Forums » Art & Creativity » Author Aspirant

Don't exactly know where you would put something like this, but this forum seemed like the best option.

Various and many circumstances throughout my life have made me deem it worthwhile to try to create a book or even a short story or a few. Does anyone know how exactly I might go about this whole process beyond the brainstorming and writing bit? To clarify, I am looking into this both to put my creativity and writing to the test, as well as having a source of income, if not miniscule.

From what I've seen, the best way to break in for pay is to submit writings to a magazine or look into erotica options. I have a friend who has done both.

My friend uses a pseudonym for the erotica, and said that tends to pay better. They said it's also good for tightening up style and such. I'm not sure what the service they went through was.

As for the magazine, they were writing for Cracked for a bit and have a few listicles on their site. My friend eventually got sick of their editing process though, because they were rewriting my friend's work more and more to insert the same few jokes that exist a billion times on their site already and even adding factual inaccuracies, and that's for the stuff they even accepted. They'd still pay my friend when they used ideas my friend submitted.

Patreon may make things easier. If you can gather up a following, then you'll probably have at least a few people willing to pay in some small amount. In that case, you'd probably want a blog or something.

I know you said beyond the brainstorming and writing bit, but keep in mind that the organization of your foundation material will be a huge boon as you are writing. It will help you keep plot points, locations, characters, and more, in line so you can keep a cohesive continuity for your novels universe. The best way to go about that is to storyboard the characters, locations, events, universe history, etc. The best suggestion I have for that is to collect images and create ‘image sounding boards’. For example, ‘X location is similar in appearance to this real world place with these differences’, and that will greatly help your brain connect dots that might have gone overlooked (and it helps a lot with descriptions!) In the concept art world, this is called 'Photobashing', and it works just as well in a literary fashion.

An option to look into as well is to join writing groups via facebook or writing-centric websites. I know a few people who have gathered incredible resources and tips to improve their writing and story/ character development that way, and some went on to publish short stories and novellas.

Places like Patreon and blogs are likewise great for gaining traction and interest.

However, in doing that, you should definitely consider some form of copyright to at least protect your concept if you feel like sharing it in public spaces like that. There’s generally a respect rule among authors, but horror stories do happen and it is better to be safe than sorry.

I know places like Amazon allow self publishing, so that is certainly a route to research, but I would sincerely recommend looking for an actual publishing company to further help you when you get to the stage of putting the completed work into circulation. A publishing company (at least a good one) will assist in all manner of things, from looking for typos and continuity errors, story pacing and character development, layout organization (Both in a printed medium and in a digital one such as E-Books), binding, cover art and illustrations (Many publishing companies will have either in house artists or contracted artists), and sales assistance, which can vary from advertising over facebook and twitter, to meet and greets at a local bookstore.