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Author branding, when done right, can be critical to future success. And self-publishing authors must be able to do this right.Even when choosing traditional publishing, something many authors miss at the beginning of their careers is creating an authentic online presence to engage readers. If you’re self-publishing, though, it’s central. You’ll be your own editor, designer, social media coordinator, production team, etc., and everything traditionally done by a publishing house, you’ll need to be doing yourself.And you may not like imagining yourself as a marketer when all you want is to get on and write.In this article, graphic design platform 99designs walks you through a few key tips (and how to keep it fun, too).Why Branding Is Essential For Authors (Self-published Or Not)Building a brand for yourself helps your audience find out what your work is all about, what you stand for and what they can expect from you. It establishes a connection with your audience and takes no more than a few careful steps to consider.Step 1: Defining Yourself As An AuthorThe following aspects can help you communicate your unique personality and engage with readers.Your author personaUse the storytelling skills you (almost certainly) possess already. Then apply them to you. What is the character of your public self? Are you snarky, quirky? Or more introspective? What is it you are sharing with your audience? Defining yourself will help you understand what you want to create. So consider your story, or “public persona”.Your readersNext, think about your reading audience. Who is reading your books right now? Who do you want to read your books? Are they the same? Think about what kind of person would represent your current or ideal audience. Then examine why they are interested in your writing. By defining who your ideal audience is and understanding what they are looking to get from you, you’ll be able to communicate with strength and clarity to the right people, and think about the community you want to create.Your specialtyFinally, and most importantly, you will need to define your specialty. You may not be the only romance or fantasy writer in the world. But whatever you are writing about, you are bringing your specific one-of-a-kind perspective, voice and way of thinking to the page. This differentiates you from other writers out there. This is your “Point of Difference”. Do you have a specific style, unusual skill or experience? Consider how these things may make you or your writing special. (But, please, never show off.)Step 2: Presenting Yourself As An AuthorYou need the right tools to communicate with readers. So here are a few tips on presenting yourself as a writer through design and social media.Get your author website designedYou’ll need to get a website and logo designed. And both must look clean, polished and professional, no matter how wacky the design. Your logo could be your name or a graphic, as long as it works with the style of the website and doesn’t clash. The look and feel of your logo and website should depend on this vibe you are going for. Look up any images that inspire you. Note down hues and typographies you like for CSS. Then once you’ve decided on a look, keep it consistent. Whether you\'re looking to redesign or create your site, look at a few examples of well designed author websites to get inspiration. Remember to think about site function as well as site design. Those two things have to work together, always.Then build a presenceIt’s not enough to simply have a website. You also need to actively build your online presence around it. Engage with readers and other writers to have the most impact.One of the most effective ways is regular blogging, keeping your audience engaged and helping them to know you better. It’s also good to be active on social media, but consistency is everything.So select the channels you’re sure you’ll use. Stick with them until you’re happy to experiment. Share updates and answer questions, but don’t just tell us about you. Look up chat hashtags to join (i.e. #amwriting on Twitter). If you see things you like, repost and reply. Others will be likelier to reply to you, too, building your following.And engagement is better than constant self-promotion. Look also for Facebook groups, forums or other blogs, where you can comment, write posts or share your content and opinions.Brené Brown’s website, for instance, is an excellent example for author branding.Find your readers where they areThough it’s good to stick with the social media you’re confident with (especially if you’re new to it), look online for where you would find readers that could be interested in you. Say if this is Instagram (i.e. perhaps you’re a novelist, but also an aspiring poet), and you’re not an Instagram user, then it might just be time to learn. Join in the likes of Rupi Kaur and Lang Leav. Get to grips with hashtags, too. You can become part of the conversation and people will get to know you.By interacting via social media, as a general rule you can find vast groups of interested people to engage with, spread the word and start building a following of your own, leading them back to your site.Step 3: How To Stand Out As An AuthorThe true challenge is to create a one-of-a-kind-brand for yourself as a writer that sets you apart from everyone else. To achieve this, here are some last pointers.Be true to yourselfTo really be successful, you need to be authentic. Only if you let your authentic personality shine through in all your efforts can you build a strong and compelling presence as an author. Your readers will appreciate your honest voice, so stick to who you are to build a connection. The most important core of your author brand is you.Be consistentIt’s easy now to be impressively consistent with your site design. Online tools exist to help you create matching Twitter and Facebook cover and profile photos, etc., for a polished look across your site and social media. To establish a clear idea, and so everyone knows it’s you, create a consistent style across the digital channels your audience can find you on.Incorporate your ‘Point of Difference’As discussed earlier, this is your biggest selling point. The clearer you can let it shine in all you do, the easier it will be for you to build a loyal audience.Your Aide For SuccessSo, the obvious: good writing is what will get you read as an author. Nevertheless, building an authentic brand as a writer is well worth it, despite the effort involved.A clear and convincing image of your work to the world will be key to building a loyal and engaging audience – vitally, one which loves you not just for your writing, but also for who you are as an author.

What is it? Do you need it? Where can you get it?Definition: What Is Developmental Editing?In the good old days, developmental editing used to have one precise meaning. It now has certainly two, maybe three, and possibly four meanings. In short: no wonder you’re confused. And no wonder it’s unclear whether developmental editing is something you need or not.But let’s start with those definitions. Here goes.Developmental Editing – Traditional DefinitionBut we start with the first, core, and most precise definition. To quote the ever-reliable Wikipedia:“A developmental editor may guide an author (or group of authors) in conceiving the topic, planning the overall structure, and developing an outline—and may coach authors in their writing, chapter by chapter.”In other words, any true “editing” took place before the writing. It was a planning and design function, in essence. Because competent authors can probably take care of planning and design perfectly well by themselves, such editing was always relatively rare and, in fiction, extremely rare.I’ve authored getting on for twenty books now and have never once had a development edit. I’m damn sure I never will.Developmental Editing As Industry EuphemismBut of course not all authors are perfect and, now and again, publishers have to deal with a manuscript they’ve commissioned, but which turns out to be absolutely dire. Think celebrity memoir of the worst sort. Or a multi-million-selling author who’s long since stopped caring about how he or she writes, because they know the money will roll in anyway.So what to do?Well, the standard solution in trade publishing is to do what is euphemistically called a ‘development edit’. What that actually means is that sometimes a developmental editor takes on the role of something akin to a ghostwriter. They rip out everything that’s hopeless and rebuild.I’ve known a Big 5 editor who had done this a couple of times, and he said it was soul-destroying. He didn’t get any bonus for doing the work. He didn’t get a share of fame or royalties. He didn’t go on the chat shows or the book tours. And he was always dancing on eggshells with the Famous Author, because the author in question was very prickly about having his work slighted in any way.Even though the work in question sucked.Great.So that’s the second meaning of a development edit: basically a euphemism designed to disguise what is basically a ghostwriting job.Developmental Editing In Self-PublishingThat second meaning – basically, “complete text overhaul” – has given rise to a third one.Unless you’ve been sleeping under a particularly weighty hardback for the last few years, you’ll have noticed that indie authors – that is, self-published ones – have done rather well. They’ve gobbled ever more market share. Their books look better than ever before. They read better than before. They are marketed superbly. (So much so, that every single notable marketing innovation of the last few years originated with the self-pub industry. That’s astonishing. You can find out more about self-publishing here.)Over time, whole sections of the market (romance, SF) have been pretty much eaten whole by these indie authors.But let’s say you’re one of the modern breed of self-pub demigods. You publish 4-6 books a year. You have a backlist of 20+ titles. You know how to exploit all the key marketing channels at your disposal, and you exploit \'em good. You earn, for sure, a good six-figures. Quite possibly, you’ve hit seven. A million bucks plus in annual income.Wow! Kudos to you, my friend. We mortals bow in awe.But those demigods still have to write the damn books! And do everything else! And sleep!How do they fit it all in?Well, the answer is often that those authors complete their full-length novel in 3 months – something I’ve done just once in 20 years. They’re skilled and experienced writers and they’re also just plain good. That’s why they earn what they earn. (You can’t market rubbish.)But still. A first draft is a first draft, and first drafts aren’t normally known for their wonderful excellence.So these pro authors often work with developmental editors. That editor’s task is basically to clean up the text. Solve plot problems. Clean up sentences. Add a bit of setting and colour, if those things are sometimes wanting. Make sure that if the hero starts with blue eyes, his eyes haven’t changed colour halfway through. And so on.The author and the developmental editor will often form a team who know each other very well, understand each other’s roles, and produce genuinely excellent books together. That’s not how the traditional industry ever worked, except in crisis, but then again the traditional industry was never all that great at churning out authors earning six- and seven-figures a year.That’s the third definition, but it brings us to the last, most relevant one:Developmental Editing As Juiced Up Manuscript AssessmentNow for me, the gold-standard method of improving a manuscript is quite simply the good old-fashioned manuscript assessment. You write your book. You send it to an editor. You get a report back saying, in essence, “this worked, this didn’t, here’s how to fix the bits that were off.”That sounds simple, but it isn’t. And often enough the effect of good manuscript feedback is a total revitalisation of the work. Many, many times, I’ve known a manuscript assessment to be the single most pivotal moment in a writer’s path to publication.But –A manuscript assessment is mostly just that. A long, written report. In the case of Jericho Writers, you get a fabulous editor, a report of no less than 3,000 words, and a long track record of success. But what you don’t get, or not mostly, is a page-by-page list of things to think about.And sometimes you need that too.Sometimes you need the rounded, structural commentary of the report but with detailed page-by-page advice alongside – actual annotations on the manuscript. Comments written in Word. Sample edits made to the document itself.That’s the glory of developmental editing. The big and the small. Both things delivered together.This kind of service is what we, Jericho Writers, offer by way of developmental editing. Others offer it too. It’s a very, very good service. It’s the ultimate gift you can give your work.(And yes. I know. That just sounds like a sales pitch – but read on. Developmental editing isn’t right for everyone. It might not be right for you.)When Is Developmental Editing Right For You?Honestly?You want my most honest opinion here?OK, here goes...Traditional Developmental EditingDo you need help conceiving, structuring, planning and shaping the manuscript before you have written it?Well, yes, maybe if you are hoping to write subject-led non-fiction. So if, let’s say, you’re an expert in optical physics. A well-known publisher wants a book on that subject for laypeople. They come to you. It probably makes sense for you to spend a day with your editor, planning the book that you will write.Your subject expertise + the editor’s market expertise = a proposition that might actually sell.I sincerely doubt that this situation applies to even 1% of those reading this article.Developmental Editing As Industry EuphemismAre you a global celebrity who has written a terrible book that needs reshaping by a pro?No? Then you do not need developmental editing of this, second, flavour.Developmental Editing In Self-PublishingAre you a self-pub demi-god? Do you pump out 4-6 books a year and earn enough revenue to employ a pro editor?If you do, then sure, you need developmental editing, but I don’t understand why you’re wasting your time reading this post. Go write another book.Developmental Editing As Juiced Up Manuscript AssessmentAre you an ordinary writer slowly working your way to a manuscript (probably a novel) of publishable quality?If you are – and I’ve been in your shoes myself – then I get why you are thinking about developmental editing. It’s a sensible thing to think about and, for maybe 10-15% of you, it’s a sensible thing to purchase.The advantage of developmental editing is that it forces you to look at the big and the small. You’re asked to think about characterisation, and place, and story arc, and theme. And at the same time, your attention is being drawn to sloppy sentence structures, loose images, clunky dialogue, and erroneous habits of punctuation.That is one hell of a mix and it is powerful. Yes. So developmental editing – such as we offer – is a great service. It’s awesome. It could do wonders for your manuscript.But –Here are some downsides:It’s expensiveMany of the page-by-page points will be picked up in some way in the editorial report. You won’t normally get a complete list of (say) poor sentences, but you’ll be given examples, so you know what to look for.Very often the structural advice will demand some significant level of rewriting, which means the page-by-page comments may be less relevant.If your prose quality and general writing technique are reasonably strong, then the most important feedback will live in the editorial report anyway.If you go on to get an agent and a book deal, your publisher will end up paying for a full professional copy-edit (and proof-read), so they’ll end up addressing all the things that a developmental edit might have addressed – and more. That said, if your work is strong enough to do without the development edit, you should do without it. Someone else can pay.Those things aren’t small. If you have all the money in the world, then yes, sure, hire a developmental editor. For the rest of us, the matter demands thought.If I were advising a serious amateur writer on the subject of manuscript assessments, I’d say, “Get one if you can. It’ll probably be the biggest single jump you can make.”If I were advising the same person in relation to a developmental edit, I’d say, “Think hard. It might or might not be right for you.”Yeah. Helpful, I know.Still not sure if a developmental edit is the right choice? Then you’ll probably find this article on the different types of editing really useful.Developmental EditorsWhen it comes to deciding whether a developmental edit is the best fit for you and your book, it\'s not just the details of the service itself that matter, but also who you choose to perform the developmental edit.So if you\'re looking for some examples of developmental editors, head to our editors page, and filter by developmental editing.Hiring A Developmental Editor: ConclusionIn the end, whether you hire a developmental editor or not is your call. It is a great service. It is expensive. The manuscript assessment alone does normally provide most (not all) of what you need.If you’re reading this post and still don’t know what you want, or which way to turn, then do reach out. Our customer service team at Jericho Writers are not employed to sell; they are employed to help. We don’t offer sales bonuses. We don’t hire salesmen. A good proportion of our workforce are writers like you. We’re on your side.I’m telling you all that, because if you want to get in touch with us to ask our advice, we’ll give that advice honestly, to the best of our ability.I hope that helps. And whatever you decide, may you and your writing thrive. In the end, that’s all that matters.

University courses in creative writing have become ever more common in both the US and the UK. But are they worth it?Personally, I think many people who do such courses can be let down by them. I think the teaching is often far too removed from the market, and the writers who graduate can be underprepared for market realities.In the first place, it’s important to realise that agents and publishers wouldn’t care about your academic qualifications. My degree is in economics. I spent ten years working as an investment banker. There was nothing in my history to suggest I had any talent at creative writing, and no one cared. There’s only one aptitude test which matters, and that’s whether you can write a good book.Yes, it is true that agents will tend to stay in close touch with various creative writing schools, watching for emerging talent, but so what? The most that’ll do is ease your path into the industry. If your book is good enough, and you’re not a numpty about finding agents (we doubt you are), you’ll secure representation.Good genre fiction is quite simply good writing. It deserves proper teaching, as much as anything else. One of our first clients came to me after having completed a creative writing course at a highly respected university. He had written a thriller – clever, stylish, nasty, memorable. But it wasn’t right. It spent too much energy on the style, too little on the thriller.I helped that client out with a couple of editorial reviews. He had much talent and a great concept. The things that needed fixing were obvious, fixable. But why was I providing that feedback? Why hadn’t this guy’s tutors already told him what he needed to know?He said that they were all literary writers who didn’t relate to what he wanted to do and had hardly ever read the full-length manuscript. I feel that’s inexcusable. (Oh, and we got that writer a top agent within weeks of his having finished his final edit with us.)And even if your interest is in writing literary fiction, I’m unsure most courses will set you on the right track. Fifteen years ago, there was a market for the ‘slim’ literary novel. You got paid £5,000 for it. It sold 200 copies in hardback. It sold 3000 copies in paperback. It got some nice reviews. No one made any money. After two or three such novels, everyone agreed that enough was enough, and an author’s career ended.That just doesn’t happen now, and it shouldn’t. Novels need to command an audience. The best debuts are loud, clamouring, unforgettable things that demand attention. Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, Audrey Niffenegger’s Time Traveler’s Wife, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated. That’s what agents are looking for. Those are the books that can launch a career. Those are the things that MA or MFA courses should be teaching.Yet the tutors often have never written such an arresting book themselves. Whilst this isn’t always the case (Scarlett Thomas teaches at Kent, and China Mieville at Warwick, and there are more besides), some tutors have published short stories and poetry, sold slim literary novels of their own, but never engaged with the industry the way that most of their students want to engage with it themselves.I do know some brilliant professional authors who used university courses to put the final finishing touches to their work, and whose careers took off as a result.I know others (more of them) who completed their courses, often with distinctions, only to find that their work was unsaleable. Creative writing tutors loved their work. Publishers didn’t.Don’t let this happen to you.If you do sign up for one of these courses, make sure you’re doing it for the right reasons. For example, do sign up for a course if:you genuinely just want the thrill and satisfaction of writing creativelyyou want the fun and company of going back to collegeyou want to broaden your feel for literatureyour course tutors have the kind of track record and publication history that you yourself aspire toIf you want to write commercial fiction, or commercially successful literary fiction – if, in general, you want a career as a writer – then just consider carefully.As it happens, we run our own complete novel course, which is like a slimmed down MFA, but cheaper, less intrusive. There are other courses we have, though I’m not saying you ought to do our course or any course. And there will be a percentage of people for whom an MA or MFA in creative writing is absolutely what they ought to do.Only that percentage isn’t 100%. (Or 80%, etc.) Before signing up, do your research, ask the hard questions, and take care.Begin with the end in mind.

My debut A Thousand Paper Birds was published by Bloomsbury last June. Here are some of the things I’ve learned.Agents Are HeroesI am in love with each and every one of them.I know, from a distance, that they can seem like impenetrable gatekeepers but they are passionate advocates for good writing, work ungodly hours for work that they believe in and have no guarantee of financial reward. Sound familiar?Like writers, they too have to go through the precarious and heart-thumping process of submissions, rejections and deals. Agents not only help hone your work and protect your rights, but are a great sounding board throughout the entire journey. But most importantly they believe in, and fight for, books and writers. If you meet one, you should look them in the eye and say thank you.(A deep bow to Jenny Savill.)Book People Are Incredibly GenerousThe generosity of the industry has taken my breath away.Influential editors and publicists from other publishing houses have praised A Thousand Paper Birds on social media and encouraged others to read it –  and I’ve seen them do it with other debuts too. Why? Because they are passionate about books that they love whether it’s from their imprint or not. There are so many inspiring, authentic, brilliant people in this industry – brains as big as planets (a big wave to Georgina Moore and Alison Barrow!).The same is true of authors.If they believe in your work, they will shout about it from the rooftops. Being published for the first time is a giddy ride and it’s helpful to meet other authors on the rollercoaster. Having received so much support, I’m keen to help upcoming writers. It’s one massive chain of ink-stained hands and I love being a part of it. I truly believe this industry contains some of the best human beings on the planet.It Is A Team EffortAfter years of solitary writing, it has been a privilege to collaborate with the team at Bloomsbury.They are brilliant at what they do. From my sublimely smart editor to my sensitive and astute copy-editor, through to my designer and the publicity, marketing and digital teams, they’ve all been fighting my corner and helping the book be the best it can be.What a freakin’ honour.It’s Not True That You Need To Be Well ConnectedI got my first agent through the slush pile (most writers do). After losing him, I went to the Festival of Writing and left with 8 agents interested in representing. I put in the graft. I said hello.At my first meeting with my publicist, she asked if I had any media contacts and my awkward answer was ‘not a sausage.’ But we sent out the proofs and a few people really liked it. They then told other people who told other people and suddenly we had momentum.I will be forever indebted to the authors, reviewers, bloggers and readers who have championed Paper Birds. And some of these ‘strangers’ have become friends. In an overcrowded market you need people singing about your book.The beauty is that one voice can become a chorus.Publishing Is A Vast Eco-systemPre-publication, most writers learn about agents and publishers, but the vitality of the industry is dependent on a much larger eco-system that includes mentors and editors, literary scouts, translators, bloggers, vloggers, reviewers and most importantly booksellers.Yes, that person behind the till at your local bookshop is the king or queen you should worship.Booksellers can make or break a book. If they buy one copy and shelve it in alphabetical order (you will normally find ‘U’ in the darkest corner) there’s not much chance of that book being sold and the shop ordering more. But if they highlight it in a table or window display, things are very different.Waterstones in Richmond did a gorgeous window for A Thousand Paper Birds. It became their biggest selling hardback for 4 weeks, almost outselling their bestselling paperback.Get to know your local booksellers. Buy from them. Give them chocolate. They make all the difference.Your First Chapter Remains As Important As EverReviewers and bloggers receive SACKS of books weekly. There is no way they can read them all.A few reviewers have told me that they read the first page and if it’s not sparked their interest, they move onto the next one. The sheer volume prevents them doing it differently and rightly they want to spend their energy and time on books they love. Many of them are freelancers or fitting reviews in between the day job and yet still they will go out of their way to make a difference. So work hard on your pitch and your first chapter.Getting past that ‘sack-pile’ is quite a hurdle.You Will, At Times, Be TerrifiedA couple of weeks before publication I said to my friend, ‘How can I stop this?’Yes, those were my words after twenty years of perseverance because suddenly it was too exposing and far too unknown. I spent the first three months completely out of my comfort zone. I was interviewed for ITV news, pranced about in photoshoots, did many Q&A events and readings, gave a keynote speech and later did a live 30-minute radio interview for America.It’s quite something moving from the private act of writing to the public stage. It requires completely different mind-sets. As hard as it is to come out of your shell, it can also then be difficult to withdraw again and deepen your focus. You almost need to separate these two identities – and with all your might protect the quieter one that is aching to write.Events are wonderful – and it’s an honour to be invited to talk about your work – but they are also exhausting. They will, at times, scare the life out of you, but they will also stretch you into a bigger person than you knew you could be.And to be honest, despite the nerves, I would return home, yelling I LOVED IT!You Will Juggle Many, Many BallsYou will be promoting one book while writing another and perhaps pitching a third. You will be answering Q&As for various journals and writing articles. You will be reading all the new books that have been sent to you for endorsement as well as trying to keep up with your usual favourites. You will also be setting yourself up as a business, sorting out foreign royalty forms, and for me, having to work out 7-years of expenses for my tax return (HIDEOUS).While doing this you may also be juggling a day job and caring for children (or the sick or elderly) – and if you’re really crazy folding HUNDREDS of paper birds for displays and promotions.Anxiety is, unsurprisingly, common. Suddenly the writer is being pushed and pulled in several directions. While writing to deadline you may well have to sacrifice personal hygiene. But to survive, at some point you will need to learn how to say ‘no’ or at least ‘not now.’ And you will need to take responsibility for your own well-being by putting in support mechanisms (for me, it was yoga).I thought that success would allow me more time to write, but actually there’s been less. There gets a point where you have to prioritise writing your next book over all the chaos.Social Media Is Both Friend And FoeMy timeline is full of stunningly brilliant people, fantastic books and new friends who make me laugh on days when it feels like the world is going to hell in a handcart.On Twitter, I’ve found my tribe, but beware, it is a major time-sucker. Also, if there are days when you’re struggling with self-doubt, it can be tricky to take in the constant barrage of big advances and bestsellers. You must do everything you can not to compare yourself to others. The truth is that there will always be people doing ‘better’ and ‘worse’ than you. (And remember, a published writer isn’t necessarily more talented than an unpublished one – it’s so dependent on timing and market.)All you can do is focus on your own journey. Twitter is also a great way to find out who is who and how it all works: the eco-system in all its glory.There Are Still Set-BacksYou would think that after getting through agent rejections and years of perseverance that once you reach publication everything is golden. But that gold is sometimes honey, sometimes treacle and sometimes actually a bit pissy.There are many books of the month and end of the year lists, debuts to watch out for, longlists, shortlists, book club selections and promotions.When you are listed or selected for something, it is an amazing feeling. When you don’t, it can feel rotten.All of the above betters your chance of getting a second book deal, so in that context it can feel quite stressful. There have been days when I’ve wanted to google ‘where can I buy extra layers of skin?’ But you can’t buy that resilience, you can only earn it.My rule is that I’m allowed to wail and beat my chest for one day but for one day only. The next morning, I roll up my sleeves and face the most compelling challenge of all – how to be a better writer than I was yesterday. Everything else isn’t in my power. It is just noise.The Reader Is The Most Important Ingredient Of AllStupidly, I didn’t share my work with many people pre-publication – mostly, out of terror. So this year has been a revelation.Every day I receive messages from readers saying how much A Thousand Paper Birds has moved them. I had no idea how much that would mean to me. Unbelievably I hadn’t got my head around the fact that it is the reader who breathes life into the characters and makes the story live. Now that my characters exist in others’ heads they have become real (and I hear they are sometimes glimpsed in the book’s location, Kew Gardens).The reader is the true alchemist. The true creator. This has been my biggest and most humbling lesson of all.Remember Why You’re Doing ThisAfter Paper Birds was published, a famous author wrote to me saying, I should try to stay ‘grounded and clear-headed. Don’t get confused by events one way or the other.’ I have found this advice to be invaluable.You can so easily be swayed by great reviews then knocked down the next day with disappointment. It is the way to madness. And the biggest joke, once you’re published, is that you realise that there is no finishing line. After years of striving, you reach the top of that glorious, much-longed-for hill and see that you are only at the start of a vast mountain range. So you have to love the journey itself – the actual writing. To stay curious about your characters. To strive to tell the truth. To fail and start again. To be in love with the work itself. To write with humility and the hunger to learn. The more I understand about both this industry and the craft, the more I realise that I am a mere novice.But isn’t that a fascinating place to be?My famous author finished his advice by saying, ‘Crack open a bottle of champagne. … And send a quiet thank you to the realms that deserve it.’ It’s important not to forget the magic. The mystery that you stumble on at three in the morning when you’re been slogging away for hours and then all of a sudden the right words fall through the sky in the right order and you are merely taking dictation. In that instant, the book market fades into the background as a temporary, fickle thing. The ego that fretted about what to wear to that event dissolves and there is just the essence –  the listening. The strange act of writing becomes the beating heart of everything.And this is what I can tell you.At that point it doesn’t matter if you’re published or unpublished, we’re all on the same daunting and heroic journey. The stories we tell each other impact us all. They shape how we respond to the world and what we create in it. In these tumultuous times we need stories more than ever. If you are a writer, I salute you. It takes a certain amount of courage, of innocent madness, to retain a state of wonder, to help us all see more clearly and to be more empathic.And sometimes, just sometimes, some of us might imagine alternative ways of walking through this world that makes everything brighter.

Thankfully, there isn\'t as much animosity between the self-publishing and traditional publishing worlds as there used to be - but it\'s still an immense question as to whether whether self-published authors should, at some point, turn to traditional publishing.Self-Pubbers Going TraditionalThere have been numerous examples of highly successful self-published authors turning to traditional mainstream publishers for the next stage of their careers. Here are a few you might\'ve heard about over the last several years:James Oswald offered his first book free on Amazon, by way of a taster for his second book which was priced at £2.99. He sold 50,000 copies in a month and was snapped up in a three-book, £150,000 deal by Penguin – and I strongly suspect that, given Oswald’s subsequent and continuing success, Penguin would feel that they got a very good deal.Kerry Wilkinson sold his first books at £0.99 on Amazon and shifted 250,000 copies in six months. He was offered a (remarkable) six-book deal by Macmillan that took his self-published work into print and extended the series to a minimum of six books.And then there\'s E.L. James. In terms of sales, James dwarfs pretty every other author who started out with non-traditional publishing contracts. She\'s a bit of an odd case though because she never really self-published - instead, she took a kind of hybrid e-book/POD deal that wouldn’t have been offered by a more conventional publisher. Her subsequent sales, via Random House, were simply vast, breaking most international sales records leading to the female-centric erotica genre becoming more mainstream.The Cons Of Going TraditionalGiven that there are plenty of intelligent voices suggesting that conventional publishers have relatively little to offer self-published authors (examples here, here and here), there’s a real question about why anyone would want to shift from a self-published status to a more traditional one.And that’s not a silly question.To be clear about it, self-published authors have the following massive assets on their side:They earn 100% of the net receipts from e-books.That’s about 70% of the cover price. A regularly published author will not be entitled to more than a 25% share.They have total control over every aspect of publication.Self-published authors pick their covers, pick their editors, pick their page-designers, pick their marketing strategies. If they don’t like something, they change it.They retain total control over copyright.When a traditionally published authors sells his or her book, they are selling it. The publisher may well retain control over that book until the author is dead and his or her children too. (The exact arrangement will depend on the nature of any reversion clause, but historically those clauses have been written sharply in publishers’ favour.)There’s nothing to stop self-pub authors selling subsidiary rights as they want to.If you are self-published in the UK and want to sell your US rights to a big 5 publisher there, you can. If you want to sell audio rights, you can. If you want to sell foreign or TV rights, you can. You can do those things if you have a traditional deal too, but the point here is that you can be self-pub in one arena and still work with huge media conglomerates in any area where you feel your own reach would be insufficient.The Pros of Going TraditionalSince those are rather significant advantages, and since the likes of Oswald, Wilkinson and James are hardly idiots, there must be some quite substantial advantages of the conventional route, too.And there are, such as:Access to print distributionEven now, it remains the case that if you want your book to appear in bookstores – and to pick up the revenues that result – you will need a publisher on your side. Yes, you can achieve some kind of hyper-local distribution by working very hard yourself, but to get properly promoted in bookshops across the nation, you will still need a publisher.Access to traditional channels of acclaimThis one is a little more in flux, but it remains the case in the UK that it is rare for self-published books to be taken seriously by reviewers. And more broadly: the kind of books that the chattering classes talk about are nearly always traditionally published ones – as though print still sheds a kind of glamour on the author. We don’t particularly welcome that fact – our view is that books should be judged on their merits, and that’s it – but we don’t get to set the rules. (Alas.)Better access to foreign marketsAs a self-published author, you can sell your work overseas without having a domestic publisher – but it’s a hell of a lot easier if you do have one. Partly that’s because you’ve already proved that one corporation has loved you enough to lay out a significant amout of cash for what you have to offer. And partly it’s because publishers are deeply nested in the whole foreign rights market. They, and agents, just have a depth of contacts that you can never acquire on your own.Better access to film and TV marketsListen: it’s actually relatively rare for fiction to get made into film, whether for the large screen or small. But when those things do happen, it’s much commoner for regularly published work get taken on. There’s just a halo of approval you get from a regular deal which just helps those film and TV deals happen.An easy lifeYes, as a self-publisher you have total control... but you also have a hell of a workload, and that load gets bigger the more successful you become. Publishers do know how to market books and they will simply, at a stroke, relieve you of much of the burden. In effect, you acquire a professional and experienced support team with a few strokes of the pen on that contract.Better financial outcomes than royalty figures suggestIt’s true that publishers pay authors only 25% of net receipts from Amazon and other e-sellers. It’ s also true that print royalties are pretty small (think about 7-10% on paperbacks). But remember that authors get advances, not just royalties, and – without getting too technical about it – if your book doesn’t earn out, then your de facto royalty per book will be far higher than those relatively modest amounts. And since most books don’t earn out their royalties, authors can do very well, even in comparison with the riches of successful self-pub.The Future is Flexible!You’d expect a site that helps writers find agents to argue that self-publishing was only ever a stepping stone to the real thing. We don’t actually believe that, however – and think that the future is likely to see many more hybrid authors emerging: authors who self-publish in one corner of their activities, and who publish conventionally in others. We also think that the relatively standard boilerplate of the average publishing contract is likely to become more flexible over time, so if there are elements of a regular deal you don’t like, there will at least be a sensible discussion over how to accommodate your preferences.And we think the emerging world will be a better one for authors.The ease with which any author can simply self-publish on Amazon will keep publishers honest. That’s great. The availability of other means of distribution will make publishers more humble and more flexible in their terms. That’s also great.The ability for an author to choose how to publish is also wonderful. You want total control? Then have it. You want dedicated corporate support? Then that’s fine. You want one thing in one market, and another in another – then, fine, let’s talk about it.And one simple and everlasting truth is this. If you can demonstrate, through successful self-publishing or simply a remarkably good manuscript, that your work can move readers, there are agents who want you.And (of course) you can find all those agent profiles in our database here.Whichever route you chose, whether that be self-publishing or traditional publishing: good luck!

Before answering this question, let’s assume you’ve got an agent.Let’s assume that you’ve done all the editorial work you need to do at this stage. Let’s assume your book is something that has potential global reach, whether fiction or non-fiction.In that case, the process will probably work a little like this.Your agent rounds up a possible 8-12 editors. That’ll mostly be editors who work at large publishers (though often in semi-autonomous imprints or companies), but there’ll be 2-3 smaller independent publishers, as well, more than likely. Your agent will introduce editors to the book, check they’re available (not off on holiday, etc.), then more or less simultaneously get the book to them. (Books used to be sent on paper. These days, it’s often electronic.)You wait. Your agent will be looking for a first offer. As soon as they get an offer:They’ll start calling everyone on the list, setting deadlines, coaxing offers, etc. A book auction chemistry is critical and delicate. Get three rival offers from three rival publishers, and you should do well, except many notionally independent publishers are connected (e.g. Transworld, Orion, Hodder, Headline), and these guys don’t bid against each other. A smaller publisher (Quercus, Faber, Profile, Atlantic) may be a wonderful publisher, but they won’t be able to fight the bigger ones on advances, so a financial outcome does depend very much on where interest lies.Then your agent will call for ‘best and final’ bids, then close a deal.A contract may take a while to follow. I’ve known it take as long as 6 months, but a verbal agreement is nevertheless something you can depend on. These agreements should never sour.So much for your home nation deal (i.e. the UK if you’re British, US if you’re American). Your agent will then start to target major overseas markets. Most agencies will have someone in charge of foreign rights, who’ll be talking to publishers or sub-agents in Germany, Japan, France, Italy, Spain.Your agent will also have a sub-agent in the US (if she’s British) or the UK (if she’s not). That sub-agent will be also start sending your book around. Note it’s often easier for US authors to get a UK deal, and harder the other way around. What’s more, books that seem obviously US-friendly are oftener ones that make no impact. Ones that seem obscurely British or quirky often do well (Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch is a famous example).And once those major markets have been dealt with, your agency’s attention will start to turn to other areas where small but meaningful deals can be done. India and China, by the way, may well buy your book, but mightn’t do so for much money.This entire process can easily take about a year, perhaps more.And by the time the last paperback publication advance drops into your account, you’re quite likely not just onto your next book, but the one after that.Good luck!

It’s not all that often that would-be authors get to meet publishers to pitch their work, but it happens.Mostly, literary agents will take charge of sending your work out to publishers. Assuming there’s interest in your work, publishers will come back with offers and then, when you do meet publishers face-to-face, they are pitching to you much more than you to them.But that’s not the only way it can happen. Recently, a client of ours was in New York for three meetings with major New York based publishers. He had a UK deal from a wonderful London-based publisher and one in Germany. In the US, though, publishers wanted to meet him before committing to an offer.They wanted that meeting not because of any real reservations they had about the manuscript. If they hadn’t liked the material, they wouldn’t have asked for the meeting. They just wanted to see the author himself. See if he could present himself well to the media. See if his vision for the book was the same as theirs. See also if they liked him. After all, your working relationship with a publisher will certainly last a year and perhaps considerably more, so you might as well like the person you’re to be working with.So if something like this happens to you, at any point in the process, it’s good to be prepared. To that end, some rules!1) Be NiceThe first commandment of publishing. The book deal you\'re involved in is unlikely to involve vast sums of money, for you or your agent or your publisher - so be nice. That can make all the difference.2) Be ProfessionalKnow the things you ought to know, and have that information ready to hand. What\'s the word count of your manuscript? If it isn\'t yet complete, when do you plan to deliver it? Who are other major authors in your genre? Or some comp-titles, whether soon to be released or recently burning up the bestseller lists? Let them know who you are, too. Be prepared to talk about your social media following, that piece you wrote for that blog, or anything else that can help them get to know the author behind the pen.3) Look SharpContrary to popular belief, publishers aren\'t just chasing books by the young and the beautiful. But that doesn\'t mean you can\'t comb your hair, dress decently, take that little extra smidge of care - show them that the meeting matters to you, not that it was something for which you barely deigned to roll out of bed.4) Ask QuestionsIt’s fine to ask questions of your potential publisher. When would they schedule release? What format would they release it in? And at what price? When does the e-book come out, and at what price? How would they think about marketing it? What kind of cover design do they have in mind? (They won’t have a cover design planned, but they’ll may be able to tell you – or ideally show you – the approximate kind of cover they’ll be considering.) What success have they had with similar books in this area? It’s fine to ask about numbers. How many hardbacks, how many paperbacks, how many ebooks? You learn a lot from these questions, and you make it clear that you are a professional and will work professionally with your team.5) Listen to Your Literary AgentYour agent will already know these publishers and quite likely the exact people sitting round the table from you. If your agent steers you in or away from a particular direction, then take that guidance. That’s true anyway, but it’s extra true if you’re in a geographical market not your own: a US author pitching to a London publisher, a UK author pitching to a New York publisher. In the first instance, you will almost certainly have a UK literary agent sitting beside you, a US agent next to you in the second case. Those people are there to help you. Accept their help with gratitude.And remember, you can go into those meetings with good heart. You’ve been invited because someone loves your manuscript and just needs a little help to make it all the way to a formal offer. You haven’t quite closed the deal yet, but you’re inches away.Now go and close it. Good luck.

A common question for all new writers and the answer (almost always) is yes.Let’s start by reviewing what agents are there to do, though.What Literary Agents DoThey have several main roles:Selecting saleable manuscripts from all those submitted. Under 1% of manuscripts are strong enough to sell.Working with the author to get the manuscript in perfect condition to sell. That can mean extensive editorial work, likely lasting a period of months.Identifying the right editors at the right publishing houses for your book. An agent needs excellent contacts and to keep those contacts up to date. It also means understanding the current market for fiction and non-fiction, making sure that your book is in tune with that market.Conducting an auction. There’s no single way to sell a book. Your agent needs to choose the right way, then sell it professionally, with drive and conviction.Negotiating a contract. Publishing contracts are long and technical. Additionally, with the advent of ebooks, those contracts are changing fast and key terms are constantly moving. So you do need an expert on your side.Making foreign sales, and handling film and TV rights. Again, that’s a complex business involving expertise and strong contacts.Guiding your career. In the long term, a good agent should be nudging your career in the right direction and keeping you away from wrong turns. Writing is an insecure business, so a good agent can make a difference.All that might may make you think that you need an agent under any circumstances – but agents make their fees on sales they make. Typically speaking, they take a 15% commission. Agents need to live, too, so won’t have an interest in representing you if there is no realistic prospect of them making money.You Do Need A Literary Agent If:You are writing a novel.You are writing commercial non-fiction (the sort of thing that might be sold at the front of a shop, or feature on a bestseller list).You are writing fiction for children.You are writing a ‘how to’ type book in a major category (such as health and well-being).You Do Not Need A Literary Agent If:You are intending to self-publish.You are writing poetry.You are writing one-off short stories.You are writing journalism.You are writing specialist or academic non-fiction.In all those cases, there won’t be enough money to interest an agent and you should approach the appropriate publishers directly.You May Need A Literary Agent If:You are writing children’s picture books. I’d probably recommend having an agent to start with, but you could go either way.You are writing a themed collection of short stories. Such collections are hard to sell, but not impossible. A truly good collection may attract an agent. Anything less than wonderful won’t.And, as ever, don’t forget that if you need feedback, advice, or help with literary agents, we’re here to supply that. Sign up for emails for more on how to get a literary agent, or have a look at more free advice.Very best of luck.More than ready to get the ball rolling with agents, but just need a little push? Or perhaps you’ve had a few rejections but aren’t sure why? Our Agent Submission Pack Review gives you detailed professional advice on how to perfect your submission and increase your chances of securing an agent. For more advice on finding an agent, see here.

Developmental editing. Structural editing. Line editing. Copy editing. Proofreading.Yes, we know: you’ve written a manuscript. You know it needs some kind of professional help. But what kind of help? Copy editing or line editing? Structural editing or developmental support? There seem to be so many options to choose from.But never fear. We’ll tell you exactly what each of the different types of editing are – and offer some suggestions on what editing you do/don’t need right now.The good news is that, quite often, you need less editorial input than you might think. (The bad news is that you have to put in a lot of hard graft instead…)What Are The Different Types Of Editing?Developmental editing: checks concept, plot coherence, and character development/arc.Structural editing: identifies issues with plot, pacing, characters, settings, themes, writing style.Line editing: looks at details line by line.Copy-editing: is much as above, except with less attention to line-by-line correction of clumsy writing.Proof reading: looks for simple typos or errors in the text.How Editing WorksBefore we go any further, it’s worth explaining the editorial heirarchy. Essentially you go from large to little, from structural to detailed.So it’s like building a house: you start with foundations, walls and roof. Then you start thinking about doors and windows. Then you start thinking about paints and wallpapers. Last, you go around sweeping up and sorting out any last little snags.The same thing with editing, where the hierarchy runs roughly like this, from big to small:Developmental editing. Is this concept sound? Does my plot cohere? Are these the right characters for this book?Structural editing. Identifying and addressing any number of issues covering (for example) plot, pacing, characters, character development, settings, emotional turning points, themes, writing style and much else.Line editing: this starts to look at the detail. Is each sentence clear? Are there typos? Unwanted repetitions? Minor factual errors?Copy editing: much as above, except there’s less attention to line-by-line correction of clumsy writing.Proof reading: At the proof stage, you generally expect that all the essential work has already been done, so this is really just rushing around the manuscript looking for last bits of lint to pick off and typos to clear away.That’s the overview. Not all manuscripts will go through all of these stages – indeed, if you’re doing a decent job as an author then two or three of these stages are probably redundant.All that said, let’s jump straight into the meat…Developmental EditingWe’ll start with the biggest, broadest, most sweeping kind of editing you can get: developmental editing. That’s a type of editing that used to have one meaning, but it’s kind of morphed into two distinct beasts for reasons, I’ll explain in a second.Definition: What Is Developmental Editing?In the good old days, developmental editing used to have one precise meaning. It now has certainly two, and maybe three.A. Developmental Editing – Traditional DefinitionBut we start with the first, core, and most precise definition. To quote the ever-reliable Wikipedia:“A developmental editor may guide an author (or group of authors) in conceiving the topic, planning the overall structure, and developing an outline—and may coach authors in their writing, chapter by chapter.”In other words, any true “editing” took place before the writing. It was a planning and design function, in essence. Because competent authors can probably take care of planning and design perfectly well by themselves, such editing was always relatively rare and, in fiction, very rare. (I’ve authored getting on for twenty books now and have never once had a development edit. I’m damn sure I never will.)B. Developmental Editing As Industry EuphemismBut of course not all authors are perfect and, now and again, publishers have to deal with a manuscript they’ve commissioned, but which turns out to be absolutely dire. Think celebrity memoir of the worst sort. Or a multi-million-selling author who’s long since stopped caring about how he or she writes, because they know the money will roll in anyway.So what to do?Well, the standard solution in trade publishing is to do what is euphemistically called a ‘development edit’. What that actually means is that an editor takes on the role of something akin to a ghostwriter. They rip out everything that’s hopeless and rebuild.I’ve known a Big 5 editor who had done this a couple of times, and he said it was soul-destroying. He didn’t get any bonus for doing the work. He didn’t get a share of fame or royalties. He didn’t go on the chat shows or the book tours. And he was always dancing on eggshells with the Famous Author, because the author in question was very prickly about having his work slighted in any way.Even though the work in question sucked.Great.So that’s the second meaning of a development edit: basically a euphemism designed to disguise what is basically a ghostwriting job.When Is Classic Developmental Editing Right For You?It isn’t. You don’t need it.What you probably need (either now or in due course) is a professional manuscript assessment and possibly some of the add-ons normally associated with developmental editing. But in the classic sense of the term, you just don’t need it. We’ll talk about what you do need right away.Structural Editing, Substantive Editing, Editorial AssessmentRight. So I’m not a big fan of developmental editing, but I LOVE the type of editing we’re about to talk about. But first up: definitions.DefinitionsStructural editing is, strictly speaking, a set of comments on the structure of your work. That will certainly involve plot and pacing. But it may also include comments on character, mood, emotional transitions, dialogue, character arcs, writing style and much more.If you’re being strict about it, structural editing should focus only on structure, but in practice editors tend to comment on anything that, in their view, needs attention. (Which is good. Which is what you want.)Basically, a good structural edit will tell you:What’s working (though they won’t spend too long on this)What’s not working (this is where the report will concentrate all its firepower)How to fix the stuff that isn’t yet rightA good report will quite simply cover everything that you most need to know. It’ll do that from the perspective of the market for books as it is now. So the kind of crime novels (say) that could have sold 25 years ago may not be right for the market now. A good editor will know that, and set you on the right lines.Substantive editing is basically the same as structural editing, except that technically it doesn’t have to limit itself to structure alone. But since structural editors don’t in practice confine themselves to structural comments, it’s pretty safe to say that, in practice, the two things are exactly the same.Editorial assessment, or Manuscript assessment. These two things are exactly the same as structural editing. The difference is that an editorial assessment gives you an editorial report, but doesn’t usually also give you a marked-up manuscript as well.Again, in practice, these things blur into each other. Our own core editorial product is, indeed, the manuscript assessment. The main deliverable there is a long, detailed editorial report on your book. That said, a lot of editors will, if it’s useful, also mark-up all or part of your manuscript. Or if they don’t, they may quote so extensively from your work, that it’s kinda the same as if they did.In short, and give or take a few blurry bits on the edges:structural editing = substantive editing = editorial assessment = manuscript assessmentEasy, right?Is Structural Editing / Editorial Assessment Right For You?Yes.Almost certainly: yes.Now, to be clear, I own Jericho Writers and if you trot along to buy one of our wonderful manuscript assessments, you’ll make me a teeny-tiny bit richer. So in that sense I’m biased.On the other hand, I just told you not to buy developmental edits, and I’d make myself a LOT richer if I got you to buy one of those things, so I hope I have a little credit in the bank. I’m speaking truth, not salesman yadda.And the reason I like structural editing so much is that:It is and remains the gold-standard way to improve a manuscript. Nothing else has ever come close. I’m not that far away from publishing my twentieth book. (I’m both trad & indie, and I love both channels, in case you’re wondering.) I’m a pretty damn good author. I’ve had very positive reviews in newspapers across the world. My books have sold in a kazillion countries and been adapted for TV. And every single one of my books have had detailed editorial input. And they’ve always, always got better as a result. Always.It makes you better as a writer. You always emerge from these exercises with new skills and new insights. You will apply those to your current manuscript, for sure, but you’ll apply them to the next one too. The more you work with skilled external editors, the more you’ll grow as a writer. (And, I think, as a human too.)So that’s why I think structural editing works so well, and for such a huge variety of manuscripts, genres and authors.When Should You Get Structural Input On Your Work?Well, OK. The businessman in me wants to say, “Get that input right now. Hand over your lovely hard-earned dollars / pounds / shekels / yen, and your soul and career will flourish, my friend.”But that’s not the right answer.The fact is that the right time for editorial input is generally: as late as possible.If you know you have a plot niggle in Part IV, then fix the damn niggle. Fix it as well as you can. Don’t go and pay someone to tell you that you have an issue. That’s dumb.Same thing if your characters feel a bit flat, or your atmosphere is a bit lacking, or whatever else. If you know your book has issues, then do the best you can to fix those issues. You’ll learn a lot and your book will get better.That means, the right time for editorial input comes when:You’ve worked hard, but you keep going round in circles. You’re confusing yourself. You need external eyes and buckets of wisdom.You’ve worked hard, but you know the book isn’t right. You don’t know what’s awry exactly, but you know you need help.You’ve worked hard, you’ve got the book out to agents, but you’re not getting offers of representation. You know you need to do something, but you don’t know what.The self-pub version of 2: you have a draft you’re reasonably happy with, but you’re about to publish this damn thing, and your whole future career depends on the excellence of the story you’re going to serve the reader. So you do the right thing and invest in the product. You’re going to get the best kickass structural edit you can, then use that advice as intensively as you can. (Editing, in fact, is one of the only two things that should cost you real money at this early stage: the other one is cover design. And, no surprise, they both relate to developing the best product it is in your power to produce.)In short: work as hard as you can on the book. When you’re no longer making discernible forward progress, come to an editor.And – blatant plug alert! – Jericho Writers is very, very good at editorial stuff. We’ve got a bazillion people published, trad and indie, and the success stories just keep coming.Developmental Editing – As Premium Manuscript AssessmentI love manuscript assessments – I think they’re the single most helpful thing you can do to improve your work. At their best, with author and editor working well together, they’re like a magic formula for improving your work.But a lot of people still find them insufficient. In particular, a manuscript assessment might say something like, “Your character Claudia isn’t yet cohering. Here’s what I mean in general terms [blah, blah, blah]. And here are some specific page references which illustrate my general point [page 23, page 58, etc].”Now that’s helpful, but it still leaves you to do an awful lot. If Claudia is a major character, the specific changes you need to make are likely to go well beyond the handful of examples the editor uses to make their broader point.So what do you do?Well, hopefully, you understand exactly where your editor is coming from, and you make the necessary changes, and your manuscript becomes perfect.Only maybe not. Some people just are helped by having their manuscript marked up page by page. That’s not instead of the more general report. It’s in addition. That way you get to see the broad thrust of the comments, as well as the more specific issues as well.So you get an overview of (for example) why Claudia isn’t quite working as well as a detailed laundry list of all the specific places where her character grates a bit.And it’s not just characterisation. It’s plot issues. It’s matters of writing style. It’s sense of place. It’s everything that goes into a novel.So – and this is because our clients have specifically asked us to create the product – we now offer a version of developmental editing that combines these services in a single package:Manuscript assessment – overview reportDetailed mark-up of your manuscript – literally page, by pageOne hour discussion with the editor, so you can resolve any outstanding questions or niggles you may have.Pretty obviously, this is a deluxe package and, pretty obviously, it’s expensive. It’s also, honestly, not what most of you need.Will I Benefit From Developmental Editing, Jericho-style?As a rough guide, very new writers are probably best off building their skills by taking a writing course or, of course, just hammering away at their manuscript. (That’s still the best learning exercise of all.)After that, once you have a first, or third, or fifth draft manuscript, it makes sense to get a regular manuscript assessment. That way, you can grasp the main issues with your work and you have a plan of attack for dealing with them.Because developmental editing is as much concerned both with the broader issues AND with the narrower ones, it doesn’t really make sense to purchase the service until your manuscript is in pretty good shape.After all, the outcome of a manuscript assessment might be “That whole sequence set on Venus just doesn’t work and needs to be rethought from scratch.” If that’s the case, then having detailed page-by-page comments on the way you write isn’t really going to help you much.So as a rough guide, you will benefit from developmental editing, if:Your manuscript is in pretty good shape (ie: this should be the last major round of work before submitting to publishers or self-publishing the manuscript)You want both broad and narrow commentsYou want the opportunity to talk at length with your editorYou are OK paying for a premium service.You will not benefit from developmental editing, if:Your manuscript is still at a somewhat earlier stage in its journeyYou feel able to handle the narrower issues yourself, so long as you have reasonable guidance from your manuscript assessment report.Because we don’t want to take your money if developmental editing is not right for you, we have made the service by application only. That’s not because we’re going to stop you doing what you want to do. Just, if we’re not sure whether it makes sense for you to splash the cash, we at least want to be able to check in with you before we go ahead.Line Editing, Copy Editing, Proof ReadingOK. We’ve dealt with the broader, more structural types of editing. We’re now going to home in on the ever finer-grained types of editing.We’ll start as before with some definitions.DefinitionsOf the detailed, line-by-line type edits, line-editing is the one that has the broadest remit. I’ll start with proof-reading (the most narrowly defined of these editorial stages) and build upwards from there.Proof-reading comes at the final stage prior to printing/publication. It basically assumes that the manuscript has already been checked over thoroughly, so this is really only a final check for errors that have managed to slip through the net. (And, in fact historically, the process of type-setting for print often introduced errors, so proof-reading was partly necessary to reverse those. These days, unsurprisingly, you can format a document for print without messing it up.) The kind of errors a proof-reader will catch include: typos, misspellings, punctuation errors, missing spaces, and the like. It’s a micro-level, final-error catching task, and nothing much else.Copy-editing includes everything included in proofreading, but it’ll have a somewhat broader scope. So a copy editor will also be on the look out for factual errors, timetable and other inconsistencies in the novel, occasional instances of unclear or weak phrasing, awkward repetitions, deviations from house style (if there is a house style), and so on. In the traditional publishing sequence, copy editing will take place after all structural editing has been done, but before the book has been set for print.Line-editing will cover everything that’s detailed above, plus a general check for sentence structure, clarity and sense. In other words, it is part of a line editor’s job to fix clumsily phrased, repetitious or otherwise awkward sentences. Yes, you the author should not be writing clumsily in the first place, but if by chance you do, the line editor is there to put things right.Why does anyone ever want or need line-editing? Well, some authors are brilliant at generating character and story, but their actual sentence-by-sentence expression of that story just isn’t so great. In these cases, a publisher will commission a line-edit to put those things right.The Editing Process: What You Need & When You Need ItRight. What kind of editing you need and should pay for depends on what kind of publication you are looking at. So:The Traditional Publishing SequenceThe normal publishing sequence (for traditionally published books) would be:Structural editing (ie: a detailed manuscript assessment)Copy-editing (or line editing if the author really needs it, but never both things)Proof-readingThat’s it.If you are aiming at traditional publication, then you may well need to invest in a manuscript assessment, in order to write something of the quality needed for a literary agent / publisher.You certainly won’t need copy editing, or anything along those lines. That’ll be carried out, for free, by the publisher down the line. (They’ll also do some more structural editing work too, but don’t worry about that – you can’t get too much, and your book always gets better.)The Indie Publishing SequenceIndie publishers, inevitably, focus more on cost-cutting than the Big 5 houses do, so a typical indie process might look simply like this:Some kind of structural support – probably an editorial assessment or something similarSome kind of copy-editing supportIf you don’t have the budget for both, I’d urge you to get the structural help: that’s what will really make the difference to the sheer readability of your book. That’s where to spend your funds.Indeed, though we at Jericho Writers offer a full range of copyediting and proofreading services, I don’t usually advise writers to invest in them at all.If you are an indie on a lowish launch budget (which is the right kind of budget to have when you’re just starting out), then I’d recommend an editing plan along roughly the following lines:Full editorial assessment, ideally from Jericho Writers (because we’re really good at it.)You then rework your book in the light of what you’ve been toldYou then give it a good hard proofread yourself for any errors and typosYou then enlist the help of any eagle-eyed friends to do the sameThat plan won’t give you a manuscript as clean as if you give it the full cost-no-object Big 5 treatment … but it’ll be just fine. Don’t overspend at this stage.The Indie Publishing SequenceOK. You know the basic layout of what editing is and when it’s used. Here’s what I think the big questions are.Developmental Editing Vs Structural EditingYou know my view on this. I think for 99% of you reading this, you are best off (a) working and self-editing as hard as you can yourself, then (b) getting professional input on your work from a structural editor.That’s going to be miles cheaper and the end result will be better too. Yes, you’ll need to do a lot of work, but you’re a writer. You like work. (If you don’t, you’re in the wrong job.)If you are a newer author, you may well need two or three rounds of structural input. That’s fine. That’s not a failure on your part. That’s you learning a new trade. It’s money well spent – and you can prove it to yourself too. Just ask yourself: are you a better, more knowledgeable, more capable writer at the end of the process? If the answer isn’t yes, I’ll eat my boots, jingly spurs and all. (*)* – disclosure: I don’t actually wear spurs.Structural Editing Vs Copy EditingOK, these are two very different things, but of the two, the structural editing definitely matters more. The purpose of structural / substantive editing is simply: make your book the best book it can be.The purpose of copy editing is simply: make the text as clean as it can be.Both things matter, but if your budget only permits one of those things, then go for structural editing, every day of the week. A wonderful story is much more important than tidy text.And again, though we sell copyediting services, you shouldn’t need them at all if you are heading for trad publication, and you should probably be able to find an acceptable but much cheaper substitute if you are self-publishing.Line Editing Vs Copy Editing Vs Proof-readingIf you are going to get line-by-line corrections to your MS, then the default answer is to go for copy editing. Proof-reading is really too narrow, and only really makes sense if your book has already been copy edited. (Which is fine if you have a Big 5 budget, but makes no sense for you.)Line editing is really only required if your sentence construction isn’t yet all it could be, in which case I’d urge you to invest in upskilling. Quite simply: as a pro author, you should be in command of your language. If you’re not, and have to pay a line editor, and if you intend to write 10, 15, 20 or more books over the course of your career, you’ll end up paying a fortune. Much, much better to nurture those exact skills in yourself, and you’ll never need to spend a penny on a line edit.Also: writing well is good for your soul and writing beautiful sentences is a source of beauty and joy forever. So don’t give anyone else the pleasure.And Finally…That’s it from me. Thanks for reading. If you’ve read this far, you may also like:Help on how to present your manuscriptHelp on how to self-edit your novelIf you need help figuring out what kind of editorial process (or, indeed, other support) might be right for you, then get in touch. Jericho Writers does not have a sales team or employ salespeople or pay anyone on commission. Our customer service people are only allowed to recommend a particular service if they genuinely think it would be helpful to the writer concerned.We’re run by writers for writers, and we’re on your side.Thanks for reading – and happy editing!Jericho Writers is a global membership group for writers, providing everything you need to get published. Keep up with our news, membership offers, and updates by signing up to our newsletter. For more writing articles take a look at our blog page or join our free writer\'s community.If you think you need copyediting for your manuscript, take a look at our copyediting services. Jericho Writers\' experienced editors specialise in editing both novels and non-fiction and would love to help you with your work. Click here for more.

You’ve written a book. You’ve got it all the way through production, either with the help of a traditional publisher or on your own, via self-publishing.And all that seemed like plenty of effort, did it not? You’d think that you could now lie back in the warm sun of adulation as readers flocked to your books and asked you intense questions about just how you found your inspiration.And then, you know. Reality.If you have a traditional publisher and you’re lucky with them and the book, then things really can be like they were in your dreams. Huge retail distribution. Big sales. All that adulation. But even for traditionally published authors, those things are rare. The situation for most of us (and I’m a hybrid author, both traditionally and self-published) is that we see our books – our beautiful, published books – languishing a long way from the happy sunlight at the top of the bestseller charts.So, what to do? There’s a lot you can do, in fact, and some of the tools are very potent indeed.So here’s the top 10 things to try when marketing a book. Some are more complex than others. Some cost money. Some are as free and easy as winter rain. So let’s explore. We’ll start with stuff that’s easy, cheap and relatively low in effectiveness … and move up the ladder to stuff that’s harder, but more potent.1. Post Something On Your BlogYou have a blog, right? Preferably integrated into your own website that has a domain name of the form yourname.com. If you’re not yet there, well – you need to get there. A decent looking website is necessary these days. These things can be put together for almost nothing these days, though if you’re serious about your career, I think you’ll do what you need to do to create something of quality.In any case, use your site to tell a story. Don’t sell at the reader. No one loves to have stuff shoved at them. Your best bet is to tell a story that engages in some way … and then make it unbelievably easy for readers to buy your book if they want to. That means creating easy, obvious links to your Amazon page, at the top, front and middle of your piece.Need to set up a website? Here’s how.2. Create Author Profiles On Amazon And GoodreadsReaders hang out both on Amazon and Goodreads. Both sites want authors to claim their profiles.Use a photo that feels personal. Write a short bio that feels human and engaged. If you want to reference your favourite authors (ones writing in a similar field to you, of course), then do so.These things won’t create readers overnight, but they are part of any modern author’s armoury. Basically, you must do them.Having said that – don’t misdirect your attention either. I have yet to meet a professional author who thinks that being active on Goodreads is a good way to spend time. It isn’t. You need to create an attractive profile there, then leave it. Spending hours engaging with the community will not create sales. Advertising on Goodreads is a simple way to lose money.Create a good-looking author page following Amazon’s own recipe.3. Create An Author Page On Facebook (And Connect It To Your Blog)You don’t want to mix your personal page with your professional one, so set up a yournameauthor page on Facebook. Maintaining that page as well as your blog will drive you crazy, so make sure that when you post on your blog, that post pops up both on your Facebook author page and on your Goodreads one.The truth is that probably no one may read your blog much in the first instance – these things take time to grow and even major authors don’t necessarily have huge volumes of site traffic. But readers do congregate on Goodreads and Facebook and they do like to see some personal, engaging material on authors they may happen to stumble across.So create the material on your blog. Pipe it over – automatically – to those other sites. If you can’t do that by yourself, then pay someone to do it. You’re an author not a tech-expert, so it’s OK to pay others when you need to … and there are cheap or free ways to automate these things, so paying someone to make the connections shouldn’t cost you much.Read up on more tips for your author page.4. Open Yourself Up To TwitterYeah, I know. If you like Twitter, you’re already on it. If you’re not, that’s because you hate it and can’t see the point.And I hate Twitter. I don’t like the zero-attention-span, weirdly formatted, near-impenetrable texts that the damn site is full of.Also: you cannot sell stuff via Twitter. Yes, this is a post about marketing your work. Yes, I am recommending that you join Twitter. And yes, I have just told you that you cannot sell on Twitter. It’s not just me that thinks that last thing. The digital marketing manager at a major publishing house told me the exact same thing. I’ve also seen data that calls into question the degree to which even a really ‘successful’ Twitter campaign can influence sales. The only real exception is where you are already established enough that you don’t have to sell your book, but you can notify people that it’s there.All that said, you still need to be on Twitter because numerous people that you may want to connect with (bloggers, other authors, marketing types, industry folk) may not publish an email address, but are publicly and easily available on Twitter. For that reason, Twitter remains absolutely central as a way to connect with these industry types (a technique known as PRM in marketing, where PRM = Partner Relationship Managament.)And if you want to reach those people, you don’t just need to be signed up to the service, you do need to follow some people, and get followed back, just so that you don’t look like the only naked one in the room. It’s a faff, yes, but you’re marketing your books and you can’t ignore Twitter just because you #hateit. And – once you’ve signed up, and got properly started – then start to contact the people that matter.And remember that conversations on Twitter are like conversations anywhere. You don’t just barge in and shout and try to sell stuff. Be courteous, interested, and – when you have a relationship – you politely enquire if Person X might be interested in your very fine Y. Out of those relationships, come invitations to appear on blogs, to get book reviews, to do Q&As and all the rest of it. There are other ways to reach those people – email works, and there are some great groups on Facebook – but Twitter is still the easiest way to make that first knock on the door.Need more on getting started? Find out more from these people.5. Use Your Ebooks As A Platform To Sell Your EbooksIf you have more than one ebook, then make sure that your ebooks are properly set up to sell each other. That means that in the back of each e-book you have a proper listing of your titles – updated, please, as new books come out. That listing shouldn’t just list the actual titles, you should also include some enticing sales copy and think about including a book cover too. The point is to catch readers when they’ve just finished your book – when they’re still half in love with your character, still giddy with the excitement of your ending – and get them to buy more stuff.So put that stuff under their noses, and make it very attractive, very engaging and very buyable.And that’s only step one!You also, crucially, need to make it unbelievably easy for people to buy the books they’re looking at. That means (for most indies) a simple link to Amazon in your mobi files – or rather three, as you’ll need different links for the .com, .ca, and .co.uk sites.Traditionally published authors can’t – for complicated reasons to do with their publishers’ contractual situation – place the same easy links to Amazon. So what you need to do is create a kind of “choose your e-store” page. That page will basically just bounce people from your ebook to the reader’s choice of e-store. You can see a fine example of such a page right here. Notice that although that page exists on my own website – harrybingham.com – it’s shorn of all in-site navigation. That is, once you arrive on the ‘choose your estore’ page, there’s absolutely nothing to do except choose your estore and move on. Also – obviously – the links are to your page on the various estores, not just the home page.Getting your ebook to sell effectively at the end of the book is essential and it’s a free and easy way to make additional sales. The best way to understand what the back end of an ebook should like is to look at an ebook that has been carefully designed to sell an entire series. My own ebooks do just that, like the back of The Dead House. Notice the author’s note, the series listing, those “choose your estore” links, and the multiple email sign-up opportunities.6. Get Clever With Your Bisac CodesYour BISAC codes or ‘browse categories’ tell Amazon where to shelve your book. (Find out more here.) And mostly, you’ll want to shelve it in places that actually collect some traffic – so “Romance/Historical” say, rather than “Family and Friendship”.But it’s hard to climb far enough up those major categories to really find eyeballs … and one brilliant, if sneaky, little trick is to choose one BISAC code that’s so minor you just don’t need to make many sales to hit that #1 position. And once you have that #1 position, Amazon tags your book with a sweet little #1 bestseller icon … which is a wonderful lure to anyone stumbling across your book.And, in any case, remember that your BISAC codes are infinitely malleable. If your original choices aren’t working for you, then change them. Mess around and see what works. That’s free and it’s easy. If you’re traditionally published, then you won’t have direct access to these codes, but do ask your publisher what they’re doing, and test their answer. Make sure they have a strategy and are revising it if need be.7. Get Clever With Your Keywords And SubtitlesTry typing something into Amazon now. Just type the first two or three letters of whatever you’re searching for and Amazon will quickly offer you a dropdown list of things it guesses you might be seeking. Sometimes, it’ll offer you the name of an author (‘Harry Bingham’). But often enough it offers you thematic-type searches – things like ‘psychological thriller’ or ‘historical novels’.Those thematic search terms are great to use as keywords for your book – just make sure they pop up on those Amazon dropdowns, because if they don’t, then no one is searching for them.And once you’ve chosen your keywords, do shove them into your series titles or subtitles, because use of a keyword with subtitle/series title support always beats an equivalent book which lacks that support.If you’re self-published, you already know about this and are probably already doing it. If you’re traditionally published, you may well think that this is all complicated stuff and your publishers presumably know their onions. Except they may not do. A huge proportion of traditional publishers have been trained and brought up in a world of bricks and mortar print. Editors who came into the industry because they wanted to edit books may simply not want to deal with the minutiae of keywords and series titles. Results: some huge and supposedly sophisticated firms can be blithering morons when it comes to online visibility.So ask. Understand the answers. And ask again. Do not let this one get away.Learn more about keywords.8. PricingSo easy, this, but I’ve relegated the matter of price to a long way down this list because unless you have other ingredients of your marketing platform well-set in advance, the impact of a pricing tweak will dissipate far too fast into the cloudless blue.But once you are happy with your author platform, once you have optimised your ebooks, once you do have your keywords and your BISAC codes and all the rest of your metadata straight, then press the pricing button.Dropping your price from $4.99 or $2.99 down to $0.99 will give you an immediate strong but relatively short-term boost to pricing. All the same, that boost gets more readers into your series and gives you the chance to make full-price sales of later books.I do also recommend the use of Amazon’s useful pricing tool, KDP Pricing Support (available via Kindle Direct), locked it would seem in permanent beta. The tool shows you the impact of pricing on both readers and revenues.You want revenues, of course. That’s your aim. On the other hand, nearly all authors want to grow their readership in the hope of earning even larger revenues down the road, in which case you’ll want to price somewhat to the left of that ‘revenue maximising point’. Dipping down to $0.99 or $2.99 to raise visibility, then jumping back to a higher price point makes great sense. If you live at the lower price levels all the time, you’ll find that you don’t secure any extra kick staying there. You’re better off with a kind of yo-yo strategy.9. Email ListsIf you don’t keep an email list, you need to create one. If you do have one, then you probably know how to use it.But for a whistle-stop tour of why you need one and how to make one, then here you go.A. You need your readers’ email addresses so you can contact your customers directly when you have a new product. It’s like when you buy a new dress from an online retailer: they’ll be in touch later to say, ‘Hey, you like dresses. We’ve got some more dresses. How about it?’ That tactic was and is the best marketing tactic ever invented. You’re basically talking to customers who like your stuff and have been ready to buy it in the past. They’re the very first people to go back to when you have more products available to sell.B. You collect readers email addresses by setting up a ‘Readers’ Club’. People want to be part of a readers’ club attaching to a series or author that they love.C. You can’t just take stuff (an email address), you must give, too, and what you give has got to be a lot better than one email address. But you’re a writer, yes? And readers are committed to writers. Write a long short story or a short novella and give it away for free to anyone who signs up to your club. The story should be exclusive, for subscribers only. If you sell the thing on Amazon, you’re demeaning the gift, so don’t do it.D. In terms of techie stuff, you need an email provider – most likely Mailchimp – and a sign-up page. If that sentence frightens you, then pay someone to do the necessary. Your aim is to have a landing page that functions like this one. There’s no in-site navigation, big obvious sign-up buttons, plenty of use of the word ‘free’.Oh, and don’t ask for an email straight away because that seems grabby. Only ask for an email address in direct response to a customer’s request. Only when a user on my website clicks the “Get my download now” button do I ask for an email address. In other words, let them give the orders. You only ask for the address to fulfil that command.E. Where do you get your email sign-ups from? Well, yes, from the website, except that realistically the only people who come to your website with the intent to join your Readers’ Club are people who have just read and enjoyed one of your books. The real source of sign-ups is from within the ebooks themselves. I have graphic calls-to-action in the front and back of my ebooks and text-only links underneath and a call to action in my author’s note and a further one in my series listing. That sounds horribly overdone, except that it seems perfectly natural when you have the book in your hand.And get this: I get about one email sign-up for every five ebooks I sell. That’s a very good ratio, which means I can reach at least 20% of my readers by email whenever I want.F. How do you use the email list once you’ve got it? Answer: as little as possible. People will just unsubscribe if you blast them with unwanted crap, so keep it very light. I reckon that two emails a year is (in most cases) plenty. One to announce when a book goes up for pre-order. Another to nudge people when that book is published or enjoying a special and temporary price promotion.G. And, to be clear, the real beauty of the email list is not the fact that you can collect however many hundred sales. It’s that because those sales are densely focused around the time you send the email, you can instantly jump into the bestseller charts, at which point Amazon’s own algorithms will start giving you a ton of visibility – then, consequently, a whole heap of additional sales. The email list isn’t there to sell to the people on the list only, it’s there to multiply your visibility whenever you choose to do it. Lovely!10. The Joy Of FacebookAnd finally, the simplest way to promote a book and get sales is the most traditional way of all. Advertising.Placing ads is not particularly hard or technical or difficult. You simply go into Facebook and click the little down arrow on the right-hand side of the top navigation bar. You’ll get a drop down with ‘Your pages’ at the top. You want to click on ‘Create Ads’ a little further down that list and you’re off.The things you really, really need to know about Facebook advertising are as follows.First, Facebook-world distinguishes between Campaigns, Ad-sets, and Ads. The Campaign might include all the ads you use to promote a book. The Ad-sets are defined by budget and audience. The ads themselves are defined by the text and images that you use.The five great keys of Facebook advertising are:1. Start with small budgets£10 a day is fine. When you get a sense of what works, add money cautiously to the ad variant(s) that is/are working. And don’t woosh the budget up from £10 to £100, as that can throw sand in Facebook’s ad gears. Go up in 50% increments, even if you’re impatient. Watch what works – and the key metric here is cost per click. How much does it cost you to send a qualified, interested reader through to your Amazon page?2. Test, test and test againTry varying audiences, headlines and either image or ad text. Once you evolve your best audience, your best headline and so on, you can pile your resources in there. And don’t vary everything all at once. You need to be able to compare ads that are basically identical except for one thing changed.3. Always include an emotional reason to buyWhat will your book make the reader feel? What mood do you want to convey? You need to make sure that your image, your text and your headlines are all in sync with that mood.4. Always include ‘social proof’People are – rightly – suspicious of ads, because those ads want to take money off the reader. So include ‘proofs of excellence’ from whatever source you can. I have nice reviews from well-known newspapers and bloggers, so I tend to use those. Others will use things like ‘Over fifty-five-star reviews’ or ‘Readers are saying that …’ Whatever you do, make sure that your ad is conveying the idea that other people like this book. That way, no one is dumb for forking out a few dollars for it.5. Always include a rational reason to buyPeople know that they can go to Amazon any time they want to pick up books at full price, so an ad that says, in effect, ‘Here’s just one more full-price book on Amazon’ will struggle to achieve real traction. So discount your book. Slap something on the ad that says, ‘Now only £1.99’ (or similar). Your ad has got to make people feel (i) Oooh, I like the sound of that, and (ii) better get in there now, before the price goes back up.And – of course – start modestly. Track results. Stick to budgets. And be quick to pull out or pull back if things don’t go the way you want. It’s easy to spend a ton of money on Facebook – and that’s fine only if you’re making two tons of money via Amazon.So that’s our top 10 marketing tips for authors, self-published or traditionally published. The last two of these tools are extremely potent but do work best if you’ve done all or most of the other things first. Good luck, and happy marketing!

It’s probably the most-asked writers’ question:How do I get an agent?And it’s probably one of the best answered, too. There’s no lack of advice on this subject, from Jericho Writers’ own Agent Match to any number of websites and chat forums, with agents themselves, publishers, and well-known writers, all offering tips and stratagems to hook that must-have gatekeeper to publishing heaven.But what happens once you have secured an agent? How you conduct that relationship, one of the most important you’ll ever have in your writing and publishing career, is crucial. If it goes well, then that’s great. But if it goes wrong, what can you do? Where oh where is the advice you need then?Because these relationships do go wrong – a lot. It’s hard to realise that from the lack of information out there because the publishing industry doesn’t like talking about the downside. It’s an industry that thrives on the positive, not the negative – it needs writers as much as writers need it, and it doesn’t want to put them off.Which is understandable. And a bad agent-author relationship is not what the industry wants to have to deal with. But writers do have to deal with it, and deal with it more often than they might expect.Why It Goes WrongIs your agent not returning your emails or calls? Is your agent not sending your book out to all the publishers that they promised they would? Is it a personality clash? Are you just not the right ‘fit’ for one another?First of all, you want to establish if you’re making your agent any money or not. If not, then they may want rid of you, they just won’t say it. I’ve been with three agents so far. We tend to think a multiplicity of agents in our career is a bad thing, because we all know the stories of successful writers who have had the same agent since forever, who’s their best friend, their right-hand man/woman, godparent to their first born, etc. It’s the agent-author relationship we all aspire to: success on both sides, as the agent nabs the best deals with the biggest publishers, and the writer cements said agent’s income and status by selling big and winning awards. Fabulous.Unfortunately, a lot of the time it doesn’t work like that. And while we shouldn’t blame our agents if they can’t sell our work to a publisher, or if said publisher can’t sell enough of our work to the public or get it onto prestigious shortlists, we can and should hold our agents to account if they’re ignoring us as a result of our book or manuscript failing.My three agents were all very different. One was with a huge agency, two were with smaller ones, and in different locations. Two were strangers before I signed with them, one was a friend. I left all three of them, although in one case I definitely jumped before I was pushed.Why did I move on each time? Well, the first time was because I didn’t feel my agent was very engaged with my work or pushing it with publishers. Her response to my novel manuscript was generic and I worried I was going to miss out. My second book had just come out and was getting a lot of coverage. I thought I might be in a strong position to get someone else so I moved on.Some people have likened the author-agent relationship to dating, and when you want out, the excuses tend to be the same (‘It’s not you, it’s me’ – I did actually use that one; ‘I think the timing/chemistry/feeling’s just not right/there’; ‘You just don’t understand me’ etc). And because having to end it is always excruciating, we use these excuses, when the truth almost certainly lies elsewhere and goes unspoken.My second move wasn’t so much of an ending because we had a kind of understanding in the beginning that if he got me a deal, I’d stay with him, and if he didn’t, I wouldn’t (already it sounds so personal). In the end, I got my third deal myself, but I still paid him an agent fee because he’d done a good job sending round a non-fiction proposal for another book (which didn’t make it). My fourth book, a historical novel, wasn’t really his area, so I went shopping for another agent, and, after a lot of leg work, I ‘hooked’ one.What To Do When It Does Go WrongMy third agent experience was the one that really pushed the scariest questions. When you find yourself in a no-win situation and you know you want to leave, these are the ones you lie awake at night asking yourself: ‘Is it too late to back out of my contract?’ ‘Will it harm my chances of signing with anyone else if I do this again?’ ‘Is moving from agent to agent just making me look bad?’I was never given a reason for my third agent ignoring me, but it soon seemed clear why. After signing me up, she had worked with me over a few months to get my manuscript right, then sent it out with much excitement. After three months, I’d heard nothing so I emailed her but got no reply. Then just three days before Christmas, she emailed me the news that the first round of publishers had all rejected it. I burst into tears, but she had promised to send it round a second lot of publishers in the New Year, so I clung to that small ray of hope.She didn’t email me again until the end of February, and that was only because I’d eventually rung her to ask what was happening (she was ‘in a meeting’ and couldn’t come to the phone). By May, I’d had two emails from her in 8 months, no list of the publishers she’d sent my manuscript to in the first instance, despite my repeated requests to see their responses, no idea who she’d sent it to in a second round (there was no ‘second round’, as it transpired), and my requests to meet face-to-face were ignored.I couldn’t ignore it any longer – I was being ‘ghosted’, and probably because of my book’s failure to get picked up in the first round. I was being dropped, without it being spoken out loud. What on earth should I do? Hang on in there? Hope that someone out of the blue took my book and my agent started talking to me again? I looked for advice online, but there was little to help me. I asked agented friends, but they weren’t sure either.I came to the only conclusion I could. My confidence was being eroded – I hadn’t written anything in the eight months since my agent had sent out my novel, and all my ideas for other books seemed pointless. I had to stop feeling worthless because I was being ignored, and that was when I knew I had to end it.So I did. I emailed to say I wasn’t happy with her lack of response and felt that the relationship wasn’t working for me.No reply.I emailed again, this time to say quite firmly, that it was over.No reply.I posted a written letter, as my contract stated that it could be terminated only in writing.No reply.I wrote another letter.Finally, a response, thanking me for my ‘brave, wonderful novel’.It was a relief. It took another six months after I ended the contract for me to start writing again, but at least the writing did return. I don’t yet have another agent, but my confidence is still growing and I am looking for one. I’m also trying smaller publishers who don’t require submissions from an agent.10 Top Tips For Surviving The Wrong AgentI’ve learned several things from this experience, and here is my advice to anyone in a similar situation.Do not let anybody, be it agent or publisher, damage your confidence. That’s different from feeling sore after a rejection, or refusing to take advice on rewrites. It’s about protecting yourself from damaging treatment by someone who appears to be holding all the cards (because they don’t).If your agent is ignoring your emails about a new manuscript you’ve submitted, and this continues for over six months, cut them loose. They’re not working for you.If your agent promises to send your work out but they don’t, and all you get is prevarications and excuses, cut them loose, too.Agents need writers as much as writers need agents. There may be far more writers out there than there are agents, but the right one for you still exists, you just haven’t found them yet. Keep looking.Get used to the notion that in your career you may go through many agents. Just as we now move from publisher to publisher more than we did in the past, so too with agents are we more mobile. Scriptwriters in tv and film got used to this years ago; now print writers have to as well.Don’t believe an agent who promises you the moon, but do hold them to account if they’re falling below deliverable promises.Give an agent a chance to correct what they’ve done before you fire them.Don’t be afraid to talk about your bad experience. The less silence there is on this subject, the better for everyone.Trust your instincts: if your instincts say this isn’t working, then they’re probably right.Remember that, as a writer, you’re more than just a brand.Recently, my blog about this experience was viewed over 1000 times and I was inundated with writers, some very well-known, on their own bad experiences. So it does happen to most of us at some time, and it is survivable. The important thing I learned from it is to develop a sense of flexibility, appreciate your own mobility, and keep positive. This is the game, but some know how to play it better than others. You have to make sure you are one of the better informed.More On Finding An AgentHow to Find a Literary Agent (the Simple 8 Step Guide)

I know what you’re thinking. Why do I need to read a blog post about Second Novel Syndrome, when I haven’t even finished the first?Well, publishing is a funny thing. In January 2017, I wondered if I’d ever get a novel published. By March that same year, I had an agent and my book was in the London Book Fair catalogue.When it happens, it can happen fast. [Ed’s Note: It kinda helps if you come to one of Jericho Writers’ events. That’s where the magic happened for our Sarah.]What Is Second Novel Syndrome?Second novel syndrome (SNS) isn’t talked about a lot. I spent twelve years writing books and trying to get an agent, and I didn’t think much about what would happen after that. Getting an agent felt like an impossible end goal.It wasn’t.Second books are actually notoriously difficult to write. I know – I didn’t think they would be, either. I wrote three ‘practice’ books before I made it with my debut. What’s the big deal about writing one more?SNS Symptom #1 – You Have Way Less TimeI started my debut novel in July 2014. In 2015, I completely trashed the draft and started again. In 2016, I wrote my next draft as part of a writing course, and then completely changed it again in the summer of that year, thanks to some feedback from an agent.All in all, the novel took me two and a half years to write – and then another year editing it with my agent and editors after that.When I casually asked my agent when publishers expect an author’s second book, she said ‘usually a year after delivery of the first’.Yep – a year.Somewhere in that year, I had to come up with an astounding concept that was as good as the first. I had to research, plan and write a terrible first draft (that I could bin and re-write entirely, before no doubt re-writing again). All of this whilst trying to hold down a full-time job and all those other things that go with being a human being.The cure: make more timeCertainly not an easy feat. For me, I’ve had to cut my working week to four days, so I have at least one day to donate entirely to writing. I work from home as much as I can, so I have more energy to write in the evenings.This won’t be doable for everyone. Find the pockets of time you can squeeze out of your day, no matter how big or small, knuckle down and make that happen.SNS Symptom #2 – You Now Have Multiple Projects On Your HandsI’m a bit of a loyal writer. When I have my head in a book, it consumes me.Over the last year, I’ve learnt that it’s not really possible to write a second book and have it consume you. I’ve had to split my time between writing my new book and editing my old one – occasionally dropping the new project completely to make a deadline.Some writers are already brilliant at project juggling. For me – it’s been a big learning curve.The cure: learn how to juggle projectsAs your writing career progresses, you’re going to have more and more projects to juggle. When you’re writing your fifth book, you might still be doing events on your debut.No one talks about it, but it is one of those skills you have to learn if you want to be a professional writer.I’m still in the process of learning it, but so far, I’ve found that sectioning my working week can help differentiate between projects. In the morning, I could be working on debut edits from home. Then in the afternoon, I take my laptop to a café and I throw some words down for book two.SNS Symptom #3 – You Can’t Shake Off Your Last BookMy debut was written in first person present, from the point of view of a girl with a distinctive voice and a weird way of seeing the world.I’ve spent three and a half years with her, and I’m still with her now. She’s difficult to shake off.I’ve written over a hundred first pages of my new novel, and they’re still not quite right. I need a new, equally distinctive, but completely different voice – but everything I write still seems to be about her.The cure: get out of your comfort zoneIf, like me, you’re struggling to find a new voice, try writing your story in a completely different way to your first.For example, I’ve found writing in verse to be a helpful way in. Writing poetry means I can get to know my new character in a place my previous protagonist doesn’t belong.Yes – I’ll probably scrap every word. But with first drafts, everything and anything you can write will help you reach the finish line.SNS Symptom #4 – Your Next Book Needs To Be As Good As Your FirstAs a writer, I feel the need to impress. My agent is amazing – she fights in my corner and believes wholeheartedly in my writing. I want to hand her a new novel that is even more amazing than she thought my first one was.Unfortunately, what I’m actually writing is terrible. I mean – of course it is. She saw my debut after two rewrites and a year of edits. All she’s going to see now is that first draft I’m going to throw away.Knowing this doesn’t make it any easier.And, of course, when we’re writing something we don’t think is as good as it could be, it can be difficult to keep going. It becomes easier to stop for a bit, maybe have a tidy up, or obsessively scour Pinterest for home décor ideas...(Not that I do that.)The cure: forget about other peopleThis one I definitely find the hardest, as I have a (somewhat ridiculous) need to please people.The truth is though – other people don’t matter when it comes to first drafts. Anyone who writes, or who knows writing, will know that first drafts are for the writer to work out what it is they want to write.First drafts of book two do not need to be as good as your finished debut.And – all because you have an agent now, doesn’t mean you are suddenly a know-it-all, master writer. All writers need to keep learning and – importantly – keep making mistakes.The important thing is that we keep writing. That’s the only way horrible first drafts get turned into published novels.Second Novel Syndrome: A CureThere is no complete cure for Second Novel Syndrome other than just doing it.But do remember this:Jericho Writers is a club for writers like you. Like us, in fact.

What are the pros and cons?What does a publisher do?Which route generates more money?Are self-published books successful?And which approach is right for you?When I wrote my first book, things were easy. You wanted to sell books? You needed to get hold of a book publishers. Simple.The rise of Amazon and the e-book obliterated all those old certainties – and made a whole array of exciting new options of how to publish a book available to authors. But this leaves one important question for writers; do you follow traditional publishing routes or explore self publishing possibilities?In the twenty years since my first book deal, I’ve published books both traditionally, and self published them as an indie author. I’ve made money and hit bestseller lists via both routes. But even now, if you asked me “which is better?”, I couldn’t tell you.Either option has advantages and disadvantages, and some types of author will find one specific route obviously appropriate to them. Other authors will just find it a hard call, because both routes look attractive.The purpose of this blog post is, therefore, to lay out the pluses and minuses of traditional publishing, and of self-publishing. I’m not going to tell you what you ought to do. I will tell you what to expect in terms of pros and cons.So sit tight. Let’s start with some basic definitions.What’s The Difference Between Traditional And Self Publishing?Traditional publishing (or just “trad publishing”):Means that the intellectual property rights in your manuscript are purchased outright by a publishing company (often a large multinational). The best known publishers include Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Macmillan, and others.The sale normally takes place via a literary agent (and novelists, especially, will benefit from having an agent),The publisher will use its corporate contacts to make your book available for sale as widely as possible. That means you can expect your book to be sold via every e-tailer (notably Amazon), but also chain bookstores (Barnes & Noble or Waterstones, for example), supermarkets, indie bookstores, and so on.Your book will almost certainly appear in print – and quite likely in four separate editions (hardback, paperback, e-book, audio.)You stand a chance of being reviewed by formal outlets, such as newspapers.You would normally expect to receive an advance.If your sales are such that your advance ‘earns out’, you will also receive royalties – though many authors don’t see royalties at all.Your book now belongs to the publisher. If you want it back – that’s just tough. If you don’t like their marketing – that’s just tough. If you change your mind and want to go indie – well, you’ll either need to buy the rights back or just write a new book.In essence, you are selling your work to a corporation, and that corporation will go about exploiting those rights. Sure, you can expect your editor to be nice to you, and to listen to your viewpoint and all the rest of it. But you’ve sold the book, and you’ve lost control. That’s not a bad thing necessarily, but you need to understand the basic nature of the transaction.Self publishing (or “indie publishing”, or “e-publishing on Amazon”) is a totally different proposition.Self Publishing:Means you never sell rights to the book. It’s yours.That also means there’s no advance in self-publishing. Rather the opposite: you’ll need to make some investments upfront, even if they’re not very large.Most indie sales take the form of e-books. (My own e-book sales volume is about 25 times greater than my print sales volume, and I’m not exceptional.)Means you are highly unlikely to see your book sold in physical bookstores on any kind of national or international basis. (Local store owners might be happy to stock a handful of books on sales or return, but that’s just being nice. You won’t make many sales from that route.)Equally, you won’t get reviewed in newspapers.And you’re responsible for everything: creating your product, marketing it, choosing an ebook format, everything.We’ve adorned this blog post with pictures of old-fashioned rotary phones in a (slightly feeble) attempt to suggest that the trad vs indie issue marks a dichotomy as profound as the analogue phone / smartphone one. But the trad / indie division isn’t about a simple technical evolution. After all, modern publishers use plenty of technology too. They sell on Amazon too.Really, what we’re looking at is a totally new ability for indie authors to reach a worldwide audience without the support of a corporate publisher. Amazon created that ability, and it’s astonishing, and it’s wonderful.But Big 5 publishers can also get you in front of a very broad audience.So which route do you choose? Which option do you take?Who Makes More Money?Traditional Publishing vs Self PublishingThere are a lot of questions with unclear, blurry answers.This question has a clear and emphatic one.Indie authors are, today, generating more money from their work than traditionally published ones. That situation is likely to become progressively more true over time. It remains true, no matter which income level you want to look at.Here, for example, is one graphic from the excellent AuthorEarnings.com:To see that, look first at the left hand side of the graph: “Authors who debuted in the past century”. Clearly, that includes a host of huge-selling and long-established traditionally published names -that’s the category where you find your Lee Childs, your John Grishams, your Stephen Kings.But those guys were all established before indie publishing was a thing. More relevant to your situation is the cluster of bars on the right of the graph: “authors who debuted in the past three years.” You’ll see that the number of indie-published authors (in blue) vastly exceeds the number of Big 5 authors (in mauve). That is, there are way, way more authors earning $50,000 or more on Amazon than there are trad authors.Now yes, trad authors may have better access to income sources beyond Amazon. (eg: Barnes & Noble, other physical retail outlets, non-Amazon e-stores, foreign translation deals, film & TV money, etc), but:(A) you can exaggerate the size of that disparity.I self-publish my Fiona Griffiths books and I’ve sold audio rights, foreign rights, and am in detailed discussions on a possible major TV deal. Many more experienced indies would be in the same approximate position.(B) the picture doesn’t change, even if you allow for greater non-Amazon income on the part of trad authors.This post isn’t quite the right place to go into all that. The numbers are now a little out of date, but if anything today’s numbers are even more favourable to indies.How Come Self Publishers Make More Money?Well, it’s not rocket science. If a trad author sells $100 of ebooks on Amazon, Amazon will keep $30 as its (very fair) retailer share. The rest passes to the publisher, who will keep 75% of the amount, passing the rest (25% * $70 = $17.50) to that author’s agent.That author’s agent will help themselves to their contractual 15% and pass the balance (85% *$17.50 = $14.88) to the author.So trad authors makes $14.88 from $100 of e-sales.Not a lot, right?The indie author sells $100 on Amazon. They get $70. No deductions, just cash in the pocket, paid monthly, and with exceptionally clear and detailed reporting.Indie authors make $70.00 from $100 of e-sales.That huge – almost fivefold – difference in what a trad author gets from an e-book sale and what an indie author gets from the same sale accounts for the basic difference in income levels.The fact is: an indie author can price their books more cheaply than a trad author’s, and sell fewer copies, and still make more money.That is the golden engine behind the entire self-publishing revolution.But even if you’re quite focused on money, the “who earns more?” question doesn’t settle all debate. You need to remember, for example, that:Traditionally published authors will (mostly) get an advance.Self published authors will be putting time and money into the publication and marketing process. Focusing on top-line revenues ignores all that.The “top of the world” type outcomes are still way more common with trad than with indie publishing. (I’m talking about explosive international successes like Gone Girl, or Girl on a Train. It’s not that hits like these are ever frequent, nor that huge hits are impossible via indie routes, but that level of global attention does mostly fall to trad published authors. It’s just the way it is.)Lots of self published authors sell effectively nothing. They may make a loss from self publishing. In fact, it’s probably true that a majority of indie authors lose money (because their books are bad, or their marketing is bad, or both. Equally, lots of traditionally-oriented authors knock at the gates of the traditional industry and are never admitted. Those guys don’t make money either.)And forget about the boosters from either camp.Making money from either trad or indie publishing is hard. Most writers don’t earn a living from what they do. There are a zillion other reasons to write of course (because it’s brilliant!), but Earning Fame and Fortune isn’t one of them.Want to know how I earn $100,000 a year from self publishing, with minimal effort?Well, I’ve put together an entire video course on the subject, that runs you through the entire self-pub process and will ensure you avoid all the mistakes I made along the way. The course is expensive to buy – so don’t buy it! It’s free to members of Jericho Writers – and we’d just love it if you chose to join our club. All the info you need is here. I really hope you hop on board.Traditional Vs Self Publishing: Different Genres/AuthorsWhat’s right for you?One of the problems with the traditional vs self publishing question is that the advantages and disadvantages of the two routes vary depending on who the author is.So here is a quick tour of the major issues.Do Traditional Publishers Even Want You?As a very rough guide, literary agents receive about 2,000 submissions a year, and they are likely to take on 2-3 authors from that torrent.Put another way, you have a roughly 1 in 1,000 chance of being taken on by a given agent.And suppose an agent does take you on. Even then, the agent may sell hawk your book around, only to find that no one wants it. Or someone does want it, but only a micro-publisher who has no money to spend either on author advances or (more serious yet) on marketing. Or you end up with a digital-only imprint that won’t get your book into bookshops, which is the thing you always had your heart set on.The truth is, I’m not sure that those Stats of Doom should alter your decision one way or the other.Here’s the simple truth:You can’t sell a bad book.I mean, yes, sure, you can make some sales with almost anything. But if you want to make a career at this game, you need to write well enough to persuade a large audience that you have what it take. And that’s why the top indies move in and out of traditional publishing with ease. Mark Dawson was published by Macmillan, then switched to indiedom. Hugh Howey was and is an indie, but he’s done some huge traditional deals too.The levels of quality needed aren’t set by your choice of publishing route. They’re set by readers. So the bar is set high, no matter what.And that’s good. We’re writers. We want to write well. So please: raise that bar.What Genre Is Your Book?Indie authors do well in genre fiction – and the more genre the better.So if you take a niche like military sci-fi or out-and-out romance, you’ll find that indies account for 80% or more of the market. Indies also do very well in crime, thrillers, westerns, SF, fantasy, young adult, women’s fiction, and so on.At the same time, there is essential no indie market for serious literary fiction.If you want to write the kind of books that could sit alongside work by Jonathan Franzen or Elizabeth Strout etc, then you can forget about self-publishing completely. The route just won’t work for you.WIth non-fiction, if your work is the sort of thing that might be found by its title (“How to Make Your Own Sausages”), then self publishing is very viable indeed. If it’s a one-off (eg: Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow), then indie publishing will not work.Short message:Genre fiction and subject-led non-fiction work very well on the indie model. With anything else – take care.Are You Writing In A Series?That sounds like a funny question, right, but here’s the thing:For indie authors, series fiction sells way, way better than non-series fiction.Here, for example, is data collected by Smashwords which shows that around three quarters of bestselling fiction (in Smashwords’ own sample) is series-driven. At the bottom end, around two-thirds of the books are standalones.And sure, Smashwords’s userbase isn’t quite representative of the broader indie market – but the fact is that series books sell much, much better than standalones: probably in large part, because an indie author’s selling tools work better for such work.If you are currently writing standalone work, but are intending to explore the indie route, I’d urge you to consider how you could series-ify your work. For example, if you write standalone private investigator novels, maybe your PIs could all work for the same agency, or run up against the same cops, or drink in the same bars or, really, anything to say to the reader, “Yes, this is the world you know and love.”Short message:If your work is not currently written in a series, then either think of ways to series-ify it . . . or consider traditional publishing as a better option.Are You Prolific?Most successful indie authors will have lists of a dozen or more books for sale. Indeed, plenty of indies will really only hit six-digit earnings when they have 15-20 titles available.if you just can’t see yourself writing that many books or if you don’t want to be under pressure to write 2-4 books a year (or even more), then the traditional route may be better for you.But think about it. You may be able to write faster than you think. A writer’s first book is often a learning experience and often a wrestling match to get into shape. Books do come more easily with time, so you may be a faster writer than you quite realise at this stage.Do You Want Traditional Acclaim?What do you think will fulfil you as a writer?Is it book sales and money and being able to give up work? If that’s the case, then the indie-publishing route may be better for you.Or are you OK for money already? Do you want, instead, to see your work in ‘real’ bookshops? Do you want book reviews in proper newspapers? Do you want to be invited to literary festivals and invited to talk on radio, and all the rest of it?If you want all those signs of acclaim, then traditional publishing is probably your only route to fulfilment. Please note that traditional publishing does not guarantee those things, not by any means. You can be traditionally published, and find that your publisher just hasn’t managed to get your book into many stores, and no newspaper reviews are forthcoming, and no literary festival is interested in hearing you speak. That experience is, indeed, more common than not.All the same, those good things almost always flow only to traditionally published authors, so if that’s what floats your boat, you know what to do.Are You Entrepreneurial? Will You Relish The Challenge Of Self Publishing?Let’s face it.Self publishing isn’t easy. You will either have to take on the following roles, or commission third parties to handle them for youAuthoring (that’s your job!)Structural editingCopy-editing (try our copy-editing service here)Book formatting (e-book and print)Copy writing (book description)Cover designingWebsite constructionEmail list: building blocksEmail list: copyFinanceAdvertising strategyAdvertising creativeAdvertising monitoring and adjustmentAside from the authoring, most of those things will either be done by your traditional publishers, or they’ll ignore them completely (effective digital marketing? from a Big 5 publisher? Hmm).That still leaves some things down to you (notably, your website and email list) but no one will fret too much if you don’t do them at all.In other words: if you want to be left alone to write and do not much else of anything, that is more possible with traditional publishing than it is with self publishing. It’s not advisable either way. But is it possible? Yes.How Much Work Is Really Involved?There are a lot of misconceptions about the amount of work involved in self-publishing and the type of work required. The result is that writers can make poor decisions because their information is faulty. It’s really easy to think, “Jeepers, I don’t want to do all that, so I’ll just have some highly paid, very experienced professionals to do it all for me.”And yes, OK, there’s some truth in that – but only some.So here are some countervailing thoughts:It’s still the case that traditional publishing tends to handle Amazon sales quite badlyI can’t even count the number of trad authors I know who tear their hair out with low energy & unintelligent e-marketing from their publishers. Indie authors who watch that hair-tearing just feel mildly puzzled that the whole thing should seem so arduous. Selling on Amazon is (in many ways) easy!There is quite a lot of author-input needed in traditional publishingAs soon as you engage on the traditional publishing process, you will notice that (a) you care a lot more about your book than anyone else does, and (b) you don’t have any control over anything – you signed control away when you sold your book. The consequence is that, to make a difference to things, you have to work quite hard and from a place where your tools are cajoling / asking / yelling, rather than simply an ability to give orders. (“No, sorry, I don’t like that. Can you redo it? Thanks.”)Much of the work in self publishing is around setting up your sales channelThere IS quite a lot of work and some expense in getting your website and email list set up as you need it to be. But that work takes place upfront. It’s basically a one-off. It’ll save you time and make you money for ever after.Short message:There is work involved in both routes and, believe me, you’ll care enough about your book that you’re happy to do any amount of work if that gets it sold.Final ThoughtsWhat’s right for you?You should probably go indie if:You are entrepreneurialYou aren’t totally scared of a few numbers and a bit of tech. (You don’t need great expertise here; you just can’t have a powerful irrational aversion!)You are able to be fairly prolificYou write genre fiction or subject led non-fictionYou are happy to write in a seriesYou favour income/readers over traditional bookstore sales / traditional channels of acclaim.The more you check those boxes, the more definitely you are an indie author. If those boxes really, really don’t apply to you, you should go for the trad route.And if you check some, but not all, boxes – well, it’s up to you. There’s no right or wrong answer here, and you don’t have to make a once-and-f0r-all choice. You can start out indie and go trad (or hybrid) later if you choose to. You can start out trad and migrate the other way if you prefer.Truth is, this is a great time to be an author. You have more choice and more possibility than ever before. Enjoy the freedom – and happy writing!

Over the years, there have been countless bold (and sometimes barmy) predictions about the future of the publishing industry – and of course the industry is still evolving at a rate unprecedented since Guttenberg first looked at a wine press and thought, ‘Hey, now hang on a minute…’The rate of change means that the future remains highly uncertain, but then, as the cyberpunk writer William Gibson commented, ‘The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.’ Gibson’s point is well made. The trends that will determine the future are here today. Making predictions about that future really come down to a judgement about how those trends are going to play out.What follows is a set of predictions and to each one I’ve assigned a probability rating of how likely it is to happen. I should also be clear that I’m not talking about publishing as a whole, or even book publishing – just that corner of it (‘trade publishing’) which deals with fiction and non-fiction for the general reader. Oh, and the illustrations that dot this piece? They’re visions of the future from the past, just to remind us all that I’ve probably got absolutely everything wrong.Print Publishing Will CollapseProbability: <10%Print publishing is plainly not collapsing. The ebook share of trade publishing is hovering at about 21% overall, and about 38% for adult fiction. (Figures true for the US; British ones are not that different.) There are serious suggestions by people on the e-book side of things that the ebook market is going to shrink in 2014, rather than expanding. For what it’s worth, I’d guess that the ebook market share will actually grow a little over time, but not so fast that it won’t have down years as well as up years. Either way, print publishing is here to stay.The Big Book Chains Will Go BankruptProbability: >30%I desperately hope the chains don’t go out of business. They do a wonderful job. They are culturally vital. They are essential for ‘discoverability’. And of course, there are genres which are highly dependent on print sales through bookshops. I would also say that, in the UK, Waterstones’ new management is doing a terrific job in challenging circumstances and if anyone can turn the chain around, then they’re the people to do it.All that said, until the big book chains (here and in the US) prove themselves able to make a consistent non-marginal profit, the doubt has to remain. At the moment, Waterstones is in loss as is Barnes & Noble in the US. That’s scary.Publishers Will ConsolidateProbability: 100%I’ve slightly cheated there because the consolidation is already happening. Penguin/Random House is the landmark deal for sure, but Hachette has just announced the acquisition of Perseus in the US. These things will progress. The big operators are going to get bigger. That will also mean that Amazon will have a tough job pushing publishers around, because both sides simply need each other too much. Random Penguins wouldn’t, most likely, be profitable without Amazon – but Amazon can’t be the everything store if it doesn’t stock a third of the books market.Price Pressures Will Ease, But Prices Will Still Come DownProbability: 70%Again: the future is with us now. When ebooks first became a force in the industy, publishers tried to maintain paperback style pricing for a digital product. That was a vain attempt and indie publishers simply raced in to the gap left open. Result: publishers allowed ebook prices to float – but those indie publishers who actually wanted to make money as opposed to simply finding readers, realised that revenue maximisation was likelier to happen around the $3-5 range than the $0.99 one. What we see now is probably where prices will settle, give or take a bit of ongoing downward movement. A revenue collapse in publishing analogous to what happened in the musical download market simply has not taken place, and it’s in no one’s interest (except readers’) that it should.Piracy Will Kill Writing For ProfitProbability: <10%See above. Essentially this hasn’t happened and won’t happen, except that what happens in each different national market depends on things like the attitude to piracy, the effectiveness of official sanctions, the price level in that market, the ease of using legitimate services, and so on. So yes, there could be major problems in specific national markets, but there won’t be an apocalypse. Phew!Big Publishers Will Print More Trash … And Micro-publishers Will Take A Larger Share Of Literary PrizesProbability: 100%Again, this is a part of the future that has essentially happened and won’t reverse. Random House made a huge amount of money and everyone else followed suit to the best of their ability. Likewise, the indie revolution has shown that there are plenty of low-brow genre works that readers are happy to gobble up. Big Publishing has always been about turning a buck, so it’s only logical that publishers are happy to go where readers lead them.The flip side of that coin is that Big Publishing has long struggled to make a go of ‘smaller’ literary novels. The number of those things being published by the big guys has fallen sharply over the years and that’s not about to reverse. But of course, terrific literary fiction is still being written and there are still people passionate enough (and financially crazy enough) to ensue that the stuff gets published. Our own Elly Millar and Sam Jordison (two of our fine editors) founded Galley Beggar Press out of passion – and they’ve just had their first absolutely smash hit success. Such stories are far more common than they were, and will only go on increasing.Ebooks Will Dominate Various Niches And Be Almost Irrelevant In OthersProbability: 75%In the US, crime fiction is already an ebook genre. Some 75% of sales are electronic, and the ratio for romance (if we include indie authors, as we ought to) is probably even greater. SFF, paranormal romance, fan fiction, anything dystopian … all these are areas where ebooks do and will continue to predominate. With literary fiction, the reverse is true. It’s hard to think of a single literary novel which arose out of the e-book industry and there will be very few where print sales don’t predominate. Those things show no signs of altering.The Old Channels Of Acclaim Still MatterProbability: >80%Following on from the above point, literary novelists are still highly dependent on the old channels of acclaim. All the old methods for establishing reputations still apply: prominence in bookshops, good reviews, puffs from Important People, festivals and mainstream media appearances.For non-literary types, those things may be less essential – it’s easy to think of a genre sensation arising without any of those things. James Oswald, would be just one example. EL James and High Howey would be others. There are a lot of them. That said, however, a good majority of genre authors – especially mid- and upmarket genre authors – are well served by those old channels and breakout exceptions in these areas will continue to be the exception not the rule.There Will Be Swaths Of Non-fiction Where Indie Authors Will (Or Should) PredominateProbability: 50%Want a good book on bee-keeping? Or help you improve your archery, or groom your poodle? If so, your local bookshop will almost certainly disappoint you. Very few bookshops stock a range of titles large enough to house these kind of niche non-fiction needs, which means that you will almost certainly head to Amazon or some other online seller.But that raises the question what publishers are for in these areas. For sure, they can edit, copy-edit, design and print a book – but those things are all fairly easily purchased elsewhere. In return, publishers currently ask for 75% of all ebook receipts and a somewhat similar share of receipts from bookshops (net of printing & logistics costs).For most authors, that’s a pretty lousy deal. Indeed, I’ve written two such non-fiction titles in my time (How to Write and Getting Published). One of those books sees about 2/3 of its total sales taking place online. The other sees more than 4/5 of its sales down that route. Now I’m no idiot: I could perfectly well have self-published both titles. I’d have lost some – not many – bookshop sales, but I’d have made a stack load by retaining the full share of receipts from Amazon. Most niche non-fiction authors will be in a similar position.At present, it’s fair to say that most non-fiction authors haven’t noticed these new economics (and I sold those two titles a few years back when the market was different), but that’ll change. The one slam-bam advantage that regular publishers do have and will retain is the kudos of having a ‘properly’ published book. Which is weird, when you think about it: regular publishing could become the new vanity publishing, for certain categories of title at any rate.More ‘Traditional’ Authors Will Go Hybrid; Successful Indie Authors Will Also Team With Traditional PublishersProbability: 80%It’s already happening and will happen ever more and with bigger names. And the logic is inescapable. It’s incredibly easy and cheap to e-publish – and though Big Publishing will continue to have clout and authority, those advantages are not insuperable. Plenty of ‘trad’ authors will think that giving conventional publishers 75% of e-royalties for, erp, just what exactly? is a game not worth playing. So we’ll see trad authors (like Barry Eisler) go indie … but we’ll also see indie authors use traditional routes wherever it makes sense. Hugh Howey, for example, is held up (with good reason) as the voice of Indie Publishing, but he also partners up with traditional publishers wherever it makes sense. And quite right too. It’s not ideology; it’s business. This trend will sharpen abruptly over the next few years and will start to include some big conventional names. And that’s good if you’re an author, potentially scary if you’re a publisher.Indie Authors Will Go On ProfessionalisingProbability: 75%Time was when you could tell an indie book cover at a hundred yards, and not in a good way. Ditto, when it came to presentation, copy-editing and story-telling. But even at $0.99, readers want a decent read and authors have responded. Editorial excellence still matters. So does strong presentation. Indie authors have learned those lessons and there will be an ever-smaller gap between the well-published indie novel and the traditionally published sort. Obviously, I’m biased, but I do think that editorial services like our own will continue to matter. (And if your novel needs editorial help, then don’t just sit there – go get it.)Publishers Will Find It Increasingly Hard To Market Books – But Discoverability Will Not Be An Issue For ReadersProbability: 80%Publishers find it much, much harder to market books than they used to. Let’s tick off the ways that have either failed or become much less effective:Direct consumer advertising – this is now minimal, except for blockbusters.Buying store position – this still happens, but it’s less significant than it was.Review coverage in major newspapers – the available space has shrunk massively.Other publicity (interviews and the like) – much less space and airtime given to authors.Getting sales teams to pitch hard to bookshops – yes, but bookshops account for a smaller share of the market.Building websites to promote a particular book – now never happens; the strategy never worked.Building gizmos that would go viral – right, sure, that technique always worked.Tooting the horn on social media – yes, but the sales impact of such tooting is usually minimal.Getting the author out and about, for book signings and the like – never happened much, never sold many books. Nothing much has changed except that people have realised the effort is largely ineffectual.Direct e-mailings to aficionados of particular genres – yes, but publishers don’t tend to know their audience that well. Jericho Writers’ excellent mailing list is at least twice as big as those of some publishers I could mention.Using clever SEO and metadata techniques to improve online visibility – that’s hardly a marketing technique, to be honest. Metadata is just catalogue info if it comes down to it. And though these things do matter, the net gain (from an industry wide standpoint) is zero sum.It’s somewhat depressing to review that list, but I doubt if many publishers would disagree – and you’ll often hear publishers bemoaning a ‘discoverability problem’, that is the difficulty of getting good new books to the attention of readers.If that complaint means, “it’s harder for us to market books now than it used to be”, then it’s true. If it means that an increasing share of sales now lies with a handful of super-successful books and authors at the top end, then it’s also true. If it means that readers themselves have trouble in choosing their next book – well, no. Readers today have far more recommendation devices than they used to. It’s not just friends, bookshops and newspapers, it’s a gazillion blogs, it’s Goodreads, it’s book clubs (more common now than in the past), it’s social media, and so on. Me; I don’t like a world where everyone only reads bestsellers but maybe that’s just how readers are if you let them read what they want.And last because this is getting to be an overly long post:The Number Of Books Sold Will Remain Broadly Flat; The Average Cost Of A Book Will Drop A Little; Amazon Will Get More, Publishers Less; Authors’ Share May ImproveProbability: phew, tough one, let’s go big and say 75%Number of books remaining broadly flat that’s an easy call. The number of books always remains about the same. Has done for years. Even with all this internettery and mobile stuff, people still read books.Average cost of a book: the average cost of a book has drifted down a little over the years. It’s very hard to see real price increases and even nominal price increases are unlikely given that intelligently applied price discounts are one of the most reliable ways to impact book sales. On top of that, indie authors will always be willing to undercut Big Publishing. So, yes, the price of a book will drift down (in real terms).Amazon getting more of the pie: Amazon gets a rough old treatment in the press. Publishers hate it. Authors complain about it or give loads of money to rivals. Agents rebuke it. The Society of Authors sounds off about it.This is all slightly odd for a number of different reasons. From a love-of-literature point of view, Amazon has brought all the books of the world to every internet-connected household and does so at wonderfully low prices. That’s a stunning achievement in the spread of human knowledge, a real milestone. What’s more, yes Amazon is a big company in terms of market capitalisation and revenues, but – get this – it doesn’t make much money. Random House on its own makes more money than Amazon. Bertelsmann (RH’s owner) makes way more money. When big publishers get into fights over terms with Amazon, they tend to talk like a small dairy farmer being squeezed by Tescos. And that’s plain weird. They’re making loads of money because of Amazon! Amazon isn’t (yet) making much money for all of its market heft.So my prediction really just amounts to this: terms will be rebalanced in Amazon’s favour because some such reckoning is overdue. In addition, since, in the past, publishers earned their share of the cake by effectively marketing the books that authors entrusted them with, it makes share for them to get a little less cake now that much of the marketing power has shifted into other hands. The process will be painful for publishers but – given what’s happened in the music industry – not all that painful. It could have been a lot, lot worse.For you and me, the only prediction that matters is authors’ share of the pie – but for the very first time since I’ve been an author (first book deal: 1998), I can honestly say that things are looking up. Historically, authors have been largely powerless. We had to get into bookshops, or we had no readers. There were only a small (now even smaller) group of publishers who could get us there. Careers were short, incomes small, prospects always precarious. That wasn’t true for the biggest sellers of course, but such sellers are and will always be few and far between.And these days? Well, a lot of that still applies – but (A) we are not now solely dependent on bookshops and (B) self-publishing is cheap and easy. That’s not a perfect negotiating foil by any means (it’s better if you’re a genre writer, almost useless if you’re literary), but an imperfect negotiating position is better than none at all. These are interesting times and for the first time in my more than 15 years in the business I think authors’ incomes might creep up. And at the very least, I can’t see our share of the pie shrinking any further.But what do you think?So much for me, but what about you? What do you think is going to happen? What do you think ought to happen? And do you approve?

The first time I thought I’d finished my novel was in November 2015. It was 80,000 words and it had a beginning, a middle and an end, and I’d given it to some friends for feedback and made some minor changes. I was DONE. Well done, me!I sent it off to a couple of competitions and put my feet up, resolving to send it to some agents in the new year. I felt very, very pleased with myself.The next time I thought I’d finished my novel was the summer of 2016.I’d been shortlisted for one of the prizes I entered and had some feedback from agents and publishers. I’d done a rewrite, swallowed my pride, deleted a load of my beautiful, precious words to make way for new ones, and done another proof.I mean … NOW I was done, right?The next time was the spring of 2017. I had found a brilliant agent who loved my book and had some ideas of how to make it even better. We had worked on it together, tweaking, making changes, polishing and rearranging. Now, it was the eve of the London Book Fair and we were officially ready to send it out on submission. The book was surely finished.In September that year I started working with my publisher and editor. Of course, the fact that “editor” is a job title should have tipped me off that she may want me to spend further time on the work. I was really happy about the changes that we were making together! It was exciting to be nearly finished.In October that year I discovered that line edits were different to structural edits.In November I discovered that copy edits are different again.In January 2018, I was sent a fully typeset manuscript to proofread. My book, typeset! Now for real it was done, hurray!All I would have to do, I was sure, was have a quick skim through to make sure it was all in order – something I had done many times before – tell them it was all okay, and we were off. I set aside a whole day to do this, which seemed excessive. I figured I would probably be able to knock off and go to the pub mid-afternoon.In late March, after a fair few back and forths and me spending an entire panicked weekend staring at a text, believing myself to have forgotten how to read. (Professional proofreaders spend FIFTY HOURS with a novel, guys! It turns out you can’t knock it out in a long afternoon.) I got an email from my production manager. She said that this was the very last round of edits, and that after this one, we wouldn’t make any more changes – it would be sent to the printers. It would finally and truly be done.As I emailed back the approval, I didn’t feel as triumphant as I thought I would. I felt a little bit sad, almost scared. I’d spent so long with that book, with my protagonist and in my world. I didn’t really want to let her go. I love that book. What if I couldn’t write anything as good ever again? I almost didn’t want to sign the proofs off.But I did it. I hit send, and I turned back to my work in progress. And over the next couple of weeks, I found I had a lot of energy on this new project. It seems so unlikely that a scrappy little manuscript will ever come to anything, but I think this one can. I know I could do it again, you see, because I’ve done it before.I’ve finally finished a novel.Some Tips On Letting Go:Admit to yourself that there is no such thing as perfect. It can be easy to hide behind perfectionism as an excuse for never putting your work out there. Obviously, if you’re sending work to agents, it should be as good as you can possibly get it, but it will never be 100% there. When you get to 99%, it’s time to move on.Value your time. Writing a novel takes ages – of course it does! But it does not take an infinite amount of time. Weeks spent “polishing” without adding value to your nearly-finished project are time that could be spent on your next book.Have a process. With such a huge, overwhelming task as writing a novel, I find it really helpful to have clearly defined stages, with multiple drafts. I do three drafts and then start showing people my work, with a different round of edits after every batch of feedback. It’s a lot to work through, but at least if you have a plan, you know when you’re at the end of it.

What Are Defamation And Libel?Firstly, you might hear the terms used interchangeably: libel and defamation mean effectively the same thing, and they refer to any published material that damages the reputation of an individual or an organisation. You might hear the term \'slander\' thrown about as well, which is defined as ‘defamation by word of mouth’. As well as books, this covers material on the internet as well as radio and television broadcasts – so even drama and fiction can be defamatory if they damage someone’s reputation.You can only publish defamatory material if it comes within one of the recognised legal defences. If it doesn’t, the publication will amount to libel and you may have to pay substantial damages.The Purpose Of Libel LawLibel law protects individuals or organisations from unwarranted, mistaken or untruthful attacks on their reputation.A person is libelled if a publication:Exposes them to hatred, ridicule or contempt.Causes them to be shunned or avoided.Generally lowers them in the eyes of society.Discredits them in their trade, business or profession.Get Your Facts RightThe most important point is to make absolutely sure that what you are printing or writing is true. Do not make claims or accusations that you cannot prove. Even if you think you can do this, be cautious. Proving things in court can be very difficult.And the test of what the words mean is what a reasonable reader is likely to take as their natural and ordinary meaning, in their full context – what you intended as the author or publisher is irrelevant.If you write something that cannot be substantiated, the credibility of your site, organisation or cause may be questioned. It can also land you with an expensive lawsuit and there is no legal aid for libel cases.The Burden Of Proof Lies With The DefendantIn libel cases, the burden of proof lies with the defendant (the author or publisher, in writing-example terms) and not the plaintiff. In other words, you must prove that what you write is true. The person you’ve targeted does not have to prove that you’re wrong. This is because libel laws are meant to compensate people for damage done to their reputations -- they\'re not meant to punish someone for lying.Something important to note here, as a corollary: a true statement that damages someone\'s reputation isn\'t libel! It may, however, be an invasion of privacy -- which we\'ll discuss below.Three Tips For Writing SafelyDon’t rely on the literal meaning. You cannot solely rely on proving that your statements were literally true if, when they’re taken as a whole, they have an extended, more damaging meaning. Also, for example, if somebody was guilty of fraud once, calling him a fraudster in a way which might suggest he’s still doing the same may well give rise to a libel which can’t be defended. Be especially wary when referring to events in the past.Don’t exaggerate in your claims or language. For example, a company may run a factory which produces certain chemicals. For you to suggest that babies will be born deformed as a result may get you into libel trouble.Innuendo can catch you out. Your comments may not appear particularly defamatory taken at face value, but greater knowledge of a person or situation may make it problematic because of the innuendo. To say Mr Jones doesn’t recycle his waste paper may sound harmless enough. But to people who know that Mr Jones is a Green Party activist, the innuendo of the statement is that he is hypocritical in his politics.Common Mistakes And AssumptionsRepeating rumours. It is inadvisable to repeat a defamatory rumour unless you are in a position to prove it’s true. Even if you are contradicting the rumour you should not repeat it. And adding ‘allegedly’ is not enough to get you out of libel difficulties.Quoting others. If you publish defamatory remarks about people or organisations made by other people you will be just as liable to be sued as they are. So if you can’t prove the truth of their statements, don’t repeat them.Drawing unprovable conclusions. It is a common mistake to draw unverifiable conclusions from the basic facts. For example, if Mr Brown is seen going into a hotel room with a call-girl, this does not necessarily mean he enjoyed a ‘night of passion’, and will certainly not prove that he did.Irresponsible adjectives. Be very careful about the adjectives you use. A misplaced word can result in costly action. If you are campaigning about a factory that releases chemicals into the atmosphere, referring to the factory as ‘poisoning the atmosphere’ is inadvisable.Defences Against LibelThe law lays down a few ways in which defamatory publications may be defended. If the defences succeed, the publisher wins. But if they don’t succeed, the publisher loses: the complainant will have been libelled and will therefore be entitled to be paid damages and their legal costs. The defences are listed below.First, justification. The most usual defence against libel is to prove that the information published is true. But this can be a dangerous route because an unsuccessful plea could increase the damages against you because you will have increased the harm to the complainant. And remember, you must be able to deal with every libellous possibility, such as inference and innuendo.If your statement implies something greater, it is not enough to prove that the statement is just literally true. Merely asserting something will not be sufficient to prove that it’s true – you will need witnesses and documents to back up assertions (whether they’re yours or someone you’re quoting).Second, fair comment. This covers content, mainly opinion, that cannot by its very nature be true or false. To be properly defensible, these comments must be: based on fact, made in good faith, and published without malice.Here\'s a great example (albeit an older one): in 2001, Daily Mail lost a libel action brought by the former Tottenham Hotspur chairman Alan Sugar over the remark that he was a “miser” when he ran the club because he didn’t give his manager enough money to buy top class players. The jury were not sufficiently persuaded that there was any factual basis for making this comment. They didn’t deem it fair comment. He was awarded £100,000.Last, privilege. Privilege is the defence where the law recognises that individuals should be free to speak their minds (and others to report what they say) without fear of being sued even if they get their facts wrong. It allows people to speak freely in court proceedings and debates in government, and allows for such proceedings to be reported, so long as the reports are both fair and accurate.The Right To PrivacyWriters tend to think a lot about libel issues, but they would be well to consider privacy as well. As we mentioned earlier, you might write something that\'s factually true and thus not subject to a libel suit... but it might invade someone\'s privacy. Human rights law give each of us a right of privacy, so even if you are not saying anything defamatory about me, you might nevertheless reveal enough about my personal life that I’d feel my privacy had been invaded. Under such circumstances, I would in theory have an actionable claim against you.And, as it happens, we at Jericho Writers have never seen a book that was basically publishable but which fell down on libel issues. On the other hand, we have seen examples of a book that was publishable -- except for privacy issues.The case I particularly remember was a really excellent and shocking memoir by a British-Asian woman who had been forced into an arranged marriage and had been very badly treated by both husband and mother-in-law.The husband had in fact been charged with assault by a court, and convicted, so libel issues weren’t in play. The substance of the book’s allegations had been tested in court and upheld. The text was certainly defamatory, but it was most demonstrably true.So the thing that broke the book – we got an agent for the author, but not a publisher – was the mother-in-law’s right to privacy. This awful woman, who had been highly complicit in her son’s abusive behaviour, nevertheless had a right to privacy that the courts might have been willing to uphold. So all the publishers contacted by the agent refused the book.A Note On The DeceasedIt\'s important to note that a person\'s right to privacy expires when they expire. A deceased person cannot be libeled, nor can their descendents/estate sue for defamation on the deceased\'s behalf. However, individuals (be they descendents or no) can have grounds for a suit if they believe that their reputations have been marred by the statement as well.Satire And ParodyYou might be wondering about your brilliant satire of the American political system, in which you\'ve cleverly changed names and exaggerated details but where your fictional President Ronald Dump retains a certain je ne sais quoi that ensures no modern reader will be confused about who you\'re satirizing. You\'re blurring the lines between truth and fiction, but in that blurring lies your best defense.With a libel case, the facts at hand are largely rooted in the plaintiff arguing as though you\'ve said something untrue about them that has damaged their standing in the world -- but if the \'something\' you\'ve written is so obviously untrue, so completely exaggerated, it\'s very easy to have the case dismissed by pointing out that what you\'ve written is fiction, a made-up story commenting on present actions, as opposed to attempting to portray them in a realistic light.Libel & Privacy Law In The Real WorldWriters anxious about libel / privacy law can, in most cases, relax:It’s exceptionally rare for a novelist to be sued for libel. As long as you are not obviously writing a roman a clef, your single strongest defence to any claim will just be to point to the way the book is categorised: “This is fiction, dummy.”Let’s say you are writing and self-publishing a memoir, that isn’t vastly defamatory of anyone and isn’t very privacy invasive either. You do those real life people the courtesy of changing names and other details, so it’s not obvious who you are talking about. Let’s say you commission a print-run of 500 copies and sell a few e-books as well. Is it theoretically possible that you face a lawsuit for the issues talked about in this post? Yes. Is it practically likely? No. It will be, for most authors, a vanishingly small possibility.And if you are writing anything else non-fictiony, very much the same applies, at least 99 point something per cent of the time.Yes, the conventional advice is “take legal advice”, but that advice will cost a minimum of $5,000 / £3,000 if you’re going to a properly experienced lawyer. So for most writers, the actual practical advice will be:Proceed thoughtfully and with caution.Change names and other details. Make your characters actually different from the real world subjects.Think about privacy as well as libel.Be realistic. If you are making serious comments about public people and your work is likely to have significant readership / impact, then you can’t wing it. In all other cases, then just take good care and you should be fine.For what it’s worth, I have written fiction and non-fiction and only once have my paths crossed with a libel lawyer (paid for by the publisher, not me.) I was working with a prominent hedge fund manager and his text made some quite serious allegations about (for example) the non-tax-paying habits of GE, the huge American manufacturer. (The text made quite a few allegations about quite a few companies and people; that libel lawyer had plenty to get his teeth into.)The lawyer queried one particular point in relation to GE and said it was essential that we contact GE for comment. So we did. We sent the relevant bit of text to the head of Media Relations and asked for comment. He replied – quickly and with some heat – that the allegation was completely untrue and he rejected it completely. We responded by asking why, in that case, his company’s own annual report, in some deeply buried footnote, confirmed precisely the point we were making.He withdrew his rejection (rather gracelessly) and it was pretty clear that the big bad wolf of GE wasn’t going to sue us, or would lose if it did.The real point of all this is that you need to use your own real-world wisdom to make these calls, not just a reading of the law. If your book is going to sell enough copies to raise a real threat of libel / privacy claims, then you’ll almost certainly be working with a publisher resourced to deal with the issue. If your book is more of a private printing with a limited circulation, it’s conceivable but certainly not probable that any suit will come your way. Do the basics, and you should be fine.DisclaimerWe’re not lawyers. We haven’t read your book. We don’t know your situation. And pretty obviously, if you face some real legal issues, you need to get help from specialists who do know your situation. A blog post is not the same as a legal advisor.

Developmental editing. Structural editing. Line editing. Copy editing. Proofreading.Yes, we know: you’ve written a manuscript. You know it needs some kind of professional help. But what kind of help? Copy editing or line editing? Structural editing or developmental support? There seem to be so many options to choose from.But never fear. We’ll tell you exactly what each of the different types of editing are – and offer some suggestions on what editing you do/don’t need right now.The good news is that, quite often, you need less editorial input than you might think. (The bad news is that you have to put in a lot of hard graft instead...)What Are The Different Types Of Editing?Developmental editing: checks concept, plot coherence, and character development/arc.Structural editing: identifies issues with plot, pacing, characters, settings, themes, writing style.Line editing: looks at details line-by-line.Copy-editing: is much as above, except with less attention to line-by-line correction of clumsy writing.Proof reading: looks for simple typos or errors in the text.How Editing WorksBefore we go any further, it’s worth explaining the editorial heirarchy. Essentially you go from large to little, from structural to detailed.So it’s like building a house: you start with foundations, walls and roof. Then you start thinking about doors and windows. Then you start thinking about paints and wallpapers. Last, you go around sweeping up and sorting out any last little snags.The same thing with editing, where the hierarchy runs roughly like this, from big to small:Developmental editing. Is this concept sound? Does my plot cohere? Are these the right characters for this book?Structural editing. Identifying and addressing any number of issues covering (for example) plot, pacing, characters, character development, settings, emotional turning points, themes, writing style and much else.Line editing: this starts to look at the detail. Is each sentence clear? Are there typos? Unwanted repetitions? Minor factual errors?Copy editing: much as above, except there’s less attention to line-by-line correction of clumsy writing.Proof reading: At the proof stage, you generally expect that all the essential work has already been done, so this is really just rushing around the manuscript looking for last bits of lint to pick off and typos to clear away.That’s the overview. Not all manuscripts will go through all of these stages – indeed, if you’re doing a decent job as an author then two or three of these stages are probably redundant.All that said, let’s jump straight into the meat...Developmental EditingWe’ll start with the biggest, broadest, most sweeping kind of editing you can get: developmental editing. That’s a type of editing that used to have one meaning, but it’s kind of morphed into two distinct beasts for reasons, I’ll explain in a second.Definition: What Is Developmental Editing?In the good old days, developmental editing used to have one precise meaning. It now has certainly two, and maybe three.A. Developmental Editing – Traditional DefinitionBut we start with the first, core, and most precise definition. To quote the ever-reliable Wikipedia:“A developmental editor may guide an author (or group of authors) in conceiving the topic, planning the overall structure, and developing an outline—and may coach authors in their writing, chapter by chapter.”In other words, any true “editing” took place before the writing. It was a planning and design function, in essence. Because competent authors can probably take care of planning and design perfectly well by themselves, such editing was always relatively rare and, in fiction, very rare. (I’ve authored getting on for twenty books now and have never once had a development edit. I’m damn sure I never will.)B. Developmental Editing As Industry EuphemismBut of course not all authors are perfect and, now and again, publishers have to deal with a manuscript they’ve commissioned, but which turns out to be absolutely dire. Think celebrity memoir of the worst sort. Or a multi-million-selling author who’s long since stopped caring about how he or she writes, because they know the money will roll in anyway.So what to do?Well, the standard solution in trade publishing is to do what is euphemistically called a ‘development edit’. What that actually means is that an editor takes on the role of something akin to a ghostwriter. They rip out everything that’s hopeless and rebuild.I’ve known a Big 5 editor who had done this a couple of times, and he said it was soul-destroying. He didn’t get any bonus for doing the work. He didn’t get a share of fame or royalties. He didn’t go on the chat shows or the book tours. And he was always dancing on eggshells with the Famous Author, because the author in question was very prickly about having his work slighted in any way.Even though the work in question sucked.Great.So that’s the second meaning of a development edit: basically a euphemism designed to disguise what is basically a ghostwriting job.When Is Classic Developmental Editing Right For You?It isn’t. You don’t need it.What you probably need (either now or in due course) is a professional manuscript assessment and possibly some of the add-ons normally associated with developmental editing. But in the classic sense of the term, you just don’t need it. We’ll talk about what you do need right away.Try our developmental editing service here.Structural Editing, Substantive Editing, Editorial AssessmentRight. So I’m not a big fan of developmental editing, but I LOVE the type of editing we’re about to talk about. But first up: definitions.DefinitionsStructural editing is, strictly speaking, a set of comments on the structure of your work. That will certainly involve plot and pacing. But it may also include comments on character, mood, emotional transitions, dialogue, character arcs, writing style and much more.If you’re being strict about it, structural editing should focus only on structure, but in practice editors tend to comment on anything that, in their view, needs attention. (Which is good. Which is what you want.)Basically, a good structural edit will tell you:What’s working (though they won’t spend too long on this)What’s not working (this is where the report will concentrate all its firepower)How to fix the stuff that isn’t yet rightA good report will quite simply cover everything that you most need to know. It’ll do that from the perspective of the market for books as it is now. So the kind of crime novels (say) that could have sold 25 years ago may not be right for the market now. A good editor will know that, and set you on the right lines.Substantive editing is basically the same as structural editing, except that technically it doesn’t have to limit itself to structure alone. But since structural editors don’t in practice confine themselves to structural comments, it’s pretty safe to say that, in practice, the two things are exactly the same.Editorial assessment, or Manuscript assessment. These two things are exactly the same as structural editing. The difference is that an editorial assessment gives you an editorial report, but doesn’t usually also give you a marked-up manuscript as well.Again, in practice, these things blur into each other. Our own core editorial product is, indeed, the manuscript assessment. The main deliverable there is a long, detailed editorial report on your book. That said, a lot of editors will, if it’s useful, also mark-up all or part of your manuscript. Or if they don’t, they may quote so extensively from your work, that it’s kinda the same as if they did.In short, and give or take a few blurry bits on the edges:structural editing = substantive editing = editorial assessment = manuscript assessmentEasy, right?Is Structural Editing / Editorial Assessment Right For You?Yes.Almost certainly: yes.Now, to be clear, I own Jericho Writers and if you trot along to buy one of our wonderful manuscript assessments, you’ll make me a teeny-tiny bit richer. So in that sense I’m biased.On the other hand, I just told you not to buy developmental edits, and I’d make myself a LOT richer if I got you to buy one of those things, so I hope I have a little credit in the bank. I’m speaking truth, not salesman yadda.And the reason I like structural editing so much is that:It is and remains the gold-standard way to improve a manuscript. Nothing else has ever come close. I’m not that far away from publishing my twentieth book. (I’m both trad & indie, and I love both channels, in case you’re wondering.) I’m a pretty damn good author. I’ve had very positive reviews in newspapers across the world. My books have sold in a kazillion countries and been adapted for TV. And every single one of my books have had detailed editorial input. And they’ve always, always got better as a result. Always.It makes you better as a writer. You always emerge from these exercises with new skills and new insights. You will apply those to your current manuscript, for sure, but you’ll apply them to the next one too. The more you work with skilled external editors, the more you’ll grow as a writer. (And, I think, as a human too.)So that’s why I think structural editing works so well, and for such a huge variety of manuscripts, genres and authors.When Should You Get Structural Input On Your Work?Well, OK. The businessman in me wants to say, “Get that input right now. Hand over your lovely hard-earned dollars / pounds / shekels / yen, and your soul and career will flourish, my friend.”But that’s not the right answer.The fact is that the right time for editorial input is generally: as late as possible.If you know you have a plot niggle in Part IV, then fix the damn niggle. Fix it as well as you can. Don’t go and pay someone to tell you that you have an issue. That’s dumb.Same thing if your characters feel a bit flat, or your atmosphere is a bit lacking, or whatever else. If you know your book has issues, then do the best you can to fix those issues. You’ll learn a lot and your book will get better.That means, the right time for editorial input comes when:You’ve worked hard, but you keep going round in circles. You’re confusing yourself. You need external eyes and buckets of wisdom.You’ve worked hard, but you know the book isn’t right. You don’t know what’s awry exactly, but you know you need help.You’ve worked hard, you’ve got the book out to agents, but you’re not getting offers of representation. You know you need to do something, but you don’t know what.The self-pub version of 2: you have a draft you’re reasonably happy with, but you’re about to publish this damn thing, and your whole future career depends on the excellence of the story you’re going to serve the reader. So you do the right thing and invest in the product. You’re going to get the best kickass structural edit you can, then use that advice as intensively as you can. (Editing, in fact, is one of the only two things that should cost you real money at this early stage: the other one is cover design. And, no surprise, they both relate to developing the best product it is in your power to produce.)In short: work as hard as you can on the book. When you’re no longer making discernible forward progress, come to an editor.And – blatant plug alert! – Jericho Writers is very, very good at editorial stuff. We’ve got a bazillion people published, trad and indie, and the success stories just keep coming.Developmental Editing – As Premium Manuscript AssessmentI love manuscript assessments – I think they’re the single most helpful thing you can do to improve your work. At their best, with author and editor working well together, they’re like a magic formula for improving your work.But a lot of people still find them insufficient. In particular, a manuscript assessment might say something like, “Your character Claudia isn’t yet cohering. Here’s what I mean in general terms [blah, blah, blah]. And here are some specific page references which illustrate my general point [page 23, page 58, etc].”Now that’s helpful, but it still leaves you to do an awful lot. If Claudia is a major character, the specific changes you need to make are likely to go well beyond the handful of examples the editor uses to make their broader point.So what do you do?Well, hopefully, you understand exactly where your editor is coming from, and you make the necessary changes, and your manuscript becomes perfect.Only maybe not. Some people just are helped by having their manuscript marked up page by page. That’s not instead of the more general report. It’s in addition. That way you get to see the broad thrust of the comments, as well as the more specific issues as well.So you get an overview of (for example) why Claudia isn’t quite working as well as a detailed laundry list of all the specific places where her character grates a bit.And it’s not just characterisation. It’s plot issues. It’s matters of writing style. It’s sense of place. It’s everything that goes into a novel.So – and this is because our clients have specifically asked us to create the product – we now offer a version of developmental editing that combines these services in a single package:Manuscript assessment – overview reportDetailed mark-up of your manuscript – literally page, by pageOne hour discussion with the editor, so you can resolve any outstanding questions or niggles you may have.Pretty obviously, this is a deluxe package and, pretty obviously, it’s expensive. It’s also, honestly, not what most of you need.Will I Benefit From Developmental Editing, Jericho-style?As a rough guide, very new writers are probably best off building their skills by taking a writing course or, of course, just hammering away at their manuscript. (That’s still the best learning exercise of all.)After that, once you have a first, or third, or fifth draft manuscript, it makes sense to get a regular manuscript assessment. That way, you can grasp the main issues with your work and you have a plan of attack for dealing with them.Because developmental editing is as much concerned both with the broader issues AND with the narrower ones, it doesn’t really make sense to purchase the service until your manuscript is in pretty good shape.After all, the outcome of a manuscript assessment might be “That whole sequence set on Venus just doesn’t work and needs to be rethought from scratch.” If that’s the case, then having detailed page-by-page comments on the way you write isn’t really going to help you much.So as a rough guide, you will benefit from developmental editing, if:Your manuscript is in pretty good shape (ie: this should be the last major round of work before submitting to publishers or self-publishing the manuscript)You want both broad and narrow commentsYou want the opportunity to talk at length with your editorYou are OK paying for a premium service.You will not benefit from developmental editing, if:Your manuscript is still at a somewhat earlier stage in its journeyYou feel able to handle the narrower issues yourself, so long as you have reasonable guidance from your manuscript assessment report.Because we don’t want to take your money if developmental editing is not right for you, we have made the service by application only. That’s not because we’re going to stop you doing what you want to do. Just, if we’re not sure whether it makes sense for you to splash the cash, we at least want to be able to check in with you before we go ahead.Line Editing, Copy Editing, Proof ReadingOK. We’ve dealt with the broader, more structural types of editing. We’re now going to home in on the ever finer-grained types of editing.We’ll start as before with some definitions.DefinitionsOf the detailed, line-by-line type edits, line-editing is the one that has the broadest remit. I’ll start with proof-reading (the most narrowly defined of these editorial stages) and build upwards from there.Proof-reading comes at the final stage prior to printing/publication. It basically assumes that the manuscript has already been checked over thoroughly, so this is really only a final check for errors that have managed to slip through the net. (And, in fact historically, the process of type-setting for print often introduced errors, so proof-reading was partly necessary to reverse those. These days, unsurprisingly, you can format a document for print without messing it up.) The kind of errors a proof-reader will catch include: typos, misspellings, punctuation errors, missing spaces, and the like. It’s a micro-level, final-error catching task, and nothing much else.Copy-editing includes everything included in proofreading, but it’ll have a somewhat broader scope. So a copy editor will also be on the look out for factual errors, timetable and other inconsistencies in the novel, occasional instances of unclear or weak phrasing, awkward repetitions, deviations from house style (if there is a house style), and so on. In the traditional publishing sequence, copy editing will take place after all structural editing has been done, but before the book has been set for print.Line-editing will cover everything that’s detailed above, plus a general check for sentence structure, clarity and sense. In other words, it is part of a line editor’s job to fix clumsily phrased, repetitious or otherwise awkward sentences. Yes, you the author should not be writing clumsily in the first place, but if by chance you do, the line editor is there to put things right. Try our line-editing service here.Why does anyone ever want or need line-editing? Well, some authors are brilliant at generating character and story, but their actual sentence-by-sentence expression of that story just isn’t so great. In these cases, a publisher will commission a line-edit to put those things right.The Editing Process: What You Need & when You Need ItRight. What kind of editing you need and should pay for depends on what kind of publication you are looking at. So:The Traditional Publishing SequenceThe normal publishing sequence (for traditionally published books) would be:Structural editing (ie: a detailed manuscript assessment)Copy-editing (or line editing if the author really needs it, but never both things)Proof-readingThat’s it.If you are aiming at traditional publication, then you may well need to invest in a manuscript assessment, in order to write something of the quality needed for a literary agent / publisher.You certainly won’t need copy editing, or anything along those lines. That’ll be carried out, for free, by the publisher down the line. (They’ll also do some more structural editing work too, but don’t worry about that – you can’t get too much, and your book always gets better.)The Indie Publishing SequenceIndie publishers, inevitably, focus more on cost-cutting than the Big 5 houses do, so a typical indie process might look simply like this:Some kind of structural support – probably an editorial assessment or something similarSome kind of copy-editing supportIf you don’t have the budget for both, I’d urge you to get the structural help: that’s what will really make the difference to the sheer readability of your book. That’s where to spend your funds.Indeed, though we at Jericho Writers offer a full range of copyediting and proofreading services, I don’t usually advise writers to invest in them at all.If you are an indie on a lowish launch budget (which is the right kind of budget to have when you’re just starting out), then I’d recommend an editing plan along roughly the following lines:Full editorial assessment, ideally from Jericho Writers (because we’re really good at it.)You then rework your book in the light of what you’ve been toldYou then give it a good hard proofread yourself for any errors and typosYou then enlist the help of any eagle-eyed friends to do the sameThat plan won’t give you a manuscript as clean as if you give it the full cost-no-object Big 5 treatment … but it’ll be just fine. Don’t overspend at this stage.What Kind Of Editing Is Right For You?OK. You know the basic layout of what editing is and when it’s used. Here’s what I think the big questions are.Developmental Editing Vs Structural EditingYou know my view on this. I think for 99% of you reading this, you are best off (a) working and self-editing as hard as you can yourself, then (b) getting professional input on your work from a structural editor.That’s going to be miles cheaper and the end result will be better too. Yes, you’ll need to do a lot of work, but you’re a writer. You like work. (If you don’t, you’re in the wrong job.)If you are a newer author, you may well need two or three rounds of structural input. That’s fine. That’s not a failure on your part. That’s you learning a new trade. It’s money well spent – and you can prove it to yourself too. Just ask yourself: are you a better, more knowledgeable, more capable writer at the end of the process? If the answer isn’t yes, I’ll eat my boots, jingly spurs and all. (*)* – disclosure: I don’t actually wear spurs.Structural Editing Vs Copy EditingOK, these are two very different things, but of the two, the structural editing definitely matters more. The purpose of structural / substantive editing is simply: make your book the best book it can be.The purpose of copy editing is simply: make the text as clean as it can be.Both things matter, but if your budget only permits one of those things, then go for structural editing, every day of the week. A wonderful story is much more important than tidy text.And again, though we sell copyediting services, you shouldn’t need them at all if you are heading for trad publication, and you should probably be able to find an acceptable but much cheaper substitute if you are self-publishing.Line Editing Vs Copy Editing Vs Proof-ReadingIf you want your work to be looked at in a little more detail, these are the types of editing you\'ll find yourself choosing between.The stage of writing you\'re in, and where your strengths lie as a writer, are good indicators as to which type of editing is the best fit for you.Line editing is a big, comprehensive editing process. A line edit includes everything involved in the process of copy editing and proof-reading, and more. It\'s best suited for authors who craft engaging stories with compelling characters, but need help fine tuning their work at the sentence level. It looks at clarity of expression, sentence structure, and repetition, and is often done early on in the editing process.Copy editing is the middle ground between line editing and proof-reading. It includes everything involved in proof-reading, but is not quite as extensive as line editing. Copy editors check for inconsistencies, unclear phrasing, factual errors, and ensure the timetable of your novel is accurate.If you\'re very close to publication, proof-reading is ideal for you, as it serves as a final check for errors. It\'s not as intensive as line editing and copy editing as it\'s typically conducted after a book has already been edited at length. This process is put in place to catch typos, misspellings, incorrect spacing and the like.

Writing is scary – but of all the scary things about it, perhaps the scariest is getting the concept right. The hard fact is: a lousy concept will kill your novel, no matter how good your actual writing is.And how can you isolate the concept? The thing which makes the difference between success or failure? The answer is via your elevator pitch – a very short summary of what makes your book so special.We’ll get to some examples in just a second, but let’s start by defining terms . . . and understanding just why your elevator pitch is such a massive deal.How To Write A Great Book Pitch:Keep it to 20 words or less.Be original.Make it memorable – An astronaut seeking to survive. A woman who fakes her own murder. An ordinary boy – an orphan! – going to an extraordinary school.The result should make the listener say, “tell me more!”What Is An Elevator Pitch For A Novel?And why does it matter so damn much?An elevator pitch is the term given to any sales pitch that could, in theory, be delivered in the space of a short elevator ride.The idea is that you might find yourself in the elevator with Someone Important who can’t, for those twenty or thirty seconds, escape or deflect your attentions – so you can use that time to deliver a sales pitch so utterly compelling that that Person of Importance is drawn in and wants to hear more.To be clear: this is a fantasy scenario.You are never likely to be called upon to pitch your book in this way. It’s just not how any normal submission process happens.(Or, for that matter, how any normal elevator ride happens. I’ve twice been in an elevator with the CEO of a major publisher. On both occasions, we chatted about the weather, or the shiny new canteen, or whatever people normally talk about in elevators.)But that notional elevator pitch still matters, because it’s a neat conceptual way to understand:The very heart of your book’s Unique Selling Point – which in turn determines,How literary agents could pitch your book to a publisherHow an acquiring editor could pitch that book internallyHow a sales team could pitch that book to retail buyersHow a publicist could pitch that book to reviewersHow you could describe the book – pithily but attractively – on social mediaHow the book blurb could pitch that book to readers (online or physically)And no book succeeds unless it’s pitchable in that way. In fact, you can define an elevator pitch like this:An elevator pitch for a novel is a very short summary of what makes the book:UniqueStrikingFresh, andCompellingIf your book pitch doesn’t tick those boxes, your book is unlikely to sell. An agent will think “can I pitch this to editors?” and think, No, probably not. An acquiring editor will think, “can I pitch this book in house?” and think, No, probably not. And so on down the chain.The book pitch is, in a way, the very heart of book marketing. It’s the heart of your product. The heart of your brand.How short is very short? Well, there are no set rules, but I’d suggest that fewer than 20 words is ideal. Fewer than 50 words is essential.If you like, you can think of the pitch as being something that would work and stand out amongst the hurly-burly of social media. If you had just 280 characters to talk about your book, what would you say? That’s not a bad discipline to apply.Brevity is key, not because that theoretical elevator ride is short, but because you need to isolate what is special about your book. That means discarding nearly everything about the book – for example, the settings, the plot twists, the great characters, the genius denouement, and so on.Sure, you need to get to those things in time. If the Very Important Person in the elevator gets out on the same floor as you and says, “Sounds great, tell me more”, then all those other things are going to matter too. A great elevator pitch is essential, yes, but it’s never enough on its own.But still. The elevator pitch is very short. And it matters.Example Elevator PitchesHow successful novels get that way . . .Here are some examples of elevator pitches. These are our versions of the pitch in each case – our attempt to isolate what makes these books special. So here goes:TwilightA teen romance between an ordinary girl and a boy who is actually a vampire.[15 words]The Da Vinci CodeA professor of symbology unlocks codes buried in ancient works of art as he hunts for the Holy Grail.[19 words]Gone GirlA woman (Amy) goes missing, and her husband is suspected of murder. But the sweet diary-writing Amy of the first half of the book is revealed to be a very different woman in the second half . . .[36 words]The MartianAstronaut, stranded on Mars, has to figure out how to survive.[11 words]Brokeback MountainA love story between two male cowboys.[7 words]Harry Potter seriesOrphan boy goes to school for wizards.[7 words]Alex Rider seriesYoung James Bond.[3 words]I hope it’s obvious that these books all have great premises. We’ll look at exactly what makes these ideas so great in a second . . . but first let’s have some (made up) examples of elevator pitches for books that could never sell.So here are some really bad elevator pitches:Eco-fantasy for 6-7sThree children go to a fantasy world where they must save the planet and learn about the importance of recycling and the dangers posed by electro-magnetic radiation.Non-literary literary fictionA slightly mediocre book about two somewhat boring people in whose lives nothing seems to happen.Paranormal romance (2018)A teen romance between an ordinary girl and a boy who is actually a vampire.We get books like these, as do literary agents. Anything lacking a grabbing, easily communicated pitch is already at a disadvantage . . . or to put that more bluntly: will simply never sell.And notice that the paranormal romance pitch in the list just above is exactly the same as the pitch we put together for Stephenie Meyer’s hyper-successful Twilight. What makes this second pitch so terrible, and the first one so great?It’s timing of course. Agents need something that will make editors sit up and say, “Hey, tell me more.” When Twilight first came out, that pitch was electric. Now? It’s so tired, it needs to sleep.Need more help? If you want more help on anything in this post, then do check out our How To Write course that has a crazy-good 1 hour video on these exact topics. The course itself is quite pricey, so we generally recommend taking out a cheap monthly membership which gives you access to EVERYTHING we offer in terms of video courses, masterclasses, etc – and at an easily affordable, cancel-any-time price. Find out loads more hereHow To Write Your Elevator PitchOK. So you know why an elevator pitch matters so much – because it’s THE key sales element in the chains that runs from:You ⇒ Agent ⇒ Acquiring editor ⇒ PublisherPublisher’s sales team ⇒ Retail buyer ⇒ ReaderPublisher’s publicity & marketing team ⇒ Reviewers ⇒ ReaderYou know what you want to achieve: a pitch that is Short, Unique, Striking, Fresh, and Compelling.So how do you actually achieve that?The most important thing to understand is that you throw out almost everything in your novel. Take that Harry Potter elevator pitch: “Orphan boy goes to school for wizards.”That doesn’t say:Anything about VoldemortAnything about Harry’s parentsAnything about his muggle uncle & auntAnything about Hermione & RonAnything about his summons to the schoolAnything about the specific storylines once Harry is at HogwartsAnd that’s not just OK. It’s good. That’s the whole point of the exercise. You are not seeking to explain your book in the elevator pitch. The only answer you are seeking to elicit is, “Hey, that sounds interesting. Tell me more.”When you get the “tell me more” type response from anyone (the agent, the acquiring editor, etc), you know you’re golden. That’s the point at which you can start to explain the broader context and story of your book, confident in the knowledge that you already have a good hold on your listener’s attention and interest.Great pitches combine a tiny bit of WHAT the book is (eg: in Twilight‘s case, that’s a teen romance), with a sense of WHY the book will be great to read (eg: “ooh, a girl and a werewolf: that sounds dark and sexy . . . and scary . . . and sexy . . .”)So the way to write your elevator pitch is to ignore everything about your book . . . except the aspect that will most make your reader say, “tell me more.”There’s no one approach you have to take. So the Harry Potter elevator pitch worked with a setting (that school for wizards.The Gone Girl one relied on its twist. (Real Amy is different from diary-Amy!)The Martian one relied on a setup / premise. (Astronaut stranded on Mars: how does he survive?)And so on.Remove everything from your book description except the part that most interests the reader.And keep your pitch intensely short. Under 20 words is good. Under 10 words is excellent. Anything over 50 words? That’s not an elevator pitch; that’s a snoozefest.Is Your Elevator Pitch Any Damn Good?And what you should do if it’s not.So write your elevator pitch. And that means:Actually do it!Or, in fact, it means:Actually do it right now this minute,or I’m going to get a mite tetchy.Reading a blog post about elevator pitches is a genius idea if it impels action: if you actually start to write and examine your own elevator pitch.Reading the same blog post if you don’t actually DO anything as a result doesn’t count as research. It’s procrastination.OK, so you have written / are currently sketching your elevator pitch.So is it any good? Do you have a saleable novel in front of you? Or an unsaleable clunker?Well, once you have a draft of your elevator pitch, you simply need to ask yourself, is it:Very short (<20 words, for preference)?Unique – does it feel original? Does it feel distinct from all the other books out there at the moment?Striking – is there an edge? Do you feel a glimmer of steel somewhere? (An astonaut seeking to survive. A wife who fakes her own murder. An ordinary boy – an orphan! – going to an extraordinary school.)Fresh – does your idea feel timely? Does it feel like part of the next iteration of what’s happening in your genre / fiction in general?Compelling – does it make any listener say, “Hey, that’s great, tell me more.”?If your pitch checks those boxes then, my friend, you have a winner. Sure, you still have a lot of work to do in actually writing the novel that lives up to the pitch – but yo’re on the right track.Congratulations.And if not – if you have an uneasy sense that you haven’t yet nailed this issue – then you have to nail it. Don’t con yourself into doing more work on that awkward Chapter 27. Or finessing the character of Bazhran the Bad any further.You have to write a novel whose pitch gets a reader to that crucial, “Tell me more” point.Oh, and if you aren’t sure whether your pitch has nailed it or not, then – trust me – your pitch hasn’t nailed it.We’ve got some great suggestions for how to develop and improve your core ideas right here. And if you want help writing your cover letter and synopsis, why not try our agent submission pack review.

A short journey to the sewerWe’re always on the side of the book. We’re always on the side of the writer.With books, we want them to be as good as they can be – written well, edited well, pressing clients to be as wonderful as they can – and if you have the guts and determination to pick up a pen and write a book, we’re on your side.And that’s why we are firmly, emphatically, viscerally opposed to vanity publishing in all its forms. This is a story, yes, about Austin Macauley, but it is also a story about a whole raft of other vanity presses too. Snakes, worms and weasels, every one.Why such strong language?Because vanity publishers take vast sums of money from authors to publish their books. This is in contrast to how to best practice in both traditional publishing (where publishers pay you), and modern ebook-led self-publishing where it costs nothing to upload your book to retailers like Amazon, and where per book royalties are excellent. So if you want to know more about what to avoid – and about Austin Macauley Publishers specifically – then read on. A more complete guide to (proper, legitimate, profitable) publishing can be found here.What Is Vanity Publishing?Vanity publishing is where authors pay for their book to be ‘published’ and where ownership of the book passes to the publisher as part of the contract.Vanity publishers never call themselves by that name. They’ll say they offer ‘partnership publishing’ or ‘hybrid publishing’ or say they offer a ‘contributory contract’ or anything else of that sort. But if any publisher:Asks you for moneyEnds up owning the rights to your bookyou should regard them as a vanity publisher.That’s if you’re polite, and inclined to be generous.Quite frankly, we prefer to think of them as thieves and fraudsters.To be clear: they are not breaking the law. But whether some narrow legal test of fraud is or is not met misses the ethical heart of the issue. The fact is that these publishers are offering writers a contract which they basically know will not meet the legitimate dreams and aspirations of those writers.What Vanity Publishing Looks LikeWe’ve spoken to one writer who was offered a ‘contributory contract’ from one vanity publisher (not Austin Macauley), requesting from her a staggering £7,000 to publish her poems.This lady was dying of cancer, and she wanted to earn a little something for the son she’d leave behind. Thankfully, she called us first, and asked for our advice.What we told her was this:There is not meaningfully any market for poetry, and certainly not of the (sincere, but quite home-spun) verses she’d written.She would never see that £7,000 againSales would be modest in the extreme. Aside from any sales she made to friends and family, her sales would quite likely be zero, nothing, nix, nada.She almost certainly would get a nicely produced book to hold in her handsShe would not find that book being sold in bookshopsYes, the book would be available on Amazon, but so are 5,000,000 other titles. Uploading a book to Amazon is easy. Selling it once it’s there – that’s hard.She would not, meaningfully, get any marketing support from the publisher once the book had actually been produced.In effect, she’d be paying £7,000 to have her book printed & the rights owned by somebody else. You could easily spend no more than £1,000 for a book of that length, print as many copies as you wanted, work with lovely, truthful, well-intentioned people, and still retain all the rights to the book.Naturally, she did not use that publisher to ‘publish’ her work. Instead, she went to a reputable local printer and, for a modest sum, got the thing printed up for local distribution. She told me that she wanted everyone who came to her funeral to get a copy.And look, there’s something good here and something awful.The good thing is that a dying woman made a book that she wanted to create. That spoke her thoughts to those she cared about.There is nothing at all of vanity in that impulse. In that sense, the term ‘vanity publishing’ is a total misnomer. I’ve seen a lot of people snared by vanity publishers, and in not one single case was vanity the issue. On the contrary, it’s naivete, hope, and nothing else.So that’s the good thing. A dying woman wrote and distributed some verses.And here’s the bad thing: someone wanted to steal £7,000 from her. Sick, dying, and not at all wealthy.Did I say bad?I meant awful.The thing about vanity publishers is they don’t really publish at all. They get books designed & printed. You can do that too, just google “typesetting”, “cover design” and “book printers” and you’ll have everything you need.Or use an ethical outfit like Matador, or Lulu, or CreateSpace, or IngramSpark, or Completely Novel, and you’ll get a fair service at a fair price. (What each of those outfits offers is different, so you can’t just compare prices – it’s more complex than that.)So if you just want to pay something to produce 10 books (or 100, or 1,000), you need to work with a company like one of those guys. Or source your own design / copyediting / cover design, etc. It’s not hard, and it can be very rewarding.What Are The Alternatives To Vanity Publishing?A word about traditional publishing and modern self-publishing[This section talks about the alternatives very swiftly. If you need more help, go to our main publishing advice page that gives you a load more detail in a very helpful format.]Traditional PublishingOr you can publish in the traditional way with a regular publisher.The advantages of that route:you get paid, upfront plus (potentially) royalties as wellyou get a real publisher working hard to market your bookyou will be sold in bookstores and have the pride of having done a hard thing well.There’s also one obvious disadvantage:It’s very hard to get accepted by a traditional publisher – the rate of success is probably 1 in 1000 submissions (or even worse)If your work IS of that quality, you probably need a literary agent. Details on how to do that can be found here. We answer further common questions about literary agents here. We also offer free lists of agents in the US and the UK.Self-publishingIf you don’t want to go that route – too hard? too slow? you don’t want to lose control of your book? – then modern self-publishing is also an excellent answer.Modern self-publishing involves selling your book via Amazon and/or the other e-tailers such as Apple.You will make a majority of your sales – perhaps over 90% of them – via ebooks, but it’s perfectly possible to create and sell print-books as well. They’ll be of good quality and will be available to readers all over the world.The advantages of self-publishing include:Royalties are superb: Amazon pays 70% royalties on ebook sales, whereas traditional publishers will pay just 17.5% (or less, if you inlcude the amount you’ll owe your agent.)It’s easyIt’s fastYou reach readers right across the globeThe disadvantages include:you have to handle the various bits and pieces yourself: cover design, ebook formatting. Most people will just outsource those tasks, but you still need to find the right people for the job.Because of those tasks, you are likely to pay something to get our book published – but $1500 / £1000 would be a perfectly reasonable  budget for most.You have to market your book. Amazon is a platform; it’s not going to market on your behalf unless you have some prove sales potential already.There is still a difference in kudos between self-publishing and the traditional sort. That doesn’t really make sense to us. (Who do you admire more: someone who sold $100,000 worth of self-published books on Amazon? Or someone who got a £1000 book deal from some remote bit of Penguin Random House?) But still: it matters to some people.If you want to find out more about how to self-publish your work, you can find out with our (characteristically comprehensive) guide here. Info on book descriptions here. Info on categories and keywords here. Advice on getting your book covers here.It’s also true that writing really well is a skill that can be learned – and then learned some more. If you’ve struggled with literary agents in the past, it may well be that your actual book isn’t as strong as it could be. For that reason, we’ve got useful advice on how to write a book right here.Learning About Writing And PublishingAlso – this does’t quite fit on this page in a way – but: it’s possible you don’t yet know enough about the whole writing/publishing industry to yet make a decision on how to proceed. And if you think, yes, maybe that applies to me, what then?Well, there’s a LOT you can do. If you feeling like flashing the cash (a very little bit), I’d urge you to become a member of Jericho Writers. You’ll get access to the world’s best resources on writing, publishing and self-publishing. Info here. You should also, certainly, join our Jericho Townhouse writing community, that just gives you an exceptional way to meet other writers, and exchange questions help and community. View our forums, our blogs, our groups.Austin Macauley – A Close-up Look At One Vanity PublisherHold your nose, folks. We’re heading down . . .This post grew (as you may have guessed) out of an encounter with Austin Macauley, a vanity publisher. Or rather: multiple encounters, all of them negative.We heard about authors feeling cheated.We heard about authors being threatened with legal action if they spoke out about their experience.We heard about authors going to court against the firm.We heard about a prominent blogger – a person of integrity and intelligence – being threatened with legal action for speaking out about these things.So we thought we’d look into Austin Macauley reviews . . . and we did not love what we saw.If you\'re asking yourself \'is Austin Macauley publishers reputable?\', we have the answer. No.In this updated post, we take another look at Austin Macauley – but please remember that ALL vanity publishers operate in much the same way. What we say about this firm could, mutatis mutandis, be said about all its snakelike brethren. Indeed, we DO say it about all those firms.Oh, and to be crystal clear: we do not believe that Austin Macauley is engaged in illegal activity. In our opinion, what they do is totally unethical and close to cheating, but some bad things are within the law; vanity publishing very much included. (Alas.)Okie-doke. So-If you Google “Austin Macauley”, as I just did, you may find this:Screengrab taken 17.5.2020And – huh?A publisher who advertises?Go and Google Penguin Random House. Or HarperCollins. Or Simon & Schuster. Those guys don’t advertise.Why not? Because their business model works like this:Find great books. Publish them well. Make money.No part of that relies on advertising to authors and luring them in. (So how do they get those great books? They pay for them. And authors and literary agents bring them all their best stuff.)But the Austin Macauley model works like this:Find authors willing to part with cash. Part them from their cash. Deliver some kind of book. That’s it.The book doesn’t have to be good. It doesn’t have to actually sell. AM doesn’t even actually have to try to do all the things that real publishers do to make sales. Of course not! They’ve already made money. From you!Bu I get ahead of myself.Here’s what they say on their website home page (text copied 24 April 2018)We pride ourselves on our hybrid publishing model, a progressively more popular means by which both new and previously published authors can establish themselves in the increasingly competitive world of books.This is horseshit.Here’s that same bit of text with my explanations in brackets:We pride ourselves on our hybrid publishing model [we take money from authors which no reputable publisher does. Deep in our snakelike hearts, we know that this is a horrible way to make a living, but we may as well make a virtue of it and pretend it’s normal.]a progressively more popular means [Rubbish. Traditional publishing is great. Self-publishing is great and has zoomed up in the world. Vanity publishing is used only by those who don’t know any better. It’s “popular” largely with those people who don’t know better and who are taken in by flashily effective advertising.]by which both new and previously published authors can establish themselves in the increasingly competitive world of books [Double-rubbish. You want to know if Austin Macauley establishes writers in the the world of books? OK. So do this. Go to the biggest bookstore near you. See if you can find any Austin Macauley books. Browse the shelves. Ask a checkout clerk. Seek specific titles by name. You will find almost none, and most likely none at all. And if I’m wrong, I’ll give you a dollar and a kiss for every one you find.]Indeed, let’s take the partnership / hyrbid / vanity agreements that Austin Macauley and its peers offers. We’d want to ask:What is the median cost to the author of these partnership agreements?Partnership implies some joint sharing of risks and rewards, so do these firms contribute a sum broadly equivalent to that contributed by your authors?What are the median sales of partnership titles? Note that ordinary averages (means) can be distorted by one or two high-selling titles, so a median figure would be helpful. This is a crucial question, and you should not part with a single penny before getting an answer.What, loosely, is the median financial outcome for partnership authors? Do they recover their contributions via royalties? Do they generally make a profit, and how much? And if they make a loss, what is the average magnitude of that loss?I hope it’s obvious why these questions are important.Austin Macauley Publishers operates within the law insofar as it prints books, makes those books available on Amazon, available for order by bookshops (not the same as saying that these books are likely to be stocked in bookshops). It makes modest efforts to secure publicity for its books and authors.All that does not amount to a good deal. It amounts to a right royal stinker of a deal.Avoid Austin Macauley. Avoid its peers. And may they, one day, all bite the dust!