Debut novel

In contemporary British and American publishing markets, most authors receive only a small monetary advance before publication of their debut novel; in the rare exceptions when a large print run and high volume of sales are anticipated, the advance can be larger. For an example of an unusually high advance: in 2013, the highly anticipated City on Fire by Garth Risk Hallberg captured the attention of ten publishers who started a bidding war that ended with Knopf buying the rights to the book for $2 million. The book's film production rights were purchased soon after by producer Scott Rudin. For similar reasons that advances are frequently not very large—novels frequently do not sell well until the author gains a literary reputation. There are exceptions, however; YouTuber Zoella published her debut novel Girl Online in November 2014, and the book sold 78,109 copies in Britain in its first week. The novel saw huge sales because she already had an established audience, and publishers were willing to run a large print run. In the same piece for the Times, Ayana Mathis describes the debut novel as "a piece of the writer's soul in a way that subsequent books can't ever be", because the novel is necessarily a work of passion and a product of all of their life before that moment. ==Literary characteristics==

Often an author's first novel will not be as complex stylistically or thematically as subsequent works and often will not feature the author's typical literary characteristics. Huffington Posts Dave Astor attributes these to two forces: first that authors are still learning their own unique style and audiences are more willing to read works from unknown authors if they resemble more conventional styles of literature. As examples, Astor points to J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit (1937), Margaret Atwood's The Edible Woman (1969) and Charles Dickens' The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1837), all of which lack the complexity or stylistic characteristics which audiences praise in the authors' later work. Sometimes, instead of writing novels to begin their career, some authors will start with short stories, which can be easier to publish and allow authors to get started in writing fiction. ==Etymology==

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the earliest attested usage of "first novel" is from 1876. However, the term is much older, with instances going back to at least 1800. The Oxford English Dictionary does not have an entry for "debut novel". The earliest usage of "debut novel" in the Google Books database is 1930 (). The term appears in newspapers as early as 1922, in a review of Marjorie L.C. Pickthall's novel The Bridge. The Google Books Ngram Viewer shows the term becoming more widely used after about 1980, gaining in popularity since. ==See also==