Dec 01 2008
Before you self-publish…
If you’re considering self-publishing your novel, I can’t say this enough – if you have only just written “The End”, whether it has taken you five weeks or five years to write the book, it is NOT ready to publish. I say that with absolute confidence – because there isn’t an author alive who has written a novel that didn’t need some revisions once it was completed. In my next few posts, I want to look at the reasons.
First reason - as the writer, you can’t see your story as a reader will see it, so you don’t realize what you may have left out – or what you should have left out!
Most writers write “long”. If that’s you, you’ve probably included every single scene that takes place between your characters, even if it’s not relevant to the story. To the reader, those unnecessary scenes are b-o-r-i-n-g. String a couple of them together, and readers will put the book down. If a reader doesn’t finish the book, they’re not going to recommend it to their friends, and they’re not going to want to buy your next novel.You’ve lost a potential fan and you’ve lost sales.
If you write “short”, you may have the opposite problem – you know what your characters and locations look like, and you know the inner motivations of your characters, and you forget your reader doesn’t. I write short, and my first draft always reads like an action movie – cutting from one scene to another with the minimum of detail. If readers don’t have enough information to imagine your characters or where they are, they won’t get involved in the story. If the story jumps too quickly from one scene to the next, they’ll feel disoriented and rushed. Either way, they’re going to give up on your novel. Once again, if readers don’t finish your book, your writing career is cactus!
The solution to this problem is to put your manuscript away in a drawer for at least 3 months, and preferably 6, then read it again. That will give you the distance to read the story as a reader – and you’ll notice where you’ve overdone or underdone. I know it’s hard to do, but if you move on to a new project, you’ll find it easier – and trust me, you’ll be very glad you did.
Amanda, thanks for the suggestion - I hadn’t even thought of proof-reading as I took basic spelling as a “given”. I’ll be sure to do a post on it now!
I recently read a book where the author had used an astonishing number of semi-colons. She had used them correctly, but the font used in the book was such that the semi-colons were almost invisible - so every time I came to one, I had a moment’s consternation before I realised the punctuation was there.