Reader Rob leaves the following comment on this post:
I’ve made a lot of plans recently regarding moving into writing fiction. A lot of research, planning, templates, ideas, and studying other writers and types of fiction.
A few weeks back, I wrote about a short story challenge I’m already behind on writing for in 2024. However, thinking today about how I could write material for readers like Rob, I have to concede that 366 short stories in a year isn’t the best way, in terms of effort-to-ratio, of kickstarting a fiction writing career.
So what is?
I spoke to a mentor who has written hundreds of novels and sold millions of copies, and his advice was simple.
Write 20 Books, Then Worry About It
There are obviously caveats and personal things and maybes about it. For instance, he considered “Books” as either novels, short story collections and/or other similarly sized-and-priced works. From my experience writing under pennames, short stories and short story collections are great ways to have a lot of penny-ante income streams, but they are not equal to a novel.
He also said, and I do agree with this, that you must do this for each pen-name.
I would add the following to it; the books will get better as you go, but it’s better to have a defined niche, audience and plot-structure before you start. (More on this in a later section.)
I researched this and there are groups centred around a concept called “20 Books To 50k,” wherein the idea is that when you have twenty books written, you have enough books to create an income stream equivalent to $50,000 a year. We’ll talk about that in the next section because it’s important, but first I want to address something.
Looking into the 20Booksto50k communities, there’s a big focus on two markets: 1) Contemporary Romance niches and 2) Authors who seem to make a lot more money selling courses on publishing than they do as authors.
Now, writing romance is, and has always been, a very good way to make money as a fiction writer. It’s the biggest genre by a landslide, and the markets for it are voracious, never-ending, and provided you hit the beats they want, not overly particular on the craft. We’ll talk about craft in the Craft section of this article. For now though, understand that making money as a romance author is in many ways different to other genres.
For the second point, as a direct response marketer, I have no problem with people making money from information products. That’s the disclaimer. However, there are a lot of writers that make a living from not writing but telling people how to write.
Again, I’ve no particular issue with people who make money from teaching. But due diligence is required; especially when you read that proponents like Mark Dawson are alleged to be plagiarists whose sales figures come from buying their own books and gaming the system in various ways.
What I’d suggest here, and this goes well for a lot of theories, ideas and experiments you read online; if the concept is simple enough you can do it on your own, you rarely need to pay to have someone talk you through it.
So, in this case, twenty books leads to discoverability and enough books on sale that you can make a living. That’s an easy concept, we can test it, and we can write twenty books ourselves and see if it’s true or not.
Which is what I suggest you do.
P.S. Part Two will come tomorrow. I’m splitting this article up as it’s already at 2,000 words and I haven’t gotten to what I actually recommend doing. We’ll splice them together later in a Vault project. (Don’t worry… this’ll make sense after the weekend.)