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Writing Insights Part Four: Publishing Your Book

By Hugh Howey

if you’re willing to do all of that hard work, the self-publishing route offers numerous benefits

You’ve decided you want to be a writer. You’ve banged out a rough draft. After a dozen passes, you’re starting to think any more edits will mar its perfection. Now what?

Welcome to my fourth and final(?) part of this series on writing insights, where I go over all the things I wish I’d known about publishing a book before I became a writer.

Before I begin, it bears mentioning that I’ve written more on this topic than any other. My blog is one long history of writing about publishing, and the talks I give are usually about publishing. Attempting to consolidate my thoughts into ten mere insights has been a task of omission.

So I cheat a little with some insights-within-insights. My goal here is to distill all my thoughts into the most important advice I can give a writer, wherever they are on their journey. I wish you the best on yours.   Insight #31: Only ONE Publishing Decision is Forever

This is by far my most important insight when it comes to your writing career: Unless you sign away the right to make future decisions, no publishing decision is forever.

I can’t overstress the value of this insight. All the insights that follow are secondary, because if you make this mistake right off the bat, then none of the rest of my advice matters. Everything is negotiable until you negotiate away your right to negotiate.

When you sign with a publishing house, you no longer have control of your published work. You may no longer have control over your writing career. Many publishing contracts include no-compete clauses that preclude your ability to publish elsewhere for fear of competing with the work they are acquiring. Some publishers worry you’ll have too many works coming out in too many places! Greater market penetration is incorrectly seen by these publishers as a problem.

Great agents can get harmful clauses removed, if you can land a great agent and your work and name have enough clout to warrant the leverage. But in most cases, signing with a publisher is the last decision you’ll get to make as a writer other than to stop writing.

If you don’t like your cover art, you may get stuck with it. If you don’t like the title they suggest, it may not matter. I’ve had to fight like hell with major publishers over these decisions, and I’ve lost some of those battles even with hard-won contracts that stipulate my final approval. The publisher will always retain the option to drop marketing support or not publish the work at all. They may even ask to have your advance returned to them.

Assuming you haven’t signed away the rights to your work, no decision you make today is a final decision. You can always decide later on to sign the work over to a publisher. This is why signing with a publisher should be the last course of action you take, because it’s the last one you can take. Exhaust all the other options first while they’re still available.

Let’s say you followed all the advice in this series, and you wrote twenty books, and none of them have taken off yet. Guess what? You haven’t done your career any harm. Nobody has heard of you. Your books haven’t been considered and rejected by readers, agents, or publishers. They’re still brand new! First impressions can still be made.

Maybe you’ll go back and give your early works another pass with all of your acquired writing talents. Perhaps you change titles, or your author name, or the cover art, or all of the above. You can make your entire oeuvre free for a period of time to increase your chances of gaining readers. Or make some works free, some inexpensive, and some priced higher as an experiment. The choices are all yours. Because you’ve retained them. Ownership is everything. Once the books are written, you now have a product you can market and sell for the rest of your life. If you sign ownership away, a publisher can limit your ability to market and sell your works. This doesn’t mean signing with a publisher is always a bad choice; it just means you should carefully consider all avenues before you pull the trigger. In the previous part of this series I urged you to be patient when it comes to publishing your work; now I’m urging you to be patient when it comes to how you publish.   Insight #32: Understand your goals as a writer

With your final manuscript in hand, you now have two major paths forward: 1) Query agents and publishers 2) Self-publish

The first path means writing query letters, which is like a pitch and a resume all rolled into the most difficult and uncomfortable single page you’ve ever written and edited a billion times over in your entire fucking life. You’ll then send these query letters to dozens of agents and publishers, and hope one or more of them asks to read a sample (or a full copy) of your work. If an agent chooses to represent you, you’ll wait as they pitch your project to publishers (you might have to do numerous rewrites first). If you then get signed, you’ll work with the publisher to get your work out to market (you might have to do numerous rewrites first). It sounds straightforward. It’s nearly impossible.

That doesn’t mean it can’t happen to you. Thousands of books are published every year, and quite a few of these are from new authors. If you followed all the previous insights about outworking your peers, putting in the hours to observe the world around you, study great writing, read voraciously, write furiously and consistently, then your chances of being one of these authors is quite good. You may need to write a dozen novels and leave many of them in drawers as you improve your craft, but this is the price the successful are willing to pay. The only person stopping you is you.

However … if you’re willing to do all of that hard work, the self-publishing route offers numerous benefits. The major ones are that you have the creative freedom to write whatever you like, not what agents and publishers are currently looking for. Agents and publishers often go through phases and they chase fads; readers, meanwhile, continue to want books in a wide variety of popular genres. Urban fantasy and dystopia novels remain very healthy markets, but publishers have moved on. You don’t have to.

Self-publishing also means keeping more of the proceeds. You can price your works lower while still earning more per sale. You’re also likely to get more overall sales due to affordable pricing. Publishing houses have a lot of overhead and cannot compete with self-published authors on price; I often find myself recommending a great ebook to friends who balk at paying $12.99 for a digital book. Many of us remember when paperbacks cost half that.

Another area publishers can’t compete is the frequency of publication. Publishing houses are glacially slow; you’ll likely be limited to one novel per year, and your first novel will take a year or more to hit the market. Many successful self-published authors publish several novels a year (or even more!). Keeping readers engaged is a massive benefit. You can also follow up successful works quickly.

Querying and self-publishing. There are other options, but these are the two main paths open to you. You’ll notice that I left out options like: Get your books in bookstores. Publish with a large publishing house. Publish with a small publishing house. Sign a movie deal. Make millions of dollars. Get famous.

The reason I didn’t mention them is because those aren’t options. Those are opportunities. The only choice you get to make is whether you do this yourself or whether you try to squeeze through a handful of tricky gates. Which one you choose will depend on your goals as a writer. Next up, I’ll try to lay out the best steps forward and the pros and cons for each goal that you might have as a writer. But first, an insight-within-an-insight: Most mistakes writers make arise because they want it all. They want a literary writer’s respect, a presence in bookstores, the glow a major publishing house bestows, millions of readers, piles of money, awards, movies and TV shows, and a phone call from Oprah. The hubris that leads us to write in the first place comes with the kind of psychological baggage that gets overage fees and well-deserved TSA checks at airports. Greediness leads to terrible career decisions.

For many years, the authors who achieved all of the above went through the querying -> agent -> major publisher route. Well, no wonder. That was the only route at the time. But this has changed. New paths are opening up faster than stigmas are falling. There are now just as many writers who achieve all of the above by going it alone as those who query agents. Even with a century-long head start, the query path is now falling behind. Having it all is a fine dream, but dreams are things you hope might happen to you while you’re working toward your goals. Goals are solid and achievable. Embrace the difference. Don’t stop dreaming, and don’t stop working. Grab your goals through diligent effort and hope that you get lucky and the rest of your dreams come to you. This is similar to the old saying that the harder I work, the luckier I get. Each goal drives you closer to your dreams.

The realistic approach here is to rank your goals in order of importance, and choose the path that gives you the best chance of netting you your highest goals. Let’s look now at a handful of goals and my advice for each:

1) Your goal is that you want lots of readers. If so, my advice is to write a lot of works and give them away for free or on the cheap. Publish on Wattpad, Medium, Facebook, and all the major ebook retailers. Price as low as possible. Free has enormous benefits for obtaining a wide readership (more on this later). Short works are also great for achieving this goal.

2) You crave awards. This is a strange goal to have, but I mention here because it unfortunately plays into many a writer’s decision making process. The top awards in many genres used to be unattainable for self-published authors, but this is changing rapidly. Self-published works have now won most of the literary awards out there. Hopefully fewer and fewer authors will make poor decisions out of fear of passing up on acclaim from readers and their peers.

3) You want to be in bookstores. If you want to be in a lot of bookstores, you’re going to want to go the query route. The chances are still slim, but if you apply yourself there’s a good chance you can do it. There’s a reason I rank this almost as low on my personal list as garnering awards, something I go over in detail in a later insight. For now, it’s worth mentioning that most books these days are sold online. Getting into bookstores is a vanity goal. Yes, it can increase awareness and add to sales, but not enough to offset the revenue lost from a lower royalty rate.

4) Your goal is to land an agent or get a deal with a major publisher. And I don’t mean as an avenue to any of these other goals (getting readers, making it into bookstores, making money). Some people have this as a goal, period. They are willing to have fewer readers and make less money, because the need to feel validated is stronger than any other goal. The problem I have with this goal is that there is no validation more important than what you get from your readers.

5) Your goal is to become a full-time writer. When you look at these five goals objectively, it isn’t a fair fight. If you love writing, what’s better than having the freedom to do more of it and only it? Earning a living doing what you love is most people’s goal in all walks of life. If you’re enjoying what you’re doing, it isn’t work. Becoming a full-time writer means earning money with your art. While you may think awards and bookstore shelves are a shortcut to making money, you’d be wrong. The shortcut to both is winning over lots of readers and being brave enough to put a price on your art. Earn a living first. That’s your goal. The rest is dreaming.   Insight #33: Don’t quit your day job. Yet.

You might think writing a book is a quick path to riches. Books sell millions of copies, right? This work of yours is genius, and everyone is going to love it, and you only need to reach a fraction of the billions of people on the planet, and you’re going to be rich, rich rich!

If you think this, you’re dead wrong and you’re going to be dead broke. Building to a writing career is a long game. With your first manuscript under your belt, now is the time to live frugally, find a day job that gives you time to work on more stories, and keep writing!

If you do this, you stand a chance of transitioning to a full-time career as a writer. It’s certainly easier now than at any time in human history. That’s because more of the money readers spend on books now flows to authors rather than middlemen like bookstores, publishing houses, and agents. Another insight-within-an-insight here: The only two parties who matter in this game are the writers and the readers. Everyone else needs to prove their worth. Do not let headlines about the health of publishers, or the number of bookstores, or what Amazon or Barnes & Noble are doing, distract you. Care about readers. Care about writers. Demand that everyone else in the business service these two groups, and don’t feel bad for those who don’t and go belly-up as a result.

Readers and writers. Make this a mantra.

Lost amid all the distractions about the health of publishers and bookstores is the fact that most bestselling authors still have day jobs. Even if you develop a steady career with a publishing house, and they buy a book a year from you, a great deal might provide $50,000 per book. This might last six or eight books if you are very lucky. That’s not a great living, and it doesn’t last for long. More common than not is what’s known as the “death spiral,” where subsequent books do less well, so bookstores order fewer copies of the following book. so advances go down, which means less excitement, fewer books ordered of the following book, even lower advances, and repeat until you are dropped by your publisher. This describes the vast majority of writing careers, among the tiny fraction who get the opportunity in the first place.

Relying on publishing contracts is a difficult way to make a living. Many of the successful self-published authors I know publish several works a year until they have a dozen or several dozen titles available. Each of these titles might only bring in a few thousand dollars apiece per annum, but those streams really add up. Trickles become torrents. One or more of these titles will usually outperform the others and really give flow a boost. Sometimes, it’s like a dam bursts. I’ve seen it happen over and over to hardworking writers.

All this is possible because the cost of materials is plummeting and buying habits are changing. Audiobooks are now more often than not delivered digitally rather than on CDs in jewel cases. Ebooks are just electrons, which makes for fat profit margins. The print book is the outlier, in that per-book printing prices are worse with modern print-on-demand (or POD) technology. But this is more than offset by no longer needing to outlay thousands of dollars for a large batch of printed books which may not sell (or just as bad: having demand but not enough books).

The lower cost of materials and the generous cut of the retail price provided by online retailers means you get a tidy sum per book sold. Most retailers pay about 70% of the list price for ebooks. That means earning over $2 on an ebook priced at a rock-bottom $2.99! That’s as much as a publishing house pays an author per hardback sold, if the hardback is priced at $24. You have to somehow cajole readers into spending ten times as many reading dollars just to earn the same income!

As a self-published author, it’s best to look at these numbers as if you are a publisher, because that’s exactly what you are at this point. This makes for an interesting comparison. When I worked as a bookseller, we paid publishers roughly 55% of the retail price of their books. Basically, we were getting anywhere from a 40% to a 50% discount when we made an order. Now I’m on the other side of this equation; I’m the publisher, and a website like Amazon is the bookseller. Instead of giving them 40% to 50% of the list price for helping me make a sale, I’m only giving them 30%. I keep the other 70%, which is much more generous than the bookstore model.

The modern online bookstore is far more democratic as well. Product pages between various books look similar. Your book can march up the bestseller list and be indistinguishable from the biggest names in the game. Going from a career as a bookseller, and seeing all those spine-out books that nobody would ever see, to seeing my books on Amazon with a very similar presence to everyone else, was an eye-opening experience.

So how much can you expect to make as a self-published author? It depends on how lucky you get. Luck always plays a massive role in these things. But the more you publish, and the more you hone your craft, and the more attention you pay to the market and your readers, the luckier you’ll get. It’s almost impossible to publish twenty works of fiction with great cover art and book descriptions and not make enough to pay a bill or two every month. It’s possible you’ll make more than this. The chances here are much better than you’ll find along the querying route, where most applications are denied before you even get to the published-book part.

My advice to myself and others has always been to write because you love it, but position yourself to make a living if possible. The freedoms afforded by self-publishing allow you to do this. You can work as hard as you need and take time off when you have to. It’s a lot like starting your own business, with the same kinds of risks and rewards. The self-published author is his or her own startup. That might make it sound like there’s a ton of work involved in self-publishing, which is certainly true, but then there’s this…   Insight #34: You’re going to be doing most of the work either way

However you publish, you are going to be doing most of the work if you want to have any measurable success. This was one of the things I didn’t understand when I was just getting started. I thought if I worked really hard in the beginning and got an agent and a publisher that I could eventually “just write.” I still hear this from authors who shy away from self-publishing. They say they want to just concentrate on the writing. It would be nice if it worked this way, but it doesn’t.

When publishers began courting me for my works, some of the things they wanted to know was how many followers I had on social media, what my plans were to announce and market my next release, how many writing friends I knew that might blurb the work for me. They were interested in my blog and my online presence. Many of the things I hoped a publisher would provide were instead expected of me.

I have New York Times bestselling author friends with major publishers who have to pay for their own book tours, their own way to writing conferences, their promotional material, even additional editing. You won’t hear many authors complain about their publishers because reprisal is very real and very damaging, but once you get through the door the chatter is everywhere. There are horror stories.

I have plenty of horror stories of my own, and my journey has been absolutely charmed compared to most. I’ve been lucky to work with some amazing publishers. But painting a rosy picture is a disservice to rising authors.  And I care about writers far more than I care about publishers. I see many ways in which publishers can improve, and I want them to improve. I don’t think coddling them or sucking up to them gives them incentive to make things better. The main thing forcing publishers to compete and improve today is the explosion in self-publishing; it’s the first real option writers have had in decades.

My advice to authors along either path – querying or self-publishing – is to approach both paths in largely the same manner. If you want to query and land an agent and a publisher, I suggest the same level of revisions and professional editing that a successful self-publisher employs. Yes, I’m suggesting you hire an editor before you query. I’m suggesting you invest in the business of you-as-a-writer.

Working with editors is an opportunity to hone your craft. For some reason we go bonkers over writers paying for their own editorial services, but people are applauded for taking cooking classes for the joy of it. Invest in furthering your education. The bonus is that if you approach the querying path with the same rigor as a self-published author, you’re going to have a ready-for-market work sitting right there if you don’t land an agent, or if your agent doesn’t strike a deal you like.

For self-published authors, the advice is the same: Approach your career as if you are going to publish with Random House or Hachette. Take your author photos, your website, your social media presence, your email habits, just as seriously. You never know, you might end up publishing with a major house one day. Even if you don’t, author platforms are critical. You should want your cover art, product pages, and personal pages to reflect the highest level of professionalism. This doesn’t mean be stodgy. Know your audience and be yourself. Be playful, sarcastic, sexy, juvenile, dorky, provocative, but do it with professionalism and self-respect.

All of these things are necessary to become a successful writer, and you’re going to be expected to do them however you publish. Working with an agent and a publisher on the query side is similar to hiring an editor and uploading final copies on the self-publishing route. The difference with the latter is that you are paying one-time costs for products that you own and profit from forever. Agents and publishers will continue costing you money, even though they largely offer the same one-time services.   Insight #35: Only YOU have your best interests at heart

I don’t have much cynical advice, because I’m not a cynical guy. I’m an optimist. That’s why this insight has been one of the biggest surprises I’ve encountered over the years, and it’s why it’s the saddest for me to relate. But it’s the honest truth, and your career depends on understanding it.

You will have many publishing partners over your career, and most of them will spend most of their time assisting you in garnering more sales and readers. These publishing partners will include fellow writers you collaborate with; retailers you sell through; publishers you sign with; agents you employ; assistants, editors, and cover artists you hire. It would be nice to think that your goals will always align, but they won’t. For instance, your agent might be asked by a publisher to send them the latest thing in a particular genre. Your project might not be on the top of their list. This is obvious, but it’s worth keeping in mind. When you work directly with a retailer or a marketer, you know your work is represented to its fullest – by you. With your agent, you need to hope this is the case. You aren’t in the room when discussions are being made.

The far worse realization is that your own publisher often has conflicting interests. Every publisher has “frontlist” titles. These are works that get the highest level of promotion (they are situated early in quarterly release catalogs, hence the name). If your work is not frontlisted, it won’t be pushed as heavily as those that are.

Where this gets especially nasty is when you would love to discount your published works to boost sales, but publishers will not allow it. This is because they worry about gutting sales of current releases by making backlist titles too inexpensive. The number one complaint I hear from authors about their publishers is the inability to discount their works. This is what I mean when I say the decision to publish may be the last decision you ever make. You think all future decisions will be for your benefit, but there are conflicts of interest. A new release from a hot new author may take precedent over the book you released last year that didn’t do so well. Publishers will always pin their hopes on the next new thing rather than figure out how to give backlist titles another chance. This is a massive flaw in their business philosophy, and one you shouldn’t expect them to fix anytime soon.

There’s also the problem of staff turnover. The editor who excitedly purchases your manuscript may not be around for its release and marketing, or be there when it’s time to negotiate for a sequel. You’d think this would be a rare occurrence; it’s not. I’ve watched editors shuffle within and between publishers like a game of three card monte. It’s not uncommon to find yourself down the road with an editor who hasn’t read your work, or find yourself jumping between publishing houses along with your favorite editor, which means fewer cross-promotional opportunities. Think about this when you sign away lifetime rights; a lifetime is a lot longer than these editors spend on any one rung of their careers.

Having been a little cynical, let me now give you some hope. There are fantastic agents and publishers out there; I’ve been very lucky to work with a few. The right agent will more than make up for their 15% commission. The right publisher can help boost your career. In both cases, however, you’re better off when you can approach them from a position of power.

Here’s your next insight-within-an-insight:

YOU hire your agent and your publisher, not the other way around.

That’s right: they work for you! Too many writers get this the wrong way around, and it leads them to accepting the first offer of representation they can land, or the first publishing deal they can get. I’ve made this mistake in the past. I was lucky in that my first attempt to query led very quickly to a publishing contract. I was even luckier to get the rights back to that work. That work has since won me many readers and made me a lot of money. But early on, I thought I was the one getting hired. I had it all backwards.

Once I figured it out, I stopped looking for agents and publishers. I concentrated on finding readers. They are my real boss; I work to keep them entertained and informed. After amassing a lot of readers, I started getting inquiries from agents, and now I could have my pick. This is exactly how it should work. Agents and publishers can boost an existing career more readily than they can create one from scratch. Hire the best. Put them to work for you.   Insight #36: Understand the market

Books are no longer just printed tomes. You may prefer to read print books or ebooks, but don’t let this bias close you off to a large segment of readers. Audiobooks are exploding in popularity. Ebooks sales have overtaken print books in most genres. And print books still rule when it comes to book signings and many promotional opportunities.

Each medium has its readers and its advantages. And there is plenty of crossover. Keep the physical limitations that some readers have in mind. Not all readers live near a bookstore, or have the eyesight for the small print of most published books, and some have no eyesight at all. Ebooks have been a boon for older readers, both for the large print and the weight reduction. Audiobooks have opened up worlds for the visually impaired. Online shopping and home delivery are the only option for millions of readers.

The point is to not assume and to not let your personal reading biases color your professional writing decisions. Instead, treat the trifecta of book publishing as equal sides on a triangle: Print books, ebooks, and audiobooks. You should offer all three formats to your readers, and give all three formats your close attention.   The Self-Publishing Trifecta: Ebooks, Print, and Audio

Of the three dominant book formats, Ebooks are the simplest to create, but it’s easy to get them wrong. You can upload an edited word document right to KDP and other ebook retailers, but automated conversion can make many mistakes. I highly recommend using an ebook formatter like 52 Novels to create perfect ebook files.

You’ll want two types of file formats: .epub and .mobi. The former is used by a larger number of retailers. The latter is used by Amazon, which means it’s used by a larger number of readers. Mobi files are basically .epub files with a few added features. A must-have tool for converting these file formats is the free program Calibre. Consider supporting the developers of this program as you begin to rely on it. It’s pure gold.

There are countless outlets for your ebooks, including the ability to sell them directly through your website. In order of popularity (ie sales), the top options are: Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) platform, Apple’s iBookstore, Barnes and Noble’s Nook store, and Kobo. There are also aggregators like Direct to Digital and Smashwords, which allow you to upload to a single place to reach multiple outlets. But I find the control and better royalty rates makes uploading to each site separately more than worthwhile.

I’m sure this sounds daunting, but it really isn’t. Learning how to write a query letter and researching which agents to send them to (and keeping track of your submissions and responses) is far more work. You can learn to publish on Amazon’s KDP site in a single weekend, and the ebook will be available to readers by Monday. If you have an Amazon account, you already have a KDP account. It’s the same login and password. You just need your polished and edited work and some cover art.   Print books are a little trickier to create, but not much. You’ll want to generate a PDF of your book. (Two PDFs, actually. One will be the interior; the other will be the full cover wrap, which includes the front, spine, and rear in a single splay). The great thing about PDFs is that they print just how they look. What you see on your screen is what you’ll see on the printed page. You can use a company like the aforementioned 52 Novels to create your PDF, or you can learn to play around with it on your own. I love and have used 52 Novels, but I’m a huge advocate for doing it yourself. For me, the layout of my print book is the final interface between me and my readers. How the fonts look, how the words are spaced, which sentences end on certain pages, how hyphens are used, all of this is as important to the reading experience as the words themselves.

The best artists stretch their own canvases and have opinions on which way is up when the painting is hung, how it is lit, how prints are matted and framed. The same can and should be true of authors. If you take your career seriously, consider learning about kerning, widows and orphans, pagination techniques, typography, even book binding. Even if you don’t do these things yourself, you’ll have the vocabulary and knowledge to communicate with those you hire to do it for you. This goes back to our insight in part one of this series about standing out from your peers by working harder than them.

The way your print books will be created and sold is different from what self-published authors had to do in the past. Gone are the days of ordering boxes of books that sit in your garage and that you sell out of the trunk of your car at trade shows. Now we have print-on-demand technology. This is partly a miracle of printing automation, but mostly a miracle of on-time production and delivery. Soon after uploading your book in PDF form to a print-on-demand facility, your book will go on sale. When a customer buys a copy, the book will be printed, bound, and shipped that same day. You’ll get a percentage of the sale in a month or two. This means your books never go out of print, and you don’t spend money on tons of books that go unpurchased.

There are a few print-on-demand companies out there, but only two that I recommend you look into. Lightning Source is one owned by Ingram, and they provide a lot of options on trim size (the height and width of your book), and binding (hardback, paperback). They can make your work easily orderable by bookstores (though almost no bookstore will make an order unless you talk them into it in person, or a reader goes in to order a copy rather than get it online). The disadvantage of upfront cost at Lightning Source is partly offset by a higher per-sale payout compared to the other option I recommend.

That other option is CreateSpace, which is owned and operated by Amazon. This is by far my runaway choice for my own works, and it’s the one I would recommend to most writers for most purposes. The simple fact is that most books are now purchased on Amazon, and CreateSpace provides a tightly integrated experience for both you and your customers (the readers). Your print books will show up on the store more quickly, and they’ll never show a low stock quantity. They’ll ship faster (especially to Prime members), and they’ll sometimes go on sale while giving you the same percentage of profits. You can also order copies for yourself directly from CreateSpace for direct sales, author events, and book signings. Since you own your rights, feel free to try both and compare. Or use both, one for Amazon sales and the other to make your books available through Ingram’s network of distributors.   Audiobooks are the biggest challenge, both in getting them right and affording someone who can get them right for you. A professionally narrated audiobook can cost a self-published author several thousand dollars. It takes a lot of sales to earn that back.

Cheaper options exist, including narrating the work yourself. Some authors have built a career on their podcasted auidobooks. You can also try to sell audiobook rights to publishers based on the sales of ebooks and print books, but this can take time and the rates won’t be as good as doing it yourself. The production quality will likely be very high though.

The best option for high quality and low price is to go through Amazon’s ACX platform. This is a self-publishing platform for audiobooks. The ACX platform helps authors match up with narrators. You can pay them outright for the work and keep the royalties for yourself, or you can share the royalties evenly with narrators who do the work at no upfront cost. This is a great way for authors on a budget to offer options to their readers. But my advice is to save up and pay for great narration on your own. It’s an investment in your career, and it will almost always pay off in the long run. If you look at my advice above, the trifecta of book formats comes down to a trifecta of Amazon offerings: KDP for ebooks, CreateSpace for print, and ACX for audiobooks. This is no accident. Amazon has become by far the #1 outlet for book sales in all formats. This is where readers are getting their stories, and Amazon has worked hard to improve the author and customer experience at all three platforms. I’ve used every outlet out there, and my current advice is to focus on this trifecta. Of course, that could change in the future. Which leads us to my next insight…   Insight #37: The Modern Book is Forever

One of the truths about modern publishing that’s almost impossible to fully appreciate is that books are now on the market for the rest of time. I list this insight very high on my reasons to self-publish, and I owe this insight to my years as a bookseller. Part of my job at the bookstore was to shelve all new incoming books from publishers. A less enjoyable part of my job was to then box up unsold books and ship them right back to those very same publishers.

The average time a book spent on a shelf was around six months. Some only lasted three months, at which time the next batch from the quarterly catalogs arrived. It was rare that a book spent a year on the shelf. Most books that end up on the store shelves for longer are age-old classics or the mere handful of top bestsellers that are destined to become classics.

This is one of the heartbreaking things to watch from the inside, especially when you appreciate all the obstacles authors overcame to get this far. To miss their chance to find a readership and only get a few months spine-out on a bookstore shelf is downright depressing. Working in a bookstore and seeing this day after day helped me lower my expectations as an author, and it made me steadily devalue the ability to get into bookstores at all. I realized those shelves were not a panacea for sales and readership.

You might console yourself by pointing out that these returned books are always available online, but this is only as long as publishers keep printing them. Unfortunately, they don’t do this forever. Not all publishers take advantage of print-on-demand (POD) technology, so some books just disappear in paperback form and remain as ebooks only. For the authors whose primary goal is getting into bookstores, you may sign over lifetime ownership of your art for a mere three months of spine-out visibility. This is why goals and dreams must be kept separate. Careers can implode when they aren’t.

If you self-publish, your works will be available forever. This is why the long goal of writing a dozen or more novels is viable. When one takes off, all the other works are still fresh. The online retailer’s algorithms will make sure readers know about your other works. Success seems to come all at once to authors who amass a library of quality titles. The great thing about today’s publishing tools is that if you don’t give up on yourself, the technology won’t either.   Insight #38: Diversify! (And consolidate)

This insight goes against much publishing advice and a lot of common sense, but I strongly suggest that you refrain from writing in the same world and about the same characters over and over. The only time to do this is if your first release has a massive amount of success. If this happens, keep striking while the iron is hot and turn your work into a long series.

A big mistake I see from too many aspiring writers is to follow up their first work with a sequel, and turn that into a trilogy, and write a fourth and fifth book while they plan their sixth and seventh.

There are three reasons we fall into this trap. The first is that ex nihilo creation is more difficult than working with something we already have, and writers tend to be paradoxically lazy when it comes to creativity. The second is that all writers are readers, and as readers we love revisiting beloved characters and worlds if possible (and now that we’re the writers, it’s very much possible). The third reason we fall into this trap is that we witness the major successes from the publishing world, and those authors seem to release another book in their same series year after year.

The problem with this third reason is selection bias. Publishers reinvest in their rare first-time successes, and they ask for more of the same and heavily promote these lucky authors. This means we naturally end up with big careers based on book series that run out of numbers and letters for their thematic titles. The self-published author is unlikely to have success with their first title, but they have as a filtered example from publishers the careers of those who were fortunate in this regard. All the authors who didn’t have this one-off success are gone and invisible, not to be emulated.

If you fall into the trap of writing a series out of the gate, the problem you’re creating is that you have to promote the same first book in the series with every new release. If it hasn’t taken off yet, it might not ever. Your writing is going to get stronger, but that first book isn’t. You’re left hoping that readers will force their way through to where the series really takes off. Don’t hope. Plan.

Plan on writing many great books about many awesome characters. Plan on writing three different trilogies in three different genres. Sequels aren’t bad; in fact, they can be critical to your success. What’s bad is only giving readers a handful of avenues into your imagination. Give them as many onramps as possible. Write short stories as well as novels. Write in different genres. Experiment and adapt to your sales and any critical feedback.

This is where we can emulate publishers. Major publishers invest in a wide variety of books, publish them all, and see what sticks. They reinvest in those that do. You should adopt the same strategy.

At the same time that I suggest you diversify your books, I highly recommend that you consolidate your brand. The only good reason I know of for multiple pen names is to keep adult work separate from all-ages work. If you write in different genres, don’t assume it’s necessary to keep up with multiple pen names. Readers are far more adventurous and diverse than publishers give them credit for – most of my readers read right across my various genres. All it takes to distinguish your content is appropriate cover art and product descriptions. Diluting your name is a huge mistake. It robs you of the advantage of critical mass when something takes off.

While I’m on the topic of diversifying and critical mass, I should mention my habit of serializing some of my novels. I’ve been hugely influenced by comic books and television, both of which offer lengthy plot arcs made up of smaller plot arclets (to coin a word). This works well if you can make each arclet a satisfying and holistic experience. Each arclet should have its own beginning, middle, and end. If not, you risk upsetting readers and appearing as if it’s a ploy to maximize profits.

What serializing really does is maximize visibility. WOOL, SAND, and BEACON 23 were all originally released in five parts. This meant five times as many impressions as readers scrolled through bestseller lists. There were other advantages: I could price these works more affordably, which served to draw in more readers to the first part. If I lost readers there, they save money in the long run, and I end up with superfans by parts four and five. But the biggest advantage is all the creative advantages. More parts means more plot climaxes. It means nail-biting cliffhangers. It means being able to shift the tone and perspective between entries. It means more frequent releases, so the passion remains high both in you, the writer, as well as the reader. Amazon’s algorithms in particular love new releases, and so serialized works continue to tickle that beast’s digital belly.

All of this was discovered by accident when I followed up a short story, WOOL, which was taking off on its own. I was writing a wide variety of stories, and when I saw one gain steam, I started shoveling coal. You might discover a very different insight through your own experimentation. The point is that you never know what will work, so don’t limit yourself to one or two ideas. Be creative. Experiment and adapt.   Insight #39: Packaging and Retail Decisions

The adaptability mentioned above is possible because of the flexibility we now have with story packaging. The words that form our stories are important, but how they are packaged and delivered is equally important. A great example of this is among audiobooks, where aficionados look for their next purchase by searching for their favorite narrator, rather than their favorite author. That’s a packaging decision, and it can overpower every ounce of your writing efforts.

There are so many other examples. Take your print and ebooks, and the sudden shift in philosophy behind cover art. That shift occurred the moment online booksellers took off, and suddenly your print and ebooks had to stand out while being seen online as a mere icon. If you can’t grab readers’ attention with your online packaging, the story you slaved to write may never get a chance.

The size of online cover art is why typography has become so critical, far more critical than the artwork. I urge authors to stay away from thin, cursive fonts. They will disappear when readers see the cover on Amazon as they’re scrolling through lists of books. Your name and the title should jump out. The biggest mistake I see (and have made) with cover art is to think you need a fancy illustration. After laboring over this illustration, or shelling out big bucks for the art, the author’s name and the title shrink to the top and bottom of the book, terrified of obscuring the artwork. This is completely backwards. Cover up that artwork. Splay your name and title in big block letters right on top of it. Take time once a month to scroll through the bestseller lists in your genres to see what jumps out at you and what looks half-baked. Study these examples. You’ll note most major publishers slap their typography right over the art. Most successful self-published authors do the same.

Here’s a trick you can try with any of your cover art ideas or existing novels: Bella Andre and I were at a book conference once, and she’d given a talk about her cover art (she does her own, and it’s some of the best in the biz). That afternoon, a young writer came up to us with a copy of her novel and asked us what we thought of her cover. It wasn’t bad as a print book, and ten years earlier it would’ve have affected this author’s career. But for a modern book, it was a disaster. To show her why, I took the book and began walking away from the author and Bella. I asked Bella to stop me when the book was “Amazon size.”

“Further,” Bella said, waving me back. “Keep going. More. Back, back. Okay, right there.”

She turned and looked at the author who had come to us for advice. Suddenly, we could both see that this writer no longer needed the advice. She saw what we saw. That is, she saw what readers were going to see online. “Got it,” she said, nodding, with the sort of can-do attitude that let us know she’d go back to work, punch up the typography, and get a new version out there.

I’ve gone through several packaged versions of my works over the years. HALF WAY HOME is on its third cover. The WOOL OMNIBUS has had four. My MOLLY FYDE series has a new set of covers from one of my favorite artists. THE HURRICANE and THE PLAGIARIST are also different from the originals. It doesn’t cost much to make these changes. For publishers, the cost would be prohibitive. They only do this when a book has a movie tie-in, or hits a major list or gets unreal blurbs it wants to add. Anniversary and special editions, that sort of thing.

But you can change your covers on a whim. An unintended side effect of this? You create collector’s items out of print-on-demand books. I’ve seen some copies of the original WOOL novelette sell for hundreds of dollars. For a little fifty page book! It’s not just the monetary value either. Early readers of my MOLLY FYDE series take great pride in the original copies with the old cover art. It’s proof and reminder of when they got into the books.

There’s so much more we can do with print-on-demand, so much untapped potential. You could celebrate a particular month like Black History Month, or put out a limited edition tied to a charity and give the proceeds for that month to the cause. You could update the cover every month with a different reader’s Amazon review blurbed on the cover, and then send the fan an offer of a free copy (this might held encourage more reader reviews). How about including a doodle in the book that animates as you flip through it, down in the corner of the book like those flip-books we made in school? You could commission one of these from an artist to celebrate an anniversary of release or a sales milestone. Show it off to readers and offer it for a limited time.

I remember a challenge I had years ago, when I had the opportunity to speak at a Boing Boing event and give away something in their swag bag. These were tech-savvy folks, and I thought about a flyer with a download link for some of my ebooks, but how boring is that? I wanted to get creative and make them feel like they’d received something special. So I had some business-card-shaped USB drives custom printed to look like ID badges worn in the silos of WOOL. They had a fallout symbol on them and were made to look worn and old. I loaded the full trilogy on the drives and included instructions on how to sideload the files to pretty much any reading device.

The fallout USB drives were a massive hit. When my readers saw them, they wanted to know how to get one of their own. So I had to print up another batch and sell them direct from my website. When orders came in with requests that I sign the drives, I realized what I’d inadvertently done: I’d given substance to electrons. I could now sign and give away my ebooks. The packaging drove sales and awareness.

Ebooks, audiobooks, and POD have allowed short fiction to become viable again. As long as the price is commensurate, and the shopper is well-informed, we no longer have to write for the very limited scope of old-school physical packaging. But it’s not just short fiction that’s affected. One of the most powerful tools in marketing and sales these days is the ability to delivery LOTS of written words all at once.

Multi-author boxsets are allowing dozens of writers to hit national bestseller lists by combining their marketing powers. It’s also possible to include every book you write into a single product, selling this library of works at a discount. In the old way of publishing, every page cost money. Publishers would shrink down the font and squeeze the margins to save pennies per copy (resulting in a worse reading experience!). And if the author sent in a manuscript that was too short, the publishers would spread the text way out to justify the same $25 price on the hardback. There was no creativity with the containers. Bean counters decided the package, and the authors and editors were forced to comply.

But now you can add as much content as you like to your works. Do you have a rough draft that is wildly different from the original? Include it at the end for a behind-the-scenes look. The reader can skip it or peruse it; their choice! Did you cut out a lot of scenes from your epic fantasy to improve the reading experience? Maybe punch those up and release them as short stories, or tack them on at the end of the book! Write a blooper reel for your novel that comes after the credits. (Has anyone done this yet? Why not!).

The point of all these ideas is that we are creatives. That’s what we’re trying to make a living doing. So be fucking creative. There is no box to think outside of anymore. Stand out.   Insight #40: The Power of Free

When I completed my first book, all I wanted was to have it read by as many people as possible. My goal wasn’t to make a lot of money; I just wanted to see if a full-time career might be possible. So I emailed the draft out to anyone willing to read it, and I made a plan to serialize the book for free on my blog. I knew of a few science fiction authors who did something similar; a couple of them had released their books as weekly audio podcasts. In the end, I was pressured by some early fans to submit the manuscript to publishers. I was told that giving my book away for free would harm my career, not kickstart it. One of the early mistakes I made as a writer was to listen to people who weren’t having any luck along the querying route and follow their lead. I should have trusted my gut and my observations of those who had broken convention and had found success.

Giving away my work turned out to be a very powerful tool indeed. In the early days of Amazon’s KDP service (their online ebook platform for self-publishing), they provided a handful of “free days” for every 90 day enrollment period. KDP authors soon learned that giving away their works led to more sales. The danger in the arts is not in having your works devalued; it’s having your works undiscovered.

Free has other advantages, ones long ago discovered by sales forces in other industries. Free lowers the barrier to entry. It’s like an app you can download on a whim, and if you love the demo, you can pay for more levels. My first WOOL story has been made permanently free, with the hopes that those who enjoy it will seek out more. When WOOL was first taking off years ago, readers joked that I was a digital crack-dealer, giving away samples. It was a terrible analogy!

It was also a perfect analogy.

Another benefit to free is market research. People who don’t like something offered for free are less likely to leave a bad review than those who paid a lot of money and were dissatisfied. Reader reviews have become the single most powerful force driving book sales. The road to going viral with your works relies on writing a work that elicits raves from readers. Pulling this off is harder than you can possibly imagine. Free books will help keep review averages high, and hopefully get word-of-mouth started. I remember seeing people on social media urge their friends to read WOOL, and part of their sales pitch to their friends was that it was short and didn’t cost much.

Free has always been controversial. Many writers hate the idea of free, and most publishers don’t understand its power. Neil Gaiman once fought tooth and nail with his publisher to give away copies of his book AMERICAN GODS. It wasn’t selling as well as he thought it should, so he wanted to just let readers enjoy it online at no cost. His publishers balked, but Neil persisted. To humor him, they agreed to do it for a month. During this month, paid sales of AMERICAN GODS increased 700%! Neil was vindicated and thrilled, but his publisher had spent the month agonizing over all the “lost sales” of each free download. At the end of the month, they terminated the experiment. Paid sales dropped back down. They’d somehow seen enough by not paying attention.

The new controversy is all-you-can-read services like Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited. Some authors loathe the service, and most publishers refuse to participate. It’s the same debate I saw play out over free books years ago. Kindle Unlimited allows readers to pay a $9.99 monthly subscription and then read as many books as they want. This has been a boon to voracious readers, and a bonanza for the authors who get discovered and paid through the program. The problem with Kindle Unlimited, for an author, is that they have to make their works exclusive with Amazon. Hence the balking from many authors.

Exclusivity is my last insight-within-an-insight, and it’s related to the paradox of free. Just as free can lead to more paid sales, limiting the distribution of your books can lead to more readers. This may not always be true, but the current publishing market certainly makes this the case today. It’s been the case for most authors over the last two years.

Let’s imagine that Barnes & Noble offers to carry your book, but you can’t make it available anywhere else. If you agree to this, they’ll put your book in the store window and run special promotions on your book to drive lots of in-store sales. Most authors I know would jump at the chance, even though it meant not being available on Amazon, or in small independent bookstores. The opportunity to stand out and win special bookshelf placement is worth taking books out of markets where they are practically invisible. This is how Kindle Unlimited works. You trade exclusivity for greater visibility in the number one bookstore in the world.

This may not always be the case as more distribution options become available. The point here is not that Kindle Unlimited is a shortcut to success, or that if you give your books away for free you’ll make lots of money. My point with free and Kindle Unlimited is that some of the best decisions you make in publishing will be illogical on their surface. You have to be brave and experiment; try different things. The beauty of our first insight in this part of my series is that you didn’t rush off and give away your freedom to make these decisions. You can jack up the price of that free ebook and one day make it free again. You can take your ebooks out of Kindle Unlimited and see if other distributors  have upped their game. You can put them back into KU at any time.

The choices are all yours. The technology is waiting. Readers are waiting. You are lucky, because there’s never been a better time in human history to be a reader or a writer. And there’s never been more ways to bring these two parties together.   Bonus Insight: The secret to marketing

There’s one more facet to publishing not mentioned very much in this series, and it’s something I’m saving for a future series on book publishing, and that’s marketing. The secret to marketing is to not market so much. Don’t spend time marketing that you could otherwise spend writing. There is no marketing force as powerful as another book to publish. Period. End of story. Mic drop. Please make me stop repeating myself.

This doesn’t mean marketing isn’t important. It just means that marketing can more easily get in the way of success as it can provide a path to it. I’ve seen too many writers market the hell out of their first novel, or first trilogy, and get frustrated with disappointing sales and never write the work that would’ve gone viral on its own if they’d just kept pressing forward.

Go back to my first part of this series and you’ll see the advice I give to have the long view, to write twenty novels before you analyze your potential to make a career of this. I mean every word of that. This detachment from sales will allow you to persevere. When you see a writer blaze past you on the road to successville, understand that they are lapping you because they set out a long time before you even laced up your writing shoes. You didn’t see them go through the same struggles you’re going through now. You don’t know their full history any more than they know yours. Assume those histories have much in common.

The time to start marketing is when you have lots of works to offer, or one of your works takes off, or you land a special deal somewhere with an agent or publisher or media outlet. Until then, the way to market is to be yourself and to put that self out there. Get engaged in the writing community. Use your writing to make a mark on social media and your blog. Lay a foundation on which future marketing endeavors may rest. The goal isn’t to sell your works but to establish yourself. Much more to come in my marketing insights series, which I’m not even considering a part of this series, because you shouldn’t be thinking about it.

You should be thinking about writing.

So what are you doing here?

Get to it.

Finish what you start.

Work on your craft.

I believe in you.

Believe in yourself.

* This is the fourth in a four-part series. Read the rest:

Writing Insights Part One: Becoming a Writer

Writing Insights Part Two: The Rough Draft

Writing Insights Part Three: The Revision Process

  A version of this article appeared at The Wayfinder.

Hugh Howey

Hugh Howey is the author of the award-winning Molly Fyde saga and the New York Times and USA Today bestselling WOOL series. The WOOL OMNIBUS won the Kindle Book Review 2012 Indie Book of the Year Award.

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Writing Insights Part Three: The Revision Process

By Hugh Howey

It is often easier to rewrite from scratch than it is to revise

Welcome to the third entry in my four-part series on writing insights. In the first part of this series, I listed the things I wish I’d known before aspiring to become a writer. The second entry was all about how to get through the rough draft. Now I’d like to discuss how to improve your rough draft to get it ready for publication.

Many of the points in this section deal with the craft of writing. You may wonder why these are brought up after a rough draft is complete. Shouldn’t you learn to write before you beginwriting? I wish it worked this way, but it doesn’t. You learn by doing, not reading about doing. Rough drafts require skills beyond the skill of writing. They are about endurance and stamina. They require willpower and force of habit. Many phenomenal writers can’t complete a rough draft and never will. This is why much of the writing advice out there is really just motivational advice to get you through that first draft. More “You can do it!” rather than “How-to.”

This is exactly as it should be. Once you know you can write a novel, you can learn through the revision process how to write a better novel.

Having said that, all of these insights are meant to be read at any time. If you haven’t written your first word, I would recommend reading this entire series before you begin. There are insights about the publication process in the next section that may influence how you structure your rough draft. And if you’re working on your tenth novel, there may be something in here that helps you see the writing process in a new light. Or you may see what’s missing from this advice and share your thoughts, which will help me and others in our writing processes. With this series, I mostly have in mind the aspirational writer, someone who is where I was ten years ago. So it assumes nothing and attempts to help anyone starting from scratch.

Before we get to the revision insights, I want to start by congratulating those of you who find yourself at this point of the writing process. It’s an amazing accomplishment. I’ll never forget the day I finished my first rough draft. I happened to be visiting my mother and sister at the time, and that night we went out for a celebratory dinner. A USB thumb drive containing a backup of my work sat on the restaurant table as we ate. I didn’t want to let that manuscript out of my sight! I still didn’t believe it. For the next week, I had to stop myself from telling perfect strangers that I’d written a novel. I also realized during this week that I had no idea what to do next. I’d worked so long and so hard to get to this point that I’d never researched the rest.

Here are the ten things I wish I’d known, sitting at that dinner table all those years ago…

Insight #21: Don’t rush to publication.

For many writers, getting the rough draft complete is the hardest part of writing a novel. It can feel like you’re done at this point, and you might want to get the project out into the wild so you can start on something new, or so you can get some feedback, or see if it’ll be the runaway bestseller that you hope it might. These impulses lead to tragic mistakes. New authors will often submit a manuscript to agents before it’s ready; or they’ll self-publish before the work is truly done.

Now is not the time to waste all the effort you’ve put into your rough draft. Now comes the fun part. The next step(s) will involve perhaps a dozen full passes through the work. Yeah, a dozen or more! Each pass will gradually smooth away rough spots and errors. It’s like taking a roughhewn hunk of lumber and turning it into a polished piece of furniture. You’ll start with heavy grit sandpaper and work your way down to wet-sanding a typo here or there.

The beauty of the revision process is that this is where you’ll learn to become a great writer, much more so than in the rough draft stage. The techniques you pick up as you shore up your story and polish your prose will carry over into the next rough draft. Because of this, the writing process will get easier and easier. The revision process will become faster and faster.

I’ve heard some writers suggest that you should step away from a rough draft for a length of time, but I never understood the usefulness of this. When I finish a rough draft, I celebrate for a day and then go right back to the beginning of the novel to start the revisions. There are a handful of main things I want to accomplish with the first pass: (1) I want to plug any missing sections (scenes or chapters I skipped). (2) I want to make the prose more readable and improve the flow between sections and chapters. (3) I want to give the characters and my world more depth and detail. (4) I want to tighten the plot, add some foreshadowing, close any logical holes.

Now is also the time to think about how you plan to publish this work, which is the area we’ll cover in the fourth and final part of this series. If your rough draft is a 300,000 word epic fantasy tome, and you want to publish this with a major publishing house, your revision process is going to involve cutting that draft up into three novels to create a trilogy. This will require some plot restructuring. One of my keenest insights that I possess now, which I didn’t appreciate when I started writing, is that how you publish will influence what and how you write.

In the next section, we’ll also discuss how insanely easy it is to publish these days, and this is why some patience is required. In the old days, you didn’t have a choice but to be patient. It could easily take several years (if at all) to bring your book to market. Now it takes a few hours. I want to convince you to take longer. At least ten revision passes before you submit to agents or self-publish. I promise you’ll be glad you took this advice.

Insight #22: It is often easier to rewrite from scratch than it is to revise.

Before we discuss revising, it’s worth pointing out the alternative: rewriting. Yes, I hear your collective groans. We just got done writing the rough draft, and now we have to start a scene or chapter from scratch?! From a blank page?! Can’t we just move a few words or sentences around and be done with it?

Usually, you can. The revision process mostly involves massaging what’s already in place. But there are times when revising actually takes a lot longer than a rewrite. Understanding when this makes sense, and being brave enough to tackle these challenging moments, is often the difference between success and failure. I’ve seen entire manuscripts abandoned and/or destroyed because of this fatal oversight.

This is especially true with the opening chapters of a manuscript, which are the most important chapters for hooking your audience, whether that audience is an agent, a reader, or a publisher. As you wrap up your rough draft and go back to the beginning, now is the time to explore rewriting as well as revising. You know your story and your characters more fully now. Your writing skills have improved through the hours and hours you’ve invested in this project. Maybe your opening feels a little stale. Or you wonder if the story shouldn’t start with a different scene or a different piece of information. You can try revising, or you can open a blank document and see what kind of opening chapter you would write now. It’s a fun exercise. You might surprise yourself.

This technique works wonders, and it works throughout your novel. You can peel off any scene or chapter or sentence and try it again from scratch. There have been times when I’ll spend hours trying to get a chapter or paragraph just right, then pound out something new in a fraction of the time that’s far cleaner and better. Our existing words often get in the way. Learn to step around them and try something new.

This fits well with the last insight from the previous entry in this series, about writing lean. The beauty of writing lean is that you spend more time adding material, and less time wrestling with the pain of deletion or the discomfort of massaging the wrong words into a different order that isn’t much better.

Insight #23: Great books are all about pacing

To become a better writer, it helps to understand how the delivery of words affects a reader’s mood and their retention of information. The most important tool in this regard is pacing. Pacing can mean different things in different contexts. The next few insights are all about pacing in one way or another.

Let’s start with the importance of overall book pacing and construction. It can help to consider extreme scenarios in order to arrive at more general truths. For instance, imagine a 300 page novel with no chapters or scene breaks. I’m sure they’ve been written or considered by people eager to break rules and convention. I imagine they are nearly impossible to read. Why? Because our brains are built to absorb ideas in chunks and to process those chunks individually.

We experience things in the moment, move those experiences into short term memory, and then perhaps to long term memory. If we get too much information all at once, we can’t process it well (or at all). Chapters and paragraphs signal an opportunity to file away what we just absorbed and prepare to absorb another chunk. This is why paragraph length is critical for flow and retention. If possible, paragraphs should be of similar length, each one containing three to seven sentences. This can vary depending on how long or short the sentences are (more on that in a bit). And this rule can be broken to great effect. Those effects are diminished when the rule is ignored altogether.

Short paragraphs stand out – but only if used sparingly!

And long paragraphs have their place in our stories, especially if the desired effect is to ease the readers brain into a somnolent state, like the sing-song of a lullaby. Proust was a master of paragraphs like these; they went on for pages, and were full of sentences that stretched line after line, full of clauses and lists, huddled together between commas and semi-colons and dashes, all with the combined effect not of conveying concrete information and facts, but to get the reader in a certain mood, perhaps to make them wistful, to deprogram their concrete minds so they were ready for the dream-state of Proust’s expert meanderings; in this, the words become like music, more notes than ideas, and the reader’s muscles themselves relax, a hypnotic trance ensuing, perhaps at the risk of losing them to literature’s great nighttime enemy and thief: sleep.

Practice both types of paragraph structure and pacing. Look for examples in your own reading. Ask how the authors you admire are affecting your mood as you read their prose, and then ask the same questions as you revise your rough draft. Chop up that long paragraph into two or more. Be frugal with your short declarations so you don’t rob them of their power. Treat your words like lyrics and listen for the song they sing.

Insight #24: Find your cadence between action and reflection

The pacing in the previous insight deals with how words are lumped together. Their physical structure, if you will. There’s a second kind of pacing, and this one deals with the actual content and type of words used. It’s the flow between action and reflection, and it’s especially crucial for works of fiction.

Action scenes don’t necessarily mean gunfights and car chases and alien invasions. An action scene can be an argument between two lovers. It can be a fierce internal struggle as a character decides to leap or step back from a metaphorical ledge. Action scenes are anytime something major is happening in the plot or to the characters. The reader is usually flying through these passages at a higher rate of speed, eager to see what happens next. Most often, these scenes have large blocks of text and less dialog, but that’s not always the case.

Reflection is what happens after the action. It’s when characters absorb the change that’s happened and plan what comes next. Period of reflection also give the reader a chance to absorb what’s happened and to guess or dread what might happen next. This is the cadence of your book, the rise and fall of action and reflection.

Now, if an entire novel was written with nothing but action, it would make for an exhausting read. And if a book consisted of nothing but constant reflection, it would be difficult to wade through. In the former, you would have change in your plot but not your characters. In the latter, you would have change in your characters but no plot. Every book should contain some balance between the two.

That doesn’t mean the same balance. A literary novel will typically have lots of reflection and very brief spurts of action. A genre novel will have lots of action and shorter pauses for reflection. I haven’t seen a definition of what makes a work “literary” that I fully buy, but maybe this fingerprint of cadence comes closest. It could be why many genre fans can’t read literary novels, and why many literary fans can’t abide genre works. It doesn’t matter if the genre works are as well-written as the literature – there’s simply too much happening. Not enough reflection. I would argue that pace defines these books far more than content. Which is why some great works of science fiction, like THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS or THE HANDMAID’S TALE, read more like literary novels (and are often shelved as such).

As you revise your work, look for places where the action goes on too long and consider inserting a pause for reflection. Let the characters catch their breath in an elevator, crack a joke or two, or tend to some wound or primal fear before you pick up the pace again. Similarly, look for anywhere that characters are ruminating too long and figure out how to spice things up. If you’re bored with what you’re writing, chances are a lot of readers will be bored as well. Make a gun go off; a car backfire; someone in the neighboring booth get the wrong order and pitch a fit; a zombie pop up that has to be dealt with, anything. And if you feel like you’ve gone on long enough, there’s always the em dash and a sudden exit—

Insight #25: Don’t repeat yourself. Unless it’s deliberate. And then repeat yourself carefully.

Alliteration and repetition are both an important part of pacing, and they both highlight the importance of grasping reading psychology. Readers love repetition when it is deliberate, for extra punch, for added stress. But our minds trip over accidental repetition, as when the same words appear too near to one another in a paragraph or chapter accidentally.

The psychology of this is strange, and it varies slightly from reader to reader. Common words can appear throughout the same sentence or paragraph without tripping the reader up. Uncommon words draw attention to themselves. If the reader sees a rare word twice, part of their brain will perk up and draw attention to the second sighting, which breaks the flow and distracts them from the content or emotional impact of the sentence. One of the most common things you’ll see from a good editor is similar or same words highlighted if they’re too close to one another in a manuscript. The editor will suggest changing or deleting one of them. This is always sound advice.

Repetition, however, can be extremely powerful if wielded appropriately. Play around and experiment. Pay close attention as a reader to see when you trip up and how you might have avoided that mistake in your own writing.

Insight #26: Reading is aural

I find it fascinating that we can hear ourselves think. When I was very young, I had a hard time telling if this was indeed the case. When I read silently to myself, am I “hearing” those words in my mind? Or am I just thinking them? What seemed to settle the question for me was the ability to hear various accents in my head. I could think with a British accent, or a French accent, which meant the words didn’t just have meaning, they had pitch and inflection and all the properties of sound.

This is why cadence is so important when it comes to writing. It’s why the long paragraphs mentioned (and demonstrated) above have a powerful effect on us. This is also how we can hear our characters’ voices, and why it’s important to make those voices distinct. Common writing advice includes the importance of observation: sit and watch crowds and make note of how they move, how they dress, how their features look. This is great advice. But we have to observe with our ears as well.

Some of your characters will have gravelly voices. Others will have a slight lisp. They should have accents and vocal tics. Be sure that all of your characters don’t have your vocal tics, or they’ll all sound the same. You want these voices to jump out, so try to exaggerate the differences between their voices in your own head. The common mistake is to leave them all sounding the same.

Another mistake writers make is to leave out all the background noises that bring a scene to life. Pay attention when background noise is done well. A great example is the novel THE THOUSAND AUTUMNS OF JACOB DE ZOET by David Mitchell. Birds and street-sweepers, mischievous monkeys, the rattling of the wind, all of these things set the stage and help break up the dialog and narrative passages. They also help bring the world to life and make it real. Read this book, and you’ll become a better writer; I guarantee it.

The musicality of silent reading is why punctuation is so powerful. How much pause do you want readers to take? This power lies almost entirely with the choices you make. Liberal usage of commas – and there’s no hard and fast rule on many of the comma choices we make – can change how a sentence sounds in one’s head. The em dash (as used above) is super powerful. So are parentheticals as in the previous sentence; the beauty here is that a parenthetical provides not just a pause, but a hint to the reader to say these words softer, almost like an aside. The semi-colon in the previous sentence keeps things flowing more than a comma but less than a period. And going without punctuation as in the previous sentence, when I could easily have added one or two commas, rushes you right through.

The last sentence in the above paragraph could easily have been written without the middle clause and the two commas that encase it. It wouldn’t change the content or meaning, it just provides an example of what the sentence before it didn’t employ. Each of these decisions is a branch; everything sounds different depending on which one we go down. One of the most powerful skills a writer develops over time is the ability to “hear” these various choices in advance and choose the best one in each scenario. At first, it’ll require typing out several versions of each to see which you like best. Read each choice both aloud and silently. Eventually, you’ll make these choices without realizing it, and your writing will grow stronger.

I’ll say it again: Practice. Take a chapter you aren’t thrilled with and rewrite it from scratch, going for a more breezy style or a more punchy one. Write scenes that don’t have anything to do with your work in progress. Athletes do this all the time. They play a game of HORSE to improve their shooting form. They take a hundred free throws in a row. Actors will sit in front of a mirror and go through different moods and inflections; writers should do the same. Sit down and write a car chase, a bar fight, a sex scene, someone losing their job, someone getting their dream job, someone wishing they could quit their jobs. Do these things to play with your pacing and punctuation. If you go these extra lengths in your writing career, you’ll see dividends. I promise.

Insight #27: Zoom down into your character’s eyes.

Remember those posters that became a fad for a while, the ones that looked like tessellations of shapes but held hidden scenes of dinosaurs and dolphins? Kiosks in malls sold them. People would crowd around them and stare and stare, and then bust out laughing or gasp in surprise. Because if you crossed your eyes just right, 3D images popped out of nowhere. And then they’d disappear. You’d fight to get them back.

When you write your fiction, do you see the words on the page, or the events you’re describing? The chances are, you mostly see the words. I want to convince you that you can see both. And that the more you practice, and the deeper you fall into the flow of writing, the more often you’ll see just the action, and the words will disappear.

When you find this flow, you’ll write with astonishing speed and clarity. This is a truth that surprises most non-writers: On the days that I write the most, I have to edit the least. Quantity and quality often come hand in hand. I’ve written 10,000 words in a single day and had to edit very little of it. I’ve had other days where I agonize over 300 words and use none of them. Some days I get my eyes crossed just right. Other days, I’m staring at words.

The voice and tense you choose have a huge impact here, and we’ll discuss them next. More important perhaps is the zoom level you pick. You have to pinch-to-zoom your manuscript at times. If you are writing a fantasy novel, and you start with a prologue, you might want to zoom way out and write with a detached omniscience about the history of the land, the coronation and death of kings, the foment and ravages of war. If you are writing a thriller, you might start off your story by zooming in to write down the barrel of a gun, deliberately leaving out-of-view the larger context (like who is pulling the trigger). My advice is to stay as zoomed in as you possibly can. See the world through your characters’ eyes at all times.

Video games usually come in one of two perspectives. One perspective is the isometric view; it’s a third-person view above the action and at an angle. Unfortunately for many writers, this is the default view we assume when we write our first novels. I think it’s a huge mistake. We end up describing events and scenes as they appear, rather than as they feel. We give too much context about the layout of the scene and the action, and not enough context about the emotions and feelings of those experiencing those actions. If you feel like you’re seeing your story from this isometric, over-the-head view, stop writing and zoom back in.

The other videogame view is the first-person view, and this is what we’re after with our writing. Push down into your characters’ skulls. See the novel through their eyes. What are they thinking? What’s going on in the background? Are they hungry? Scared? Excited? Cold? Angry? Do they have any lingering aches? Is their mind wandering? Did they miss-hear something and need it repeated?

Whatever you do, don’t fall into the trap of describing events to the reader. Live through those events yourself and help your readers do the same.

Insight #28: Play with Tense and Voice until you find the right combo for each work

Tense and voice are basic writing concepts, but they merit mention here. I can’t count the number of times I’ve written a story in one tense or voice and had to revise the entire work to a different tense or voice. It happened in the previous entry of this series when I needed to write a quick chase scene. I thought it might be useful to share the before and after, so you can see the difference.

In past tense:

Marco bolted out the back door, Sarah right behind him. He could hear bar stools and tables toppling, had that last image of Marco reaching for his gun, and now every nerve in his body was waiting for a shot to ring out, for Sarah to cry she’d been hit, or to feel the punch and burn of a bullet slamming into his body. He urged Sarah ahead of him, knowing being shot would hurt less than seeing her go down. The end of the alley was a forever away. Footsteps pounded behind them, one of the goons yelling for them to stop or he’d shoot. Sarah swerved left and threw her shoulder into a shut door, the wood cracking. As the first shot rang out, Juan threw himself against her to shield her body with his. The both of them crashed through the door and into a busy kitchen. Men and women in white turned and gaped, but there was no time. Juan and Sarah scrambled to their feet and kept running.

And now in present tense:

Marco bolts out the back door, Sarah right behind him. He can hear bar stools and tables toppling, has that last image of Marco reaching for his gun, and now every nerve in his body is waiting for a shot to ring out, for Sarah to cry she’s been hit, or to feel the punch and burn of a bullet slam into his body. He urges Sarah ahead of him, knowing being shot will hurt less than seeing her go down. The end of the alley is a forever away. Footsteps pound behind them, one of the goons yelling for them to stop or he’ll shoot. Sarah swerves left and throws her shoulder into a shut door, the wood cracking. As the first shot rings out, Juan hurls himself against her to shield her body. The both of them crash through the door and into a busy kitchen. Men and women in white turn and gape, but there is no time. Juan and Sarah scramble to their feet and keep running.

Present tense is more powerful when we want to leave the outcome in doubt. Past tense often spoils the fact that the narrators lived to tell their story. Even worse, past tense can lose some of the immediacy of action. Anyone who has watched a taped sporting event versus a live sporting event can relate. Knowing that a thing is happening right now is a powerful feeling. But there are times that past tense just feels more apt for a particular story. Many writers are more comfortable writing in past tense, so they default to this. Whatever you choose, be consistent through each scene or chapter (in most cases, the entire book). And choose deliberately.

Voice is another major decision, one that can change in the revision process. This is a laborious amount of editing, so it’s best to think on these things early. But don’t be afraid to try both and see which one works better. There are myriad combinations of voice and tense. Some combinations are more off-putting than others, but this doesn’t mean you can’t make them work. The HUNGER GAMES books are written in first-person present tense, which many find difficult to read. Millions of fans of the books disagree. Here’s my chase scene again, this time in first person:

I bolt out the back door, Sarah right behind me. I can hear bar stools and tables toppling, and I see that last image of Marco reaching for his gun. Every nerve in my body is waiting for a shot to ring out, for Sarah to cry that she’s been hit, or to feel the punch and burn of a bullet slam into my own body. I urge Sarah ahead of me. Getting shot would hurt far less than seeing her go down.

The end of the alley is a forever away. Footsteps pound behind us, one of the goons yelling for us to stop or he’ll shoot. Sarah swerves left and throws her shoulder into a shut door, the wood cracking. As the first shot rings out, I hurl myself against her to shield her body. The two of us crash through the door and into a busy kitchen. Men and women in white smocks and hairnets turn and gape, but there is no time. Sarah and I scramble to our feet and keep running.

First-person present tense is great for reader immersion, but don’t rely on it. The number of sentences that start with “I” can be grating to the reader, so you have to work hard to mix it up. And the advantage with third-person perspectives is that we can move between characters from chapter to chapter. There’s also the nagging doubt that our narrator doesn’t survive their adventure, that the reason it’s told in third-person is because it has to be; the protagonist doesn’t make it. Third-person can be just as immersive if we write it zoomed in, as we mentioned above. Give us their thoughts and perspective, and it feels almost like we’re writing in first-person:

Juan hadn’t felt love like this since high school. Since Amanda. Turning over his arm, he studied the scar there across his bicep, the jagged raised whelp with the staggered row of dots to either side. She had told him to stop being a baby, to hold still, but he’d seen the way her hands shook as she threaded the needle. He remembered the blood on them both. There was only so much numb in the world when thread is making its way through flesh, skin puckering up as it’s pulled tight, the girl you love twisting her face up in concentration and worry, and you trying your damnedest to not pass out. Only so much numb in the world . . . What Juan wouldn’t do for some of that numbness right now.

In this example, we remove the reader from the POV by making it third person, and we remove events from the present by describing something about the past, and we write it all in past tense! Normally, these choices would create distance and reduce immersion. But is the passage above any less immediate? It feels like it’s through Juan’s eyes, even though it refers to him in the third person. Details and zooming work miracles, and they balance out our decisions about voice and tense. Speaking of details…

Insight #29: Details, details, details.

It has taken this long to mention my favorite writing technique, and now you’re in for it! Details turn stories into works of art. Details make us believe the stories we’re told. The number one thing that separates a serviceable writer from a great writer is the level of detail they achieve. We’re going to go through several examples here to kick your attention to detail up several notches.

Before we do, I want to stress why details matter. Our brains are wired for telling and hearing stories; there is some good research to suggest that this is a foundational feature of the human brain. We are storytelling animals. Some of these stories are true, and some aren’t. Some are meant to warn us of danger, some stories are meant to just give us information, and some stories are designed simply to entertain.

When stories are full of little details, we tend to believe them. Especially if those details make sense, and we don’t think the person telling the story would know to make those details up. Con men and practiced liars are great at sprinkling in details to distract from their overall fictions. Fiction writers should take note.

Let’s look at some common mistakes I see in early novels. These are problems you might find in your own work. These problems arise because the author cannot see the details of their world and their characters. The absence of these features call attention to the fiction. They create a backdrop similar to the one in the film THE TRUMAN SHOW, a feeling of all façade and no substance.

– The main character has no job and seems to never have had a job. You see this in a lot of YA. The character’s job – according to the author – is to allow the plot to happen to him or her. The character cannot possibly know about the plot that’s going to unfold, so this bit of convenience distracts us. Our brains can tell there’s something wrong, something missing.

– Entire branches of the protagonist’s family are missing. Anyone not central to the plot is absent, or paper-thin. Grandparents especially. This is because many authors don’t know how to include details without distracting from the plot. Great writers sprinkle details in a way that make the plot easier to understand, rather than distracting.

– Characters in poorly written novels often feel naked and empty-handed. When most of us leave the house, we have to plan what we wear, and we hunt and double-check that we have a handful of important items with us. In many freshmen novels, the character only has the plot to attend to. Out the door they go, furthering the plot along. Again, this often comes from improper zoom, inattention to detail, and not thinking about characters while away from the keyboard. As the author, you might know the protagonist is out the door to meet the girl of his dreams, but he only knows he’s going grocery shopping. Have him prepare and think accordingly.

– Food, water and their disposal. We eat, poop, and piss a lot. Characters in fiction never seem to. You don’t have to capture every instance, but you do have to include enough. Keep your characters hydrated! Make them stop the car and pee in the woods, the wind causing shadows to dance on the forest floor, the sound of something large moving through the branches, hopefully a deer. Food and its disposal are a great chance for reflection and cadence. No one does this better than George RR Martin, but you don’t have to take it quite so far as he.

– Give your characters scars, both physical and emotional. Too many characters are inserted into a plot as a blank canvas on which to drape some action. Their next love is their first love. Their next injury is their first injury. This is because not enough time has been spent daydreaming about these characters, their pasts, their families, their experiences. ROMEO AND JULIET starts with Romeo pining for his last love. The pattern of his fickleness tells us depths about him that a one-time love affair would not (and more about the Bard’s view of love as well).

– Behind-the-scenes knowledge. I read a book recently in which a character went on a talk show. One of the details mentioned was the choreography of cameras dancing and weaving beyond the bright lights, and it not only painted the scene for me, and what it must feel like to sit up there, it made me suspend disbelief because the author was sharing a detail that I realized must be true that I don’t often think about. Small details like this are what make it difficult to be a great writer; you need to know a lot of things about a lot of things. This is why a wide variety of experiences, jobs, reading, travel, and other types of media consumption make for a better writer.

– Totems and object origins. Does the character have a favorite piece of jewelry? Is their car a hand-me-down from a friend or relative? Is there a secret place they keep the things dear to them hidden? The more details like this that you sprinkle in, the more you’ll find use for them later in your plot. Just the mention of an uncle who gave your character their beater of a car might inspire you to bring that uncle in for a greater role down the road. This is the amazing thing about sprinkling details throughout your novel: Each one is an instance of pure imagination, and intricate plots are built on them. The best part is: when you use some detail for later inspiration in your novel, you’ve set up the original mention as a nice bit of foreshadowing.

During the revision process, I’m always looking for places to add detail. In my chase scene from the last section, I originally didn’t have the chefs in the kitchen wearing white smocks and hairnets. With just a few words, we can paint a scene more vividly. In a fast paced action scene, only certain highlights might stand out. We might not see that one of the chefs is tall and thin, another short and squat, one holding a colander, another stirring a steaming pot. But we’d notice they’re all dressed the same, because a group of strangers rarely are. We might notice all are wearing hats or hairnets. Or that one is holding a knife, because our adrenaline is pumping. Which details we choose to add are important. Think about what would stand out to your character if you were in their shoes.

One last example of detail, this one on how to interrupt your action. The world does not come at us linearly. When people talk, they rarely do so in complete sentences. They finish each other’s sentences, cut each other off once they understand the gist of what’s being said, incorrectly hear some words and make mistakes or have to ask for clarification. And some details interrupt the flow of the plot. A plot on rails stands out as being inauthentic. Send characters down dead-end alleys, literally and metaphorically. Use interruptions to sprinkle in backstory, foreshadowing, and missing details.

For instance, your detective might be chasing the bad guy when her grandmother calls to ask her to help with her computer. The detective doesn’t have time right now. You never have time for your grandmother, she might hear. Oh, okay… And she walks her through sending an attachment to another relative, all while trying not to lose the killer. Diversions like this add depth and realism. They wake the reader up. Make sure your story has a few.

Insight #30: Get help!

Every writer has strengths and weaknesses. You might be a whiz with dialog, but you can’t write action scenes that feel gripping. You can build amazing worlds, but you can’t create characters that leap off the page. There are hundreds of small skills that add up to one great writer; no one starts off good at all of them.

Getting many different perspectives on our works during the revision process will not only improve the drafts, they’ll improve the writer. It’ll make subsequent novels better, and they’ll require less editing. Join a writing group in your area; form one if a writing group doesn’t already exist. There are online editing groups out there as well. These groups often exchange rough drafts, and each member makes notes to assist the author. Take this process seriously. You’ll learn much through another author’s strengths and weaknesses. They’ll teach you much in return.

Read about writing, especially while you’re in revision mode. One of my favorites is EATS, SHOOTS AND LEAVES by Lynne Truss. It’s a hilarious book about grammar that will clean up lots of technical mistakes, leaving room for your editors and critique partners to comment more on story, characters, and pacing.

Find a loved one who can be an honest critic. My mother has been a wonderful collaborator over the years. She never hesitates to tell me where I can improve a story. It also helps to know when she’s confused, when I’ve left out too much information, or perhaps where I added too much detail.

When the revision process gets to the last stages, and you’re reading along looking for typos and rough edges, rope in some beta readers if possible. Some authors employ dozens of beta readers, but this is only easy to do once you have a following. Starting out, you might have to cajole friends into helping. Whatever you do, don’t be worried about “giving away” your work or your ideas. If you’re this far along in the process, you’ll know by now that execution is the difficult part. Ideas are the cheap bits.

Those are my top ten insights on the revision process. If you’ve made ten or twelve passes through your work, and you’ve had some editorial assistance to find the things you missed, you should have a nicely polished draft of an interesting story clearly told. Now what? How do you get as many readers as possible? Or as many sales? Or win awards? Or ensure the best chances of making a livable income?

* This is the third in a four-part series. Read the rest:

Writing Insights Part One: Becoming a Writer

Writing Insights Part Two: The Rough Draft

Writing Insights Part Four: Publishing Your Book

  A version of this article appeared at The Wayfinder.

Hugh Howey

Hugh Howey is the author of the award-winning Molly Fyde saga and the New York Times and USA Today bestselling WOOL series. The WOOL OMNIBUS won the Kindle Book Review 2012 Indie Book of the Year Award.

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Writing Insights Part Two: The Rough Draft

By Hugh Howey

The most important thing in all of the writing process is to get an entire story down on paper

In the first part of this series, I listed some of the insights I wish I’d known before I set out to become a writer. Those insights might not be equally useful to all people, and that same warning applies here as we dive into the writing process. I’m sharing these simply because I think my twenty years of fruitless endeavors might’ve been a whole lot easier if I’d known a few things before I got started.

To me, the rough draft is the most difficult part of the writing process. Revising and publishing are the fun and easy parts. I know many other writers also struggle with their rough drafts. The idea for the story is exciting, and the first chapter leaps right from the fingertips, but things quickly bog down. Excitement wanes. Doubts creep in. The inner critic takes over.

I hope to help you through this process as much as I can. We’ll pick up the numbering right where we left off.

Insight #11: Your Rough Draft Doesn’t Have to be Good

If you take only one insight away from this part of this series, please let it be this one. Nothing stifles creativity and production like the inner critic who shows up too early. I’m going to repeat this, and I strongly suggest that you make it your daily rough draft mantra:

My rough draft doesn’t have to be good. A version of this article appeared at The Wayfinder.

The entire next entry in this series will be about how to revise rough drafts and make them better. But that process is impossible if the rough draft doesn’t exist in the first place. The most important thing in all of the writing process is to get an entire story down on paper. This is the first goal as a writer. Don’t let anything get in the way of that goal. Remind yourself of this every day.

I like to think of it as gathering clay. You can’t sit in front of a potter’s wheel and turn air into a vase. You need a wet lump of clay to work with. The rough draft is that wet lump of clay. Every day you sit down at your computer and force another sentence onto the screen, you are creating that clay. This comes first. It’s okay if it’s messy. You’ll fix it later.

Insight #12: Write all the way to the end before you revise your beginning

Related to the above, you have to write all the way to the end of your story before you start revising the beginning.

I’ve seen this mistake trap far too many a writer. Revising is easier and more appealing than writing new material. Sitting down in front of the computer, the writer recoils from the awful empty whiteness at the bottom of the document, and their eyes scroll up to the last thing they wrote. They are tempted to improve what they’ve already written instead of pressing forward into the unknown. This is like being lost in the woods and deciding to dress up a clearing rather than hacking your way out to open air. Novels and adventurers die like this.

Forget what you’ve written. Plunge forward. Even if there are continuity issues, plunge forward. You can bridge gaps later. If you want to change the name of a major character, just switch to the new name and leave the old names as they are. You’ll fix it later. If you start your search-and-replace now, you’ve given yourself an excuse to stop writing for the day. If you need to look up the name of a town, enter a placeholder and keep writing. If you get on Google, you may stop writing for the day. Your goal is to cut that trail all the way to the end, however rough a trail it is. You’re going to pave it and make it beautiful later.

This is worth repeating to yourself every day as you sit down at your keyboard: You must write to the end of the story. You must make progress toward that end today. A sentence, a paragraph, a chapter. You must push the story forward, forward, forward. Don’t stop until you get to the end.

Insight #13: Know what you’re writing

Writing to the end of your story is a whole lot easier if you know where you’re going.

Far too much is said about outlines, pantsing, plotting, and the preparations made before the rough draft is written. One of the things I’ve learned is that there are elements of all these methods in every writing style. When you write an outline, you’re doing it by the seat of your pants. And when you meander through a story as a pantser, you are often following established outlines about character arcs and the hero’s journey absorbed through years of entertainment. Outlines contain leaps of imagination and sparks of sudden inspiration, just as wandering stories are far more constrained than we like to admit.

The best stories, however, know where they want to go. This is different from the best prose, and the best plot twists, which often strike the author like a sucker punch in the flow of daily writing. The two aren’t to be confused. The difference can be seen in the TV show LOST, which had moments of pure brilliance that were undone by not having any clue where it was going when it got started. It made for a gripping view at times, but an overall dissatisfying experience for many. The theme of the entire show was cobbled together in the last few seasons. Its meaning was layered on like icing. You should aspire to bake your meaning in right from the beginning. The plot is the thing, and the literary flourishes are the icing.

Knowing how your story unfolds requires time away from the keyboard. Quiet time. You may need weeks or months of daydreaming about your story before you’re ready to write. My best stories had this in common: I knew the final scene of the novel before I got started. I knew where everything was going to end up. This can be as simple as knowing the girl and boy are going to end up together. Or that the murderer is going to be caught. Finding love and finding retribution are adequate goals for stories, but I would call them just barely adequate. Even better is finding love by overcoming the odds of specific ghosts in one’s past. Or getting retribution while also resolving an internal conflict about justice, or gender, or race. The theme should be something important to you. The theme serves as the bones of the novel even more than the plot. It will keep you focused, motivated, and power you to the end of your rough draft.

I’ll give you an example here, and more examples in the next part of the series, which will dive even deeper into the craft of writing. Let’s say I want to write a young adult novel about a teenage ninja girl who falls in love with a young pirate boy. Obviously there are going to be jokes in the novel about peglegs and parrots, and how someone’s wardrobe tends to be heavy on the color black. There will be swashbuckling ship scenes and some sneaking around in the dark. Our young ninja will learn that climbing a mast is a lot like climbing a tree, and that pirates make kinda-okay ninjas if they can learn to keep their mouths shut for one hot minute (and if you can convince them to shower so no one smells them coming). And here is the germ of the story’s theme: Things as disparate as ninjas and pirates have a lot in common. It’s possible to challenge our biases and discover these commonalities.

This is not a new theme. It’s not new because it’s an important theme. It’s one worth repeating, and it can really power a novel forward. There’s a lot of conflict baked right into the plot. It doesn’t matter if the reader has seen the theme before; they haven’t seen it in this context. It doesn’t matter that they know the conflict will be resolved; what matters is the suspense of how it’s resolved.

The detective almost always solves the case; what’s gripping is how she puts together the clues and avoids getting shot by the bad guy in the process. The boy and girl almost always end up together in the end; what’s exciting is seeing the obstacles that crop up along the way and how they overcome them. Find a theme that interests you and mold your story around this. Or daydream about your story until the theme presents itself. Understand the final scene in your story, how your characters have changed, how the reader might feel about those characters and about your story on that last page. Writing is a gradual process of taking one step after the other. It helps when you know where you’re going.

Insight #14: Plot is king. Prose is pawn.

There are two elements to writing that are often in conflict with one another. The first of these elements is plot, or the dry facts of what happens in a story, where it happens, whom it happens to. The other element is prose, or the words chosen to describe these events. Finding the perfect balance between the two is the key to writing your best novel.

The biggest problem I’ve seen with writing advice and writing classes is that they spend too much time teaching prose and not enough time teaching plot. The result is a cadre of authors who write well about nothing. The problem with this is that the vast majority of readers value plot far more highly than they value prose. This isn’t just borne out by the commercial success of genre works over literary works, but also by the conversations people have about the novels they enjoy. They discuss the characters and what happens to them. Far rarer are those readers who gush over their love of Proust’s florid sentences.

The best writing, without a doubt, combines great writing with a great story. It’s absolutely possible to have both. Justin Cronin made the leap from literary writing to genre writing without losing his fine touch with words. You can certainly have both, but the story should always come first. A gripping story told clearly, so the reader understands what’s happening, is the primary goal. From this base, a great writer can sprinkle in as many wonderful analogies and turns of phrase and beautiful descriptions as she likes, so long as she doesn’t distract from the telling of the story.

When writing a rough draft, the truth of this is critical. Rough drafts are often like detailed outlines, so that the author can see the entirety of their novel. The prose is punched up in the revising. And over time, the writer will get stronger both in plot and prose, so that the rough draft needs less work in the revision process.

Insight #15: Write in your own voice

The best way to kill your chances as a writer is to attempt to write like one. We all fall into this trap. When pounding out a Facebook post, or a comment on a forum, or an email to a friend, we write like the wind. The words tumble right out, and the meaning we hope to convey is succinct and clear.

And then, when we sit down to write a novel, we trip over our words as we try too hard to sound like someone we aren’t. I don’t know why we do this in the beginning, but the sooner we get over the impulse, the better. Write that rough draft as though you’re composing an email to a friend about a story you heard. Use your own voice. The subtleties and nuances of this voice will grow over time. For now, keep it simple.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be creative, or witty, or use the fullness of your vocabulary. It just means that you shouldn’t strain yourself as you write your rough draft. You shouldn’t try too hard to be flashy.

Continuing my love of basketball analogies, think of your rough draft as learning to dribble up and down the court. You don’t start by trying to dribble between your legs and around your back. Your first goal should be to get to where you can dribble without looking down at the ball. Make your writing comfortable and second nature before you get fancy. Just get the story down.

I’m going to give you a few examples. Below are the opening sentences of my hypothetical young adult novel about a young ninja who falls in love with a pirate. The first opening:

"Anya woke up on the day of her final exam. If she passed, she would finally be a ninja, just like her father and her grandfather. She didn’t want to think about what would happen if she failed. She slowly got dressed, careful to lace everything tight. Loose fabric can get one killed. And today would start a long life of trying very hard to not get killed."

Here’s a second opening:

"Anya’s thoughts raced like buzzing bees as she woke up and slowly donned her jet-black ninja uniform, complete with split-toed shoes and her tenth degree blackbelt. The sun lanced through the open bedroom window, reminding her that she was late for her final test, the test that would mean she was finally a real ninja, like her father before her, and her grandfather before him."

And a third one:

"Anya was nervous. And ninjas weren’t supposed to be nervous. Maybe that’s because she wasn’t a ninja yet. Today was the day, the final test. If she passed, she’d be a full-fledged ninja like her father and her grandfather. Today she would make them proud. Or she would die trying."

In the first example, I’m just dribbling the ball up the court. Nothing fancy, just the dry facts and plain descriptions. I’m telling a friend a story. In the second example, I tried to emulate what I remember from old habits and what I see from some writers who are just starting out. The temptation to get flowery. It’s not a terrible opening, but it would be more difficult to revise. The ending has punch, but it’s too cliché. And in the third example, I show what happens when we concentrate on the prose and not the plot. You almost forget the details of what’s happening because of the awkward pacing of the sentences. Readers drift off when they run into writing like this.

Of course, all three openings work okay for a rough draft. Remember that this isn’t what the reader will see in a final book; it’s just whacking a hole through the underbrush. So why is the first example the clear winner? Because the first example took very little thought and time to write. I spent twice as long on the second one, and three times as long on the third (and hated the last two even as I played with them).

I’d like to add that if you’re reading these with the critical eye that you’d give a finished novel, you’re already forgetting the important insights from above. The point here is not perfection or even good. The point is to get to the scene where the girl ninja meets the boy pirate. Playing around with the prose does not get us there. Dribble the ball up the court. Make a layup. We’ll work on fancy passes and slam dunks later. For now, find the style that allows you to make progress. It’s usually the simplest one. That’s your voice.

Insight #16: The constant application of pressure works miracles

If you remember back to the last part of this series, insight #3 was that a career in writing is a marathon, not a sprint. As a hopeful author, you need to take the long view of your career and trust in the process. There are no shortcuts. You might have to write a dozen novels before you break through. This same bit of patience will get you through your individual rough drafts as well.

I want to tell you about making it through my first rough draft, the thing that changed to allow twenty years of frustration to suddenly morph into success after success. Those twenty years, you see, were spent wishing I was a writer, rather than spending my time writing. The same might be true for you. We spend hours and days and years wishing we were getting writing done, while not writing.

What changed for me is that I started writing every single day. This simple habit allowed me to write two or three novels a year, where before I couldn’t complete a novel in a decade. I learned to form this habit by writing daily book reviews. I had a self-imposed deadline that forced me to write by the clock, not when I felt inspired. You can’t wait for the muse to strike. You have to sit her down and make her work with you.

When I saw how productive I could be writing for an hour or two every single day, I decided to try – once again – to write my first novel. This time, it worked. I didn’t take a day off. I didn’t worry if it was a great draft. I knew from my daily book reviews to trust in the revision process. But the most important thing is that I carved time out of my very busy life and filled that time with nothing but writing.

We all have that time. For me, I gave up the hours I spent playing videogames and watching TV. I kept the time spent with my family, the time I spent hiking, and going to work, and cooking, and household chores. I just gave up some passive entertainment and replaced it with writing-as-a-professional entertainment. I soon found myself going to sleep earlier and waking up when the house was nice and quiet to write before the sun came up. Perhaps you find your writing hour after everyone has gone to bed. Or during your lunch break. Make it consistent; make it daily; make it happen.

Insight #17: Most of the writing takes place away from the keyboard

Each one of these insights feels to me like the most important advice there is when it comes to writing. I have a hard time ranking them in order. But this one deserves a place near the top.

What used to kill my writing process were the hours spent staring at an open document not knowing what to write next. Writing should not take place behind a keyboard. Your computer has too many ways of distracting you, and nothing puts on the pressure like a blank page and a blinking cursor. The time to write is all the quiet hours spent away from the computer. This is a challenge, because we have become allergic to quiet time. The aspiring writer needs to fix this immediately and with absolute stringency.

Quiet time means driving to and from work or school without the radio on. It means wearing earbuds on the subway but not playing any music. It means taking up yoga or meditation. It means putting an end to perseverating on conversations with friends and colleagues that aren’t productive. Our minds race, no doubt. Keep your mind racing on your novel. Not only will this help with writing, I believe it helps in general.

For instance, instead of going over conversations I wanted to have with my boss, beyond the usefulness of such thoughts, I started listening to conversations between my characters. While doing rote tasks at work and home (cooking, dusting, shelving books, mowing the lawn), I thought about the next scene in my novel, or fleshed out the world a bit more, or thought about what my characters are really like. The goal was to know my next scene before I got back to the computer. I especially found that the time I spent in bed, waiting to fall asleep, was very useful for thinking about my story.

What began to happen is this: Rather than sit down with dread in front of a blank page and a blinking cursor, I raced impatiently to grab my laptop to hammer out the details that I’d already seen in my imagination. As the writing began to take place away from the keyboard, I started to see writing as if I were watching a movie over and over, with the movie becoming perfectly clear, and now my job was to describe the film to someone who hadn’t seen it. Soon after I started writing this way, I began to get compliments on how vivid my writing felt. I kept hearing the word “cinematic.” I was no longer placing words in some particular order to generate a scene; I was living inside the world and transcribing it on paper.

To achieve this, I can’t stress enough the need to cut distractions out of your life. Give up Facebook cold turkey if you must. Stop grabbing your phone every time there’s a lull in the world around you. Embrace the quiet. We used to have hours of quietude in which to indulge our imaginations. It’s possible to return to this. The things we give up will pale before the conquest of bringing a new story out into the world.

Insight #18: Don’t be surprised when you get caught at the crux

In rock climbing, there’s a name for the most difficult part of every climb. It’s called the crux, and it’s where most climbers fall. Getting past the crux is the most critical step in completing the route.

It seems like every novel has a crux, and they all happen roughly in the same part of the story. About three quarters of the way through the novel, it’ll feel like the plot is losing steam. Your heart isn’t into the story like it once was. The middle part is stretching out too far. You know how the story ends, but you can’t quite see how to get there from where you are. For the rough drafts that manage to survive beyond the first few chapters, this is next place they’re likely to falter. Don’t be surprised or dissuaded if it happens. It’s normal. The problem is that you’ve reached the most important part of the story, and you don’t know how to make it through.

Often, the problem is that the story has gone down the wrong path. Part of you knows this, but this part of you can’t communicate any of the details to the rest of you. You just sense that the story has headed off in the wrong direction. The solution here is painful, but it’s the least painful of all the ways out: You often need to go back to the last place you felt excited about your story and start over from there. This isn’t revising; it’s branching.

To ease the pain, copy and paste the text that isn’t working into a new document and save it. Chances are you’ll never look at it again, but it’s less painful than outright deletion. This is an insight I’ll discuss in detail in the next part of the series, and it helps to mention it here: it’s easier to write from scratch than it is to revise what can’t be fixed. While it hurts to start over, you’ll save time in the long run. It also helps to realize that a dead end in the thicket is not useless. Each plot idea that you realize doesn’t work narrows your options and refocuses your writing on what will work. What doesn’t help is staring at a blank page or old writing that you aren’t happy with. Start over; write another dead end; keep exploring.

Insight 19: Your story will have a familiar structure

Overcoming the crux and writing to the end of your novel is easier if you understand and embrace the structure of most plots. There are generally three parts to every story, whether it’s a novel, a short story, an epic saga, a film, a TV show, even a piece of flash fiction.

You have the first act, where the world and characters are introduced and the stakes are set. Here, the reader gets to know what the main characters are aspiring to accomplish or overcome.

In the second act, those main characters encounter obstacles that make it seem as if they won’t succeed. All hope is lost, whether it’s catching the bad guy, finding true love, or defeating the alien horde.

In the third act, by some change they undergo or some personal growth they achieve, our protagonists overcome their obstacles and reach their goals. They solve the case, get the boy, or slay the dragon.

There are very good reasons for these formulas. Turning our noses up at them is the quickest way to fail as a writer. Rather than be avant-garde and buck tradition just to be different, or feel like it’s best to do things like they’ve never been done before, it’s far more useful and fascinating to understand that these structures have existed for thousands of years across countless cultures – and why. When things are this pervasive, it signals some deep root beyond culture and more likely in our DNA. It could be that we tell stories to warn and to inspire. Perhaps stories that follow these patterns are more easily remembered and are the most impactful.

Whatever the root cause, it seems that the crux we discussed most often occurs during the transition from the second act to the third. Here we are writing about the odds our characters overcome and how they manage to pull this off. What clues does the detective unravel? What does the farm girl discover about herself? How does the boy nearly lose the girl but resolve that conflict in the end?

Knowing how to tackle the crux ahead of time is the best option. But if you do get stuck, walk away from the novel and spend hour after hour daydreaming of as many solutions and paths as possible. Seize upon the one that gives you a Eureka! moment.

In my pirate and ninja love story, perhaps it’s the moment where Anya turns the tide in a ship-to-ship battle she was told to stay out of, and here she learns that her training works just fine in the sunlight, where she can be seen. That being a ninja and a pirate is about being brave and making moral choices. And that everyone has told her to stay hidden all her life, to the point that her confidence requires a mask. Perhaps my Eureka! moment while daydreaming all of this is that Anya has been known by her pirate friend both as a ninja and as herself, and she fears he only loves her ninja side. When she decides to remove the mask, she sees her true self for the first time.

Yes, this story has been done before. And there’s a reason for that. Don’t we all fear that the people we love wouldn’t love us back if they could see what our most critical selves see? Maybe Anya realizes that her pirate friend must have those same fears. The crux isn’t the moment she takes her mask off; it’s the moment she realizes he’s been wearing a mask of his own all this time. The crux isn’t when she incapacitates White Beard without killing him, showing a mercy she was never taught. The crux is when she tells her new boyfriend that it’s okay to be scared. That courage is only useful if we are afraid. Maybe the final test to becoming a ninja is an assassination, and when she refuses to kill White Beard, and reveals all of this to her pirate boyfriend, she fails the formal test and succeeds at everything else. Here, we’ve subverted the expectations of the reader (that she’ll pass her final test) while satisfying an age-old structure about the hero’s journey. The test she starts the story worrying about is one she passes by failing to complete. And rather than becoming a pirate, or her lover becoming a ninja, they both become ninja pirate-hunters, setting sail together looking for foes, always at night with black sails flying so no one can see them coming…

Once you know your crux, you can see the light through the thicket. The way out. And the writing comes easy. Keep the writing easy, keep thinking about your story when you’re away from the keyboard, making writing a daily habit, and write like you’re talking to a friend. Do these things, and you’ll get your rough draft complete. And when all else fails…

Insight #20: It’s okay to skip entire scenes and chapters

I saved this insight for last, because it’s so closely related to the next part of this series, which is all about revision. There are two primary ways of writing a rough draft and revising it into a completed manuscript. The first method is to write a “fat” rough draft, and edit out the unneeded parts. You might write 120,000 words and whittle it down to 80,000 for publication. The other choice is to write “lean” and flesh it out as you revise. You could start with a 50,000 word rough draft and layer in detail and extra chapters and scenes until you hit 70,000 words in the final pass.

Each writer has to discover the method that works for them. Try both if you like. But from my experience and observations, I see far more writers fail when they opt for the “fat” writing style. Not only do you put in more hours than needed, but you end up with sections of the story that don’t belong but that you hate to get rid of. Sections that break the flow for readers, and break your flow as a writer. A bloated manuscript is almost guaranteed to be rejected by agents and publishers, and less likely to be finished and recommended by readers.

There are more advantages to writing lean than I can list here, but perhaps the greatest advantage is that you save elements of your writing for after you’ve seen the completed work. This allows you to layer in meaning and depth to your characters with a better understanding of their full arc. It means better foreshadowing and richer themes. We’ll get to these techniques in the revision process in the next part of this series. What bears mentioning now, as you work to complete your rough draft, is that you should celebrate skipping scenes and entire chapters instead of getting stuck.

This goes back to insight #12 about forging ahead and getting to the end of your story. This goal is so important that you should embrace leaving bits out rather than getting bogged down. I promise it’s okay! Perhaps you have an exciting foot chase you want to write, and it comes after a tense scene in a bar where a fight is about to break out. You can’t quite see the bar scene yet, but you know how the foot chase is going to lead to the next chapter and beyond. It might be time to skip ahead and keep your momentum going.

Before you do, make a note of the scene you’re leaving behind. I use the word BOOKMARK a lot in my rough drafts, capitalizing the word so it jumps out (and easy to search for when I start my revision process). Here’s what I would do in the example above:

"BOOKMARK (Bar scene where Juan and Sarah realize they’ve been set up by Marco and his goons. Sarah creates a distraction and tells Juan to run. He does. Sarah follows, with the goons on their heels)

Marco bolts out the back door, Sarah right behind him. He can hear bar stools and tables toppling, has that last image of Marco reaching for his gun, and now every nerve in his body is waiting for a shot to ring out, for Sarah to cry she’s been hit, or to feel the punch and burn of a bullet slam into his body. He urges Sarah ahead of him, knowing being shot will hurt less than seeing her go down. The end of the alley is a forever away. Footsteps pound behind them, one of the goons yelling for them to stop or he’ll shoot. Sarah swerves left and throws her shoulder into a shut door, the wood cracking. As the first shot rings out, Juan hurls himself against her to shield her body. The both of them crash through the door and into a busy kitchen. Men and women in white smocks and hairnets turn and gape, but there is no time. Juan and Sarah scramble to their feet and keep running…"

And so on. Rather than get hung up on a scene I can’t fully see, I move on to one where I know what happens. The beauty of this is that bridges are easier to build when both shores already exist. Now I can see the bar scene more clearly. I know what has to happen to get to the chase scene. Even better: I am now very motivated to plug that gap. When you write scenes you love, you’ll want to link them all together. When the future bits of your story are hard to see, you’re less interested in writing to meet them.

Once you see the potential in skipping scenes, the demarcation between pantsing and plotting truly disappears. Someone who writes an outline is simply creating a rough draft where every scene is skipped. You make dozens or even hundreds of little notes as you jot your way to the end of the story. And then you begin the revision process by turning those notes into bridges, linking each one up to the next. Pantsing, then, becomes nothing more than very detailed outlining. Just as outlining is little more than bare-bones pantsing.

One of the most successful techniques I’ve found for my own writing is to skip ahead to the end and write the final scene early on. You can even write your last chapter first. This gives you a destination for all of your other scenes. It tells you what the stakes are, what the emotional impact of the plot will be. Even if that final scene doesn’t survive the last edit, and you replace it with a new scene you write from scratch, it doesn’t matter. Use scene-skipping as a way to create the parts of the story that motivate you to write more, all the way to the end, until your rough draft is complete.

Once you’ve done that, you’ve finished the hardest part. Up next is the revision process, the subject of part three of this series. There, we’ll discuss how you can make your rough draft sing.

* This is the second in a four-part series. Read the rest:

Writing Insights Part One: Becoming a Writer

Writing Insights Part Three: The Revision Process

Writing Insights Part Four: Publishing Your Book

  A version of this article appeared at The Wayfinder.

Hugh Howey

Hugh Howey is the author of the award-winning Molly Fyde saga and the New York Times and USA Today bestselling WOOL series. The WOOL OMNIBUS won the Kindle Book Review 2012 Indie Book of the Year Award.

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Writing Insights Part One: Becoming a Writer

By Hugh Howey

A successful writer is one who finishes what they start while striving to improve their craft.

I started writing my first novel when I was twelve years old. I was thirty-three when I completed my first rough draft. That’s twenty years of wanting to do something and not knowing how. Twenty years of failure and frustrations and giving up.

A big part of the problem is that I didn’t know what I didn’t know. I didn’t know which questions to ask, much less who might have the answers.

These days, people write to me as if I know what I’m doing. Or like I have a shortcut to success. I’m not sure either is true. One thing I’ve learned is that luck plays a massive role. But what I do have are some insights today that I wish I’d had twenty years ago, tips and pointers that might’ve saved me a lot of headache and heartache if I’d known them sooner. Maybe it’ll help some aspiring writer out there if I jot them all down now.

I’m going to share what insights I have in four parts. The first part is a list of all the things I wish I’d known about becoming a writer before I set out. The second part is tips and tricks for completing that first rough draft. In the third part, I discuss the important art of turning a rough draft into something worth reading. And finally, I share some tips on how to get your story out into the world.

These are my insights now that I’ve written over a dozen novels, sold a few million books, been published in over forty languages, and have seen all angles of this complex industry as a reader, bookseller, writer, editor, and publisher. My first novel was published traditionally through a small press; I’ve self-published many on my own; others are with some of the biggest publishers in the world. I give this advice knowing how much it would’ve been worth to me while understanding that it all might be worthless to you. I only have my own experiences and observations. I wish you all the best of luck.

Insight #1: Anyone can become a successful writer; the only person who can stop you is you.

I spent twenty years stopping myself from becoming a successful writer. The biggest obstacle I faced is thinking success meant selling a ton of books, which meant writing something that millions of readers would enjoy. As I began writing my first attempts at a novel, watching the sentences form on the screen, I knew the words weren’t good enough, and so I stopped in order to spare all those readers from what I was writing.

The problem is that I had the definition of “successful writer” all wrong. A successful writer is one who finishes what they start while striving to improve their craft. It’s as simple as that. And the only one who can stop you from doing this is you.

Imagine if NBA all-star Steph Curry attempted to learn to play basketball with a million people watching. Or if the first pickup game he ever played was his only chance to land an agent and get signed to an NBA team. This is the pressure writers put on themselves, and it makes no sense. Basketball players will put all the hustle and energy into a thousand practice games before they ever get a shot at turning pro. Most will spend a dozen years playing almost every day of their lives before they make it onto a high school or college team. Writers should have the same expectations. Perhaps you write a dozen novels before you write one that blows you away or becomes a bestseller. The point is to finish them all. Play all four quarters. Steph Curry played a thousand games to the end before he turned pro. Every game he finished was a success. He didn’t stop himself, and neither should you.

Insight #2: You can’t compare your rough draft to any of the books you’ve read.

If you’re just starting out as a writer, there’s a good chance that you’ve never read a rough draft in your life. So don’t compare what you’re working on to what you’ve read from your favorite authors. Their rough drafts were nowhere near as wonderful and polished as the final product that you loved as a reader and that made you want to become a writer. Just like you, they had to get the words down on the page first. And then they had to go back and rewrite much of what they wrote, several times. At this point, they probably gave it to their spouse or a friend to read, and that person saw lots of room for improvement. Which meant another revision. The same process took place again with their agent. And then their editor. Each time, the rough draft got better and better. So will yours.

The books that made you want to become a writer were rewritten and revised as much as a dozen times, with the input of several other people. You don’t get to see all of the mistakes and boring bits – all of that has been cut away. It’s just like when you take a thousand photos on an epic vacation and only share the thirty or forty very best ones. This is what it takes to be a successful writer: You have to learn how to write the good and the bad all the way until the finish. Trust the revision process. No one will have to see your rough draft but you. And you can’t revise a work to perfection until it already exists. So make it exist.

Insight #3: There is no special qualification required.

I used to think writers belonged to a special club that had all sorts of requirements for admittance. You had to graduate from a special school, or live in the right city, or own a turtleneck. Nothing could be further from the truth. The best writers have the most diverse backgrounds. They come in all ages, all genders, all races, all sexual persuasions. They all have unique things to say. Anyone can be a writer, if they put in the work. Like most things in life, it takes lots of practice. How much practice you get is entirely up to you.

I first started dreaming of being a writer after reading Ender’s Game. I was around twelve years old. This novel blew me away, because the heroes of the story were children my age. It made me think there were no limits to what I could do. At the end of the novel, there was a brief biography of the author, Orson Scott Card. I was shocked to read that he lived in my home state, North Carolina. I always thought writers lived far away in little shacks in the woods or tall glass towers. I always thought kids had to wait to be adults to do amazing things. This book got me thinking that both assumptions might be wrong.

Related to this insight is the idea that there are too many novels out there in the world. This is rubbish. There are always readers agonizing that they can’t find something great to read. Maybe your next book will fill that void for a reader. Or it’ll be the book that leads to the book that fills that void in many other readers. Either way, there should be joy in the act of creation. My mother started knitting for the pure joy, then grew her talents until she was giving away works, then having people pay for them, and then owning and running her own yarn shop. The lady at the farmers’ market you buy tomatoes from started gardening to see if she could. Steph Curry enjoyed shooting hoops with his dad and grew hooked on the sound a perfect swish makes. There is nothing wrong with starting something as a hobbyist and asking for compensation for your art. We can all turn pro whenever we like.

Let the readers decide if you’re worth supporting with their time and money, not the cycicism of other writers who don’t want you playing ball with them.

Insight #4: The best writers are the best readers.

There aren’t any shortcuts around this. Successful writers read. They read a lot. And the best writers read a wide variety of books. It’s impossible to stress the importance of this insight. When aspiring authors ask my advice on making it as a writer, this is my most common first response: Read.

Writing is a lot like singing. There’s a musicality to good writing, and I don’t mean florid writing like you might encounter in a literature course. I mean the simple flow and cadence of sentences, how they run together, how long paragraphs should be, how much dialog to sprinkle among the action (or action among the dialog). Every sentence in this blog post is an example. I listen for the rise and fall of stresses, the iambic pentameter, mixing short punchy sentences with long comma-filled breezy ones. It should come naturally. You don’t want to even be aware that you’re doing it. Eventually you won’t.

Of course, your style will be different than my style. This is called “voice,” and we’ll talk more about voice and constructing sentences in the next part of this series. For now, it’s important to know that you’ll have a very difficult time creating pleasant prose without absorbing years’ worth of it first. Books are like tuning forks. We hear the pleasant ring of words on key, and it helps us recognize when our own pitch is a little off. The avid reader will know when a sentence needs more tinkering.

It would be convenient if we could dismiss this advice and say, “I’m going to write my own way, rules and tuning forks be damned.” But it doesn’t work that way. There are millions of effective voices and styles, but all share a common framework. Just as there are an infinite number of songs in a single guitar, but that guitar needs to be properly tuned. The way we tune our writing instruments is to read, and to read as writers. Recognize sentences that make you smile, or think, or laugh, or cry. Pore over them. Ask yourself how this writer made you care about the protagonist, or feel revulsion for the antagonist, with so few words. Where is the conflict in the story? How are the characters different at the end of the novel? This is the craft that we’ll discuss in the next part of this series, and it’s what we should look for as readers.

It’s never too late to start. And it’s impossible to do too much of it. Above all, branch out. I wrote my first novel after months of reading and reviewing detective and crime fiction for a friend’s website. These were not my preferred genres, but I was reading and reviewing a book a day. I learned so much about intricate plotting, misdirection, tension, danger, and the crafting of horror. These elements now appear in my young adult novels, my science fiction, my romance. Every type of story has many elements of all other types of story. Study all the genres deeply. You may even uncover a new passion or write a completely different kind of novel.

It also helps to not be too deeply immersed in the types of stories you want to write. If you only read within your writing genre, one of two things will happen: You’ll write something derivative and unoriginal, or you’ll be so terrified of doing this that you’ll be closed off to exploring themes that your colleagues are also delving into. Both are terrible risks.

As a science fiction author, I’ve found it better to read non-fiction. Many of my story ideas come from newspaper articles and the latest works of science and philosophy. History books are a great inspiration, because they reveal the cultural patterns that forewarn the future. Satire is impossible without a deep understanding of history.

Romance novels benefit from books on psychology. A thriller featuring a tortured couple gets new layers by reading self-help books meant for those going through a divorce. Even fiction authors have to do research. Certainly read enough in your genre to understand what readers expect (even if your goal is to defy expectations). But don’t get trapped. The more adventurous you are with your reading, and the more avidly you read, the stronger your writing will become. There is no better writing advice than this. All writing advice, in fact, presupposes the truth of this: that we must be readers first and foremost.

Insight #5: This is a marathon, not a sprint.

Despite what appears to be exceptions to this rule, writing is not a get-rich-quick scheme. You don’t sit down, bang out a rough draft, and watch the money flow in. Your first novel will quite likely not be your best. When I was starting out, I gave myself ten years to see if I could make this work. Ten years! The plan was to write two novels a year, twenty novels in total, hoping that eventually one of them would be decent.

I get emails all the time from writers who have heard this advice from me and credit it for the success they eventually found. It helped them to not give up. It’s exactly what this philosophy did for me. It also allowed me to concentrate on the writing and not the promoting. Promotion is a waste of time until you have enough material out there for each one to feed on the other. It’s not like those books are going away or growing stale. Wait until you have five or six novels published before you start to spread the word. Pour every spare minute and every ounce of energy into the writing while you can.

This is one of those bits of advice you simply must trust and believe in. I was lucky to stumble upon the truth of this early on in my career. These last two insights truly distill what a writing career is all about, and the simplicity can blind us to the quality of the advice: Read and write. Just keep doing this and you will surprise yourself.

Insight #6: Whoever works the hardest will get ahead.

This insight is for those who measure their success as a writer by readership, sales, and the ability to make a full-time living from their craft. The biggest, most daunting, terrible, awful truth working against this type of success is this: There are only so many readers. It really is as simple as that. If there were twice as many books being consumed, there would be a lot more seats on the bus to successville. Ten times as much reading would be even better. You’d have ten times the chance of making it as a writer. There’s a lot we could do as a society to increase the number of readers, but that’s a blog post for a different time.

Because of the limited number of readers, and the ever-growing number of distractions and hobbies that aren’t reading, only a limited number of people can find an appreciable audience and make a living with their writing. But there’s good news as well: A larger share of the readers’ dollars are now going to writers, which means more writers today can make a living than at any time in the past. The other bit of good news is this: Not many writers are willing to do what it takes to make that living. Which opens the door for you.

I know a lot of people who make a living with their writing. Many of my close personal friends are among those who do. And this isn’t a self-selected sample, where I end up meeting other writers at writing conventions, so all my friends are successful writers. What I’ve seen happen over and over is people who want to know how to get this done, and then go out and do it. What they all have in common, bar none, is a work ethic that borders on obsession.

This is true of all careers with more dreamers than open slots. Going back to sports, imagine the number of times Lionel Messi kicked a soccer ball off a brick wall, passing back and forth to himself, while his friends played Nintendo or watched TV. Successful people find a joy in the thing they do that allows them to do more of it than their peers. I guarantee I’ve read more books than 99.9% of aspiring writers. For many years of my life, I had a goal of reading a book a day. I did this throughout college and most of high school. And when I started writing, I carried the same obsession into my craft. I joined a writing group, read writing theory and advice, and wrote two to three novels a year, plus many shorter works.

This meant getting up at four in the morning to write before work. I wrote over my lunch break. I wrote all weekend. I revised my rough drafts a dozen times. I hired, traded, and begged for editing advice. And I’m not even a good example of proper work ethic. I have friends who write, revise, edit, and publish a novel a month. Year after year. I have friends who have published over fifty novels in their first handful of years of writing. Both of my friends who publish a book a month make millions of dollars a year, and they are among the best writers I know when it comes to craft. I can’t put their books down. They pass like Messi.

When I hear writers brag about how little they publish, or how long it takes them to finish a novel, I hear Steph Curry brag about how little he shoots hoops, or how he only practices once a year. I turn on the TV to watch athletes who obsess over their craft. I admire writers who have the same level of obsession. This is what anyone who wants to make a career at writing should expect from themselves. Stop listening to anyone who brags about how little they write and how much they procrastinate. Surround yourself with the Messis and Currys of the writing world.

Please note here again that making a career at writing is very different from being a successful writer. They’re two different goals. Successful writers are out there completing works and making those works available to readers. These writers might dream of making a living one day, but unless they are outworking everyone they know, their chances are slim. A dream is not a plan. There’s nothing wrong with writing for the pure joy of creation. There’s nothing wrong with shooting hoops with friends, or playing in a community basketball league and wanting to win every game without ever being paid one dime. Know your goals, and know what it takes to achieve them.

Insight #7: Competition is complicated

It might be true that there are a limited number of readers, and that you have to outwork your peers to turn writing into a career, but that doesn’t mean we’re all in competition with each other. We’re only competing to a certain degree, and then we’re in cahoots. Believe it or not, this is a team game.

Steph Curry played for Davidson College, not far from where I grew up. I watched him play college ball. Steph was competing with every player on his team, and every player in his division, for a spot in the NBA. But once he made it to the NBA, he was now reliant on not just his teammates but on his opposition to advance his career. The better Lebron James played, the more spectators and the more money Steph Curry enjoyed. And vice versa. Every NBA superstar grows the pool of viewers, hence advertising dollars, and so all NBA pros benefit.

I see a lot of writers get this wrong, claiming it’s a zero-sum game and we’re all competing with each other. This is nonsense. None of us can write fast enough, or a wide enough variety of material, to please all readers. We rely on our fellow pros to keep interest in the hobby high. JK Rowling did so much for all writers when she increased the number of young avid readers. I rely on my colleagues to keep people reading while I’m working on the next book. Just as Steph and Lebron both work to keep ratings high, advertising dollars flowing, and salary caps increasing.

The biggest fear NBA players, team owners, and executives should have is that viewers might change the channel. The real competition at this level is the NFL, MMA, CNN, the great outdoors, and so on. The paradox is this: You compete up to a point, and then you rely on each other. This means it’s never too early to foster great relationships with fellow writers. Which leads me to the next insight…

Insight #8: Be helpful and engaged

If there’s a shortcut to writing success, it’s here. Be helpful to other writers, and you’ll find your generosity will pay dividends. It’s not the reason you should try to be helpful, but it doesn’t hurt to know that being a good person will be rewarding. I’ve seen it over and over in this industry.

One author I know was a brilliant illustrator. While still working on his first novel, he started helping indie authors with their cover art. He did much of this work for free, and then for much cheaper than he should, all because something most of us find difficult came very easily for him. His generosity and kindness made him incredibly popular. When Jason Gurley finished his novel Eleanor, there was a long line of people eager to give it a read, offer blurbs, and promote the hell out of it. Your novel still has to be good, of course. But you won’t believe how difficult it is to get even family and friends to read your work. Writing good material is a necessity, but it isn’t enough.

Another friend of mine got her start by being a beta reader for other writers and later an editor. You could learn how to format ebooks and offer this service. Or start a blog reviewing and promoting new releases (I’ve watched several bloggers move into writing; it was my path as well). You could join a few writing forums and contribute as much as you can to the helpful discourse among writers. Be yourself. Be kind. Form relationships. Share your journey. Soon you’ll meet and get to know those who want this as badly as you do. And if you’re lucky, you’ll find yourselves on opposing teams one day, realizing that you are now both colleague and competitor, but that you only go as far as you can lift each other up.

Insight #9: Know your readers

My first reader was my cousin Lisa. Other people had read my rough drafts and manuscripts before her, but Lisa was the first person who – under no obligation to read my work – sought it out, loved it, and started asking for more. She also – crucially – began telling all her friends how much she loved my debut novel and asked me if she could send copies to them. At the time, my book was just a Word document. I told her to feel free to send it to anyone. By the time I received a book deal and had the novel ready for pre-order, Lisa had dozens of friends and family excited about the release and securing their copies.

When Lisa talked about what she loved in the book, I listened. As readers began leaving Amazon reviews, I read them closely. I started a Facebook page primarily to connect with readers. I’ll never forget the day I friended my 1,000th reader and realized I was reaching well beyond friends-of-friends. Now I was connecting with strangers from all over the globe. Cultivating these relationships, and giving back every ounce of the love and passion that was streaming toward me and my works, was profoundly satisfying and paid enormous personal and professional dividends.

Connecting and getting to know your readers is critical. Set up platforms that allow this as early on as you can. The important thing is to make it easy for readers to find and connect with you. Don’t waste time trying to win over new readers by spamming social media; this does not work in a sustainable manner. Instead, spend your creative energies writing more works. And use your downtime to connect with the readers you already have. Other readers will come. It all starts with one, like my cousin Lisa.

Insight #10: Know your industry

My last insight is a peek ahead at the final part of this series, but it’s one of the things I wish more aspiring writers thought about before they began honing their craft. The writing industry is a business. Whatever your goals and aspirations, you should learn as much as you can about how books are made, distributed, sold, published, edited, translated, purchased, read, shared, and recycled. Working as a bookseller gave me an advantage that I didn’t appreciate until many years later. When I realized how little most writers knew about their industry, I was shocked at first and then later dismayed. Dismayed, because I saw how many writers were taken advantage of or disappointed simply by not knowing very much about the field they’d devoted their creative lives to.

Most students who go into medicine have at least some idea of the work that will be involved, the hours, the expected pay, the time it will take to get through their residency, the fact that they’ll be working graveyard shifts before they ever catch a whiff of their own practice. Before they take on several hundred thousand dollars in student loans, they look into what an anesthesiologist might expect to make in the state of Indiana upon graduation.

Very few aspiring authors know how much they’ll earn from every paperback sale. Or that most works of fiction are now purchased as ebooks. Or that most physical books are now purchased online. If the goal is to sell enough books to raise a family, the dream should be to have a great online presence for one’s books, and to concentrate on ebooks. However, if the goal is to place books into bookstores and submit for awards in particular genres, the plan should be very different. Understanding these choices and managing expectations will be the subject of the fourth part of this series. For now, my advice is to start learning as much as possible. Read Publishers Weekly, The Passive Voice, Kristine Rusch, JA Konrath. Spend time in bookstores. Follow authors who blog about their experiences. Know what you’re getting yourself into.

Those are the top ten things I wish I’d known before I got started. Next up, I discuss what I wish I’d known about finishing my first rough draft. Maybe it’ll help you, however far along your own writing path you happen to find yourself.

Bonus Insight:

Many of the challenges and frustrations you’ll encounter along the way are the exact same as those felt by every other writer. The exact same. Writing requires long stretches of uninterrupted concentration. This sort of time has always been difficult to carve out. We have children, pets, and spouses who require our attention. We have day jobs to work around. We have the stress of bills, mortgages, student loans, rent, empty gas tanks, empty stomachs. We berate ourselves for not writing more. We judge ourselves when our works don’t sell. We watch as other writers get ahead, as markets change, as retailers come and go.

Every generation of writer thinks that their challenges are unique, and that every other cohort of writer had it easier in the past or will have it easier in the future. That’s because the past highlights those who succeeded there, and their success seems to have come all at once, without the failures, frustrations, and challenges that all writers feel in the moment. The present for a struggling writer is certainly suffering, but this never stops being true. It’s always been true.

The only thing that truly changes over time is the stories and rationalizations that we tell ourselves when we feel these universal pangs of self-doubt, envy, and exhaustion. We tell ourselves it’s because Barnes and Noble is killing indie bookstores. Or that it’s Amazon destroying B&N. Or that it’s Amazon introducing a new program. Or the Nook not doing enough to compete. Or James Patterson and his stable of co-authors. And so on and so on and so on.

The excuses and the stories we make up vary. The challenges don’t.

The fact is that the writing landscape today is as vibrant and viable as it’s ever been in the history of mankind. Authors have more power and control over their careers than ever before. They have more access to readers, to each other, to foreign markets, to the tools of publication, and to the infinite manufacture of goods at almost zero cost. Ten years ago, it was almost impossible to reach readers. Ten years from now is a complete unknown. Seize the day, my friends.

* This is the first in a four-part series. See the rest at Hugh Howey's blog:

Writing Insights Part Two: The Rough Draft

Writing Insights Part Three: The Revision Process

Writing Insights Part Four: Publishing Your Book

  A version of this article appeared at The Wayfinder.

Hugh Howey

Hugh Howey is the author of the award-winning Molly Fyde saga and the New York Times and USA Today bestselling WOOL series. The WOOL OMNIBUS won the Kindle Book Review 2012 Indie Book of the Year Award.