I always wanted to write a novel.
There have been a few things stopping me. First, although I used to write for magazines I generally am a horribly slow writer. Second, I absolutely hate either reading or writing description (having The Great Gatsby in 9th grade English was torture). Third and most importantly, I’ve found (when doing NaNoWriMo) that I have a tendency to get so far into a story and then run out of things I want to say and lose interest.
So fiction hasn’t worked out well for me. Nonfiction I can do better; while my slow writing speed still comes into play, I can just write what I know. With ebooks, there aren’t really any length requirements either; Amazon estimates my first book (which covered electronic medical records and the HITECH Act) at 26 pages, and nonfiction buyers are more interested in getting the information they need than in curling up with a book for four or five hundred pages.
So, I write. My healthcare book probably made me a thousand dollars or so before it became obsolete (most of that in the 2nd year after I published it). My next two books made essentially nothing. My latest nonfiction book, published last August, has consistently sold around a hundred copies a month (combined ebook and paperback) and actually made a fair amount of money. In the meantime I also finished my novel, finally, and published it earlier this year to a pronounced lack of interest (although to be fair I haven’t yet advertised it).
So how did I decide what to write? I think the clear rule is: write what you’re interested in. While there are exceptions, most successful authors seem to write the same kind of material that they enjoy reading.
In my case, I wanted to find a side project and asked myself: what’s unique about me? What can I do that not a lot of people can? I’m a software developer with a PhD in computer science and experience teaching, writing, and editing a textbook, so I decided to combine those and I wrote a book about computer science for programmers. I was able to advertise it at a programming conference I attend, and many of the people I interact with are naturally programmers as well. I got lucky when Scott Hanselman (a programmer at Microsoft with a large following) picked up my book and tweeted about it, and it’s sold fairly steadily ever since.
Self-publishing a book is ridiculously easy these days; selling one is somewhat more difficult. Step one is to write something that people will want to read, and step two is to let them know about it.
In part 2, we’ll talk about everything that needs to happen to get your book ready to publish.