novel

I’m not a particularly patient person, and writing (then, eventually, publishing) a novel is certainly a good test for whatever patience I have. It’s sometimes amazing just how little of the time you spend writing, and how much is spent doing all sorts of things to polish and prepare that novel — and yourself, because you’re a writer, not a salesman, or something like that — for people buying it. And reading it. And not thinking it sucks. It’s not a quick process.

As I’m right in the middle of that, a blog post from Just Publishing Advice caught my eye the other day, looking at “How To Publish A Terrible Book.” Incidentally, it used to be really hard to publish a terrible book. You had to slip it by a lot of gatekeepers, from agents to editors to publishers before it ever saw the light of day, beyond you just paying to print a few copies for the people in your Bridge club. But today, with Amazon and other self-publishing services just a few mouse clicks away, it’s never been easier to publish your crappy little novel about unicorns and fairy dust (not that there’s anything wrong with unicorns and fairy dust). It takes no time at all to publish a terrible book. Anybody can do it, in less than the time it takes you to boil a pot of water for the pasta you’ll eat because it’s cheap, and nobody’s buying your terrible book.

If you want to write a good book, though — one people will buy, and enjoy, and recommend to their friends, and subsequently stalk you over — it takes a lot of patience, and a willingness to go through a borderline masochistic process of having people rip your work apart, and ripping it apart yourself, in the hopes of finding the diamond that hopefully lays at the heart of it. Here are the steps Just Publishing Advice laid out, all of which, once complete, might tempt you to publish, but that’s a temptation you must resist. I’ll look at where I stand with each. [Read more…] about Patience Between Rough Draft and Publication