You’ve Published Your Novel. What Did You Learn?

Okay. You’ve written your pitch paragraph. You’ve plotted your plot. You’ve created a detailed plot outline. You’ve fleshed out each chapter. You’ve written chapter after chapter until one day, you turned around and saw that you’d written a novel (even though nobody ever does). You got beta feedback, you made revisions, you had editing and proofing done, and you’ve actually taken the scary step of clicking “publish” on your screen.

Now what?

Well, now is up to you. You’ll have lots of opportunities to promote your book, get it reviewed professionally, look at those reviews, and compare them to the reviews that come in organically from readers. You’ll have the chance to discuss the book with other people — fans, other authors, etc. You’ll network. You’ll promote. You may go on podcasts and talk about it. There are endless possibilities.

The one thing you absolutely should do, however, is learn from the process. By “process,” I mean both your writing process and your promotional and marketing process.

What worked and what didn’t? What would you change? What yielded results? What do your readers have to say? How are your sales? There are always conclusions you can make, even from a first novel. But let’s say you publish more than one novel. Now you can compare them to each other. Now you can see trends. Most importantly, you can start to identify what worked well and what you need to change.

You only get one first novel, and most of them are terrible. There is no shame in this. As a beginner, you don’t know what you don’t know. You can take hundreds of hours of courses and seminars on writing fiction, but none of this will write the book for you. Writing a novel comes down to you, alone in a room, staring at a computer screen with a keyboard in front of you. If you’re old school, it comes down to you in that same room with a typewriter and a blank sheet of paper.

Only you can fill in those words. Only you can bring those characters to life. Only you can make that plot come to fruition.

It’s not going to be easy. After you’ve done all that work, wouldn’t you want to learn from both your successes and mistakes? Don’t you want to use what you’ve learned as you write your next novel?

Your second novel will be better than your first. It will probably take less time to write. Thereafter, as long as you get feedback, you’ll continue to improve. Always take the time to learn from your published book. See what it, its marketing, its sales, its reviews, and its reader feedback can tell you. Never ignore it. Never make the mistake of just publishing and moving on without looking back.

Every book tells a story — to the author as well as to the reader. Never be content only to tell the reader’s story. Make sure you take the time to listen to the story your novel is telling you, the writer, too.

Now time to get to work!