One writer's path to the first novel

What a surprise—last night I got a note from an old roommate at Columbia, Richard Beeson, whom I hadn't heard from in many years. He told me about the long, roundabout path he had to take to his first novel, Seduction of a Wanton Dreamer, and I thought it might be of interest to other writers:

I was so immersed in the music business that I had little time for anything else. I did keep trying to do my own writing (the reason I went to Columbia in the first place), but an opera job at Lincoln Center is all-consuming. 

I became orchestra manager at NYC Opera, thinking that would give me more free time. Big miscalculation. I started this book in 1988, the year after I became orchestra manager, and managed to finish the first part (which I thought then was the whole book) in 1991, but it didn't fly. 

I kept puttering with it, but simply didn't have the time to do it justice, until finally in late 1999 I bailed out of the job and "retired" as of Feb. 2000. Then I spent a year or so going through all my notes, including all the dreams I had logged. I even made a database of them.

Slowly I managed to formulate the plot and characters for the rest of the tale. I began to think of it as a many-book series, probably seven. When I had finished 3, I found an agent, but after a few months she said she didn't know what to do with them. She suggested I write a mystery instead (based on some of the material in the big books).

I did that, and had just finished it, when I was diagnosed with the big C, head and neck, stage 4. (This was in early 2004.) I managed to come back from that, but the experience changed my whole approach to my writing. 

I left that agent and spent the next 4 years rewriting the big book into one book comprising three parts. Also rewrote the "mystery," making it a thriller. I found a team of agents who were willing to represent the thriller, but they didn't even want to look at the book that really mattered. After a year, they gave up on the thriller.

At that point, I said to hell with it, I might as well self-publish. I had always been loath to follow that route, but the way the publishing industry was going, and given my age, I didn't think I had much choice. It could take me another five years to find an agent for a weird book like Seduction, and how many more years for the agent to find the publisher, etc. etc. This way it took less than a year to get the book "on the shelf," as it were. Also got to design my own cover, which I couldn't have done otherwise.

So now it's out, and in a few months I'll bring out the thriller.

Of course I'm delighted that Richard's brought out his book, especially after so many years, and I wish him every success with it. 

Like Richard, I long considered self-publication a racket—and it was, in the days of the vanity presses. But it is now possible to come to a businesslike deal with an electronic print-on-demand publisher that gets your work out there, on however modest a scale. If you've got any kind of knack for business and marketing, you should at least be able to get your investment back. 

If the book does sell pretty well under your own imprint, you may even be able to interest a commercial publisher in becoming its distributor. That could give you access to markets you could never reach while pitching it to booksellers with your car trunk full of copies.

As with Richard, determination is the key factor.