazon, on the other hand, offers great discoverability, especially if you write something people really like. A lot of great writers had trouble getting published using the traditional system. Nietzsche, or HP Lovecraft, or Marechera, for instance. The traditional publishing industry had a purpose - to turn manuscripts into print, with a side of helping people discover good books. They're now irrelevant for printing, and they were always terrible at the discovery thing.
Kirth 8y ago
Hi! I moved to Germany a year ago and have been consuming a lot of media to learn the language. Have you considered publishing the works yourself/making them available (as ebooks) online?
gvand 8y ago
Have you considered translating one of them and self-publish it in digital format? Could help you gain some following and use that to be able to publish the rest.
sethammons 8y ago
Hyperion, probably my favorite sci-fi, was deemed too long as a single book, so it was pretty much cut in half and sold as two books.
- gpderetta 8y ago
  Do you have a source? It seems very hard to believe as thee first and second book are very, very different (I find the first book excellent, but the second only sufficient).
  - sethammons 8y ago
    Might have been an interview at the end of the audio book.
dvdkhlng 8y ago
Hi, I /read/ science fiction as a hobby, mostly english originals although I'm native german speaker. I'd love to get german science fiction, however, as I'm only buying DRM-free (or at most watermarked) ebooks, I'm currently relying on humblebundle.com and storybundle.com and direct-buying from various smaller publishers. This sort of rules out non-english books. As there is no humblebundle and storybundle for german books (yet), have you thought about releasing your stuff via crowd funding? Just use a crowd-funding platform and "demand" some (arbitrary) amount of money total before you openly release something on the web. I like this "payment" strategy because it does not depend on DRM.
shubb 8y ago
'Webnovels' seem to be a growing thing. Bigger in asia than they are here, these are very long stories published in serial on novel publishing platforms like webnovel.com (english language). Sometimes the publishing platforms lock new chapters to paid users only and share out the proceeds spotify style. Sometimes authors use patreon with early access to chapters as a reward. Maybe look into something like this and, if it doesn't exist in Germany, be happy and use your own writings to seed a platform like that?
- Qwertystop 8y ago
  There's also a decent number of webnovels (sometimes perhaps too long to be a novel, may or may not be split into distinct books) without a unifying platform, just individual per-book sites - four that come to mind from different authors are Edally Academy, Practical Guide to Evil, Worm, and UNSONG (all different flavors of fantasy/sci-fi). At least the first and third of those are by authors who have also done other things with their own distinct sites. The sites often have links for works by other authors, as well. It might be a bit harder to break in that way than through a platform, but it's still much easier than print publishing.
BerislavLopac 8y ago
> learned the hard way that at least in the German publishing market there are virtually no program places for science fiction, very few agencies accept manuscripts in that genre at all, and publishers rarely accept novels larger than 400 norm pages from a first-time writer Hah, this brings memories. Coming from an even smaller language market (Croatian), I've decided to learn HTML as a way to publish my writings to a wider audience. Skip 25 years and now I'm working as a senior/lead developer, without publishing anything significant in my life... :D
akeck 8y ago
Heh. I'm a bit on the other side of the spectrum. I love writing, but I love the craft of "book-making" even more (everything from LaTex, through Kindle, through physical book-making). So I know that I have to "leave room" for the book-making part by limiting my content within specific projects.
gwbas1c 8y ago
Take a look at The Martian: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martian_(Weir_novel)#Publishing_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martian_(Weir_novel)#Publi... In summary, the author originally self-published to get around problems with publishers.
ttepasse 8y ago
You're probably already aware but if not: Andreas Eschbach is one of the very few published german authors in the (somewhat) SciFi space. And he's also a fan of Papyrus. On his web page he has for over decades a large subsection of Q&As about writing and publishing on the basis of his personal experience. http://andreaseschbach.de/schreiben/schreiben.html http://andreaseschbach.de/schreiben/schreiben.html

restalis 8y ago

Here's a market strategy: write off-shots of your long novels as teasers. Make them tasty (as their primary reason is to give the readers a taste for the main piece), make them as close in style as possible to the main work, although you may focus on different aspects in each of them, and lastly - make them convergent (towards something that "happens" to be missing). Let's say shorter stories around some independent characters which at some point get in contact with one main work character somewhere at the end of the novel. Make that interaction stand out and the main work character larger than life in some way. The shorter novels should be easier to push onto market, maybe even independently, and should provide the necessary ground for rolling out the main work. Heck, that should be THE publishers' advice for first-time writers out there.

meuk 8y ago
Sounds like excellent advice. In the Netherlands, we have spaces where you can leave and take books. You could always bind some books yourself (google 'DIY book binding'), or buy a small batch of books, and leave them at such a place. I also remember there are companies that allow you to publish and sell your work, and handle the printing and shipping. I don't remember the exact companies, but that sounds like a good fit for the poster.
- nestorD 8y ago
  lulu.com is such a company (not affiliated but I have friend that have used it).
Cthulhu_ 8y ago
I'm not a writer, but I don't get why first-time writers - as in, first time they're trying to get their works published, not that they've only now tried to write a book - try to do too much as their first project. I think they should really force themselves to start with short stories first; focus on finishing a story. That avoids a sunk cost, avoids people beating themselves up for what they believe is their life's work getting rejected by publishers (for e.g. being too long), etc. Same with software development; it's easy to write big chunks of code, it's hard to get that to production.
- kbenson 8y ago
  I've always heard that writing a good short story is actually quite a bit harder than a novel, since you have to be fairly ruthless about what you include and leave out to have enough room for the essential components. A novel's plot can meander for a while, and it still might be good or okay. A short story's plot that meanders either isn't short anymore or doesn't go anywhere in the space it has.
- restalis 8y ago
  That's because (at least in my case) starting something out of creative desire and finishing a project are stimulating different parts of the brain. First is that mind itch associated to problem solving, the second is the satisfaction of managing to walk the necessary path and do what had to be done. Those don't necessarily come together. What the average artists do is to follow their passion. Trying to "augment" that way into a more pragmatic one may lead to a loss of motivation. I've come to the conclusion that the best strategy is to tap into whatever gives me energy and let myself do as much as can be done "for free", then take that result and enter "the soldier mode" for the last part, which requires discipline. Ultimately, it boils down to considering the personal strengths and limitations when devising plans of actions, and pushing too many constraints for a first project may result in failure on exactly that planning.

akuji1993 8y ago

As a german, I think the biggest market in fiction by far is the fantasy market. And there are also a lot of German authors included in that market that don't get translated but are rather picked from local. But I agree with the rest of your post, if you want to live by writing fiction, good luck, because it's going to be the steepest of mountains to climb.

stewbrew 8y ago
I'd say crime, thrillers and such. There are many German writing authors.
- akuji1993 8y ago
  Hm, you might be right yeah.. I forgot about the slightly older, middle aged demographic. We surely love our crime series and books.

akuji1993 8y ago

Also, have you ever thought about writing your stuff in Markdown? I've made pretty good experiences with it regarding converting to epub, mobi and pdf. I'm not sure of norm page formatting though, so that might be a good reason to use LaTex instead.

jonathanstrange 8y ago
I'm writing with Papyrus Autor [1], which is pretty expensive proprietary software that, at least for the German language, has many advantages over other writing programs available. Especially the Duden spell-checking integration is much better than in any other software. IMHO, it's worth the money for that alone. If it weren't for this software, I'd definitely use Markdown and Emacs. [1] https://www.papyrus.de/ https://www.papyrus.de/
- akuji1993 8y ago
  Thanks for the link, I'll definitely try it out :) I'm still figuring out what works best for me, since I've written a lot of fan fiction / rpg's with other people together but have yet to write a bigger piece of fiction by myself (working on a big fantasy project right now). So I might take Papyrus up down the line when I feel the need for it.
- ahaferburg 8y ago
  I'm curious. If you're using a special software for authors, why is it necessary to convert to LaTeX manually? Isn't this software capable of exporting to formats for publishing? I would imagine not a lot of authors bother with LaTeX.
  - jonathanstrange 8y ago
    It doesn't convert to LaTeX, it's intended for creative writing, not for academic writing, and LaTeX plays no role in this market. LaTeX is really just used in academic writing.

barry-cotter 8y ago

Why are you typesetting them if it’s a hobby? Why not just write? I commend you for your dedication to your craft but I presume some readers would please you so have you considered self-publishing, writing short stories or serial publishing, like Scott Alexander did for Unsong with http://unsongbook.com/ http://unsongbook.com/ or Wildbow did with Worm? https://parahumans.wordpress.com https://parahumans.wordpress.com

jonathanstrange 8y ago
> Why are you typesetting them if it’s a hobby? Why not just write? Long answer: Good question. I typeset the print version of the one book I've self-published in LaTeX, because I love books and didn't want to contribute to the abysmal typesetting of KDP and bulk self-publishers. Converting to LaTeX is not that hard, the problem is that unless you write everything in Markdown or Orgmode in the first place, you'll you have to maintain two sources - one for the ebook and a LaTeX version. I'm using some special word processing software, though, so I cannot write in Markdown. My biggest conundrum is that of many hobby authors, I presume. I don't like Amazon and don't want to aid them in destroying the print book market. At the same time, for German self-publishers there are not many realistic alternatives to Amazon. So thanks a lot for the links. I am definitely looking for ways to distribute my works (for free) in alternative ways. Short answer: Yes, in the future I'll probably not typeset my books by hand if I self-publish them. It's too much work. But the decline in typesetting quality caused by self-publishers bothers me a lot. And don't even get me started on book binding, cover design, etc.
- MakeUsersWant 8y ago
  Lyx can produce both latex and ebooks from the same source document. You don't have to worry about latex technicalities while writing, and you can version it with git. (I'm not affiliated with www.Lyx.org. But I wrote my PhD and masters with it.)
- pasabagi 8y ago
  I can't really see Amazon as anything but a boon for obscure writers, to be honest. I don't like them as a company, but as publishers, they beat traditional houses on every scale. Getting published via traditional means essentially works through networking, luck, and a bit of skill - and the amount of support the book receives is also predicated mostly on the first two. Amazon, on the other hand, offers great discoverability, especially if you write something people really like. A lot of great writers had trouble getting published using the traditional system. Nietzsche, or HP Lovecraft, or Marechera, for instance. The traditional publishing industry had a purpose - to turn manuscripts into print, with a side of helping people discover good books. They're now irrelevant for printing, and they were always terrible at the discovery thing.

Kirth 8y ago

Hi! I moved to Germany a year ago and have been consuming a lot of media to learn the language. Have you considered publishing the works yourself/making them available (as ebooks) online?

gvand 8y ago

Have you considered translating one of them and self-publish it in digital format? Could help you gain some following and use that to be able to publish the rest.

sethammons 8y ago

Hyperion, probably my favorite sci-fi, was deemed too long as a single book, so it was pretty much cut in half and sold as two books.

gpderetta 8y ago
Do you have a source? It seems very hard to believe as thee first and second book are very, very different (I find the first book excellent, but the second only sufficient).
- sethammons 8y ago
  Might have been an interview at the end of the audio book.

dvdkhlng 8y ago

Hi, I /read/ science fiction as a hobby, mostly english originals although I'm native german speaker. I'd love to get german science fiction, however, as I'm only buying DRM-free (or at most watermarked) ebooks, I'm currently relying on humblebundle.com and storybundle.com and direct-buying from various smaller publishers. This sort of rules out non-english books. As there is no humblebundle and storybundle for german books (yet), have you thought about releasing your stuff via crowd funding? Just use a crowd-funding platform and "demand" some (arbitrary) amount of money total before you openly release something on the web. I like this "payment" strategy because it does not depend on DRM.

shubb 8y ago

'Webnovels' seem to be a growing thing. Bigger in asia than they are here, these are very long stories published in serial on novel publishing platforms like webnovel.com (english language). Sometimes the publishing platforms lock new chapters to paid users only and share out the proceeds spotify style. Sometimes authors use patreon with early access to chapters as a reward. Maybe look into something like this and, if it doesn't exist in Germany, be happy and use your own writings to seed a platform like that?

Qwertystop 8y ago
There's also a decent number of webnovels (sometimes perhaps too long to be a novel, may or may not be split into distinct books) without a unifying platform, just individual per-book sites - four that come to mind from different authors are Edally Academy, Practical Guide to Evil, Worm, and UNSONG (all different flavors of fantasy/sci-fi). At least the first and third of those are by authors who have also done other things with their own distinct sites. The sites often have links for works by other authors, as well. It might be a bit harder to break in that way than through a platform, but it's still much easier than print publishing.

BerislavLopac 8y ago

> learned the hard way that at least in the German publishing market there are virtually no program places for science fiction, very few agencies accept manuscripts in that genre at all, and publishers rarely accept novels larger than 400 norm pages from a first-time writer Hah, this brings memories. Coming from an even smaller language market (Croatian), I've decided to learn HTML as a way to publish my writings to a wider audience. Skip 25 years and now I'm working as a senior/lead developer, without publishing anything significant in my life... :D

akeck 8y ago

Heh. I'm a bit on the other side of the spectrum. I love writing, but I love the craft of "book-making" even more (everything from LaTex, through Kindle, through physical book-making). So I know that I have to "leave room" for the book-making part by limiting my content within specific projects.

gwbas1c 8y ago

Take a look at The Martian: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martian_(Weir_novel)#Publishing_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martian_(Weir_novel)#Publi... In summary, the author originally self-published to get around problems with publishers.

ttepasse 8y ago

You're probably already aware but if not: Andreas Eschbach is one of the very few published german authors in the (somewhat) SciFi space. And he's also a fan of Papyrus. On his web page he has for over decades a large subsection of Q&As about writing and publishing on the basis of his personal experience. http://andreaseschbach.de/schreiben/schreiben.html http://andreaseschbach.de/schreiben/schreiben.html