Writing a Novel and Getting Published For Dummies UK

George Green, Lizzy E. Kremer

• Publisher: For Dummies
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781118910405
• eBook ISBN: 9781118910443
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Methods for Reading

Learn to:

• Craft a winning manuscript
• Troubleshoot and edit your work
• Prepare your manuscript for publication
• Find a good agent to represent you
• Negotiate the best possible deal

Turn your aspiration into reality with this completely updated guide

If you've always wanted to write that great novel, but never knew where to start, look no further! With a published author advising you on how to write well and a literary agent providing insight into getting a publishing deal, this updated guide gives you the inside track on the art and science of breaking into the fiction-publishing industry. Taking you step by step from concept to contract, this book provides the tools you need to tell your story with skill and approach agents and publishers with confidence.

• Dive in — check out how to combine your natural talent with the writing techniques used by successful authors
• Establish a firm foundation — construct your basic story, plot and structure
• Examine the key elements — create characters, develop dialogue, explore relationships and insert conflict
• Fine-tune and finish up — discover tips on adding detail, creativity and flair while bringing your work to a close
• Get published — take the next step by weighing up your publishing options, working with agents and negotiating deals
• Find out more — check out additional advice, like the most common mistakes you need to avoid, and tips from published authors

Open the book and find:

• Tips for getting started
• Creative ways to develop plots, storylines, characters and dialogue
• The seven basic stories and how to put them to work
• Tricks for crafting a great ending to your novel
• How to prepare your manuscript for editing and publishing
• The lowdown on the business side of publishing

Part I

Getting Started with Writing a Novel and Getting Published

For Dummies can help you get started with lots of subjects. Go to www.dummies.com to learn more and do more with For Dummies.

In this part …

• Get the right work space and tools to start the job – whether that’s your expensive new laptop, or a simple notebook and biro.
• Consider your readership and the length of your novel.
• Be realistic about approaching publishers with your work.
• Get to grips with grammar basics.
• Start thinking like a writer.

Chapter 1

Entering the Writer’s World

In This Chapter

Appraising yourself and your motivation

Getting to know your reader

Polishing your prose

Approaching publishing

Beating the odds

Writing a novel isn’t like assembling a flat-pack wardrobe. It’d be much easier if it were. You’d be able to lay out all your words and ideas on the floor, check the instructions, and make sure you had everything you needed. Then you’d just follow the steps, and at the end of it you’d have built a novel. Easy.

But writing a novel isn’t like that. The process is different for every writer, although that isn’t the same as saying that everyone’s experience is completely different. Much of the process is common to many writers. But the most important part of your writing experience is unique to you.

The problem is that, unlike assembling a wardrobe, when you write a novel you don’t have a blueprint. There’s no set of instructions you can look at and say, ‘Ah, I see what it’s going to look like when it’s finished, here’s a box of all the things I need, and I see clearly how I’m going to put the pieces together.’ There are guide books, like this one, which can help by showing you how other people have met the same challenges you face. But the bottom line is that no one else can write your novel for you.

The key concepts to keep in mind as you write your novel and think about getting it published are:

• Never give up – never stop writing.
• Never stop reading and finding out about your craft.
• Have faith in what you’re trying to do, but always be prepared to consider the possibility that you may be on the wrong track.
• Trust the process.

Knowing Yourself

Knowing yourself means being honest about yourself and your situation. When you know yourself, you know what your avoidance strategies are likely to be, and so you can prepare for them.

You have to know yourself to know whether you’re capable of doing the things you have to do in order to write your novel. Can you, for example, say to your friends, ‘I’m not coming out with you just now; I’ll meet you later, when I’ve finished this chapter’? Can you leave phones unanswered, all forms of social media unchecked? Can you say to the people you live with, ‘I’m going to shut myself away for a couple of hours now’? Can you do that even though they’re settling down to watch a film you want to see? And if they say you’re boring and no fun and they’re going out without you, can you laugh that off?

Can you make writing one of the good things in your life, instead of a drudge that needs to be avoided except when you really feel like it, which is, let’s face it, about once a week? Most importantly, can you arrange your life so that you have time for writing every day or almost every day? Can you treat writing like lunch: you sit down and eat lunch every day, and it wouldn’t occur to you not to except in the most unusual circumstances. That’s how you need to see your writing. Can you, honestly, see yourself doing that? And if you can’t, can you train yourself to do it? Even when you’re tired, when you’re having a bad day, when you just don’t feel like it? Because that’s what the authors of the published novels you read and enjoyed did. They didn’t wait until the mood overtook them and then dash off a few golden chapters. They sat down and slogged, just like you. That’s what successful writing takes.

Knowing Your Reader

Your reader doesn’t owe you a living, or even a second glance. The only way you can get readers’ interest is by giving them the best possible book you can. How do you do that? Read this book for a start.

Beyond that, you need to make sure that you know who your readers are. A book aimed at party-loving young women working in the media in London isn’t going to be the same book as one aimed at retired men living in rural Sussex. At least, probably not. (If you can write a book that appeals to both, we know some publishers who want to talk to you!) Know who your readers are, and make sure that you address them.

Who is your reader? The easy answer is, ‘Someone quite a lot like me,’ and that’s not a bad start. If you like reading trashy science fiction, and you write trashy science fiction, your reader’s someone like you who likes what you like.

However, presumably you want to attract people who like other things, too, people who are going to read your novel and then say, ‘Well, I don’t normally read this sort of thing, but this isn’t just a trashy science fiction novel, it has a wonderful romantic story, it made all sorts of interesting points about politics, and it made me completely reconsider my attitude to the death penalty. Oh, and it had a great recipe for beetroot soup.’ We exaggerate, but you take the point. A book with this sort of wide appeal is called a crossover novel and is the publishers’ Holy Grail. Write one of these books and everyone gets rich. (A good example of one of these is The Time Traveller’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger (Vintage).)

So, who is the crossover reader? Presumably someone open to different experiences. Beyond that, it’s hard to say. Who is a Harry Potter reader? You may reply, ‘boys and girls aged 8–14 with a taste for adventure’, but we all know that the appeal of these books goes way beyond that.

How do you target your reader? You don’t, at least not at the writing stage. You write the book that you want to write. Then, when you submit the manuscript, your agent and/or your publisher may well say something like, ‘I love it, really love it. Just a couple of suggestions. The romance is really nice, but can it be a bit more intense? And the battle is over a bit too quickly; I’d have liked it to go on a bit longer, with maybe a climactic single combat.’ And so on. These people know the publishing market; they make a judgement as to where your book should be aimed and try to push you in that direction, as necessary. (Of course, you don’t have to agree with them.)

Keep the picture of your general reader while writing. ‘A 14-year-old boy who goes to grammar school and lives in Edinburgh’ is too specific. ‘Anyone who likes an exciting adventure story and who’s interested in boats but isn’t too bothered about romance’ is the kind of picture to paint at this stage.

You aren’t writing for yourself. Of course, you have to like your book, but never forget about your reader. If you ever think, ‘Oh, to be honest that’s not really as good as I can get it, but I’m not going to worry about making it right,’ or ‘I’m tired; the heck with that bit, it’s a muddle, but I can’t be bothered to fix it,’ your reader’s going to notice and won’t forgive you. Your book must always be as good as you can make it. No compromises.

Remembering that Writing Is Editing

Creative writing isn’t actually what novelists do. What this book encourages you to do is creative re-writing.

Writing a novel – putting about 90,000 words on paper – takes you about three months if you write three pages – about 1,000 words – a day. Writing a finished novel can take you anything from three months to thirty years. Fortunately, it doesn’t take that long for most people, but it can still easily take a year or so.

That extra nine months is spent re-writing: shaping, changing, re-ordering, re-phrasing, honing, and polishing – over and over again, until your novel’s as good as it possibly can be.

The process is no different to creating a sculpture: you can make the vague shape of a javelin-thrower relatively quickly – a lump about six feet tall, a long thin bit at the top, maybe standing on two smaller lumps for feet. Then you start the real work: the chipping, shaping, sanding and so on – the editing and polishing.

Writing is all about getting the details right.

Entering the Market

We aren’t going to pretend that getting a publishing deal for your novel is easy. Over 180,000 books were published in 2013 in the UK alone. Of those, very few become sales successes. It’s impossible to say for sure what percentage of novels that are written end up getting published, but it’s fair to say that, all other things being equal, the odds of you becoming a bestselling author aren’t good. Fortunately, all other things don’t have to be equal.

So, what can be done to better the odds? Read this book for a start. We’ve gathered together a lot of advice for you on what to write, how to write it, and how to get what you write noticed by the people who count.

Part V has loads more information about getting published. In Part V, you can also find a thorough introduction to the world of self-publishing. Even if you can’t interest a publisher in your novel, you can still find readers online. Nearly as many books were self-published in the UK in 2013 as were published by traditional publishers. You still need to work hard on being discovered, but we have tips for that too.

Steeling yourself

Getting your novel published calls for clear-eyed realism and absolute honesty with yourself. If you think that getting a novel published is easy, you’re just plain wrong. You have to deal with the publishing market as it really is, not how you would like it to be. This reality means never being too proud to learn. It means doing research and whatever needs to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Part I: Getting Started with Writing a Novel and Getting Published
• Part II: Building from the Basics
• Part III: Examining the Elements
• Part IV: Fine-tuning and Finishing Up
• Part V: Publishing
• Part VI: The Part of Tens
• About the Authors
• Cheat Sheet
• More Dummies Products