Random Musings

First Novels

On Saturday, I went to a writer's workshop. Jodi Thomas, NY Bestseller Romance Author, was our keynote speaker, and she ran three mini-lectures over the course of the day.  She's a great speaker, and I highly recommend going to see her if you get the chance.

Over the course of the lectures, we talked about NaNoWriMo, seeing as it is the season, and about writing books for publishing. We had maybe 50 attendees at the workshop, and one of the questions she asked was -- "How many of you sold your first book you wrote?"  Not how many of you have published/sold, but how many sold the very first book you wrote?  I saw two hands go up.  That was scary. The chances that your first book you write (which my table was full of first-time novelists) will get published is very very slim.

Later on, however, Jodi mentioned a list of books and asked what they all had in common -- they were all first novels!! And they were BIG name books.  I did a search for a listing of "first novels published" and found this:

Some famous first novels (bestsellers and Pulitzer Prize winners) include:1

Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights
Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason's The Rule of Four
Agatha Christie's The Mysterious Affair at Styles
Ralph Ellison's only novel Invisible Man
Janet Fitch's White Oleander
F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise
Fannie Flagg's Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistlestop Cafe
Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain
David Guterson's Snow Fall on Cedars
Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Melinda Hayes's Mother of Pearl
Marjorie Kellogg's Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon
Sue Monk Kidd's The Secret Life of Bees (4 million copies sold!)
Jhumpa Lahiri's The Interpreter of Maladies
Harper Lee's only novel To Kill a Mockingbird
Jay McInernay's Bright Lights, Big City
Brad Meltzer's The Tenth Justice
Margaret Mitchell's only novel Gone with the Wind
Laurie Notaro's Idiot Girls Action Adventure Club
Boris Pasternak's only novel Dr. Zhivago
Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar
Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things
Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones
Anna Sewell's Black Beauty
Curtis Sittenfeld's Prep
Nicholas Sparks's The Notebook
John Kennedy Toole's only novel A Confederacy of Dunces
Lauren Weisberger's The Devil Wears Prada
Rebecca Well's Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood
Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray

That website also suggests that approximately 10% of all book deals are first-novels.  Granted, that is still a small chance, but it IS a chance. And something to strive for. I don't want to hold onto my book if it is simply not good enough to publish, but I can try and create an amazing story that is well written, and maybe, just maybe, it'll get published.

Footnotes
1  http://www.bookmarket.com/debutnovels.htm