This week, we’re discussing the stages of being an author. In Monday’s video, we covered getting started. Today, we’re going to talk about momentum and voice, the second stage of being an author.
It’s strange to me that I don’t hear people talking more about the stages of being an author. Sometimes, people will discuss where they are in their author career in terms of the number of books they’ve written or the number of sales they’ve made. However, I think it’s very helpful to understand on a macro level where you are positioned. That’s going to tell you what sort of actions you need to take in order to make forward progress.
If the first stage is about getting your novel finished and understanding what your options are, the second stage is all about proving you can do it. I write in fantasy, and in fantasy, we write in series. We very rarely have standalone books. So, everything I’m going to be talking about in this blog will assume that you’re writing a series, but this does actually apply to standalone novelists as well, or even people who are writing non-fiction. So even if you don’t write your stories in series, that’s okay.
Just like in the first stage, the second stage is split up into two distinct phases. The first of these phases is learning to write a series, or learning the power of ‘do it again’. You’ve already written a novel, and you know you can do that. Whether it took you 14 years or it took you a month, it doesn’t matter. You know that you can complete a work.
After you’ve decided how it is that you want to approach this whole author thing, what path you want to be on, you have to do it again. There are the insanely rare exceptions who write one book and are done, but if you want to be an author, especially a full-time author, that’s not going to work. You have to write more. There’s a saying, “books sell books,” and very little is more true than that.
In this phase, you’re really looking to clarify your process. You’re looking for sustainable strategies that are going to allow you to write book after book after book. This isn’t a once and done thing. This is something that we will continue throughout our career. So, you want to figure out how you can best do that, and there are two major considerations.
If it takes you a really long time to write a book, you need to figure out how to shorten that time frame. If it takes you a really short amount of time to write a book, you have to figure out how to increase the quality of your writing. These are two different problems, and you’re probably not in the 14 years or one month camps, but somewhere in between. There’s this spectrum of how quickly you write versus how good your books are, and you want to find the right spot on that spectrum for you, the spot that’s sustainable in the long term.
That might take you a year, two years, three years. There’s no real set amount of time that you’re going to be in this phase. Really, it’s just a matter of how much work you put in, and how quickly you can hone in on what is a sustainable rate for you. During this time, you’re also going to be finding your voice. You’re going to be identifying the way you write and polishing that voice to make it distinct from everybody else in the market.
Then, the second phase of this stage is doing it again. In the first phase, you’ve written a series. It might be three books. It might be five books. It might be seven books. It might be ten books. It doesn’t matter. You’ve done it. You’ve written your series, and it’s out there in the world.
Well, guess what? The second phase is repeating that action. It’s taking those strategies that you’ve developed and putting them to work. This, believe it or not, is where most authors falter. They’ve already done the thing. They’ve written the first book, and then they’ve written the follow-up books, and they think to themselves, “Oh, I can do it.” They pull their foot off of the gas, and then all of a sudden, things start to fall apart.
We don’t want to do that. Instead, we want to build momentum. We want to lean into this phase by continuing to implement the strategies that we’ve learned, continuing to do the thing, which is writing. There’s really not much to this phase besides that. We just keep walking forward. We keep writing. We keep creating. We keep developing new ideas and implementing them in stories.
Again, there’s no time limit to this stage. You might be in this phase for years, and that’s okay. This is the point where you really hone your craft, where you really understand how you write, and you lean into it.
In this stage, there’s a huge temptation to get distracted by all sorts of shiny things. People will talk to you about advertising. People will talk to you about book deals. People will talk to you about social media presence. They’ll talk to you about all sorts of stuff that might supercharge your author career, but it’s all a trap.
What you really need to do in this second stage is focus on writing. Build your voice, build momentum, and keep going at it as long as you possibly can.
YouTube Video Link: https://youtu.be/QKiEtweMG5Q
Thanks for reading and watching.
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