Award-winning travel writer Alex Hamilton on preparing to go the distance...
If you don’t fancy writing just one novel, and won’t settle for several, then we assume you mean to unleash dozens on the market. When friends in other professions have retired on a pension, you’ll still be stroking the keys, receiving research from your partner and acting like a drug on your faithful readers.
And I mean faithful. Like, the first-year paperback sale of a Dick Francis novel was always 550,000 copies, give or take a palletful. His books were, dare I say it, fairly similar. From the publisher’s point of view they had to be. When Peter Cheyney excitedly brought in a novel utterly unlike his usual thrillers, publisher Billy Collins was appalled, locked it in his safe and made him promise never to do something so destructive again.
That was a bit hard. He could have used the pseudonym Peter M. Cheyney, as shown by literary novelist Iain Banks, whose broad following was not disturbed when he renamed himself Iain M. Banks for a dazzling dozen SF titles.
Neither need you feel lonely in the midst of mass production. Once when my plane was held up for six hours at Heathrow I checked out the bookshop offers. The novels of 22 different authors proclaimed “International Bestseller” on the cover. The airport would be a good place for a mass international bestseller signing.
If you are impelled to write more than dozens, more than scores, more like hundreds of novels, then study the example of Dame Barbara Cartland. I’ve never seen her name on a bestseller list, I suppose because in writing, or rather dictating, 740 romances she was competing with herself. She was one of the very few who got away with writing down to the public.
So be yourself, and hope there are enough people like you to keep you in business.
Too often writers are ‘controlled’. Tangled with the choice of making a successful career, they lose themselves. On one hand, publishers and agents think of writing as an author’s signature. On the other hand, some writers want to diversify, always the same soon gets antiquated and they yearn for diversity to maintain personal interest. From a reader’s perspective, there is no reason why a writer can’t be as interesting in one genre as they’d be in another. Sometimes, trying and failing is better than not having tried at all.
Xean
4/20/2011
PS. Gonlor, let Alex be. Personal preferences aside, he does a fine job of sharing his experience in his own way, though not everyone may have sufficient experience of their own to comprehend. Other styles may tempt readers to respond differently, but they would not be as subtly effective at conveying their message across to understanding minds as Alex does.
I would actually prefer it, if guest bloggers asked questions at the end of their posts. I have noticed that no-one answers these type of posts on this site. Why is this? Discuss.