Is your very big book really more than one title?
Becoming a well-published author can seem daunting today. Agents are ghosting your query letters, or those who at least send a reply are passing, maybe. You might be one of the few who’s getting published by someone besides you. Thank the stars for your good fortunes, if so. You certainly earned it. For you, I wish success with a company who’ll love on your book the way you did while you wrote it.
For many authors, though, frustration is around many a corner. “It’s a waste of my time” to author-publish, they might say. You may be concerned with the expense. Slipping into the maw of Amazon is not a challenge, although doing it well is a task with genuine work. You can look around to see well-meaning books that represent the state of an author’s art. Not just the state of their storytelling; the state of their publishing.
The predicament is one reason I consider the publishing mission to be author-publishing, instead of self-publishing. The difference is the way you think about publishing. As an author, you have a book, maybe several books. You envision people who you’ve never met enjoying your work, so you’ll earn an income. When it’s only a self who is publishing, you might not consider writing to be a commercial prospect.
A couple of million books get published via Amazon every year. I am not making that number up. You seek to become an author whose book is downloaded, or shipped off in a cardboard carrier to readers. Or maybe checked out from a library in someone’s town, or dialed up over a phone for an audiobook listen.
Do less, and more of them
There is one strategy you may not have considered. I know that I did, and then I didn’t, on my books. The strategy is the Shorter Book. As I started in publishing, back when we produced newsletters and magazines on paper, we published at lengths that encouraged reading to the last paper page. We had advertisers on the last page, waiting for eyeballs. So that was a periodical, subscriber-driven strategy.
Then I transitioned to fiction, where I wrote my 101,000-word Viral Times. I still love that book, and a thriller about a pandemic, published more than a decade ago, should have found a bigger audience. I was author-publishing in 2012; the tools were crude then. It might have helped to release two books from the same material. That novel was 144,000 words at one point. It could have become two books.
The multi-release strategy wasn’t certified in 2012, though, for the author-publisher. A single-book author would only get another sale when a reader would recommend a book to a friend. Reading to the end of a six-figure book, as I call the big ones, takes more time than a five-figure book. If you’re stuck on how to produce something at that smaller size, an editor who’s also a creativity coach can help.
It’s no small task to take something that you intend to be a tome and make it shapely and slimmer — but also a set that makes a series. You can do it, once you find a mid-story resolution and then a leap-off point. Whether you write fiction or make non-fiction, there’s probably more than one book in your concept or your premise.
(You call it concept for nonfiction, like how to believe in the hope for a sustainable future. You say premise for fiction, like “what if a Catholic immigrant falls in love with a priest and delivers their child?”)
I brought that smaller-book strategy to Stealing Home, the memoir about my two-week ballpark tour with my Little Leaguer while I tried to make-do with two weeks of divorce custody visitation in the summertimes. A memoir shouldn’t be longer than 70,000 words, most of the time. I got a good editor who brought mine in below that total. More people finish that book, and it gets recommended.
When you’re heading for author-published books, consider how long each one simply must be. By now we’re used to consuming stories by the episode, in a series. A three-hour movie like Oppenheimer or Killers of the Flower Moon can be memorable. The zing of Barbie sold a lot more tickets, and you can almost imagine what a sequel would earn at the box office. Barbie, at one hour and fifty-four minutes. Killers, approaching twice as long.
You might be writing the book that must be Oppenheimer, or the vast guide to everything to know about author-publishing. Consider if the same amount of creativity can be enjoyed at a shorter length, with more episodes. It can be a limited series, with unlimited respect for readers’s time. It’s a worthy idea, when a couple million books a year roll out of Amazon. They’re not your publisher, after all. That might well be you.
Strategy needs comprehensive thought and dreams. It’s worth your time to reach out to someone like me, busy practicing beyond the preaching, who can show you both. I hope to help you.
