Publishing: Everybody starts somewhere

Start a blog… That's what every “How to sell your book” guide tells new writers. You know the ones? They promise fame and success if you follow their instructions, and make it all sound so easy. Just do X, Y and Z, and instant riches will follow.

Well, they don't. Turns out the whole book writing/publishing/selling process isn't that straightforward.

I started writing a few years ago, after reading a few spectacularly shonky books on Amazon. Were they self-published? I have no idea. I didn't check. People say there's a stigma attached to self-publishing, but as a reader the mechanism of the book getting from a writer's pen to my kindle never entered my mind. I was simply after a good story.

With that in mind, I figured surely I could do better. After all, I'm the proud owner of two A-grade GCSEs in English, even though I only squeaked through the Literature exam thanks to watching Macbeth and Far From The Madding Crowd twice each on video the day before. I'm ashamed to say I never did read the end of Thomas Hardy's masterpiece. Every so often I threaten myself with going back to finish the last few chapters, but then I pick up something with a little more tongue action and the adventures of Farmer Boldwood and Bathsheba are soon forgotten again.

Anyway… I tried writing a book. And I soon found out it wasn't quite as easy as I thought. My first effort was abysmal, there's no other word for it. I found it again the other day, lurking on the hard drive of my old computer, thirty thousand words of telling rather than showing, purple prose and endless descriptions of what each character was wearing, right down to their last shoelace. Thankfully, nobody else ever set eyes on that mess.

But being a tenacious little bitch, I wasn't about to let the fact that I had no clue what I was doing stop me. So I set about learning. At first, I pulled apart every book I read, working out what I liked and what I didn't. Gradually my pacing and storytelling improved, even if I still didn't know how to punctuate dialogue properly. Towards the end of that first book, I realised I'd made a mistake with my characters. My female character simply didn't like the ending to her story, and seeing as she'd taken up residence in my head and told me this every day, I had to re-write it. One book became three. As I embarked on the second, I decided I'd better learn a bit more about the technical aspects, because, heaven help me, if anybody else ever looked at the book I wanted them to concentrate on the story, not on misplaced commas and incorrect quotation marks.

When I finished the trilogy, one of supporting characters decided he wanted his own story. Three books expanded to four, then five, then six. Why? Because I loved it. I found pouring the contents of my head out onto paper cathartic, and the satisfaction of writing “The End” made me feel warm and fuzzy. Or was that the gin? I'm not sure.

Soon after that, I discovered a writing site called Wattpad, and among the fan fiction and slightly dubious romances, I started finding a few gems. Then I thought, why don't I put one of my stories on the site? After all, they were just sitting on my hard drive, gathering dust. So I did. Over five months, I discovered the art of giving and receiving feedback, and that further ignited my appetite for learning. People were reading my story. Mine! And I wanted to make it as good as I could for them.

Ten thousand reads turned into fifty, then a hundred. Wattpad put my book on their “featured” list and even used it to promote a movie. Then people started to ask if they could buy my book, but the answer was no. Even then, I knew that book could be better. It needed an editor's attention, and based on feedback from the Wattpad users, I needed to change parts of the story. But the question got me thinking, and that led me to my next adventure.

I decided that I'd see what I needed to do to publish a book, and it turned out writing was the easy part. At times the process made me want to scream, and the urge to throw my laptop from a tall building would have made an Olympic shot putter quake in their trainers. But in the end, I managed to do it and I thought I'd share the trip. If it saves one author, somewhere, from having to pick bits of keyboard from out of their pot plants, it'll be worth it.

And with that, I'm finally starting that bloody blog…