“Nerdection Good Read”
Just imagine: breathing life into the story that’s been bouncing around inside your cranium for what feels like forever, smashing it out on your laptop and acing your first draft, and then being offered a lucrative deal with a big-time publisher – book tours, signings with adoring fans, and interviews! The success. The validation. And now wake up – because that’s not how any of that happens.
Writing and publishing a book is laboriously difficult. It requires an ego-smashing amount of re-drafting (everyone’s first draft is rubbish), a steely resilience, an eye-watering monetary investment, and the strength to face the morbid reality that the risk might not pay off and result in a flop of a novel. Hank Quense’s Creating Your First Novel takes you through a five-phase breakdown of the process and how you, as a writer, can prepare yourself not only for the writing process, but the business of being an author.
Spoiler-Free Plot Summary
Aspiring writers gather around! This one is for you. Creating Your First Novel provides a blow-by-blow guide on how to develop and write your story, and then how to try and make money out of it. Not only do you have to have a productive imagination, wide vocabulary, and insatiable passion to be a published author. Oh, no! You also need to have a working knowledge of the tax laws in your country, how to format an ebook (or know where to find someone who can do that for you), and have the arithmetic skills to calculate the point at which you have paid off your marketing and production costs, and actually get to start taking home a paycheck. Whew, there’s a lot more to it than I think the average wannabe writer could fathom. Luckily, Hank Quense, an author with over twenty self-published written works and many years lecturing and teaching writing, publishing, and marketing, has written an extensive guide on how you can pull it off.
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My Take on Creating Your First Novel
Quense has formatted the ebook to be easy to navigate with his use of in-text links, so that you can skip sections and easily revisit content. He also uses hyperlinks to reference other external resources that readers can use to bolster their learning. The Fiction Writing Workshop is a guide to planning, developing, and writing a story, and was probably my favorite part of the book. It focuses on the creation of engaging and relatable characters, plotting of story and emotional arcs, and highlights the importance of subplots to accentuate the main plot. It has an interactive energy to it – at the end of each chapter, readers are given an assignment to consolidate the learning of the theory. A reader could be reading and then writing, and slowly working to create their own story plan as they go. It’s both participatory and practical!
Quense himself discusses the stigma of self-publication and how it is generated by the ease with which authors these days can self-publish in the “Lazy Way” – which is to write, but then skip the editing and marketing processes, and simply release their work into the world through Amazon. Quense explains that this is because the editing process is where authors can expect to hemorrhage the most cash. As a freelance proofreader, I found myself bashing my head against my desk because despite his consciousness of the problem, Quense has contributed to it. Creating Your First Novel skipped the proofreading process and was riddled with punctuation errors and inconsistencies, as well as awkward document formatting, and content double-ups. Rather than hire experts to polish this into something beautiful and seamless, Quense chose to openly admit that he couldn’t be bothered condensing what he originally had planned to be multiple ebooks into one cohesive volume. He openly cited money as the reason for publishing Creating Your First Novel as a single entity and using self-publishing methods to do so. It is a pet peeve of mine for authors to place an understanding burden on their readers.
Audience
I have been pondering what age group the audience of this book is supposed to be. The first part of the book reads as an instructional guide, which I can imagine would be perfect for secondary-education level English students. Adult aspiring writers may find this part of the book too generic and the assignments a little unimaginative. But when it comes to the business education chapters, it’s more adult-level content and not very relatable for the high schoolers honing their imagination and writing skills.
Averaging it out, this is still an informative read that I would recommend to anyone hoping to start writing a book. But for younger readers, some adult guidance and support may be required for the business education chapters.
About The Author Of Creating Your First Novel
Hank Quense has self-published his books for over 12 years. His non-fiction books cover fiction writing (Creating Stories), self-publishing (How to Self-publish and Market a Book, Self-publish a Book in 10 Steps), marketing (Book Marketing Fundamentals) and author business (Business Basics for Authors).
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