Hard Work Does Not Always Pay Off

I have always believed that writing is a skill that can be learned.

Talent helps, imagination certainly helps, and having a brain that insists on inventing conversations between people who do not exist is probably useful, but writing itself improves through practice, patience and a considerable amount of stubbornness.

You learn by writing something that does not work, trying to understand why it does not work, changing it, reading it again and occasionally wondering who on earth wrote such nonsense before remembering, rather inconveniently, that it was you.

That is part of the process, and I think what surprises many people when they first imagine becoming a writer is just how much work exists behind the finished book.

The romantic picture is rather lovely. A writer sits beside a window with a cup of tea, gazes thoughtfully into the distance and waits for inspiration to arrive before producing several beautiful pages.

There are days when writing does feel a little like that, although several beautiful pages may be stretching things and one reasonably good paragraph is sometimes cause for celebration.

Most of the work lies elsewhere, in research, planning, rewriting, editing, checking continuity, removing things you once thought were brilliant, putting some of them back, moving chapters around, changing names, discovering that a character somehow knows something they have not yet been told, and trying to work out why the person who was standing beside the door on page seventy-three is suddenly sitting at the table on page seventy-four.

Once the book is written, another education begins, because there are covers to create, manuscripts to format, descriptions to write, keywords to choose, publishing platforms to understand, blogs to maintain, websites to build, social media to feed and readers to find.

Then comes the strange experience of releasing something you have worked on for months into the world and discovering that the world is under absolutely no obligation to notice.

That may be one of the hardest lessons in writing.

Hard Work Is Not a Guarantee

We are often told that if we work hard enough, success will follow, and it is an appealing idea because it makes the world feel fair.

Put in the effort and receive the reward.

Unfortunately, creative work does not always behave like that.

You can write a good book and sell very few copies. You can spend hours creating a blog post that hardly anyone reads, while something you wrote quickly one afternoon suddenly travels far beyond the audience you expected. You can polish a story until every sentence is doing exactly what you want it to do and still discover that readers simply do not connect with it.

Meanwhile, another book appears at exactly the right moment, reaches exactly the right readers and becomes enormously successful.

That does not necessarily mean one author worked harder than another, because timing matters, visibility matters, marketing matters, connections matter and luck matters far more than most of us probably like to admit.

Readers are wonderfully unpredictable, which is one of the reasons nobody can confidently manufacture the book that everyone will suddenly decide they must read. Publishers have tried, authors have tried, and marketing departments with far larger budgets than mine have certainly tried.

Sometimes they succeed, and sometimes everybody is left staring at the figures wondering what happened.

I Have Seen This in My Own Publishing

My own books have taught me this lesson rather effectively.

When I began publishing my science fiction, I quickly discovered that writing the story was only one part of the job. I could spend months developing a book, then go back through it repeatedly, checking the story, correcting continuity, changing wording, adjusting the cover, preparing the Kindle edition, preparing the paperback, writing the description and finally reaching the point where I could press the publish button.

By that stage, it feels as though the book ought to emerge accompanied by trumpets.

Amazon, rather disappointingly, does not provide trumpets.

The book simply appears.

Then you wait to see whether anybody finds it.

I have put considerable work into my Whakataukī Among the Stars books, not only in writing the stories themselves but also in preparing them for publication and then finding ways to introduce them to readers. I have written blog posts, created social-media material, worked on covers, thought about descriptions, built a website and continued looking for better ways to make the books visible.

None of that creates an automatic audience.

Publishing a book does not mean readers suddenly know it exists, and producing another book does not guarantee that the previous one will somehow be discovered along the way.

That was one of the realities I had to learn.

There is a difference between finishing a book and finding its readers, and the second part can take much longer than the first.

What I have also learned, though, is that every book gives me something the previous one did not.

I understand more about formatting than I did when I began. I know more about covers, blurbs, Amazon listings, websites and promotion. I notice problems in manuscripts earlier, and I am far more willing to change something when I can see that it is not working.

Perhaps most importantly, I no longer believe that pressing publish is the finish line.

It is another beginning.

Writing Is Not a Meritocracy

This is uncomfortable to say, but being good at something does not guarantee recognition.

There are extraordinary writers whose books never reach large audiences, while other books become worldwide successes despite dividing readers, critics and occasionally entire families around the dinner table.

Publishing has always involved a mixture of talent, persistence, opportunity, fashion and sheer chance.

Being discovered by the right person can change a career, while an enthusiastic reader recommending a book to another reader can begin something unexpected. A social-media post can suddenly reach thousands of people for reasons nobody fully understands, while the post you carefully designed to do exactly that disappears into the electronic wilderness without so much as a polite wave.

None of this means quality does not matter.

It matters enormously, because if an opportunity does arrive, you want the work waiting behind it to be good enough.

Luck may open a door, but it helps considerably if you have remembered to bring the book with you.

— Rebecca Vardy