• How much money does a book like Microadventures make? – Laurence
• Do you have any tips for improving my writing skilzzz? – Rosie
• Is it easy to get a book published? – Leo

Most people who ask ‘how do I get published?’ are asking the wrong question. I think there is a much more useful question to ask. 

Being a published author myself, I climbed into my Ferrari and roared off to eat Truffles at my favourite restaurant* and mull over this topic. (The fact that I actually cycled to my local greasy spoon caff for a baked potato might shatter one of your publishing dreams…)

Before asking ‘HOW do I get a book published?’ you should ask ‘WHY do I want to get a book published?’

I don’t think these are good reasons:

• To get rich! The average full-time writer earns only £5.73 per hour. Here’s a nice article about the conundrum.
  
• Dunno really, but it sounds cool! UK publishers release more than 20 new titles every hour. The competition is stiff.
• To get famous! If you’re looking to build an audience it is often easier and more effective to reverse-engineer a tribe through story-telling in other media, then write the book.

Here are some better reasons for wanting to publish a book.

• To solve a problem in people’s lives.
• To tell your story for the grandkids. (Skip this whole post and self-publish your book.)
• You’ve always wanted to write a book. (That was the end goal for me, at first. If involves a similar thought process as a musician deciding if she’s happy to simply have fun at the pub’s open mic nights or if she wants to hustle her way up to headlining Glastonbury. You need to consider your motivation, skill, and energy.)

Here are more questions for you to ask yourself. (I know these articles are supposed to be where I answer your questions!)

1. What would success look like to you?
2. Do you want to write a book or do you want to have written a book? (The old noun/verb conundrum.)
3. Do you really want to write a book or have you just been on a marvellous adventure and a book feels like ‘the thing to do’?
4. Do people often say ‘you should write a book!’?
5. Do they still say that after reading a few of your sample pages?
   
6. Do you have any background, talent, training, experience or knack for storytelling? (Before my first book I had zero training, but I had written four years of blogs and told my story to hundreds of audiences.)
7. Do you really, really want to write a book?

In terms of finance, time, loneliness and misery, writing a book is similar to someone coming to your house for dinner, loving it, and then suggesting that you go flip burgers for long hours and little pay or public approval for a year or more.

A lot of people who have done fabulous adventures send me their manuscripts. And… let me put this really politely… almost all of them are AWFUL! (Multiply this experience by a lot and you’ll get an idea of the vast slush piles of manuscripts and desperate cover letters covering publishers’ desks!)

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book?
It took me years to write, will you take a look?

(A generic cover letter or email is the number 1 route to an instant delete from busy people.)

Before you dive too deep into your writing dreams, send a couple of chapters of your work to some discerning, candid friends and ask for their honest opinions. Bear in mind that you’re asking for a sizeable chunk of your mate’s time: ask for help, yes, but don’t impose yourself to be helped. (On which note, please don’t ask me to read your manuscript unless I’m a good friend or owe you a favour. ? I feel churlish saying ‘no’ and I feel a clot saying ‘yes’ and then regretting it.)

Hopefully these cautionary paragraphs might have weeded out quite a lot of people who realise that publishing a book is not for them after all. But if you are now clearer about WHY you want to be published then the labyrinth of HOW, below, will become simpler to navigate.

How to get published. Your questions answered.

Is it easy to get a book published? Yes! All you have to do first is write an amazing book. Do that, then we’ll talk… (Or just skip this whole article, self-publish it today, and take your place in a store selling millions of books in every imaginable niche.)

How much money does a book like Microadventures make? I don’t really know, is the truthful answer! It’s not as easy as you’d imagine to calculate how many books you have sold, plus I am hopeless at reading royalty statements or paying the slightest jot of attention to money so long as I’ve got some in my pocket and there’s food on the table. But lest that sounds evasive, I received an advance of £16,000 for the book (I think!). That means I got £4000 on signing the contract, £4000 on submitting the manuscript, £4000 on publication, and £4000 at some other point which I can’t remember!

If that sounds like a lot of money (and I spanked a few grand of it on my writing shed, so I did feel pretty fancy) remember that it took me over a year to write and involved me travelling thousands of miles on trains, cars and ferries, buying lots of camping and photography equipment etc. Be aware also that an advance is no more than a loan: I would not earn another penny from the book until I had earned out my advance from sales. Luckily the book sold well and I was soon earning royalties. I have zero idea how many copies it sold in the first few years (I’ve asked my publisher and agent for numbers but haven’t had an answer), but I was earning royalties fairly swiftly. Most books never manage that.

After that, for as long as the book remains in print, I’ll receive 10% of sales (minus the 15% cut my agent gets for negotiating the deal. More on agents later. The longer a book remains in print the more massive the agent’s slice feels to me!)

[A quick aside here: I think these figures are broadly standard. Be very aware when signing with an agent or a publisher that they know far more about contracts than you do. I’ve been stung by a publisher for just 2.5% of a book for the dumb reason that I was so excited to get published and didn’t care about money and thought contracts were too boring to read (I still stand by that final point). I’ve also been stung by an agent’s commission which riled me as unfair for years. But it was, of course, too late by then. Seek out help from savvy people before signing contracts!]

Sales of the book are inevitably declining over time (though only a little bit, plus they get a boost every time I write a new book – a strong reason for doing new books is to increase sales of my old books), but I still get about £5000 a year from Microadventures six years after publishing it. The longer the book stays relevant, the greater the overall earning from the book will be. Potentially I will earn something from the book every year for the rest of my life, plus for 70 years after my death. Books are very much a long tail, slow burn form of passive income.

And lest you doubt my inability to understand the maths of books, here’s a section of a recent royalty statement. It makes very little sense to me!

Rosie’s question about improving her writing skilzzz comes down to two simple (but not quick) suggestions: read a lot and write a lot.

The internet is full of quick lists of 10 Tips To Be A More Better Writer, and of course there is a lot to learn about writing well. I wish that I had studied literature for years rather than coots. But when you dive into Google rabbit holes such as this, it’s important to appreciate that there are no shortcuts or lifehacks to writing good books. 

The time you spend scrolling through endless advice articles might be better spent by reading good books and writing –lots and often– in a public place where people can respond and feedback on what you have to say.

(Go on: open up Medium and share some words with the world today. Do it again next week… 2000 words every week and after a year you’ll have finished the first draft of a book.)

The temptation to spend months pootling through happy ‘research’ about pens and writers’ tools without achieving very much is the same one that sees folk scrolling endlessly through social media posts about getting fit or losing weight.

We all know how to lose weight and get fit: eat better; move more. Sadly, months and months of broccoli and burpees are hard work, and therefore we don’t bother, despite how much we yearn for the six pack or published book.

I know that it is more fun and easy to read books on ‘how to be a writer’ than it is to dust off a pad of paper, grab a biro, and write 100,000 words. But if you really want some practical advice on the writing craft, I will limit myself to recommending just two books:

1. A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King
2. Bird by Bird: Instructions on Writing and Life which is worth the price merely for the advice on your inevitable ‘shitty first draft‘ and the permission that gives you to begin.
   (And perhaps sneak in a dip into the archives of 70 glorious years of author interviews by the Paris Review.)

If all that does not teach you enough to begin (pro tip: it does) then there’s a world of podcasts to help you find your writer’s muse as well: How Writers Write, Monocle 24: Meet the Writers, Writer’s Routine, In Writing with Hattie Crissell, The Writer Files, The Creative Penn Podcast, and many more. Loads more, in fact.

But trust me on the ‘read more, write more’ approach to improving as a writer, even though it is not a quick fix.

The short answer (he says, one thousand words into this post) is to spend a few days reading The Creative Penn website.  Joanna answers all the questions around “How can I get my book published?” with more expertise, enthusiasm and thoroughness than I can ever muster!

Once you’ve done that, the next level up in the pyramid of complexity is to think whether you want traditional publication via a literary agent (or without), publication with a massive publisher or a tiny indy, to self publish on Amazon, pay for a vanity publisher, or crowdfund it (perhaps with Unbound)?

I’ll leave those decisions up to you! There are pros and cons of all of them (except the vanity publisher option which is totally unnecessary these days).

Most large publishers will only deal with you via an agent. (Some niche publishers, like travel/adventure publishers Summersdale or Vertebrate, do accept direct submissions.) So finding an agent is the first gatekeeper standing in your way. There are masses of online articles about finding an agent, but this brief video of Dos and Don’ts is handy. And working through a copy of the Writers and Artists Yearbook is essential.

Alas, if you are not blessed with nepotistic connections or literary genius, then there is no simple shortcut to finding an agent.

If you are writing a fiction book, the agent will want to read a polished finished copy of your sample chapters and cover letter has piqued their interest. For non-fiction books they will require a substantial written proposal for the book.

In summary, here is an excellent publishing guide for writers by Penguin, and Waterstones cover the worlds of agents, publishers, self-publishing, vanity publishing, blogging, and do’s and don’ts for budding authors here.

Back then I wrote some thoughts about my experiences of full-on rejection from publishers and the stepping-stones towards becoming a career writer via self-publishing rather than giving up.

Nowadays I mostly choose to self-publish my books even though I do have the option of using a traditional publisher.

Why do I self-publish more these days? Speed of process, control of process, freedom of choice, and better royalties (60% vs 10% minus agent’s commission).

The downside: you need to hire your own editor, cover designer, and audiobook recording sessions. You need to be your own publicist and marketeer. (I learned a lot about getting your book up the Amazon charts once I realised that publishers don’t do any of that stuff for non-A-List authors like me.) But, for me, none of those are downsides.

It can be a lonely world being a writer, and even more so if you don’t have the support of an agent and publisher. But there are plenty of communities to help you write more and write better, as well as things to help you knuckle down to work like Cave Days and the Freedom app.

Above all, I love that self publishing means that I can indulge my stupid ideas that traditional publishers are likely to roll their eyes at:

• I had an idea to write a blog post a week, put it out as a newsletter, and then at the end of the year turn all those articles into a book and sell it to the audience who had already read the articles every week! ? Done.
• Writing books is really hard; there are so many pages to fill… I had an idea to sell blank pages instead! ? Done.

So long as you can bear getting into bed with the Amazon beast, self-publishing is an amazingly good system for authors at all stages of their careers.

In conclusion:

• Ask WHY you want to publish a book.
  
• Mull over the different options of HOW to publish a book.
  

And then comes the important part:

• Re-read the 20 books you’d most like to aspire towards in your own writing.
• Write, write, write.

Good luck!