This book is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Copyright © Ian Hall. Hallanish Publishing. Smashwords Edition.
Published by Ian Hall at Smashwords
ISBN: 978-1-4659-3109-2
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“Writer’s Help”; Also available by Ian Hall on eBooks;
“How To Write Your Own Zombie Novel.”
How to write an e-Book e-Novel e-Short
(Traditional Publishing versus Electronic)
By Ian Hall
List of Contents;
PART ONE: The Traditional Novel versus The e-short.
Firstly, Let’s Look At The Traditional Novel.
Anyone Can Write a Book.
National Novel Writing Month; NaNoWriMo.
The Actual Writing. The Over-Writing Bug.
The Editing; Re-Writes. The Editing; Line By Line.
Agents. Publishers. The Cold Hard Cash.
Your ‘Hold’ On The book: your rights. Summary.
Now, Let’s Look At The e-Short.
Short Sizes. The Actual Writing. The Over-Writing Bug.
The Editing; Re-Writes. The Editing; Line By Line.
Agents. Publishers. The Cold Hard Cash.
Your ‘Hold’ On The book: your rights.
The Customer’s Search. Summary.
PART TWO: How To Get Your e-Short Online.
The Essentials. A Formatted Manuscript.
To Look Professional is Mucho Importante.
A Cover. The Upload Process.
What Happens When You Open an Account.
What Happens When You Up-Load an e-Book (e-Short)
Summary.
PART THREE: The After Works.
Friends and Family. The Website.
Blogs Facebook and Social Media.
The Others in The Stack.
PART ONE; The Traditional Novel versus The e-short.
Firstly, Let’s Look At The Traditional Novel.
Anyone Can Write a Book.
Anyone can write a book.
Anyone can write 50 words per day, (three/four/five lines of the stuff you’re reading now!).
The ‘accepted’ length of a novel is 40,000 - 80,000 words. It’s a kind-of arbitrary range that most publishers go by for a new writer. Most will definitely NOT publish more than 120,000 words.
Let’s assume that anything we write will be edited, so we’ll aim for the higher figure, and let ourselves be chopped down a bit.
(Remember that Stephen King’s editor chopped 50,000 words from his original manuscript of “The Stand”. None of us are safe, even the famous ones.)
On 80,000, if you write 50 words per day, that’s 1600 days, or just short of 4 ½ years.
The average writer puts 500 words per day on paper. Average.
So; if you write 500 words per day, that’s just 160 days to finish the book.
I can write 2000 words per day in my spare time. That makes it 40 days.
Wow. When you see the figures above, it becomes almost possible…
National Novel Writing Month; NaNoWriMo.
Every year, millions of writers gather on the 31st October, after putting their Trick-or-Treated kids to bed, with their fingers poised over the keyboard, ready to write. As the clock strikes ‘Midnight’, NaNoWriMo begins; the annual race to finish a 50,000 word novel in a month.
There are NaNoWriMo competitions every year, the NaNoWriMo enthusiasts blog their progress; it’s a huge writing club, world-wide. They chart their figures as the month rolls on, and either breathe a sigh of relief, or panic as December closes in.
Many thousands do it. Many do it every year. Then put writing behind them, their task done.
Fine. Yu can try it if you like.
I don’t do it.
I have enough of my own deadlines without adding an extra, abstract, irrelevant one.
However, with the calculations above, I’ve proven, like a mathematical genius, that anyone can physically write a novel.
But here’s where many dreams begin to fade.
With countless millions of manuscripts out there, (NaNoWriMo’s included) 99% are forgotten about right now, lying in old cupboards, or on old computer disks.
While 1% have actually made it into published actual paper print, they are on some bookshelf somewhere, waiting for just the right person to walk past, and be grabbed emotionally by the words on the spine. It’s not a great manifestation of subject to object, trust me.
(The great saying; “You can judge a book by its cover”, is not exactly the pitch most books get. Books in bookshops are judged by the spine. That’s all most people see.)
You might be starting to see the task your published book faces, amongst so much competition for space on the bookseller’s shelves, and the fact that there’s so many bookstores to browse through.
Even after being published, to be successful, your life begins a book-signing/promo-tour/shake hands mentality that you never foreseen when you typed your last word and went; “I’m finished honey!”
So let’s look at the writing process and see where the time and effort are applied.
The Actual Writing.
I’m assuming that if this is your first book that you’re not going to write it in a month. You might be the next Ernest Hemmingway, but usually, the motto is; ‘write in haste, write a lot of crap’. (That’s mine actually; I thought it kinda erudite)
You sit at the computer desk, ready to write.
You may have just the germ of an idea; nothing more.
You may have a complete plan, plot points and all.