How I Survived My First Year of Fiction Writing: Really Simple Writing & Publishing

By Dr. Robert C. Worstell

Writing Fiction isn't very hard - if you throw out 95% of what you've been taught is true.

Academics and those who earn their income marketing how-to books and courses, as well as freelance editors, proofreaders, and cover designers all have a vested interest in making it seem that writing and publishing is very difficult. 

It's just not true at all.

Yes, there is a lot of hard work to it. And it's not something you can learn overnight. And you have to keep studying and practicing your craft to get any good at it - just as musicians and athletes practice daily.

But you can publish your first book on Amazon in a half hour from now. It's that simple. (Of course you can use a pen name to avoid being embarassed later.)

The point is that writing and publishing is simple, and inexpensive.

Here's the secret: Write short and narrow, publish long and wide.

Write short stories for a specific sub-genre you like to read.

Publish long in advance (pre-schedule) and wide to every possible outlet - including free ones like Wattpad and Medium.

Including setting up all the accounts, you can publish everywhere on the globe in an afternoon. For no cost, except your time.

This book is a compilation of the blog posts I wrote and published while I was busy doing a test of everything I'd rounded up and studied about writing and publishing fiction.

And it's a very raw, passionate description of exactly what I found works - as I was testing it. 

So it's more an adventure that starts from having no published fiction and ends up with have well over a hundred books published. Step by step, blow by blow.

To test what I'd found and bring it all to you.

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Midwest Journal Press
• Release date: Feb 17, 2019
• ISBN: 9781393235859

Dr. Robert C. Worstell

Dr. Worstell is known for the depth and volume of his research - as well as his published works.  With seven degrees to his credit, ranging from comparative religions to computer networking, there are few fields he hasn't researched as a means to finding workable truths anyone can apply. His current work is in making fiction writing profitable, and kicking over the bee-hives of established "guru's" in that field. Worstell feels that creating a living by writing should be simple and inexpensive.  Most of his work is available through his blog posts long before they become books. This blog-to-book method is a way of sharing and refining his material broadly to everyone.

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Introduction

DECIDING TO WRITE EVERY week for a year is hard enough for most.

Deciding to write and publish a short fiction work every week is difficult for the rest.

Writing enough in a single year to qualify as a prolific writer for a lifetime just seems impossible.

Yet, I did all these.

And as I point out, I don't expect anyone to try this on their own – because without the skills I've acquired in over a decade of writing and publishing, it probably is impossible for any beginning author.

But it can be done. My books are on Amazon and everywhere else. And I expect the naysayers and trolls to tear this apart. Let them. Because none of those will ever try to do something like this.

Why did I do this?

TO TEST WHAT I'VE BEEN recommending to others – to walk my own talk. (To eat my own dog food is another phrase.)

I'd been told that Fiction is a wide-open field to build up and earn income rapidly. (Not without running advertising, is what I've found.)

I'd worked out that if you want to get out from under the Amazon algorithms that require you to submit new content every month in order to keep being recommended, you need to publish at least twice that amount. (And this is true – but still won't get you much income by itself.)

And I saw that publishing two short stories (longer than the Apple and Amazon standard of 2500 words) each week, you'd then be able to create an anthology every month that would total around 50K words, the minimum for a novel. (Each book being at least 6K words.) Meanwhile, all your short stories would keep you in Amazon's recommendation-engine for 30 days.

As well, the analysis of Smashwords founder, Mark Coker, showed that all the big-selling books on that platform were all released as pre-orders. Meaning that if you started pre-publishing your short fiction works one week earlier every week, you'd soon have a continuing flow of books being released every month and being recommended by Amazon for an additional 90-days before they went on sale.

Was this prolific output sustainable?

COULD I KEEP UP THIS level of production for an entire year?

Short answer: Yes. And I can now say: been there, done that.

The caveat is, of course, you have to have another income course to support you while you are writing. Most authors don't have a real breakthrough until their fifth year of (part time) regular, consistent writing and publishing.

The outliers I've read about can take short stories like these and with advertising alone can make them into 6-figure incomes. But you never see the background they went through before that final year. It's more like the oft-heard comment, It only took me 10 years to become an overnight success.

In the days of the pulp magazines, writers were paid to fill pages. The faster they could churn out stories, the more they got paid. And passing a million words per year was not uncommon among the best paid. But editors had to review it and accept it.

This year's work showed that it's possible. Combining the fiction books I was publishing and my non-fiction blog posts built out to that amount of wordage. It's only moving to three 6K short fiction works per week.

In our modern days, you simply self-publish anything you can finish. No editors to say it's good or bad – or pay you.

Why this book in this format?

THIS IS A VERY NON-perfect book. I've compiled a blog into a book, and I can hear the complaints from here. But I'll also hear people who will say, Hey, this reads different every time I pick it up.

Because you'll change in reading this, just as I changed in writing it. There are tons of life-changing ideas in here – if you'll just let them show up in your life.

You'll also see a lot of very pointed comments in what follows. I'm not expecting you to agree with any of what I say. I only suggest you test everything I cover here for yourself. This book is a deep dive into material I've had a chance to study and research on intensive basis, with tools most researchers don't have available.

So the attitude is salty. And these posts took place over most of a year or more. As I've can, I tried to straighten up the conflicts – but pushed this through to make all this available as a priority.

As I've said a few times here – if you don't like what you're reading, then put it down.

But – maybe you can tough it out and see what I missed. Or improve on what I found.

Regardless, you'll only find what you look for. And only what you test for yourself will wind up working for you.

Yes, this gets raw. Nuts and bolts, bare knuckle raw. But this book takes the subject of writing and takes it beyond any text currently out there.

Because I put this stuff to the test this year. But just because I say so doesn't make it so. And contrary to the books I've narrowed down to and studied – I tell you to accept nothing at face value. Test everything.

There's a world of data that this book starts piecing together. But it's just a start.

Very possible that you can find books coming to you to be written – and in your improved skills, can make that into true classics. Ones that sell forever.

Was this test viable?

SHORT ANSWER: NOT YET.

And that leads up to our next challenge this coming year – to make those self publishing actions into a viable business.

The point of this collection of articles is to collect all the work-outs and homework that went into the craft and practice of writing, not just record the weekly analysis of my book production.

Because I took the year or so before that in studying and understanding the craft of fiction, different from the dozen years of work at non-fiction writing and publishing before this.

And this year of fiction writing also proved or disproved the value of all these texts I'd assembled to study, as well as the many courses I took about the fiction author's craft.

All this year was a very hard-nosed test of fiction writing, and trail-blazing.

How to Study This Book

WITH EYES OPEN. TESTING everything. Especially what I wrote here.

Make your notes as you go. Dog-ear, highlight, underline the stuff you think is important.

Dig up the references I mention and read/test them for yourself.

Then read everything through again – maybe a few times.

Because repetition will sink the datums you find worthy into your own subconscious/unconscious mind.

Then throw the book away. (Or put it on your shelf some where so you can pick it up at some later date when you need to find a certain author's name – or just a refresher.)

Up to you. Entirely.

NOW THE TRAIL IS BLAZED, the path marked, the bar is set.

And it's all over to you.

Robert C. Worstell

PS. Again – and you'll hear this afterwards even more: take nothing as Gospel in this book or any other about writing. Test everything for yourself. Compare your own results only against your own results.

A Note to My Potential Critics

NOTHING IS PERFECT, especially according to the tales from the peanut gallery.

Never criticize a person until you've walked a mile in their moccasins. was the old Amerindian proverb.

In these days of Twitter, Facebook, and other irresponsible social media, we are encouraged to spout off without thinking it through first.

I say at the outset that this isn't a perfect book.

But go ahead – write and publish a hundred short stories of your own in a single year, and then come to me to compare notes.

I'll be here. Writing and publishing every week. And by then, I'll have improved on just about everything I've written here.

What works for me is what I've tested. What works for you is what you've tested.

People who regularly talk without testing their facts first are giving only the value of any free opinion –  what everyone already has, along with their own belly-button.

Recommended Sources? Not so much

By the end of the following year after this was written, I'd thrown out the bulk of those I'd started with. Anything to do with writing to market - this doesn't give you perennial top-selling books. Any course I've studied was suspect or thrown out wholesale.

Because Sturgeon's 90% bunk applies to the teachers as well. And is closer to 97% or 99%.

Writers learn to write by reading and writing. Especially fiction. (But non-fiction improves when you study fiction – because you study life itself.) The great writers write the books they most want to read. Lots of reading (or watching movies, particularly classics) and lots of writing.

So pulp writers like H. Bedford Jones (and his This Fiction Business) were discovered later (as Fugate's Erle Stanley Gardner book) and found to be more applicable to the process than almost all of the current crop of book-marketing experts.

Some courses (especially those created by marketers-turned-author) and textbooks written by professors) were exceedingly wrong in their approaches. The best were books by successful authors who incidentally wrote a book about how to write and successfully sell your stories. (Like Bedford-Jones, above – even William Wallace Cook's Plotto.) While DW Smith, in his courses, does give a good deal of aggregated and compiled data. I gave up when the opinion-to-data ratio got too great. Nothing else to learn there, move along.

So you'll see references to individuals and there courses which I've now thrown out after absorbing their core workable data. But you'll also see how I test these as I go.

Here's the short list of recommended books (and no courses):

•  On Writing - Stephen King

•  Becoming A Writer - Dorothea Brande

•  This Fiction Business - H. Bedford Jones

I'm currently working to develop courses for the last two, so they can be more readily studied.

And I'd recommend you get courses for yourself, and read these technical books widely. But realize that you'll probably throw them all away after you've pulled the 1-3% useful data and internalized them.

Stick with perennial favorites like those three above. Time-tested and proved.

Part I: 9 Key Lessons From A Year of Pulp System  Writing

I SAT OUT AT THE BEGINNING of 2018 to write fiction short stories every week, following the footsteps of Louis L’Amour, Jack London, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, and many others. Their general consensus was that achieving the target of 50 short stories was the first step.

I ended up finding that writing at the million-word-per-year level of Erle Stanley Gardner and H. Bedford-Jones (as well as several other pulp-method writers from the 20’s to 50’s) is actually easier than it seems. There are some caveats, but not very many.

This is my third boil-down of lessons learned – to take it back to a bullet-list and make everything more accessible.

Here’s some statistics right off, to give you the production summary as of Week 48:

•  125 original books written and published.

•  27 of these were anthologies

•  2 were full novels (50K plus)

•  96 were individual short stories (at least 2500 words plus, usually 6-8K)

•  637,533 words in single fiction books

•  added a typical base of 3400 +/- subscribers to my active list (starting from 0)

•  total words published on paid platforms were 2,057,564 (as the short stories were published on their own and also as part of anthologies.) And this doesn’t count fiction words also published on free platforms of my own site, Medium, and Wattpad.

And this is just posted here so those who need to know I’m walking my talk can have some statistics they can dispute. Otherwise, feel free to ignore these.

(Note: at week 52, this became 100 original short stories written and published, 38 anthologies compiled and published.)

No One School Has All the Teachers

THIS IS AN OLD ORIENTAL saying (Japanese, if not even earlier) that describes the state of advice out there about how to write, as well as how to publish. I  assembled 227 books on the writing craft, then narrowed these down to less than 20 worth really studying. But none of those had all the answers. They only had answers for themselves and their own production systems. And when I took their lessons and tested them, I only assembled a method of writing that worked for me.

You Can Only Compare Yourself With Yourself

OTHER PEOPLE HAVE WHAT works for them. Getting down on yourself because you haven’t already cracked 6- or 7-figures of income helps no one. That is the typical problem with many courses about writing and publishing books – they keep touting the million-dollar results – and seldom tell about the quiet successes of people simply enjoying their writing and getting some income from it – enough to at least pay for their expenses (or not.) And I made about as much at the end of this year as I was at its beginning. Because I was working on the writing habit, not the income habit. (And these are both habitual mindsets you train in over time.)

Writing is Regular Work. Regular Action Forms Habits

I SET OUT TO WRITE at least one, and possibly two stories each week – and publish them as well. Some weeks I wrote zero. Some weeks I published nearly 10 books. The average was two original fiction books per week. Every couple of months, at least, I collected these up and published them as anthologies. And they generally sell better than the individual books – as a single title. Through this, I developed my own systems for writing, and getting the inspirations I needed. Now they are ingrained as habits. (If it takes 28-40 days to build a habit, what does 196 days give you?)

Prolific Writing is Easy. Making a Living At It is Hard

I HAD TO CHANGE MY target of 50 short stories at about week 23. Because I was about to pass it. One of the first steps I took was to round up everything I had written as fiction and publish it. All under pen names. Wasn’t that much. A couple of NaNoWriMo wins. Several flash fiction pieces. And then I got steadily to work writing. After that 23rd week, I resolved to write and publish 2 stories per week. I’d set that up earlier as a solution to getting out from under the Feeding the Beast syndrome some authors have experienced with Amazon. But then I found it was a great deal of fun to help these stories come to life. The joy of writing kept me going. Meanwhile, my existing books (mostly non-fiction) kept bringing me enough income to more than cover my bills – without having to pay for advertising.

Writing is All Long Haul Work – Overnight Success is Just More Fiction

LOOK UP THE BACK-TRAIL of any successful author and you’ll be able to find a decade or more of work perfecting their craft and setting up their life to support their writing. All you hear about in the press is the last year or so where it started paying off. So you can’t listen to these bally-hooed successes. Again, you have to compare yourself with yourself. Did you write more this year than last? Get more published? Earn more income? Your own analysis will tell you where you can improve. Stories about others can be inspiring – but don’t take them as Gospel. You can only harvest what you plant. And that harvest is more likely a decade or more off. The second best time to start is now. Look up the prolific authors on Wikipedia and you’ll find them mostly investing several decades at writing. Several. Decades.

Enjoy What You Write And So Will Your Readers

THIS ONE DATUM HAS come up over and over. If you find yourself grinding at writing something, or bored with it – that is also coming through your writing. The only valid reason to write is because you enjoy it. People who try to make a lot of money at this never last. It’s just too labor intensive. There are no real short-cuts to creating great fiction. So enjoy all you do. If you’re having fun, and enjoy re-reading your own stuff, then your real fans will like it too. Reviews mean nothing except to Amazon. Read what you like to get inspiration to write what you like. Then the readers who like your stuff will find it – somehow. At least they won’t put it down when they eventually discover it. Best advice I’ve heard on this is: "Write what you want to read. And then you’ll be writing for the best idea of an avatar" you could find.

Writing is Learned by Writing – Lots of It

THAT’S THE SHEER BOTTOM line. The biggest breakthroughs I’ve had personally was studying all these courses and craft books – then throwing them all away. Once you’ve internalized (testing these ideas for yourself) then you’ll be able to just sit down and write. You’ll know if the story is going anywhere. By your own gut feeling and interest the writing coming out of your fingers (or through your auto-transcriber program.) But there is no substitute to writing on a regular basis – and working to make every story better than the last. Sure, some authors can crank out 20K words per week, and output a million words per year. Not very many of us. Most writers have their day jobs. Many still write in retirement at the same pace they used to write on a part-time basis. I’ve been blogging and journaling since the late ’90’s. So writing straight ahead with no plot per se was more natural to me. But I had some two decades of writing behind me when I sat down to just concentrate on writing fiction. The surprise was that it wasn’t hard work – but it was enjoyable work. And my stories are much, much better now than when I