I would say that step one in this is to write your best-selling novel, but I haven't done that yet and I'm already pushing on to step two. Step two in my case is to get some feedback about it. Sending to friends is not the worst idea, since they might well read it whereas others might not, well, why should they? They don't know you from the unshampooed stalker that might be hanging around their front door, waiting to fall deeply in lust with them and wind up boiling their rabbit.
Friends might read for one of two reasons (there are more and I'll think of them soon and put them in later). One is some variation on them liking you. A variation being that they don't want you to stop liking them, which can be emotional blackmail on your part. I don't advise this. Not just because it is a BAD THING, but because people who read because of emotional blackmail are probably not going to have much common sense about what they are reading, might well start by viewing it as a chore and might, therefore, never get bowled over by the brilliance of your prose, the cunning of your plotting or the joke about the dragon, the Enfield Bullet and spandex psychedelic leggings.
Better are the friends who get chosen 'cos you know their tastes and are sure your writing is just what they'd love to curl up with. They will have some common sense about what you are writing, but they might not be ready to tell you, 'Yeah, I do love reading this kind of stuff, but not when written by you. This sucks.'
A way of getting round all that is to enlist strangers.
This post is about how, or at least, one how.
Youwrite on. com is a site for writers to get feedback on their work, samples of it at least, by other writers. Writers will do this in some cases because they have big, generous souls. YWO, sensibly, ignores that possibility and bribes them instead.
If you review another writer's work, you get a reading credit. You can then use this credit to get a review yourself. Each review has to give you marks on a number of features of your writing - the characters, the narrative voice, the settings etc. They have to write at least one hundred words of what they are urged to make constructive criticism and then they have to pass a test on the sample that you posted. That's the part that is most cynical and therefore my favourite bit. Some of those writers might get tempted to score you 3's for everything, say it wasn't bad and then pass on to spend their reading credit without ever going to the effort of reading your damn work. Can't do that if they don't pass the test, which you get to set.
After eight reviews the computer crunches the numbers of the scores you have been given, awards you an overall mark out of five and puts you up on the top ten chart.
Should you actually get into the top ten and stay there long enough, you can be read by expert punters from Random House. They'll probably tell you nice try, here's the first of your rejections, don't you feel like a real writer now? Should this happen, feel good about yourself, most don't get that far. (Oh, I've been here ten years and I'm still waiting for someone to spit in my face. They must think the sun shines out of your arse.)
Anyway, I've put up the first 6,000 words, or thereabouts, I've never been good with numbers, on YWO and am now waiting for people to comment.
I've done this before with Brendan, which once got up to equal twelfth. The run of good reviewers stopped there, however, and I was then subjected to a range of reviewers who either just didn't get it, didn't like reading other people's work, or had dropped the last of their medication down the back of the fridge and hadn't waited to get more before committing their hallucinations to print.It dropped down the charts and reached a level from which statistics meant it would never significantly rise. I gave up.
So why start again?
Well, Brendan was a very ambitious piece of work. A Science Fiction novel set in a children's fantasy world, courtesy of a Matrix-like computer simulation. It was narrated by two main, first person narrators and a squad of others, giving a lot of story-jumps, names to remember etc. One of the protagonists is a girl from 2020 who speaks a teenage argot that wasn't as hard to get the head around as Clockwork Orange's Nadsat, but which bent some people out of shape a good bit.
I was worried when I wrote it that it might fall a bit between a number of stools and not be quite enough for one group while being too much for another. Of those who've read and reviewed it half have been friends, who are blokes, Brits and people who do read the same kind of stuff as me - we've traded books for years. They've said they've liked it and I think they've meant that. The other group are book blog reviewers who've been strangers, female, American and (not 100% sure about this) probably don't read as much of the stuff I do - two said they've not seen anything like it before, which is an, 'Umm, yes there is.' Most said they really got gripped by the premise and the story, but had problems with the complexity and, in two cases, the dialect forms used. Both thought I'd made a lot of grammar mistakes. Bit mean I thought, Faulkner never had to put up with people saying, 'this guy's grammar sucks'. At least, not as far as I know.
Shadowlands isn't like that. One omniscient narrator, a story set in the First World War era (tick Downton Abbey fans), with the story being about a young boy who goes to a castle full of women - the men have all gone off to the war - and his sexual adventures there (tick dirty old men and maybe Shades of Grey fans, though my hero is a nice guy). From the beginning, you know that there are ghosts in this story (tick ghost story fans) and there is a question about what a boy called Jack is doing with a knife for killing in his bag and a surgeon's knowledge of how to use it in his head (tick Ripper/Slasher story fans, though they are going to be mostly disappointed - I have much better ideas about what my hero can do with sexy young women than stick knives in them). Later on there will be zombies (tick), but no vampires (tick, tick , tick) and maybe Nazis and Mexican bandits (no, I'm not kidding, it follows the logic of the story). All of this announces that it is a Science Fiction story from the beginning, so TICK SF fans.
I'm really wondering if I've missed anything (oh, there are some scenes of martial arts, even before we get to the Nazis, tick).
The only thing that is ambitious about this is the massive cheek of trying to cram all of that in, though I honestly think I can make it work and have a reader say, yeah, that does make sense. At least by the end. I'm going to bung the sample off to friends who might be able to tell me if they'd read on past the bit I give them. But the probable answer to that (see above) is yes.
That being the case, YWO is a good place to start. If I get positive reviews from there, it might be something to put into an approach to an agent, or a media kit for self-publishing and sending to book review blogs.
Friends might read for one of two reasons (there are more and I'll think of them soon and put them in later). One is some variation on them liking you. A variation being that they don't want you to stop liking them, which can be emotional blackmail on your part. I don't advise this. Not just because it is a BAD THING, but because people who read because of emotional blackmail are probably not going to have much common sense about what they are reading, might well start by viewing it as a chore and might, therefore, never get bowled over by the brilliance of your prose, the cunning of your plotting or the joke about the dragon, the Enfield Bullet and spandex psychedelic leggings.
Better are the friends who get chosen 'cos you know their tastes and are sure your writing is just what they'd love to curl up with. They will have some common sense about what you are writing, but they might not be ready to tell you, 'Yeah, I do love reading this kind of stuff, but not when written by you. This sucks.'
A way of getting round all that is to enlist strangers.
This post is about how, or at least, one how.
Youwrite on. com is a site for writers to get feedback on their work, samples of it at least, by other writers. Writers will do this in some cases because they have big, generous souls. YWO, sensibly, ignores that possibility and bribes them instead.
If you review another writer's work, you get a reading credit. You can then use this credit to get a review yourself. Each review has to give you marks on a number of features of your writing - the characters, the narrative voice, the settings etc. They have to write at least one hundred words of what they are urged to make constructive criticism and then they have to pass a test on the sample that you posted. That's the part that is most cynical and therefore my favourite bit. Some of those writers might get tempted to score you 3's for everything, say it wasn't bad and then pass on to spend their reading credit without ever going to the effort of reading your damn work. Can't do that if they don't pass the test, which you get to set.
After eight reviews the computer crunches the numbers of the scores you have been given, awards you an overall mark out of five and puts you up on the top ten chart.
Should you actually get into the top ten and stay there long enough, you can be read by expert punters from Random House. They'll probably tell you nice try, here's the first of your rejections, don't you feel like a real writer now? Should this happen, feel good about yourself, most don't get that far. (Oh, I've been here ten years and I'm still waiting for someone to spit in my face. They must think the sun shines out of your arse.)
Anyway, I've put up the first 6,000 words, or thereabouts, I've never been good with numbers, on YWO and am now waiting for people to comment.
I've done this before with Brendan, which once got up to equal twelfth. The run of good reviewers stopped there, however, and I was then subjected to a range of reviewers who either just didn't get it, didn't like reading other people's work, or had dropped the last of their medication down the back of the fridge and hadn't waited to get more before committing their hallucinations to print.It dropped down the charts and reached a level from which statistics meant it would never significantly rise. I gave up.
So why start again?
Well, Brendan was a very ambitious piece of work. A Science Fiction novel set in a children's fantasy world, courtesy of a Matrix-like computer simulation. It was narrated by two main, first person narrators and a squad of others, giving a lot of story-jumps, names to remember etc. One of the protagonists is a girl from 2020 who speaks a teenage argot that wasn't as hard to get the head around as Clockwork Orange's Nadsat, but which bent some people out of shape a good bit.
I was worried when I wrote it that it might fall a bit between a number of stools and not be quite enough for one group while being too much for another. Of those who've read and reviewed it half have been friends, who are blokes, Brits and people who do read the same kind of stuff as me - we've traded books for years. They've said they've liked it and I think they've meant that. The other group are book blog reviewers who've been strangers, female, American and (not 100% sure about this) probably don't read as much of the stuff I do - two said they've not seen anything like it before, which is an, 'Umm, yes there is.' Most said they really got gripped by the premise and the story, but had problems with the complexity and, in two cases, the dialect forms used. Both thought I'd made a lot of grammar mistakes. Bit mean I thought, Faulkner never had to put up with people saying, 'this guy's grammar sucks'. At least, not as far as I know.
Shadowlands isn't like that. One omniscient narrator, a story set in the First World War era (tick Downton Abbey fans), with the story being about a young boy who goes to a castle full of women - the men have all gone off to the war - and his sexual adventures there (tick dirty old men and maybe Shades of Grey fans, though my hero is a nice guy). From the beginning, you know that there are ghosts in this story (tick ghost story fans) and there is a question about what a boy called Jack is doing with a knife for killing in his bag and a surgeon's knowledge of how to use it in his head (tick Ripper/Slasher story fans, though they are going to be mostly disappointed - I have much better ideas about what my hero can do with sexy young women than stick knives in them). Later on there will be zombies (tick), but no vampires (tick, tick , tick) and maybe Nazis and Mexican bandits (no, I'm not kidding, it follows the logic of the story). All of this announces that it is a Science Fiction story from the beginning, so TICK SF fans.
I'm really wondering if I've missed anything (oh, there are some scenes of martial arts, even before we get to the Nazis, tick).
The only thing that is ambitious about this is the massive cheek of trying to cram all of that in, though I honestly think I can make it work and have a reader say, yeah, that does make sense. At least by the end. I'm going to bung the sample off to friends who might be able to tell me if they'd read on past the bit I give them. But the probable answer to that (see above) is yes.
That being the case, YWO is a good place to start. If I get positive reviews from there, it might be something to put into an approach to an agent, or a media kit for self-publishing and sending to book review blogs.
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