Novel writing: dangerously futile?
Hello and welcome to my first ever blog post. My name is Paul Samael and I’ve written a novel. Saying that, I feel as if I should be
at some kind of self-help group called “Novelists Anonymous” where people with
a similar affliction can unburden themselves with a view to preventing the
recurrence of this dangerously futile activity. Why do I regard it as dangerously futile? Let’s look at some facts and figures:
Google estimates there are already about 130 million books in the world - actually 129,864,880 to be precise (in case you are wondering how they came up with such a nerdishly precise figure, they explain how they did it here).
What about new books?
Well, the number of English language titles published in 2010 was
estimated to be about 4 million.
See Fig 3 of this document (that link doesn't work any more, but I've seen various more recent estimates which suggest the current figure is similar, if not higher - I'm adding this in 2023).
This leaves me (and any other budding author) with a bit of
a problem. Even assuming the novel
is any good (which of course it may not be), how am I going to make it stand
out? The answer is – with great
difficulty (warning: if you too are a budding author and the figures I have quoted above are already making you
feel enormously depressed, don’t click on either of the links below, because it
only gets worse):
- Bad news - this link doesn't work any more, but here's a very similar piece from 2023 (not much has changed!)
- More bad news
The rational response to this would be to give up now. But I am not rational. Like I said, I have written a
novel. Worse still, it’s quite
possibly unmarketable so far as any publisher is concerned. At least, that’s what my agent tells me
(yes, I have an agent but you shouldn’t read anything into that, as she only
agreed to take me on based on my non-fiction work).
So why don’t I just give up? The trouble is, I’m quite attached to my novel. Throwing in the towel now feels like deciding to have a much-loved pet put down because I’m not prepared to pay even a single vet’s bill. So I am going to persevere with it. This blog will either:
- [chronicle my heroic efforts]* OR
- [demonstrate beyond a scintilla of doubt the utter futility of my novel-writing ambitions]*
In : Writing fiction
Tags: "first novels" publishing
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