Published Author Or Bust!

It’s all well and good to say “I’m going to write more” or “I’m determined to finish my book” but if you don’t have a plan beyond that (other than “er, get it published somehow”), there’s nothing really driving you to finish your work. You just relax and think “I’ll get it done in my own time”.

No more.

My growing relationship with podiobooks has inspired me. I have two years of experience podcasting, even longer writing – the only reason I can’t instantly get in on this phenomenon is because I haven’t finished anything. So, now I have a plan for The Thieves’ Guild:

- Establish a writing routine
I think I’ve just found one that works. Now that I’ve stopped commuting by train (thus ridding me of over an hour’s writing team per day), I’ve tried doing 100 words a day and failed. After 150 words, I found myself stopping because I’d met my goal, and I never prepared properly because a mere 100 words didn’t seem to matter.

I’ve tried writing an hour a day, but I can never find a full free hour. Ideally, I want more than an hour but that’s even more unlikely.

After reading Cory Doctorow’s article, I’ve now started doing a solid 20-25 minutes per day. The result is that I get more done. When I leisurely wrote for an entire Sunday morning, I did about 600 words. In each 20-minute slot, I seem to be doing at least 800.

I need to stick to this. I already faltered last night by not writing, so I need to get on top of this now.

- Finish the book
Self explanatory. I know what’s going to happen. For the most part, I know how it’s going to happen. Stop thinking and just bloody write it down, will you?!

- Seek publication
I still intend to see my book in print, so I’ll do my utmost to get the book published through conventional means first. I’ve got a good proposition – a fairly unique story, merging two genres together and written in a reasonably original way. And it’s a trilogy, followed by a series that will culminate in another trilogy – so there’s plenty to follow if publishers like the first book.

- Podiobook it!
This is the key to the plan.

As Mur Lafferty recently pointed out, there’s a very good chance this book sucks. Which means publishers won’t want the second and third parts of the trilogy, or the series or the second trilogy.

If that’s the case, I move on to something different, while continuing The Thieves’ Guild in my spare time and releasing it through podiobook.

This means that, come what may, this book will be released.

And that revelation, that determination, is what will keep me going. So far, any low points that I’ve hit have generally been hand in hand with the idea that if my book isn’t good enough for publication, it will never be read, so what’s the point in writing it? But that’s not that case today, thanks to the Internet.

Book One will be finished by the end of the year (or at least very close to it). If I’m writing 800 words a day, it won’t take 12 months to rack up the full 50,000 – 100,000 words of the finished work.

Watch this space.

James Novel Novel, The Thieves Guild