How many books have you written?

A question I get asked a lot at school visits is, "How many books have you written?" And they don't mean how many books I have published. They mean how many books, published and non-published, that I've written all the way through. It's a great question, and one that always gets me counting.

Right now, as of January 2013, I have six books in print, with a seventh on the way in February. But that's not nearly all the books I've written. There's the awful college novel I wrote which shall never be spoken of here (my first attempt at a novel), and the two books I wrote and collected a pile of rejections on before I finally sold my first book, Samurai Shortstop. And since I was published, there have been... (let me count) one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine.


Add those nine unpublished novels I wrote after Samurai Shortstop to the three I wrote before Samurai Shortstop, and I have written twelve books that have never been published. (Nineteen in total, if you're keeping score at home.)

Now, three of those unpublished books I hope to sell in the coming year or two, after I work on them more a bit. But that still leaves nine novels I've written that may never escape my hard drive.

Why did I put them aside? Sometimes they weren't working, and I had another book to write in the meantime, and I haven't gone back to them yet. Sometimes I sent books out and they were rejected across the board, so I gave up on them. Sometimes it was a combination of both things.

I hope I can sell some of those books down the road. But most likely I won't sell all of them. Does that mean they a waste of time? No! Because every time I write something, I get a little better. I find something that works, or something that doesn't work, and I can add or subtract that from my writer's toolbox.

So the first lesson is, if you want to be a writer, you have to write. A lot. And don't expect that everything you write is going to turn out the way you want it to and get published. Write one story, and when you're finished, write another. And another. And another. The more you write, the better you'll get--and somewhere along the way, you'll write something really great.