How many books did you write before you got published?

When I first started writing novels, I did some research about publishing. I read one author’s blog post that said that they wrote six novels before getting one published. The prospect was daunting. I had written two novels and it was so much work. Two was hard enough!

At a writer’s festival recently, I was asked how many books I wrote before getting one published. The answer is ten, much more than the six I was dreading having to write. I think that because we only see an author’s successes and published works, we often don’t realise how much work comes first.

Of course, some people get the first book they ever wrote published straight away. This is just my own experience.

These are the novels/novellas I have written:

2009 — The Story of Benjamin Bell
2010 — Simon and Will
2011 — Ida
2012 — The Revengers
2013 — Highway Bodies
2014 — Long Macchiatos and Monsters, Highway Bodies
2015 — We Go Forward, Lucy (first 25,000 words)
2016 — Spooky Hills Story
2017 — Euphoria Kids
2018 — Sky Runners (first 30,000 words)
2019 — Spooky Hills Story (major redraft), unnamed middle-grade book (co-written)

And these are the novels/novellas I got published:

2015 — Long Macchiatos and Monsters
2016 — We Go Forward
2017 — Ida
2019 — Highway Bodies
2020 — Euphoria Kids

Long Macchiatos and Monsters is a novella I wrote quickly after a callout by Less Than Three Press (RIP) for stories about trans geeks. Later on they also had a callout for books featuring asexual and aromantic characters, so I wrote We Go Forward for that.

These two are new adult fiction, I suppose. But every other novel I have written has been YA , and that’s where my heart is, so I’m mostly going to be talking about them.

Ida was the first book I got published, and it took six years. I wrote the first draft in 2011, then started submitting it to publishers in 2013 after several redrafts. I stopped after a few rejections. I remember thinking: what’s going on? Why don’t people like it?

I rewrote it into first person, then sent it to Echo Publishing in 2016. They published it the year after.

Highway Bodies, my second YA book, is on the list twice — 2013 and 2014. That’s because I initially wrote 50,000 words of two POV characters and thought the story was done, but in 2014, I decided to add a third POV and an extra 38,000 words.

I sent it to Echo in 2018, and it was published in 2019.

Euphoria Kids, my third YA book, will be published in 2020. I wrote the first draft not too long ago, in 2017. This is, so far, the smallest gap between writing and publishing of my YA books.

By the time my first book was out, I had already honed my craft a lot, I knew my voice, and I was confident in my own writing. Some people might find the idea of writing ten books before getting one published daunting, but if Ida was picked up in 2012, the year after I wrote it, I don’t think I would have been nearly ready enough for this process.

Everyone’s journey is different, writing is a strange craft, and publishing is an even weirder beast.

The TL;DR of this post is basically, don’t worry that you didn’t get your first book published. Just keep going.

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