Today was April 22, 2023, and I finally typed "The end."
This was my first truly completed book.
My first book was My Shop Connects to Ten Thousand Worlds. I had no outline for the entire thing and just wrote wherever the story took me. Somewhere along the way, it got taken down, and it was only just reinstated.
My editor wasn't optimistic about my second book, so I posted it on another platform. To my surprise, it got signed. I stopped after writing 150,000 Chinese characters and came running back to Tomato Novel.
So this was technically my third book, but also my first truly completed one.
Let me give myself a score.
61 out of 100.
The early stats made it clear: it wasn't that the writing was bad, but that it didn't make readers stay.
Those who liked it followed along for a long time, while those who didn't dropped it straightaway. That made me, Tiger, pretty sad, but I had no regrets.
What was I sad about?
As my editor said, if the first few chapters had managed to hold on to readers, this book might not have become a runaway hit, but it definitely would have done much better than it did.
The book actually performed pretty well. Income was the measure of success, and I was quite satisfied with mine.
Some people said, "Tiger, your book has a 9.4 rating, but you only give yourself 61 out of 100. Was that rating rigged?"
I swear to heaven: if I ever faked the ratings, may I drop dead.
The reason I gave myself such a low score was that there was no outline, no outline, no outline...
Yes, you heard that right. I wrote a novel of 700,000 Chinese characters without an outline.
I came