Starting fiction writing from nowhere - a letter to my earlier self
Could have done better baby steps in fiction writing ...but what is learning to walk without falling down?
I finally admitted to myself that I screwed up in starting out. As well as succeeding wildly.
Part of this I could blame on accepting advice from a marketer-turned-writing-coach, but not really.
It's been about two years at this writing since I started the research on how to break into fiction writing - and I learned a few things:
Begin with the end in mind.
Work backwards from your goal, but keep your goals in increments. Sure - set out that sky-high goal, but take the advice of looking for the intermediate steps in order to get there.
Most of the material on this site (including the fiction) is built around goal-achievement materials. And that is the first emphasis you need to have in your training yourself to write and market fiction. As well as non-fiction.
In hindsight, I'd have done much better in sticking to non-fiction (which has financed my fiction foray although neglected). Figure out how to make ads work to improve sales for these instead of looking to the bright lights of fiction publishing. Technically, I'd have been better off with non-fiction subscribers who also like to read fiction.
Would I quit writing fiction now? Not on your life. But getting the two balanced will be my next approach.
The trick is to narrowly focus on what is selling well and consolidate these into a single series that can be advertised simply. I stayed away from advertising so far as I block all ads myself and hate being interrupted. (Similar reasons for social media, which is even worse.)
Plan you your work, work your plan - but write down your goal and read it out twice daily, am and pm.
Learn there are two types of profit-making authors - writers who learn marketing and marketers who learn writing.
You tell the difference by looking at their backgrounds. If they were into marketing and sales before they learned how to hack Amazon's algorithms, they are the second. Avoid. If they have been writing for some time and only recently learned how to make advertising turn Amazon's algorithms in their favor, they're in the first. Cherish them. In both cases: test everything they say for yourself. And update often against others.
There are students of marketing who share their wealth of successful actions. But there are far more "Internet Marketers" (IM) who are looking for the fast buck - and have no large difference to scammers. In the first case, you can verify their results. In the second case, they use income numbers in the titles of their articles and their glowing testimonials are no one you've ever heard of - and also will use numbers in their spiel. One giveaway to marketers is that they are always changing their operation (once the first one was mined for all the income they could get.) Their products are always about "what's working now" as opposed to the classic principles that never change. Both are based on human behavior. IM Scammers push what the fads are - and respected marketers simply align the current fads to the constant and 10,000 year-old habits that seem hard-wired into our daily operation on this planet.
Takeaway: once you've found a fiction writer was a hard-core marketer before they learned to write fiction, delete all your downloads from them from any hard drive or backup. I've gone back and reviewed these guys courses I have, and found that none of it was worth keeping.
An author who consistently has continued to write fiction and tell the lessons he's learned from marketing: Mark Dawson.
An author who is fascinated with books marketing and writes non-fiction successfully: David Gaughran
Avoid like the plague anyone who champions "writing to market." Because they are saying that you should write throwaway fiction that requires substantial reinvestment of book sales income into ever-changing advertising - instead of championing improving your skills to create perennial-selling fiction that continues to sell without advertising.
UPDATE: I have found Walter S. Campbell, who advocated writing for magazines of what their editors accepted - and then write them the same type, kind, and style of articles and/or stories, but with better technical quality. To that degree, this is writing “to market demands”, but not as the Amazon “guru’s” recommend - in this case, they carefully study what is already working instead of churning out boilerplate to produce also-ran stories, covers, and blurbs. The latter doesn’t sell. The former can make “breakout” authors.
Writing exclusively "to market" means burning yourself out early.
Writing fiction is a long-game. Consider that you have a "river of interest". Go where your passions lead you and you'll find readers who want that type of book. And you provide top-notch value with every story you write. They each get better as you focus on improving your craft.
What has proved successful for me has been to study all I could about the craft of writing itself, picking out those principles and patterns that fit my own passion and talents. Then either throw everything else away, or simply put it into storage to pull back out for review as needed.
I pulled in a collection of a few hundred books about writing. And narrowed these down to about a dozen that are really useful. Of these, they turned out to all be written by successful writers who then incidentally wrote a book about how they wrote: Steven King, Dorothea Brande, Orson Scott Card, Dean Koontz, Ray Bradbury, C. S. Larkin, Ben Bova, William Wallace Cook, H. Bedford Jones, Carolyn Wells, Mark Twain.
The worst advice came from a professor who had written a couple of dozen books about how to write, and had also written some 75 novels. Yet his main line of work was teaching. His non-fiction books were all re-hash of data already out there. I didn’t bother looking up his fiction.
Dean Koontz derided his own book, saying that he's learned better than all the advice he gave there - because he kept writing and improving. Louis L'Amour as well said that he was just about to master the craft after nearly 5 decades of writing fiction, and just before his own death.
You want to study the pulp-fiction writers who books are still selling today: Louis L'Amour, “Max Brand:, Robert Erwin Howard, Erle Stanley Gardner, Ray Bradbury, etc. Boil down what they wrote, how they wrote, and you'll be set. Use a contemporary style, but with historic settings - full of accurate details.
Do, teach courses, write textbooks - goes the old phrase. But do is first. Doing successfully. Lots of people teach courses, lots of people write textbooks. The ones you value are the writers who are known for continually top-selling original fiction, not boilerplate procedurals.
Finding your own passion is essential for every writer.
Write what you know about most. Ray Bradbury wrote his relatives into his short stories about Mars - which anthology became a bestseller on its own. Twain wrote about life in a rivertown and from his experiences as a riverboat pilot. Stephen King's horror stories all take place in Maine. (His “On Writing” turned out to be a memoir with a scene of his being hit by a van and nearly killed, one leg broken in several places. Another scene of his sliding down a steep snowy slope toward a deep lake with no witnesses to save or hear him. Horror.)
One success I had was to write under four pen-names to master the genres I was most interested in learning. Only to find that I first really needed to master the three story structures. (Your top selling books have all three plot structures in them: romance, mystery, action-adventure.)
Update: Add redemption and non-fiction.
Setting mostly determines what they call genre. Westerns are out west. SF is in space. Fantasy is in magical lands where normal physics laws don't apply. Dystopian stories are in cities.
Characters (like teenagers - young adult) have their own subgenre for all the main genres. Erotica and deviant sex have their own as well. Again, setting sets the main genre, character types set the subgenre below that. Thrillers are a subgenre to Mystery, just extreme fast-paced.
Again, master the five story structures and you can weave any story into them you want. But the bestselling stories have all five. These are your perennial-selling classics.
The throwaway fiction usually only has one story structure. (And never really develops its characters.) Shallow be thy name. And this is where boilerplate romances come from, as well as "procedurals" on TV. (I had to quit watching my purchase of the entire "Murder, She Wrote" series, as it was always the same story in every episode, just different settings. (You could play the entire 10-year series with about 6 or 8 actors playing all the roles in different makeup and costumes - now that would make a nice study, just in setting and characterization.) You can't do that with Shakespeare...
You want to be prolific to polish your own rough edges down as soon as you can. Publish everything and publish under pen names. Non-fiction is best done under your own name. Keeps your integrity high. Fiction is better under pen names. IMHO.