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It’s a fact: A racing catamaran can sail faster than the wind – over twice as fast, indeed, under perfect conditions. (Don’t believe me? And yet it’s true, I tell you, true!) Something like the same effect – only better – is achievable via mailing lists. Still better: this email is just as important to trad-publishing types as it is to indies. Almost more so: this is the one part of your marketing destiny that you can, and really must, control. So: Let’s say that you hustle and bustle your way to 1,000 names on your mailing list. You’d be pretty pleased with yourself if you did that, no? And let’s also say – fantasy land, here – that you put out a book launch email which secured a 50% success rate. That is, half of all those you emailed went out and bought your book. (That’s not impossible, but it would be very good. Anything 30% or better would be excellent.) So, you’ve just sold 500 books. Let’s say you’re offering a launch promo price of $2.99 for the ebook, which means your royalties are (roughly) $2, so you’ve just earned $1,000 from your 1,000-name strong mailing list. I mean, that’s good, right? No one hates $1,000. But you’ve had to go to a lot of effort to secure it. Maybe your time and energy could have been better spent elsewhere? Not so, my furry friendBut that’s not so. In an earlier email, I told you that Amazon responds quickly and powerfully to signals which tell it that a certain product is selling well. Now the beauty of email is not especially the volume of sales that you can generate. The beauty is that you can generate those almost precisely when you want. A launch-type email will generate essentially all its sales within 24 hours and, honestly, within about 6-12 hours of sending. So, the way to think about those 500 sales is that they allow you to manipulate the visibility of your book on Amazon’s system. If you generated all those sales within 2 hours, you might lift your overall bestseller rank on Amazon.com to perhaps 200. (In the UK, you’d do even better, with a peak rank of under 50.) Now, as I told you in that earlier email, you don’t want to do that. You want to space your sales out over 4-7 days. So, for example, you might send your launch email out in waves, aiming to secure roughly 100 sales/day over 5 days. That will give you a lower peak rank, but will send a much strong signal to Amazon. Your email will get Amazon’s bots active on your behalf, and they’ll take over the marketing for you. The result of your email to 1,000 eager readers could easily be sales of well over 5,000 copies over the next 1-4 months. Phooey to catamarans. You and your mailing list can sale much faster than the wind. None of this is theoretical. The summer when my wife and I had our second set of twins, I was due to launch a book. Our first set of twins was not yet two and my wife and I… were pressed for time. So, my launch strategy – the whole thing, not withholding a single thing – was: 1. Send an email That was it. There is no ‘2’. I didn’t tweet. I didn’t blog. I didn’t flap around on Facebook. I didn’t float zeppelins over New York or hire PR people at $1500 an hour. I sent an email, that was it. And to about 1,000 people at that. But those people liked my book and bought it. And my visibility rose. And Amazon saw my book happily a-selling and marketed it further. Over the next few months, I sold over 5,000 copies. My mailing list more than tripled. The other books in the series also sold much more than before. I’m not saying this was a good, rational, well-planned launch – it was not. But it worked. Indeed, it was the success of that spectacularly lazy campaign which told me just how much power there could be in self-publishing. How to build your list The basic way to build your emal list is: Sell your ebook – via promo sites (covered here) or Facebook (covered here)In the front and back of those ebooks, you place a call to action, which says, “please join my readers’ club”. (You will never say, “please subscribe to my newsletter” unless you truly don’t want anyone to sign up.) Now, nice people don’t especially want to sign up to a readers’ club unless they get some kind of reward. So, you offer the reward that this particular group of people most wants: namely, another story, written by you, and involving the same world and group of characters that they’ve just enjoyed. Naturally, people then sign up to your reading list, which they do by heading over to your website. Once they’ve signed up, you need to give them the book that you’ve promised. You simply automate that process using an automated email system (I use MailerLite) and Bookfunnel, a firm which solves the problem of how to get your ebook onto someone else’s device. A helping hand Now, yes, there is something circular about my telling you to build an email list to sell books… but you need to sell books to stock your list. I hope that the emails on promo sites and Facebook ads covers that issue, at least a bit. (This is a flywheel. It’s hard to get it to start spinning. But once it’s going, it’s hard to stop. The first 250 names on your list are the hardest.) Additionally, though, there are sites whose purpose is specifically to help seed those lists. You can check the various options for yourself, but the current champ in this area is BookSweeps. The emails you’ll get from that source won’t be as good as genuine organic signups from people who have bought and read a full-length novel of yours, but they’re not bad – and a darn site better than nothing. Some specifics One email isn’t sufficient to outline how to build and use a list – there are whole books that cover the territory in detail. But here are some starting points: First, offer plenty of opportunities in the front and back of the ebook to sign up to your list. That’s not being shouty – it’s being appropriately helpful to your readers. Just like if you were building a website, you wouldn’t place just one link to a key page. You’d pop that link anywhere that users might find it helpful. You need to follow the same logic in your ebook. Second, the webpage (on your website) where readers sign up to your club is very important. The key thing is to make it unbelievably obvious what you want your reader to do and that means removing all distractions. My own signup page is here: note the complete lack of a top menu or, really, anything to do on the page except sign up. Your free gift needs to be a nicely produced ebook. It doesn’t need to be long – anywhere from 7,500 words to 15 or 20,000 words seems about right to me. But apart from length, in every other way the gift should be first rate. A proper cover. Proper editing. A proper story – and one that comes straight from the world of the characters your reader has just enjoyed. (If you happen to enjoy crime stories, and would like to experience the whole sign up procedure, then be my guest. It’s that process which you are going to replicate.) Third, you mustn’t think of your mailing as a way to take stuff from your readers. The mailing list is a way to build relationships. Once you’ve done that then, yes, around launch, it’s perfectly natural to say, “Hey, do you want to buy my latest?” But put relationships first, then asking second. So, the first email that goes out to readers on my list offers the free gift (as promised), but the second one offers a second free gift – a pure surprise. I also tell readers a bit about myself. I tell them roughly what to expect in terms of emails from me. Hopefully, by that point, readers like my books that little bit more than they did before and – admittedly only in a tiny way – they feel like they have a teensy bit of relationship with me. Fostering that relationship is THE most important thing in your authorial career… beyond – of course, of course – writing quite excellent novels. And fourth, you do, I’m afraid, need to kill people – and surprisingly often. Every email list will, over time, fill up with people who NO LONGER OPEN YOUR EMAILS! That shows shockingly poor taste, I agree, but it will happen. And you need to get rid of those people. Murder is one route. Simply removing their emails from your list is another. (All email list providers have simple tools to enable this.) The more dead wood you have on your list, the more likely your emails are to get dumped into Junk email or similar. You must avoid that fate. A small, highly engaged list is better than a large but baggy one every time. Big Publishing and mailing lists I’m not going to get into a huge digression here, but suffice to say that it is a Foolish Writer who gives up control of their mailing list to Big Publishing. I have seen some ugly car crashes take place under those circumstances. Even if you plan to be a bestselling writer working under the care of Big Publishing – especially then, in fact, you need to own and operate your list yourself. Aside from your books themselves, that’ll be the biggest asset you have. Don’t give it away. And that’s it You sell books. People sign up to your list, get their free gift, get some welcome emails, experience the joy of a relationship with you… and are fully primed to buy your next book when it comes out. Amazon will notice that burst of sales, and will reward you for them in the multiple – feeding your pocket and building your list in the one and same sweet process. That’s the joy of the list – and the thrill of sailing faster than the wind. Next week This series of emails comes to a close next week, with thoughts about mindset… and plumbing. FEEDBACK FRIDAY: Query LettersWe’ll keep things simple this week as well. Any chunk involving physical action – a fight, a car crash, a fall, an accident. Anything like that. 250 words please. And exciting, of course. Pop your excerpt here.Till soon,HarryPS: This email has been running faster than the wind on Townhouse here. It’s pretty sure it can see its own backside looming up in the windshield.PPS: Oh you silly billies. It’s November. It’s time to become a member of Jericho Writers at 30% off the normal price. How can that not be a good, wise, rational thing to do? You get: All our member courses – HOW TO WRITE, GOOD TO GREAT, GETTING PUBLISHED and many more. These are big, properly produced courses any one of which would often sell for more than the price of membership. All our masterclasses – hundreds of hours of them on every topic you can imagine Live events – everything from Critique Club, to agent panels, to live editing, Build Your Book, and so much more. AgentMatch – our proprietary database of 1400+ agents, with detailed profiles and all easy to search and filter A Query Letter review – totally free, of course The joy of Feedback Friday And the knowledge that we have your back. Got a query? Ask us. We’ll either know the answer or we’ll know someone who does. We’re here for our members. Joining information is here. And honestly? We’d love to have you. Please come. 

Last week, we dealt with the cheap and unglamorous world of book promo sites.This week, we go to Madison Avenue, or at least to Silicon Valley. We’re talking digital advertising and, specifically, advertising on Facebook.Now, before we go any further, I need to tell you that this is a complicated subject and small errors can quickly become costly. One email is not enough to fully explain the ins and outs.Also, while I’m a more than competent Facebook advertiser, I’m not a seasoned expert. For both of those reasons, you should use this email as an introduction only – a first step. I’ve put some further reading in the PSes.Please use it; it’ll be expensive if you don’t.What is a Facebook ad?A Facebook ad looks something like this:The various components of the ad are as follows:Sponsor identifier: You’re the sponsor of the ad so it’ll be your name (or writer-pseudonym) in the top left.Primary text: That’s the bit of text that sits above the image. “6,000 5-star reviews…” The position of the text will vary depending exactly where in FB’s ecosystem the ad is shown.The image: That’s the picture, obviously. (Andjust so you know, the sale ISN’T running, so don’t bomb over to Amazon to find it.)Destination URL: The ad won’t send people to Amazon’s home page, it’ll send them to my book series page. But you want to show a tidied up version of the URL, just to keep the ad looking pretty.The headline. This is the text right at the bottom. (“Save over 50% …”) I always think it’s weird that the headline sits at the very bottom, but I don’t make the rules.The Call-To-Action (CTA): That’s the “Shop Now” button, in this example.This email is going to offer a very swift overview of how to use these various elements – but, again, please think of this as a quick orientation only.What you’re aiming to createA good ad is sexy, spare, focused – and repellent.It’s sexy, in that it should attract the eye, and arouse reader-lust in the right group of readers.It needs to be spare, because you don’t have a lot of text to play with and you need to make sure that you give the essential messages fast and unmistakably.It has to be focused, because your ad needs to tell people what it’s advertising. In the example I’ve given, it should be clear that I’m offering (a) a crime series, (b) it’s on sale [except, it’s not – this is just an example], and (c) what I’m offering is ebooks on Amazon.This is also why the ad also has to be repellent. I actively don’t want ad-clicks from people who want to watch TV crime, or only buy print, or only use Apple as their bookstore. Those clicks will cost money and destroy returns. To those people, the ad has to say, very clearly, “this ad is not for you.”How to build a persuasive creativeIn terms of primary text, the basic rule is that you need your tagline followed by an explicit statement of what you want the user to do next. In my example, the tagline spends two lines pitching Fiona’s unique quality and reader reactions, followed by half a line which tells the user what to do next. (And you’ll note, I’m explicit about “download on Amazon”: I don’t want clicks from non-Kindle users.)Don’t use more than 125 characters for all this, or your text will be cut off. It’s best to come up with several (three?) variants for primary text. One variant might emphasise a price discount, another might emphasise social proof (“X number of 5-star reviews!”), a third might pick out some key property of the book. Facebook will be able to test which variant works best for you, so give it some options.Your ad image matters immensely. The basic rule here is that you use the cover art (without text) as a background and overlay a book cover on that art. You might think that sticking a book cover on top of the artwork is not exactly a way to make the artwork look its best, and it’s not. But again, your ad has to say: “I am selling books, nothing else.” You can get cheaper clicks if you don’t include a book cover… but your conversions are likely to suffer.It’s also tempting to overcrowd your image. You’ve got some great reader quotes! You’ve got how many 5-star reviews? And wouldn’t it be nice to cram a bit of your blurb on there as well?But radical minimalism tends to work best. A few words to convey whatever it is you want a reader to hear and retain. And a price alert. That’s it.The colours you choose to do all this should, almost always, be either black text on yellow (like wasps) or white text on red (like danger signs). Using other combinations steps away from the tools used by generations of marketers. That’s probably not a good idea.One positive in all this: you don’t need a designer or any fancy software to create these images for you. I made this image on the free version of Canva in well under an hour. The image above is 1080x1080 pixels. A letterbox format is also possible but tends to work less well. You can try both, but make sure you’re working to the standard FB formats.Your headline is the only other element that truly matters. You have 45 characters to play with here, but shorter is often better. Pick the thing you want to emphasise (“Sale, now 50% off”, for example) and keep it short.Your call-to-action button won’t make a huge difference, but on the whole you want to tell users what you’re expecting: so “Shop now” rather than “Learn more”.No, but really: how to build a persuasive creativeWhat I’ve just told you is not the law; it’s a set of guidelines that works for most ads and most authors most times.But you need to test. Testing is the only route to excellence. You need to generate multiple bits of text. You need to generate multiple images. You need to refine those, by eye, the very best you can. Then you feed them to FB and let it test what works. And that, in the end, is how you perfect the ads. You build several great variants, then test. Then you do it again. And then again.Where do you want to show your ads?Facebook will offer you a million different placement options, across its whole sprawl of websites. Many of those placements will offer much lower cost clicks than the Facebook Feed placement, but they tend to come with lower conversion rates too. So you need to test. Try (a) letting Facebook do its stuff, and (b) restricting placement to the FB Feed only. Remember, you’re not looking to see which option delivers a better cost per click. You’re only concerned about sales. There are good indie authors who favour approach (a) and others who favour (b). All that matters to you is what works for your readers.Who do you want to show your ads to?A big question, this.A few years back, I’d have been encouraging you to go and ferret out your audience by targeting the readerships of comparable authors, and TV shows that chime with your work, and figuring out the demographic niche that works best for you.These days, Facebook’s AI can essentially figure this all out by itself. On the whole, I think you need to tell FB:What country to targetThat you want people who read books on KindleThat’s it.There are highly successful marketers who don’t even restrict by Kindle usage, which somewhat puzzles me, but again: you can test with and without that restriction. And remember, Facebook’s AI is very effective, but it needs data. You can’t spend $20 and hope to have found your optimal targeting. It doesn’t work like that!What results are you looking for?When you’re setting up your ad, Facebook will ask you what you want to achieve. Do you want engagement (clicks and likes and so on)? Or website traffic? Or sales?Now, of course you want sales – but you have a problem, because the sales are being made on Amazon, a website you probably don’t own. Since Amazon won’t tell Facebook which user has or has not bought your book, that route is simply closed.You therefore have to ask Facebook to optimise for “website traffic”, and Facebook will duly oblige. It will report its success or failure in terms of CPC, or cost-per-click. And yes, this metric is important. But in practice what matters most is cost-per-sale, and Facebook can’t tell you, because it doesn’t know.You can solve this problem in one of two ways, and they’re both fine.One is: you just average out your baseline sales before you start advertising. Then you advertise and see how much above baseline you achieve.The second (and my preferred) approach is to use the Amazon Ads attribution tool to figure out precisely what sales come from what campaigns. I’ve put a link in the PSes to some useful resources.But whichever way you approach this, the arithmetic is little muddy. What counts as success?The obvious way to think about things is:How much have I spent in terms of ad-spend?How much money have I earned in royalties as a direct result?Except –Directly boosting the sales of Title #1 by advertising will also increase its sales indirectly by lifting its visibility on Amazon and thereby attracting more organic sales.And that visibility lift will have some afterlife – if you engage in an intense promo, you may feel the effects of it some 30 days after a promo ends.And if you’re writing a series (as you kind of need to be for this kind of approach to work), then you should in principle be happy to pay, say, $0.10 to get a reader into #1 of your series, if you have a high degree of confidence that a sufficient proportion of readers will go on to buy #2, #3, #4 and so on.So the benefit of a sale is very likely worth more than that one sale… you just don’t know how much.As a result, it’s hard to say what an adequate cost-per-sale is. It genuinely does depend on your objectives and what you have to sell. You need to figure this out for yourself, based on the data you have in front of you.How much do you want to spend?I’ve told you to generate multiple versions of your text, and multiple images, and to test them all. I’ve said to test placements and audiences. I’ve said that estimation of actual success is somewhat muddy. Furthermore, Facebook’s ability to snuffle out the right traffic for you has become impressive – but it needs data to work with, and those early clicks cost money.Unfortunately, all that says that you can’t really engage intelligently in a Facebook campaign without being willing to plonk down a significant sum of money, which you are very likely to lose. I’d say that you probably need to commit $150-200 just to get your feet wet: that is, to get your testing to a point at which you might start making (or at least stop losing) money. And that would actually be a good result. You’ll only achieve that if your images, your text, your campaign set up, and your Amazon books page itself are all excellent.When and if you think you have a successful campaign, you’ll probably want to run that at no less than $10 a day, and perhaps more like $20/day. Just go carefully – and watch that data!When and how to use Facebook adsThe book promo sites, which we looked at last week, can certainly add a chunk of low-cost, fair-quality traffic on demand – but you can’t scale up, or not beyond a point.Amazon ads have a huge potential audience, but – even for really proficient advertisers – it’s hard to get scale and it’s essentially impossible to support a surge-marketing campaign.Facebook, on the other hand? If you want to surge market via FB, it’ll be more than happy to take your cash – and deliver your ads in potentially huge volumes. That quality of scalability is vital to most seasoned book marketers. It’s going to be an element of any large-scale, professional digital marketing campaign for books.That said, it is NOT likely that you can earn money by marketing a single book: you probably want to have a decently performing series of three books first. (Decently performing? That means good evidence that a good proportion of Book #1 readers will end up buying Books #2 and #3.) As I say, Facebook is not a newbie-type technique.In short…Facebook ads are powerful – potentially career-altering – but also dangerous. It’s easy to overspend and lose money. People who lose are more common than those who win.And again: please don’t forget the qualifiers that have studded this series of emails. You can’t sensibly market bad books. You can’t sensibly market books whose packaging (covers, blurb, and the rest) are subpar. You are competing – literally, not metaphorically – against the best authors and book-marketers in the world. So match those standards.Next weekNext week, we’re going to talk about mailing lists – and a ship that can sail faster than the wind.FEEDBACK FRIDAY: Query LettersIt’s been a while since we’ve looked at Query Letters on Feedback Friday, so let’s go for it today. Your task: simply this – present your draft query letter. Post yours here when you\'re ready to share it.Simple, right? Till soon Harry 

Last week, I explained that the trick of selling on Amazon is to achieve steadily growing traffic and sales over 4-7 days. In effect, you’re priming Amazon’s own algorithms to take over the task of marketing your book for you … and Amazon turns out to be rather good at doing just that.But how do you get your traffic in the first place? We’re going to look in turn at promo sites, Facebook ads, and mailing lists. Today, we’ll look at the simplest and easiest tool of all – namely, the promo site.These sites aren’t just useful to newbies – they’re nigh on essential. They bring the readership that you don’t yet have. Plus, they’re cheap. Plus (with one exception) access is easy.The BeastThe biggest, best-known book promo site is Bookbub. It promises readers that it will help them get ‘Amazing deals on bestselling ebooks’, and that’s just what it does. (And, to be clear, the site is all about ebooks. Now, of course, you can happily sell print books on Amazon… you’ll just find yourself selling 10 or 20 times as many ebooks, so that’s what this email will focus on.)In effect, Bookbub runs a massive mailing list – the biggest in this sector, by far. That mailing list is divided up into genres. So if you join Bookbub as a reader, it’ll ask you what books you’re interested in. In your specific case, you’ll tell it you like Literary Fiction, Crime Fiction, and Swamp Monster Steamy Romance. Bookbub will then send out regular emails which will notify you of selected books in those categories when they are on special offer. So, a book that might normally sell at $9.99 as an ebook could be available, for one day only, at $0.99.Bookbub is offered a LOT of books. The books that are chosen for the emails are editorially selected and standards are high. Unsurpisingly, if you like your steamy swamp monster romances, and you find a classy and bestselling title sold at a fraction of its normal price – you’re likely to jump on it. Loads of your fellow readers will do the same.For an author, this is bookselling gold… just relatively expensive gold. If you’re in a major category – like crime, for example – a Bookbub Featured Deal will cost you upwards of $1,000. You might think that’s pretty dear for a promotion of this sort… but on the three occasions I’ve had a Featured Deal with my books in North America, I’ve repaid the money by tea-time in the UK, which means barely midday in New York, and not-even-properly-woken-up time in California. The deal lasts all day, and the effects of the deal last even longer.So: if you can get a Bookbub deal, then do. And really, a disciplined author should put in for a deal at least 5-6 times a year. There’s no harm in knocking.In fact, the only real problem with Bookbub is that you have no guarantee at all of being accepted – and the odds are against you. (They used to say they take no more than 1 in 5 books offered. I think that ratio has gone down and is, in any event, increasingly biased towards authors with a well-established following.)That means, it’s good to know how The Beast works. It’s good to apply for promos. But it’s also good to have a back-up. And that’s why we need to get to know…The little sistersThere are literally dozens of book promo sites, many of which are simply useless. But there are still a good few sites with meaningful email lists and a meaningful capacity to drive sales for you.The best sites do change from time to time, so I always check out the latest information from David Gaughran and Nicholas Erik. Both of those guys are in the market a lot, for their own books and for campaigns they manage on behalf of other authors. I basically trust them to know the good sites and make honest recommendations to others.Be aware that the various sites do have their differences. Freebooksy, for example, will only handle books that are being promoted at $0.00. Bargainbooksy will handle promotions of $0.99 and similar. There are also sites that handle only specific genres. And so on. Prices are relatively affordable and should certainly be within your budget.Crucially, these sites are essentially non-selective. That means, if you’re a newbie author without a huge pre-existing following, you can still use these services. Indeed: not just “can”, but “bloody well ought to”. It should be the very first layer of your promotional campaign.Promo stackingYou’ll hear indie authors use the phase ‘Promo stacking’ – and it’s what I recommend. But the phrase is just a little misleading. A stack is a set of things piled vertically, right? A stack of books, a stack or ironing.And that tends to suggest that if your overall book promotion campaign is going to run Monday to Friday, that you should ‘stack’ all your promo sites on (say) the Monday. And that’s not right.Promo stacking means using multiple different promo sites, but spaced out so you can add traffic throughout your promotional period. BargainBooksy for Monday, RobinReads for Tuesday, Fussy Librarian for Wednesday, and so on.For under $200 you can build a five-day promotional campaign that will get your book out in front of thousands and thousands of readers. You shouldn’t leave things there – we’ll talk about more powerful strategies in subsequent emails – but even pro marketers working on big campaigns for authors making seven figures a year will start with the basics: bookings on promo sites running through the term of the campaign.It\'s easy. It’s low cost. And it works.Don’t forget the basicsAll that said, please don’t forget the basics.By far the biggest marketing failure made by newbie authors is to hurtle through to the very end of the selling process – booking promo campaigns, designing Facebook ads – when the preceding plumbing is woefully leaking.So:Is your book actually good, or is it just you and your mum who thinks so? If it’s just you and your mum, there is no amount of marketing that will make that turkey fly. You MUST get your book to the kind of standards required by high quality digital-first publishers. If that means investing in writing courses and professional editorial feedback, then spend that money. (Preferably with us! We’re very good.) If readers don’t like your book, Amazon will figure this out, you’ll get lousy reviews, and the more money you spend advertising the book, the more money you’ll lose. Write. A. Good. Book.Is your cover actually good, or is it just you and Dorky Phil who did the Photoshop work for you who think it is? Again: there’s no compromise here. Your book cover must look like something that could adorn a book put out by Penguin Random House or any of the other big boys. That also means that your pitch and your genre have to be visually assimilable – and quickly – from the thumbnail of cover and title. Here too, there can be no compromise.Is your blurb good? Do you have good reviews coming in? Is your pricing sane? Is your website up to scratch? Is your mailing list set up and do you have a proper welcome automation in place?If you allow any of these things to be sub-par, you will struggle. You are up against the best writers and the best publishers on the planet, so don’t think some lowlier standard applies to you. It doesn’t.Next week: a tool that’s more powerful and more scalable than anything else out there. It’s also a tool that will spend your money with glee and won’t in any way guarantee results. In short, we’re riding the bronco that is Facebook ads – and don’t tell me you’re not ad-curious. I know you are.See you next week.FEEDBACK FRIDAY: Single Sentence SummariesBecause we\'re now at the end of Build Your Book Month, we ought to look at what you\'ve accomplished. So, I\'d like: A one sentence summary of your book, please. Just a quick explanation of what kind of book you\'re talking about.250 words or so of plot outline - which will include giving away the ending. You\'re not blurbing the book; you\'re summarising. Ideally, I want to see a nice tidy sense of shape. I want to feel the point of the book and the forward thrust. It\'s really not easy summarising in this way, and you can write a good book and a lousy summary - but still. Let\'s give it a go. When you\'re ready, post yours here.I have just noticed: I have many children. And they\'re still here. Oh yikes. They made pumpkin soup today, and I saw an actual footprint, in soup, on my kitchen floor. Till soon,Harry

Over the last couple of weeks, we thought about how to sell books the traditional way - print books sold through physical bookstores. The short summary: you try to amass retail footprint (via your publisher’s sales team) then create a real density of awareness once you have it. The lethal catch: if you don’t capture that footprint in the first place, there’s essentially nothing that can be done to achieve sales thereafter. Today, we turn from a world of tweed, pipe tobacco and hardbacks… to bits, bytes and algorithms. This email (and the ones that follow) are of particular relevance to anyone self-publishing their books, but I think they’re ALL of relevance anyway. No ambitious author should be without a mailing list under their own control. And the other tools we’re talking about are so basic to modern digital selling that you can’t afford to ignore them. And, to be blunt, plenty of trad publishing companies who ought to know better are still poor at digital selling. You won’t be able to understand or modify those failures unless you understand the territory. So: listen up. The big question today is: How, in theory, do you achieve huge sales via Amazon? Yes, I know that other online bookstores exist. But they’re so small in comparison with Amazon that they barely count. Kindle Unlimited alone is about equal in size to all other non-Amazon e-stores combined. So, I’m going to focus on Amazon. That’s where the sales are. And… the answer to our big question is easy. It’s: Achieve strong, steady traffic to your book’s Amazon page; andEnsure you have strong conversions once readers get there. I’m not going to talk about Part 2 of that very much. In a nutshell, you need a blisteringly good book cover. You need a strong blurb. You need to accumulate some reviews. You need a sensible price (which means a low one. My Fiona series is self-published in the US. The first book in the series normally sells at $0.99. The other books sell at $4.99.) And – have I ever mentioned this? – everything of course needs to be perfectly in line with your insanely strong elevator pitch. You all know what a strong Amazon page looks like, because you’re familiar with it as readers. Create that. So let’s turn instead to Part 1 of the question: an altogether harder and more thought-provoking question. How do you drive traffic to your Amazon page? The biggest source of traffic Before we start to answer it, I want to call your attention to the phrase “strong, steady traffic”. What does that mean exactly? Also: who cares? If you had, say, 10,000 visitors to your book page, why would you especially care if they all came at half-past two on Saturday, or trickled out over a week, or trickled out over two months? If, let’s say, one in ten of those visitors ends up buying a book, that’s 1,000 book sales whichever way you count it, right? But no: that’s not right. That arithmetic is totally wrong. Because the biggest source of traffic to your Amazon page will be… tiny drumroll… Amazon. Amazon’s websites have more book-buying traffic than anyone else, by far. Amazon knows exactly who amongst their horde of buyers is likely to buy your book. Further, Amazon has any number of ways to advance or drop the visibility of different pages. For example, a really popular book page might feature on: An overall bestseller list.A sub- or sub-sub-bestseller list. (You can sit at the top of multiple lists.) A “customers also bought” selection attached to books by other writers in your genre.The home page for certain users. (So, if you’ve bought a lot of romantic comedies from Amazon recently, you may find that your Amazon home screen fills with various other rom-coms for you to consider.) A hot new releases list.Emails to selected users (i.e., readers in the same genre.) Search pages, where the search term is in some way relevant to your book. This could even be for another author’s name. So if I enter “Gillian Flynn” as a search term, Amazon will first display some books by GF and then start to suggest books that it thinks GF-type readers are likely to enjoy. And so on... So, the best way to get traffic to your book’s Amazon page is to get Amazon itself to boost your page’s visibility. Essentially, you want to make sure that Amazon’s algorithms and robots to decide that what they most want to do is feed traffic to your book page. But how?Strong and steady To answer that question, you need to know two things. The first is that Amazon’s bestseller lists are extremely sensitive to short-term movements. A classic bestseller list – the NY Times list, for example – reflects the total volume of weekly sales, and is updated once each week. Amazon’s list, by contrast, updates every hour. What’s more, the sales you’ve made in the last 24 hours account 50% of your total ranking. The sales you make in the preceding 24 hours account for the next 25%. The prior day for 12.5%, and so on. That means Amazon is electrically sensitive to quite small movements, in a way that the NYT list is not. That said, Amazon’s little robots know that a one-off spike doesn’t mean too much – it could be an email blast that gets a flurry of sales and nothing more before or after. So, the Indie Author Hive Mind (which is exceptionally smart, by the way) says: Work to secure sales over 4 days, not 1. A little longer than 4 days is probably better – say 5-7 – but that does depend on how much marketing oomph you can bring. Ideally, you’d have a gently sloping increase in sales over the period – so aim for something like 100 / 110 / 120 / 130 in terms of sales progression. (I mean these as indicative units, not specific book sales. A brand-new indie author would be doing very well indeed to shift 400+ books over four days.) If your sales tools are still in their infancy (i.e., no mailing list, smallish ad budget), then do what you can. I’d suggest that getting some sales on Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, and Day 4 would be a reasonable aim, with anything splashy you can manage coming on Day 4. You’ll note that this advice will NOT maximise your peak bestseller rank. If you wanted to do that, you wouldn’t just try to get your sales compacted into a single day. You’d ideally try to have them squashed into a single hour. And yes, you’d have the pleasure and satisfaction of a salesrank you can boast about to your dental hygienist. But you won’t get as many sales overall as if you follow the plan here. And sales matter more. What happens next? So let’s say you follow the plan, and achieve that gently sloping uptick in sales over 4-7 days. What then? You’ll have exhausted your mailing list. Your ad budget will be empty. What next? Well, what next is – Amazon. If you do this right, at about the four-day point, you’ll see a sudden surge in sales as Amazon takes over the marketing. Its tiny little underpaid, non-union bots are essentially saying, “OK, author-human, we’re convinced that this book of yours is worth marketing, so we’re going to start marketing it ourselves. We’re going to sift through the MILLIONS of readers who come daily to our website, and we’re going to show your book to the ones most likely to buy it.” That sounds exhilarating – and it is. But the exhilaration (and the sales) won’t last forever. New books come onto the market, new sales surges are manufactured, those underpaid little bots are fickle – FICKLE, you hear me? – and they will start flashing their glossy metallic ankles at other books and other authors instead. So, over a period of about 30 days, you’ll see sales tail off to a base level… then probably dwindle further as time goes by. You’ll do better in that 30-day period (and maybe extend it a little) if your Amazon page is all seven shades of fantastic: Amazon will prefer to send readers to a page that ends up in sales. You’ll also do better if readers read and enjoy and finish your book. (How does Amazon know if you finish your book? Because it collects data from a gazillion Kindles.) But nothing lasts forever. Your sales surge won’t. The arithmetic of sales Earlier in this email, I said: “If you had, say, 10,000 visitors to your book page, why would you especially care if they all came at half-past two on Saturday, or trickled out over a week, or trickled out over two months? If, let’s say, one in ten of those visitors ends up buying a book, that’s 1,000 book sales whichever way you count it, right?” You can now understand why that logic is flawed. If you trickled those sales out over two months, your popularity on Amazon would almost certainly never rise to a point where you tickled Amazon’s bots enough to get them involved. So your expected sales would indeed be 1,000 books, or something similar. If you took the one-off surge approach, I think that Amazon would respond, just not in a very powerful or sustained way. But still. Books sold? More than 1,000 anyway. And if you took the slow and steady over 4-7 days approach? You’d easily generate enough sales to get a really good blast of love from Amazon and you’d see lovely, organic sales for week, after week, after week. That’s where you’ll really make the money. That’s also why smart indie authors are perfectly happy if their Week 1 ad campaign makes exactly zero profit. It doesn’t have to make a profit in week 1. It has to make a profit in the somewhat longer term. The approach outlined in this email tells you how to go about doing that. “Now look, you blithering idiot, you gibbering phytoplankton, you lumpen mass of curdled whey – why won’t you answer the ONE QUESTION that I really want you to answer?” I expect that most of you will be thinking along these lines – or a politer version anyway. Because of course, it’s all very well setting out the theory of how to apportion your traffic to Amazon, but how do you secure that traffic in the first place? I’ll answer that question in some detail next week, with deep dives into a couple of further areas after that, but suffice to say that there are lots of things that don’t work: Twitter / XInstagram Blogging Blog tours Organic Facebook traffic (probably) Boosted Facebook posts Amazon ads Traditional publicity, of the sort that Big Publishing uses. Some items on this list might be surprising: how could Amazon ads not increase sales on Amazon, for example? The answer is that Amazon ads may increase sales in a low-level, evergreen-type way. They are not well adapted to the kind of surge marketing I’m talking about here. I also think that Amazon ads tend to work better as a phase two option: that is, once you have already generated some good book sales through other sources. Or again: how could trad publicity not work, since it works perfectly well for trad publishers? And yes, of course it does: but they have a huge physical retail footprint. Trad publicity is pretty much hopeless for generating digital sales on demand. The two worlds – physical bookstores and all things Amazonian – are largely separate in terms of sales approach. So I’m only going to focus on three tools, but they’re all important: Promo sites Facebook ads Author mailing lists. That’s it. That’s what lies ahead. If you’re trad published, then knowing about promo sites is valuable, in that publishers should – these days – think of them when it comes to boosting your ebook. Author mailing lists are critical for everybody. And Facebook ads? Well, it will be essentially impossible to profit from them if you’re trad published. But indie authors will rely on them heavily – and I do think that trad authors just need to know what their publishers could be doing, and in many cases ought to be doing. You can’t even have the conversations, if you don’t understand the territory.*FEEDBACK FRIDAY: Selling StrategiesAn unusual task this week. Simply: Do you have experience of a selling strategy that really didn\'t work for you? Do you have experience of one that really did? You might be talking about something that your publishers conceived and executed for you. You might be talking about something that you did yourself. Either way, let\'s hear about it. When you\'re ready, post yours here.And? Yes: writing books is hard. Selling them is harder. But let\'s also not forget that loads and loads of books do get written and sold, and authors make money and find readers. Just this week, for instance, our very own Becca Day has published her latest thriller, The Woman In The Cabin, to rapturous reviews. So, this is a hard task, but not an impossible one. Avanti! Til soon,Harry

Last week, I talked about how print-led publishing is essentially dominated by the battle to secure retail space. If your book gets a really good level of retail space, it stands an excellent chance of selling well. If not, your book is mostly likely to sell badly, irrespective of its basic quality. I ended that Depressing, Pointless and Nihilistic email by promising you that this week I would offer you some Very Sound Advice. And yes: I will. But be warned. That advice is akin to finding running shoes for the portly gentleman at the start of his race. It’s akin to massaging his quads and calling his attention to a trip hazard en route. His odds will improve, for sure… but the race is still a crapshoot. The basic shape of the game remains unaltered. All you can do is boost your odds. So that’s coming up, but first: I got a LOT of replies from you guys last week, and quite a lot of you seemed to think I was saying that trad publishing is basically broken and that self-publishing is a better option. To be clear, I am not saying that. Trad publishing has its challenges. Self-publishing does, too – they\'re just different challenges. And, either way, a ton of books get sold all the time. Authors are taken on by agents, their books are bought by publishers, they’re sold to retailers, who sell on to readers. Despite the huge torrent of new media, books remain absolutely central to culture. And of course, you can earn a lot of money even if your book doesn’t sell: that’s what advances are for. So, trad publishing is great and full of opportunity. But it’s also difficult and full of challenges. Here’s what you need to do. Write a good book The quality of your book ought to matter, and it does matter. Ideally, the major retail buyers would read all the books offered to them by publishers, and pick the ones that were the very, very best. That doesn’t happen. Too many books, too few buyers. But quality still matters. Your publishers are sophisticated readers and will know the difference between a book that feels genuinely special and one that feels just fine. They’ll put more work into the first one than the second. That will affect every conversation between your publishers and the wider world. It can generate some startling, immediate, significant wins. For example: when my Fiona Griffiths series was launched in the UK, hardback sales weren’t great. They weren’t awful, but certainly mediocre. In the normal course of things, hardback sales are the best predictor of paperback ones… except that my publisher (Orion, part of Hachette) had an in-house book group. A reading group, in other words: a bunch of friends getting together to talk about a shared reading experience. That group read my book and loved it. That enthusiasm spilled over to UK’s biggest bookseller who ended up putting the paperback into their biggest monthly promotion, thereby sharply changing the book’s (and series’) sales trajectory. So: write a good book. That’s the only part you have real control over, so do it right. If you need or want help, then of course we offer a ton of ways to provide that. Two easy options are: Our Good To Great course, which is specifically there to help competent writers become dazzling writers – the sort that agents have to take on. The course is free to Premium Members, but everyone gets to have a free first lesson. Manuscript assessment. This is still the gold standard way to improve a novel, and our editors are very, very good. If I’d recommend any one thing, it would be this. Make nice Back in the day, I was published by HarperCollins and my editorial team also handled a major bestselling author, whom we’ll just call Jack. (The author in question? Rich. Litigious.) HarperCollins knew this author would earn them money, but he was horrible. Just a nasty human. So yes, they put together a pitch for this chap’s next book. Yes, they tried to win it. But – they were also kind of happy when they failed. Publishers will work harder for people they like. So make nice – and, really, that’s just a way of saying BE nice. It makes a difference. Be professional For the same reason, it helps to be professional. Delivering on time, working well with edits, responding fast to emails – all of that. Those things help your editor do his or her job, so being professional is basically just a way of making nice, in a way that is directly helpful. It all makes a difference. Be strategic If you’re lucky, you’ll get the chance to meet bloggers, and retail buyers, and booksellers, and other industry types. Those meetings really matter. Yes, there are often other authors floating around at those events and authors are generally more delightful souls than, erm, almost anyone, and so it’s tempting to curl up in a knot of drunken writers and ignore everyone else – but don’t. Be strategic. Booksellers and bloggers and other influencers matter, so seek them out, and be interesting and make nice. And retail buyers really, really matter so seek them out and make super-nice. And if that sounds too calculated – well, hell, I should probably add that you should be authentic too. Don’t just lie and flatter. Be yourself, just a polished up version of yourself. Make nice with the people who matter, then get hammered with your cronies. (Oh yes, and crime writers are WAY the most interesting authors, so you should probably write crime, not something smelly like lit fic or YA. And even when crime writers aren’t the most interesting, they have way the highest capacity for booze.) Care about your cover Your book cover matters – intensely. It’s something I’ve often not got right in my career. I don’t mean that I’ve chosen a poor cover, because I’ve never exactly got to choose. I’ve got to comment. (And, by the way, a publisher may be contractually obliged to consult with you about your cover, which sounds nice. Just be aware that their legal obligation would be entirely satisfied by the following exchange: Publisher: “What do you think of your new book cover?” You: “I hate it in every possible way.” Publisher: “Thank you for your opinion.”) But – even without having a contractual right of veto, it’s a rare editor who doesn’t basically want to make his or her author roughly happy. So: Before you see your draft cover, have a damn good idea of what the other books in this space look like. Yours can’t look worse. You want it to look better. When you do see your cover, be as honest as possible with yourself about your feelings. That’s harder to do than it sounds! Discard completely all feelings that have to do with the way the book, or the cover looks in your head. It doesn’t matter if the cover seems to refer to an incident or feature that’s not in the book. The key questions are: Does it convey genre? Does it convey mood? Is it arresting and just generally brilliant? That’s what matters. Tell your editor what you think. If you want changes, say so. If you want a total rethink, say so – and in those terms. Be direct. Do not be too people-pleasey.  Beware: if you think the cover’s wrong, your publishers is likely to “nice” you into submission. If your editor says, “Oh, I’m sure once you see the cover with the raised lettering and the foil effects, you’ll be absolutely blown away,” what they mean is, “Give us a chance to let a few more weeks pass, and then it’ll be too late to make changes anyway.” For that reason, make sure you get a reasonably early sight of your cover. If it arrives with you too late, you may be stuck with it. A bad cover will kill your book. A great cover could propel it into the stratosphere. Do not accept compromise – and throw your toys out of the pram if you have to. This is almost the only area where toy-throwing makes sense.  And when you are considering cover – or blurb – or marketing in general, then always remember: The pitch, the pitch, the pitch! Publishing is a machine. It makes its profits by employing good people, working them too hard, and paying them too little. It can seem like a privilege to work for a good, big publisher, but by heck they’ll take their pound of flesh (or 454g, for our EU readers.) The result is that books don’t always get the level of thought and attention they deserve. And in particular, your cover designer hasn’t read your book, didn’t commission your book, and has little more than a page or two of notes from your editor in terms of design brief. The result can easily be a lazily “me-too” cover, or one that simply doesn’t evoke the mood and tone of your book. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. You are most likely to get stellar sales if: You have a brilliant concept – an elevator pitch; and Everything lines up perfectly behind that concept: the text, the title, the blurb, the cover, and every line of marketing yadda. Your job, as author, is to be the scent-following, rat-shaking terrier that ensures the fidelity of everything to your pitch. If your title and blurb promise one kind of experience, and the book cover promises another, that book will not persuade readers to walk it over to the till. You need a great concept. And everything – everything – needs to line up behind it. Honestly? Nowadays, I’d be blunt about it. I’d offer my own cover design brief to an editor. I’d suggest my own blurb. I’d say what I thought our pitch was and what tone we needed to strike. If you do that right, you won’t even come across as an asshole. Offer your material humbly and accept advice when it’s wise. Most of the time, an editor will actually be grateful: you’re making their life easier. That’s a positive blessing. But if they say you’re wrong about something, you also need to accept that you don’t know everything.  FEEDBACK FRIDAY:  Well, I’ve yammered away about the pitch – again – in this email, so let’s have another pitching challenge. If you haven’t watched the free first lesson of Good To Great, then do please do just that. And, in any event, please: Give me the pitch for your novel in a maximum of 20 words, and preferably fewer. If you’re stuck, try the “Premise + Conflict” recipe to see if that unsticks you like slippery egg on Teflon. Also, present your pitch as an extremely short list of ingredients “Teen romance + werewolf”, “Orphan + wizard school”. You have 3-8 words for this. For extra pepperoni on your pizza, then please also show me how everything is going to line up behind that concept: What’s your title? And how does that line up with your pitch? What kind of cover would work? You need to advertise genre and you need to advertise pitch. Don’t get too specific: just offer a sketch of a possible cover brief. What we’re trying to do here is make sure that your pitch flows right through to the places where your book is first going to touch the reader: on a bookstore table or on an Amazon search page. When you\'re ready, post yours here.NEXT WEEK We turn to the beast that is Amazon and all things digital. Til soon Harry 

Last week, I talked about how selling print books is a very different proposition from selling ebooks. Print books can’t change their covers, can’t radically lower their price, can’t link to the internet, and are sold (by publishers) to huge corporations not direct to consumers.So how do publishers sell books?Well, there are two ways to look at it. There’s the way that publishers will talk about (at length) if you ask them at a festival or elsewhere. Then there’s the way that actually illuminates what happens.How publishers sell books (publisher version)Let’s honour publishers first by talking about bookselling the way that they do. Selling a print book, these days, is more complicated – more multi-channelled – than it has ever been. So publishers will think about:Social media activity, including relatively novel channels like BookTok.Some digital advertising (maybe).Book reviews via notable bloggers in whatever your genre space isBook reviews via mainstream mediaOther media opportunities, from local radio to national press or even (rarely) TVRequesting puffs and review quotes from authors and other influencersSending out proof copies to all and sundryFestival appearancesIndustry get-togethers that give you a chance to meet bloggers, reviewers, etcIndustry get-togethers that give you a chance to meet retail buyersIndustry get-togethers that give you a chance to meet booksellersBook signings (less frequent now than they used to be, thank the Lord. Turnouts at these things seldom helped an author’s ego.)Book giveaways, however handledPrice promotions, especially with supermarketsPurchasing “book of the week” type slots with chain booksellersInclusion in the publisher’s seasonal catalogueThat’s not even a comprehensive list – and it includes categories (eg: ‘social media activity’) which in itself comprises a whole bewildering and inventive range of initiatives.That said, what publishers actually do for any particular book tends to be a very small subset of what they could potentially do.Let’s say that you have a really capable agent from a heavy-hitting literary agency in London or New York. Let’s also say your Really Capable Agent has sold to a highly credible imprint at a major publisher. The publisher concerned has a fancy office building at some glamorous address. They have a billion dollars plus in global revenues and make a very healthy profit on those sales. Let’s also say that your book deal wasn’t even marginal. It wasn’t one of those $10,000 / £5,000 advances that basically say, “Look, we’re not that excited by this, but we’ll give it a shot …”So, you’re all set, right? You just need to stand back and let this mighty machine do its perfectly polished work?What actually happensWell – maybe.Sometimes, yes, an author will find it pans out, all as they’ve dreamed it. It’s as though they’ve gone to sleep in some frozen landscape, then woken up on a geyser, tossed higher than seemed possible. “Hey, sorry, Oprah, I’m on Jimmy Fallon that night, could we maybe reschedule?”But mostly – it’s not like that.Mostly, you have these weird conversations with whichever Glossy Marketing Person your publisher allocates you.YOU: “Cover reveal on Twitter, OK.”GMP: “Yeah, it’s called X now.”“And, uh, the book’s in a catalogue?”“Yes, we’ve really revamped the way we address indie bookshops, so there are going to be a LOT of eyes on this.”“And proof copies? When you took me on, you were going to print up some book proofs with a fancy cover …?”“Well, yes. I mean, we’ve gone the PDF route, in fact, because so many people find PDFs easier to handle.”“And Festival appearances? We spoke about that too …”“Yes, we’re really getting your name out there.”“But nothing booked?”“Well, we haven’t yet heard back from the Little Piddle Lit Fest team. They were very  enthusiastic at one point.”“Book reviews?”“We can send out another email, but it can be positively unhelpful to chase too much.”“Adverts? I mean, are you taking any positive steps to get this book in front of readers?”[Glossy Marketing Person does the nervous laughter compulsory when an author mentions a strategy that costs actual money.]“We really feel that organic reach works better on digital.”It’s perfectly possible – no, likely – that your marketing conversation goes something like that. And you watch on as this huge machine, this reliable creator of bestselling books and authors, appears to do virtually nothing to support your book.Sure enough, what looked likely to happen, does happen.Not many retailers buy your book, and those that do don’t buy it at huge scale. Sure enough, you make some sales, because it would be weird if literally no one bought it, but the sales seem very low.Nobody from your publisher ever calls you up and says, “Hey, you do know that your career is completely ****ed, don’t you?”, but by the time you get to the latter stages of your two-book deal, the mood music has altered so unmistakeably, you get the message anyway. You always quite fancied pig-farming / floristry / exotic dance as a way to make a living, so you start retraining as one of those good things instead.You are about to be a former author, except that – like American presidents – you always get to call yourself an author, even if it’s been years since you ran a country / wrote a book.How publishers sell books (the reality)What publishers say about selling books is all, 100%, completely true.But they mostly don’t add a crucial little rider, and everything that truly matters is in that rider.Your book will get a huge and impressive density of marketing effort if retailers agree to stock your book in significant volumes. If retailers don’t agree stock your book in bulk, we will offer you the absolute minimum of support – and yes, we are well aware that this lack of support will be terminal.They are extremely unlikely to tell you this directly. They are not likely to volunteer what level of orders they are looking for. They are not likely to tell you if you have / have not met this level.Publishers are, in the end, profit-seeking companies. Their basic sales model (for print) is as follows:Buy 12 books from debut authors.Do a reasonable (if cost-conscious) job of book production – covers, editing, all that.Present those 12 books to retailers. (That’s why “Inclusion in the publisher’s seasonal catalogue” is the most important element in the list I gave you earlier, even though it seems like the most boring and least impactful element there.)Retailers are getting bombarded by loads of catalogues from loads of imprints from loads of publishers. Even the biggest stores don’t have shelf space for everything. Most stores are small not big. And supermarkets – which sell huge volumes of books – sell very few individual titles. The result is that most debut novels don’t get many orders. That’s just how it is.Publishers then triage, ruthlessly.If a book gets a heavy level of advance orders from a good number of retailers, the marketing artillery will come out in force. The advance orders from supermarkets are most likely to come if the publisher offers significant price discounts, but supermarkets know that they can and will secure those discounts if they back them up with orders. All this is potentially geyser territory; where you wake up on a glorious fountain of sales: your book, in a lot of stores, backed by hefty price promotions.If a book does not get a heavy level of advance orders (and it probably won’t), publishers will, in their smilingly deceptive way, let your book (and your career) die.The publisher then moves onto the next batch of 12 debut authors. You move on to pig-farming / floristry / exotic dance.All this is perfectly logical.Retailers can’t possibly stock all the books they’re offered. If a publisher runs an expensive marketing campaign aimed at generating sales in bookstores, that campaign is bound to fail – badly – if your book is invisible in the places where people buy books.The result is that, if your book doesn’t get ordered in significant volumes, your publisher will simply throttle any marketing effort. They’ll do just enough to stop you being shouty and screamy, but they know perfectly well that the little they do won’t meaningfully shift books.In effect, modern publisher bookselling is akin to twelve fat men running for the same revolving door. It’s not really an athletic competition. It’s more of a random scramble. But in the end, only one fat man can pop first through that door – and the bliss of Selling Heaven – and eleven portly gentlemen will be sitting all a-tumble on the skiddy granite outside, wondering what happened.What happened, my friend, is that you just got published.Pipes and tweedNow, I should say that all this is very much the pipe and tweed version of things – what happens with a very print-led publishing process. There are, for sure, imprints at big publishers that are either digitally-led or reasonably adept at pivoting between the two. But since the pipe-n-tweed imprints are always the most prestigious, and the ones most likely to create the kind of bestsellers you’ve always dreamed of writing, this model is still profoundly influential.If you’re startled by my cynicism, I should say that I’m hardly alone. I had a conversation a year or two back with someone who used to run one of the most prestigious imprints in British publishing. I gave him my 12-fat-men analogy, and he essentially agreed. He said that one of the reasons he left publishing was precisely because he felt it had become too much of a lottery, with books elevated by happenstance more than quality.(And all this, by the way, explains lot about your experience as a reader. Let’s say you read about the new bestseller by Q. It has fancy reviews from X and Y and Z, and it’s selling a LOT of books. So you buy the book and read it, hoping to learn something about how to write … and you think, huh? I mean, books don’t get to be super-big bestsellers unless they genuinely have something special. And you don’t even get to be an ordinary-level bestseller unless you bring a basic competence. But dazzle? Bestselling debut fiction should be dazzling, and it often isn’t. You know it. I know it. Everyone knows it. This email explains the reason why.)So what to do?This email would be Depressing, Pointless and Nihilistic unless it ended with some words of advice on how to win that 12-fat-men-and-a-revolving-door race. And …?Well, I don’t know.And this email is too long.And these emails are ALWAYS too long.But, that being said, I do nevertheless have some Very Sound Advice to offer.But you’ll have to wait till next week to get it.Tell me what you thinkAs we go further with this series of emails, I’d love to know what you think. What’s useful? What isn’t? What do you want to know more about? Just hit reply, and let me know.I got a lot of replies last time, so do keep your thoughts coming. I read everything and reply to nearly everything.FEEDBACK FRIDAY: Build Your Book Month - PlottingIt’s Build Your Book Month and we’re plotting away.Sophie’s workshop last week - “Start your book with a bang” was free to all and and generated a LOT of interest. So the assignment this week is:Watch Sophie being amazing here (that link will take you to the Masterclass area of Premium Membership. Not a member? We\'ve made the replay free to watch here too.)Upload your opening page (max 300 words)Give us some comments (after your opening) about how you decided on what you wrote.Post yours here. (I’m asking for comments because personally I don’t really start my books with a bang. My most tedious ever opening paragraph? That’s easy. It was the one word: “Rain.” Although, more broadly, that opening was probably beaten out by my very next book which opened with two characters, including my protagonist, discussing a new pair of jeans:I say, ‘Great. Really nice.’ I’m not sure what to say.‘My jeans. They’re new.’‘Oh.’Any time, Becca Day and her team want a BYB workshop on “How to craft a tedious opening”, I’m their man.)I’m off to open things in a boring way – books, beer bottles, supermarkets. I’ll see you next week.Til soonHarry

This is the first in a season of emails on how to sell a book. Today’s email will cover the shape of the industry as it is today. Further emails will cover things like traditional sales techniques, Amazon’s algorithm, Facebook ads, Amazon ads, mailing lists, non-fiction, and other topics.What’s the point, mate – I mean, honestly?There’ll be a large group of you for whom this kind of information may seem redundant. Those folk may be inclined to think, roughly:“Look here, you Cheerless Charlie, I haven’t even finished my book, and I don’t know if it’s any good, and certainly don’t know if any literary agent will be keen to take me on. And all that mailing list and Amazon ad stuff? Isn’t that something that publishers are meant to take care of? I have zero interest in self-publishing a book and a couple of emails won’t change that.”Well, yes, I hear you.And yes: selling a book may seem a distant dream, and the information that follows may feel theoretical. But that’s not the right way to look at it. You are, all of you, seeking to create and sell a product to an industry – or, for indie authors, perhaps it’s more accurate to say that you’re looking to create a product that you’ll sell direct to consumers via some well-established industry structures.And to do that, yes, you need to write a good book. You’ll know me well enough by now to know that I’m a craft-first kind of guy. I’m all about hard-writing and easy-marketing, not the other way round.But understanding the industry always helps. Always.Sometimes, it helps in very direct ways. If you sell your book to a publisher, and you’re at some industry event supported by that publisher, you’ll know who performs what role – and who you ought to be out charming. Good knowledge about the industry will change the way you think about Twitter/X. It’ll change the way you think about your book cover. It’ll change the way you present yourself as an author.But more than that, I think you grow up in less definable ways. All fiction projects start out in a kind of dream. A story pops into your head and you think, wouldn’t it be fun to write this down? That’s perfectly fine – it’s how I started, too – but your aim has to be to become a truly professional author. Yes, you will always need to satisfy your own creative spirit (what a waste it would be if we didn’t do that), but you’d be plain dumb to think that your creative spirit doesn’t need to work hand-in-hand with an industry.What’s more, for all the mwah-mwah-darling nature of the (very pleasant) publishing industry, it is at its heart as ruthless about income and profits as any other.So:You need to remain creative, but you also need to build a product for a shamelessly profit-seeking industry. These emails will tell you how books get sold and that in turn will tell you a lot about how agents, editors, publicists and everyone else thinks. Get to grips with these emails and your odds of success go up. Got that? Good. Allons-y!The doom loop that wasn’tFor a few years, it seemed credible to argue that the traditional books industry could simply collapse. Bricks-and-mortar booksellers were near-bankrupt. E-books were booming. Print-runs were getting shorter. It seemed possible that shorter print runs would drive up print prices, which would force the collapse of Barnes and Noble (US) and Waterstones (UK), and that in turn would create a doom loop for the rest of the regular bookselling industry.That didn’t happen. A couple of big book chains went bust (bye-bye, Borders), but the flagship chains recovered their spirits, their profitability, and their charm.Meantime, e-books (and audio book) did in fact turn out to be the Next Big Thing – a vast new way of reading and marketing and selling books – but that new thing has added to, not replaced, what was there before.The invisible publisherThe publishing industry, as it exists today, divides into two (messily defined) chunks.One chunk is ‘traditional’ publishing. The company names are essentially the same as they always were. The imprints are often the same, too. The firms they sell to are largely the same. The products they sell have shifted – but only a bit.Thus, a modern trad publisher might sell roughly 70% of its books in print form, roughly 20% as ebooks, and roughly 10% as audiobooks. If you look at value, not volume, then ebooks drop back to more like 10% and that chunk gets added onto print instead.So, for most modern publishers, ebooks are and have long been secondary. It’s true that ebooks play a bigger role in adult genre fiction, but that means they play a correspondingly smaller role in kids’ books and adult non-fiction.This summary – 70 print / 20 ebook / 10 audio – is often presented as though it were true of the books market as a whole, but it’s not.Talk to indie authors, and you’ll find they barely think about print at all. My own self-published books sell at least 95% of their copies in digital form – ebook and audio. I really only sell in print because it’s easy to do so, and because it’s nice for readers who prefer lovely, lovely paper.Virtually all self-published authors are like me: we sell digital products. Our print sales are little more than decorative. Yet because mainstream media has long, deep connections with trad publishers and essentially no connection at all with indies, the self-published part of the industry is essentially invisible – perpetually forgotten, perpetually surprising to those from trad publishers.But, collectively, these indies are hardly negligible. The self-pub industry is at least as large as Penguin Random House and probably larger. If you add in the digital-first publishers – who are quasi-traditional in that they are selective, but still very ebook dominated – then the ebook-dominant publishers are collectively way bigger than PRH.And yet – still invisible.Selling in print and selling in bytesNow all this matters to you because selling print books is radically different from selling ebooks.Take ebooks first:If early sales data says that your cover isn’t working quite right, you can change the cover instantly. Or the blurb. Or both. Aside from the new design itself, it’s not even costly to make the switch.If you want to tweak the price, you can. Want to drop a book from $9.99 to $0.99 or even $0.00? You can do so, easily and instantly.Supposing you want a reader to visit a website, with an ebook you just offer an ordinary, regular link and say, “Tap here.” Done.One more thing: ebooks are sold (almost exclusively) via Amazon and Apple, two of the world’s largest companies. Those companies don’t hand-curate their bookstores. They just sell everything, no matter how good or bad. So that means you, the author, aren’t really selling your book to Amazon for them to on-sell. You are selling via Amazon direct to the consumer.So that’s ebooks: instantly flexible, price-adjustable, online-linked, direct to consumer.None of that stuff is true of print books.Yes, in theory a publisher can change a cover – and often does from hardcover to softcover, or for an anniversary or TV-special edition. But for that process to operate cleanly, the old stock has to be recovered and pulped before the new stock is issued. Consequently, the process is slow, rare and considered.Price tweaking doesn’t really work with print. Because there’s a hard cost (in materials, printing, warehousing, shipping) to get a book to a bookstore, a publisher can’t just chop the price and expect the same margin. So price cutting happens less radically (“3-for-2”, say, not $9.99 to $0.99) and less frequently.Visiting a website direct from a print book? Good luck with that.And, finally, print books aren’t sold to consumers. Not really. Print books are sold to retailers – often huge companies (such as supermarkets) for whom books are all but irrelevant.Why this mattersThis matters to you because print sales techniques are utterly different from digital sales techniques. You need to know how the whole print selling process works, because you may end up working with a big publisher and you need to know what you can influence and what really matters.But you also need to understand, in depth, how the ebook selling process works, because if you have a trad publisher, they may well cock it up. (Though they’re less hopeless than they used to be.) And if you don’t end up with a trad publisher, your alternative will be selling digitally in one form or another, so you need to know all that side of things, too.As we go further with this series of emails, I’d love to know what you think. What’s useful? What isn’t? What do you want to know more about? Comment below to let me know.***FEEDBACK FRIDAY: Publishing and selling Q&ASimple one this week. Just tell me what your publishing / selling plans are, and what questions you have.Premium Members only, please. If you’re not a PM, then this could be the time to Do The Right Thing…I’ll give as many responses as I sanely can.Post your plans and questions here.

When I was a lad, and the sun shone hot, and water was bluer and the grass was greener, I used to do a fair bit of hiking and mountaineering. My slightly random claim to fame? I once climbed the highest mountain in Africa not to have been previously climbed. It wasn’t much of a mountaineering challenge, but there was a lot of very jungly jungle to get through first. One of the biggest issues in planning those expeditions was always: what to pack? What food, what camping gear, what clothes, what climbing kit? All those decisions, of course, operated under a hard constraint of weight and volume. The question wasn’t “would an X be nice?” but “can I justify an X, given its weight and given all the other things that are also needed?” Same thing with authoring, of course. You need to write a book. You need to edit it good and well. Then – publishing. Here the path divides quite sharply. Trad publishing calls for a fairly light day-pack. The self-publishing path is more demanding, more arduous. The cliffs are higher, the gear needed is more significant. You can’t load too much – weight isn’t a constraint, of course, but time certainly is. Either way, you need to pack with care. Now, last week I asked y’all about topics you’d like to see covered in these emails. I got back a lot of really useful thoughts and comments. The rough summary: A lot of you liked the somewhat random nature of these emails, and I’ll keep that going. But we will do more to cluster our Feedback Friday material by theme. Specifically, we’ll be running 2 or 3 mini courses through the year. (A starter-type one on how to write. A more advanced one on getting your manuscript from good to excellent. Maybe something on getting published too.) But we’ll also tend to cluster things into topic groups. We might have a season on character, for example. Or plotting. Or marketing things. As far as possible, we’ll link these topics to Masterclasses and the like (available to Premium Members.) So there’ll be high quality tutorial material AND an assignment AND feedback by the forum each week – and those things will be grouped up into mini-seasons with rough thematic coherence. I got a lot of thoughts from you about specific topics you’d like to see covered, and I’ll get to as much of that as I sensibly can.  This week – and for the rest of this month – I’m going to be talking about Tools. How to stow your backpack. That’ll be the themes for both the Friday emails and for the FF topics too. This week, let’s just list out what you need for your backpack. Trad Publishing What do you need? As in need-need? Well, arguably not much, as plenty of authors climb that mountain with only the skimpiest little bivvi bag for protection. I don’t recommend that though, much as I love a good bivvi bag. I think any serious 21st century trad-published author needs: An author website An Amazon author profile A mailing list, probably MailerLite A Bookfunnel account A free gift to entice users to sign-up A bit of messing around with tax forms. If you live in the UK, you don’t want to be paying US taxes on US sales, and vice versa. What you need to do depends on where you and what your situation is, but unless you live somewhere quite exotic, you should be able to receive overseas income without significant tax. (You’ll pay the tax in your home country on that income, of course; you don’t win – you just don’t double-lose.) Social media accounts, if you happen to like that kind of thing. I have em and I never use em. It’ll surprise a lot of you to see my scepticism about social media, but SM doesn’t really sell books, or not directly. If you like interacting with bookish people – I mean, booksellers, critics, reviewers, agents, etc – then good. Do it. It’ll only be helpful. But yelling “please buy my book” on Twitter doesn’t work. Never has, never will. Digital first publishing Digital first is trad publishing, really – it’s still selective; entry is still controlled by gatekeepers – but it belongs in a different category because the kit-list is different. I do think that if you’re publishing digital first you need to add: Social media accounts – the ones you think you’ll actually use. There’s zero point having five inactive accounts. One good one easily beats five bad ones. For most authors, Twitter and Facebook will be the places to start. (And yes, I know it’s not Twitter, but I’m not going to use stupid names for things, just because a billionaire wants me to.) Maybe Booksweeps as well – but talk to your publisher about ways and means to build that email list. Self-publishing Here, you need the full works. As well as all of the above, you need: A KDP account (that is: the Amazon platform from which you upload and sell your books) A Draft2Digital account, if you want to sell your books beyond Amazon. (It’s not a given that you do, by the way. Tastes and experiences differ.) To make use of Amazon ads – probably. To make use of Facebook ads, almost certainly. This will mean that you do need a “Jon/Jan Jones Author” page as well as your own personal account. To be knocking regularly on Bookbub’s door (though access to that profitable beast has been harder for indie authors than it used to be.) To use promo sites in support of major activity, for example during launch. To use Booksweeps (probably) as a way to get your mailing list charged up to start with. That’s not an exhaustive list – plenty of indie authors will do more. At the same time, you could argue that this list goes beyond real essentials. The only things that you have to have as an indie are: (i) a book, (ii) an Amazon account, (iii) a mailing list and everything which goes with that, and (iv) one other source of traffic, probably Facebook ads. *** And that’s it. It all looks a bit daunting written down in this way – but expedition packing always does. The fact is that the tools have got so much better and slicker over time, and they’re built by people who know that their audience is not naturally techie. It’s all built to be simple. Do please take a look at the Feedback Friday stuff this week. Whether you’re a Premium Member or not, this stuff matters. Once, when climbing a different mountain, my climbing buddy used a dodgy petrol stove and set his head on fire. Luckily, we managed to put him out and there was a glacier not too far away, so we even had ice. Lesson of that story? Equipment matters. And, OK, glaciers. FEEDBACK FRIDAY / TOOLS SEASON / The Freebie All good email lists are seeded by a free gift. The offer to readers is “you give me your email address; I give you something you want.” That something is a free gift. For novel writers, it’s almost always a short story. For non-fictioneers, it could be an anything – a checklist, a case study, a questionnaire, whatever else. The actual setup of your mailing list is a relatively drab, technical affair. The design of your short story is anything but. It’s joyous, or should be. The normal specs for a free story is that: The story is set in the world of your novel / character It’s a decent length. I think that less than 6 or 7,000 words feels a tad lightweight. Anything over 15,000 words is more than you need to do for free. The story should enrich your novel in some way. Add a dimension, not just content. I have two freebies available. One is a Fiona Griffiths prequel, and give us a glimpse of the younger, rawer Fiona. The other one is told from the viewpoint of an important secondary character and both enriches him and gives a third-person view of Fiona too. And, critically, some welcome text. That’s the letter to the reader that goes right at the front of this free gift, which will say, in effect, “Welcome to my reader’s club. I’m your author and I thank you for joining and I really appreciate it, and I’m going to look after you.” So your challenge this week is simple: What’s your freebie? I want: The title of your full-length novel and 2-3 sentences about it, so we know what the freebie relates to. The title of your freebie. 2-3 sentences about what that freebie will offer. Your welcome text. That’s probably only 150 words or so, but be warm and welcoming and personal. You’re not selling anything and you shouldn’t talk like some AI marketing robot. Talk like yourself and be warm and welcoming. For some reason, people freeze at this part of the brief, but they shouldn’t. It’s easy and it matters. That’s it. Til soon. Harry 

Because I’m charging around in Wales with the kids – I’m going to keep it short this week.One thought and one thought only:There’s a heck of a lot of luck in writing.The way we talk – the way I talk – often suggests that if you’re just good enough at your art and craft, you can force your way to success. And that’s just not true.For sure:A strong elevator pitch is the single most muscular thing you can do to maximise your chances. And I don’t mean that you write your book, then come up with the best single sentence with which to pitch it. I mean roughly the opposite of that. I mean you come up with a brilliant idea, then you write the book of the idea, then your pitch can be any old phrase that gestures at your brilliant idea.But yes, the pitch matters.Then too, you have to be able to write. You can’t achieve any kind of success without basic competence … but there are plenty of commercially successful writers who don’t have huge literary talents. Their sentences work, but never sing. That’s OK. That can definitely be enough.And then on top of that, if you can actually write well, it really boosts your chances, not least because agents and editors do recognise good writing when they see it and they want to be close to it. They want to help it along.But …It’s still a game of luck. If three big supermarket chains take your book – based off little more than a title and a book cover – and if they sell that book at a nice little discount – then your book will be a bestseller. It’s not about whether the book deserves it or not. Just that number of feet walking past a well-displayed and sweetly discounted title WILL produce sales.You can’t produce that outcome by force of will. A publisher can’t either. They all play the same game and all want the same outcome. They’re all professional. They all make nice book covers. They can all put together decent catalogues. They all know how to pitch.Self-publishing is less chancy to be honest, but even big-selling authors don’t really know whether Series X is going to succeed as well as their big hit Series Y. They can put the same craft and market intelligence behind both, but in the end, they don’t know until they get the book out there.So don’t judge yourself by sales. Aim for sales, yes – I always do. But it will be the Lady Luck herself, in her green-hemmed gown, who will determine whether you win or lose or just muddle through to some kind of draw.Light a candle, eat a shamrock – and write another book.Feedback FridayLast week, another elevator pitch discussion kicked off (here; you need to be a logged into Townhouse to view that link.) The discussion is all good and the topic really, really matters. Take an owl ‘n’ imp refresher here.Then just give me your pitch.Let’s shake this up and you can give me:Ingredients: 2-4 ingredients only. So your pitch looks like “teen romance + vampires”. Very short, and not even a sentence.Short, messy: A short pitch (<15 words) that is for you only. It’s not going to go on a book or a movir poster, so keep it scruffy please.Short, elegant: this is the line you want on the movie poster of your book. Or the back-of-book headline.Longer version: Up to 50 words.You don’t have to do ALL those pitches. Just offer what appeals. If you’ve done this before, then repeat the exercise but with a different book.***That’s it from me. Post yours here. Very normal service resumes next week.Til soon.Harry

Last week’s Feedback Friday was all about synopses, so we’ll talk synopsis in a moment … except that first, obviously, we need to deal with a squirrel.At the weekend just gone, my kids found a dead squirrel in the garage. We think maybe it was Haselnuss, a squirrel who used to eat out of my girls’ hands a year or two back. Now, I won’t swear to the animal’s identity, but clearly any dead squirrel in the hands of 8 to 10-year-olds needs proper ceremonial burial, so we dug a grave beneath her favourite tree and did the honours.That sounds sweet and sombre, and it was, but there was also a bit of mucking about. Getting Haselnuss to ‘wave’ her paw at people to say good-bye. Pretending that she was coming back to life and wanting to bite people. Wondering whether she was moving in her grave as we scattered the earth.The kids liked all that so, no sooner than our maybe-Haselnuss was laid to rest, they demanded a really scary story about a squirrel.Since we had a car journey ahead of us anyway, I obliged. The ingredients: a dead squirrel with an unusual marking – an upside down cross – jolts of static and apparent movement in the corpse – a thunderstorm – strange sounds in the loft and night – a displaced tombstone in the churchyard – a village myth.And so on.The hardest thing with making up these stories on the hoof is exactly the same as the challenge with writing a synopsis. You have to figure out what your story is. What’s the arc? What’s the beginning, middle and end?With a kiddy story made up to while away a car journey, it’s easy enough providing the bits of detail. The grey film over the dead eye, the sudden flash of being in a still corpse, the rain and thunder of the darkened churchyard. But to get the story to work, there has to be some kind of coherent shape. And that’s hard.It’s the same challenge in a synopsis, and people almost always think about the synopsis backwards.To get the synopsis right, you need to understand two (or maybe three) things. They are:Your synopsis is one of the many daughters of your elevator pitch. (Don’t know what I’m talking about? Your owl, imp and box refresher is here.) Your synopsis has to deliver on the basic promise of that pitch: to show how it works in terms of story.An agent doesn’t give a dead squirrel’s tail about the minutiae of your story. They can’t. They might read 30 synopses in an evening, and that’s about as fun as eating a plateful of brickdust. All an agent wants to see is the basic shape of your story. Does that shape look right? Does it feel satisfying?The maybe-third thing to know is that agents don’t care too much about the synopsis. It’s probably the last thing in your submission package that gets read. It’s also the least important. Agents vary in how much importance they attach to the synopsis but, honestly, some of them barely care.Now, a synopsis is, supposedly, a summary of the book. So most writers think, logically enough, that they need to get accurate with their synopsis. Chapters 25-31 deal with Astral’s difficult journey to the White Kingdom. You’ve calculated that you can spare 35 words with which to deal with those chapters. You tie yourself in knots trying to come up with the most compact summary and are deeply torn as to whether or not you need to name YANOK (114, a dwarf of poisonous temperament).But stuff that. Who cares? Those kind of worries arise because you’re thinking about the synopsis backwards: from 100,000 word book to summary.You need to think of it the other way round. From concept to summary – and ignore the 100,000 word manuscript completely. The point here is that:Shape is everything.So forget about the hassles en route. Just say, “Astral makes a difficult journey to the White Kingdom, where …”Your synopsis needs to honour and reflect your elevator pitch.It needs to show the shape of your story. The more detail you are able to omit, the better your synopsis gets.That’s it.Feedback FridayGetting Published Week #3 / Opening PageFirst week, query letter. Last week, synopsis. This week, the bit that matters: opening page. I want:TitleGenreYour opening page. No more than 300 words or soAttaboy. Attagirl.And don’t forget: we’ll be selecting opening pages from Feedback Friday to discuss at our live critique event this coming week. To be considered for that, please post your material by Monday. And if you don’t want your work to be shredded live in front of a baying mob of (erm) very nicely behaved JW members, then please mark your submission as “NOT FOR LIVE REVIEW”.***That’s it from me. Post yours here. I’m off to reset a few tombstones in the churchyard.Til soon.Harry

The theme for this week’s Write with Jericho coursework is settings, and I’ll have more to say on that topic later. But first, I have eleven boxes in front of me, wrapped in jewel-coloured silks and tied with ribbon.#1 A dark crimson box, tied with a bow in midnight blue.In this box, I find these words:“An elevator pitch is for you, and only you. The pitch is not the cover quote, or the book blurb, or the query letter, or any sentence from your query letter, or anything you ever say to anyone. The elevator pitch is for you and for you and for you and only ever for you.”#2 A flattish box in Dutch-blue silk, tied with a bow of daffodil yellow.In this box:“The cover quote and the book blurb and the cover design and the query letter and all those things: they are the daughters of your elevator pitch. They spring from it, but they are not it.”#3 A middling-sized box, perfectly cubic, in dark pink with a pale green ribbon.In this box, I find these words:“And the text.And the text.And the text.The text of your novel is also a daughter of your elevator pitch, and the most important one, and the only one that truly utterly matters.”#4 A jewellery-type box, in very dark green, tied with an antique cream ribbon.In this box:“If your elevator pitch is perfect, anyone encountering it (or one of its many daughters) will say, Oh golly gosh. That sounds interesting. Please tell me more.The purpose of the pitch (or one of its many daughters) is to elicit precisely that response. If you hear that response, your pitch has worked. If not, it has not.”#5 A box without shape or size, clothed in a rich bronze-brown silk, tied off with red.In this box:“Because the parent-pitch is for you and you alone, it doesn’t matter one whit whether the pitch sounds pretty or whether it resembles something that you might use for the front of a book.”Flapping around in the same box is a white owl. Printed on its back are the words: “Orphan + wizard school.”It is not clear what the role of this owl is, but I surmise that it is there to remind us (A) that “orphan + wizard school” is an extremely compelling elevator pitch, and (B) that this phrase does not sound pretty, nor does it resemble something that you might put on the front of a book.The owl is silent and is missing a tail-feather.#6 A box clothed in the colours of a parrot tulip. No ribbon.In this box:“Imagine yourself in a large bookshop. There is a table devoted to the leading books of your specific genre, whatever that may be. No reader is going to read three chapters of each book, compare them carefully, and choose the best. That would be an ideal way to select a book, but it is not a method that anyone chooses, ever.Instead, readers look at two things. They look at what we might call proofs of excellence – a gushing review in the New York Times, for example, or some very large number of books sold. And readers try to get a sense of the basic elevator pitch.They can’t see the elevator pitch itself (which – see Box #1 – is for you and for you and for you and for you.) But they will see multiple daughters of that pitch: the cover design, the title, any cover quote, the back jacket blurb, and of course any page or pages picked at random from your book.The purpose of your elevator pitch is to produce beautiful daughters. The purpose of those beautiful daughters, collectively, is to make the sale.”In this box, there is a single white feather and the sound of an owl calling at midnight.#7 A box dressed in a dark, coppery gold, with a twice-knotted ribbon that has the colour of dried blood.In this box, this text:“No one cares about abstractions.No one.If you write: This is a tale of one woman’s fight for justice against oppression, no one is interested.Think of that.One woman. A fight for justice. And no one’s interested.Yet if you write, A woman lives in a near-future America, where she and others are made to produce children for their Commanders, you have just described The Handmaid’s Tale and everyone on earth will want to read it.”Also in this box: a ring, that once bore a ruby.Also, in a dancing line around the interior of the box, there are repeated the words:“No one cares about abstractions.”#8 A box, made of green-black glass, and knotted with exquisitely embroidered material, upon which it is possible to discern the shape of a peacock and the leaves and branches of an exotic tree.In this box:A small but furious imp dashes itself against the sides of the box and screams, “But if I get specific, I will GIVE THE GAME AWAY! Under no circumstances will I ever reveal the specifics of my BIG IDEA.”#9 This box is the most gorgeous box so far, and takes on whatever colour the eye wishes to see. It smells of winter jasmine and white tea.In this box, there sits a short letter addressed to the imp of Box #8:“Dear ImpHad you not noticed? The pitch is for you and for you and for you and for you. You cannot give the game away to yourself; you already know the game.So be specific and candid.After all, why does a reader HAVE TO pick this particular book up? What makes THIS BOOK essential? Almost literally, essential. Like, if you hadn’t already written this book, the idea was so good that someone would have to. (The Handmaid’s Tale very much falls into this category.)”There is nothing else in the box.Imp #2: scarlet, and angryAn imp has come loose from one of the boxes. It is eating smouldering pellets of coal and yelling:“Orphan + Wizard School? Bah. That’s not a fair summary of the book. What about Quidditch and Voldemort and who Harry’s parents were and Hermione and all that? A summary of the book HAS TO include those things and you can’t do that in something ridiculous like 12 words.”Box #10 – a faded golden beige, tied with redThe sound of a bell, heard over wet fields.That, and these words, very calm:“An elevator pitch is not a house. It is a front door.A pitch is not the book, or a model of the book. It is the reason why you want to pick the book up.A house is for living in. A book is for reading.The pitch and the door are there to encourage entrance.That’s all.”Box #11 – a beautiful blue-and-white ceramic box, made to fit in the palm of the handInside this box, remarkably, sits a life-size version of me, wearing a red silk dressing gown and smoking a pipe.This version of me sits in front of a warm fireplace, and says:“Personally, I find some of the strongest pitches just knit together two or three (or sometimes four) ingredients. That’s all.For example, Orphan + wizard school. That works.Or indeed, Teen romance + vampire. That also works.You can find examples aplenty. For example, from the Feedback Friday just gone, some excellent soul came up with a pitch that boiled down to Wolves + orphan + sense of belonging. You can already feel a good book beginning to stir with only that by way of description.”What bemuses me about this is that I don’t wear a dressing gown and I never smoke. But no sooner do I put the box down, than I glimpse myself in the mirror, wearing vibrant red silk. On the table before me, an ashtray full of discarded pipe tobacco.I have no explanation.***Honestly? If you want a perfect elevator pitch (and the foundation of an excellent novel), then you need to sit and contemplate those 11 boxes, the 1 owl and the 2 imps. All the wisdom you need is there.

OK – short email this week. We have 40 kids in the garden on Sunday for a massive 4x kids birthday party. Highlights are (i) a castle to be assembled from cardboard boxes and (ii) a siege catapult to knock it down.I was worried that my siege catapult might not have the chops to knock down a castle so I kept on adding power to my construction. It can now fling an apple 70 or 80 yards and at horrendous speed. There are alpacas in the field beyond the drive beyond our garden and we’ve had letters from them (written in pure Alpacaese) asking if we would please stop throwing apples at them.Oh my, it’s fun, though.Bowing in praiseI just wanted to kick off with a word of praise for Jackie Morris who absolutely nailed her Feedback Friday thingy last week.Here’s her pitch:Victorian collector + mythic creature + freakshowHere’s her opening para:The slip-slap of waves on a pebbled beach. A bleached white cuttlefish of a moon in a squid ink sky. Prick of starlight on my mother’s silver-scaled arms as she sniffed the air for prey.I hope you can see that para does exactly what I’ve been yabbering on about for weeks now. Jackie’s found the essence of her book’s DNA and then that DNA makes its way – obliquely and beautifully – into that first para. I’m impressed by the mother’s silver-scaled arms, but I’m even more taken with that cuttlefish & squid second sentence. By turning the moon into a fish, she alludes to themes of mythical creatures and freakshows with the very lightest of touches. Wonderful. Do likewise.DeepitiesThe thought of the week is on Deepities, a term invented by philosopher, Daniel Dennett. He writes that a ‘deepity’ is:“a proposition that seems both important and true – and profound – but that achieves this effect by being ambiguous. On one reading, it is manifestly false, but it would be earth-shaking if it were true; on the other reading, it is true but trivial. The unwary listener picks up the glimmer of truth from the second reading, and the devastating importance from the first reading, and thinks, Wow! That’s a deepity.”The first example he gives is “love is just a word.” That has two possible meanings:The word, “love”, is just a word – TRUE, but a very boring, trivial statement.Love, the thing, is just a word – FALSE, it’s not; it’s a powerful and important emotionOK: that’s a deepity. But Dennett gives a second example too. He says:“Richard Dawkins recently alerted me to a fine deepity by Rowan Williams, the then archbishop of Canterbury, who described his faith as ‘a silent waiting on the truth, pure sitting and breathing in the presence of the question mark’.”Now, I’m not quite sure that is a deepity. What’s the true-but-trivial version of that phrase? I’m not sure.But here’s what struck me. That phrase of Rowan Williams’s is PERFECT for literary fiction. It just sounds great. Suppose Williams had said this, “Faith is waiting for the truth to arrive, knowing that there’s a big question which needs answering.” That’s actually clearer, but much more boring. So dull, in fact, no one would think to quote it. (Indeed, is it even true? That sounds like a better description of how faith might be acquired than it is of faith itself.)But by making the phrase more obscure, more metaphorical, more ambiguous, Williams makes it less explanatory … and miles better for literary fiction.I think that kind of unclarity is where literary fiction gets a lot of its juice from. Readers think, “Gosh, I didn’t quite understand that, but it sounds really great, so the author must be really deep.” It’s as though the reader reads, in order to get some of the reflected lustre for him/herself.My take?Well, I mostly don’t write deepities. I tend to drive towards clarity in the way I write. 99% of the time that is, for sure, a better way to write.But if you find a deepity in your work – well, heck, you should probably keep it. Readers love em. Agents love em. Editors love em. Even if the actual thing you’re saying collapses to nonsense if you analyse it closely, most people won’t analyse it closely. And if you’re writing literary fiction, then plenty of deepities is pretty much essential for the genre.If all that puzzles you, I’ll just leave you sitting and breathing in the presence of the question mark. Just mind it doesn’t hit you on the head when you stand up.Feedback FridayAssignment for this week:Simple one this time. We’ve been on book DNA in recent weeks. Can we do the same for Main Characters, please? I don’t need you to write out a dirty pitch for your character. What I want instead is three things:Name of characterCharacter intro: a line or so of introduction, so we know who we’re dealing with.Description: An excerpt from your manuscript in which we get some kind of description of your character’s physical appearance. If you describe your character in one unitary paragraph, then let’s have that paragraph in full, please. If your character descriptions are more broken up and scattered, then let’s have several extracts enabling us to put this together.That’s it. As always, I will look after Premium Members first and foremost, but everyone’s invited.Not a Townhouse member? It’s free and easy to join. Info here.Want to become a Premium Member? Join here and get 15% off a year’s Premium Membership with one of our discount codes:Purchasing a whole year upfront? Use FRIDAY15Purchasing for a whole year but paying monthly? Use: FRIDAY15x12That’s it from me. Jobs for today: go and make peace with the alpacas. Either that, or build a really high garden wall.Til soon.Harry

This week, I want to talk about who’s buying your book. I don’t mean your eventual reader. I mean your publisher. It’s easy to assume your book will follow a particular sales pathway, when it really really won’t – and if it doesn’t fit the pathway you have in mind, you may end up failing no matter what the quality of your actual book.That issue is easily corrected by simply understanding enough of the industry to know which bit of it you should be aiming at.We’ll get to that in a second, but I also wanted to quote an email following last week’s Feedback Friday. The author – Katharine “the Cat” Kalypso, a Caucasian bear-wrestler – wrote to tell me:Somehow, writing the pitch for my novel has really sharpened my understanding of the story trajectory and highlighted where a couple of subplots were detracting from the tension … I have written two post-it notes for my computer screen to ensure I cut the weakening waffle this time around: ‘complete clarity’ and ‘concision’.Yes! That’s it. Writing a pitch should sharpen your understanding of the story trajectory. Not just that but, as we’ll see, it should float everywhere over the novel itself. That’s why I get driven nuts by pitches that offer cutesy little slogans for the book. “Romance, revenge – and a threat to the kingdom.” That kind of thing. Slogans like that might or might not be a good shout-line for a book once it’s packaged up with a strong cover and strong blurb and all the rest of it. But they’re not going to help you one tiny bit in checking whether your novel is built on the right lines. They’re also not going to tell you whether or not your story idea has the bite and snap necessary to compete on the bookshelves.My favoured sort of pitches – aka, Really Rubbish Pitches™ – will help you with both those things. “Orphan + wizard school” would have been a terrible slogan and an impossible shout-line. But it would have told JK Rowling exactly what her book had to be about and ensured that the book would be insanely marketable when finished.Anyway. I’m not going to get into that more now. Do please take a look at the Feedback Friday challenge this week though. It’s the last in our trilogy on pitches and (for me) the most exciting and important one.Who’s your buyer?Right.Forget about pitching. Let’s think about selling.Literary agent + Big 5 type auctionMany of you will simply think, “I’ll write the book, then hope to get an agent. If I get an agent, they can find me a publisher. If I can’t get an agent, then my book just isn’t good enough to sell and I will make my money wrestling bears in the Caucasus instead.”And, OK, for lots of books and lots of authors, that’s a perfectly practical way to think. Indeed, it’s roughly how you ought to think, if you don’t want to self-publish and you are writing:Mainstream commercial fictionBookclub fictionMainstream literary fictionMainstream non-fictionObviously, I’ve used the word ‘mainstream’ a lot there. What I mean is anything which could plausibly sit on the front tables of a decent bookshop. That’s what Big 5 publishers are aiming to publish. Literary agents will effectively only take you on if they think there’s a hope of a Big 5 sale. A decent book auction, of course, may be won by a major independent – a Kensington, a Faber, a Bloomsbury, for example – and any sane agent is completely happy with that outcome. But it’s the possibility of a Big 5 sale which pushes advances up. If an agent considers that there is effectively no hope of a Big 5 sale, any likely advance level is lower and perhaps very low indeed. Under those circumstances, an agent is unlikely to offer representation.OK. This is a good model. It’s the model that – apart from my forays into self-pub – I’ve always followed.But you need to bear in mind that publishers are still essentially focused on print. Yes, Amazon will in every case be their biggest buyer. Yes, audiobooks are huge and all publishers recognise this. And of course, no print-led publisher neglects the need to offer e-books too.But still. For the biggest publishers, the dominant format is print – and that makes a difference. For example, a digital-first publisher will happily change a cover overnight if they feel it could help. A print-led publisher can’t have an e-book with one cover and a print book with another, so the cover you start with is the one that you’re stuck with. So books that are likely to have a largely digital readership may well benefit from a publisher focused on that exact niche.Some writers may therefore prefer to target our next category:Digital-first, with or without an agentDigital-first houses are going to be very strong at selling:Genre romanceGenre crimeGenre anythingThere’s not a clear distinction between the way I’m using ‘genre’ here and the way I’m using ‘mainstream’ earlier. My own crime novels are both ‘genre’ and ‘mainstream’. But very roughly, the more you bring something distinctive as a writer (in terms of writing, characterisation, and so on), the more likely you are to be considered mainstream. The more your books could be felt interchangeable with other books of the same genre (police procedurals, say), the more e-book friendly you are likely to be.The classic illustration here is romance. Big publishers still handle romance, but these days the market is dominated by self-publishers and digital-firsters. The reason? Romance readers read A LOT. They aren’t going to pay $12.99 for a paperback when they could pay $3.99 for an e-book, so they read digitally for preference. Naturally enough, if the market is basically an e-book market, then publishers with a laser-like focus on that market are likely to do better.The lesson for you? You need to figure out if your readers are likely to be heavily e-book driven. If they are, a Big 5 house is probably not going to bid for your book – and probably wouldn’t sell you very well if they did.Oh yes, and just to be clear, all digital-first houses will take direct submissions. So an agent is great if you have one; inessential if you don’t.Tiny print-led specialist, with or without an agentThat still leaves a fringe of other publishers with an intense, specialist focus. The publishers that get the most attention here are the slew of tiny publishers that often achieve astonishing success when it comes to getting literary books shortlisted for, or winning, the major prizes. But there are also small publishers that do well with (for example) mental health, or engineering, or military history.If you get published by one of those guys, you may get very little money indeed. Plenty of them will either offer no advance at all or a purely notional, “thank you for choosing us” one. But who cares? If you’re Eimear McBride (author of A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing published by the tiny-but-excellent Galley Beggar Press) you probably don’t care that your first advance was small. Prize success and fame and (later) a book deal from Faber were probably ample compensations.If your book is hyper-literary or hyper-specialist in some other dimension, then your natural next step is probably to find a publishing soul mate. An agent (working essentially for free and because they like your book) might be a companion in your search, if your book is literary. If your book is not a literary one, then you don’t need and probably wouldn’t benefit from an agent.Or … do it yourselfAs you know, I’m a big fan of self-publishing. That won’t work (probably) for literary fiction and is much more powerful if you’re writing a series. But lit fic apart, there aren’t many fields where self-pub can’t work for you. You can make loads of money, bond with huge numbers of readers and determine everything about the way your books are published. I’m not going to talk about all that here, because this email is long enough already, but don’t dismiss self-pub. It’s a wonderful way to publish.Feedback FridayAssignment for this week: Last week on pitches – and again, we’re shaking things up. This week, I want:Book titleShort pitch only (12 words or less). I’m happy with just a list of ingredients if you want: ghosts + trains + Victorian curses, that kind of thing. And NO SLOGANS, no abstractions, no mysteries. I want nothing that would look good on the front of your book. Got that? Good. I’ll scream if you haven’t.3 x 100-word max chunks from pages 1, 100, and 200 from your manuscript. What I want to see is whether your short pitch floats over and inhabits every page of your book. So I want you to go to (for example) page 100 in your manuscript and find anything – a word, a line, a bit of dialogue, some description, which alludes in some way, even obliquely, to your short pitch. If you haven’t got as far as page 200, then you can do page 1, 50 and 100, for example. And if your page 100 is unsuitable for some reason, then just dig out something from page 99 or 101. I just want to see that your short pitch floats right through your text.That’s the assignment – and oh my goodness, it’s a good one. I did it with my own book here and pretty much yelped with excitement when I realised how completely my short pitch lived through the pages of my book. I never intended that outcome. I just wrote the best book I could … and ended up with that outcome.I will look after Premium Members first and foremost, but everyone’s invited.Not a Townhouse member? It’s free and easy to join. Info here.Want to become a Premium Member? Join here. Use FRIDAY15 at checkout, and save 15%.That’s it from me. Jobs for today: have a swim, mow the lawn, grow a beard, eat a plum.Til soon.Harry

There’s an E. E. Cummings poem which tells us:here is the deepest secret nobody knows(here is the root of the root and the bud of the budand the sky of the sky of a tree called lifeAnd that’s what we’re talking about this week. The root of the root and the bud of the bud and the sky of the sky of a book called Sales.Or, indeed, a book called Quality.All this is a roundabout way to say that this week’s email is going to be talking (again) about elevator pitches and it’s going to invite you to forget completely that a pitch is meant to be about sales. Forget selling. Forget marketing. The pitch I want you to find is all about finding the root of the root and the bud of the bud.We’ll get to Feedback Friday later in this email, but for now – clear your mind and chant:My pitch has nothing to do with sales.My pitch is not going to try to describe my book.My pitch is going to avoid all abstract nouns. (Revenge, honour, redemption, whatever.)My pitch is not the house; it is only the front door.My pitch is going to find the one little piece of crystal that somehow embodies the novel.My pitch is likely to have two or maybe three ingredients, probably not more.To explain those points in a bit more detail –Nothing to do with salesTake my basic pitch for the Fiona Griffiths stuff: “detective who used to think she was dead.” That pitch never featured in any marketing material, nor could it, because that sentence gives away THE big secret of the book.Not a book descriptionIt doesn’t even vaguely describe the book, because you don’t know where or when the book is set or anything at all about the crime or investigation on which the book centres. As a book description, the pitch totally fails.No abstractionsThere are no abstract nouns in that pitch. In practice, the book deals centrally with some big abstractions. (What is it to feel alive? The book is all about the struggle to be human.) But the pitch has no interest in those big themes, or not really. There’s a detective. She is in recovery from a strange psychiatric illness. The tiny bit of information conveyed is very specific, very narrow.Front door onlyMost pitches I see are attempting to summarise an 80,000 word book in 12 words. That doesn’t work. You can’t do that – or not in any interesting way. All you can do is show people a front door that they want to walk through. One of your pitches from last week (one good enough to get a free agent 1-2-1) was simply this:Dirty Pitch: A refugee crisis in space.Boom! That doesn’t tell you much about the book – who’s the hero? What’s the story? Are we near future or far future? What specific goals and obstacles define the story? But it’s a front door you immediately want to walk through. You just instantly want to know more.A little piece of crystalA crystal is specific, not abstract. It’s tiny, but fully formed and perfect. And in the case of your book, it’s the root of the root (the deepest thing in your novel) and the bud of the bud (the thing from which everything else shoots and forms.)So that take that “refugee crisis in space” pitch. You can already guess that those words will hover over every page of the novel. It’s the deepest thing and the most fruitful. It’s the source of everything else. It’s also the thing you’ll recall first, when you remember the novel 20 years later. That’s a perfect pitch.Two or three ingredientsLots of great pitches have just two ingredients:Teen romance + vampiresOrphan + Wizard schoolRefugee crisis + spaceshipsDetective + thought she was deadSome pitches need three ingredients. One of last week’s Feedback Friday winners came up with a pitch that effectively amounted to:Ghosts + Orient Express (or similar) + Victorian curseTake away any one of those ingredients and the book would seem a little thin. Pop all three in the pot and there’s just a little shiver of anticipation.Another example (again drawn from one of your Feedback Friday entries):Murder story + 1960s America.That’s OK, but a bit dull, right? I mean, you might like murder stories and you might like that setting, but this pitch is giving no reason to pick up that book specifically. On the other hand, what about this:Murder story + 1960s America + NASA space programmeNow you immediately want to read that book. The combination of ingredients coheres perfectly into something yumptious. You can already feel that if you started to over-describe your book (forgetting that your pitch is offering a door, not the whole house) you’d lose that instant pop of interest.Two last things from me before we turn to this week’s Feedback Friday.One: A couple of people, writing literary fiction, have complained that this pitching task is one required by genre fiction only. But that’s truly not the case. I found myself using Ian McEwan as an example of how successful literary novels always have a gleam of silver at their hearts. So Atonement had a famous dirty bit, Enduring Love had a bloke falling off a balloon, Amsterdam involves a euthanasia / murder story. And so on. In each case, the deeper purpose and themes of the novel offer proper, thoughtful, literary fare. But McEwan purchases his right to do the literary stuff, but making damn sure that there’s a gleam of silver in every book. If you’re writing literary fiction, and you are less famous than Ian McEwan, then I recommend you take the same approach.Two: Are pitches about achieving sales? Or maximising quality?The opposition is phoney. A good pitch deals with both things. Sure, it’s about sales, as those Ian McEwan examples show. Even when you’re as good as he is, you need a spark to make the sale.At the same time, a good pitch is fundamentally about quality. Because a good book has a kind of holism and the little scrap you use for your pitch should say something really deep about what the novel is. What it does. Why it is. Why it’s necessary.Go back to that simple pitch: “refugee crisis in space”. Would you want to read a book about a modern-day refugee crisis? An overcrowded camp in Calais? Trafficking gangs in Libya? Probably not. Move that same basic dynamic to space and of course you want to read more. What’s more – if the book is any good – it’ll shift your view of refugees. It’ll change you.The root of the root and the bud of the bud.Feedback FridayFree agent feedback: Last week, I promised that three talented people would get a free agent 1-2-1. I’ve chosen the lucky three and you can read their winning pitches here:The RunnersThe Truth and Lies of Coraline CrowThe Necropolis LineCongrats to the Chosen Ones and I’ll be giving away free 1-2-1s to Feedback Friday Folk as often as the mood takes me. I’ll honestly be surprised if at least one of those three books doesn’t end up in print.Assignment for this week: Elevator pitches again please, but a bit different this time.Book titleShort pitch only (12 words or less). I’m happy with just a list of ingredients if you want: ghosts + trains + Victoriana, that kind of thing.One para book description. So now you can describe the book in more detail. We want to feel the connection between the book and the longer description. Make sure we can feel the “bud of the bud and the root of the root” joining the short pitch and the longer description.That’s the assignment, share them here. I will look after Premium Members first and foremost, but everyone’s invited.Not a Townhouse member? It’s free and easy to join. Info here.Want to become a Premium Member? Join here. Use FRIDAY15 at checkout, and save 15%.That’s it from me for this week. Do have a go at this week’s exercise. It’s the simplest, but most productive exercise you can do for yourself.Over to you.Til soon.Harry

This week – and inspired by your excellent responses to Feedback Friday – we’re going to be talking steam engines and the particular importance of not leaking steam. Or, if you happen to be more interested in books than engines, then the importance of not leaking pressure from your book.The good news is that some quite small changes will deliver a substantial improvement in reader experience. Better still: the changes aren’t even hard. They’re about mindset more than anything else.First though, with a tinkle of very small cymbals and a clatter on a kettle drum remanufactured from a dressmaker’s thimble, it’s time for …Feedback FridayFree agent feedback: Since our festival is approaching, I had the bright idea of helping you prepare for any agent one-to-ones you may have booked for our weekend in London.This week, we’ll be giving away three free agent one-to-ones (the ones you can book at any time of the year). I’m going to pick the pitches I like the best. If you’re successful, you get to put your work directly in front of a literary agent and I very much hope that leads to good things. But of course, you gotta be in it to win it.So, without further ado, let’s look at your pitch!Book titleAbout your book: A maximum of one short sentence to identify basic genre / premise or whatever else someone might need to know. (“A contemporary police procedural set in Cardiff” for example.)Your pitch, the dirty version. “Robot which mows lawns”, for example. Maximum 12 words here and less is better.Your pitch, the pretty version. “Mow while you sleep – the lazy gardener’s route to perfect lawns,” for example. Max 25 words.The dirty pitch is for you, no one else. It’s the Post-It you stick above your computer monitor. It’s the tag which reminds you of your book’s USP. The thing that keeps you centred. A five-word reminder to keep you on track as you write.The pretty pitch is for the front of the book, maybe, in time.And honestly? The pretty pitch doesn’t matter. The dirty one does.The point of the dirty pitch is to make someone – in this case me – think, “Ooh, sounds interesting, tell me more.” I don’t want pretty. I want interesting. If you look at those two pitches for lawn robots, the first one would work miles better in any real-life conversation between you and your friends. If you gave a friend what sounds like a marketing pitch, they’d think you’d gone nuts. If you just used the dirty pitch to explain why you’ve got a new orange and black gadget on your grass, then anyone with a lawn will want to know more.So, that’s the assignment. As usual, I’ll do what I can, but I will look after Premium Members first and foremost, but everyone’s invited.Share them here.Not a Townhouse member? It’s free and easy to join. Info here.Want to become a Premium Member? Join here. Use FRIDAY15 at checkout, and save 15%.Leaking steamSteam engines existed before James Watt. Famously, Watt – then an instrument-maker at the University of Glasgow – became interested in the problem when he was asked to repair a model steam-engine that followed Thomas Newcomen’s basic design.Newcomen’s engine worked, but badly. A coal-fired furnace boiled water, forcing steam into a cylinder which drove a piston. So far so good: a coal-fired power station uses the same system today.But to get the piston back to its starting position, Newcomen’s device simply cooled the cylinder, turning steam back into water, altering the pressures and closing the piston.This arrangement meant that the furnace was called upon to repeatedly warm the cylinder back up to a point where it didn’t immediately condense the steam. Watt’s little piece of genius was to create a separate condensing chamber, so that the furnace could deal with the steam only, not the cylinder too.That was his speck of genius, but he was also a very good development engineer. Getting a really good seal for the piston wasn’t as important, but it was still important and he cared about every detail.All through this development work, Watt saw his challenge as one of minimising waste. Minimising the waste of coal, minimising the waste of heat.I tell you all this (fantastically interesting) stuff because I want you to think about your book in the exact same way.At the moment, your manuscript resembles a Newcomen engine. Which is very good indeed! It means that you’ve done almost all the hard work. You’ve built a plot, you’ve engineered characters, you’ve thrown 80,000 words (or whatever) on the page. You have a manuscript.But the challenges you’ve had so far are quite macro in scale: deliver a plot, write 80,000 words, and so on. At a certain stage, you need to flip things. You need to think about leakages of steam. Places where your book leaks reader-interest through tiny little cracks and crevices. Each one of those losses is small. Cumulatively, however, they can threaten to be lethal.But which is better:Sentence A. Burning brakes, upholstery damp and ghosts of fast food turned the air into a warm soup of smells that caught the back of my throat like two fingers.Or:Sentence B. The car smelled of hot brakes, damp upholstery and the ghosts of fast food.You only have to drop those two on the page to see that the second one is better. The first one has a whole lot of baggy language “turned the air into a warm soup of smells” that really doesn’t add anything much. (Of course, smells change the air. What else could they change?) and the thing about catching the back of the throat “like two fingers” almost makes sense, but doesn’t quite. Really, for clarity, the sentence needs to read “like two fingers shoved down the throat as though seeking to produce retching.” But that’s way too cumbersome, so the author (rightly) cut off most of the baggage. Her only error was not cutting even more.And the funny thing here is that the sentence is really good! I mean, those three smells placed together in a sentence are really evocative. The writer’s actually done the hard work (of building the engine) and not done the easy work (of preventing any steam leaking out from dodgy joins.)Here are some other simple checks to make – of your opening page especially, but really of every line in your book:Do you have tiny redundancies?For example, “so she was happy with the situation as it stood” could probably (depending on context) be replaced by “she was happy with the situation” or even “She was happy.”Likewise, it’s easy to write things like “clouds covered the sky” or the ”wind blew” or “the rain made the pavements wet”, but what else do we possibly expect clouds, wind and rain to do?Simply tightening these tiny things means your story can convey the exact same amount of meaning, but in a much smaller space. That’s more pressure, less leakage – a better engine.Do you switch points of view?Yes, this is something you can do in a book, though (mostly not only) around chapter breaks. But changing POV on your first page? That’s literally disorienting the reader at a point where their #1 priority is getting themselves properly oriented. There are probably exceptions, of course, but in general, just don’t do this. It’ll almost always be a mistake.Do you hop about in time?I’ve talked about that before, so I won’t bang on about it now. But if your #1 task is to help the reader orient themselves in your book, then don’t disorient them by giving them multiple times – or indeed places – to deal with.Do you fail to tell the reader where you are?You don’t need to offer co-ordinates of time and place, but any drama needs to take place on a stage – and the readers needs to see that stage. So to my eyes, that sentence we looked at earlier – about hot brakes and damp upholstery – sets the scene beautifully. Whatever dramatic action we are about to witness feels placed. We know how to imagine the sequence of events that follows.But it’s really common for writers just to jump straight into the action / dialogue without any meaningful explanation of where we are. Or sometimes, the author kind of ticks a box (“They were in the Great Hall of Ra-Thamar”), but without actually providing any material to help the reader imagine the place.Do you rush?It’s astonishing to me how many writers use their first page to say: heresmystoryitsgoingtobereallygreat.If they have a fantasy world, they start to rush into an explanation of how the magic works. If they have (say) a Big Secret – a female character in historical fiction dresses as a man to get work – they want to reveal that secret on page #1.And – slow down.Secrets are fun when they wink at you and you have to tease them out. They’re just boring when they’re delivered like six-year-old secrets. (“Hey, Papa, I’ve got a really big secret. Do you want to know what it is? OK, then I’ll tell you.”)That’s probably enough for this email, but I will say this:Feedback Friday seems like an incredibly rich way to turn the somewhat abstract insights of this email into practice. There will be LOTS of opportunities for feedback – not just on opening pages but (as with the week coming) on elevator pitches, on query letters, on book covers, on marketing plans, on character descriptions, and so on. If you’re a Premium Member, then please tuck in to the full. We’ll support you the best we can. If you’re not a Premium Member, then please engage anyway.Intelligent, respectful and constructive feedback is THE gold-standard way to improve your work. So let’s improve it.Over to you.Til soon.Harry

The opening chunk of your book can do a LOT.I once sold a non-fiction book off the back of no more than 10,000 words. The NY editor who picked up Talking to the Dead told me she knew she was going to buy the book after she’d read the first couple of pages.You can lose an agent (or an editor or a reader) in that opening chunk. You can also pretty much convince them to take a ride with you.I’m thinking about this, partly because it matters in its own right, but partly, because we have a First 500 Novel Competition (details here) which offers a range of goodies, including a manuscript assessment, JW membership, and an agent one-to-one. Entry’s free if you’re a member (so, duh, enter). If you’re not a member, we’re charging the rip-off price of £10 per entry.Oh yes, and the 8 shortlisted entries will read their work out in front of literary agents who will probably throw HUGE GIANT INCREDIBLE offers of representation at the winners. So this is a prize worth chasing.In a minute, I’m going to offer some incredibly High Quality Thoughts on how to ace that competition – but first I want to tell you about:Feedback FridaysAs from next Friday, this email is going to be coming out to you at 10.00am or so, UK-time – a few hours earlier than it does now.Each week, I’m going to set you a little “Feedback Fridays” writing challenge. That challenge could be “what’s your elevator pitch” or “show me the bit in your manuscript where you first describe your character” or “I want to see your query letter”. I’ll invite you to share those things on Townhouse and will of course tell you exactly where to go. (If you’re not yet signed up to Townhouse, it’s free and easy to join. Just choose the free option here.)You’ll have the whole week to think about the challenge and upload your response. Then, on the Friday following, I’ll jump in and take a look at your responses – giving as much feedback and advice as I can. I’ll be online on Friday morning, but I’ll try to check in over the weekend too – I don’t want the interaction to be limited by what you’re doing on Fridays or what time zone you’re in.These challenges are open to everyone. I’d love you to join in, both in terms of uploading your work and in offering constructive advice on everyone else’s. I’ll do what I can in terms of feedback, but do be aware that my own feedback is going to go to Premium Members first and anyone else if I get a chance. There’ll be a couple more yummy extras to announce, but I’ll tell you about those next week.All this comes by way of an extra, not a replacement. So the main thrust of these emails will remain exactly as before – too long, discursive, under-planned, random, and occasionally useful.OK.First 500 words. Here’s what I think:1. It’s not about the opening sentenceSure, fancy-pants opening sentences are fine. Some books announce themselves that way. There’s nothing wrong with doing so.But readers aren’t persuaded by that first sentence. The real test for a browser in a bookshop is “does this first page or two persuade me that I’ll want to read further?” That’s partly a matter of story-promise and largely a matter of whether you feel trust in the author.If your opening sentence feels glued on, if it doesn’t feel natural to the book, then a fancy-pants opening sentence may actually weaken the reader’s sense of trust.For what it’s worth, my opening sentences are basically dull and I’ve never been especially tempted to jazz them up. You can do differently if you like, but you certainly don’t have to.2. No bedsToo many books start with the character waking from sleep. There’s nothing actually wrong or bad about that, but agents see it too often. So, yeah, ditch the bed.3. VoiceYour opening chunk needs to establish voice. It needs to hypnotise and seduce. The reader needs to think “I’m safe” and ideally, “this feels different” – that is, the feel of the text needs to be unique. If you’re writing a crime novel, you don’t want the book-buyer to think that they could pick up the book sitting next to yours and get, effectively, the exact same thing as you’re offering.For clarity, though, this isn’t about trying too hard. It’s just being completely you. It’s honouring the story and the character and doing that in a way that only you can do. If that all sounds a bit wishy-washy, here’s what I mean – this is the opening paragraph of Talking to the Dead:Beyond the window, I can see three kites hanging in the air over Bute Park. One blue, one yellow, one pink. Their shapes are precise, as though stencilled. From this distance, I can’t see the lines that tether them, so when the kites move, it’s as though they’re doing so of their own accord. An all-encompassing sunlight has swallowed depth and shadow.Can you see how little that does? There’s no suggestion of story. There’s no big, memorable, quotable sentence. There’s no hint really of the situation in which the character finds herself – or, in fact, anything about the character at all.But – there’s voice. A kind of authority which says, “I know what I’m doing, I’m not going to rush it, and I know you’re going to enjoy the ride.” That authority is, above all, what you’re seeking to establish in your opening.4. The scent of character, the tickle of storyIf authority – voice – is the most important comfort you can offer, the two things that matter next are:A good whiff of character and (less important)The tickle of storyI should probably qualify what I’m about to say next. So: If you’re writing for the James Patterson market, then you need to deliver big from the first paragraph: “The first bullet struck the wall six feet from me. The second one hit about six inches away. I didn’t want to know where the third one was landing.” – that kind of thing.But in most cases, you just don’t need to be as immediate. In my Talking to the Dead, it’s 2,000 words before I offer the reader what they know I’m going to offer them: a corpse and a police investigation. I don’t even make that offer in a dramatic way. Fiona Griffiths is in the office, doing boring office stuff, when she gets tasked with a minor chore as part of a large homicide investigation. There isn’t a big fireworks display at the start of the book and there doesn’t need to be one. That’s true of most books.So what does the first 500 words actually accomplish? In my case, I’d say there are plenty of clues as to character but really nothing much in relation to story.Fiona is being interviewed for the police job. Her interview notes that she did philosophy at university. She says yes, but corrects him as to what kind of topics that comprised. He says, “Useful for police work”. She says, “Not really.”Is there any story there? I don’t think so. There’s a scent of character, definitely, and that scent (plus the voice) will, I hope, keep you reading.It’s probably not until the 750-word mark that you can feel story intrude. The interviewer asks about a gap on Fiona’s resume when she was a teenager. Fiona basically deflects the question (“I was ill. Then I got better.”) No one feels that the issue has been properly addressed. So, after 750 words, there’s a first hint of mystery, if not quite story action.All this is really just to remind you that you can take it slow. If you have a mystery, you don’t need to reveal it too fast.5. The dinner party paradigmLet’s say you’re a guest at a dinner party. You’re sitting next to some people you haven’t met before, but they’re basically your sort of people. (That is, to de-code the analogy, your book is with the right sort of readers – literary fiction for literati, crime fiction for crime lovers and so on.)Because this is a dinner party, not a shouty disco set-up, you have all evening. You don’t need to rush.So you wouldn’t bellow at your neighbour, before finishing your first breadstick, “Hi, I’m Charles, I’m divorced, still really messed-up after the break-up and, yeah, I’m having kind of inappropriate sex with a co-worker.”You might, in fact, have disclosed all those facts by the end of the evening, but you’d hardly rush to get them out. You’d establish a pattern of communication first. You’d offer some clues, gauge the responses, find out a little more, and so on.Obviously, the analogy is imperfect because book/reader communication is one-way not two-way, but it’s kind of the same thing. Establish trust. Don’t be boring. And that’s almost it.6. A word of honestyAnd look. I’m offering these thoughts because we have a First 500 Novel Competition on. (Did I mention it? I did. The link is here.)But if I’m being completely honest, the advice I’ve given in this email is probably good advice if your mission is “Write a good and saleable book”. It’s probably not the best advice in the world if your mission is “Win Jericho Writers’ quite fantastic competition.”Unsurprisingly, judges of these competitions do tend to favour entries that have something to show off about. Quiet elegance tends to get outdone by bold colours and improbable hats.So what to do? Well, I think the experience of entering these competitions is massively helpful, so it’s worth doing no matter what. But don’t bend your book out of shape in order to win. Write the best book you can. Polish the first 500 words. Then enter.Good luck. I can’t wait to see what you come up with.Til soon.Harry

We’ve been talking a lot about marketing: here, on how to make Amazon work for you, here, for a more holistic view of book marketing, here, on why you need, as a very first step, to get people engaged with your book offer at some very minimal level, and  Here, on how my Fiona series put some of these thoughts into action I also said that I would “show you some snippets of how the book itself lines up behind its marketing promises – not just early on, but all the way through.” So that’s what we’re doing today. Last week we said that my books were: Dark Literate British-set Police procedurals With a female detective Who used to think she was dead That was the marketing message we wanted to deliver everywhere. But is that actually true of my stuff? We’re about to find out. I’m going to look at the first book in the series, Talking to The Dead, but in principle we could do the same exercise with any of the books. Here goes: First chapter The first chapter opens with Fiona being interviewed for a British police job by a British police officer. So I obviously tick the boxes for British-set police procedural and it’s already evidence that Fiona is going to be the detective who propels the series. So at the most basic level, my opening chapter reassures readers that they’re going to get what they came for. As for the “literate” requirement – well, the literacy doesn’t shout out at you, but it’s there all right. Take this passage: Matthews is a big man. Not gym-big, but Welsh-big, with the sort of comfortable muscularity that suggests a past involving farm work, rugby and beer. He has remarkably pale eyes and thick dark hair. Even his fingers have little dark hairs running all the way to the final joint. He is the opposite of me. That last line is inventive enough that it will catch the eye of people wanting to engage with decently written and thoughtful prose. But it also hints at more. What is the opposite of Matthews? Well, Matthews has a “comfortable muscularity” to him. The ingredients making him up involve farm work, rugby and beer. So Fiona’s the opposite of that. If Matthews is physically grounded in his body, Fiona is the opposite. Where Matthews is literally comfortable in his skin (and muscles), Fiona isn’t. That’s a very roundabout way of suggesting that where Matthews is comfortable with the basic task of being alive, Fiona is not. But roundabout is fine. The theme is there. And (not to beat about the bush) it’s there in the last paragraph of the first chapter too, just after Matthews has told Fiona she’s getting the job: I’m standing up. Matthews has stood up too and comes towards me, shaking my hand and saying something. His big shoulders block my view of Bute Park and I lose sight of the kites. Matthews is talking about formalities and I’m blathering answers back at him, but my attention isn’t with any of that stuff. I’m going to be a policewoman. And just five years ago, I was dead. Boom! You want a story about a detective who used to think she was dead? Well, here she is, chapter one, telling you she used to be dead. Page 50 On page 50 (in my Word document, not the actual book), I have this: I’ve never cried once during my time on the force. Indeed, that hardly says it. I haven’t cried since I was six or seven, ages ago anyway, and hardly ever even then. Last year, I attended a car accident, a nasty smash on Eastern Avenue, where the only serious casualty was a little boy who lost both his legs and suffered significant facial injuries. All the time we were getting him out of the car and into the ambulance, he was crying and holding his little tiger toy against his neck. Not only did I not cry, it wasn’t until a few days afterwards that I realised I was meant to have cried, or at least felt something. I reflect on all this as Amanda cries and I say, ‘It’s all right,’ like a mechanical toy, wishing one day to find some tears of my own. The core elevator pitch is present here too – albeit only very obliquely. But obliquely is fine! Obliquely is actually good. If you bash away at the same thing in the same way for 300 pages, you’re going to produce a tedious book. So really you’re pasting together a thousand jewelled pieces, no two of which are quite the same, and which all have slightly different lustres and qualities, but which combine to give the effect you are seeking to deliver. And this passage – Fiona failing to cry when it might be normal to do so – points again to the core oddity of Fiona. What’s wrong with her? Why no feelings? Why does she talk of herself as a mechanical toy? And, golly gosh, if you wanted to summarise in two words the self-view of someone who used to think she was dead, then ‘mechanical toy’ gets you pretty darn close, right? Page 150 Fiona gets ready for a date: I go up, get dressed and put on some make-up. I don’t often make the effort, but if I put my mind to it, I can look all right. Not Kay-like gorgeous. That’ll always be well beyond me. But nice. An attractive girl. That’s all I’ve ever hoped to achieve, and I feel a kind of satisfied relief at being able to achieve it. More than relief. Pleasure. I like it. I like the way I look tonight. At seven ten, I skitter out of the house. I’ve still got an undercurrent of anxiety about my physical safety, so I carry a kitchen knife in my clutch bag, but the knife is quite a small one, and the clutch bag matches my dress, has silver trimmings and boasts an extravagant silk bow, so as far as I’m concerned, I’m still in girly heaven. There are two things here. First, the relationship between Fiona and physical looks is slightly non-standard. It feels like she is wanting to tick a box – to fit in. It’s not quite that there’s anything forced about that impulse, just that it doesn’t feel to flow with real naturalness. And second – more strikingly – she goes on a date with a knife in her clutch-bag. Fiona’s version of ‘girly heaven’ still involves something intimately bound up with violence and death. All that is highly consistent with a woman who has a very complicated relationship with the fact of being alive. Page 250 We’re getting towards the end of the book now. The big denouement is about to take place. Naturally enough, the prose is more concerned now with setting up the next stage of the action. Except that here is how the chapter starts: A mile or so away from my destination, I park up. The verge is so thick with tall stalks of cow parsley that I have to mow a swathe through them to get off the road. All their pretty white decapitated heads. That last sentence is classic Fiona description. Yes, British verges in May are gloriously lacy and white. Yes, if you park on them, you’re likely to knock over some flowers. But ‘pretty white decapitated heads’? Only Fiona would join some springtime floral loveliness to a particularly gruesome image of mass murder. Again, the reference to our elevator pitch is notably oblique. But it’s present – that’s what matters. Fiona has a strange relationship to life and death. And here, looking at flowers, those two things get joined in a very unsettling way. Even on page 250, where the book is getting ready to let off some fireworks and then close down, the theme is there. Oh yes, and the reason why I chose to look at pages 50 / 150 / 250 is simple: I wanted to prove to you that I wasn’t cherry-picking extracts. Truly, truly, the theme is there pretty much anywhere you look. (I checked page 100 and page 200 too. And yep. You find the basic pitch all present and correct there as well.) Closing chapters I won’t talk about the closing chapters in detail. Suffice to say that in the pre-penultimate chapter, Fiona tells her boyfriend (and the reader) about the psychiatric condition that she used to have. She tells him: ‘In a mild form [of the illness], patients suffer from despair and self-loathing, but my form wasn’t mild. Not mild at all. I had the full monty. In a severe state, patients hold the delusional belief that they don’t exist, that their body is empty or putrefying … For two years, I thought I was dead.’ Boof! That’s the promise of the elevator pitch fully and completely discharged. All those earlier clues and hints now line up between the fact that unifies and makes sense of them all. The penultimate chapter is something of a riff, a monologue, from Fiona. As part of that, she imagines talking with one of her former psychiatrists. In that (imagined, not real) conversation she tells the doctor that she spent a night once in a mortuary. The doctor is shocked and she responds: “Yes, The mortuary, Doc. Where they keep dead people. Why? Are you bothered by the dead? Do you have uncomfortable feelings around them that you find hard to deal with? Perhaps you should find someone to talk to.” Again, that keeps the core pitch front and centre of this chapter. We then move onto the final chapter where Fiona learns another deep secret about her past. She is moved and finds that something very strange is happening to her: It is not a painful sensation, as I always thought it must be. It feels like the purest expression of feeling that it is possible to have. And the feeling mixes everything up together. Happiness. Sadness. Relief. Sorrow. Love. A mixture of things no psychiatrist ever felt. It is the most wonderful mixture in the world. I put my hands to my face again and again. Tears are coursing down my cheeks, splashing off my chin, tickling the side of my nose, running off my hands. These are tears and I am crying. I am Fiona Griffiths. Paid-up citizen of Planet Normal. She cries. For the first time in twenty years. The person who started the book as the ‘opposite’ of big, Welsh, muscular Matthews is now not exactly the same as him, but on the same planet as him. She’s come home. Elevator pitch – delivered. Reader (assuming they are in the market for this kind of book) – satisfied. Marketing task – done. And that’s enough about marketing. We’ll be on something completely different next week. Bring a glass of rosé and a bowl of salted almonds. We’ll talk till the sun sets beneath the wine-dark sea. Til soon. Harry 

This email completes a messy quartet of emails around selling books. If you’ve missed them (and – what? – you’ve missed them? YOU DON’T READ MY STUFF???), you can catch up:here, on how to make Amazon work for youhere, for a more holistic view of book marketing, andhere, on why you need, as a very first step, to get people engaged with your book offer at some very minimal level.But look. Advice on all this stuff has a useful, wholesome feel to it, but there’s always a gap between wise advice and implementing the stuff yourself – especially if the wise advice in question is full of nonsense about time machines and inflatable unicorns.So this email is going to try to join up some of the thoughts we’ve collected so far. The obvious thing would be to do that in relation to obvious bestsellers: books which have clearly nailed their marketing. The trouble is partly that those books now sell themselves in large part on their own aura. When Harry Potter was first marketed the core pitch was “orphan goes to wizard school.” These days, the pitch is substantially different. It’s more “What do you mean you’re undecided? This is Harry ****ing Potter.”Also, of course, I can’t tell you what was in the mind of Bloomsbury’s original marketing folk, but I can tell you what’s been in my mind in relation to my own novels. So I’m going to use my Fiona Griffiths work as an example of marketing. I’m not saying it’s perfect – just that I’ve tried to get it right.For clarity, the elevator pitch for these Fiona books is something like: “Crime story, where the detective once believed herself to be dead.”Is that pretty? No. Does that sentence appear anywhere at all in my marketing? No, of course not, it would be terrible. But could that phrase be a useful memo-to-self stuck above my computer screen? Absolutely yes. And does it intrigue enough that the average crime reader would want to know more? Hell, yes.So it’s a good pitch.But marketing doesn’t depend on a pitch alone. You also have to map out your book in terms of some broader co-ordinates, most notably genre.My books are:Police procedurals. A bad term in my case, because Fiona isn’t really one for following police procedure at all. But my books still count as police procedurals because they’re set around police offices, feature police detectives, have a police investigation at their centre, and so on.)British-set. That sounds obvious, in a way, and obscures a more interesting point, which is that the books are set in Wales. But from the point of view of international readers – and I’ve sold way more books in the US than in Europe – the books are British first, and Welsh second. It’s also relevant here that Amazon has a specific category for British-set police procedurals, which means there’s an actual sub-bestseller list that British crime addicts can haunt.Led by a female protagonist. Again, this matters to some readers and Amazon has a specific sub-categorisation for readers who want a female cop at the centre of things.But of course, procedurals come in all kinds of flavours and, as I’ve just mentioned, my books take the ‘police’ part seriously and the ‘procedural’ part not seriously at all. If I were analysing my books not by genre, but by tone, I’d say they were:Literate. I don’t mean my books should win the Booker Prize, but they are read by the sort of people who do also read literary fiction – as well as people who just like a good crime yarn. My books demand a kind of literary intelligence in the reader. They care about the prose and expect the reader to notice.Dark. My books aren’t bloodthirsty, but they’re very much not cosy crime. They take the reality of crime, its darkness, seriously.And that’s it, really. To market my books, you have to tell the reader fast and effectively that they are:DarkLiterateBritish-setPolice proceduralsWith a female protagonistWho used to think she was dead.Ideally, you want to communicate that message as briefly as you can. Remember last week’s email: your elevator pitch isn’t there to sell the book. It’s there to prompt the next level of engagement.You can do that with titles. My titles clearly refer to crime (“Talking to the Dead”), to darkness (“This Thing of Darkness”), and to a female protagonist with an unsettling relationship to death (“The Strange Death of Fiona Griffiths”). Given that the second title there deploys a quote from Shakespeare, I’d say that the ‘literate’ box was ticked as well.So much for the titles, but your communication also needs to run visually through the book covers. Here are mine (the US versions, which I commissioned myself): US book covers.Those covers communicate crime. (Not thriller, by the way. There’s a stillness about the covers which suggests crime. A thriller image needs to suggest explosive action.)They also literally communicate darkness – the covers use plenty of black.The topmost quote, which is drawn from a British newspaper, quickly suggests to a US reader that this book is likely British. It also refers to the ‘most startling protagonist’ in recent crime fiction. That doesn’t yet say female, but it does already draw the reader’s attention to the important oddness of the central character.By the time you turn the book in your hand, or read the book description on Amazon, you’ll quickly find that the book is indeed British, and does have a compellingly strange female detective as its lead.And of course, I have a problem. My elevator pitch refers to Fiona’s Cotard’s Syndrome – a genuine psychiatric condition in which patients think themselves to be dead. But I can’t put that fact anywhere on the cover of the book, because it’s the big plot reveal which only happens at the very end of the book. So I’ve got an elevator pitch I can’t directly talk about.Which is fine. You can’t talk directly about the huge plot twist in the middle of Gone Girl either, but that book did OK. If you can’t slap the pitch down directly on the page, you have to allude to it – hint at it – give the reader a feel of the shape, like a vase hidden under velvet.The book description introduces Fiona this way:“Rookie Detective Constable Fiona Griffiths - a new recruit with a reputation for being deadly smart, more than ordinarily committed . . . and unsettlingly odd.” That does enough to suggest what I need without giving away any plot spoilers.I’m lucky enough to have a ton of nice quotes to use about my book, and I don’t choose the ones that are kindest. I choose the ones that most communicate the basic marketing pitch: dark, literate, female protagonist, strange. Each quote wants to be repeating those basic thoughts, echoing the cover, echoing the blurb.You won’t have all those quotes yet – though you may have some from readers. But whatever elements you do deploy, you need to make sure they are knock-knock-knocking at the one same door you want your reader to walk through.So far, therefore, everything has lined up: title, cover art, cover quotes, book description or blurb, quotes.And, if things go well, you’ll even find your reader reviews lining up nicely too. I have some nice 5-star reviews that I like very much. (Thank you, readers.) But I’ve got some 1-star quotes that I like too. This one for example:“Anyone who touts this work of fiction as resembling real police procedure, has never stepped inside a police car in real life. The measures the main character took were bizarre, illegal and wholeheartedly unusable as evidence. The only thing they got correct was the stupid amounts of paperwork involved in a homicide case.”That’s a terrific way of telling readers what my book is and isn’t. If you like your police procedurals to be, ahem, vaguely accurate, then my book is not for you. And yes, you want sales, but no, you should never seek to sell your book to the wrong readers. There are some technical reasons there, but they boil down to this: Amazon knows whether books are positively or negatively reviewed, and whether they are or are not read to the end (in the case of e-books.) You want Amazon to think that readers love your stuff and that means not selling your books to readers who just aren’t going to like it. So that one-star review is a brilliant way to warn the wrong readers away from reading my book. That’s good. That’s helpful. It’s actually part of a good, rounded marketing effort.If I feel like it, next week, I might show you some snippets of how the book itself lines up behind its marketing promises – not just early on, but all the way through.Right now, the kids are in the very last stages of building a model version of the old Victorian village school for a class project. They want cotton wool smoke to come out of the chimney, and the glue gun is needed.Hey, ho, hey ho. A-gluin’ I go.Til soon.Harry

This email is, I guess, the third in a set of missives about marketing. (Here’s the first one, here’s the second.) If I were more thoughtful and more organised, today’s email would probably have appeared first not third – and, arguably, it’s the most important of the three so far.Those of you with time machines can zoom around reorganising space-time to rectify my shortcomings. The rest of you can simply consider this one deep truth:Marketing costs are a tax payable on bad product design.Bad books won’t sell profitably under any circumstances. Good books still need marketing, but the power of that marketing will be vastly greater, longer lasting, and more profitable.Obvious, right? And of course, to write a good book, you need a decent plot, you need great characters, you need all the yadda-yadda blah-blah that I talk about in these emails.But it’s not enough to write a good book. You need to write a saleable good book. (And, by the way, I know I often sound like a novelist talking only to novelists, but I do also write non-fiction and much of what I say – including every word of this email – applies to non-fiction too.)Readers are going to encounter your work in a bookshop – which may have upwards of 50,000 titles – or on Amazon, which has millions of titles. As readers, that diversity as great. As authors, we find that competition terrifying.Let’s assume that your book is good. You’ve ticked the boxes for plot and character and prose and all that. But why the hooting heck should anyone buy your book? If you’re writing spy fiction, why should anyone buy your books over John Le Carre’s? If you’re writing psych thrillers, why should anyone buy your work, not Gillian Flynn or Patricia Highsmith? In most markets, premium products sell at a premium price. In Booksland, the best books ever written sell at the same price as yours, in the same locations, and in unlimited quantities.So why should anyone buy your book? Why, why, why, why?Ah, solving that questionBrings the priest and the doctorIn their long coatsRunning over the fields.If you don’t have a priest / doctor / field combo to consult, then here’s a suggestion:Readers will engage with your book, if something about it piques their interest.Please note, I’m not saying “buy” – I’m saying “engage with”. I’m thinking about a reader picking up a book from a bookstore table and turning it over in their hands and reading the blurb and sticking their thumb into the book to find a chunk of text to read. On Amazon, I’m talking about a reader engaging with the ‘look Inside’ feature or scrolling down to read reader reviews. Obviously, not all of those readers will convert to buyers, but you’re in the game.Please also note, I’m saying “piques interest”. That’s all. I’m not saying “a potential reader has considered every aspect of your book in detail, consulted newspaper reviews, Amazon reviews, inspected Goodreads, and compared a sample of your prose against Le Carre / Highsmith / Flynn / Nabokov.”You don’t need all that. You just need to pique the reader’s interest and secure some engagement. Achieve those things, and it’s then down to the deeper, broader qualities of your book to achieve the sale.And what is it to pique interest – in any context, not just books?It’s to give somebody a snippet of information which sparks interest in learning more.For example, friends of ours recently went camping and invited us over for a Saturday supper. To pique my interest, they said, “It’s a campsite with its own climbing wall.” Eight words, that instantly engaged me – because I love climbing – and immediately made me want to learn more.Or:“A lawn mower robot means you never have to mow again.” If you have a sizeable lawn, as I do, those words instantly make you want to enquire further.Or:“The kids’ summer fete: £4 for 10 games.”You instantly want to know what kind of games are on offer, when this thing is taking place, how certain is it that there will be thunderstorms, whether there will be a hog roast, how the hog in question feels about this, and much else.In not one of these cases does the snippet of information represent an even remotely complete picture of the thing described. A proper description of the fete needs to talk about barbecues and whack-the-rat and gym displays and archery and pony rides. A proper description of a lawn mower robot needs to explain about wire tangles and set-up hassles and how tiny sticks on the lawn will make the robot yap like a sad puppy until it runs out of battery.A complete description doesn’t matter. It’s actually a negative at this very first introductory stage. Your description simply needs to deliver a snippet of information which sparks interest in learning more. That’s the whole deal.That’s why great elevator pitches can be – should be – ridiculously short:Campsite, with climbing wall.Robot lawn mower.Orphan goes to wizard school.If you have any length to your pitch, you’re saying too much. You haven’t yet found the single point that nudges your potential reader into engagement.Equally, if your elevator pitch is artistic, you’re missing the point. There’s nothing remotely artistic about the pitches I’ve just given you. They’re just words shoved together. The point is to highlight the thing of interest fast and clearly. That’s all.I often hear pitches like, “A queen who came to conquer – but learned to yield.” And, ye gods, that’s all summer dress and no boots. Forget the dress. I want the boots.Suppose, instead, you’d said, “An alternative history novel: Mary Queen of Scots invades England at the head of a 50,000 strong army.” Wouldn’t you instantly want to learn more? (Or rather, if that kind of history is vaguely your thing, wouldn’t you want to learn more? You can’t sell a comb to a bald man.) Being specific is good. Being clear is good. Being blunt is good. Being artistic and unclear is utterly useless.And here’s another key point: the elevator pitch is for you. It’s so you know what you’re selling.Nowhere, ever, does JK Rowling’s marketing material say, “Orphan goes to wizard school.” Nowhere, ever, does the marketing blurb for my Fiona Griffiths novels say, “A detective who used to think she was dead.”If you think an elevator pitch is for the reader, you’re thinking about it backwards. It’s for you. You need to know your elevator pitch so you can check your product design is right. It’s also so you can check that every single itty-bitty part of the universe surrounding your product – your book – harmonises with that basic offer.Next week, I’ll explain further what I mean. I’ll take my own Fiona novels and show you how I try to make sure that my elevator pitch exists always and everywhere in the Fiona universe – from the text of the books to the design of the covers, and much more beyond.But the deployment of the pitch is secondary to the thing itself. What’s your pitch? What makes someone want to learn more?Don’t be long-winded. Don’t describe the whole thing. Don’t be artistic. Don’t be clever.Think of your pitch as something you scribble on a Post-It note at the top of your screen. An eight-word memo to yourself. “What’s going to pique the reader’s interest? This is.”There are fifty thousand competitors in a good-sized bookshop. Ten million or so competitors on Amazon. And none of that has to matter, because you’ve got your pitch. Campsite + climbing wall. Robot + lawn. Orphan + wizard school. Something to arrest the roving eye.Til soon.Harry

A couple of weeks back, I wrote a piece on marketing your books. The gist of that email was that you needed to generate meaningful Amazon book sales through your own means, through the course of a week or a little bit less. If you do that successfully, Amazon’s own marketing bots will spring into action and take over – and, surprise surprise, Amazon’s quite good at selling books. There’s easily enough empirical evidence to demonstrate the power of this approach. It’s how most (not all) indie authors conduct their affairs. Put simply: it works. But that advice feels a bit narrow and technocratic. It doesn’t feel as though it has much to do with books. Your approach could well be the same no matter what you wanted to sell on Amazon. Dry cat food, mosaic tiles, novelty slippers, inflatable unicorns. And maybe too that advice feels remote from the things that marketers normally obsess over: slogans, images, emotional pull. Don’t those things matter? Isn’t that the heart and point of marketing? Well, OK. Let’s try and knit these things together. Three observations: One: books are an unusual product category. If you’re selling inflatable unicorns or dry cat food, you probably aren’t bringing out dozens of new products every month – whereas a large publisher is committed to producing thousands of new titles a year. What’s more, in the inflatable unicorn market, when you produce a new style of unicorn, you’re probably retiring some older products at the same time. That’s not true in books-land. The ocean of books you compete with gets larger all the time. Old e-books never die. Two: when you buy your unicorns from Amazon, you don’t give a horse’s damn about the seller. I mean, yes, you want to know that the product will inflate, will look as pictured, will scatter rainbows, and all the rest. But you have no personal relationship with the seller. If the seller offered one (“Hey Inflatable Fan, Be so kind to sign up to my corporate mail-list so I can advertise you my great unicorns.”), I expect you’d politely decline. Again, it’s not like that with books. Readers like authors; authors like readers. The respect is two way and wholly genuine. Three: Marketing folks have a reputation for being superficial for a reason. In Banbury, the nearest big town to me, there’s a Mondelez factory. That factory churns out coffee pods, amongst other things, but the multinational itself makes a gazillion different things. Oreos and Toblerone and Philadelphia and Milka and Cote D’Or and Cadbury and Bournvita and very much else. Each of those brands has marketing people earnestly trying to deepen the brand values of Toblerone, or whatever else. But Toblerone isn’t made by smiling Swiss milk-maids. It’s made in giant factories like the one in Banbury. The marketing stuff is just glued on, cynically, to a mass-manufactured industrial product. So. You. Books. Readers. How does marketing work in the very unusual product category you inhabit? The first thing to say is that your marketing work can’t be skin-deep. The opposite. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: You need a great elevator pitch; and That elevator pitch needs to permeate every page of your novel. If you think of those books that have utterly nailed elevator pitch (for example, Twilight, Harry Potter, Girl With a Dragon Tattoo, To Kill a Mockingbird, Sherlock Holmes, Wolf Hall), it’s more or less literally true that the elevator pitch is present on every page. That deep promise to the reader is maintained always and everywhere. Put another way: if your book were chocolate, you really would have to make it using smiling milk-maids. With books there are no factories, no cheating. Second, your marketing can’t live on the page and nowhere else. The opposite. The book cover needs to embrace your central promise. The title does too. The blurb does. Good lord: your name does. If you were writing sweet romance and your name was Kelly McSavage, I’d suggest changing your name. And it’s not just things-you-find-on-a-book which matter. It’s your website. It’s your social media presence. It’s the tone of your mailing list. It’s the images on your ads. What you want to achieve is a perfect integration between the deep promise of the book (“American teen falls in love with vampire”) and every other element that touches readers. I’m not a huge lover of Twilight myself, but that book cover – black background, bare arms, a red apple – contains the whole promise. So does the title. So does everything else. Your marketing needs to be like that – only, pretty please, with fewer vampires. And third: you. You’re not a factory belching out coffee-flavoured smoke in a medium-lovely south Midlands town. You’re a smiling milk-maid. That apple-cheeked, full-skirted, tumble-haired miss skipping down from those flower-strewn pastures: that’s you. To put the same thing just a wee bit more clearly: you are a core part of your book’s marketing. So if you are writing sweet romance novels, your communications to your readers (via social media, or emails, or the author’s note in the back of your book, or at a festival, or wherever else) needs to be in sync. If people come to your Twitter feed because they like your sweet romance novels, they don’t want to find you moaning about Brexit, or spreading covid conspiracy chat, or exchanging tips on how to make money at crypto. I’m not saying you can’t do all those excellent things, I’m just saying you can’t do that on your author-Twitter account, or your author Facebook page, or your author mailing list. Everything has to line up. The elevator pitch. The book itself. The title. The cover. Your digital footprint. Your reader communications. You. Do that, write well, market effectively on Amazon – and your books will sell. It’s easy when you know how, right? Til soon. Harry 

It’s hot here. There’s an outdoor pool near me and I was there the other day with a load of people stretched out on sun loungers, chatting, reading or fiddling with phones. Now the phone-fiddlers, we can sneer at and discard. To them I say, Phooey. To them I say, Pah. To them I say, Get a life, bud. The chatters? We have to make room for those in our world. Human connection, face to face? We want more of that, not less. But the readers? Ah, the readers! Those people feed us. Without the readers, we’d be reduced to beggary, hawking our unwanted stories for a crust of yesterday’s bread. And there are two types of reader. There are magazine-readers and there are book-readers. Magazine reading is interesting. There\'s something intentionally provisional about reading a magazine. You\'re almost announcing to the world that you are happy to be interrupted. Your attention span is held anywhere from the five seconds it takes to look at a picture to the few minutes it takes to read an article. You’re saying, I’m a bit bored and I’d welcome interruption. With books on the other hand, you announce the opposite. You say I am busy in this other world of mine. I intend to be busy in this place for the next hour or two or three. So please take your idle chatter somewhere else: I have no time for you. There is almost no way of consuming art which demands more commitment. Yes, some plays or operas have a long running time. But they are still relatively passive. You commit to them when you buy a ticket and again when you turn up. Thereafter, the default action is to stay sitting and watching. You don’t have to commit; you have to sit. With a novel, on the other hand, that default doesn’t exist. It is perfectly acceptable to put your book down and never pick it up again. If you continue reading, it is because you have truly committed to the three or four or six hours it takes you to finish that book. Each finished book, is a little victory, a marathon completed. To help your reader complete that marathon, you mostly have to do all those good things that we always talk about. Build a great plot. Develop a great character. Clothe your story in rich settings. And so on. Those things are the backbone, always. But I have a little soft spot for treats scattered for the reader. Treats that almost directly acknowledge how committed the reader has been and how much they have earned this little bonbon. So, for example, in my Love Story, With Murders, Fiona is interviewing a somewhat self-absorbed Englishwoman. She asks a question and: .. Gets a shrug, not an answer. ‘Sophie, we need a “Yes” or a “No”.’ ‘Look, he didn’t talk to me about any of that. There’s a cottage he used to go to. He shared it with his brother and sister. We used to go as a family, in summer mostly. It’s a bit …’ She makes a face. A face which says, ‘I’m too precious to deal with anything muddy, or wet, or rustic, or basic.’ It’s a face the English have used about the Welsh for fifteen centuries. Fifteen centuries, during which they stole our farmland, murdered our princes and scattered castles, a giant Saxon screw you, the length and breadth of the country. Wales is the world capital of medieval castles, the world’s most conquered nation. Either that, or the most belligerent. ‘Twll dîn pob Sais,’ I say. ‘Pardon?’ ‘Doesn’t matter. The address of the cottage, please.’ That’s it. Unless you speak Welsh, what Fiona says to Sophie Hinton is completely opaque. The (English-speaking) reader is waiting for an explanation that never comes. Except it does. A full 200 pages later, Fiona is in Glasgow, Scotland and this happens: Two kids pass my car. One of them raps on my window. I wind my window down and say, ‘Yes?’ The kid says something in an accent so thick I don’t understand it. I reply in Welsh, the same thing as I said to Sophie Hinton. Twll dîn pob Sais. Every Englishman an arsehole. He goes off muttering. He might as well be speaking Icelandic. I guess there’s something funny there. Fiona was apparently conducting her Sophie Hinton interview in a vaguely professional manner, but just slipped into Welsh when she wanted to insult Hinton and her entire people. And because Hinton didn’t know Welsh, she didn’t know she’d been insulted. But also: the later little episode in Scotland is something very close to a direct acknowledgement of the reader’s support. “You’ve stuck it out almost to the end of the book, so here’s a little gift of mine. You wanted to know what that phrase meant two hundred pages back and I didn’t tell you. But you’ve stuck with me all this time so here’s your reward. And a little laugh. And a thank you.” Or another example – again towards the end of a book, a reward for commitment. In this case, the allusion goes right back to a previous book, which is picked up again in this one. In that other book, Fiona encounters a young woman, Francesca / Cesca, who keeps some dope in a ‘Little hippy-dippy Indian box.’ Cesca thinks Fiona is quite odd (which she is) and calls her ‘Ess’, short for ‘Strange Detective.’ This isn’t a deeply important relationship, but it is significant enough that any reader of the series will certainly remember it. And then, towards the end of The Deepest Grave, Fiona’s just had a rough night. She’s about to make some arrests. It’s four in the morning, but she makes a call: I ring off. Call Cesca. She answers, sleepily. ‘Cesca, it’s me. Your strange detective.’ ‘Ess? Hi. Are you OK?’ ‘I’m fine. Where are you? Right now. Where are you?’ Plas Du, is the answer. Her mother’s house near Llantwit. ‘Good. That’s good. Then do you want to see how this ends? This investigation of mine.’ She does. I tell her to shift herself over here. ‘And Cesca. That little hippy-dippy box of yours. Do you still have it?’ There’s a short pause, then, ‘You want me to bring you a joint?’ That High Rising Terminal. A generational thing. ‘No. Not one joint. Bring everything you’ve got. I’m not in a one-joint place right now.’ She says OK. Says it, enthusiastically enough that I can actually hear her leaping out of bed, starting to get organised. I ring off. Again, there’s a kind of joke here. Cesca thinks, ‘You’re a detective? You want me to bring you a joint? At four in the morning?’ And Fiona is irritable: ‘No, of course I don’t want one joint. I want to smoke until I fall over.’ That’s clearly not the way His Majesty’s Constabulary is meant to behave. But alongside that joke, the passage delivers a reward. You’re saying, “You are a proper, loyal, committed reader, so I know that you do in fact remember that hippy-dippy Indian box. And I have created and gift-wrapped this little incident especially for you. I could have procured a joint from pretty much anywhere, but I did it this way because I knew you would particularly relish this way of doing things. Thank you.” These tiny little episodes have the quality of a conversation directly between author and reader, a conversation that the character herself is not really part of. I don\'t think these things make all the difference. They certainly don\'t make or break a book. But I know that as a reader, I relish such things. And as a writer, I love creating them. Little buried sweetmeats, ones that only the right sort of reader can enjoy. Go well. And have a bonbon. Til soon. Harry 

The hardest thing in our game: writing a decent book.The second hardest thing: marketing it.Big publishers, you might think, have cracked the second of those tasks. That’s what they’re for, after all. They don’t write the books. They don’t print the books. Selling the damn things is what they’re all about.But most novels lose money, even when sold by Harper Collins, or Penguin Random House, or whoever else. Good books can simply disappear for essentially no reason. Book marketing remains hard, even when you’re Penguin.And, OK, the rather clickbait-y title of this email might make it sound as though I have solved this last great mystery. And of course, I haven\'t. But I can tell you truthfully the one marketing trick which will always work for any well written and well packaged book.Here it is:Find an online platform that can reach almost every reader in the world. You want that platform to know the purchasing habits of those readers, their tastes and preferences. You want that platform to hold your readers’ card and shipping details. You want that platform to be utterly trusted when it comes to e-commerce and delivery times and all that. You want that platform to be best-in-class when it comes to the delivery of e-books and audio-books. And look, I don’t know about you, but I think Amazon might fit the bill.Convince Amazon to market the heck out of your book.That’s it. You just hand over control to the best in the business.Amazon doesn’t put ads on the side of buses. It won’t book TV spots to promote your book. But it can:Place you on bestseller lists.Place you on niche sub-bestseller lists that appeal directly to the most passionate readers in your genre.Send emails out to likely buyers.Place you on hot new release lists.Place you on “also bought” lists.Give you best seller icons to distinguish your book from its competitors.Give you sales volumes that will lead to a tide of new reviews.Give you additional visibility in Kindle Unlimited, if you have signed up to that programme.Given that Amazon knows pretty much every reader in the English-speaking world, and given that it knows their habits and preferences, and holds their bank card details, if Amazon starts marketing your book, you will make sales. You can’t not.Remember, the caveat, though. You can\'t market rubbish. If your book cover is bad, or your blurb is not interesting, or your actual text is disappointing, Amazon will soon lose interest in any idea of helping you. It can be lured into presenting your book to readers, but if those readers do not and up purchasing the book, Amazon will soon look for better opportunities elsewhere.But if your book is strong, Amazon can find readers who want a book like yours at the exact time those readers are looking for their next read. There has never been a more powerful way to market books, ever.So how do you persuade Amazon to put your book at the centre of its marketing activity?The answer is straightforward. You create enough of a sales platform to pique Amazon’s interest. To put it more precisely, you need to build enough sales over four to seven days to make Amazon think, “Gosh, this book has some real organic sales of its own. Readers are clearly buying it. The volume of sales – and the steadiness of sales – make me think that this book is worth promoting more widely.”As soon as Amazon is engaged in promoting your book, you can hand over. Your job as a book marketer is to get Amazon working for you. As soon as it is fully engaged, you can ease off without feeling bad.So your marketing challenge now comes down to this:Make sure that your book packaging (the cover, the blurb, the pricing, the look-inside text and all that) is spot on.Generating sales, on Amazon, over 4-7 days.That already seems a narrower and more achievable goal than we started with, right? And there are good, reliable tools for generating sales. For example:Book promotion sites, like these. This is the best place to start for newbies – and, actually, it’s just the best place to start.Amazon ads. Easy to set up, but they’re hard to scale up – you can’t give yourself a real sales punch with these.Facebook ads. Harder to work with, but incredibly powerful. Don’t mess around here, though, without informing yourself first. Anything by Dave Gaughran is reliable. Ditto anything by Nicholas Erik. Ditto anything by Mark Dawson (though you may end up paying a fair bit.)Your mailing list. Ultimately, your mailing list will become the single most important engine behind all your sales. But you need to feed your mailing list and organic sales is the best way to do that. When you are starting out, however, you will find that outfits like BookSweeps offer a great way to get started.Social media, maybe. If you’re good at it. And you don’t need to be across every platform. The reverse is more likely true. If you like TikTok, then go all in on TikTok and largely ignore everything else. If you like Facebook, then go all in on that. If (like me) you hate all of that nonsense, then ignore it all and don’t feel bad.You really only need to pick three elements from this list and two of them – promo sites and mailing list – are pretty much compulsory.And again: remember the main point of this email. You don’t need to market all the time. You just need to market effectively enough for 4-7 days that Amazon gets the message and starts working for you.That’s it. That’s how to market a book in a way that always works.And, to be clear, Amazon’s attention will move on. It always does. If your week-long marketing blitz delivers enough sales to engage Amazon’s marketing bots, then you win yourself about a month of Amazon-love in total. You’ll find visibility – and sales – spikes as Amazon gets interested, then gently falls away. A month or two after launch, those heady sales spikes will feel unbearably distant.But that’s the way it goes. And, in that happy month or two, you can generate easily enough sales to make some money and build up your mailing list for your next launch.Here endeth the lesson. Good luck. Feed those bots.Til soon.Harry

I just realised that I write quite often about beginning a novel, and not all that often about ending it. And yes: beginnings are important. If you don’t get your reader onto the story-train in that opening chapter, you’ve basically lost the game before it’s really started. And also: if you don’t set expectations just so in those opening pages, you’re likely to confuse your reader or upset them later in the book – another way to lose the game. But endings matter too. To a huge extent, they set an architecture for the whole book. They determine the way you understand it. What if Lizzie Bennet hadn’t married Darcy? What if Atticus Finch had secured the peaceful release of the falsely accused Tom? What if James Bond just bungled things when he came to defuse the bomb? Endings matter at least as much as beginnings and the reason I don’t talk about them much is simply that endings mostly write themselves. I don’t know about your experience, but my endings generally pass in a rush. It’s as though the entirety of the preceding novel is there to allow me to write the final chunk in a blaze of understanding and joy. The understanding is: I know my characters. I know how all my little plot intricacies need to play out. I know what the grand finale needs to deliver. The prior 90,000 words involved me figuring those things out. The last 20,000 are my reward. The joy is partly the ease of writing. But it’s also the joy of completing the arc. It’s like writing one long punchline, where you already know that the joke is going to land. I’ve certainly had some spectacularly happy writing sessions that haven’t involved endings. (Giving Fiona hypothermia in the snows of Love Story, with Murders was joyous. And I did enjoy burying her underground in The Dead House.) But mostly – the writing sessions I remember with most pleasure involve endings. Words flowing and the text satisfying. So maybe you don’t need help with the endings. I think there’s an argument that if the preceding story has worked properly, the ending should just fall into place. But here, for what it’s worth, is a checklist to keep at hand … Exterior drama Have you properly completed your exterior drama? In the kind of books I write, that’ll typically involve some good splash of violence – a sinking boat, a fight, a burning building. But that’s not necessary. In Pride and Prejudice, the exterior ‘drama’ involves a naïve girl eloping with Mr Wrong and the Romantic Hero doing (off-screen) what Romantic Heroes are there to do. The off-screen quality of that drama is probably a little underweight for a modern audience, but so long as you have some dramatic action that’s well suited to your genre and readership, you’re fine. Interior drama The flipside of the exterior action needs to be some serious internal pressure. In a standalone novel, that pressure needs to have the sense of being pivotal – life-altering, life-defining. In a series novel, you can’t quite get away with a new life-defining moment with every instalment, but the stakes still need to be high. Series characters take a bit of a battering as a result. (I once did an ‘interview’ with Fiona, in which she grumped at me for giving her a rough time. Reading it back, I have to say that she’s in the right. I’ll never tell her that though.) Romantic relationship Most books, not all, will involve a romantic relationship. And – of course – the pressures of your grand finale are also pressures that test and define that relationship. You definitely don’t have to kiss and get married at the end of every book. I’ve ended a book with my protagonist ending what had seemed like a strong and constructive relationship. But when your character enters the furnaces of your ending, everything is tested, everything will either prove itself durable or fallible. The relationship can’t simply be as it was before. (Again, series characters need to play those things differently, but ‘differently’ doesn’t mean you can just ignore the issue.) Other key friendships / relationships Of course, there are a ton of other relationships that build up over the course of a book. Those might be best-friend type relationships, or children, or parents. They can (importantly) be office colleagues, which sounds dull but they can matter too. My detective’s relationship with her boss and other colleagues is just quite central to the architecture of her life and the books. These relationships too don’t need profound alteration necessarily, but they need some token of ending. A boss hugging your character (when he/she never normally would), or talking about a promotion, or offering a holiday – those things sound trivial, but they can define something important about everyone’s relationship to what has just happened. You don’t necessarily need much here. Half a page? A page? That might be ample. But if you book misses that page, it’ll never quite satisfy as it ought to. Mystery resolution Most books – not just crime novels – will often have some kind of mystery at the heart. That mystery will probably be unfolded in your grand action-climax, but that won’t always be true. Modern fiction has (rightly) moved away from that moustache-twirling final chapter where the Great Detective reveals the mystery to a completely static audience. But it’ll often be the case that little questions and niggles remain. Those things need to be addressed. It’s even OK if they’re addressed by saying, “We’ll never know exactly how / why / who X.” But you need to resolve your mysteries or acknowledge that you haven’t. Movement And, since we’ve just dissed static and moustache-twirling final chapters, I’d add that maintaining some kind of motion still matters at the end. Just as you’ll want to move settings fairly frequently in your middle chapters, I think you’ll want to do the same at the end. Physical motion is still a good way to convey story motion. The closing shot And –  There’s a theory in film-structure that the opening shot should show the ‘Before’ state of a character and the closing shot should show the ‘After’ – where the before/after vignettes somehow encapsulate the alteration brought about by the story. So to take the (vastly excellent) Miss Congeniality movie, the opening shot shows Sandra Bullock as goofy, unkempt, and without close female friends. The closing shot shows her kempt, still her, but now with close female friends. That’s the key transition in the movie. I don’t quite like the mechanical nature of these movie plotting guides, but I do think it’s worth reflecting on the closing shot. What are you wanting to show? What’s the image of your character that you want to leave with your reader? In one of my books, a girl had been long separated from her father. Fiona’s last act in the book is to rejoin the two. She’s not physically present when the two meet – she’s set up the meeting, but remains in a car outside, watching. And that maybe is just the right tone for the book. Fiona plays this almost Christ-like role – suffering for others, undoing wrongs – but nevertheless remains on the outside of ordinary human society. That point isn’t made in any direct way, but it doesn’t have to be. An indirect point lingers longer than one made more crudely. *** That’s it from me. The excellence of this email’s start and middle sections means that the ending will now write itself in a burst of creative joy: Til soon. Harry 

I have my usual summer hay fever at the moment, combined with a nasty cough and a few spadefuls of antibiotics.So what follows isn\'t really a logically sequenced e-mail. If anything, it might be like the precursor to something useful – a collection of raw materials, in effect. But that’s the hopeful way to look at it. More than likely, what follows is just the ramblings of a delirious brain and sooner or later I will start telling you that I am the lost king of Sardinia and have the power to sprout feathers.So, I’m not going to be too strategic here. I am going to spill out what I have and you can pick amongst the debris as you will. Deal?OK. Then here we go:1. Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse is – yeughI mean, obviously, I have never experienced it first-hand. And I could never see myself wanting to wear those ridiculous goggles. And maybe I\'m not of the metaverse generation anyway. But have you ever seen a screen grab from matters multiverse nonsense that makes you want to explore further? It looks like a corporate waiting room, dunked in Really Bad Art, then extruded through some Hunger Games style dystopia.It isn\'t only me who thinks that way. The firm has been losing stupid amounts of money on it and the popularity of the service still seems rock bottom.2. Jane Austen’s metaverse is – yumThe art of fiction is obviously lovely and has none of the problems associated with the metaverse. But it does share some characteristics. You are an altered you in an altered world. It is a game that plays with and relies on an altered reality.I suppose it is true that, in Zuckerberg\'s metaverse, you mostly role-play as you, rather than Jane Austen’s Emma or Melville’s Ishmael or JK Rowling’s Harry Potter. But that doesn\'t seem like a key difference. After all, when you enjoy a Jane Austen novel, it is because you choose to identify your hopes and fears with those of the heroine. So, in effect you are choosing to role-play as an avatar in somebody else’s meta-reality, just as you can choose your wardrobe in the metaverse.3. Jane Austen’s world has way better clothes.Also: Jane\'s characters have legs.4. The difference is probably not terrible graphicsJane Austen doesn\'t come with graphics.5. I went to get antibiotics yesterdayThe pharmacy was closed for lunch which was really annoying. So I sat in a coffee shop while I waited. The woman next to me was editing her novel. I mean I can\'t be totally sure it was her novel but it darn well looked like one and somehow the way she was working on it was the way a novelist cares about something they have given birth to. She didn\'t look like a professional editor doing a professional job all the 15th manuscript of the year. She sat forwards, almost cradling it. Her attention was certainly focused, but I would say that it was lovingly focused.I am really not sure whether this is relevant.6. Mark Zuckerberg wants you to love his technologyThat\'s the focus, isn\'t it? You are meant to marvel at the possibilities. If that kind of technology has a selling point, it is that you can do anything. I mean, not have realistic bodies, of course, but, apart from that, you can do anything.7. Novelists offer the oppositeYou can\'t do anything. You can\'t make choices. You get on a train at the start of a novel, and then steel tracks steer you all the way to an outcome that you, the reader, has not chosen.8. Readers choose the type of fun fair rideObviously, somebody picking up a novel by Jane Austen wants a shot of something different than does somebody picking up a novel by Louise Penny or Stephanie Meyers, or whoever else. But once a reader has chosen their type of ride, the power of choice leaves them completely. The author is in control.9. That woman. In that coffee shop.But it isn’t control without kindness or focus. I watched that woman writing her novel and she was caring about every word, as she should have done. As I would have advised her to do.10. The technology of printing is still basically 15th centuryThe machines have got fancier, but they are still all about slapping some ink on some hard-wearing surface and pressing that against paper. Still. In this day and age.11. We like booksPhysical books. Things that you can throw at an annoying child, or leave on a bus, or put on a shelf somewhere. E-books have been revolutionary, but we still like the old-fashioned things too.12. The metaverse is empty. A book is a conversation.Between a human author and a human reader. And about a topic that they both deeply care about.13. You can swat a hornet with a book.I mean, I’m all for live-and-let-live. But there was a massive hornet in the kids’ room with a sting on it like some kind of scary-insect-Apache-gunship-poison-dagger thing. I couldn\'t get the damn hornet to go out of the window, so it ended up dying at the hands of Enid Blyton\'s Famous Five. Can\'t do that with an e-book. Now the kids want to squash the hornet into some modelling clay, so they can make a plaster cast of its corpse. Not sure if that counts as a parenting win or a parenting fail.14. And look, it’s love, isn’t it? It all comes back to love.Zuckerberg\'s metaverse seems cold because it is cold. It seems technologically focused because it is technologically focused. And books seem warm and human and living because they are born of a kind of love.That woman in the coffee shop. Me when I write, you when you write. All of us have complicated relationships with our creations, of course. We are never only loving. We are also anxious and paranoid and fearful and self-doubting and all the rest.But that is what we transmit when we write. We transmit love. And that is why people read it.Put love in your books. And swallow antibiotics by the handful.Til soon.Harry

A year or two back, when the world was young, I loved the music of Bob Dylan and knew much of his canon by heart. One of his lyrics has always stayed with me: Everything passes Everything changes Just do what you think you should do. And, you know, the Bard was right. Right about the world, right about publishing. You can’t blame the world for changing. You just have to make your own best accommodation with how it is. This thought is prompted by an article in the Bookseller magazine – the equivalent, roughly, of the US’s Publishers Weekly. The writer is an editor working in publisher. He/she chooses to remain anonymous, but I’m almost certain that she’s called Hepzibah Plum. She says: Over a decade ago, when I first came into the commercial publishing industry, my fellow assistants and I were well versed in early starts and late finishes, and regularly worked weekends. However, what I have seen a marked leap of in recent years is what is expected of each editor, publicist and marketeer in terms of the volume of books – a growth that, in my experience, is often not supported by an increase in budget and resources. The inevitable result is a cutting of corners elsewhere, and it is author care, whether intentional or not, that is effectively deprioritised. I think that’s right. I honestly don’t think that author care in the industry has been satisfactory at any time in the last quarter of a century, which is how long I’ve been playing this game. But it’s got worse and the most wicked effects are to be seen when it comes to marketing. As the good Ms Plum tells us,  It is simply impossible for each book to have a comprehensive marketing and publicity plan or for each author to have direct contact (or indeed any interaction) with the wider publishing team. The worst setup I’ve experienced in my career saw one marketeer overseeing six editors’ lists, and each list was considerable (my own included 17 authors, most of whom were publishing two or even three books a year). That means, effectively, there is no meaningful marketing for almost anyone. So what you get is an editor telling you excitedly that (ta-da!) you’re going to have cover reveal, yay! On Twitter and Insta! And, naturally enough, you’re liable to feel a tad disappointed. The impact of those things on sales is exactly nil. The people who are telling you about your cover reveal know that what they’re saying is meaningless, but they’re nice people and they can’t bear to tell you the ugly truth. So you get no meaningful marketing and a packet of sweetly told lies. So why don’t publishers just get more selective about the books they take on and give each one a proper marketing spend? Well, alas, the Big Publishing strategy is perfectly rational. The books which sell in volume are the ones bought in volume by the biggest retailers. And although Barnes & Noble and Waterstones (in the UK) sell a lot of books in total, those chains are now managed rather like chains of indie bookshops, with each store manager making their own buying decisions. That means they can no longer reliably build a bestseller. Instead, it’s supermarkets that have the real market clout – the ability to place large orders for books and to sell those books fast in a short space of time. But do the book buyers at those major retailers have the time to read everything they’re being offered? Of course not. Result: it’s become ever more of a crap-shoot which books do or don’t sell big. An excellent book cover will do more for you than any amount of wonderful prose. (Of course, big name authors will always be picked up by the supermarkets, so they’re going to sell at scale no matter what.) So if it’s a crap-shoot, publishers are – quite rationally – buying and publishing more books and investing as little as they can in them. Each book is an extra lottery ticket and if you manage to invest very little in the book, then you can pick up a lot of tickets at very low cost. But: Authors don’t get any meaningful care. They’re going to be lied to about their prospects. Real industry relationships will be attenuated. And the quality of what’s on sale at a bookshop or supermarket near you will be patchy. There probably are print-led publishers who do things differently (and, Hepzibah Plum, if you’re reading this, I’d love to know who you rate.) But I will say this: the digital-first crowd do arrange things differently. There’s proper marketing spend for every debut novel. There’s a proper focus on analytics. If one book cover doesn’t work, they’ll try another. Those tricks won’t always work, of course. It’s not like there exists any sure-fire strategy in publishing. But effectively, a good digital-first publisher works to get the right books in the right packaging in front of the right audience in the right way. Self-publishing essentially deploys the exact same tools to deliver the exact same result. And what do you do with this information? Well, you take your cue from Bob: Everything passes Everything changes Just do what you think you should do. You can’t change the world of publishing. Lots of people still want to work with a print-led publisher, because they like the sense of a book as a physical object, that idea that you haven’t been properly published if you don’t have something you can put on a shelf. But digital-first is wonderful, and less overstretched, and more meritocratic in terms of outcomes. Ditto self-publishing. So make whatever choice you want. Just do what you think you should do. That’s it from me. I’m going to wear a red-silk dressing gown, drink a glass of mint tea and smoke a thin-stemmed pipe, packed with the best Moroccan hashish. Best of all, I shall do it outside, in the sun. Til soon. Harry 

Sometimes, you know, publishers just get it right.(And, I should say up top, this email has nothing useful to say. Contrary to my subject line, this email will not tell you how to make money in publishing. The fact is: this email is perfectly useless. If you’d rather just get on with your life, then please – direct your feet to the sunny side of the street. No offence, and I’ll see you next week.)So.Shakespeare.In his lifetime, he was widely published, given the age. Much of his poetry had been through several editions. Roughly alf his plays had been published in some form.But that still left out an awful lot. Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Macbeth, The Tempest, The Comedy of Errors – these and many others had never been published. The plays which had been published had often been come out in quarto form. To make a cheap quarto book, you took a large sheet of paper and folding it twice, to get four pages / eight sides. Binding was expensive, so was often omitted. An unbound quarto book would have cost about sixpence, or, in modern terms, a bit less than a contemporary paperback.Now, another name for an unbound quarto is ‘pile of paper’ and, back when paper was valuable and not abundant, unbound books soon found themselves being used for other things. One ditty of the time said, ‘Publish me in the smallest size / lest I be eaten under Pippin-Pies [Apple pies] / Or in an apothecary’s shop be seen / to wrap drugs or to dry tobacco in.’In short, the situation at the time of Shakespeare’s death in 1616, was dire. Half his plays, including some of his most important, were wholly unpublished. The rest had been published but in editions so impermanent that many of those too would disappear. The idea that this playwright would be seen as probably the most important author ever would have been just nuts. His star was fading by the day.And then – Between 1622 and 1623 – four hundred years ago – a team of people banded together to produce the First Folio, or to give it its proper title: Mr William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories and Tragedies. A folio was the largest, most impressive printing format of the age, and the most expensive. The team needed the capacity of one of London’s major printing shops. Paper had to be imported from France. And the texts? These were gathered with surprising resourcefulness. Where there had been decent printed copies, those were used. Sometimes, they used Shakespeare’s own ‘foul papers’ or working texts. Other times, they used the prompt copies kept by theatre companies to nudge actors on their lines.There were difficult squabbles over publication rights. Troilus and Cressida was originally intended to follow Romeo and Juliet, but was kept out, probably because of a rights issue, then inserted later. It never made it into the Table of Contents.The publishing plan was bold, high-investment – and successful. The team printed and sold about 750 copies. Each copy sold for between fifteen and twenty shillings – let’s say £150-200 in modern terms, or $200-250. The cheaper copies were unbound. The posher copies were bound in calfskin and sold for more.That book saved Shakespeare. Literally. It kept (almost all) his dramatic work alive. There are still about 250 copies of that book in existence today. It’s because of that book that we know Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra and the rest. It’s because of that book that Shakespeare has the reputation he has. There were subsequent folios and subsequent textual revisions and arguments, but that single book stands alone in its importance for British (and arguably world) literature.The story reminds you of the essential strange duality at the heart of any publishing company. Yes, it’s about money. And yes, it’s about art. A company only focused on the art would not have had the funds to do as that First Folio team did: to gather the texts, to refine them, to set them, to buy the paper, to hire the print shop, to do the marketing. And a company only focused on the cash would not have done as much to gather every text they could, to take as much care over each line.Art and money, money and art.Publishers don’t always get things right, but when they do, they make one hell of a difference.Til soon.Harry

With most projects, it’s clear when they’re done. A bike shed is built once there are walls, a roof, and a place to store bikes. A lasagne is done once you have a gooey tray of tomatopastamince steaming in front of you.And a book? It’s done exactly when?Well, as with most of these emails, I don’t really know. The image that I mostly work with is that of an apple. You don’t really pick it from the tree. You don’t pull it. You twist it. And the twisting isn’t best understood as an efficient way to separate fruit from bough. The twisting is, in effect, a question. ‘Are you ready to come now, pretty red thing?’ If the apple falls into your hand, it’s ready. And if it stays on the tree, it’s telling you that it would like another day or two to turn its pips from creamy white to nut brown.And there you go. That’s how it works with books.If that fruit-based methodology doesn’t work for you, here are some others:Can you find places to cut text?If you can, you need to do more work. And I don’t mean, “Can you find chapters, pages and paragraphs to cut?”, although of course that’s important. I mean, “Can you find a 12 word sentence that could use 10 words to say the same thing?” I mean, “Is there a descriptive paragraph that uses three sentences, where two word actually work just as well?”The main aim of cutting text isn’t to reduce the amount of things you communicate. It’s to leave the communication unchanged, but with fewer words. If that process still has further to run, you haven’t finished.How easy is it to make insertions?There’ll always be little insertions you want to make. It might be a plot point, where your Big Reveal later in the book needs some little clue offered early. Or it might just be that you need to deepen Aunt Jem’s character up front, because of the new role she plays in the warehouse shootout scene. Or whatever.One of the things I notice as I’m editing is that, the nearer the book is to completion, the harder it becomes to make those insertions. When a book is looser, less edited, there are plenty of places where you can insert the blade of a screwdriver and force open the text. As the book moves towards being finished, it just gets harder to make those insertions. Yes, you could in theory put something about Aunt Jem on page 36, but when you look at page 36, it’s feels very smooth. There’s a sort of inevitable logic to the way the text plays out. You can’t add anything about Jem without interrupting the emotional flow of something that needs to happen. That’s good. Your apple is nearly ripe.Do you find greater density in your text?Bit more Zen, this one, but as a book gets closer to being fully ready, you may well start noticing echoes that you hadn’t quite intended, but feel really good. It might be that a sea metaphor naturally crops up in Chapters 4, 12, 18, and 31. You wrote those damn chapters months apart, but now that you’re editing into shape, it’s almost as though you planted those references to show a particular evolution of something. The more you notice things like that, the riper your book is becoming.Can you spot the bits you hated?Frank Herbert, author of Dune, once said:I don\'t worry about inspiration or anything like that.... later, coming back and reading what I have produced, I am unable to detect the difference between what came easily and when I had to sit down and say, \"Well, now it\'s writing time and now I\'ll write.”That’s a good test. If you can still feel the sweat and the awkwardness, you might want to work a little longer.Have you done The List?Editing involves plot, it involves character, it involves settings, it involves prose, it involves everything.It’s easy to think of editing as a process that starts at page 1 and ends at page 350, and, OK, that is partly how it works. But it should also be a process that simply works through items on a list. Aunt Jem’s character. The plot issue involving Gordon’s car. Your holiday house setting. Addressing those things will involve hopping around through the book, fixing Jem, fixing Gordon, fixing that holiday house. So you work in layers, not just by page numbers. And once you’ve worked your way through those layers, bingo. You’re done.How does it feel?I enjoy editing. It’s a pleasure, not a chore. But what you’re doing evolves. Early on, editing involves quite a lot of fresh writing. This chapter just doesn’t really work and you end up giving it a major rewrite. Later on, you are definitely editing – not writing, but manipulating plenty of text. And then you get a point where whole pages go by without you really touching them. Or maybe trying out a change here, reversing it, then maybe reversing again. And at that, you’re done. There’s a kind of sweet pain in realising it, though. Your book now is the best it’s ever been. It’s the first time you’ve looked at your text and not thought ouch.That’s it from me. My own apple trees are coming into blossom, except the big monster tree which always blooms late and then produces huge green fruit well into October.Til soon.Harry

I had a silly online exchange with my brother just now, on the topic of names. We currently have dealings with a firm of solicitors called Penman and something, and I said that Penman and Drudge had a good Dickensian ring to it. (Note to Americans: British solicitor are attorneys and soliciting is not a crime. Or rather, soliciting is a crime, but solicitors don’t usually get involved in soliciting.)While on that topic, we admired the names of some real firms:Heidrick & Struggles (a recruitment firm)Reeves & Pain (a bunch of funeral directors in Oxford)Skadden Arps Slate Meagher & Flom (US lawyers)And a few not so real ones: Dewey, Cheetham and Howe, a US partner to the well-known London firm of Sue, Grabbit and Runne. Oh heck, and if we’re on this topic, I have to tell you that – cross my heart and hope to die – I was at school with a boy called Robin Banks. He was, as it happens, perfectly nice and entirely honest, but an itsy-bitsy part of me does hope that he’s doing 20 years in maximum security.There’s a pleasure in such thoughts, no? It’s fun messing about with things like this and, of course, authors used to mess about all the time. Henry Fielding’s The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling famously let his names tell you about the characters. There was the excellent Squire Allworthy, the villainous Reverend Thwackum, the selfish Honour Blackmore, the dilettante Mr Nightingale and so on.Of those names, the most often quoted examples are the Thwackum / Allworthy pair. The purpose of those names is so loud it shouts.But even in Fielding, the approach to naming is generally a little more subtle than the Thwackum example suggests. There actually are people called Nightingale, and nightingales are best known for their particularly melodious birdsong, not for their moneyed life in high society London.Likewise, the name Tom Jones itself is on the one hand a nice way to indicate a sturdy man-of-the-people type, a healthy everyman, but the name is also one of the most common in the UK. It’s hard to argue that the name choice is artificial when it’s also a stunningly common one.These days, the directness of the Thwackum / Allworthy approach seems too much. It’s a bit hard to articulate why. Yes, OK, it feels very artificial to call a character Allworthy – but who are we kidding? All of fiction is completely artificial. The whole damn thing is made up. Every other aspect of character – looks, clothes, speech mannerisms, backstory – is invented for a particular purpose. Why not names too?I guess that the real answer is that names that are very on-the-nose (like Thwackum) have a flattening effect. They shout about one aspect of character and that invites the reader – and perhaps the author – to neglect the rest. Since rounded characters are THE essential tool for getting readers engaged in a book, names that kill the character are to be avoided.Which leaves authors – you and me – in a little bit of a bind. On the one hand, we feel drawn to Fielding-style names. Not the grosser end of the scale, but the Mr Nightingale / Sophia Western end. On the other hand, we feel we should avoid it. We’re too modern, too sophisticated for those kind of naming games.But, but, but …Perhaps there’s a middle way here. Some suggestions:I think it matters that you are settled with a name. If a name feels wrong, then change it. (And, for because Find / Replace All is a useful tool, I try to use names that I can easily find with a word search. So ‘Ed’ would not be a name I’d use unless I was a million per cent confident that I wasn’t going to change it. ‘Edwina’ on the other hand would do fine.Some demographic matching does make sense and lend colour. One of the series characters in my Fiona books is her boss, Dennis Jackson. He’s much older than her, much bigger, much more solid. His name reflects his age. (How many twenty-something Dennises do you know?) It’s also a Wales-appropriate name, without shouting Welshness at you. The name rounds out and thickens the character. It’s a decent vessel for the man himself.You certainly can play a little. At one point in the first book, Fiona ‘Fi’ Griffiths explains to her beau that her name is iffy. Her first name is an ‘if’ in reverse, and there are two more ifs buried in her surname. That iffiness somehow suits her vocation (detective, solver of logic puzzles) but also her nature – provisional, ungrounded. The iffiness in her name is so hidden, so closed to the reader, that it doesn’t shout at you the way ‘Thwackum’ does. The fact that Fiona Griffiths finds that stuff in her name tells you more about her than the name itself.A former colleague, Sarah, suggested that, when you think about characters, you think about their story purpose. Her debut novel (one which JW helped find an agent for) was about a girl who had never been outside. That was the title of the book: Outside. One of the key characters was called Willow – a real, contemporary name, but also willow tree, branches, birdsong, light. It’s that kind of lightly associative touch which can enrich a book without toppling it into artifice.I will say that I’m bad at names. I often don’t settle on important names until I have a complete draft. (I’ve switched genders of key characters too. That can make a really useful difference at times.) But my best names end up feeling like a pair of really comfortable shoes. There’s a quality of fit that just works. Whether that fit is just for me or whether it extends to readers too, I can’t quite say. But your comfort becomes their comfort. A character you feel comfortable with will end up being one you write better and more richly.Go back to the name of that law firm: Skadden Arps Slate Meagher and Flom. That’s a genuine name. It’s not obviously comic, the way ‘Reeves and Pain’ is comic. But – it’s musical, it’s strange, it’s somehow suggestive without those suggestions ever becoming too clear, too specific. It’s that kind of name that wants to float down on to your page – not with every new name, but with some of the key ones.Oh yes, and I can’t finish this email without telling you this. Psychologists do in fact believe there’s evidence to suggest that your name can (very slightly) affect your choice of career. So people called Denise are very slightly more likely to become dentists, for example. The article that inspired this search for ‘nominative determinism’? It was a piece on incontinence in the Journal of Urology. The authors of that magnificent piece? AJ Splatt and D Weedon.Til soon.HarryPS: Did I mention that we have rebooted our Festival of Writing? I did not. But we have and you can learn all about it here. It’s miles more affordable than before and I hope you come.PPS: Last week’s email was about the failures of agents and, as ever, the topic brought forth a torrent of replies. But you do know you don’t need an agent, right? When I sold the Fiona Griffiths series into the US, I had a superb literary agent and got one of the top editors and publishers in the business. But the books failed COMPLETELY. I bought back the rights and self-published them. A couple of years later, and with very little effort, I was making $100K a year.I’m not saying that’s standard and it’s certainly not automatic. But it is possible. If you want to know the secrets of self-publishing then Debbie Young’s course, here, is outstanding. It’s a very, very expert guide to the art of self-pub, and it’ll save you years of fooling around and making mistakes. Go take a look.

Housekeeping: We’ve just migrated our site from one webhost to another. We know that the site is still being a bit temperamental and are ironing out any issues now. I’m told that the new site will be much better behaved than the old one …-Every now and then I get an email from one of you lovely people that sends me into a GRUMP.It’s pretty rare that you yourselves are the cause of the grump. On the whole, it’s some instance of malpractice by the people who are meant to be there to support and further your career. On this occasion, the story is this:THE SET UPAn author – called, I swear it, Penelope Potts – wrote a novel. It was a good novel (even better after a Jericho Writers manuscript assessment) and when the good Miss Potts sent her book to agents, an agent flung his hat into the air and cried out loud: I would like to represent you, oh Potty, my Pottifer.Despite his hat-flinging, the agent seemed well-qualified. Though he hadn’t been an agent for long, his website looked professional and he’d had an excellent career in publishing.INCITING INCIDENTAt this point, our excellent Potter was shortlisted or highly recommended in a couple of major awards. Other agents sniffed around. One offered representation.Twist or stick? Stay loyal or jump?It sounds like a dilemma, but it truly wasn’t. Young Penny Potts is nothing if not loyal and true, so (sternly, sternly) she raised a white-gloved hand and told the second agent that she was taken.DEVELOPMENTS: THE DIFFICULT MIDDLEThe first agent told Penny that he was sending her book out to publishers large and small across the land. He told her that every avenue was being pursued, every stone was being turned.Penny was puzzled at the idea that publishers were to be found beneath stones, but she trusted her expert. What did she know of these things, after all?Weeks went by, and months. In an email to Jericho, she lamented, ‘nothing seemed to happen. My agent kept telling me I should be patient, and I understood that. But he seemed vague about the companies he was submitting to and very reluctant to give me much information. When I asked directly for names, he refused, saying he couldn’t disclose information about contacts! I started to realise that we had never had a proper conversation about my novel, and a horrible suspicion grew that he might not even have read the whole book.’CRISIS!Depending on what genre you favour:Potts the Terrible stole into her agent’s office in the dead of night, spread a skin-permeable neurotoxin on his favourite executive fiddle-toy, then flew off to spend a long weekend in Lisbon – and returned to hear of her agent’s sudden and horrible death.Pantifa Potiana commanded her stable of dragons to burn and then eat her agent, which they did, albeit unfortunately eating a rather meek and likeable intern by way of digestif.Penny Potts simply gave her agent 60 days’ notice under the terms of their contract and terminated their relationship.And, whichever story you prefer to tell, she ditched one agent and secured the services of the next. At the same time, she did a major rewrite of her novel and felt it was much improved.But – the new agent said she couldn’t send the novel out to editors without knowing where it had already been submitted. The old agent wouldn’t even answer Penny’s email asking which editors had seen the manuscript.And, in consequence, Penny now has an agent, a viable book – and nowhere to send it.RESOLUTIONI can’t tell you what the resolution is, because I don’t know. That wheel is still in spin, the story still in progress.But here are some comments:Agents, even apparently reputable ones, and even ones at major agencies, can be AWFUL. They aren’t usually, but they can be. There aren’t meaningfully any professional standards that they have to adhere to and, even in bigger agencies, supervision of agents can be weak.You have an absolute right to know where your book is being submitted. I mean, that’s obvious and unarguable no matter what, but it’s also a question of law. Anyone who holds data on you needs to tell you what they hold. That’s certainly the law in the UK and Europe. I don’t actually know-know that that’s the case in North America, but I’d be astonished if it weren’t. So don’t ask meekly to know who’s seen your book. Ask with force. If the agency is a multi-person agency and your agent doesn’t respond to your question, then write direct to the CEO. You’re in the right. They have to tell you.Be willing to lie. I’ll bet a horse to a farthing that the first agent hadn’t properly read the book and hadn’t submitted it to anyone. Don’t allow that idiot’s idiocy to disrupt your career. If that means just not telling agent #2 about agent #1, then don’t. It’s your career, your book, your life. And, honestly, I think agent #2 should be a bit more assertive too. Here’s a fact: telephones exist. Agent #2 should just call agent #1 and say, “Did you submit that novel to anyone and if so where?” These stories often have a lot of Victorian decorum about them – oh, I couldn’t possibly send to X, if I’m not certain about the activities of Y. But the hell with decorum. What do you want? What helps your career? Actually poisoning agents is probably a bad idea. Ditto, anything that involves having them eaten by dragons. But beyond that, just look after your own interests. Everyone else looks after theirs.There aren’t any very good outside bodies to support you, but make use of what there is. The Association of Authors Agents (in the UK) or the Association of American Literary agents in the US might send a mild rebuke to anyone behaving in the way described in this email. That rebuke won’t actually have any meaningful consequences, but nevertheless the threat of it might initiate some action.And one last comment, an important one.It’s not you, it’s them.You’re not stupid. You didn’t make idiot choices. There weren’t checks you could sensibly have made beforehand. These things just happen and some agents are desperately unprofessional.I do think that you should establish from the outset that agents will share the names of editors & publishers to whom that they submit your work. They should also share responses (perhaps not the full text, but the gist.) Those promises can’t in practice be cashed in anywhere – but you’d hope that an explicit upfront commitment does something to remind the agent about whose interests they are meant to serve.And – hmm.I entitled this email ‘short, fat and grumpy’ because I thought that such a simple story would end up taking 500 words, no more. But short is not my skillset, is it? A haiku-writer I amn’t.Til soon.HarryIf you want to reply, please please please please please please please can you send your reply by dragon. I’d absolutely love to see one.PPS: I don’t want either a horse or a farthing. It wouldn’t be much of a bet.

FolksThere are weeks when everything flows, when the sun shines, when the traffic lights turn green on command, and the toast always falls butter-side up.And – there are weeks of darkness, weeks of doom. Weeks when everything that could possibly go wrong does, and in exotically complicated ways.I’ve had a week more like the second sort than the first, so I have decided to CHEAT you. You are used to a good old slab of a Friday email. A wodge of text. It might not be interesting, it might not be useful, but by heaven there are plenty of words there. Yadda, yadda, yadda. Print the damn things off and you could use them to light a fire, or build a shelter, or form into a brick solid enough to fell an attacker.This email, by contrast, is a skinny little thing. A waif of the catwalk. A bones-sticking-out rescue pup. It has no content. No meat. No value. No heft.But …Ah, I’m not really going to let you down. So instead of a thousand words of blah, here’s a video instead.The video is on HOW TO WRITE GOOD PROSE. It’s by me. It’s 45 minutes long. And it tells you exactly how to write commercially acceptable prose. Follow the rules that I give you, and no agent will reject your book for any inability to put a sentence together.The video comes from our HOW TO WRITE video course that’s free to premium members. The course has 15 core modules altogether, and three of them deal with prose. This first video is about the basics. The next is about dealing with cliché. And the third has to do with writing great and magical prose (something that’s useful for any writer, but essential if you want to tickle the palates of more literary writers.)So this week – I give you a video. I’m hoping that normal service will resume next week.Til soonHarry

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, good night. Wherever you are and whenever you get this, happy New Year – and I hope it’s going to be a cracking good one for us all.Just one question in today’s email.Why?Let’s just say you achieve your dream. You write a book. You get it published (or you publish it yourself). And – the gold at the end of the rainbow, the fairy on your Christmas tree – is simply this: that you get readers.Think for a moment how rare that achievement is. I mean: in the whole of your life ever, have you had the chance to talk at someone non-stop for four or five hours? And done so with that person’s freely given consent?Of course, you haven’t. I haven’t. But I have written a lot of books and I have had a lot of readers and I have – often, often, often – been granted the opportunity to dominate someone’s attention for hours and hours.And, sure, when you watch a film on TV, that film earns your attention for a couple of hours. A big TV series may hold your attention for much more, in aggregate. But those things – films, TV shows – are made by dozens, and probably hundreds, of different hands. A novel is more intensely personal. It’s like a powerline connecting your brain to the reader’s. There’s not a word or a comma in the book that you yourself haven’t chosen.How rare that is! How precious!One thought that arises immediately is you need to justify your remarkable status. If someone is disposed to grant you all that time, you have to honour their decision. That means showing gratitude. Respect. Appreciation.As an author, you can’t show those things in a normal way – you can’t say thanks, or send flowers – so you have to show those things in an authorial way: by putting the reader’s interests first, always.Does that sentence have two surplus words? Kill the words.Is that joke funny enough? If not, improve it or delete it.Is that scene intense enough? Is that page of flashback needed? Does that character feel lifelike? Again and again, you need to be asking questions whose purpose is to deliver the most perfect reading experience you can.It’s only natural, when you’ve been working a long time, to debate the necessity of shaving two words from what is essentially a perfectly functional sentence. How much will that act of love and duty actually improve things? The only realistic answer: terribly little.But …You. The reader. Five hours in their head.That’s such a unique and precious relationship, you need to add every terribly little drop of goodness you can. Collect up a lot of such drops, and your manuscript will visibly improve. You’ll feel it. Your reader will too.But I haven’t yet got to the purpose of this email. The WHY.So let’s say that a reader allows you five hours in which your voice, alone, will occupy their head and their thoughts.You’ve honoured that permission by making your manuscript the very best you can make it. You’ve shaved those words, you’ve cut those jokes.But, in the end, why? What are you going to do with that time? What do you want from it?It’s OK to say that you want money. That’s a valid answer, or part of one anyway.If you self-publish an e-book priced at $4.99, your time in someone’s head will be worth $3.50. If you publish traditionally, your per-book income will be a lot less than that, but still not nothing. If you work hard, it’s fair to be paid.So, yes, in part, the answer to that question of why has to do with getting paid. Nowt wrong with that.But still: why?I know you’re a serious sort. If getting paid was all you wanted, you’d find better ways of doing it than writing books. So if you tell me, “Sir, I want to earn an honest crust from my books and that is all,” then I’d say, “Pshaw!”I’d say, “Piffle!”I’d say – to your face and in public hearing – “Flapdoodle, hogwash, bunkum, poppycock and every sort of wallop you can think of, including plaice, haddock, eel and cod.”You want to show off a bit? That’s OK.You want appreciation? Why not. Most readers won’t write to tell you that they’ve enjoyed a book, but some will and silent appreciation is valuable too. Again, that’s a perfectly good reason for writing.But don’t you also want to put your finger on someone’s soul and change it, just an itsy little bit? Don’t you want your reader to rise from reading your most excellent book a slightly altered person?I think you do. I think you should.So: how do you want to alter that person?Over the Christmas holiday, I watched a bit of telly. I’m fond of an action movie now and again, but I do notice that plenty of them just make me feel slightly icky afterwards. A good guy has some reason to go after bad guys. He kills lots of them. Then there’s a one-to-one shootout with the top bad guy himself. The hero wins. He kisses the girl. End of movie.But very often, it all just feels like violence. Violent people chasing around after violent people. My soul feels a bit nastier, a bit dirtier, for the experience. The world’s got a little bit worse, not a little bit better.It doesn’t have to be like that and it’s not about the violence. Over the Christmas break, I watched The English, a non-standard Western, starring the predictably good Emily Blunt and the quite excellent Chaske Spencer.The series is violent. Almost too violent for me – I almost stopped watching.But –The series was rich in humanity and love for its characters. I ended up moved and uplifted. I felt, ever so slightly, like a better human being than I’d been before watching.And isn’t that the effect you want too? Isn’t that, in fact, close to being the very centre of why you write?I think it is for me. I think it should be for you. For all of us.We get five hours, alone, in someone’s head. Let’s use that time for good.Til soon.Harry PS: Though, you know what, the Wild West genuinely was pretty wild. In Victorian England, the homicide rate only once rose above 2 per 100,000 people. Mostly, the rate hovered at around 1.5, before dropping even further in the last two years of the century. In mid-nineteenth century California, by contrast, homicide rates averaged maybe 65 per 100,000 and, in Los Angeles, were closer to 200. So, yup, at least there’s some real historical veracity behind the killing. Jack the Ripper’s London was a whole lot safer. PPS: We sent out an email earlier this week telling y’all about the spring release of our Ultimate Novel Writing Course. The response was enormous. We’ve had (in total, including over Christmas) well over 500 prospectus downloads and we’ve already had an excellent number of strong applications. So – whoop-de-boop. This is a really excellent course. We keep tweaking it to make it better. The aim, quite simply, is to help you write and edit a novel in a year. We’ll also teach you the ropes on publishing and author-led marketing. A huge proportion of past students have had full manuscript requests from agents following the course. We hope it’ll do the same for you. More details here. And, yes, places are limited, so neither dilly nor dally. PPPS: Hmm. The first email I send out in January normally has a New Year’s resolution up and at em quality to it. Not quite sure that this one passes muster. But yes: up and at em. Action this day. Let’s DO this thing.

Last week\'s email was a very positive one, and I\'d like to sign off for Christmas now on an equally hopeful note. (In true literary spirit, I\'m currently laden in bed with the flu in the manner of a little Dickensian child. So, a heavily assisted email today, and a shorter one.) It would be remiss for me not to mention what an eventful year it\'s been at Jericho Writers. We brought back our in-person Festival of Writing. We met loads of promising new writers on our courses. We introduced a new, more accessible membership structure and launched a brand-new Townhouse. So many of you have passed through our doors now, and we hope your writing is all the better for it. More importantly, it\'s been a fantastic year for you lot. We\'ve had the pleasure of meeting writers with Big 5 deals; self-pubbers making a name for themselves; playwrights; poets; experts changing the non-fic game. Our inboxes have been flooded with success stories. And we love hearing from you - you\'re the reason we do all of this, after all. In keeping with our Dickens references, here are three ghosts of newsletters past: The spy in your novelPears, walnuts, blue cheeseThe curse of coolAnd one for when, like me, you\'re not feeling too fresh and need to rest: A little rain. You\'re always a writer, friend.Peruse at your leisure - but that\'s all for now. Keep plodding on. And happy holidays. Til January, Harry

Every few years, a British authors’ outfit, the ALCS, commissions a survey. And every few years, the ALCS reports the results in doom-laden tones.The results this year (to quote Joanne Harris and the boss of the Society of Authors, a body that represents authors) are once again dire:“When the ALCS first ran its survey of author incomes in 2006 it found that the median self-employed income of a full-time author was £12,330. In 2022 – a year in which multiple publishers have posted record profits while freelancers in all professions are still reeling from the impact of Covid-19, Brexit and rising living costs – the median full-time income has fallen to £7,000. That’s a drop of more than 60% when accounting for inflation.”She also says:“I have made a career out of being an author. It has been a great privilege to be able to do that. But I am deeply saddened that the job I love has become inaccessible and unsustainable for others – and increasingly ruled by luck …We arrive at what we imagined would be the creative heart of an industry, but it turns out to be a room full of slot machines. Some of us are lucky enough to feed the right slot at the right time and hit jackpots of varying sizes. Others bring their own luck to the room – they can afford to feed the slots regardless of what they get in return. But what about everyone else? Who can honestly afford to stay?”You won’t hear me arguing about the role of luck. Indeed, my last email, about the literary multiverse, talked about exactly that. It argued that book sales themselves are a hopelessly unreliable indicator of real quality. There are just too many other factors in play.But do we have to be all doom-mongery about this?Let’s start with the survey itself. These ALCS surveys are very long and very boring. I imagine that the completion rate is very low. There are 60 questions on the form and, personally, I’d want to scream after the first dozen or so. The form is also extremely data-hungry. It asks you, for example, about royalty rates on every major book format. Really, to fill out the form, you’d need to do it with a file of earnings and royalty statements beside you as you did it.News of the survey is thought to reach around 60,000 authors, but there’s no restriction on who can fill it in. If the form reached your hands, and you had made any money at all from publishing, you’d be welcome to fill it in and return it. In total, the study got about 2400 responses, or 4% of the pool they were trying to survey.Now one point is obvious: if you base your conclusions on a self-selecting 4% of a group, you have really no way to know if the results are even vaguely meaningful. Why should they be?In short: I don’t believe the results of this survey. I don’t even disbelieve them. I just don’t think there’s any reason to think that the results are well-defined to start with, or consistent from survey to survey.And as for the core message of the survey – roughly: “It’s getting ever harder to make a living from writing, and that’s a Really Bad Thing” – I’d have ask: is it?I mean, let’s even say, on the basis of terribly little evidence, that it’s getting harder to make money from writing. So what? Absolutely none of us thought, “I really want to be a writer, because I love Ferraris so much, and I bet you make loads of money as an author.”The opposite. Most professional authors – you know: ones with Big 5 contracts, and books in the front of bookstores, and even ones who feature on bestseller lists – most of those guys run a regular job alongside the writing. What’s wrong with that? That’s a nicely balanced life, no?For nearly all of us, writing is a passion, for which it’s possible to get paid. Hooray for that.There’s also something a bit odd in this obsession with publishers. The Society of Authors and bodies like it all over the world were set up to deal with an Author vs Publisher world. That’s what they know. That’s what their audience knows.But – self-publishing.We have good reason to believe that there are more self-published authors at every level of income than there are traditionally published ones. There are more indie authors earning $1,000,000 from their work than there are trad-published ones. There are more indie authors earning $100,000. There are more indie authors earning $10,000.For sure, indie authors have their grumbles (mostly to do with the random, aggressive, non-communicativeness of Amazon), but – they make money.Indeed, as I see it:It’s never been easier to become a professional author There have never been more routes to publication It’s never been more possible to write niche books (Viking Romance, Alien Invasion, LGBT / Sci FI) and locate an audience Until ebooks and KDP came along, it was impossible to get 70% royalties on book sales. Now it’s routine. You can get them yourself by clicking a button. There have never been more powerful tools for author-led marketing There has never been a greater diversity of publishers There have never been more high quality publishers who don’t require you to have a literary agent firstMost of those bullet points are just factually true, and they’re never mentioned in those ALCS type surveys.So, yeah, if you want: doom doom doom. Everything’s bad. We should all cry or – better still – blame someone for the mess.My preference: this is a great, great world for authors. It’s full of commercial AND creative possibility. For sure, most of us will never make a ton of money from writing, but that’s been true since Dickens first picked up a pen. It’ll be true long into the future too.But we love it. And we’re happy doing it. And we’re going to go right on.

Let’s just say that you’ve been writing for a while. You’re serious. You’ve taken a course or two. You’ve probably had at least one manuscript assessment, and maybe more than one. What’s more, you’ve got your stuff out to literary agents. Not timidly, but properly. You approached at least 10-12 agents, and you chose those dozen with some care. You wrote a decent query letter. You polished the first chunk of your manuscript until you could see your face in it. And? Agents liked it. You got some full manuscript requests. Yay – You went crazy and drank half a glass of white wine before eight o’clock. (You devil!) Then – Some agents just never got back to you, even though they’d asked for the whole damn manuscript and even though you carefully nudged some 6-8 weeks later. And a couple of agents maybe did get back to you, with what could be described as positive, but not really positive feedback. You heard things like this: \"I loved the concept and your writing, but didn\'t feel quite engaged enough to want to offer representation. Another agent may feel differently.\" And look. At this point, we need to say, WELL DONE. Most writers don’t get to even this point. You only get as far as this if your work has some serious credibility. Agents are a very, very tough bunch and if you’ve almost persuaded them, you’ve already done very well indeed. But you don’t want praise. You want to get published. So what are you meant to do now? Spend MORE money? Another course, another manuscript assessment? If you’d done little or none of that already, you would be nuts not to make the necessary investment at this point. (If agents are flirting with you before you’ve had professional feedback on your work, they’ll be dancing with you once you have.) But suppose you’ve done all that. Partly, you just don’t want to spend more money, but also you feel (probably rightly) that another spin on that merry-go-round won’t alter the final outcome. So what, realistically, are your options? This is a hard question and I don’t have an easy answer. But here are some of your choices:1. Spend more money If you’ve already done one or more courses and had one or more manuscript assessments, then personally I wouldn’t recommend this route. You buy a manuscript assessment because you want to move the needle on quality. For me, one manuscript assessment is, almost always, an excellent investment. Assuming you are even vaguely rational about using advice, your skills will develop and your manuscript will improve. The same can often be said for a second assessment of the same book. But a third assessment? A fourth? I don’t think so. For me, that’s an investment too far. (For most authors, most of the time. There are always exceptions. A clear exception would be if the feedback from agents gives you a clear editorial pathway to follow.)2. Approach more agents Well, maybe. Personally, I think that for a standard novel – something mainstream and in principle easy to place – you shouldn’t need to go to more than a dozen agents. If you try a sensibly chosen dozen and they say no, then you should only persist if you have strong evidence that you only missed by a whisker. (Let’s say two or three agents were effusive, but passed on the manuscript because it was too similar to things they already had, for example.) For me, the idea of just banging on 40 or 50 doors doesn’t seem right. Not fair to the agents, and not really a sensible strategy for you either. Agents are easier to persuade than publishers, so if it’s that hard to get an agent, is it really likely that you’ll end up with a publishing deal? The answer is no.3. Make direct approaches to digital-first publishers I like this idea, especially if your book is the right sort. Agents and publishers never tell you this, but increasingly the traditional industry is looking at a book to see if it’s more of an ebook or more of a print book. The more mass market / genre-based a book is, the more likely it is to sell well via ebook and not necessarily so well in print. The kind of books I’m talking about? Horror. Many thrillers. Lots of crime novels. Most SF, especially space opera. Urban fantasy. Romance and the less literary end of women’s fiction. All those genres (and more) sell largely as e-books. That’s not territory that the Big 5 have ever done well in. Some of the areas on that list (hello, space opera, or volume romance) are more than 80% self-pub or digital-first. The trad industry still puts out this idea that ebooks have peaked at a relatively low 20% share of all books. And that’s true – if you’re only talking about the traditional industry. But there’s a whole world beyond trad. There is a host of digital-first publishers, there’s all of self-publishing. Those things combined are far larger than even Penguin Random House. It’s a whole continent that the regular books-media simply ignores. In short, you need to think where your book most happily lives. Perhaps your manuscript just doesn’t feel print-booky – perhaps it’s not something you’d find on the front tables at Barnes & Noble or Waterstones. That’s not a good/bad judgement. It’s just a judgement about where your manuscript is most likely to sell. If the answer is “predominantly on Amazon”, traditional publishing is not likely to be your answer. Digital-first publishing is an excellent answer. So is self-publishing (so long as you do it properly.) If your best route to market is self-pub or digital-first, you are best advised to skip agents altogether. The reason you’re getting that “almost but not quite” message from agents is that they like the book (ie: you can write) but they can’t see it as a Big 5 book. In which case, don’t pursue that route. Don’t spend more time or energy chasing it. Just submit direct to some digital-first outfits. Or self-publish. That way lies joy – and control – and maybe sales.4. Question your elevator pitch / write another book Why should anyone in the world read your book? What’s the one sentence that makes a potential reader exclaim, “Ooh, sounds interesting, tell me more”? That’s such a central question and you have to have an answer. If your basic pitch isn’t strong enough, your book won’t get picked up by agents. It won’t get picked up by the industry. Even if you skip all that by self-publishing, your book will still struggle to sell because you can’t put a compelling reason to buy in front of your target reader. And (sorry) but it’s common for good writers to write a competent first book that lacks a powerful elevator pitch. And that’s OK. In effect, your first manuscript is, it turns out, a learning project. It’s where you learn the tools of the trade, the processes, the tempo. If you write a competent first project that interests agents, but fizzles out for want of sufficient commercial grab, please throw it away. Come up with an idea that blows your brain – then deliver that idea, using all the craft you’ve acquired along the way. That’s not failure. That’s a really intelligent way to navigate towards success. I can’t even count the number of people who have got their second or third novel published in this way. Many of them were utterly passionate about their first novel, their baby. They were disconsolate when it wasn’t picked up. They questioned their dream of authorship. And then, when the right book was eventually published, they admitted that the first one just hadn’t been ready and never would have been, no matter how many manuscript assessments had been thrown at it. *** I like #3 and #4 as options on this list. I like #1 and #2 the least. But every book and every author is different.If you have this problem, then figure out the solution that works best for you. And GOOD LUCK!

Last week’s ‘flat-pack’ email was, on the face of it, a right old mess.Most of my emails (including this one) take the form of short articles, the kind you might read in a newspaper. They start with a thought, develop it, and end up with some kind of conclusion. Nearly always, I try to make sure that the emails are going to be useful.And last week? Well, the whole thing was a jumble.There was no visible sequence. Yes, there was some actual advice in there (Roughly: “50,000 words doesn’t make a novel” and “think of Nanowrimo as a way to establish strong writing habits.”) But there was also a lot of apparent nonsense – an anecdote about a friend tempted to give her publisher the 100,000 words they’d requested, but ‘haven’t had time to get them in the right order.’ A couple of bits of housekeeping. Some misdirection nonsense about flat-pack parts missing the right sort of bolt. And so on.Now the crisp logic of Normal Life says that such an email ought to be a failure. Why would people want to pick through a mess when they could have a nice straightforward A to Z type read like everything else in the world?On the other hand: we’re creatives, right? If we adhered closely to the crisp logic of Normal Life, we wouldn’t be writing books or reading these emails in the first place. There’s something about the subversive which appeals to us. Last week’s email generated more than one reply suggesting that I write a whole novel in a kind of flat-pack form. (My reply? Yep, honestly, I’d love to.)But flat-pack novels? There aren’t so many of those, are there? I think I’ve read only two genuinely flat-pack novels – The Unfortunates by BS Johnson, and Dictionary of the Khazars by Milorad Pavic. The first of those is literally a book in a box. There are 27 chapters in total, each one separately bound. One of the chapters is marked as being the first, another one is marked as the last. Apart from those two, you can read the chapters in any order you fancy. The thing is a meditation on friendship, loss, football and (I guess) the randomly associative nature of the human brain.The second book is presented dictionary-style with three mini-encyclopaedias (one Jewish, one Christian, one Islamic) presenting information on a people called the Khazars over various different time periods.Neither book has a plot. I personally didn’t finish either book, nor was I especially engaged by either.I don’t think the BS Johnson book ever sold much. The Khazars book was certainly fashionable but I seriously doubt that most people actually read it.Oh yes: and if your covering letter to a literary agent tells them that your work is experimental, it has already moved 85% of the way to the dustbin. First bit of actionable advice for this email: please don’t tell an agent that your novel is experimental, even if it is.Maybe experiments are only for emails to creatives. Maybe for everything else we just need to stick to existing templates.And look – second piece of actionable advice – mostly the answer to that is just a YES. Stick to the formula. The formula for writing a good book already offers tons of flexibility. It’s not like writing a good book is easy. The recipe is not exactly easy to follow.Especially if you’re not yet published, I’d urge you to get a regular novel right and published, before you start to mess around with the template.But …If you do want to rough fiction up, then please do. Examples:Twilight. Teen girl meets handsome boy? Yawn. Teen girl meets handsome vampire? An utterly different proposition. A tedious me-too book has just become something you want to read. (Or did, before vampires were everywhere.) Fingersmith. The genteel world of Victorian-era historical fiction is ripped apart by this brilliant book with its central lesbian love story and its mad, convoluted crime plot. Utterly modern in some ways, the book also seemed more true to Victorian England than most actually Victorian books. The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle. An Agatha Christie country-house style murder? Boring. Or rather: if you wanted that, why wouldn’t you read Agatha Christie and her contemporaries? But if you take the exact same concept and have one person trotting through seven different incarnations on the exact same day, you have a real beauty of a crime puzzle: like a Sudoku puzzle played in three dimensions Maynard and Jennica. A brilliant novel – a debut and also (it looks like) Delson’s last novel. The book tells a boy-meets-girl story (yawn) but does so via dozens and dozens of different voices. Friends and relations and casual acquaintances of the pair offer their insights on different bits of the narrative as it progresses. It’s a technically virtuoso performance; I’ve still never read anything quite like itThese books didn’t play by the rules. Whatever people thought Victorian historical fiction was all about, Fingersmith did something different. As a matter of fact, the natural market for Fingersmith was quite likely not with people who mostly liked historical fiction. If you generally like corsets and “Good heavens, Mrs Fortescue” type fiction, then Sarah Waters’ take on all that was likely to make you drop your teaspoon in horror.But – here’s the kicker – all these books totally, 100%, completely play by the rules that matter.You read them from beginning to end. Although authors may mess around with timelines, the reading experience is one of continuous, structured narrative. There are Big Story Questions that get asked and answered. The outcome of the whole story remains in flux at all points.In short: the only experiments you can get away with are experiments that nevertheless pay close and careful homage to the basic template of successful story. If you live within that template, then experimentation is nothing but a joy and a delight.And last week’s email?Well, honestly, it looked like a random assembly, but it was more thoughtfully designed than that. Yes, it had a playfully digressive quality – with you, the reader, very much in on the game – but it was also carefully structured. Very roughly that email ran like this:Nanowrimo is all about writing a 50,000 word novel But novels aren’t 50,000 words long and writing that much text at speed is only going to produce rubbish Then again, a thuggish “just do it” approach is not a bad way to smash bad writing habits and reinforce good ones So maybe Nanowrimo has a point, so long as you understand what it can and can’t achieve.If the email had genuinely just been a random spillage of facts and thoughts, I think you’d have rejected it. It’s the sense of purpose threaded through the random spillage that kept you (I hope) thinking that you’d get something by reading on. And it was the random spillage that (I hope) kept you entertained en route.So experiment, yes please.But stick to the template.

This week’s email is inspired by a 3,000 word rant, written by author and podcaster Meghan Daum on Substack. The piece was entitled “Who Killed Creative Writing” and among other things, it says this: “In the past couple of years, I’ve come to see the MFA in writing as the educational equivalent of a draft dodge. If the annual Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) conference is any indication, getting an MFA in writing has little to do with actual writing and nearly everything to do with finding a place in a social clique. This clique, which convenes mostly online, seems less interested in the values or dynamics of any particular program … than in something called literary citizenship, a term I didn’t hear until probably 2017. Separate from caring about literature, literary citizenship implies adherence to an unspoken moral code, one that pays lip service to equity and inclusion while still making gossip and exclusivity the main event … Over the past five or six years, the cult of literary citizenship has thrown me into a merciless spiral of revisionist history. I see who shows up to AWP, who wins prizes and judges them, who edits literary journals, who gets tenure-track teaching jobs and fellowships and speaking tours, and I think these are some of the most mediocre people I’m likely to ever encounter. I think these are people who wanted to take on the trappings of university life but couldn’t cut it in real academic programs. I think these are people who were too lazy to go to law school, too insecure to seek mentors on their own, too entitled to just get regular jobs and write at nighttime and on weekends if it really meant so goddamn much to them. Real writers write no matter what.  Now that’s harsh, of course. Too harsh. Plenty of fine writers teach on university creative writing programs. Plenty of fine writers travel through them too. And, when she’s not in ranty-mode, I’ll bet Meghan D would acknowledge that too. But she has a point, and it’s a relief for someone to make that point loudly and publicly. To put that point in my language, not someone else’s, is that there are three overlapping groups of people. One group comprises:People who teach on university literary programmes People who attend those programmes People who run or write for literary journals Literary agents Editors and other publishing types Marketers, publicists, events organisers and all that Writers who are highly involved in that milieu, with all its events and gossip and interconnectionsA second group comprises:WritersA third group – the biggest – comprises:ReadersOf these three groups, only two, the last two, really matter. Of these three groups, only one, the first one, makes a lot of noise. Indeed, if you wanted to develop a data-based method of discovering whether somebody was or was not a member of group #1, the easiest technique would involve mining Twitter accounts. It’s not impossible to be a member of the first group without an active Twitter account, but it’s certainly rare. If you wanted a more old-school method of crunching data, you’d simply count the number of mostly-literary parties a person was invited to over the course of a year, and figure out your groups that way. The fact is, however, most professional writers don’t live much in group #1. I mean, sure, if you have a book out with a Big 5 firm, and that firm puts some wellie behind your book, then you’ll end up with a bit of noise around you during launch. (And I do mean a bit of noise – quite likely less than you expect or want.) But the real group #1-ers don’t swim temporarily in their noisy pond. They live there. They enjoy it. It’s a huge part of their motivation for working in a career that has worse hours / pay / dependability than most. And almost certainly, you don’t live in that pond. Yes, this mailing list attracts a fringe of agents and publishing types, but they’re the rare exception. The vast majority of you just write. You want to get published, or you intend to self-publish. But either way, once you’ve written one book, you’ll move onto the next one. You probably live too far from London or New York to go to many parties. And quite likely you wouldn’t really enjoy them much if you went. Also: you probably do have a regular job. You probably do write in evenings and weekends, on trains and in coffee shops, or squeezed around childcare and all the compromises of ordinary life. Some authors do of course live in Group #1 and their careers, in all honesty, do almost certainly benefit. (I remember talking with an agent once about a major recent prize winner. I said that I thought her book wasn’t especially good, and he agreed. But he commented, ‘She really knows how to play that literary game.’ She was a group #1-er through and through.) But that’s not you. It’s not even me. Weirdly – although I run a large writing-focused business – I’m not a group #1-er myself. I don’t tweet. I’m not interested in other people’s tweets. I don’t send mwah-type messages at other people’s cover reveals. I’m not invited to those parties. And I don’t care. Nor should you. Writing matters. Reading matters. The rest is optional. I really hope I see you in Townhouse on Thursday. Details below. Again: everyone’s welcome, but my own commentary will focus as much as possible on Premium Members. See you there.

Here\'s the place to chat about my Friday May 17 email on the routes to publishing in 2019. The blog post I referenced can be found here:https://jerichowriters.com/how-to-get-published/ Have I missed anything out? Is there anything where you violently disagree? What has your experience been? Here\'s the place to tell me ...