In a word – a lot.
A good story with a believable plot and compelling characters is the baseline. But there’s more.
You’re the reader. You’ve parted with some money to buy my book and while I appreciate that, it’s not the most important thing. When you open the book and start reading, you’re ready to spend twenty hours of your life reading my story.
To me, that is the ultimate commitment. You will never get that twenty hours back. It’s a block of time you could have spent in a thousand other ways, but you gave that bit of your life to me. So, I owe you the best book I can write.
Which means it’s not the first draft. I write fast, and while the story arc is there it’s not a finished product. One is Evil went through five iterations of editing, every time getting tighter and faster. I cut sixty pages, sharpened the dialogue, and hacked out any descriptions that weren’t totally necessary.
It’s painful, believe me. It’s not like I wrote the first draft thinking it was terrible and needed a ton of work. I did my best at the time, then set it aside for a while before going back and taking a second look. Then I rewrote it and handed it off to my editor, thinking it would require minimal changes.
Oh, I must have been dreaming.
What I got back was a sea of red ink that took me two months to fix. Entire sections that I thought were great ended up on the cutting room floor. There were a lot of times when I felt physically sick looking at the firestorm of red on the pages.
But here’s the thing. I stuck with it and listened to my editor, fixed the manuscript and then handed it back to her. Done – finished. A masterpiece.
Wrong again. More red ink, more heartache. Three times we did this dance, then it got the green light and went to my proofreaders. Even then they found inconsistencies and grammatical errors. And I fixed them.
Then there’s the cover – thank goodness for Lance Buckley and his incredible talent. But even Lance doesn’t get it right the first time and there’s plenty of back and forth.
Book descriptions, metadata, keywords and so much more. You, the reader, need to know the book exists. Without all this (and more), there’s no connection between you and me.
That’s what is required to get one book on the market. I have twenty-one written and in various stages of this process.
This, I think, is what an author owes the reader.
