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5 Hard Lessons Before You Write a Book

Harry Lang
3 min readOct 8, 2024

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I’ve been working on the research and premise for a new novel for a few months now.

Books are hard.
I can pump out short form articles, posts and White Papers no problem, but put the word count above 10,000, and I suddenly disappear down every rabbit hole imaginable.

Here are the 5 things I learnt (from painful experience) writing my first two novels (and my non-fiction marketing book ‘Brands, Bandwagons & Bullsh*t’):-

🖊️ In my first book, Parabolic, I did minimal pre-planning of the characters, focussing on the narratve arc instead. That was a BIG mistake. Characters ARE the storymakers. They take ALOT of work to come across as convincing, compelling and likeable (or hateable — both work).

🖊️ Writing a book for you is fine. You won’t get an agent, which means you won’t get a publisher, which means nobody will ever read it, but it’s fine. It’s a cathartic and enjoyable process, but if you want to sell even 1 copy, you need to identify your audience and write for them from word # 1. For my second book — ‘Try Morality’ — I ignored this, which was fine. I enjoyed the process, created a bunch of short stories tied together by a common thread and self published it. It’s sold under 50 copies to date, which is more than it deserves.

🖊️ Define you motives — don’t write a book because you ‘want to be an author’ and DEFINITELY don’t write one ‘to make money’. The former means you just like the idea of being known as writer…

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Harry Lang
Harry Lang

Written by Harry Lang

I'm a UK based CMO and author of 'Brands, Bandwagons & Bullshit' - a guidebook for young people about how marketing, advertising, media and PR work.

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