Write a Fiction Book in 12 Steps

Posted under Uncategorized by admin

Writing your first fiction book will give you above all a sense of accomplishment. Not a large percentage of people in the world publish a book. Fewer still publish a good one. I hope this helps you publish a good one resulting in tremendous sales and offers of dinner from the President. That is, if you’d WANT to eat with the president…

12 Steps to Writing your Fiction Book:

1. Read something about the number of hours and the dedication it takes you to write a book. Do you have the hours needed to write 80,000 words? For me, the editing is the part that takes the longest. It drags on. I just can’t get excited everyday about reading the same story again and again. Editing is probably going to be the longest process for you unless you pay someone to edit it for you.

Is there a market for your book? Who would read it? How many people are there in the USA or whatever country you’re in that would read it? Any parallel markets - Canada? Europe? Would it do well translated into Chinese? I don’t write a book unless I think there must be 10 million people in the world that would want to read it. Not that 10 mm ever WOULD read it, but that’s my benchmark I use. I wouldn’t write a book about sugar ant pain perception and it’s effect on the global economy for instance.

2. Choose a subject you are very passionate about.

3. Write down a very short description of what the book is about - the main idea - the WHY that motivated you to write the book.

4. Think about a story… think about the general outline of the story. Where do you want to start? What content is in the middle? What is at the end?

5. Outline the story. I make a regular outline first and then I make a timeline. A timeline is a long squiggly line I write on a paper turned to landscape orientation. I start at the bottom left,and moving to right go to the end of the paper, then curve around to the left at the end of the page and then back to the right. The end-product is a squiggly that has 3 or 4 curves to it and lots of space to write the main points as time goes on in the book.

6. Write the story. I write the whole story out from the beginning. It flows better that way. Some people like to create an outline of the book and then go about writing each part like filling in the blanks. Try both ways. For some books the story may come to you in a nice ready to write format. For others maybe you’ll need to outline and fill in the blanks.

7. Copy paste into a word document and check the tools / word count feature. See how many words to your story now. Typically 80,000 - 120,000 is good for a fiction novel as a finished product. You may only have 30,000 words written initially - but this check will give you an indication how far there is to go. Each page of a regular sized fiction paperback has about 300 words so divide total word count by 300 to get an estimate for the number of pages in your book.

8. First edit. Arrange paragraphs to fit. Fill in the story so it makes sense from one paragraph to the next and from one chapter to the next. Try to get the flow of the story correct. Don’t worry about punctuation and grammar mistakes if you can ignore them. If you can’t, fix them now. I can’t ignore them so I edit the entire story for spelling, grammar and punctuation during this edit. This edit is a bear, as it might take weeks if you don’t do it full-time.

9. Second edit. As you read through the story this time try to read through it as a reader might that has no idea who your characters are or where the places are that you’re describing. If you write about characters that are actual people you know you probably haven’t described them well enough for readers to picture in their mind. A good one paragraph description for minor characters and more for main characters is prescribed.

Add the details of the story. The tiny details that make the story unique and special. Add a sentence behind spoken lines of dialogue to explain more about what is behind the words being spoken.

Researching the details is important. You can likely have one or two mistakes of accuracy about a place or something during your story and you won’t have too many problems. If your story has more than a handful you’ll likely have readers and reviewers talking about the inaccuracies of the story rather than what a great story it was.

10. 3rd (final?) edit. For me this is the final edit. I go through and read the whole story. I’m looking at things like:

Flow of the story - does it flow well? Does it drag in some places? Is there too much information about any one topic? Not enough about another area?

Characters - are they all easily pictured in my mind just from having read their description?

Scenes - are they easily pictured? Are they accurate?

Excitement level - is the story exciting and plays with the reader’s emotions?

11. If you haven’t already - research publishers for your book. Target publishers of books that are in the same niche as the topic of your book and you’ll cut out a lot of wasted effort. Write authors and ask for recommendations of agents. Big publishing houses only deal with agents. If you don’t have one you don’t get in. There are bad agents and worse agents is the general feelign about agents in the industry, at least from an author’s perspective.

12. If you’re a new author, don’t rely on your publisher to market your book. Do everything possible to get the book in front of as many eyeballs and possible buyers as you can. As you do that, collect their email addresses (opt-in) if possible because many buyers of your books will buy other books you write too. Multiple sales to the same people are the easiest sales.

Hope that helped. This was the process I used to write my first couple fiction books. If you haven’t read the free sample chapters for “LOS Tots Network: Secret crimes? Secret retribution” go get it, it’s free after all.