Are you one of the more than 300,000 people who participated in National Novel Writing Month in November? If so, you may now have more than 50,000 words of novel that you didn’t have before. So the question becomes: what next?
Fortunately, the official NaNoWriMo website provides a variety of resources for helping new novelists through what they call the “Now What?” Months of January and February. While November may be National Novel Writing Month, January and February, for many NaNo participants, may as well be National Revision and Publication Months.
Ask any writer: The revision process is every bit as important as the writing process. There’s a saying in cinema that the movie happens in the editing room, and that’s true for many writers, as well. Revisions are more than a time to cut out dead wood or tighten up sentences. They’re the place where themes that you may not have even been aware of before suddenly become apparent, and often the novel or story that you had when you started revising may bear very little resemblance to the one you have when you’ve finished.
Many writers benefit from writing groups, or other writers online who are willing to look over their work and make suggestions, offer critiques, notice typos, and otherwise catch the stuff that the author may have missed. It doesn’t matter if you’re a first-time writer or a New York Times bestseller, you’ll always benefit from another pair of eyes looking over your work.
Once you get past revisions and your novel is as polished as it’s going to get, the next step is getting it published. For most people, this means shopping it around to agents. Some people choose to self-publish their novels instead, or to take other routes to publication, but for most first-time novelists, an agent is the first step on the path to that much-sought-after contract and, with it, a newly-published novel.
Whatever road your new novel takes to ultimately finding a home, when it does, you want to make sure that it has every opportunity for success. After all, a novel is a lot of hard work, and by the time it sees publication, chances are you’ll have put a lot more time and energy into it than whatever it took you to write it in the first place—whether that was a month or a year or longer—so you want it to do well.
So whether you’re a first time novelist who just finished your first NaNo novel, or an established author with dozens of books under your belt, don’t forget the importance of a good author website to the success of your next book, and let Clockpunk Studios help make sure you have the best one you can get.