Begin your novel with a blast – and keep blasting

Many freelance writers are closet novelists. To make their daily bread, they write copy for businesses, articles for magazines, or technical manuals.

Secretly, they’re working on a novel.

The challenge with turning a novel into cash is that it takes time. Let’s say you complete your novel in January 2007. The novel does the rounds of agents and publishers throughout 2007. You get a publishing contract ( oh happy day!) and half of the (tiny) advance in March of 2008. You work on editorial revisions through the rest of 2008. Your novel is slated for publication in late 2009, at which time you get the rest of the advance. (Publishers being who they are, you actually get the rest of the advance mid-way through 2010.)

So, the saga of getting PAID for a novel is a long one. We won’t even discuss royalties – most novelists should be so lucky.

The above scenario is the BEST result you can hope for with a novel, believe it or not. The usual result is that your novel’s partial (three chapters and an outline) does the rounds of agents and publishers for three years, finally languishing for 15 months at one publishing house, before the editor who expressed interest leaves. The new editor can’t find the manuscript…

Begin your novel with a BLAST
Go over to your bookshelves and pick up five bestsellers. Read the first page of each.

You’ll find that you’re pulled into the story immediately. SOMETHING happens. Even if there’s no overt conflict – no one gets killed – there’s a suggestion of conflict. Conflict is the key to a novel which sells, and the conflict has to be built into the novel from the very first page.

Focus on CONFLICT in your novel, and you increase your chances of selling it.

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