Join me on my road to publication (part 8)

My multipart series chronicles the ups and downs of an ordinary person striving to becoming a novelist in the real world. The series will span more than five decades.

If you’ve read parts 1-7, you can skip the intro (though it’s a fascinating intro 😀):

I’m the author of ten published novels, three novellas, and one nonfiction book. Seven of the novels, the three novellas, and the nonfiction book were traditionally published. I self-published the remaining three novels.

Though this might seem impressive to some, it goes without saying that I’m no Stephen King, especially when it comes to our respective bank accounts. Despite boasting over 50,000 purchases/downloads of my books, I’ve barely broken into five figures in cash royalties because (admittedly) most of the sales were free or inexpensive ebooks. Regardless, it’s likely there are authors who would trade places with me, which might be viewed as a depressing commentary on how extraordinarily difficult it is for a no-name to hit it big.

Though I’m not the only author on Substack chronicling something like this, my story has unique elements that I believe will be informative and relatable to writers and readers. Over the next several months, I’ll post a bimonthly account of my journey to publication—from the 1970s when I was a young man with big dreams to a recently retired dude who hasn’t given up on those dreams quite yet. Here is part 8.

To produce the best book possible, publishers will put you through the wringer

In my previous post, I talked about how I caught lightning in a bottle and signed with a respected midsize publishing house at a time when I had almost given up hope. Now it was time to get to work.

After signing the contracts and making everything official, I was assigned a content editor. Needless to say, working with a content editor—who also happened to be a New York Times bestselling author—was eye-opening. This wasn’t something like “we caught a typo on page 74 and fixed a minor grammatical error on page 212 and now we’re ready to go.” Nope. This was about tearing it apart and putting it back together again. This was about hours and hours of work for the editor and for me. But that’s what talented editors do.

The first thing the editor asked me to do was remove a bunch of back story from book 1 of the series. She argued that the backstory bogged down the main story too much. I argued that the backstory added valuable context. She won the argument.

Doing this was not as easy as just hitting the delete key. For one thing, there were many things in the main story that wouldn’t make sense if the backstory was removed, so I had to be careful to massage those places. Also, taking out the backstory shortened my original book 1 a little too much, so I needed to come up with about 5,000 words of new content. That’s not that big of a deal, except that—in my mind—the book was already done, so adding new content didn’t come easily for me.

Here’s where the infamous hot tub enters the picture. Do you remember this paragraph from part 3 of this series?

Have you ever taken a few days off from work and sequestered yourself in a remote location in hopes of putting a big dent in a novel? I once did just that, renting a log cabin with a really nice hot tub. My goal was to spend ten hours a day doing extensive rewrites on a novel. But instead of ten hours a day, I was lucky to cobble together three. (I blamed the hot tub.) A typical day went like this: Coffee in the morning in the hot tub, then breakfast, then write one hour, then lunch, then write two hours, then enjoy late-afternoon beers in the hot tub, then dinner, then screw anymore writing after that. The rest of the evening was spent in the hot tub downing even more beers. I sat in the water for so long, I turned into a pale pickle. It went on like this for an entire week.

My job in that cabin was to rework book 1 to my editor’s liking. I got it done, no thanks to the hot tub.

And yet, this was only the beginning. The book then went to a line editor to refine flow and style at the sentence level; a copy editor to ensure accuracy, consistency, and clarity; and proofreaders to catch any final errors that the rest of us might have missed. Whew! I wonder if Stephen King has to go through the same thing? Probably so.

The back-and-forth process took weeks to finish, and there were still five more books to go. But in the end, the final product was worth the effort. I wasn’t about to complain. Quite the contrary, I was thrilled.

Book 1 was finally ready to go. I was about to become an official, super-duper, ultra-proud, stars-in-his eyes published novelist.

$75 million, here I come!

Up next: A book is born—and it’s off to the races.

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Previous episodes

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7