PART I
"HOW IT ALL BEGAN FOR ME"
"HOW IT ALL BEGAN FOR ME"
My name is James P. Sumner. I'm a self-published, independent author, and I sell my books on Amazon. I've been doing this for almost two years. In that time, I have written and published four full-length novels, and one short story.
In this relatively short time, I have learned a helluva lot about the business of writing and self-publishing. Am I an expert? No. Not even close. Sorry. I'm far from a template on how to do either of those things. I am, however, just like you. I work full-time... I have a family to support... I wouldn't call writing a hobby, because I work really hard in every spare second I have to further my writing career, but it's not the thing I do for a living. Not yet, anyway. But my point is, very few independent authors make a living from writing. That's a fact. People can top up their monthly income with it, but they still need to work as well.
It's a hard business, and a competitive business. I have very little operating budget, for the simple reasons I've just stated. I started out, in July 2013, with maybe £30 a month to spend on this. To give you an idea of how uselessly insignificant that amount is, a highly-coveted, game-changing Bookbub promotion could quite easily set you back $1500... Yikes!
But I manage, and even though I'm in the early stages of my career, I'm doing alright for myself. Everything I know, I've found out as I went along. You can easily spend more time planning and promoting than you do writing, which is a vicious circle. There are people out there who can help you with that, and I'll touch on that later in the blog, but what I thought I could do is share with you my experiences, my techniques, my successes and my failures, in the hope that you might find it useful, save yourself some time (which could be better spend writing) and help you on your journey to writing superstardom!
So, let's start at the beginning: a little about me. I've always loved reading, and from a young age, I've always enjoyed writing. I dabbled with ideas as I progressed through my teens, and my early twenties, but lack of focus, patience, and a short attention span meant I never took it seriously and committed to it. It was always just something that sounded like a fun thing to do, but I never actually wanted to make the effort and do it.
Then I grew up... I met a beautiful woman and got married - a real fairy tale! And it kick-started my obsession with writing. It all started on my honeymoon, in May 2013. We went to Greece for two weeks, and (like you do) I stocked up my Kindle with a few books that took my fancy, and I sat by the pool, turning lobster-red, reading in the sun. The first book was "Siege" by Simon Kernick, which I'd had my eye on for months, and I really enjoyed it - it was fast-paced, edgy, set within a small timeframe... all in all, a damn good book.
The second book I read was the one that got me. The one that made me believe I could be a writer. It was "Lethal People" by John Locke. The book itself was alright - it's no literary classic, but it's a decent, short read that took me maybe four hours on the sun lounger.
Two things got me about the book. The first was that it was a quick and easy read - low on description, more dialogue-focused, and very fast-paced. I liked that. It was refreshing and I enjoyed the experience. The second thing was that I thought it could be better. Not in a critical way, but a practical way. I thought there were elements of the story, of the characters, that I would've done different. I'm not saying I'm a better writer or anything, I simply mean that if it was me, I would've done it differently. And that sparked this creative... explosion in my head. What if I DID do it differently? And then came the catalyst that finally made me pick up the pen... I looked up the author. John Locke was the first self-published, independent author to sell one million e-books on Amazon. In fact, there's only been a handful of people ever to do that. And he was the first.
So I lay there, burning happily away in the Greek heat, and I stared at my Kindle. I'd just read a book that inspired me to write my own, and the guy who wrote it published it himself, showing me that it was possible to get the book out there in the world without the need for a big publisher and an agent.
I could do that...
So I did.
Like I said before, I'd dabbled for years with different ideas, but never had the patient to structure them and turn them into a story. But I had in my mind the idea for a character that I'd created whilst sitting at my desk, at work, about six months prior. I had no idea what to do with that character, but I had a name, and a look, and the beginnings of a personality, so I used him. I toyed around with loads of different ideas, looked for inspiration in the Amazon charts, at what was selling well, and eventually settled on a genre and a theme.
Adrian Hell, the assassin, was born.
I have absolutely zero formal writing training. I don't know the "proper" way of writing a book, structuring it, planning it... I didn't know the standard format for layout, dialogue... I even struggled with basic grammar when I first started (unprepared for how difficult it is to write U.S. English when you're British). But I had the basis for my story, and I was determined to write it.
I started out by writing a basic description of every main character - height, eye colour, hairstyle etc, so I knew what they looked like. Next, I wrote down their personality, their mind-set, the way they think, so I knew who the characters were. Finally, I wrote a very brief history, maybe a two paragraphs, so I knew why they were the way they were. I figured, that way, I didn't need to make it up on the spot as I was writing and risk losing any consistency. That worked quite well for me, and it was fun literally creating people.
Then I looked at the story. I didn't (and still don't) have the mental capacity to detail line by line, chapter by chapter, everything that will be said and done, start to finish, in my book. At first, I put this down to a lack of discipline and experience, but as time went on, I realised that wasn't the reason. I found myself thinking like an artist. I'd never really had a creative outlet before, and I always used to look at those artists and sculptures who talked all fancy and pretentious and think they were idiots. But I'd become an artist myself. I was creative. I was telling stories to people, and that's an incredibly complex and artistic thing to do.
My Adrian Hell series is written in the first person, so it's the character who's telling the story. I love this style, because you feel like you ARE the character. But also, it fascinated me that I could actually get inside their head and tell the reader not only what they were thinking, but why they were thinking it. In standard thrillers, third person/past tense, it's hard for the storyteller to legitimately tell you why a character thinks the way they do. I was writing about a hitman, someone who killed people for money, for a living, and I wanted people to like him. That's a tough sell! But I figured, if you understood him, you might sympathise with him, which would lead to you rooting for him.
I found that I wrote very organically. I knew how my story started, and I knew how it ended. I also thought of a couple of big set-pieces throughout the story that would make for exciting reading. But everything else, I literally made up as I went along. I had no plan, no structure, nothing. I just started writing. I was thinking like Adrian would think. He walks into a bar... then what? Well, he'd definitely put some music on and order a beer - okay, let's have him do that. Now what? Well, I want him to have a bar fight... what could cause that? I thought of something and wrote it. The next day, what if he meets the guys who he had the bar fight with, and they turn out to be another character's bodyguards? That'd be funny... okay, we'll do that...
And so on...
And that's how the first Adrian Hell book come to fruition. I quite literally made it up as I went along. And it seemed to work pretty well. The first draft finished around 63,000 words, and I had a working title of "Heaven & Hell"... which eventually became "Paradise Burns" - that was the title I looked to publish. I read, and re-read, the book... over and over again until I hated the sight of it, making sure it was as close to perfect as my abilities at the time would allow. I increased the word count to 71,000 words, re-read it for at least the twentieth time, and then stopped.
That was it.
I'd written a book. I remember staring at the screen and letting that sink in for a moment. I'd written an ACTUAL book. Like the ones you see in shops, or on Amazon - like I read...! I mean, wow! And do you know what? That feeling never goes away. The overwhelming sense of achievement when you finish the first draft, or the final draft, of your book is beyond words (ironically!), and it helps you remember why you do it.
I started work on the next one straight away - the excitement was too much for me, and I'd already started planning it (as much as I DID plan things) as I was writing my first, so I could be sure to set the story up. So whilst I was scribbling away at the first draft of what would eventually end up as "Hunter's Games", I started looking for ways to publish my debut novel.
PART II is coming soon!
