I kind of laughed at this advice when I first starting writing, even though my first two trashy novels (under another pen name) that were 60,000 words did kind-of-OK, selling a couple of hundred. But of course they were in the end total rubbish and nothing I would ever admit to or put my real name on.

No, for my first stab at being a serious author I was going to ignore all this, and all the previous advice I had read, and get everything just right!

So, it was back in 2021 and I had just penned the final chapter of my first serious book, after a literal lifetime of procrastinating. The word count was OK by any metric at 110,000, and without any rush I re-read it a couple of times editing and perfecting it. By the third round of changes, my “editing” had actually increased the book to 130,000 words (and I did not know it then added some big plot errors) and it was now Christmas 2022!

I had just gone through the initial loop of getting a new Amazon author account under my own name this time, and then I spent freakishly little time working on the cover, blurb and other marketing bits before publishing it, because, well, who needs that shit, it will obviously sell itself! So I published it in January and opened my Amazon author metrics page daily as I waited for it to take off. I waited, and I waited, not one sale! By March I knew something was wrong!

Maybe there was not enough action (it wasn’t really that kind of novel), and the story was OK but had set up, and begged for a sequel. However none of that actually mattered, because as far as I was aware nobody had even read it! I could not even find it on the Kindle store at first, even when I searched for it by name, and when I eventually did find it, using every single key word in the search, it was lingering on about page 25 of the search results and it looked out of place and lonely next to it’s peers; the cover was terrible and amateurish, the blurb boring, and my author bio and picture made me look like a desperate hill-billy (no offence to hill-billy’s!) and of course I had priced it at $6.99, because, well what genius gives away their masterpiece!

I had also categorised it in the young adult, science fiction, and the book next to it on the search list was called “Jimbo the farting robot“. I kid you not, a book for 3-6 years olds, not quite the young adult audience I was aiming for! (BTW Shoutout to Jimbo the Farting Robot as all publicity is good publicity!) Anyway, why my arrogant-self just assumed it would up there sitting proudly in between the Hunger Games and Harry Potter on page one of the search I do not know, and I guess many a would be author gets to this first bump in the road and goes no further. The algorithm is not your friend! At the time, my only thought was that it was not “Epic” enough. It was serious Sci-Fi though, just without the usual sex and violence.

Well I had almost 120,000 more pages for the sequel penned, and the story really did need to have some action, a teeny bit of violence wouldn’t hurt, and of course bigger is always better! As nobody had bought a copy yet I withdrew The Phoney War from Amazon (though it was still called The Summer of Reasoning at that time) and spent most of 2023 bigging the story up, adding the sequels with all the action, finishing all the story arcs and by October 2023 (in my mind) I was ecstatic that it was now the same size as a “proper” “real” Sci-Fi novel. I updated to a darker cover, fixed the blurb, found a more rugged, but lovable, bio picture of me (not easy), and re-released it with the same name, same ISBN (naughty) and same expectation.

I of course forgot to change the category so this serious sci-fi novel of 370,000 words was still stuck next to Jimbo the farting robot, and me being me, decided $6.99 was far too cheap so I actually upped the price to $9.99. Marketing my friends is not my strong point!

The rest of my story is spread out over a few posts on this site. TLDR; I still fucked up! So I wrote my next book (A Level of Consciousness), I got my act together with the covers, the blurb and the pricing, revisited The Summer of Reasoning and split it back out into its original three book series, and now I am just happy that I have done everything I can, beyond spending physical money on marketing.

Why Smaller Books Work

The first reason why people give you advice about not writing long books is simple. Most readers are simply unwilling to invest 370,000 words on a new author when there are plenty of good and well established authors already out there. Yes, even when the book is free, you are still taking up dozens of hours of your readers valuable time reading it, and if it is not what they want they will discard it quickly.

But there are plenty of other good reasons for writing smaller books, especially when you start off:

1. An author with one book to their name looks like a failure to some, two or more somehow shows serious commitment, and the algorithm looks at this!
2. Those same people see a series of books like a Netflix series, instead of a single four-hour movie, you have four one-hour episodes and for some reason you are more likely to get traction.
3. Lets face it, it is way easier to write a small book than a big book. It is easier to keep track of the plot, the characters, easier to edit it, and a lot quicker to get it to market. (I hope you are reading this Mr George. R. R. Martin!)
4. You get more bites of the marketing pie. Instead of one cover and one blurb to entice your potential audience you get three or four, this alone will raise your search profile on-line. (remember the Algorithm!)
5. You get quicker feedback on what people like or dislike about your book, a 100,000 word disaster is better than a 300,000 word disaster, and if 200,000 words are not released yet, you may be able to re-purpose them in to another different novel where you also fix any mistakes from feedback such as killing off characters or story-arcs that nobody likes.
6. You might be able to take a loss on your first book to entice the readers into the series or invest in you as an author, Giving away your first masterpiece might sound like a terrible idea but lots of new authors either give away or greatly reduce the price of their first work as a “taster” hoping to hook you into buying the rest of your books at a hopefully more normal price.
7. If your books are in a library then having three normal sized books as opposed to one massive epic, means three people can be reading your books at the same time, rather than one person struggling their way through the novel in the three weeks they get allocated to read it.
8. If you do make the book physical, then shorter books are lighter, I know some old people who will no longer read big heavy books as they are too uncomfortable to hold for long periods or travel with. (And the main reason I like e-books!)

The above list is certainly not definitive, but are the essence, distilled from what I was told, what I have read, and what I have learnt (painfully) as an author. Of course, once you have a fan-base and a few good reviews under your belt people are more likely to invest time in you and then you can go all War-and-Peace on your readers.

Some genres are a little different than others, normal sized for a fantasy book might be over 150,000 words, whereas a Romance novel might be half that. Of course if you already a well known celebrity, have a brand-name, a few thousand followers on twitter/YouTube or just have lots and lots of friends who can write reviews to say how awesome your book is, you can just skip all this advice and publish whatever the fuck you want.

I wrote most of The Summer of Reasoning on my Chromebook in Google docs. In full screen mode it is an amazing distraction free writing environment. Open the Chromebook, write something, close it, I unfortunately had to do it in three parts as Google docs (before 2023 at least) becomes painful to use over 100K words (The Chromebook has 4GB FFS Google!). Like it or hate it, most publishers (or epub conversion software) expect docx source files, so for the 370,000 word novel I combined the 3 parts in LibreOffice, which also has its faults, but it is fast and can work in docx and also export to Epub format though there are lots of superfluous “<Span>” declarations and your cover needs to be a .jpg not .jpeg. (again probably fixed by the time you read this)

If you are doing this for pleasure and that feel good factor (like me) then sweet, you’ve cracked it, it’s all pretty easy.

1. Knock up your masterpiece. No tips here, just keep writing it will happen eventually.
2. Proof-read it and re-edit. For me this was emailing it to my kindle or Kobo in Epub format.
3. Unless it is for a specific plot element, remove any rants, personal politics, biases etc and go back to step 2. (I may have failed a bit here)
4. Go back to step 2. I did this four (or was it five) times, each update fixing dozens of problems, and of course probably adding some new ones, very like programming really! Hot tip here is if you change something, go back a few paragraphs before re-reading it. Feel free to email me any errors, I’m certainly not perfect.
5. By now you will be sick of reading your masterpiece so get someone critical to read it and take their advice carefully, then go back to step 2 if necessary.
6. (Optionally) Get an ISBN number. In NZ this is free from the National Library, you just have to email them your finished eBook. Amazon Kindle doesn’t need one and Draft2Digital will give you one.
7. Create an account on the Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) page, if you already have a kindle account this is quick, but you do need to upload some bank details for all those mega-dollars you are obviously going to rake in. (trying to keep a straight face writing this bit!) Then upload and publish your book. Ta-Da! 70% of the eBook market can now buy your book.
8. If you want to also include the other 30% (Apple, Kobo, Smashwords, Barnes and Noble, etc.) then the easiest way I found was to create an account on Draft2Digital. They are an aggregator and will publish it everywhere including Amazon. Their service costs nothing but they take 10% of your royalties. (10% of nothing is still nothing!). The only gotcha I could see with these guys was that you cannot enroll in the Amazon Kindle unlimited or Prime, but if you do this then you cannot release your book on the other platforms anyway. The DOCX to ePub converter in Draft2Digital is also pretty good and its output file can be downloaded and used as the source for your Kindle KDP book. (2026 Update: D2D Changed their policy to charge $12/year this may be higher or lower as you read this. Your call, I dumped them as my books were on sale for $0)
9. Again, really, really work on your cover, blurb and keep the category generic and cover/blurb as close to the subject of the book as possible. I cannot emphasise this enough as I seriously screwed up here, and your first entry in the market really needs to shine.

Note that eBooks are only around 10% of the book market so making the next step to printed book is a good idea and again there is no cost, they just print on demand and take the printing cost out of the sale price, I made a few editing passes after feedback from readers before I went this option as it is harder to change a printed copy. Note printed books make good Christmas presents and look awesome on you bookshelf!

On whatever publishing platform you use, you are going to have to think up your short blurb, keywords and categories you want the book to appear in. Best to do this early as doing it at the last possible moment will ultimately lead you to pick some last-minute rubbish with silly search terms and half cut off description (like I did). Luckily as an eBook I was able to edit it later when my brain started working again.

Optional also, (but cool!) add publisher to the list of services your business offers. It’s only a few changes to your web site and voila you are a publisher; makes you look bigger and more professional!

Don’t Give Up Your Day Job!

Then comes reality. Nobody is going to ever read your book as they are never going to find your book on amazon.com or any of the other platforms out there. I think the statistic I saw was that almost seven thousand new books are published every day, and your masterpiece will probably languish on page four hundred of your target eBook buyers search list forever unless you are an established author or pay money to promote it. There is a great meme I recently saw which sums this all up perfectly.

I wonder how many authors start writing before finding this out and I now wonder how many awesome novels I have missed because of stupid algorithms forever excluding them. (Please Amazon, B&N, Smashwords etc. Add a search filter for books that have not been rated yet!). I did not promote my book, nor mention it much except in passing comments to friends and family. Don’t get me wrong, I really want people to read it, I just don’t want them all to be friends and family.

The algorithm (that shit piece of software that tries to read your mind and recommend your next movie, song or book read) thrives on reviews and star ratings so if you have a following or lots of friends and family I would suggest sucking up your pride and asking them to leave reviews. I did not and still have no reviews so as the years go by it will get to a point where it wont just not be recommended, but it will be difficult to even find. As an author you will come to hate it and everything to do with marketing/promotion. I threw the towel in early and made my books free.

So today, even when I search for my title or author directly (it doesn’t help being called Boz!) my book was still on page two or three of the search results.

Then how do you price it? Free and well people may think its trash (it may be!) but too expensive and nobody is going to ever buy it (assuming they can find it of course!) anyway it is priced at $3.99 $0.99 (Note hot tip, if a book is $0.99 on Kindle it might be free on the other sites as Kindle charges $0.99 minimum).

Another option as I finally did in 2025 was to create a Ko-Fi account and have it downloadable from there at a price the reader wants to pay, this means they can read the book for free and (if they like it) can then make a donation by clicking a “Buy me a coffee” button. See example Here.

A few more observations/tips:

1. Don’t write long books until you’re famous! (Lots of reasons)
2. Get your categories correct. Genre readers are really finicky and will punish you on the reviews, people who read romance, generally hate sci-fi or horror and vice-versa, so err on the side of caution if you’re doing this for $$$.
3. Put some action at the beginning. All the book sellers have the equivalent of the Kindle “send a sample” which lots of people use to judge if it’s a good book. Unfortunately, mine doesn’t really get going until about fifteen percent in, it’s more setting up and character building up until then.
4. Don’t, don’t, don’t ever use the real name of someone you know, and even if the name is different and the character is 90% based on someone, they will think it is them. Feel free to use mannerisms of actors or other fictional character, but no, nobody I know is a character in my book nor will they ever be.
5. Shout out to AI for letting me design my book cover for free, even if it is only to give your favourite artist/illustrator an idea of what you want. I would love to have paid somebody to do this, and if I ever get famous and need a new cover I certainly will.
6. Plots age! I really wish I had set my first book in a completely separate universe. The plot feels perfect as of 2024/2025, but I dread to think how dated and laughable it will look in a few years.

So, has it put me off writing another book? definitely not, but it will stay a part time endeavor and it looks like I won’t be giving up my day job and will still be programming for a few more years.

I am also happy to discus my mistakes with any fellow writer who will listen over a beer or a coffee, I know you’re out there..

External links

Don’t give up your day job to become an author | Hacker News (ycombinator.com)

NaNoWriMo: National Novel Writing Month | Hacker News (ycombinator.com)

Pen Pinery – Home – More good information for aspiring Authors