Successful Fiction Writing: How Good Is Good Enough?
The secret to writing a "damn good book" isn't a mystery. Follow these steps...
Successful Fiction Writing: How Good Is Good Enough?
The first commonly-agreed advice I’d ever run across was “Write a Damn Good Book.” And in five years of researching, taking courses, and reading books (plus a decade of writing and publishing) that’s never been defined by anyone.
What they do tell you is how to get your book published, all the mechanics.
And that doesn’t mean your book was written well enough to sell decently.
Success is typically being defined in these many books and courses as earning a living online, which to many means earning 6-figures (except out here in the boonies. Cost of living in cities is quite insane.)
Earl Nightingale said that income is a result of success. You don’t “make money” unless you work at the government presses. You earn money. Once you’re successful, the money rolls in.
Authors earn money by writing the best they can. The better they are are writers, the higher income they earn.
The worst courses and books currently out there on this subject of “writing good” mostly push money in their marketing. Saying how much you can make or earn (usually along with how fast you can make it) is usually the sign of a scam.
The next scam sign to look out for is if they claim you can become a “bestseller.” It can be done on Amazon for a few minutes in a category where there are no sales. And with a big enough mailing list, with the right persuasive incentives, any book can become momentarily a bestseller. But having a single “bestseller” title and being a routinely bestselling author are light-years part. (And why an “Amazon bestseller” title is becoming worthless.)
However, the worth of a long-running NYT best seller list standing probably has something going very well for it. (And we are talking years on the list - https://www.supersummary.com/the-best-best-sellers/#longest-running-books)
The writers who concentrate on improving their craft with every story they produce are the ones who ultimately earn the big bucks.
It takes lots of written stories. Lots. It takes lots of years of routine writing and publishing. Maybe decades. The good point is that it’s easier than ever to publish, and in a year or so (with prolific output all published) you can possibly be earning 6-figures.
You still won’t be very good as an author, though. A lot better than most. For what that’s worth.
Almost no authors achieve a decent income from writing. For the millions of authors on Amazon, only a tenth of a percent even get to five figures in income.
And you can reject this all you want. That’s not what you’ve been told. I’m just telling you the results of recent research.
.54 percent actually make a living from publishing on Amazon. (per a 2016 Author Earnings report.) This is based on their 200,000 author study, where only 1080 Amazon authors were earning over $50K per year.
Studying Truly Successful Authors
To achieve success, you should study the successful.
When you study successful authors, they do two things:
Prolific writing and publishing. An average of hundreds of stories.
Decades working at it. And they never quit.
This data comes from the Wikipedia, the million-book sellers.
The core idea is that writers get better by writing. Lots of writing. Not re-writing, not multiple drafts.
This is supported by the high-volume (million-words-a-year) model that was used in the boom days of magazine fiction, just before WWII broke out. These authors had earned the King of the Pulps label - such as H. Bedford Jones, Max Brand, William Wallace Cook, and Erle Stanley Gardner.
Essentially, After typing “The End”, these writers rolled the next sheet in and began again. The next story was already there, waiting for them.
Before I started my own experiment in straight-ahead fiction writing, I compiled all I could from these authors. Many had left write-ups which partially explained their production. (Bedford-Jones wrote his up in “This Fiction Business”.)
Somewhere after 3 years of writing at least one fiction short story per week, I moved back to non-fiction. I had totaled 166 short stories by then. The various collected works brought the total up to 245 books published.
That’s how I’ve worked up and tested my four-proof system.
Write it out and complete it. A story is as long as it takes.
Go back through and repair the obvious errors, mis-spellings, missing stuff. (Links and footnotes for non-fiction.)
Get your first readers to go through it and note your oopsies.
Get it line-edited. Then fix your sentences if those changes screwed up any flow/pacing/etc. (For those of you who are just starting out and can’t afford a line-editor, my suggestion is ProWritingAid.com, which is far more affordable.)
Read it out loud and record what you say. Edit the text as you go. Edit that recording into shape for your audiobook.
Then publish it in all possible formats to all possible outlets.
If this is non-fiction, you have more than enough material for several courses.
And then get started on your next story, unless you already have. The key is to get a steady flow of stories being produced. This is one-half of how you improve as an author.
The second half is reading. The breakthrough is in what you are reading.
If you want success, you study success. You read the books of people who are exceptional successes in their field.
Studying other beginning authors won’t help you as much as studying authors who have written successfully for decades and are routinely hitting the bestsellers lists just on the basis of their quality.
W. S. Campbell recommends reading only those authors you want to model. Not the also-rans, but the authors you love reading and would like to write as good as or better than.
When you go to Wikipedia (their List of Best-selling Fiction Authors) you can then find a long list of authors to read. You should pick a contemporary living author, or one who died in the last few years. Sort that list by citizenship and you’ll have a good list of authors to study for the language you speak.
You simply have to drop-kick the conventional wisdom which is keeping other people down and out.
Then do this:
Write, edit, proof, publish. No rewrites, no endless drafts.
Do lots of writing. Train yourself to be prolific.
Learn from your mistakes about what sells and what doesn’t.
Meanwhile, keep improving your craft. Every story better than the earlier ones.
When you are more concerned with telling story instead of word use, then you’ve arrived.
In upcoming articles, we’ll review W. S. Campbell’s approaches to training yourself beyond anywhere you’ve already arrived at. So far, you’ve used whatever you’ve absorbed from all the writers you’ve read. After this, you’ll start conscientiously work on your writing skills daily.
First, you have to read daily. Become as prolific at reading as you do in writing (or vice-versa.)
Next, get a pile of books to read. Start with short stories, just as where you should start as an author.
Stack them up. Collections, singles, all of them.
Make sure you have an ereader that enables notes or some way to signify the books you thought were exceptional.
Main rule: if you bounce out of a story, delete it from your stack. If the short story is in a collection, then note which one it was. If you find the author’s style is boring or tedious, then go ahead and toss that book.
The point here is that books (per Chris Vogler’s “The Writer’s Journey”) create a glandular response. This is what most people mistake for emotions. Your body will tell you if a book is good or lousy. A book keeping you up at night is great. A book putting you to sleep means you delete it.
At some point during your business slot, you can go back through those books to study how that author made it work.
If you are delighted with the book, then study it to see how that author created that effect. If you are bounced out of a book for any reason, delete it from your reader.
You can watch movies and TV shows all you want. But there is that caveat: if you get bored, it’s not worth it. Turn it off and start another, or just go to sleep. Better, pick up a book.
You won’t learn sentence structure, vocabulary, or many writing skills from a movie. Usually just plots, in addition to music scores and camera angles. Maybe dialog.
Reading lots and lots of books are the key. Drop them when they don’t interest you. Study the ones that take you right to the end and leave you wanting more.
At this level, I think this fills in the cracks of what your courses teach. Courses are an overview from that teacher’s perspective — what he or she has found to be workable for them. And as “no school has all the teachers”, each course should be taken with a grain of salt. Each course should be tested in your own writing.
And once you stop learning anything new, then get another teacher.
I’ve already gone through several sets of courses. Again, I earlier reached the end of needing to study any more of the “how-to” courses that only taught mechanics. Now I’m studying to learn the craft. And that takes me full circle, back to where I started.
The first thing I learned, and was repeated constantly: write a damn good book. The trouble with all those other courses were that they either said to hire an expensive editor or, worse, said nothing at all.
Now you and I both know:
Read for pleasure.
Study the books that have the greatest effect on you.
Warning: There Be Dragons
Most writers never make it beyond being a genre writer. Mainly because they quit striving for real excellence in everything they write. Other things in their lives become more interesting. Various conventional wisdom data can contribute to quitting. Essentially, it turned out that writing isn’t giving them the joy they want.
But it’s the stuff they’ve swallowed that makes them quit. They can’t digest it. So they pick up something that gives them more joy. Nothing wrong with that. This article is here to give you warning that there are “fake dragons” which have been set up to keep you from succeeding. (Just like the warnings inscribed on the edges of old maps in Columbus’ time, say the legends.)
Some courses only tell you the mechanics of how to get books sold by running ads. Or plotting. Or some literary hocus-pocus that doesn’t even sell in magazines.
Once you have these mechanics down, then you see that there is more to this than just making a living. You start seeing writing as a craft. And you start seeing that you can help the readers more if you simply learn this craft so well that you cease thinking about the tools and more about the finished product and how well the reader is going to like it.
Dragons you are going to have to slay:
Drafts and multiple editors.
Needing reviews.
Depending on Amazon for everything.
Spending more time marketing than writing.
All of those are simply garbage. Test everything by this: does (what you’ve been told, or read, or heard) help you write more?
Remember, freelance editors sell editing. Freelance proofreaders sell proofing. One-stop-shop book publishers sell all of these. Ask them: does what you’re selling or providing help me write more or faster? Or are you simply delaying what I am doing so it takes longer to go to press?
Sure, there’s a business to writing. You have to run a business. Or hire someone to do it for you (and pay them based on results, not an hourly rate or salary.)
Without books to publish, you have no business income. Without words written, you have no books to publish.
The better you write, the better your books sell. Even the ones which are marketed poorly. Crappy books can be expertly marketed and sell well - but only for a little while. Great books can be marketed poorly and not sell. You want the middle line. Write decent books and give them decent marketing. You’ll earn your decent income.
Meanwhile, improve the quality of your writing.
The first step is to start publishing everything you write from here on out. Use pen names.
After a few decades, it will be easy for you. Still work, but you will have trained yourself (and keep training yourself) to that you hit a line of production that pays well to keep you writing.
The primary reason to keep writing is because of the inherent joy in it. That joy is another reason to read the truly gifted writers. They give you books you can get lost in. And those books are the ones to dissect and learn from.
Writers who never get beyond the mechanics are finding themselves distracted by other fluff. They quit writing after a few years, regardless of whether they had a bestseller or not. Because they think (and bought into the idea that) writing is mechanical.
Writing doesn’t give them bliss. It’s a means to the end. Usually that end is a certain income goal.
“Writing to Market”
So after awhile, they quit writing and concentrate on mechanics of earning income by selling products and services. There are many of these around. People who had “bestsellers” but their main drive is selling courses about writing and publishing. They quit writing.
And that is the core disagreement I have with the bulk of the books and material out there. They sell mechanics, usually overpriced. They don’t make authors, they only profit from wannabe authors. (Impolitely: leeches.)
One of the bigger lies is that you have to “write to market”. You have to know the market and include what that market demands in its books.
The second biggest lie authors tell themselves is that they can write anything they want and then find somewhere to sell it.
The middle ground is told as writing what you like to read, but realizing that certain genre’s (like Westerns) don’t earn much income. So you tweak what you write in order to publish these in genres/categories that sell better. (Hint: read titles in those genres, and find the ones you really like, then adjust your writing style slightly.)
Then I ran across a prolific short story author who was right back at recommending “writing what you want and selling where it fits.” The difference between the advice given to (and by) beginning authors is that they don’t know their plot structures and reader expectations (and “conventions” as well as “obligatory scenes”) to actually pull it off.
Once you have been writing and self-publishing for a bit, you’ll have figured out enough so you can simply write and sell. You’ll be writing from your bliss. The better you get, the more bliss you’ll have.
You’ll only really get there by writing prolifically. Most writers are known for only a few really good books.
Again, study the true “top guns” that you want to model. You have a list of them from that Wikipedia article. Read and immerse yourself in these authors. Internalize their use of language and structures.
Writing is joy. If it isn’t, go find something that is.
That’s the bottom line. Enjoy yourself thoroughly.
What an interesting take on this :)