Anyone can learn the basic mechanics of self publishing. It’s a fairly straightforward process to format a manuscript, upload it to an eBook storefront, and even run ads. Yet simply following those steps does not guarantee success, or that readers will stay up late turning pages because they can’t put your story down. The reason is simple. There is a fundamental difference between the process of publishing a book and the craft of actually writing one. Without mastery of that craft, you can spend years producing books that are perfectly adequate and completely forgettable.

That’s why in today’s blog, Ginger attempts to bridge the gap between knowing how to publish and knowing how to write a book that truly works. Drawing on personal experience, hard-earned lessons, and specific techniques used by bestselling authors, he breaks down the craft of writing in practical, usable ways. From emotional engineering and scene structure to proven techniques you can study and steal, this guide is for authors who are ready to stop writing mediocre books and start creating stories readers will never forget.

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If you’ve been reading my articles for a while, you might have seen me write this before:

“Anybody has the potential to be a successful self-published writer. They just need to learn the craft of writing, and follow the process of successful self-publishing.“

I truly believe this statement, and while I most often write about the “process of self-publishing” part, that’s only because I believe that’s the information I think will be most useful to my readers (and straightforward for me to write about.) I specifically use the word “process” to describe it because that’s what it is—a step-by-step process that any author can follow.

But process alone won’t make you rich, famous, or even modestly comfortable. Process will get your book uploaded, formatted, and visible. But process alone won’t make strangers stay up until 3 a.m. turning pages with greasy fingers because they can’t bear to put the damn thing down.

That part is the craft.

The Craft of Writing

A couple of days ago, a pristine cardboard box showed up on my doorstep fresh from Amazon. I knew what it was before I even ripped it open: Author copies of High Point, the book I’m proudest of out of everything I’ve ever published. I tore into the box like a kid on Christmas morning, and there they were. Big, chunky paperbacks with the gorgeous matte covers that feel like velvet under your fingertips and that intoxicating new-book smell.

I just plonked myself down on the hallway floor, cradling one like a complete idiot, grinning ear-to-ear. Even after having sold more than 71,000 copies of my books (mostly digital versions) I get more of the “I’m a real writer” feeling from holding a real, physical copy of my book in my hands than I ever do from tracking figures on a spreadsheet.

Moments like those are why I still love the concept of being a writer, especially now that the algorithms seem to be intent on burying us under a deluge of politics, outrage, and AI slop videos. There’s something beautiful about knowing that strangers have trusted you with their time, their attention, and sometimes even an inch on their bookshelves by buying and reading your book.

But it wasn’t a smooth journey to get here! Every time I hold a copy of one of my books in my hands, it reminds me that I had to write and publish eleven full-length novels before I sold my first bestseller. I remember the first full-length book I wrote and published, more than a decade ago. Until my name got out there a little, it had the unfortunate distinction of never having sold a single copy.

It wasn’t that it was a bad book. I read it to my kids and they quite enjoyed it. If anything, the biggest problem is that it was fine.

Fine.

The single most soul-crushing word in the English language for a writer.

In America “fine” is normally a compliment, and even a praiseworthy adjective. Just think of “fine china” or “fine dining.” However, in England, the word “fine” is usually a synonym for “adequate.” If you’ve ever had an appraisal at work or been graded at school, think of it as the equivalent of “meets all necessary expectations.” It’s good enough, but it’s not necessarily good.

It’s certainly not the kind of book that earns 5-star reviews and emails complaining: “I missed my train stop because I couldn’t put it down!”

“Fine” sells a handful of copies to your friends, your mum, and your auntie, then quietly fades into the Kindle graveyard. I’ve been there. I know.

I had to write ten more books before I launched an instant bestseller—a book that took me from earning $50 a day to $500 a day overnight. Since then, I’ve written several more successful books, including stories that total strangers still email me about years later, telling me they laughed so hard on a plane they got dirty looks, or cried in a coffee shop like a weirdo when they got to the ending, or stayed up until dawn because they had to know what happened next.

I sometimes revisit the earlier books to try and figure out what happened, and the brutal realization (which sounds dead obvious once you hear it) is that the bestsellers were simply better books.

By the time I wrote that first bestseller, I already had the self-publishing process down. I knew how to publish books, get early reviews, and promote them during a launch window. I did nothing different when launching my unexpected bestseller. It wasn’t the self-publishing process that made it successful, it was the book.

The cover demanded clicks. The blurb whetted the appetite. The first few pages in the Look Inside were electric, and the story that followed was a cracking, fast-paced blast (even if I do say so myself).

It performed so much better than all the books I’d written previously because it was literally written better. In writing the eleven previous books, I’d learned all sorts of techniques that I employed to tell the story more efficiently, and connect with readers more deeply. I applied these techniques like a craftsman—deliberately and purposefully—and eventually they paid off.

If you want to really be a writer, you have to do the same thing.

Because writing what happens in your story is easy. Writing normal English is easy. Making a complete stranger feel a specific emotion on page 237, however? That’s an actual craft, and many self-published authors don’t appreciate the fact that we have to actually study and learn that craft to be really good at it.

Ernest Hemingway was known for claiming that writers “are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.” He’s also known for being one of the best writers of his generation precisely because of the craftsman’s approach he took to telling a story.

If we want to elevate our own writing careers, we need to become apprentices too.

The Big Lie We All Tell Ourselves

Many of us were first inspired to write because we wanted to tell a story, and we imagined that we were already equipped with the tools to do that.

After all, we write all the time. We write emails, texts, X posts, work reports. We do it every day without thinking about it. So when we finally sit down to write a novel, there’s the logical assumption that it’s basically the same skill, just longer.

It took me eleven books to realize that it isn’t.

Writing a novel that actually works is less like sending an email and more like trying to share the experience of watching your favorite movie using nothing but words on a page.

When you watched the movie you felt the rush. You felt the fear. Your heart pounded during the chase scenes. Your gut twisted at the shocking ending.

But you can’t expect your readers to feel those emotions too, just because you wrote the events of the movie in order. Great books aren’t transcripts of your imagination, they’re carefully engineered emotional experiences.

And how do you engineer those experiences? The same way you engineer anything else in life—whether it’s a written sentence, or a towering suspension bridge. You build it using tried and tested techniques you’ve learned by studying your craft like an apprentice.

As a writer, that means learning about scene structure, emotional beats, stakes, subtext, escalation, payoff, and making sure every word you write does a specific job.

These are all real, valid things that elevate a story from “fine” to “shut up and take my money” and what’s really important to know about storytelling is that it’s not magic. It’s a learnable, repeatable skill that you can get better at the more you study and use it.

A Practical Guide to Mastering the Craft

Stephen King wrote that good authors read as much as they write, and I think that’s invaluable advice. Deliberate, conscious study of other authors’ writing helps you to identify the tools that they used to turn what might have been a “fine” book into one that hijacks your entire weekend.

Until you actually think about it, it’s easy to take the choices an author makes for granted. Why do many romance authors write in present tense? Why does Lee Child switch between first person and third person in his Reacher books? Once you start asking these questions, you start to understand how much they impact the way you experience a story.

1. The Big Stylistic Choices – Decide Once, Commit Forever

There are some non-negotiable decisions you’ll have to make before (or very early into) a writing project, and writers early in their career often just go with the default. However, switching things up can result in a completely different story, and often a much better one.

• Tense (Past vs Present): Past tense remains the commercial default because it feels like storytelling around a campfire (“Luke stared at the twin suns…”). Present tense creates cinematic urgency but demands flawless execution.
• Point of View (First vs Third / Limited vs Omniscient): First person = instant voice and intimacy (think The Martian: “I’m pretty much fucked.”). Third limited gives you camera control without breaking reader trust. Omniscient is almost extinct in modern genre fiction—readers will riot if you head-hop mid-scene.
• Narrative Distance (Close vs Distant): How deep inside the character’s skin are you? Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl lives in razor-close psychic distance (“I’m the crazy bitch”). Lee Child’s Jack Reacher books sit one step further back—close enough to feel the punch, distant enough to see the whole fight.
• Dialogue Tags & Action Beats: Said is dead… or is it? Master Elmore Leonard’s rule: never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue, and even “said” should disappear when action makes the speaker obvious.
• Sentence Rhythm & Syntax Variation Short. Punchy. Fragment for impact. Then a long, flowing sentence that gives the reader room to breathe. Read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road aloud. Notice how he withholds commas to create a breathless, apocalyptic cadence.

When I’m working with self-published authors, I often challenge them to rewrite a chapter with a shift in POV just for them to see how big the difference is. Once you’ve started approaching these decisions with deliberate intent, you’ve already become a better writer.

2. Five Named Techniques You Must Steal Immediately

Apprentice carpenters are taught specific techniques to help make better products, such as joining things together with mortise and tenon (a protruding tenon fits into a mortise hole), dovetail (interlocking fingers, often used for drawers), dado (a groove cut across the grain, common for shelves), and butt joints (where two pieces are joined end-to-end or edge-to-edge.) 

Likewise, writers can study techniques used by other authors to help make their books more concise, more compelling, or more immersive. Here are some popular techniques that deserve deeper study:

a) Hemingway’s Iceberg Theory

Hemingway believed that you only needed to reveal a few details to explain something, trusting the reader to fill in the rest with their contextual understanding.

For example, in Hills Like White Elephants, Hemingway never once uses the word “abortion.” He simply has the couple talk about “letting the air in” and whether it’s “a simple operation.” What’s left unsaid devastates more than if it had been said outright.

Application: Cut every line that spells out emotion. If your heroine’s hands tremble while she stares at the pregnancy test, delete “She was terrified.” The trembling hands do the work.

b) Stephen King’s Fossil Method + “The Boys in the Basement”

Stephen King believes that every story already exists completely in your subconscious. Your job is excavation, not invention. King starts with a vivid “What if?” (What if a rabid dog trapped a mother and son in a hot car?—Cujo) and digs carefully around it, letting the characters reveal themselves.

This technique works especially well if you like to do multiple revisions of your books, each one revealing more and more of the buried narrative.

c) “Save the Cat” Beat Sheet (Blake Snyder / Jessica Brody)

Blake Synder and Jessica Brody created a 15-beat roadmap that 95% of bestselling novels and blockbusters secretly follow. Very roughly, it plays out like this:

Opening Image → Theme Stated → Set-Up → Catalyst → Debate → Break into Act Two → Fun and Games → Midpoint → Bad Guys Close In → All Is Lost → Dark Night of the Soul → Break into Act Three → Finale → Final Image.

It’s similar to my favorite story format, Dan Harmon’s Story Circle. Having a guide to the essential elements of a satisfying story is really helpful for making sure you deliver on everything that’s expected. Plotters swear by frameworks like Save the Cat (and pantsers/discovery writers often use it as a diagnostic tool after draft one.)

d) Dwight Swain’s Motivation-Reaction Units (MRUs)

When a carpenter varnishes a table, there’s a science to making sure the end result looks right. Writing is exactly the same way. Author Dwight V. Swain created what he describes as “the atomic unit of pacing” and it’s a specific and correct order in the way a writer should describe things, just like there’s a specific order to the electrons, neutrons, and protons in an atom.

The objective fact goes first (stimulus), then the character’s involuntary reaction (feeling), then their rational response (action/speech).

The wrong order seems okay at first glance: “The door burst open. She screamed and dropped the vase.” This is objective fact, followed by objective fact and another objective fact.

But when you look at the right order, you realize why this is a technique that elevates your writing: “The door burst open. Her heart slammed against her ribs. The vase slipped from her fingers and shattered.”

The objective fact (the door bursts open) is followed by her body’s involuntary reaction (her heart begins pounding) and then her rational response (she drops the vase.)

When you start wording things like this, you’ll start seeing a real difference into how engaging your story is. Read any Jack Reacher novel, Lee Child is an MRU ninja.

e) John Gardner’s “Psychic Distance” Continuum + Fictional Dream

Not to be confused with the famous James Bond continuation author, American writer John Gardner was noted for creating a famous scale from 1 (omniscient narrator) to 5 (stream-of-consciousness inside the character’s skull) which described a scale that authors could slide up and down to deliberately control how deeply the reader is immersed into the perspective of a character.

He also coined the term “fictional dream” to describe the trance you induce when a reader gets caught up in your words. Break it once—with an info-dump, inconsistent voice, or telling instead of showing—and the reader wakes up just like their alarm had gone off. You’re probably familiar with this as the concept of “the suspension of disbelief.”

f) Lajos Egri’s Premise + Three-Bone Structure

Lajos Egri was a Hungarian playwright who wrote The Art of Dramatic Writing. He argued that every great story must prove a moral/philosophical premise, and that every character must be built on a rigid “three-bone” skeleton that forces inevitable conflict.

For an example of the moral premise, Othello delivered with: “Jealousy destroys itself and the object of its love” while The Godfather provided: “Absolute power corrupts absolutely—but family loyalty can be even stronger than corruption.”

In terms of the Three-Bone Structure, Egri suggested that every living character needs three dimensions, like a body needs three bones to stand. Physiology (the body), Sociology (the environment), and Psychology (the unique inner world). A story happens when you give a character a contradiction between these three bones.

This list barely scratches the surface of the tools and techniques writers can learn and master. Every book you read becomes a new textbook to study from. Every observation you make in another author’s masterful book becomes a tool you can employ in your own writing. 

So, never stop studying. As Hemingway said: None of us will ever become a master of this craft

3. The Apprenticeship Library – Read These in This Order

Just as every college student is given a reading list, I’ve got some solid recommendations for you to consider as you become an apprentice in the craft of writing. This is far from an exhaustive list, and obviously it’s subjective. However, if you’ve got recommendations of your own, don’t be shy about talking about them in the comments section below.

1. On Writing by Stephen King: The bible. Half memoir, half kick-in-the-pants masterclass. Read it first, read it last, read it every year.
2. Save the Cat! Writes a Novel by Jessica Brody: The clearest commercial beat sheet ever put on paper. Use it like architectural plans.
3. Techniques of the Selling Writer by Dwight V. Swain: 1965 and still the deepest dive into scene/sequel and MRUs. Dense but life-changing.
4. The Writer’s Journey by Christopher Vogler: The Hero’s Journey distilled for modern storytellers. Essential if you write anything with a protagonist who changes.
5. Story by Robert McKee: Brutal, brilliant, and genre-agnostic. Warning: will ruin bad movies forever (which is a feature, not a bug).

Bonus advanced: Self-Editing for Fiction Writers by Renni Browne and Dave King.

Treat these books like trade school. Buy physical, paperback copies. Highlight them, dog-ear them, argue with them in the margins. Then write a million words applying what you stole.

Because here’s the secret every six-figure indie already knows: The “process” of covers, blurbs, ads, and launch strategy is learnable within a few weeks. The craft of writing prose that makes strangers cry on public transport? That takes years of deliberate apprenticeship.

When you combine the two, something truly magical happens, and it makes all that hard work worth the hours and effort. 

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