Jan 02 2010
Eight Facts About Writing That Surprise Prospective Novelists
I'm a former assistant editor with advice about how to write novels, comic books and graphic novels. Most of my content applies to fiction-writing in general, but I also provide articles specifically about superhero stories.
1. Even if you get published, you will get paid much, much less than you can imagine. A 75,000 word manuscript takes 2000+ hours and typically sells for around $5000. That’s not even close to minimum wage, particularly when you consider the work put in after getting published. If you plan on eating food more expensive than Kibbles and Bits, get a day job.
2. Most novelists don’t get their first novels published. According to a Tobias Buckell survey, only 35% of published authors broke out with their first novel. This shouldn’t be too surprising– look at what you were writing 2-3 years ago. You’ve gotten a lot better, right? You’ll probably feel the same way about what you’re writing now in 2-3 years. It may take a novel manuscript or two to develop professional-grade writing skills. (Keep practicing and you’ll get there!)
3. Novel publishing is freakishly competitive, particularly compared to English classes. In an English class, most of the papers will get A’s and the teacher will usually explain to everybody else what they need to fix so that they will get A’s. In contrast, publishers reject over 99% of submissions and won’t bother asking you to revise-and-resubmit unless you’re close. The vast majority of submissions are rejected without any specific feedback. Thanks for submitting–we enjoyed your manuscript, but not enough to tell you what to fix.
4. Even after you’ve finished your novel manuscript, it will take you years before the book is actually on shelves. A novel publisher usually takes at least 3-6 months to evaluate its submissions. After you finally get the offer, you have to get through editing/rewriting, cover design, any advance publicity and promotional work, etc. Processes that involve a lot of people are usually slow.
5. Almost all novel sales are made through brick-and-mortar stores and A-list websites like Amazon. Unfortunately, authors’ websites are usually insignificant.
6. When your novel gets published, you will have virtually no control over what the cover looks like. They may show it to you before it gets printed. Or not. If this is very important for you, you have a few options. For example, get some professional-grade visual design skills. They’ll probably take your artistic input more seriously if you’re visually trained. Failing that, you can self-publish your novel. Then you’d have complete control over the cover. Or you can get a huge audience. If J.K. Rowling wanted an exploding alien on her cover, the publisher would ask green or gray. Alternately, you can write comic books. Comic book writers and graphic novelists have significantly more influence over their covers.
7. The most important question controlling whether a book will get published is whether the publisher thinks it will sell well. For a novel, that usually means five to ten thousand sales. Another consideration is whether the book is stylistically similar to what the publisher has worked on before. You could have the most awesome superhero comic book for kids ever, but it would still get laughed out of the office at Avatar Press. “Umm, you do know we do porn, right?”* Pick your publishers carefully!
*More precisely, porn and/or extremely mature content, but the distinction would probably not matter much to most children’s authors.
8. Publishers tend to prefer particular kinds of stories but hate ripoffs. The authors that get published build on what the publishers already have. If Scholastic wanted another Harry Potter, it already has J.K. Rowling on speed-dial. To get published, you need to convince several professionals that your submission fits their style but adds something to their collection. In contrast, “this is a second-rate knockoff of our biggest work” is a sure-fire rejection.
Please read this article’s sequel, Another Eight Facts About Writing That Surprise Prospective Novelists, here!
Did this article help? Submit us to Stumble!
Oh, I should probably add that a lot of these don’t really apply to comic book writing. I’ll do a comic book version of this article later, but until then, here are a few quick thoughts on applying this to comic books.
“You will get paid much, much worse than you can imagine.” Comic book writers earn more than novelists.
“Most novelists do not get their first novels published.” I imagine that’s true for comic book writers but that’s just a hunch.
“Novel writing is freakishly competitive.” Major publishers in both industries reject more than 99% of unsolicited submissions. But arguably I think it’s easier for an excellent comic book submission to stand out of the crowd because it’s so much easier to identify artistic excellence at a glance.
“Even after you’ve finished your novel manuscript, it will take you years before the book is actually on shelves.” I think the turnaround for comic books is considerably faster. Talk to your publisher, of course, but I’m guessing that the evaluation time would take something like 2 months instead of 3-6 months for novels. Artistic quality can be evaluated at a glance. Evaluating writing takes more time, and novels obviously have a lot more writing than comic books do.
“Almost all novel sales are made through brick-and-mortar stores and A-list websites like Amazon.” True for comic books as well.
“When your novel gets published, you will have virtually no control over what the cover looks like.” Definitely NOT true for comic books. In fact, some publishers (like Image) require you to include a draft of the cover as part of the submission process.
“The most important question controlling whether a book will get published is whether it will sell well, and whether the book is stylistically similar to what the publisher has worked on before.” True for comic books as well. However, the bar for selling well is a bit lower for comic books than novels. For example, in November 2009, Dark Horse had four issues crack 20,000 sales and thirteen break 10,000. Image had three and seven, respectively. If you could guarantee ten thousand sales per issue, you’d probably be a standout rookie at any medium or small publisher. In contrast, a novel publisher usually needs to sell between five and ten thousand copies just to break even, so selling ten thousand novels will probably get you a bit less of a “wow!” than a “you’re actually going to turn a profit next time, right?” (It’s not quite THAT brutal, because editors know how hard it is for a beginning author to build up an audience from day one, but the industry is under so much financial duress that it can’t be very patient).
[...] Hero Nation burst your bubble with Eight Facts About Writing That Surprise Young Novelists, starting with that fact that most authors make less than minimum wage, when all is said and [...]
[...] Hero Nation burst your bubble with Eight Facts About Writing That Surprise Young Novelists, starting with that fact that most authors make less than minimum wage, when all is said and [...]
[...] Superhero Nation: how to write superhero novels and comic books » Eight Facts About Writing That Su…: [...]
Right, here is the plot summary of my novel. Please take it into account that this is a very rough draft. But don’t be afraid to tell me what you think. The story is something of a superhero-arthurian-semi religious mix.
A young man, the main villian, hires a group of hitmen to kill a teenager (the main character) and refuses to reveal the reasons why to the hitmen, just warning them that it won’t be easy. The hitmen attempt to do so, but fail to kill the main character, Adam, who either kills them or beats them up, not decided. However, Adam’s friend is seemingly killed in the crossfire and Adam goes into hiding with his talking, metal dog Sidney (his parents having gone missing an undecided amount of time before the novel. He later is rescued from a group of people trying to kill him by the villian (though he doesn’t know that he’s bad at the time) and his friend who reveals that she has regeneration powers. The villian soon enough after tries to kill him, revealing that he is a necromancer, a person who gains the abilities of a person by killing and performing a ritual on that person and that Adams parents were both killed by the villians father. Adam escapes and the rest of the book is about Adam’s struggle to defeat the villian along with the help of several other superpowered people that he befriends throughout the story.
Any questions that you have I’ll answer. I appreciate that I have left some obvious gaps in the plot but, as i said, this is a rough draft. Any thoughts or views on this story are welcome.
I thought this was okay. I have some suggestions.
1. I’d highly recommend focusing this more on the main character and any other major characters rather than minor ones. If a character IS major, you need to show that. For example, why mention the dog? Does he do anything important? Is his relationship with Adam important? If so, show that. If not, I’d recommend taking the talking metal dog out of a super-brief summary like this because he is a distraction from the star.
2. Speaking of making this a bit more focused on the main character, I’d recommend starting with the hero surviving an assassination, which is probably the inciting event.
3. This is probably going to sound strange, but what’s the villain’s ultimate goal? (He isn’t just amassing superpowers for the hell of it, is he?) I suspect that giving him a concrete goal will raise the stakes.
4. After the hero escapes from the villain, what’s his incentive to try hunting down the villain rather than walk away from the plot? Anything sturdier than revenge?
5. On the topic of revenge, I think it’s slightly corny that his parents got killed by the villain’s necromantic father. One alternative that strikes me as more interesting would be to have the hero‘s parents be the evil necromancers. This would give the villain a somewhat more justifiable reason to want revenge (because his parents died in the fight, too?) I think that’d make him a bit more three-dimensional.
6. What are the character’s personalities like? Except for some of their capabilities/superpowers, we don’t really know anything about what the hero is like, or his lady friend, or his dog. And the villain sounds kind of one-dimensionally evil. He’s trying to kill people and drain their powers for apparently no other reason than that superpowers are pretty sweet. (Agreed). Now, Heroes made that quite compelling with Sylar the power-sucking serial killer, but 1) for almost all of the first season, it looked like he had a grand plan to nuke New York and 2) he had a hell of a lot of style and personality.
7. Are there any relationships worth mentioning in the story? IE: between the protagonist and his dog? (Umm, I should probably clarify that relationships do not have to be romantic to move the story). What about between the hero and his lady friend?
Right. to B. Mac “I thought this was okay. I have some suggestions.”
1. I originally planned for Sidney (the dog) to be a major character in the story but as time went on I gradually relegated him to a minor one. I appreciate that he perhaps isn’t right for the story but I’m reluctant to completely cut him out of the story. He was to have been made by Adam’s parents to protect Adam should anything happen to them. (Adam’s mother being a sorceress (sounds better than witch) and his father having the ability to give life to inanimate objects.)
2. I get were you’re coming from but I liked the idea of beginning with an introduction involving the villian and the hitmen with Chapter One involving the hit.
3. The villian’s plans are to absorb enough powers until he’s capable of overthrowing the Grand Council, the twelve most powerful people with abilities in the world and then to rule the world. And to get revenge. Although, at the end of the novel it’s discovered that he was really being manipulated by two minor characters who were previously thought to be his henchmen.
4. Well, revenge is a strong motive but there are several others. His friend who gets shot, is later brainwashed into despising Adam, believing that he fled and left her to die. Of course she’s not aware that the villian had ordered the hit. And for a couple of chapters, Adam does flee until he realises that eventually he won’t be able to run anymore and that his conscience won’t allow him to let the villian continue to murder people and absorb their abilities.
5. I’ve actually been thinking about that but I don’t think I’ll go with it for it would mess up with most main stroyline. And since I’ve planned for them to have been King Arthur and Guinevere it would destroy my plot. Although I’ve thought about making Adam’s parents having killed the villians father, so he then swears revenge and enlists the help of the aforesaid supervillians, one who will have the ability to control shadows, making them sharp, solid or whatever, and the other will be able to control minds.
6. Personality is going to take a while. I’ll write up the cast of characters and their personalities in a bit.
7. Again, i’ll write up a character summary. The main romantic aspect of the novel is between Adam and his friend (Grace) whom he planned to ask out the day of the attack. His relationship with his dog is strained as Sidney is generally incompetant, defensive and annoyingly sarcastic but very loyal.