As an aspiring writer, one of the most difficult things can be figuring out "am I even good at this?"
Even if you're not a writer, we all have things that we'd like to be good at. For most of us, these subjective things constitute our hobbies, which means we don't usually have to figure out if we're any good at them. At no point have I ever asked myself if I was "good" at hiking. Or reading. Or playing games. Yes, I've tried to get better at each of those things (be more prepared before I head up into the Uintas, broaden my tastes in novels, read up on tactics to beat my brother in Settlers of Catan). But it still doesn't feel crucial for me to gauge how "good" I am at my hobbies. I simply enjoy them.
Enter the weirdness of pursuing writing as a profession.
Like all art, it's highly subjective. And yet, because I hope to eke a living off my writing, I also have to examine it with the objective lens of "is my skill good enough that I could make money off of it?"
As I've journeyed down this path of a writer, I've stumbled upon a metric that I think authors can use to judge whether their writing is commercially viable. The secret: involving other people. Huge plot twist, right? If you want to know if your book will work with other people, you have to give it to other people.
And so, with the huge caveat of I-haven't-actually-made-money-off-writing-yet, here's the metric for figuring out where you are on the path to publishing:
1. If you share your work with several friends/family members but only two or three people (likely in your immediate family) read it, you are not ready to publish.
If your friends say yes to reading the manuscript but then you have to continually hound them about whether or not they've finished, it likely means that your story simply wasn't as engaging as you hoped. Those people most invested in you (a parent, a sibling, a grandparent) might get to the end and heap praise, but that doesn't mean it's ready for market—simply that you're lucky to have a very encouraging family member or friend who doesn't want you to give up on a dream yet. This was the case with my first book. I think only my mom and dad finished it; not even my siblings did.
Recommendation: put that first book aside, and write a new one from scratch. You will learn far less from endlessly editing your first book than being willing to give it up for a year and writing something new.
2. If you share your work with others and a handful of friends get back to you but their feedback is mostly advice, you are still not ready, but getting closer.
Here's the thing—as writers, we sometimes like to protect our fragile egos by thinking "well, I know more about writing than them, they just can't see how good it is." I've learned from much experience that this is not the case. If you've moved up to a point where a handful of people are finishing your book but they have a lot of improvements, then it simply isn't ready. I remember a time I shared my second book with the young daughter of a popular book/mommy blogger, back when I was writing middle grade. Her dad told me she'd only made it 1/3 of the way through and it was too dense. At first I dismissed the critique because she was like 8 years old and what could she know? With time, I realized that if I couldn't engage my target audience, it was the book's fault and not the child's.
Recommendation: again, try another book. You'll learn a lot more from starting something new because you'll have to practice all parts of the novel-writing process again. Beginning, middle, end, pacing, character, voice, plot, setting, world-building, etc. Stretch those muscles.
3. If you share your work with friends/family/strangers and people start reading it and getting back to you without you bothering them, you're probably close or ready to publish.
I had the opportunity to go to lunch with a Newbery Honor author a few years ago, during which I asked him how to know if my writing was good enough to publish. In return, he asked whether I'd shared my writing with anyone, to which I responded that 40 people—including some strangers—had finished and given me feedback on my most recent book at the time (book no. 3, which I wrote for Brandon Sanderson's highly competitive workshop class). Shaking his head, the author told me that if I'd gotten 40 people to finish my book, it was almost definitely ready for publishing. While I was encouraged by this, I decided not to pursue publishing for this 3rd book because I felt like I still had some things to learn, and there was still quite a bit of feedback I was getting on the book, even though people were finishing and enjoying it. But, I was glad to know that I was on the right track.
Recommendation: if a lot of people are finishing your book, especially people who don't have any sort of obligation to you as friend or family, then you might be ready to publish. You can either work on editing the book based on the feedback you've received, or you can put it aside for now and write another book using everything you've learned from the process of writing this one and from the feedback that you've been given. Either way, you're very close.
4. If you share your work with friends/family/strangers and people are binge-reading it and have almost exclusively positive things to say, you're probably ready to publish!
My 4th book was such a mess that I only let my writing group and a close friend read it. Both agreed with me that it needed a lot of love. Rather than go into an intense editing process and essentially re-write the book, I wrote a 5th book, The Engineer's Craft which I finished in October. When I was done, I posted on Facebook asking if anyone wanted to read the early draft and got quite a few responses. Now, the feedback is starting to come in, and more than one person has told me that they're having a hard time putting it down (which, as an author, is one of the best things I've ever heard). To me, this has been an indication not only that I've improved as an author, but I'm also closer to publishing than I've ever been before. If friends, family, and strangers are getting sucked in, hopefully it means that agents, editors, and the wide world of readers will get absorbed by the story as well. A few people have also asked if it's okay for them to send the book to a friend of theirs, which means that the book is more marketable than those I've written in the past.
Recommendation: try to publish that book! Start sending it out to literary agents to see if they want it. And then, like before, start over with something fresh and get even better at writing. If this book doesn't get picked up even though others enjoyed it, that's okay. Sometimes the industry just isn't looking for whatever genre you're writing at the moment. But your writing is definitely at the level where it can be picked up, if all the publishing-stars align in the publishing-sky. Maybe the next book will be exactly what some agent or editor is looking for.
Also, some good news to share! Yesterday I got my first full-manuscript request from an agent, which means they liked my pitch and the first two chapters and wanted to read more. There's a whole other metric of readiness I could talk about with how agents respond to your queries, but that's an article for another day. I just sent off the full manuscript and we'll see how it goes from here.
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