Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Lessons learned: writing really long fiction

antipope.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 72 posts

Re: Lessons learned: writing really long fiction

#31

Post by SolaceQuantum »

buf wrote: post #11
deanalevitt wrote: post #9

Oddly enough, I believe there are a number of lessons that crossover between tech and writing. Having written a novel, and built companies, they both require similar skills in terms of planning, patience, MVP (first draft), rushing to market, incremental improvement, shipping regularly etc.

Can you talk about rushing to market in terms of writing a book? Wouldn't a well defined marketing campaign serve better?

IME it is important to actually complete a work in order to begin the editing, beta-reading, etc. process. Very rarely will one come across a writer who does not need to spend significant amounts of time polishing their piece- often more time to polish than the writing time. It is often more efficient to minimize time writing and maximise time editing. Marketing in fiction is often in the form of novel-swaps, blog-reviews, and book signings- in other words you need at least one piece published or in-the-publishing-process in order to hype your work.

Re: Lessons learned: writing really long fiction

#32

Post by dghf »

ilamont wrote: post #15

I really enjoyed reading this. I like Stross' nonfiction work and wasn't aware that he wrote sci-fi, which I will now have to check out. A couple things to add, as a writer and publisher: * There are all kinds of tools to help writers get going. I have twice used NaNoWriMo ( https://www.nanowrimo.org ) to force myself to get fiction and nonfiction ideas from outline to rough draft. I also found the writing program Sc…

> I like Stross' nonfiction work and wasn't aware that he wrote sci-fi

I'm the reverse: I only know his sci-fi, and wasn't aware he wrote nonfiction. What would you recommend?

Re: Lessons learned: writing really long fiction

#33

Post by dvdkhlng »

jonathanstrange wrote: post #3

I'm writing German science fiction novels as a hobby that are around 700-800 norm pages each and learned the hard way that at least in the German publishing market there are virtually no program places for science fiction, very few agencies accept manuscripts in that genre at all, and publishers rarely accept novels larger than 400 norm pages from a first-time writer. I'm currently sitting on 8 manuscripts - two of t…

Hi, I /read/ science fiction as a hobby, mostly english originals although I'm native german speaker. I'd love to get german science fiction, however, as I'm only buying DRM-free (or at most watermarked) ebooks, I'm currently relying on humblebundle.com and storybundle.com and direct-buying from various smaller publishers. This sort of rules out non-english books.

As there is no humblebundle and storybundle for german books (yet), have you thought about releasing your stuff via crowd funding? Just use a crowd-funding platform and "demand" some (arbitrary) amount of money total before you openly release something on the web. I like this "payment" strategy because it does not depend on DRM.

Re: Lessons learned: writing really long fiction

#34

Post by Cthulhu_ »

restalis wrote: post #14
jonathanstrange wrote: post #3

I'm writing German science fiction novels as a hobby that are around 700-800 norm pages each and learned the hard way that at least in the German publishing market there are virtually no program places for science fiction, very few agencies accept manuscripts in that genre at all, and publishers rarely accept novels larger than 400 norm pages from a first-time writer. I'm currently sitting on 8 manuscripts - two of t…

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…

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.

Re: Lessons learned: writing really long fiction

#35

Post by akuji1993 »

stewbrew wrote: post #8
akuji1993 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a german, I think the biggest market in fiction by far is the fantasy market. And there are also a lot of German authors included in that market that don't get translated but are rather picked from local. But I agree with the rest of your post, if you want to live by writing fiction, good luck, because it's going to be the steepest of mountains to climb.

I'd say crime, thrillers and such. There are many German writing authors.

Hm, you might be right yeah.. I forgot about the slightly older, middle aged demographic. We surely love our crime series and books.

Re: Lessons learned: writing really long fiction

#36

Post by akuji1993 »

jonathanstrange wrote: post #17
akuji1993 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, have you ever thought about writing your stuff in Markdown? I've made pretty good experiences with it regarding converting to epub, mobi and pdf. I'm not sure of norm page formatting though, so that might be a good reason to use LaTex instead.

I'm writing with Papyrus Autor [1], which is pretty expensive proprietary software that, at least for the German language, has many advantages over other writing programs available. Especially the Duden spell-checking integration is much better than in any other software. IMHO, it's worth the money for that alone. If it weren't for this software, I'd definitely use Markdown and Emacs. [1] https://www.papyrus.de/

Thanks for the link, I'll definitely try it out :) I'm still figuring out what works best for me, since I've written a lot of fan fiction / rpg's with other people together but have yet to write a bigger piece of fiction by myself (working on a big fantasy project right now). So I might take Papyrus up down the line when I feel the need for it.

Re: Lessons learned: writing really long fiction

#37

Post by pasabagi »

jonathanstrange wrote: post #23
barry-cotter wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you typesetting them if it’s a hobby? Why not just write? I commend you for your dedication to your craft but I presume some readers would please you so have you considered self-publishing, writing short stories or serial publishing, like Scott Alexander did for Unsong with http://unsongbook.com/ or Wildbow did with Worm? https://parahumans.wordpress.com

> Why are you typesetting them if it’s a hobby? Why not just write? Long answer: Good question. I typeset the print version of the one book I've self-published in LaTeX, because I love books and didn't want to contribute to the abysmal typesetting of KDP and bulk self-publishers. Converting to LaTeX is not that hard, the problem is that unless you write everything in Markdown or Orgmode in the first place, you'll you…

I can't really see Amazon as anything but a boon for obscure writers, to be honest. I don't like them as a company, but as publishers, they beat traditional houses on every scale. Getting published via traditional means essentially works through networking, luck, and a bit of skill - and the amount of support the book receives is also predicated mostly on the first two. Amazon, on the other hand, offers great discoverability, especially if you write something people really like.

A lot of great writers had trouble getting published using the traditional system. Nietzsche, or HP Lovecraft, or Marechera, for instance. The traditional publishing industry had a purpose - to turn manuscripts into print, with a side of helping people discover good books. They're now irrelevant for printing, and they were always terrible at the discovery thing.

Re: Lessons learned: writing really long fiction

#38

Post by sharedfrog »

jonathanstrange wrote: post #23
barry-cotter wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you typesetting them if it’s a hobby? Why not just write? I commend you for your dedication to your craft but I presume some readers would please you so have you considered self-publishing, writing short stories or serial publishing, like Scott Alexander did for Unsong with http://unsongbook.com/ or Wildbow did with Worm? https://parahumans.wordpress.com

> Why are you typesetting them if it’s a hobby? Why not just write? Long answer: Good question. I typeset the print version of the one book I've self-published in LaTeX, because I love books and didn't want to contribute to the abysmal typesetting of KDP and bulk self-publishers. Converting to LaTeX is not that hard, the problem is that unless you write everything in Markdown or Orgmode in the first place, you'll you…

In my experience, converting to LaTex is hard, but writing in LaTex from the start is trivial. That's how I write my novels, and I don't need more than the occasional \emph{}, \ldots and \chapter{}, and remembering to use `` when opening dialogue. Could you do that from Papyrus Autor?

The printed book you have self-published but without KDP or bulk self-publishers, can I ask how you went about it? Did you take your LaTex / pdf file to a book printer, use some other self-publishing service...?

Re: Lessons learned: writing really long fiction

#39

Post by shubb »

jonathanstrange wrote: post #3

I'm writing German science fiction novels as a hobby that are around 700-800 norm pages each and learned the hard way that at least in the German publishing market there are virtually no program places for science fiction, very few agencies accept manuscripts in that genre at all, and publishers rarely accept novels larger than 400 norm pages from a first-time writer. I'm currently sitting on 8 manuscripts - two of t…

'Webnovels' seem to be a growing thing.

Bigger in asia than they are here, these are very long stories published in serial on novel publishing platforms like webnovel.com (english language).

Sometimes the publishing platforms lock new chapters to paid users only and share out the proceeds spotify style. Sometimes authors use patreon with early access to chapters as a reward.

Maybe look into something like this and, if it doesn't exist in Germany, be happy and use your own writings to seed a platform like that?

Re: Lessons learned: writing really long fiction

#40

Post by mindcrime »

I'm actually starting to kinda dislike long series in sci-fi and fantasy, because the time commitment to finish them is just so high. I still have one more book to read in the Wheel of Time series, and after that I'm really reluctant to start another long fantasy series anytime soon. But it seems like every fantasy novel I pick up off the shelf says "Book x of the $FOO series..." Uuuggh. I'd like to plead with fantasy and sci-fi authors to write more standalone novels that are very explicitly meant to not be part of a series.
Post reply on HN