Publishing Fiction on HubPages

This Hub is about what I have learned about writing in general, and specifically what I have learned about writing fiction for HubPages.

Your situation is inevitably different from mine, but I am sure there are some sililarities in our positions and ambitions. To help explain my perspective I will give a brief history of how I came to publish fiction on HubPages.

In common with many people I had long dreamed of writing a book. I entertained fantasies of hitting the best-seller list, appearing on daytime television, buying a Prada dress to wear at book signing events and generally living the life of Riley.

The chief difficulty was that I actually had to write something before anything could happen. I had a full time job with long hours, plus a family. My list of excuses was longer than my catalogue of dreams.

Then I literally had a dream, one so vivid that I kept thinking about it during the following day. The next night, I had the same dream.

As far as I could recall, that had never happened to me before (or since).

In the dream I was seated at a restaurant table waiting to be served. The table was by a window, with a view of tree lined square and an ancient cathedral. An Elvis Presley record was playing, and I knew that there was about to be a firework display outside. I also knew that the restaurant was called "Respect for the King."

When I woke and tried to analyse the dream I was puzzled. The cathedral was real and at one time I had lived close to it. But I had never been in a restaurant in that location, and as far as I was aware such a restaurant had never existed.

I came to believe that the dream was a gift and that I should write a novel drawing on the dream. I would make up the story of how the restaurant came into existence.

As soon as I reached this decision, I started writing in the evening after a day at work. I set aside 45 minutes every evening and pushed myself to carry on.

I knew that my own ambition could peter out and that I would need an external driver. I emailed the first parts of the story to my daughter, who was at the time a University student living a long way from home.

As I had hoped, she enjoyed the story and urged me to produce further installments.

The end of my career in paid employment came to an end more sooner than I had expected, so it turned out that I finished working before completing the novel.

I tried to view this as an opportunity and rushed to finish my masterpiece.

I researched publishing agents and sent off the initial chapter to those that I thought might be interested. All of them rejected it.

Thinking that I might need to make some revisions, I asked an acquaintance who is an avid reader to cast a critical eye over the manuscript. I chose this person because I knew that she would not see any need to avoid hurting my feelings. On that score she did not disappoint: she said that reading my novel was about as exciting as watching paint dry.

This was discouraging but I still felt an urge to write. Perhaps fiction was not going to bring me the results of my dreams, but I could try my hand at non-fiction.

One piece of well known advice is to write about what you know. I ignored that advice in developing the plot of "Respect for the King". I have never worked in a cafe or restaurant so I found it difficult to writing convincing descriptions of the physical challenges of standing up all day, or cooking in a hot kitchen. Worse, I had little knowledge of Elvis Presley and one of the key characters was a big fan, so I had to carry out hours of research.

So I tried to think about what I did know about, and came up with clothes and style in general.

I knew that I was too old to start a career as a fashion writer and tried to think what other avenues might be open for a middle-aged aspiring style journalist. The idea came to me that I could have my own website, and make it into an online magazine.

The major drawback was that I had no idea of how to put together a website, or get it onto the Interneet.

One day I went for a long walk with my friend Tricia and told her my idea. She replied that this was an amazing conincidence because she was also thinking of creating a website. Tricia is very practical and full of confidence. She volunteered to work out how to move from the idea to the reality.

We launched our website Looklovely.net on 1st January 2007.

Once Looklovely.net was up and running, Tricia said that we must establish an Internet presence. This was a new concept to me, but she was quite certain that the website would not succeed without more dedicated work.

Late one evening I received a text message from Tricia with the news that we were now members of the HubPages community.

Our first Hubs were based on articles that we had written for the website, but had decided not to use for one reason or another. I remember collaborating on a quiz called "Are You a Couch Potato", then finding that we couldn't master the technical issues required to make it work. However, there was a suitable HubPages capsule, and we adapted it for HubPages. It didn't succeed as a Hub, but that taught us a lesson about what works and what doesn't.

Eventually we decided that we would focus on two objectives in writing Hubs. We would test a range of topics to work out what was worth researching in depth for our website, and secondly we would use HubPages as a medium for publishing articles on subjects that did not fit the theme of Looklovely.net.

Meanwhile, Tricia kept saying that she was concerned that the website had diverted me from my novel.

I still felt affection for the characters I had created and felt that I had abandoned them. So I went back to the manuscript and started to edit and redraft.

When I felt that the prose had been improved I decided to break the novel into segments of about 1500 words and publish it as a series of Hubs. My novel is still on HubPages as the "Respect for the King" series.

1. Many members of the HubPages community are very supportive and helpful. A few wonderful people read every single installment and made comments on most of them. Almost all of the comments I received were positive and I now feel about 100 times happier about my writing.

The lesson is that HubPages can make you a happier writer.

2. When publishing a story as a series of Hubs you need to help readers. I tried to bear in mind that some people might have a time gap between reading episodes of my novel. Each of my "Respect for the King" Hubs includes a capsule with the 'cast of characters', plus a brief synopsis of the previous episode.

I used the linking feature that enables readers to easily move from one Hub to the next in the series.

3. The Internet (and HubPages) offers facilities that are not easily or freely available in printed matter. For example, illustrations make a book quite costly to produce, but photos can be added to a Hub. I included a photo with each episode. All of these were my own work.

When I wrote "Respect for the King" I gave each chapter the title of a song that had been recorded by Elvis Presley, as one of the central characters is an Elvis fan. When I was writing I could hear the songs in my head, and I wanted to share this experience with the reader. I included video clips to remind readers of the songs.

4. If you are publishing a long story or novel in serial form, each episode should end in such a way that the reader really wants to know what will happen next.

I don't think I really achieved this because I did not write the novel as a series of episodes. However, I think it is generally a good discipline as it maintains momentum in the narrative.

If I ever write another novel I will try to write in chunks of approximately 1500 words and make each one build to a small climax and teaser for the next event in the story.

5. Don't expect to make money from publishing fiction on HubPages. I suppose a very clever writer could include subliminal advertising and persuade readers to buy products, but that is beyond my abilities. Many of the episodes of "Respect for the King" drew Google Ads for Elvis impersonators. This amused me and I felt that it provided a sympathetic ambiance for the story. However, it did not produce any income because a person searching for an Elvis impersonator would probably go straight to relevant websites without getting diverted into reading a story.

In my experience the main benefit of publishing fiction on HubPages is that it can make you a better writer. If you are as fortunate as me, other Hubbers will tell you what they like about what you have written, and you can then build on your strengths. A few may tell you what they don't like - view that as helpful feedback and use it to improve your writing.