The Joy of Self-Publishing. Mike MD Buchanan
possibly my favourite. Or maybe the reminiscences of the wartime fighter pilot with whom he had worked as a young man. The book will surely become another international bestseller for LPS publishing.
I recommend you spend time honestly working out your motivation(s) in writing books. Dogged persistence is one of the factors behind the success stories of many successful writers: read Joanna Trollope’s article (Appendix 7) if you have any doubts on the matter. What if she’d given up writing books after her tenth commercially unsuccessful book in 20 years? We should never have heard of her. Are you prepared to be that persistent? Can you afford to be? What are you prepared to sacrifice?
If your prime motivation is to write commercially successful books you might like to read Chapter 3. If you’re like me, you might prefer instead to focus on writing about what you’re interested in – even if you’re not very knowledgeable about the topic of the proposed book at the outset – and hope for commercial success too. If you’re intellectually curious the journey of discovery will in itself prove rewarding, regardless of whether or not the book sells well.
Of course you can combine the motivation of selling lots of books with the motivation of writing about something you’re interested in. I did exactly that when selecting the topic for this book. I knew more and more writers were self-publishing, but many books on the topic were hopelessly out-of-date, particularly with respect to book production options, and some of the books were downright poor. I also suspected that many writers were using vanity publishers because they simply weren’t aware that true self-publishing had become a highly viable option.
I also wanted to better understand a number of aspects of self-publishing that I hadn’t explored before, such as ebooks. I thought I could present some perspectives on writing with the objective of informing and inspiring the reader, not of terrifying him – all served up with a dash of humour that you’d struggle to find in the existing books on the subject of self-publishing.
The Marriage Delusion was the result of my lengthy exploration to better understand my unhappiness in my two marriages. As a twice divorced third generation divorcee I knew a thing or two about marriage and unhappiness. I read numerous books in the ‘how to improve your marriage’ genre but none explained my own unhappy experiences of marriage.
After reading many books on relationships, psychology, religion and more besides I finally understood the factors that were making me unhappy. But what I hadn’t anticipated was the realisation that they were factors I shared with most married and divorced people. This led me to write the book which has received strong positive reviews from readers – both male and female – and testimonials from psychologists and bestselling writers Oliver James and Professor Alan Carr.
After his well-publicised marital difficulties I mailed a complimentary copy of The Marriage Delusion to Tiger Woods, who was then playing in the British Open golf tournament at St Andrews. The poor man looked like he could do with a copy.
We move on to the tricky area of taking advice as a writer and as a self-publisher. As a writer every piece of advice you take on board – including advice on grammar – will inevitably make you less distinctive, especially if you’re taking heed of the same advice as other writers, such as that in Stephen King’s On Writing. How on earth can you develop distinctiveness as a writer if your brain is full of rules dictating to you all the time?
Among my favourite quotations on advice are the following:
I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.
GK Chesterton 1874–1936 English essayist, novelist, and poet
I once complained to my father that I didn’t seem to be able to do things the same way other people did. Dad’s advice? ‘Margo, don’t be a sheep. People hate sheep. They eat sheep.’
Margo Kaufman American writer
My advice is to read books giving advice on the craft of writing, with a view to you supplying the art when you settle down to the task of writing your books. I have yet to embark on my first work of fiction, possibly because I’m not a big reader of fiction and I always have plans to write more non-fiction books. I read the four books in the Write Great Fiction series which gave me plenty of insights into the craft of writing fiction, but few about the art. And that is surely how it should be if you’re going to bring your own creative spark to writing fiction – or non-fiction, come to that.
If I ever write fiction I want my first or second books to be as good as my favourite work of fiction, Nineteen Eighty-Four, thereby winning the Man Booker Prize for Fiction. I do like to set the bar high when it comes to intellectual challenges. I read Nineteen Eighty-Four as a teenager, I read it in my thirties, and I read it two years ago at the age of 51. That was in 2009, in the 13th year of a dire left-wing administration then led by Gordon Brown and the dismal ‘Mad Hattie’ Harman. The book explained to me why so many people in the United Kingdom were so unhappy with the administration. The parallels between the book and the administration were uncanny.
We sometimes forget that ‘rules’ on writing, including grammar, are man-made and not handed down from on high. I tend to fully agree (rather than agree fully) with Raymond Chandler’s perspective on one matter in particular, which he related in a letter to his publisher:
Would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split.
letter to Edward Weeks, 18 January 1947
I greatly admire Raymond Chandler’s books. He wrote one of my favourite sentences in modern (post Twain) American literature:
It was a blonde, a blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window.
Farewell, My Lovely (1940)
I wish I’d written that. Along with many of the Mark Twain lines in Appendix 1.
Aspiring writers are often given the advice to ‘write about what you know’. I think the advice is terrible, especially when it comes from writers. The sentiment reflects the idea that people don’t have the necessary authority to write about subjects they’re not familiar with. I shudder to think how many authors have abandoned promising book projects in the light of such advice.
Most fiction – most good fiction, at least – wouldn’t pass the test. A number of genres wouldn’t exist, including science fiction and much of the fantasy genre. Does JK Rowling write about ‘what she knows’? No. 16 years after bashing out the first Harry Potter book on an old manual typewriter, she’s now worth over £600 million.
Much non-fiction, for that matter, isn’t written by writers about ‘what they know’. It’s created by writers seeking to understand complex subjects in the absence of satisfactory books; writers seeking to shed light on topics about which they – and hopefully their target readers – wish to learn more.
Because you’ve bought this book it’s likely that you’ve read books giving advice on writing. I’ve read a number of them myself, and I am often surprised at how prescriptive they are. The underlying premises of most of these books seem to be:
1.I’m a successful writer.
2.I’m presenting the principles behind my writing.
3.If you adopt these principles, you’ll be a successful writer too.
On the basis that nobody ever became a millionaire after reading books with titles such as How to Become a Millionaire, let’s challenge this model. Let’s start with Stephen King, possibly the world’s best-selling fiction writer, and his book On Writing, published in 2000. In June 1999 King was hit by a van while he was walking along the shoulder of a country road in Maine. Six operations were required to save his life and return him to a semblance of physical normality. When he returned to writing it was to write On Writing. 11 years after publication the book remains a bestseller in its genre, and with good reason. But you won’t be able