What I learned about writing by finishing a whole-ass book series

Kpopalypse is back with another post to help out those aspiring authors out there!

Caonimas have probably noticed that recently I finished writing and publishing the entire Shin Hana series of four books. I already have posts about how to write and edit a book, and also how to publish a book, but I’ve picked up a bunch of new knowledge in the process of making an entire book series. This post has all the new information that I’ve uncovered – read on and enjoy!

Thing Kpopalypse learned by writing a whole-ass book series #1 – keep lists for continuity

For a simple short story, keeping track of all the characters is easy. It’s not so easy for an entire series, with dozens of characters in it. You don’t have to create an entire Excel spreadsheet before writing, I wouldn’t make a lack of planning stop you from getting started writing your epic story. It’s fine to just start writing straight off the top of your head if that’s the way you like to write (I personally do), but it’s important to keep notes and track of each character that you introduce to the story as you go. Every time a new character appears, write them down. For each chapter I wrote I’d have some very basic scratch notes, so I could remember who came in when:

And I’d also maintain a list of characters overall plus any other details that I had trouble remembering, or needed to refer to a lot when writing, like which order the girls would prefer to line up in, or their schedule during the day, etc:

This isn’t even the complete list of stuff, readers will notice some characters missing. For unnamed characters I wouldn’t bother to list them, but every time I’d name a character in the actual story itself (either first name or full name) they would go in the list of people, even if I only ended up using that character once.

As each book wound to a close I’d also add notes for myself about what plot points or scenes I still had open that I had yet to resolve in that book, to make sure that I didn’t skip over anything I wanted to cover before the story ended. Nothing detailed, just a few words for each thing to jog my memory with the main thing I wanted to have happen:

Another continuity aspect is maps. It’s good to have a map of various locations. Since in the books the girls spend a great deal of time navigating around the agency building, I needed a map of the building for continuity reasons. My solution was that I made the floor plan of Blockberry in “Try Not To Have Gay Sex With Yves 5: The Angecy Strikes Back” mimic the basic idea of what I had in my head about what the dorms looked like in True Miracle Entertainment. It’s not exactly the same, as the RPG Maker engine has a few limitations, but it’s close enough just for me to remember basic things like which side of the hallways doors are on, etc. You don’t have to go to lengths like that however, a very basic map on paper or in Paint will do. Here’s one I made:

Ground floor plan of True Miracle Entertainment (underground car park/bedrooms/marijuana grow-room not shown)

It may also help to map other areas, for instance if you were writing a fantasy adventure with a lot of travel you may want to create a map of the geography of the region.

Having notes like this will save your ass time and time again when writing, and your writing will flow better if you don’t have to keep checking back to earlier parts of your book to remember what you called things and what goes where. You also don’t want details to suddenly change for no reason halfway through the story, or for you to leave out something critical.

(By the way, this is another fantastic reason to never use AI in your story, as AI is incredibly bad at continuity. One of the key ‘tells’ that a story was lazily written with AI is how small scene details don’t quite match up. Continuity is the “fingers and hands” of AI story writing.)

Thing Kpopalypse learned by writing a whole-ass book series #2 – AI sucks for anything creative, but it has one surprising use…

It’s said that there’s no point asking successful people how they got successful, because they’ll generally never tell you. Instead, find someone who is a fucking failure, and ask them how they completely fucked their life goals up, and they’ll probably tell you their entire life sob story. Then, take notes, and be sure to never do any of that shit.

Out of all the creative ideas out there, most aren’t successful, yet AI trains on all creative ideas available to its data-scraping capabilities, not just the ones that made bank. This makes the sum of AI the distillation of the creative failure of the modern age. Therefore if you’re brainstorming ideas, a great strategy is to ask the AI for creative ideas and not use them. It’ll always come up with some completely shit, generic ideas, a bland average of all the bland ideas out there. Example:

Consider AI only if you need to know what the absolute baseline of thunderously boring shit might be for any given creative idea. You goal is to come in well above it. You can do it.

Thing Kpopalypse learned by writing a whole-ass book series #3 – text-to-speech is amazing for error checking

Editing is a hard thing to do on your own, which is why so many people hire a professional proofreader/editor. However I’d urge people to do their own editing if at all possible, just because the expense of a quality proofreader/editor is very high. You won’t be perfect though – after hours of rereading your own story, your brain is going to get sluggish and there’s typos and other shit that you’re definitely going to miss. Spellcheckers aren’t perfect either and can sometimes miss things too (like words that are misspelled as other valid words in the English language) or even suggest the wrong solutions completely, especially if your characters have very idiosyncratic ways of talking that are not “perfect English”. And I’m not even mentioning the Korean language phrases in the books that I wrote, which add another layer of proofreading fun. So a way that you can effectively proofread your book is text-to-speech, and listen as you read.

Where to find text-to-speech in Mircosoft Word.

Where to find text-to-speech in Foxit PDF Reader.

Microsoft Word has a text-to-speech reader built into the program. If you can’t afford Microsoft programs, I don’t know if OpenOffice has the same thing (I think you can probably get a plug-in which does it), but you can convert your book to a PDF and then get the free Foxit PDF Reader to read it aloud to you instead. You can adjust the speed of the reading in both programs. This is great for hearing words that are misspelled as other words in the English language, that a standard spell checker may not pick up on, because when the reader hits the mistake you’ll “hear something wrong” straight away even if your eyes missed it.

Of course, this probably still won’t get every error if you’re writing a 90k page novel, it’s almost impossible to remove all errors in such a huge project completely. I have several commercially-released books in my collection that also have typos. However with the combination of spelling checkers, grammar checkers and read-aloud, you can find 99% of the errors fairly quickly. The rest, your readers will find, so be sure to go back to your original master copy of the story and fix them as they are reported, and then republish your work.

Thing Kpopalypse learned by writng a whole-ass book series #4 – scams are plentiful

As soon as you announce to the world that you are an author, be on the lookout for scams. Many of these will come via Instagram, and I’ve had dozens of them thrown at me since I started publishing books. The common varieties:

Social network promotional scam – a stranger posts to you on social media (usually Twitter or Instagram) saying that you should check out a certain social media account who are great to boost book sales. So you go and check it out – the social media account promises that if you sign up to their promotional deal, they will promote your book on their social media page and they can promise you X amount of social media followers when you do this. Here’s the kicker – if you sign up you will get listed on their socials and you will get the extra social media followers, so you may think “wow, it’s working”, but these are all bot accounts/fellow scammers who are in on the scam, who will vanish as soon as you stop promoting with them, and of course none of them will buy your book. So it’s just a scheme to get money out of you for no return.

Hybrid publishing/vanity press scam – hybrid publishing or vanity press is when a person or company promises you that they can get your self-published book listed on Amazon or in bookstore catalogues etc if you pay them a fee, usually several thousand dollars. The thing is, you can actually get your self-published book listed on Amazon or in bookstore catalogues yourself (my self-publishing post tells you how to do it) so there’s no reason to sign up to services like these. If you submit a manuscript to one of these places, you can guarantee that they’ll be amazed by it and will want to do business with you, but will also have a bunch of interesting reasons why you have to pay them a shitload of money. You should not have to pay anyone for self-publishing, or for publishing through a legitimate book company, outside of the minimal purchase price of ISBNs and other things that are listed in my self-publishing post. Anything else is a scam.

Literary agent scam – someone contacts you pretending to be an agent in the book publishing industry, they offer to read and edit your manuscript before sending it to publishers, for an upfront fee of course. This is always a scam, because this isn’t how literary agents work. A real literary agent will not charge upfront fees, instead they only get paid once you actually have a book deal, and then they will get a percentage of the earnings from the deal that they got you (15% is typical).

Anthology scam – this scam works two ways, either a competition is run asking for submissions with the prize being publication in an anthology of stories (which you amazingly always win), or, you’re just directly solicited to contribute to such an anthology. Of course, a fee is involved. Since the purpose of this scam isn’t to sell the anthology to anybody but to collect the fee from you, the end result will be packed with as many other victoms ahem sorry I mean “winners” as possible and isn’t going to have any value or even have things like proper proofreading or editing. You’re certainly not going to see any money or exposure from it.

These are just scratching the surface, there are a lot more scams out there, but they all tend to follow the same pattern of someone charging you a shitload of money upfront for [fill in the blank], and then either vanishing or just providing a weak-ass service that isn’t any better than what you could have done yourself with a bit of legwork. Golden rule in the book publishing industry is that you don’t have to pay for legitimate offers. Also double-triple check anyone claiming to be from a real publishing house or anyone claiming to be a well-known author etc as there’s a ton of scammers who will impersonate real agencies and real people.

Thing Kpopalypse learned by writing a whole-ass book series #5 – Kpopalypse is a caonima

As I’ve been writing I’ve been doing my best to get to known other authors and chat to them, and they’re all just so fucking nice that it’s weird. There’s not a single asshole among them, everyone just loves writing and loves being nice to other people. Nobody wants to write because they feel the constant urge to be a cunt. I’m grateful for the acceptance, but I also feel very alienated at the same time. Where are all the asshole writers like me? Message me if you’re one of them, I feel very alone.

That’s all for this post! Kpopalypse will return!