In August 2023, I launched my first self-published novella on Amazon KDP. I knew it was going to be a learning experience, but it was still a much harder struggle than I thought it would be.
I know that right now everyone who has ever written a book is thinking — Duh? What did you expect?
I want to share with you what I learned through this process of writing and publishing the book so that you may find some common ground with my experience.
I began like everyone does — with a desire to write a book that I would be proud of. While I was mostly preoccupied with writing a good book from start to finish, I also wanted it to generate reviews and sales to get a sense of how my work stacks up out there in the Wild Wild West of Amazon self-publishing.
When it came time to pick a story to tell, I tapped into a few outlines that I had written several years ago. However, none of those concepts were “to-market” as is conventional wisdom when it comes to self-publishing. So, instead of tackling one of my passion projects, I decided to come up with a brand-new story that was as cookie cutter as other books on Amazon.
This didn’t bother me as such because my mission was to finish a book — any book — and go through the self-publishing process before I moved on to something that was personal to me.
With this goal in mind, I set out to learn as much as I could about the craft of writing. The first book that I was recommended by the almighty algorithm was Stephen King’s On Writing. I made it through one chapter and stopped because the legendary author did nothing but talk about his own upbringing. I was definitely entertained, and there is relevant advice later in the book, but I put it down and saved it for a later day.
Next, I binged on all the AuthorTube content I could find. I followed and watched videos from some of the biggest fiction writing educators on YouTube such as Jenna Moreci, Alexa Donne, Shaelin Bishop, Jerry B. Jenkins, and, of course, Brandon Sanderson. Though it wasn’t relevant to my genre — romance — I found Brandon Sanderson’s now famous BYU 2020 Creative Writing class to be an excellent resource to learn how professionals think about and hone their craft.
The pivotal book in my journey was Romancing the Beat by Gwen Hayes (affiliate link). Among aspiring romance authors, it is considered the gospel on how to structure and plot a romance arc that meets the expectations of hardcore genre fans.
Armed with this knowledge, I conjured up a second-chance office romance between two coworkers who once fell in love, split due to the MMC’s (Male Main Character) selfish decision, and are now forced to be in close proximity to each other. The setting was a hackathon at a tech giant which I specifically chose because I wanted to write a story where both characters are racing each other to solve an expensive software bug before the other one does.
With the plot set, my copy of Scrivener ready to go, and investing in a lifetime license of ProWritingAid, I began my journey.
And here is where the learning began.
I breezed through the first 15K words in just 2 weeks. Honestly, that first part of the book, which was Act 1, the set up to the conflict, was written without strict adherence to the plot I had made. I was pantsing it through sheer excitement of writing my first book! I added many new elements that were not present in the original outline but, I realized, were fun to include as I was writing the story.
However, once I reached that point, I realized that I did not have enough plot points to justify 25K more words to take the book’s word count to 40K — Amazon’s technical definition of a novel (which is half of what can be considered publishable in trad publishing).
Either I was an underwriter, or the story’s plot was paper thin.
Both of these things were true.
I am an underwriter because I often just focus on dialogue while leaving out the other elements that make fiction great like environment descriptions, sensory attributes, character attributes, setting the mood, and others that I’m still learning.
Moreover, though I hit all the beats according to Gwen Hayes’ template, the actual plot elements in the middle of my book hardly took up a scene or two. So, the book had a solid start, flimsy middle, and severely rushed ending (which one reviewer pointed out after release).
Here the project stalled, for over a year (!), as every few days I would open Scrivener, look at my plot, have no idea what to do, and close it back again.
I realized that I’m not, in fact, a pantser, and that I need a detailed, finished plot to see a project to completion. This makes me a plotter.
The challenge I was facing is what Jerry Jenkins calls the Marathon of the Middle — when you start out all excited like I did but then end up stuck at the actual hard part, the middle of the book. This is when you have to not only sustain your own enthusiasm for writing the book but also think about keeping the reader’s interest.
As months passed by, I grew more and more frustrated with the stalled project. I couldn’t think of any more plot points that made sense for the overall narrative and love story. I also did not want to pad the story with useless fluff that added nothing to the dynamic between the two lovers.
I was also keen on not having any plot holes in the book as they often break immersion for me when I consume media myself. Many of the elements that I had introduced when I was pantsing Act 1 were now conflicting with the original plot that I had laid out for the book.
So, I went back to Romancing the Beat.
This time, instead of adopting each and every beat as Gwen Hayes suggests, I came up with a shortened “pattern” for myself.
A love story is like a push and pull of emotions with each side struggling with the fact that they need the other person but are too proud to admit it. As I interpret it, Romancing the Beat breaks this up-and-down roller coaster of emotions into separate beats to keep the reader thinking — will they, or won’t they?
After much deliberation, then, I decided to scrap the original outline and work with what I had already written. Much of it had to be thrown out too as it caused issues with pacing.
I started at the point where I had left it and asked myself this simple question — what would I do if I was in this character’s shoes?
Slowly, the answer came to me. So, I wrote up the rest of the plot points as best as I could and set out to finish the thing.
And voila! A few weeks later — I did!
So, in a roundabout way — I started plotting the story, was a pantser while writing, and relied again on plotting to finish the book.
In short, for me, it was not a straightforward process. And that is fine! I’m pretty confident that this is exactly how most writers write — a little bit of both — nobody can be a true pantser or true plotter.
I also ended up using only half of the words I had written. My original manuscript was around 55K words, and the final novella was just over 28K.
When I was finished with it, I was too impatient to go back and make a second draft as this was foremost a publishing exercise for me. I don’t want to say that I wasn’t focused on quality but that I didn’t want to obsess over making it perfect.
I got the editing done with Grammarly and ProWritingAid and — the most important tool of them all — hearing back the manuscript with Word’s Read Aloud feature. The last one is a genuine game changer that helped me catch even the sneakiest errors that the software couldn’t catch.
I say this because I often forget to type words as I have thought of them in my head. It is indeed embarrassing when you go back and read or listen to something you’ve written, and you’ve skipped a preposition or pronoun that you just assumed you had typed. I listen to everything I write before I publish it now — even this post. I’m pretty sure many readers out there will relate with me as they have done the same thing — maybe in a tweet or an email.
I made the book cover myself by getting stock images from Deposit Photos (affiliate link) and using Inkscape. While my cover is not really a standout, I figured it was serviceable enough to get some attention on KDP.
So, finally, after going through the entire process, I finally released “Random Affectionate Memories” on KDP on August 21st, 2023.
What was the result?
It sold two copies — both to people I know. My friends said, “Well done”, some in my family were excited for a day or two, and I got three reviews thanks to the copies I had given out using Voracious Readers Only. It was only a year later (last month) that someone I did not know read 50 KDP pages of the book and that made me around 12 cents.
Did it change my life? No.
Did I write another book after that? Yes!
Do I have a story to tell about that? Of course!
Follow me here on Medium as I have much more to share about my journey. This post hardly captures everything I learned about the craft of writing, and myself, over the course of the two books.
Until then, keep writing!