Behind the Red Door prequel to Without A World is available now. I finally followed through on Johnny B Truant and Sean Platt’s advice to make a permanently free option to start my book funnel. If your first reaction to that sentence is, “Book marketing- yuck!” Believe me, I was right there with you, but I am trying to reset my mindset to do the things that will allow me to live the life that I want, which is to write full time. So I am pushing myself to follow the advice of the trusted gurus, but it ain’t easy. 

The novella as a reader magnet

In their book, Write. Publish. Repeat. Johnny and Sean talk about the importance of writing a permanently free piece to bring readers into your world and introduce them to your writing style. They recommend a novella between 8,000 and 10,000 words because it will not take long to turn out, is long enough to entice readers, but also short enough to hold their attention. 

Sure, it was… quick 

For me, there is nothing quick about writing fiction, no matter the length. I started Behind the Red Door in February and I knocked the first draft out that month. But then I sat on it for a week or two, just thinking about it, and then I started editing. After a few rounds of my own edits, I posted parts of it on Scribner, which is my preferred site for getting (and giving) critiques. I’ve written about Scribner in more detail in an earlier post. Those critiques ranged from “this is perfect publish now” to “Are you joking? Re-write everything.” [Receiving critiques is an artform amIright?] I did a round of very heavy edits, scrapped the first chapter and punched up the action at the beginning. I rewrote a lot more over the next several months. When I have something halfway decent, I love to use the read-aloud feature in Word to hear the words. That allows me to polish the prose and get it to where I like it. I did that about 4 times for this piece. 

After getting a great cover with 100 Covers which I wrote about in an earlier post, I finally hit publish in late August on my ~9,000-word novella. Not exactly quick by the Truant Platt timeline, but this piece will be the first impression for some people, so I wanted a strong piece. That said, there were some unexpected and very important benefits to writing this novella. 

Unexpected benefits

To write Behind the Red Door I asked myself what unanswered questions linger from Without A World? That exercise allowed me to get even closer to the setting and characters and pried open possibilities for the sequel. 

First a brief introduction to Without A World: the book opens on a dying planet Earth where the rich have created a domed city to get around the inconveniences of climate change and to basically shut out reality. Our main character, Miranda, lives in a settlement outside the city but is allowed to work in the domed city because, well, they need to import workers. Miranda lives with her mother, Beda in a hovel far outside of town and they are barely getting by. 

We learn fairly quickly in act 1 that Beda and Miranda are, in fact, not from Earth and could have had a better life if they had not come here. But Without A World does not answer this basic question about why Beda came to Earth and why she only brought one child, Miranda with her. 

I wanted to answer this basic question in my novella: What would motivate Beda to leave her comfortable life to try to save people on Earth? And why would she separate her twin girls to do that? 

The process of answering those questions through the novella let me get closer to Beda and Carl (her husband), two characters that I needed to spend more time with to better understand their motivations. It helped me to make some changes to Without A World (because I had not published it yet) to tighten up the backstory, because now I fully understand it, and it helped me to envision the new world (Nibiru) that they came from in a much more whole way. At the same time as writing the novella, I am writing the sequel, Collapsing the Divide, and learning more about the setting has helped immensely for that book as well. 

Writers write

The process of writing the novella has proved more useful to the rest of the books in the series than I thought it would when I initially approached it as a marketing tool. Because, as Johnny and Sean know, writers are not marketers and we just want to write. So, make the writing the marketing. It’s kind of genius and not even secret genius. 

Major plugs in this post for Write. Publish. Repeat. I am not affiliated, just a fan.