I think I gave my finished and polished manuscript for We Are Stardust to about a dozen people and aside from my aunt and my friend Jann (who reads everything I write, God bless her kind heart) no one finished it and told me what they thought. The silence, as the cliche goes, was deafening.

My aunt told me it sucked.

Well, to be literal, she said it was sad and she couldn’t relate to any of the characters.

In other words, it sucked.

I’m kind of angry that I paid someone to developmentally edit a novel, and it took a reel on TikTok for me to realize that the structure of the book had a very serious flaw. That being, and this proved out with my silent beta readers, if there’s a murder in your book and it’s a major turning point, it needs to happen in the first thirty pages of a three hundred page book. If not, you know what happens?

Exactly what happened. Nobody reads past the first fifty pages.

So, after the initial shock of learning that I paid someone several hundred dollars to poorly edit my book, I calmly decided to halt querying and shelve it until I could do a complete rewrite. Not exactly my favorite situation to be in, but the damage, for the most part, was contained to the twenty agents I’d sent queries to. Or was it?

I ran to my laptop and uploaded the first 30,000 words of my new novel “Deadbeats” into Claude AI and asked if I was making a similar error. The answer was yes. Once again, the big event of the book needed to happen within the first 10%– 300 pages, 30 pages. 400 pages, 40 pages.

So I went from querying the book I’d spent the last two years working on, to needing to completely rewrite it, and from writing a book I was very excited about to having to stop everything I was doing and restructure the whole thing from jump. Humbling is not the word.

But who am I kidding? It wouldn’t be a Billy Manas story if it didn’t contain a heaping helping of naturally occurring irony. Today’s was brought to you by the fact that my first novel I ever attempted, “Calliope in a Cruel World,” stuck to that very 10% formula. There was a murder in the first chapter that served as the engine for the whole manuscript.

Beginner’s luck? Not sure. Maybe after writing the first book, I felt confident enough to not have to hit the reader over the head with tragedy in the first fifteen minutes. That confidence was misplaced.

It doesn’t matter how beautiful your prose is—readers, audiobook listeners and movie viewers will not wade through a hundred and twenty pages or an hour of buildup before going back to ten second reels of cats trying to eat Pringles. Duh. But as writers, this is what we’re up against.

This isn’t conjecture. Some studies have shown that 60 to 70 percent of readers don’t make it to the second chapter before abandoning a recent purchase. And we’re talking about books that attracted the attention of a literary agent, who in turn got a publisher excited enough to gamble money on an advance. Sometimes even a little marketing.

It follows that if this is happening even with books that satisfied the very fickle and picky gatekeepers, it’s got to be happening with the endless pit of self-published titles that never see another pair of eyes outside of the Sheboygan Book Club. And worse.

These stats come from Amazon’s ebook department who, by the way, are able to see everything everyone is doing. So they’re accurate. They don’t come from what people profess, but what they actually do.

It’s frustrating but it’s not fatal. Somehow, when I was possessed by better angels and refused to stop trying to find a home for “Kickass Recovery,” I hired an author on the Simon and Schuster imprint to rewrite my query letter after my first 30 rejections. This was the same person who consulted on my book proposal.

If being traditionally published means something to you, you have to be willing to invest real hard earned money and you have to be willing to observe and course correct. It’s much easier to curse and give up but that never got anyone anywhere.

Education is expensive in the United States. The average undergraduate leaves school with $30,000 in debt and a piece of sheepskin that might, if they’re shrewd and hungry, land them a $30,000/yr gig. My recent education cost me huge chunks of my life on earth, hundreds of dollars and a lot of frustration.

But you can bet my days of boring readers are behind me. With the exception of the avant-garde (which, be honest, no one really likes) great art is great because it’s powerful while adhering to a stringent formula. The Beatles did this with the two and a half minute pop song. Fitzgerald did this when he created The Great Gatsby in 47,000 words. Hemingway, whose favorite phrase when it came to Fitzgerald was “Hold my beer,” won a Nobel Prize for Literature with The Old Man and The Sea at 27,000 words.

This is why Rilke said that no one should try to write unless they know in their hearts that they’d have to die if they couldn’t. It’s not a half-assed proposition. And given the average writer’s chances of finding a solid audience, that little kernel of advice from a hundred years ago is even more pertinent now than ever. With the millions of weekend warriors and now all the AI slop, it’s getting very noisy out there.

And a book that isn’t flawless may as well be a hoarse whisper.