“Who should give me feedback on my first novel?”

You don't want just any reader. Also, you are inexperienced in understanding feedback.

Most of the time, for instance, when a reader says “It felt long” or “it was too slow” you will think that means you need to cut.

The opposite is true. 🧵 Usually it means you moved so quickly through the story that you didn't give the reader time to care about the characters and their relationships. Without emotional involvement, it FEELS slow or long, but when you give us more details of life and relationships, the longer version will FEEL more involving and important, and it won't feel long.

I’ve been asked by new writers: “Should I read books of the same genre that I’m writing?”

With science fiction in particular, it’s absolutely essential that you have a general familiarity with the tropes of the genre. When I started writing sci-fi stories and novels, I was NOT a fan, per se. I was a playwright, writing historical and contemporary plays. However, I had voluntarily read H.G. Wells and Jules Verne, then the Heinlein and Norton juveniles (the old word for Young Adult fiction), and then I read Asimov and Bradbury and Clarke, LeGuin and Niven and Ellison. 

As I started writing sci-fi stories, I did begin my deliberate science fiction education, reading the SF Hall of Fame and the Hugo Winners novels, reconstructing the whole history of science fiction from sample novels. Some I hated (I couldn’t finish Slan; unreadable. EE Doc Smith was sadly archaic). But I read A Case of Conscience by Blish, I read Pamela Sargent and James Tiptree Jr., but even then I was sadly ignorant of much of the field. Still, even though I had not (and still have not) read Starship Troopers when I wrote “Ender’s Game” (novelet), I did not try to reinvent the wheel. I absorbed Heinlein’s expository method, which is the bare minimum for writing sci-fi. I knew I was uneducated in the field, and so I educated myself by reading copiously. This applies to all other genres. If you want to write Romance, READ ROMANCE. If you want to write Fantasy, READ FANTASY — from Tolkien, Macdonald, and other early fantasists, to the YA fantasists who were published in hardcover by Atheneum and then in paperback by Del Rey, and on to the commercial fantasy genre of today, where Brandon Sanderson, Patrick Rothfuss, and George RR Martin lead the way.

Do you have to read them all? No, you GET to read them all. You need to be familiar with what has already been done, not so that you can avoid doing it, but so you can do it even better, and with your own slants and interests.

“When should I start preparing my book cover design?”

Short answer: After you’ve been dead for about a year. Or never. Whichever comes first.

I promise this advice will save you time and frustration. But for a more detailed explanation (and tips for those self-publishing), see 🧵 below: Unless you have already had sales like Stephen King or J.K. Rowling, book covers are sadly none of your business. The book cover is not an illustration, it is the billboard designed to sell your book. And you know nothing about marketing a book. So your opinions about what the book cover should look like are as interesting to editors and art directors as a fart in an elevator — it's meaningless and annoying, but you have to put up with it till the elevator gets to your floor.

Back when I was an eager young writer I was trying to figure out what made good stories good. From the start, I knew that it wasn’t the MANNER of writing — it wasn’t the style, no matter how quirky or clever it was.