The Reason First Books Fail

We’ve all heard it: “Don’t plan on publishing your first book, it’s going to be terrible, but it’s ok.” Rarely do we ever get a reason for it. But when we do, it is normally along the lines of, “You wouldn’t book a concert at the Met after one piano lesson, would you?” Of course not, but why is it like that?

Short answer: you improve too much as a writer and the consistency of your quality suffers for it. If you’re interested in the long answer, read on.

First, I’m going to assume you’ve read the first two parts of How to Plan a Writing Career. If not, here’s a brief summary: The average person only has 3 hrs/day of free time (more on the weekends) and there is approximately 3.75 hours worth of writing work to do each day. This includes writing, practicing craft, reading in your genre, and managing your online presence and writerly relationships. Neglecting any one of these harms your work.

This is the basis for why first books (or even most early books) fail. Not the time itself, though that certainly could be the reason (if you skimp you only hurt yourself). The thing is, using the process outlined in those articles, you write one book a year, but it takes about a year and a half for the first book (because of the way I overlap work in the examples). From the time you start to the time you finish you will probably read 20 - 50 books in your genre, another 10 books on writing craft, and have written over 150,000 words (assuming multiple drafts and some heavy rewriting).

Let’s go back to the piano lesson analogy. It is not like having one lesson and planning a concert at the Met. Instead, imagine your first lesson is recorded, as well as every lesson and practice session from then until a year and a half later. After that time, you’ve come a long way. You’re a much better piano player. Not a professional, but way better than a hobbyist. But your performance won’t be at your new level. Instead, you’ll be showing all your practices from when you started to the present day. As if it was professional work.

That’s the main problem. Not with just being a writer, but learning any skill. You’ve no doubt heard of the 10,000 hour principle. Malcolm Gladwell is a big proponent, and it says if you practice something for 10,000 hours (3 hrs/day for 10 yrs) you become an expert at it. Unfortunately it’s not that simple. Or even remotely accurate based on further studies.

Instead, whenever learning a new skill, there is a great amount of early resistance. The learning curve is steep, so discomfort is high and the learner lacks confidence. However, a decent level of mastery can be obtained in about 20 - 40 hours. The difference in understanding and quality of work will be drastically different between the beginner and someone who has worked on the issue for a handful of weeks with regularity.

Now think of how that applies to your writing. When you first set out, you have only your instincts to guide you, which will likely be based on previous books you’ve read and stories you’ve seen or heard. Once you learn a little of the craft, you jump forward in skill. You know enough to be dangerous. Your confidence increases (more than it should) but your skill has increased too. If you’re an average writer, you’ve written 15,000 words between starting and getting your first 30 hours. That’s about 60 novel pages. And your quality is noticeably different.

After the initial burst, you improve in leaps and bounds over the next 3 - 6 months. In that time you’ve probably finished your first draft. If you’re like me, you’ve taken a break and will get back to it in a few months before finishing the draft. Either way, your skill has drastically improved once more.

We’ll assume a more leisurely pace to demonstrate the problem, say 250 words/day. After your first 30 hours, you’ll have 7,500 words complete. After 6 months you’ll have 50,000 - 75,000 words complete. That’s about 12 hours of work a week on your writing. Not including anything else you do to improve.

Here’s the thing though, you can’t do it in a vacuum. If you just start writing and don’t read in your genre and don’t work on craft (reading craft books, doing writing exercises, getting second opinions) then your progress will be much slower. The variability of quality will be lower, but the point is moot since you won’t go far enough alone to be published.

But if you do put in the work over those 6 months? You’re a totally different animal than when you started. Your prose is better, tighter, and leaner. You’ve started shedding some of the bad habits you started with, maybe relying less on adverbs, or using fewer dialogue tags.

After the first 3 - 6 months, your skill improvement happens at a relatively steady rate, assuming you continue to push yourself and work on craft. This means that you can’t watch beginner structure videos forever. You need to graduate to more specialized content the further you go and practice it.

By the time you finish your first draft you’ve become ten times the writer you started as. But that starting work is still there in your first chapters. And the next boost happens somewhere between the midpoint and the last quarter of your book. Your readers will be able to see the difference. Mine did, and they aren’t particularly experienced. Imagine what a professional would see.

And no, you can’t edit it out or go back and fix it. Yes, you are a much stronger writer, but there’s a funny thing our brains do. Memory (and skill, to an extent) is context based. Have any childhood friends? When you see them, does your behavior change significantly, regressing to older more childish behavior? For most people it does. This is because the context you remember limits your actions in ways you can’t fully control. Your brain simply isn’t firing on all cylinders because you’ve gone back to an older engine, albeit temporarily.

Which is a long-winded way of saying that when you go back to edit your work, you start to engage the old writer brain. Distance from the work can help (3 - 6 months is ideal), but it won’t solve the problem. The only way to fix it is to go back and rewrite large portions of the work from scratch, or close to it. And by the time you finish that, the beginning of the book will be substantially better than the back half. You chase your own tail until you decide to stop.

But wait. If this is true, how does any book get published? Won’t every book have this problem? Yes and no. Editors and critique partners can really help in this arena. But you also have to think of time in relative terms. In your second week, you are learning as much as you learned the previous week, effectively doubling your skill. The next doubling takes two weeks, then four, then eight, and so on. By the time you’ve been writing for ten years (the average before publishing) your experience gain has slowed considerably.

Your first book has exponentially more experience gain than your second, and so on through each book and each year. The first book represents you at minimal skill all the way to your current skill, which took a year or two to get to. Your second book will go much faster (maybe six months for draft one) and the relative experience of 6 months is only a quarter of the 2 years you’ve spent. You’re still getting better, but the difference is smaller. This results in less variability of quality over the length of the work.

This means that working on your first book will be frustratingly difficult as you improve. You’ll write and rewrite over and over again, never quite getting it to be as good as you want it to be. It doesn’t help that most of us write the story of our hearts in the first book. You know the one. The idea that first grabbed you and forced you to write. It’s special in a way none of your other stories will be, so it’s that much harder to let go.

You’ll never be good enough to fully realize this first story. Not because you can’t improve, but because it’s on a pedestal, an idealized platonic form of a book, rather than a flesh-and-blood novel you plan to sell for money.

This isn’t to say that your first book will never see the light of day. Maybe ten years from now you dust it off and rewrite it. Many authors meet with success doing just that.

But you can’t write your first book forever. Don’t think of it as abandoning your story. Think of it as letting it marinate for awhile. You have to get to the point that you can let it go. Maybe you come back to it, maybe you don’t. But either way, you’ll have leveled up a ton by the time you make that decision, and the book will be better for it.

That brings us to the end. You’ve come a long way. Now, get back to writing.