So You Want to Be an Author (Part One)

Writing the book turned out to be the easy part.

I want to write a few honest posts about what it actually takes to become an author. Not the dreamy version. The real one, with the costs and the dead ends and the days you wonder why you started. Some of it I managed to navigate. Some of it I learned from. Some of it I am still fighting. And I will say the thing nobody likes to say out loud, which is that all of it might come to nothing.

This first part is about the parts before publishing even begins. The desire, the motivation, the writing, and the first real wall.

Let us start with the obvious

Being an author is not for everyone. That sounds harsh, so let me explain what I mean before you close the tab.

Why does anyone want to be an author in the first place? I think we humans carry an innate hunger to live more lives than the one we were given. One life never feels like enough to hold everything we want to feel and see and be. So we gossip. We tell stories. We watch movies. We scroll reels at midnight. We build Instagram and Facebook and all the rest of it, and we pour hours into watching how other people live. We are endlessly curious about each other.

Authors, especially fiction authors, are the extreme end of that curiosity. We are not content to watch other lives. We invent them. We tell the stories of imagined humans and then go live inside them for a while.

But is that enough to build a career on? No. And this is where I think most new authors set themselves up for heartbreak.

Get your motivation straight on day one

If you want to write fiction, you have to settle your reasons before you begin, or the disappointment will find you.

If your motivation is money, you will be disappointed about 99.99 percent of the time. The reason is simple scale. There is an ocean of fiction already out there. For every Andy Weir and his Martian, there are millions of authors who sold fewer than 50 copies in their whole lifetime, mostly to friends and family who felt obligated.

If your motivation is fame, it is the same story. There are thousands of novels you can read for free right now, and almost nobody wants them. So do not waste your time chasing that either.

The right motivation is quieter and, I think, the only one that survives. You want to experience the lives of the characters you write. You want to walk through the worlds you build in your head and put them into words. You want to enjoy the process itself. That motivation points inward, at your own satisfaction, which means the market cannot take it from you. Anything the outside world gives you after that, a reader, a review, a sale, arrives as a bonus rather than a verdict. Get that part right and you will be fine. Get it wrong and no amount of success will feel like enough.

My own go at it

Which brings me to Sanctuary, my own novel, not yet published as I write this. It is due out November 12, 2026.

The core idea is simple. What if an American kid were left in Central America and had to find his way home, learning about himself and the world as he goes. It is a coming of age story.

The writing itself comes in layers, the same way my paintings do. The base layer has three parts. Plot. Worldbuilding. Character design. I polished those three for about a year and a half before the book reached any kind of decent shape. One day I will write a whole post just about the writing process, expanding on all of this. I suspect an experienced novelist can do this base work in a quarter of the time it took me. This stage eats the most hours, and it is the most fun and the most painstaking thing all at once.

I remember waking in the early morning with Lucia or Miles already in my head, worrying about the next danger waiting for them on the road. I remember reading about Central American geography at half past eleven at night while the whole house was asleep. You end up living in two worlds at the same time, floating a little above the ground, never quite all the way back in your own life.

That part, hard as it is, I would not trade. Then comes the part I would warn anyone about.

Publishing, where the real difficulty begins

Here is where it stops being romantic.

Editing, and the thousands of dollars you do not have

I went into this knowing I would not make money. I would almost certainly lose some. So at some point you make peace with a humbling fact. Your writing is not good enough on its own. It needs help. Professional help.

There are several kinds, and they are not the same thing.

Developmental editing is the big one. An editor reads your plot, finds the holes, and tells you where the story is broken. Line editing works at the sentence level, leaving the plot alone but sharpening dialogue, voice, and the way lines land. Copyediting is the commas, the full stops, the spelling and grammar.

Now the prices, which is where the air leaves the room. For a typical 100,000 word novel, developmental editing runs around $3,000 to $5,000. Line editing, roughly $2,500 to $3,500. Copyediting, $800 to $2,500. Conservatively, real professional help is $6,000 or $7,000. When we get to the profit section in the second part of this blog post, you will see how absurd that number looks against what a debut actually earns back.

So what is the alternative? You find people new to the trade, people like you, who do it for love rather than a paycheck. What you get is uneven results, and you lose an enormous amount of your own time. I got help from amateurs like me and then spent hundreds of hours myself, poring over every line of dialogue, every detail, every comma, close to obsession. Partly to save money, partly because I genuinely wanted to learn the craft. In the end I decided to let my readers be the judge of my manuscript.

If I were Emily St. John Mandel, or Octavia Butler, or David Baldacci, I would not be doing this part alone. I would have a team around the work. Editors to sharpen the plot and the lines, a publisher fighting to acquire it, a marketing machine to carry it to readers. That is a real advantage, and it is not nothing. But make no mistake, the craft is still theirs. The sentences, the voice, the imagined world, the decisions that make a book worth sharpening in the first place, those come from the writer and no one else. The team amplifies the work. It does not replace it.

So when people look down on debut or self published authors, I want them to ask whether they are comparing like with like. A self published author next to an established one is a hole in the wall shop next to a Costco. Same category on paper. Completely different machine behind the counter.

Querying, or sending letters into the void

The next wall is querying. A query is the pitch you send to publishers asking them to take your book. It is complicated and tedious beyond anything I expected.

You wrote a good book. You want it to reach readers. Standing between you and them is a tall, old wall. For your book to appear in bookstores, to be reviewed by the New York Times, to sit on library shelves, you generally need a traditional publisher. Bookstores, libraries, and major newspapers will not even glance at a self published title. It is simply beneath their radar.

And you cannot walk up to a publisher yourself. They do not want to deal with authors directly. You need a middleman called a literary agent, who takes a cut of your royalties, usually 15 percent, in exchange for finding you a publisher. There are thousands of agencies in the United States, with thousands of individual agents inside them. Their whole job, at the first pass, is to read a synopsis and decide in minutes whether they want to represent you. Each has favorite genres, favorite kinds of books, favorite publishers.

So you set out to query hundreds of agents across hundreds of listings, and oh man, this is the most tedious thing I have ever attempted. Every site wants something different. Some want an email. Some want a short synopsis. Some want your past work, your bio, a dozen small variations of the same material, all just for a first look at maybe your opening 10 pages or first chapter.

It is brutal, because if your first chapter does not move fast enough, you get no traction at all. If your story could be controversial, or make people uncomfortable, or the agent decides the current trend is not what you wrote, you will not get anywhere either. Agents receive hundreds of these. They are ruthlessly picky. They know the trends, they know what sells, they know which stories go nowhere with readers. If they like those pages, they ask for the full manuscript, and then quite often you never hear from them again. I used a tool called QueryTracker. For Sanctuary I sent close to 100 queries. Every one came back with nothing, if it came back at all. Most agents never respond. You are mailing letters into a void, and the void is busy.

Success here is rare unless you have already published something that is selling well and earning praise. The door opens most easily for people who do not really need it.

Small presses, the road I half took

When the queries hit a wall and you are out of ideas, there is another path. Small presses. Unlike the big houses, these are niche. They tend to focus on particular themes, cultures, age groups, or social subjects.

I should have tried harder here. I gave up after some early frustration, which I regret. If your book is niche, as mine arguably is, your odds are better with a small press that already speaks to that audience. If your book is broad, your general romance or science fiction or fantasy, a small press may not be the fit.

And if you crack any of this, big house or small, you are ahead of almost everyone. Pat yourself on the back. You are some combination of talented, good at the craft, good at the marketing, and genuinely lucky.

Why traditional publishing is worth all that trouble

It helps to understand what the prize actually is, because it is real.

First, they pay for everything. They assign editors, cover designers, and turn your manuscript into a finished book with very little effort from you. All included.

Second, before you sell a single copy, they may hand you a lump sum up front, an advance, based on your reputation and their expectations. This is why so many politicians, actors, and famous people publish books. They are paid a fortune before writing a word, and are often assigned ghost writers who write the whole thing, so not one sentence is really theirs. No skill required. Then for every copy sold, you get a small royalty, usually very small, because the large share goes to the house.

Third, they handle the marketing. Your book gets trade reviews, which I will come to in the next part of this blog post. It moves through bookstores and every other channel. You may do some events, but the house usually arranges them.

That is the machine a self published author does not have.

And if nobody bites?

So neither the big houses nor the small presses want you. Now what?

You self publish. This is the last resort. I will not call it the worst resort, because it is not. But understand what you are signing up for. You become everything. The writer, the editor, the designer, the publisher, the marketer, the accountant. Everything.

In the next part I will get into that world properly. Kindle self publishing, IngramSpark, Draft2Digital, trade reviews, and ARCs. The part where you discover exactly how much everything you can do yourself, and exactly how little anyone is waiting to notice.

And I will be honest with you, because I promised I would. All of this, the years, the money, the hundred letters into the void, might add up to nothing. I may sell 50 copies to people who love me and never reach a single stranger. That is a real possibility, not a dark mood.

But remember why we started. We write because one life was never enough to hold everything we wanted to feel, and for a year and a half I got to live two. I walked a road through Central America inside a boy who is not me, and I was afraid for him, and I loved him. Nobody can take that back, no matter what the sales report says. If the only reader I ever reach is me, I was already paid.

To be continued.