I listened to a podcast today featuring this indie (read: self published) author that I’m reading right now as part of my research…and it opened my mind up to some new possibilities that I’m kind of wrangling with right now.
I hate rewriting. Hate it. It’s always a slog. It has none of the charm for me of writing something raw. Rewriting, however, undeniably makes my writing better. On this there is no debate. I doubted that throughout this rewriting process for Starstuff…and was shown the errors of those doubts as I’ve read through my rewritten manuscript over the past couple weeks. It’s a leap better.
But, man, listening to this author’s interview and having read his prose…it really hit home something for me that I’ve heard before but really understood: people who read eBooks don’t give a shit about polished prose. They really, really don’t. This author’s prose is basic and clunky as fuck…but people love his books and he’s making REAL money without hardly doing any rewrites. NO rewrites, actually…just proofreading. Straight from draft one to proofreading. The trad pub industry is rolling in their proverbial graves at a thought like that…
…but here we are. This is an audience they clearly don’t understand. It’s an audience that wants a specific kind of story (namely, the various genres of romance, paranormal, thriller, and science fiction), and they want A LOT of those stories, and they want them NOW. They don’t care if the stories are hurried, they just want them NOW. They want to know what happens NEXT.
It had a slight effect today of taking the wind from my sails a bit on Starstuff…which, again, is this manuscript that I wrote without having any of this knowledge. I’m actively putting weeks of my time right now into a process that might not actually be necessary.
Before I get ahead of myself, or lead any other writers reading this right now astray…this is not to say that ALL or even the MAJORITY of readers don’t care about polished prose. That’s simply not true. If it were, even the traditional publishers would be letting their writers run amok and publish everything as soon as it was written. No, no…this revelation is simply that there is a group of readers on amazon (specifically), a rather LARGE group of them, that don’t need “professional” prose, and you can write for that group and make some really, really good money, and not spend any time rewriting.
So, with respect to Starstuff, it simply means that there is a version of that book that I could have written that didn’t necessarily need all this time spent rewriting. But, the version of the manuscript I *do* have, did need it…which is why this revelation taking the wind out of my sails was kind of annoying. I still have to finish what I started. Still.
But, the wheels are turning. It emboldens me to try some new things, reassess my workflow perhaps…at the very least to experiment more quickly to see what might catch fire. My mind is opening to all the possibilities of success.
I had a wonderful first work day of the week. I got everything done I needed to, including some solid writing. Not as much on the writing front as I’d have liked, but that was because it was rent day, so…cest la vie.
Now, it’s time to map out tomorrow, and bed. I’m going to finish typing in my proofreading edits tomorrow. It’s happening. Wish me luck.