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Comment by restalis | Hacker News Reader

Here's a market strategy: write off-shots of your long novels as teasers. Make them tasty (as their primary reason is to give the readers a taste for the main piece), make them as close in style as possible to the main work, although you may focus on different aspects in each of them, and lastly - make them convergent (towards something that "happens" to be missing). Let's say shorter stories around some independent characters which at some point get in contact with one main work character somewhere at the end of the novel. Make that interaction stand out and the main work character larger than life in some way. The shorter novels should be easier to push onto market, maybe even independently, and should provide the necessary ground for rolling out the main work. Heck, that should be THE publishers' advice for first-time writers out there.

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I'm not a writer, but I don't get why first-time writers - as in, first time they're trying to get their works published, not that they've only now tried to write a book - try to do too much as their first project.

I think they should really force themselves to start with short stories first; focus on finishing a story. That avoids a sunk cost, avoids people beating themselves up for what they believe is their life's work getting rejected by publishers (for e.g. being too long), etc.

Same with software development; it's easy to write big chunks of code, it's hard to get that to production.

I've always heard that writing a good short story is actually quite a bit harder than a novel, since you have to be fairly ruthless about what you include and leave out to have enough room for the essential components. A novel's plot can meander for a while, and it still might be good or okay. A short story's plot that meanders either isn't short anymore or doesn't go anywhere in the space it has.

That's because (at least in my case) starting something out of creative desire and finishing a project are stimulating different parts of the brain. First is that mind itch associated to problem solving, the second is the satisfaction of managing to walk the necessary path and do what had to be done. Those don't necessarily come together. What the average artists do is to follow their passion. Trying to "augment" that way into a more pragmatic one may lead to a loss of motivation. I've come to the conclusion that the best strategy is to tap into whatever gives me energy and let myself do as much as can be done "for free", then take that result and enter "the soldier mode" for the last part, which requires discipline. Ultimately, it boils down to considering the personal strengths and limitations when devising plans of actions, and pushing too many constraints for a first project may result in failure on exactly that planning.

Isn't that how most writers who go through MFA programs do it? (I realize that's not a representative sample of most first-time writers). I find most short stories pretty dull, but enjoy novels. So I can understand why someone would want to start with a longer length work.

This is what my wife did. She is a physician, not an MFA graduate, so she workshopped and wrote short stories for years, and even continued to do so while she worked on her first novel. By the time she published her novel, she was quite good, and even won last year's (2017) "first novel prize[0]" for "Mikhail and Margarita" (a fictional account of the writing of Bulgokov's "Master and Margarita").

[0]http://centerforfiction.org/awards/the-first-novel-prize/

Because writers are told publishers want 100k word novels, and they won't touch 25k novellas, and the short story market is very hard to get into, and writing a good short story requires an extra level of talent and discipline beyond writing a novel, and so why not make it a trilogy anyway, because publishers love those? (In reality they don't, but they'll fall over themselves for a good trilogy if a writer is one-in-a-million good.)

Writers are also told it takes two or three failed novels to write a good one.

And on top of that, there are plenty of writers whose primary motivation is vanity. They care more about seeing their name on the spine of a book - as if that proves they're Someone Important. They also think the more words there are, the better they're doing, and don't understand the value of understatement or editing.

Writers who view it as a business - willing to learn the required skillset, realistic about their potential, and with a product plan, a marketing and customer engagement plan, and a realistic assessment of sales outlets and likely income - are not common.

Even a short novel is fine. Outside of the points you listed, I think shorter is better for potential readers as well.

I am a pretty avid reader and would never pick up a novel by a first time published author that is 800+ pages; the time (and potentially monetary) investment is just too large. On the flip side, I do pick up books by new/unheard of to me authors that are 250-400 pages long.

Yes for short stories. (1) Magazines need several new stories every publishing cycle. And (2) if no one buys it, you've wasted less time.

Sounds like excellent advice. In the Netherlands, we have spaces where you can leave and take books. You could always bind some books yourself (google 'DIY book binding'), or buy a small batch of books, and leave them at such a place.

I also remember there are companies that allow you to publish and sell your work, and handle the printing and shipping. I don't remember the exact companies, but that sounds like a good fit for the poster.

lulu.com is such a company (not affiliated but I have friend that have used it).

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