A lament for the author

21 July 2016, Gavin Chait

‘I’ve got a book out,’ says me hopefully, my hands twisted on the keyboard.

Three years ago, I took a month off and set out to start and finish writing a novel. A science fiction novel set in Nigeria, no less.

The first month allowed me to knock out 60,000 words. It took the next 18 months to make time to expand and polish that core.

‘Nobody knows anything,’ said William Goldman in describing Hollywood’s ability to pick winners (and their investors’ regular ability to produce financial disasters).

I’ve wanted to write novels since before I was in my teens, but it always seemed overly intimidating. Swatting out a few short articles a week is one thing. Sitting down and committing to produce 100,000 words is quite another.

The not knowing is also about not knowing what’s involved in producing the thing, let alone whether it will be successful.

And the economics are fairly harsh. If you want to make, for example, R20 from each book, you’re going to have to sell tens of thousands every year before you can quit your day-job.

In exchange, you need to commit months of time unpaid in the insecure hope that what you produce is – at the very least – read.

Each day an estimated thousand to two thousand books are published, adding to the 31 million paperbacks or the 3.1 million ebooks already available on Amazon.com.

Maybe you’ve heard of the self-publishing phenomenon, and of the miraculous stories of people like Hugh Howey who self-published his Wool and Sand series and became a best-seller, or Mark Dawson’s series about an assassin which earns him $450,000 a year?

Sadly, out of the well over half a million new novels published every year, very few are going to make that sort of money. For most writers, scribbling in any spare time they can manage, they are unlikely to experience that kind of success.

There are numerous lightning strikes you need to navigate, many lottery tickets which need to be won in sequence before the final lottery of which ‘nobody knows anything’: why does one book become a best-seller but another, similar book, goes read only by close friends and relatives of the author?

You can throw runes and try divining their meaning; is it price? Is it the cover? How about the day of week or time of day when it is launched? Summer or winter?

George RR Martin published his first novel in 1983, but it wasn’t till 1996 that he released ‘A Game of Thrones’, and it wasn’t till the fourth in that series – 2005’s ‘A Feast for Crows’ – that he began to achieve success. The HBO ‘Game of Thrones’ adaptation of his novels has made him world famous.

At the other end is Andy Weir who published his first novel, ‘The Martian’, in 2011, achieved runaway success immediately, and saw it turned into a madly successful movie in 2015.

Writers can achieve success instantly, languish in obscurity and then achieve success, or languish in obscurity indefinitely.

Figuring out what and who will connect is, well, you know already.

Weirdly, the same is true of newspaper columns I’ve written. I’ve had relatively obscure topics explode my inbox, and others where I thought it would result in some controversy result in the gentle sound of crickets at midnight.

Despite all the uncertainty - and the supposed destruction of mainstream publishers - 60% of all commercial sales still accrue to the big six publishers. In the US, that’s an astonishing $27 billion industry total a year.

I hope you’re interested in reading about how my hero escapes from an orbital prison, survives the subsequent fall and crash-landing in a small Nigerian village, and escapes the interest of a local warlord.

Continues me, ‘It’ll be out on Friday. Like a real book, with pages and everything. It’s called “Lament for the Fallen”, go buy it.’