I’ve been wondering about how people get started with writing their first book. Is it something you do for free in your spare time and then try to see if someone will publish it? Or does someone pay you to spend time writing it?
Either option sounds like a really difficult path. How do you find free time to write a book while working to support yourself? How do you find someone who will pay you to spend time writing a book?
Who would pay a totally inexperienced author to write a book?
And how does anyone find time to follow their dream while working 9 to 5? If it’s your passion, you find the time. Many artists started out with hobbies, and it grew from there. Art isn’t easy.
Fiction: start with getting short stories published. No one will pay you to write anything fictional, ever. You must build a relationship with editors and others who can help you. To get a novel published, it needs to be completely finished and (key) salable. Genre novels are much easier to sell than literature. Usually you will need to find an agent to represent you to publishers. It’s very very difficult, to be honest.
Nonfiction: start by getting articles published, on similar topics to your planned book. You need some kind of reputation. Again, who you know is critical.Topic of book must be (key) salable. It is easier to sell nonfiction, and if you have several gripping well-written chapters on a timely topic ready to show, you can often get an advance for the rest.
Many authors have gotten started by living in abject poverty doing very isolated work (living in a fire tower, or herding sheep). You could be one of them!
For my first programming book, I just went to the publisher’s web site and submitted a proposal. After I proved my expertise in the field and submitted a writing sample, they hired me to write the book. Many nonfiction publishers use a similar process.
I doubt anyone is going to get paid in advance to write their first book unless they’re a celebrity (or somebody in a technical field like Sefton).
After doing grad school and an industry job, I quit to be a SAHM when my daughter was born. I had been doing that for almost three years, had failed to get pregnant with a second child, and needed somewhere to funnel the frustration.
I wrote the first draft of my first novel at the kitchen table, late at night when everyone was in bed. 2 months 2 days. 112K words.
I was innocent. I didn’t know anything about writing novels. I had 33 years of pent-up subconscious ideas. The thing was wholly pantsed–I didn’t know what would be on a page until I wrote it.
And that was a charmed state to be in. That novel got me an agent and is on submission to Big 5 publishers now. Apparently everything I’ve written since has been incrementally worse.
In which case it’s customary for someone else actually to write the book.
Nice work. Good luck, Sattua!
First of all, good going Sattua!
Second: How I wrote my first book. I got laid off. Since I had a new baby, it seemed like an excellent time to be laid off and I carefully calculated that I had five more months with my baby before I absolutely had to accept a job, assuming someone offered me one, and I might as well finally write that novel.
Also, for some reason the structure of it all worked great for me. Hanging around the house with a new baby requires a certain amount of engagement but it also leaves part of your mind free for other things. Also, for some reason engaging in mindless drudgery is kind of like a prompt for me to plot things in my head. So what happened was that when the baby went down for a nap, I hit the keyboard and typed like mad, figuring that I did not have the luxury to sit there and stare out the window. I never knew whether he’d nap for 20 minutes or 2 hours and as soon as he woke up, I left the keyboard and got him–so sometimes in mid-sentence.
Surprisingly, this worked so well that I have tried to emulate the process ever since (using a kitchen timer).
I got laid off in January, finished the book in March, won an unpublished writer’s contest in August, got an agent in September, revised the book and sent it out in December, and had a contract by the next January, two-book deal. This gave me a deadline for the second book and as a former journalist I am always inspired by deadlines. I wrote the second novel during down time at a series of temp jobs, and of course nights and weekends. Really, at the most long-lasting of the temp jobs, the office manager just wanted people to look busy if they didn’t have actual work to do, so when I said, “Hey, can I write my novel?” she said, “As long as you look busy.” So, type-type-type. Again no looking out the window. And again I didn’t know if it would be 20 minutes or 2 hours before I’d have to stop mid-word to do some company work. I almost said “actual work” but writing is actual work.)
Before the novels, I had written maybe 150 short stories, which I could not sell and in fact could not even place in journals that paid in contributors’ copies. I did get lots of personal notes the likes of, “Nice story, sorry we can’t take it, try us again!” If you count the stories written for newspapers and magazines that I did get paid for, I probably wrote a million words before my novel got accepted.
I wrote a lot of books before I got anyone to publish one. In notebooks, on typewriters, on old-fashioned computers with floppy disks. Most of them best forgotten really, but there were two finished and one unfinished fantasy novels I hadn’t entirely given up on.
I wrote a few articles for an online literary zine around the turn of the century–I met the woman who is now my editor because we were both writing Star Trek fanfic and got to be friends. When she started to publish a series of anthologies, I wrote some short stories for them. Then she asked me if I had anything else. I dusted off the first of the fantasy novels (which was in WordPerfect on some of those floppy disks; I had to convert the files into Word) and emailed it to her. She liked it; she published it. I gave her the second one a couple of years later, and that gave me the incentive to finish the third.
I also write period murder mystery novellas for the anthology series about once a year.
I came up with a series of ideas about the origin and meaning of the Gorgon, at least one of which struck me with particular force. I wanted to share this insight with the world.
the thing is, it’s a multidisciplinary subject. It involved not only Greek Mythology, but Comparative Mythology, Anthropology, Astronomy, Animal Behavior, Pathology, Psychology, Art History, and other disciplines, none of which I was expert in, or even had (for the most part) any formal training in.
The best place to try to publish these ideas would, I thought, be some journal that touched on multiple topics. Nature, perhaps, or Science. This might be suitable for a long entry in their Letters sections.
Many months later I had a lot of rejected queries from a lot of magazines. I figured the best thing to do was to write my own book and get it published. This is, arguably, insane – if you couldn’t even get a letter published, why would anyone publish an entire book on the same topic? But I had some credentials behind me. Besides a number of technical papers in scientific journals, I had published an article in Scientific American and a science-meets-myth piece in Parabola magazine, and another in Weatherwise, and had published articles on other topics outside my field in other magazines. And I was inspired by David Ulansey’s book The Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries, which sought to explain Roman Mithraism in terms of astronomy. Ulansey’s book had been published by Oxford University Press, and he had a tie-in article in Scientific American.
So I went to work, writing individual chapters in no particular order, each on one aspect of the myth. Then I put them together in what seemed to be a logical order, and gave it to my wife to read.
“Nobody’s going to read this,” she said. “It reads like a thesis.” This is one reason I married this woman.
So I threw the whole thing out and started over from scratch, writing the book from beginning to end, so that the ideas would build in a logical order. And trying to write in a popular style, so that people wouldn’t get bored or lost and throw the book away with great force.
I had my wife and some friends read it and offer criticisms.
Then I composed a Book Proposal – after I had written the damned thing. I had written project proposals, so this wasn’t completely new territory for me. I gave it a snazzy cover and sent it off. to my complete and utter surprise, Oxford University Press – which has a tradition of publishing academic works by previously unpublished authors (and doesn’t always get its money back) – offered to publish it after their university readers had vetted it. even more surprising (to me), they left it almost completely intact. They did minimal revision in editing it.
over the next year I went through that book more times than I can count. (If you write a book, you better love it, because you’re going to be reading it a LOT). Because I wanted it to be heavily illustrated (to help make my points), I spent a year getting photographs and illustrations and permissions*, exhausting the meager advance they sent me. I even spent some of my own money for professional illustrations.
Then the whole thing went into their book incubator and took forever (it seemed) to get turned into an actual book. But it was worth it when I held the hardcover in my hands.
It must’ve been worthwhile. I still get cited (including multiple times by Wikipedia, and by academic tomes as well). The History Channel turned the book into an episode of their series Clash of the Gods (which features me, speaking, on camera. The show still shows up in the wee hours of the morning and startles people who knew me but had no idea what I’d been up to.) It’s still in print – I just got a royalty check a couple of days ago. It’s for a lot less than you’d imagine, so don’t get your hopes up. Somebody’s making money in the publishing business, but Og knows, it’s not the editors or the mid-grade or lower authors.
But the point of the book wasn’t mainly to make money** – it was to get my ideas out there. Writing a book allowed me to express the ideas at greater length and detail than I could have in a Letter to Nature, and it guaranteed that it would be picked up and passed along by other outputs – Wikipedia, the History Channel – so that the ideas really were dispersed.
Plus, it’s great for the Ego. I might not have made much money on it, but, godammit, I wrote a book!
And my wife still loves telling about how a nice lady from the British Museum called about some of the photos I wanted and they had a nice long chat about the weather and our cats.
**Although that would have been nice.
After I sold my first short story, I decided that if I was going to have a career in science fiction, I’d need to write a novel. I thought of two characters from stories of mine (one which I never completed) and decided to have them meet. Then I started to write.
It took me about six months to finish the first draft. I was unemployed most of that time, but that wasn’t a factor, since I was only writing about 500-1000 words a day – a pace I’m able to keep up when working full time. It took another three months to edit it
Back then, most SF publishers took submissions from anyone (only a couple do now), so I sent it off to several publishers, getting some positive comments, but no bites. Then I happened to meet an agent; he sold the book in four months (agents are even more important today).
I have a different agent now (the same one who represents Gene Wolfe 
) and she’s marketing a couple of mine right now.
As Fred Pohl pointed out, a 70,000 word novel (a bit short these days) takes about 40 hours to type at 50 wpm. An hour a day and you can produce 70K words in 40 days (people produce 40K novels in November every year). A half-hour a day, and it’s 80 days. The trick is to produce something every single day.
I first set out to write the book I wanted to write. I wrote it. Then I began to seek out literary agents and publishers.
It’s a totally different trajectory than first deciding you want to be published and then deciding what to write. It probably makes it a lot easier to write the book and a lot harder to get it published.
I sat down with a pen and lined paper and hand-wrote the damn thing. Every four pages or so, I’d go and read it aloud to my mother. Took me about nine months to finish. (Like having a baby!) It wasn’t too awful.
I do highly recommend reading it aloud, even if just to yourself. Hearing the words makes you more aware of them. Also, if you run out of breath, you know the sentence is too long. And if you find your dialogue hard to say out loud, you’re doing it wrong. Finally, it helps you with words that you use repeatedly, too close together. This is one of my fiercest betes noir. I’ll say someone was “cantankerous” and then use the same word somewhere else on the same page. (Don’t do that!) Reading it aloud helps bring those instances into focus.
Other than that, Kipling was on the ball. As for different ways of writing, “Every single one of them is right.”
One thing to be aware of is even if your first book sells - unless its a runaway hit, you don’t make enough money to pay for your time. I have a friend who has been a published SF/Fantasy novelist for ten years. He was an unpublished novelist for fifteen before that. And after ten years, he finally has enough books in print to make a living off it. Fortunately, he married well :).
My first book came about because I entered a short story contest for a children’s magazine. It didn’t win, but while researching the background for it I discovered some fascinating facts, which I turned into fiction that read like fact. I submitted that story to nearly a dozen children’s magazines with no success. Then I turned it into a picture book, basically by adding a page of “fun facts” and sold it to the first publisher I sent it to.
I sold four more books, BTW, before I ever sold anything to the magazine the original contest was in. Now I write mostly for children’s magazines, although I’ve e-published a novel, am currently shopping another around to agents, and have started the third draft of my WIP.
My first three books were on the “submit an outline and first chapter, get a contract” model. My last few have been written as both author and publisher. (You can say “self-published” if you like, but as I’m a multi-decade pro at both specialties, it’s not quite the same as having Kinko’s print your memoirs.)
My first book was on lactose intolerance, which back in the 1980s was a term almost nobody had ever heard of. I’d been diagnosed with it in 1978 and found nothing on the subject for guidance. After many years of research in medical journals and trade publications I finally said to myself: “you’re a writer; you should write a book on this.”
I put together a proposal and got an agent. She sold the book for a nice advance. I was working full-time, so I did all my writing nights and weekends. The timing was good. Lactaid had just started making its pills and distributing them nationwide. Food issues were creeping into public consciousness. I even got a mini-book tour around Upstate New York. I did radio interviews from my office at work, which fortuitously had actual walls, the only time in a decade that I wasn’t in a cubicle. It was all very cool and then it was over. I did two more books on LI, but I’m famous to about twelve people in the field. It’s okay. I helped large numbers and that’s what I wrote the books for.
I started on a book a couple of years ago not because I wanted to write a book but because I wanted to call attention to something I felt was begging attention that has yet to be approached. I became fascinated with the subject while studying the potential dynamics that it would take to drive it. Over a year ago it became clear I would need help, most likely a small team to finish it. I started contacting different experts in the various fields involved with almost no response at all. At times I would become discouraged but I felt so much passion for the project I find I bounce right back. Finally I started to attract a little attention from a couple of successful authors and a well know screen writer who puts together and manages teams of writers on a wide variety on projects. We have a lunch date set for this month and we have been conversing by telephone and e mails. Feeling very hopeful right now.
They said, “If you write this book, we’ll give you some money.”
I wanted the money, so I wrote the book.