The laziest author in the world

My (kindly) 12-year-old daughter’s two favourite insults for me at the moment are:

“You’re lucky! You remember the dinosaurs.”

“You’re famous! You’re the before photo in a men’s fitness magazine.”

On the latter – hmph. I’m a man of steel, and have the blood results to prove it. On the former? Well, yes, I’ve kicked around a lot longer than my 12-year-old know-it-all, and it IS true that back in the day, getting published involved this:

Step 1                  Write an excellent book

Step 2                  Buy a physical (!) directory of agents. Pick some names at random.

Step 3                  Send a submission pack out. Wait. Then either win or lose

There was not meaningfully a self-pub option. There was no meaningful self-pub option.” Absolutely no one thought I should have a Twitter profile or a website or anything of the sort. My job description was: Write good books and (a long, long way short of that requirement) Be available for 2 weeks of publicity around launch, though even then most books got no publicity at all, so for a lot of authors, that requirement was rather easily met.

And these days?

Well, the list of requirements can seem endless.

Twitter. Insta. Facebook. BookTok.

Mailing lists, reader magnets, Bookfunnel, autoresponders.

Marketing plans.

If you’re self-pubbing, then the list gets more extensive yet. Facebook ads. Amazon ads. Amazon attribution. Canva. Dashboards. Image libraries. Promo sites. Newsletter swaps.

I’ve not even touched the edge of what people are told they ought to do.

So – and here roareth the dinosaur – what’s actually the least you can get away with? How much of this stuff is really necessary and how much is just a breathless Internet trying to eat your life?

The answer depends, of course, on whether you’re trad or self-pub, the requirements for the latter being significantly greater.

The lazy trad author

You need to write a really excellent book. No shortcuts there. Not with book #1 and never afterwards.

When you’re starting out, you are likely to want / need a course to build your skills and a manuscript assessment to develop your manuscript itself (and also for a basic reality check in terms of quality.)

Obviously, we sell those good things, so I’m hardly unbiased, but I think it’s a rare author who engages seriously with a good course or manuscript feedback who doesn’t come out much improved as a result. I’m not saying that these things are essential – just that most of you will find them very useful.

You also need a competent submission pack: a query letter to 10-12 well-chosen literary agents, a good synopsis, 10,000 (ish) words of good opening chapter.

Because the knowledge of how to do these things competently is much more widely disseminated now, I’d say the basic quality standard has certainly risen. It’s harder, these days, to get an agent with a lousy query than it was. Even so: what matters is the book. The rest of it is still not crucial.

And …?

And nothing. No Twitter account? I don’t care. No FB, no Insta, no stupid TikTok? Fine, I don’t care. Agents won’t either.

No mailing list? Well, I’d advise you to have one, but you can always do that later and it’s a good-to-have. It’s not essential. It’s certainly not something you need

Website? Well, yes, you should probably have one, but I don’t care if it’s one page long and not very informative. If you spend one afternoon on Squarespace, you’ll do fine.

Yes, publishers would love you to have a YouTube channel with 1,000,000+ views in the last year, but who cares? What matters is the book, the book, the book, the book. It’s not really a secret that lots of authors are introverts who love marketing as much as they love pushing plastic picnic forks into their toes, and publishers are happy to work with said introverts. It’s the book that matters.

These days, honestly, the chores facing the Modern Lazy Author (Trad variety) are not really more onerous than they were 20+ years ago.

The Somewhat Lazy Indie Author

You can’t actually be a lazy indie author – or, rather, you can: you’ll just be one with rather modest book sales.

So the things you need to look after are:

A splendid book. You can’t sell rubbish. The book still matters most, most, most.

A copy edit. I don’t mind if you seek out low budget options (a very picky friend, for example), but you can’t sell a badly edited book these days. I do honestly think that a manuscript assessment will help almost any first time indie author, simply because quality is the overwhelming objective here

A book cover: hire a pro. Spend what you need. Fuss over this. Get it right.

A website: keying off that book cover in terms of look and with a really good, functional newsletter signup page. Again, half a day on a popular website builder is plenty.

A mailing list. You can’t not do this. You need a reader magnet, a mailing list provider (I suggest MailerLite) and a delivery service (Bookfunnel; there’s no real contest here.)

Use of book promo sites around launch. This is simple. An hour or two is all you need.

A Facebook author page. I don’t mind much how inert it is. Busy and popular is better, of course, but I don’t bother and I do fine.

Facebook ads that work. Setting your system up takes time, but after that simply monitoring those ads should take only about an hour a week. Less is actually more here: too much tinkering will impair, not improve, performance.

Amazon ads are, in my view, kinda optional – and they only really work when everything else is humming. So for the Lazy Author scoping out what lies immediately ahead, I’d say that AA isn’t something to worry about for now.

That feels like a long and arduous list, but you note that I don’t ask you to engage with social media at all (except via ads.) And most of that list involves set-up chores, not maintenance chores. If you want to maintain that lot with 1 hour a week (Facebook) + 3 hours a month (mailing list) + 2 weeks of work around launch, then that’s genuinely plenty. Write a great book, then write another and another and another. Keep the marketing stuff low demand. That’s a plan that works just fine.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / Opening page

OK, an oldie but a goodie.

First 250-300 words of your book please. Minimal intro about what we’re about to read. (Give us a title and a genre, but nothing else.) When we read this opening, I want feedbackers to put themselves in the place of an agent. Your questions are: “Would I read more of this? Am I excited? Do I feel this writer has authority, that I trust them to tell this story?”

That’s the mission. Any questions? No? Then go for it. Post in Townhouse here.

Til soon.

Harry