NaNoWriMo and Me: What happened next

For those who didn’t read my last blog post, here’s the story so far. I completed a novel called The Ruby Girls for NaNoWriMo 2012 and self-published it in April. It did very little until I put it on a free promo over the first weekend in August, after which it sold amazingly well for a week. Sales continued into the second week – not quite as enthusiastically, but at least it was still selling.

And halfway through the second week it was my birthday. One of those big birthdays, the scary sort with a zero on the end. However, I had lovely plans for the day, not least of which was a lie-in. So there I was, lying in bed with my Kindle and my dog, reading A Bitch in Rome. I was enjoying it enormously until I reached a sad bit. I had no desire to spend my birthday crying, the inevitable outcome of reading on, so I got up.

Ten minutes later, I was wishing I’d stayed in bed.

My Guilty Secret

Here’s the background to my misery. Before the free promo, I’d added a page at the start of the book, asking people to review it. I needed to know how strangers perceived it – but at the same time I was secretly terrified of reading their reviews. Why?

I have a strict rule when writing. It is this. Make every word matter. Every single word. Even writing ‘which was’ or ‘who were’ where not strictly necessary for clarity is a sin in my view. It’s cheating the reader (and in creative writing, quite often interrupts the flow and makes for a clumsy text). The buying public are not paying to read the superfluous words you’ve thrown in to boost the word count.

The truth is, dear budding authors everywhere, I’d broken my own rule. I had cheated my readers. I’d been repetitive. It was sort of justified because of the nature of the plot, but in my heart of hearts, I knew it was wrong. And with each new download, I felt elated and guilty in equal measure.

On my birthday, my literary impertinence caught up with me.

The Sad Tale of the Rotten Review

I opened up my Ruby Girls' page on Amazon and discovered someone had posted a new review. A two-star review. I was fleetingly grateful it wasn’t one star, or no stars – is that even possible? It wasn’t actually posted by someone called Nemesis, but it might as well have been. This is what it said:

‘This seemed to me to be several separate short stories, based on the same theme, all mashed into one, rather messily. There was a lot of repetition in there which went beyond funny and into tedious, then just plain annoying. I won’t be reading anything from this author again.’

OUCH!

My immediate thought was to unpublish the book. My next thought was to revise it.

I revised it.

I completely slashed all the repetition, losing a few thousand words and reducing the first eight chapters – where most of the problem was – to a prologue. Then I ‘filled’ to get the word count back up (it’s still only just longer than a novella), and in the process gave more depth to each of the characters. In the end, I had a far better book that, if still nowhere near a masterpiece, at least no longer embarrassed me. It was all ready to republish.

Typically, when I finally dared to look on my Amazon page again, there were two new five-star reviews of the original version. One said ‘Amazing book’. The other said ‘Great reading’. I wondered briefly whether I should leave the original where it was. Then I accused a couple of friends of planting the reviews to cheer me up (they both denied it, I think truthfully), and published the revised version.

Learn From My Ignominy

Revising the text on the grounds of one scathing review might seem an extreme reaction, but I wouldn’t have done it if I didn’t agree with the review. Which of course I did – it was nothing more than confirmation of what I already knew. I wouldn’t have bothered on the strength of the reviewer who said ‘it makes suspension of disbelief impossible to sustain’ – the fact that the plot is highly unlikely is rather the point, and I make no secret of it.

I’m an experienced editor and I demolished and rebuilt my own text in exactly the same way as I would another author’s wordy offering – coolly, ruthlessly, and without attachment. You must be prepared to do the same if, when you’ve completed your NaNoWriMo novel, you suspect that if you were to read it again in a few years’ time, you’d cringe. Then blush. Then disown it.

Save yourself that agony. Be happy with it before you publish. You must have confidence in whatever you’ve written. Because if you have no confidence in it, how do you expect an agent to, and a publisher? And if you’re self-publishing, it’s even more important – I’m convinced that if you publish your book apologetically, in a shroud of doubt, as I did, buyers will pick up that vibe…

Preparing to Publish

I have two recommendations for anyone who is planning to self-publish. Actually, the first is less of a recommendation and more of a plea.

This is my plea. Get your book edited. I’ve just read a current best-seller that is stuffed full of cringeworthy spelling mistakes and completely devoid of helpful punctuation. It’s as if the author just churned it out and didn’t bother reading it again. This might not trouble some people, but it certainly does others – I read another book that was so badly written even the main character’s name changed quite frequently, and all the reviews focused on that, rather than the content of the story. It’s not a good advert for an individual book, and – more to the point – it’s not a good advert for self-published books in general.

And my recommendation? Be prepared to sell yourself. Hard. I’ve been absolutely hopeless at this, but am exploring ways to make my presence felt when I publish my next book. Be the person who jumps up and down yelling ‘Pick me! Pick me!’, not the one who lurks invisibly in the shadows, longing but not daring to be noticed.

For more information on how Writers & Artists is going to be supporting NaNoWriMo this year, please take a look here.