Patron Question: Will Cryopod ever become a finished novel?

Hey guys! It's time to return to the bi-weekly Patreon posts! Today is special because I've decided to directly answer one of my Patrons' inquiries.

Christopher Parris is one of my longest-running patrons, having been around since September of 2016. Wow! I still have a lot of patrons from the start of Cryopod's run, and for that I am eternally grateful! If any other patrons have questions about Cryopod, The Last Precursor, or other such things, feel free to DM me any time. My 'door' is always open.

Thank you for reminding me of this topic, Christopher. Today's post will focus entirely on Cryopod's future in a physical/book-based medium. Is it possible? Will it happen? Can it happen? Let's find out.

...

To start, let me give some background. Cryopod is the first story I have ever written. I have, as of this post, published more than 2.5m words in the last four years between Cryopod Classic, Cryopod Refresh, and The Last Precursor. If you count parts I totally rewrote, deleted, and so on, my body of work almost certainly exceeds 3 million words, but it's hard to keep track of those numbers.

Cryopod Refresh, as of Part 273, is 1,145,000 words long. I would estimate it is 1/3rd complete, assuming the parts of Cryopod Classic we've yet to reach pan out similarly in length when they make it into Refresh.

So how long is the average published book? I've looked those numbers up, and here is what I've found.

The average length of novels in various categories.

According to many articles I've found, the average length of books tops out at around 90,000 words. There are some sci-fi books which can get published at around 120,000 words too, but those are not often posted by first-time authors.

If you look at some of the biggest books in Cryopod's genre, you end up with the absolute tippy-toppiest of best-selling authors, like George RR Martin, JK Rowling, etc. What are the lengths of their books?

Wordcounts of books published by best-selling fiction authors.

WORD COUNTS OF THE BOOKS IN J.R.R. TOLKIEN’S LORD OF THE RINGS SERIES:

• The Hobbit – 95,356 words
• The Fellowship of the Ring – 187,790 words
• The Two Towers – 156,198 words
• The Return of the King – 137,115 words
• The entire Lord of the Rings series (including The Hobbit) – 576,459 words

WORD COUNTS OF THE BOOKS IN J.K. ROWLING’S HARRY POTTER SERIES:

• Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone – 76,944 words
• Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets – 85,141 words
• Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban – 107,253 words
• Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire – 190,637 words
• Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix – 257,045 words
• Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince – 168,923 words
• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – 198,227 words
• The entire Harry Potter series – 1,084,170 words

WORD COUNTS OF THE BOOKS IN GEORGE R.R. MARTIN’S A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE SERIES:

• A Game of Thrones – 298,000 words
• A Clash of Kings – 326,000 words
• A Storm of Swords – 424,000 words
• A Feast for Crows – 300,000 words
• A Dance with Dragons – 422,000 words
• The entire A Song of Ice and Fire series (so far) – 1,770,000 words

SO...

With these numbers in mind, how might an eventual 3 million Cryopod book come into play? It won't! It is impossible to fit Cryopod into one book, let alone get it published as one book.

But what about dividing Cryopod up into many books? Is that at least possible?

Sort of.

If you, dear reader, happen to look at Cryopod Refresh's index list, you will find the following is true:

Book 1, Reign of the Demons: 302,000 words long.

Book 2: Fall of the Angels: 424,000 words long.

Book 3, Rise of Humanity: 419,000 words long (And counting).

These numbers are incredible, and not necessarily in a good way. I personally do not mind, and happen to even love, long, well-written fiction. This applies to books, web-serials, movies, TV, anime, and so on. However, in terms of publishing Cryopod as a book series... YIKES! 

The entirety of Book 2 in Cryopod is the exact same wordcount as GRR Martin's longest book, a Storm of Swords. That means that it would fit into a paperback novel length, but getting it published would be essentially impossible.

So, if publishing Cryopod professionally with its current length isn't a possibility... does that mean Cryopod will never get published?

Not exactly.

I think a lot of people tend to put the cart before the horse. There are many, many, many people in the world who are desperate for big payoffs. These people think in terms of goals, and as I've written about in past blogs, I do not. As per a fantastic book I read in the past, I think in terms of systems. I build systems that pay off exponentially over time, with each step advanced in the system further advancing my development toward self-improvement.

So that begs the question: What system am I using for Cryopod, or rather, what is my authorial system?

Step 1: Just keep writing. Write a lot. Write daily, or in my case, bi-daily. I average about 2k words a day, which translates to nearly 800,000 words a year (365 days x 2000). The more I write, the better I become at writing.

Step 2: Experiment often. I am constantly trying new things in my writing. I'm trying out new character archetypes, new genres, new tropes, and also trying to expand my ability to write certain broad types of content. As an example, I am -AWFUL- at geography. With the Stormbringer War in Cryopod, I've put special effort into drawing a map of Tarus II and using it to inform the battles. I also try to include more environmental storytelling in my work, which is a weakness I identified at some point in the past.

Step 3: Expand my reach, try to find new readers. This is an ongoing step I will never fully finish.

Step 4: Finish a story. This is the BIG one. After four years, I've yet to complete a single body of work. That will change in about 6 or so months when I complete The Last Precursor. This story, much shorter than Cryopod, will finally show people that I can complete something, and because I'm extremely certain TLP's ending will be pretty goddamned incredible, this may just excite people for Cryopod's eventual ending several years down the line. In the meantime, I won't only complete TLP, but other stories much shorter than Cryopod.

Step 5: Once I have completed several stories, start looking into self-publishing.

Step 6: Once I've learned how self-publishing works and am confident in my ability to write, edit, rewrite, and publish stories, I will start seeking out big publishers.

There is a reason I listed all of those steps in order. Notice anything about steps 5 and 6? Those are last on the system hierarchy. It's not because they're the least important steps, but because they're the most important.

In my opinion, too many people rush into publishing early, looking to get rich quick. Take a look at some of the biggest authors and how long it took them.

Length of time before authors got published.

If we ignore the fact many of these people got published back when there was less competition in the writing marketplace, and now it's actually even harder with tens of times more people trying to break in, there's still about a minimum number of 7 years before getting published, with 8+ being standard. It took Stephen King 12 years, Michael Crichton (my favorite author, RIP) 7 years, and so on.

We live in an age of instant gratification. I, however, am an extremely patient and methodical person. I'm also not much of a risk-taker. I like to have my feet firmly planted on solid ground before I make a big leap.

At the start of this post, Christopher Parris posited a question: Will Cryopod ever become a physical book release? And if so, when?

Let's now take a look at my estimated timeline for Cryopod, and Cryopod alone. I will not discuss TLP or other future stories.

First draft, Cryopod Classic: Basic structure of the story, big failings revealed. I learned where my weaknesses lay and decided to stop and do a total rewrite.

Second draft, Cryopod Refresh: After 1.5 years of writing Cryopod Classic, I started on Refresh and used my incredible improvements in writing to drastically overhaul the script. Now, the story is far better, but bloated. I'm up to Book 3, with several books to go.

A few years from now: I will complete Cryopod Refresh. At that time, the story will be extremely long, bloated, and unfit for publication. However, it will be complete, and assuming I did my work correctly and built up the story well, as I certainly hope I will, it will have a really satisfying ending.

Next up, the Third Draft/second total rewrite: Let's call this one Cryopod Ultimate Edition (CUE). CUE will have a LOT of material to draw from. My goal will be to take the huuuuuuuuuuuuge story I have written and start chopping it into somewhere between 75k and 120k word-books. This will not only make the story much more condensed and allow me to cut out useless characters, content that I ultimately dropped, and so on, but also to make the story much better prepared for mass publishing.

Finally: Seeking a publisher. Once I have completed Cryopod's third draft and its second total rewrite, I can start looking into publishers. By this point, it will have easily been 8 years since I started writing Cryopod. Is that a long time? Yes. Will I ultimately succeed in my pursuits? I don't know!

When I first started Cryopod Classic, people immediately asked me to make a Patreon. I was brand new to all of this, this entire system, and so I had to figure it out from scratch. I promised releases of books, not because I thought or knew I'd definitely write and publish books, but because I figured "that's just what people do!"

However, I have learned a lot over these past few years. I know now what goes into publishing a story. I'm not going to rush into beating down a publisher's doors with a gigantic, unwieldy story with fun but long-drawn-out beats, and neither will I rush to self-publish a huge and unwieldy set of six 350k-word books either.

I want to see Cryopod in physical book format, but I also want its books to be something worth feeling proud of.

...

Here is something I want to include in this post, but I couldn't really find a good spot for it before.

I would like to ask my readers to think differently about Cryopod than other series they've read. Please do not think of Cryopod as 'a story.' TCTH is a story, yes. It has a beginning, a middle, and will eventually have an end. However, as someone who is a huge fan of longform fiction (something I've blogged about in the past) I would like to ask people not to think of Cryopod as one singular piece of work, but as an ongoing universe, similar to the DC comic universe, or the Marvel universe, the Star Wars universe, or even the Naruto-verse.

I am not writing Cryopod to be a one and done story. My intent is to write Cryopod as a launching pad for many, many other stories. Cryopod will set the stage for countless smaller, but just as impactful, sci-fi and fantasy novels. The Cryoverse will have stories about aliens, monsters, demons, angels, time travel, multiverse travel, and all sorts of other such high-level premises.

TCTH itself is actually a testing bed, a playground of sorts for my many ideas. One reason it is so expansive is because I want it to be a story where 'anything goes.' We could, at any moment, meet some cool historical figure, like Alexander the Great or Joan of Arc. We could have some crazy plot development created due to fantasy or sci-fi rules. Magical portals and non-magical portals alike!

Importantly, I have structured the Cryoverse to be an infinite source of creativity. 

It is not like other stories, where the heroes gang up together, learn about friendship, and beat the villain. I grew tired of those tales a long, long time ago. I am writing the stories I want to read, and those stories are huge, epic romps with countless interesting characters doing countless interesting things.

So, to answer the question Christopher posited: Will Cryopod ever become a novel?

Yes.

Not this year, and not for several years... but eventually, it will. And that will only be the start of the greater Cryoverse.

Thanks for reading, everyone. I'll start posting TLP in a couple of days.

If you have any other topics you want to hear about, let me know! I'm going to keep a list maintained on this post.