by Chris Harris

It’s the New Year, 2026 and I’ve been looking at what I’ve been doing and what I want to do next, I keep coming back to a simple thought. This blogging is easy and very satisfactory.

My two blogs are going well, my main blog very well, and I can genuinely see myself doing this forever, happily, with no great angst about whether it adds up to something bigger. For a long time I’ve assumed blogging could be my sole writing endeavour and I’d be perfectly content with that. It is something that works well with my business, that I can write ten blogs in a week or one. I can get the sites designed properly and the number of views monthly js rising in a highly satisfactory tangent. Yup, it fits me very well.

The book of short stories has been a labour of love, anyone can blog, not everyone can write a good book, albeit, at the moment just short stories.

Eight stories, finished with Louise halfway through editing them. I started writing the second book, the first story of which I have to admit it’s probably better than the other eight. Which is mildly frustrating in the way writing often is. When you write your first book of short stories, the work tends to get progressively better. You learn as you go. You get sharper. You stop doing some of the clunkier things. You become more confident about what you’re trying to say and how you want to say it.

So you end up facing this slightly awkward scenario: the second book is probably going to be better than the first, yet you’re creating your first book, trying to get it out there, trying to get someone to eventually take note. There’s always the fear, isn’t there, that you’ll run yourself into the ground trying to make the first thing happen, when it turns out the second , thing might have been the one that landed, the one that someone actually said yes to.

Part of you thinks you should rewrite it all, but then part of you thinks of all of those great first albums from your old favourite bands and how that initial rawness and simplicity, before they developed and matured, was what got you into them in the first place and was their defining sound.

So, over Christmas, I decided to stop the second collection of stories, add the ninth to the first book, ‘Ordinary Lives, Extraordinary Messes’ and concentrate on writing my own first proper novel and also focus on getting book one finished and punted out to publishers and TV and Film companies.

My first proper novel, a satire on a non league football club in the same village my short stories is in,  Denham Phoenix FC, is coming along nicely. Very nicely. I’m writing it in weekly instalments and blogging it, and it’s set around. I’ve managed to curate roughly 2,000 words per week for the serialisation. That may not sound like much, but it’s been a huge thing for me because it means I’ve shown the discipline. It all needs pulling together better and shaping once the first run is done, but as things stand I’ve got about the first quarter of that second novel sitting there, written and banked, and that feels like a genuine achievement.

Christmas was a bit of an eye-opener in other ways too. On Monday morning, I went to meet Louise, and we did what we usually do: caught up on how the editing was going, talked through the plan. The general plan had originally been that once the editing was finished; I’d self-publish the short story book.

But over Christmas I started researching properly and discovered something that changes the order of everything.

Publishers, generally speaking, don’t want to consider something that has already been published, even if it’s only been self-published. If you’ve put it out there, you’ve used up the “first publishing” moment. You’ve taken away part of what they’re buying. So the original plan—finish edits, artwork and self-publish, and see what happens, starts to look like the wrong way round.

The new logic is almost the reverse. Try the traditional route first, punt out to publishers first, If there’s no joy, then self-publish.

I’ve also been reminding myself of what I already know, even if I don’t particularly enjoy it: if you’re going to approach somewhere like HarperCollins, you need a literary agent to get your foot through the door. Not that HarperCollins is remotely in my league, but the point stands. Big publishing is designed to be gated, and the gatekeepers tend to want their gatekeepers. That’s how it stays big.

What’s been more interesting, though, is discovering the scale of the independent publishing world. There are, from what I can gather, something like 2,000 independent publishers in the UK alone. A large chunk of them won’t be interested in what I do because my work doesn’t neatly match the big genre lanes. There’s no romance. No sci-fi. No fantasy. If a publisher is built around those markets, then I’m not their person and that’s fine.

But a good number of independents do take submissions, and some will accept material directly. I can send them my work for consideration, and it’s at least a path. It may be a slim path, but it’s a path.

I’ve even done the modern thing and stuck the material through ChatGPT to see what it makes of it in terms of likelihood. It thinks there’s an average chance 35-50% which I’ll embrace with open arms. It also floats “high chance” in places, but I’m not hanging my hopes on a robot’s optimism.

The same goes for film, TV, and radio. We’ve been following the suggestion to send material out to those outlets too, and again the broad message comes back that the sort of thing I’m writing is “match fit” for those mediums at the moment. That doesn’t mean anything will happen. It doesn’t mean anyone will read it. It doesn’t mean someone won’t roll their eyes and delete it within five seconds.

Because getting your foot through the door in that world looks almost impossible. It’s gatekeeping on top of gatekeeping, and the volume of people trying is enormous.

But we did find something useful: some companies who accept unsolicited material. In other words, they have enough foresight to recognise that there’s a lot of talent out there, people with ideas and scripts and stories, who simply don’t have the time, energy, money, or inclination to play the full industry game of making everything “solicited”, packaged, introduced, championed, and networked into existence.

And I’m absolutely one of those people. Not necessarily one of the talents, but certainly one of the people who hasn’t got the time or appetite to spend years trying to position myself into someone’s neat, little package. I have a life. I have a business. I have other writing. I need to pick my battles and allocate my time properly.

I also don’t want to become one of those people who are remorselessly chasing fame and fortune, only to be slowly hollowed out by rejection. Not because rejection scares me, I’m not interested in living like that.

And, in truth, rejection doesn’t bother me at all. I’ve built up plenty of those in life over the years, and I have enough going on in my life that I’m not emotionally dependent on someone in publishing or television saying yes. If it happens, great. If it doesn’t, I still have the work. I still have the writing. I still have blogging, which I actually enjoy.

This is simply a punt. I’m giving it a go. I have no illusions that any of it “deserves” to be published or made into anything. But I’ve always been someone who likes to try.

And if nothing else comes of it, I’ll still be where I started: in winter, in 2026, sitting down to write, happy enough to be a blogger.

Writing My First Book. A Diary. Episode 13: Christmas Update: From Writing to Trying to Get Read

by Chris Harris

It’s Christmas time. It’s boring. So far, all of the writing exercises I planned to do over Christmas have completely failed to materialise. It is the 28^th, and I have 90% of next week off, so I plan to regroup and get my act together.

However, I have managed to input all of my stories into AI and ask for ideas on how I might begin marketing my book. The most surprising answer I got back was that I should be sending it to film, radio and television production companies.

I asked why. The AI’s reply was basically: because the themes you’re writing about are exactly the kind of material film and television are looking for right now.

So naturally, you go to the pub. You have a drink. You start thinking and dreaming about which famous actor is going to play which character in your book. Then of course, in the cold light of day you ask: how the hell do I do that? Suddenly, your alcohol induced visions turn to dust, because you realise the absolute nightmare is just getting anyone to even look at it.

I’ll be publishing an accompanying blog on this particular angle of trying to get discovered, the link will be at the bottom of the page, explaining the (depressing) system better, and why it’s actually quite crazy.

The Problem with a Writing Diary.

Now, I’m going to hold my hands up here and admit something.

This blog, the one you’re reading now, was originally intended for the purposes of content creation about my writing journey.

I have a very successful blog on my other interests. But the likes to views ratio on this one, The Novice Novelist, is… well… off the scale successful. Or at least, it would be, if more people bothered reading it!

And it’s pretty obvious why many people aren’t.

Because the truth is: writing a diary about writing a book isn’t actually that interesting.

It’s vaguely interesting in places. Sometimes, yes. But frankly, there’s just not a lot you can write about. Your thought processes and your internal debates aren’t always fascinating, not even to you, half the time.

But when I started reading the AI material about how you actually get your work seen and read, I realised something: This is the real challenge, and actually, this is where the diary might finally become interesting, because anyone can write a book, but not everyone can get it read by lots of people. That is what I’m aiming to do.

By the way, the irony isn’t lost on me. In my earlier “writing a book” diaries I was espousing the view that I was just going to write for the enjoyment of it, as a hobby, but as the final stories drip in and my nearest and dearest read them, the feedback has been surprisingly excellent. With that encouragement comes confidence… perhaps slightly ill-placed, but confidence all the same. I suppose, as with everything I’ve done in my life, I always want to strive for a high standard, and validation for a high standard tends to come from success. I’m not saying I’m good enough to be successful, not at all, but I am saying I’m going to give it a proper go.

The New Year Plan: Ten Hours a Week to Market It

So, with the new year coming and with the time now arriving for me to actually try and find an audience, this is where the blog diary should begin to heat up. Because it looks like it’s going to be a very long and challenging process.

I’m juggling a ridiculous amount already: maintaining two blogs, three books on the go, and I’m about to publish Issue 21 of my football fanzine. I’m creating a hell of a lot of content, but not enough people are reading it. So I have to find the time and the headspace to attempt to market my work properly.

I feel slightly daunted by it, because it involves joining and excelling on platforms and social media, which are all things I don’t enjoy and am pretty hopeless at, which needs to change, and yup, easier said than done, especially when my efforts so far have been dire. But I think if I can change my attitude from seeing it as a drag to seeing it as an exciting process, then I might be able to switch that around.

I know that from next year I probably need to find ten hours a week to start marketing my work properly.

The truth is, as my editor keeps saying, my output is prolific. Producing the content is easy for me. The speed I write at is fast, and what I think I’ve mastered this year is the ability to create a lot of high-quality work quickly.

So while I haven’t marketed it as well as I’d like, I have established something important, I can create the content, which is undoubtedly the most challenging part by far. Perfection, of course, is being able to make excellent content and get people to notice. That’s where I’m clearly failing now. So that’s my Christmas update.

And here is the link to what I think is a crazy scenario about trying to get your content seen by TV, film and radio.

I can guarantee here and now that this diary will start to heat up as I begin trying to make this work, with what will hopefully be some successes, and what will definitely be a huge number of failures. But I’m also aware this is probably going to be a two-year process to establish myself properly.

So if nothing else… at least I’ll have plenty to write about!

#WritingABook #ContentCreation #NoviceNovelist #WritingFiction #WritingForDummies