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Folks, a couple of weeks ago we celebrated International Pennebaker Day, which has nothing to do with baked pasta, and which, for some reason, still lacks proper international recognition.Today, and in that same uplifting spirit, we celebrate International Csikszentmihalyi Day. The word in between “international” and “day” may look like a really terrible attempt at an anagram, or what happens when a Slovakian and a choose to double-barrel their surnames, or just what you get when you put a couple of alphabets into an ordinary domestic liquidiser and hit the Blitz button.In fact, of course, the name is (a) an example of a nice, straightforward Hungarian name, and (b) one belonging to the US-Hungarian psychologist, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (roughly, “Cheeks Sent Me High”).Csikszentmihalyi is best known for his work on flow, a mental/emotional state that’s characterised by total immersion in the activity concerned. He says the state takes place when you are:“Completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you\'re using your skills to the utmost.”Writers achieve this state. So do painters and musicians. But sportspeople do as well. I’ve known it, myself, when rock-climbing, but I imagine that the followers of other, lesser sports feel it too.When Emma Raducanu says of her US Open win, ‘At one point mid-game, I just let my racket go because I just didn’t believe I made that shot,’ you sense the presence of flow in action. That shot wasn’t exactly the consequence of a consciously willed action, but nor was it involuntary or unconscious.Csikszentmihalyi elaborates the state thus:Complete concentration on the task;Clarity of goals and reward in mind and immediate feedback;Transformation of time (speeding up/slowing down);The experience is intrinsically rewarding;Effortlessness and ease;There is a balance between challenge and skills;Actions and awareness are merged, losing self-conscious rumination;There is a feeling of control over the task.I’ve known all of that when writing. Most often when writing fiction, but I’ve certainly known it with non-fiction too. I get it (a bit) when I write these Friday emails.The merging of actions and awareness is certainly a leading feature for me. So too is the intrinsic reward. So is the complete concentration. So is the loss of time.When I write, time just vanishes. I can easily miss an appointment by an hour and feel amazed, because I thought I still had ages to go. More weirdly, when I’ve been at peak fitness, I’ve felt it rock-climbing. I’ve had the sense of jumping for a hold and – instead of my normal desperate, failing lunge – I’ve found that I’ve had more time to locate and grasp the hold than I expected. When I see really good climbers climb, the thing that always strikes me isn’t how much stronger they are, but how much more time they always seem to have.Now, I don’t think you really need me to tell you about flow, because I’m pretty sure you already feel it and understand it from within. So here are some further thoughts or questions that occur to me:Do you have to have flow to write?Once you’ve experienced flow, it may seem that it’s the only way to generate quality words on the page. That if you’re not in flow, you should just walk the dogs or fix a shelf or perform some other displacement activity until you feel ready to try again.I don’t think that’s right, or at least it’s only about half right.I strongly suspect that a book written entirely by force of will and without the aid of flow won’t ever be entirely satisfying. It may have craft, but won’t have magic, and without the magic, honestly, what’s the point? That’s why I always have a mental reservation about the 2,000-words-a-day brigade, those folks who point out that you should be able to write a 100K thriller in two months, even allowing a bit of time off along the way.But at the same time, the single best way to bump-start your writing is simply: write.If you feel locked out of writing, then just forcing yourself to do it – going through the motions, if you like – is still the best way to unlock that inner blockage. That approach has worked often enough for me in the past. If you feel any blockage at the moment, then the same basic approach will work for you.(Except that if days and weeks go by and you’re still not feeling right, you need to question things more broadly. Is all well in your life? Maybe there’s some deeper issue that needs addressing. Or is all well with the book? Maybe your inability to get into it is because there is some fundamental issue with the project that you need to acknowledge and tackle directly. Writing, like caustic soda, solves most things, but ...)Can a reader tell the difference between flow-words and non-flow words?I tend to know, even years afterwards, which pages of a book came awkwardly for me and which came smoothly. It’s as though I still feel the ghost of that early awkwardness haunting the text.At the same time, I can honestly say that no agent, editor or reader has ever called attention to those patches and suggested that they’re lesser than the rest. I think a book needs, as far as possible, to be written in a flow state, because that’s what lets the magic in, but once the magic is there, it disperses through the text. There may be better scenes or worse scenes, but magic is a quality that adheres (or not) to a book as a whole.In short: if some scenes just come awkwardly and brutishly onto the page, you don’t need to worry about it. No one else will ever know.Editing can be a flow state tooFor me, this is critical.Actual writing probably brings the greatest joy. (My very greatest joys have been placing my character in extended peril. Oh, how I loved almost freezing Fiona to death in the Black Mountains. I adored bricking her up at the side of a church in the Brecon Beacons. And I had a rare and deep joy when I sank a trawler, with her on board, in the midst of an Atlantic gale.)That said, editing has always been a deep, absorbing pleasure for me. I think writers should train themselves to expect flow in editing as well as writing. The rewards of editing are a little different and, OK, perhaps a little shallower too, but they are real for all that.I love editing so much, it’s always a little grief to hand over a book. I’d like to spend more time with it. If you don’t find editing utterly absorbing, it’s almost certain that you’re cutting corners you don’t really want to cut.__That’s it from me. I’m on holiday next week – as in, really, truly, on a beach somewhere warm – so you won’t get a real email from me. You’re going to get a short “best of selection” that you can sneer at, then tear to shreds.Normal service will resume the week after that.Oh yes, and the header photo on this page? That\'s not me. It\'s James Pearson on The Quarryman, which is the most dazzlingly beautiful climb in the UK - and about a million miles beyond my pay grade. In my next life, I\'m going to come back with the balance of a ballet dancer and forearms like Pop-Eye. I once met Jonny Dawes, the revolutionary who first climbed The Quarryman and I almost fainted with adulation. He\'s a god.

We usually look at the world through the eyes of authors – and quite right too – but I recently saw an interesting article by literary agent Kristin Nelson, which evaluated the changes she’s seen over twenty odd years on Planet Agent.The gist of the article was that agenting has become a tougher business than it was. I’m going to look at her fourteen reasons why … but first:Oh ye people.Last week, I told you that the Summer Festival of Writing is, from now on, going to be free to Jericho members. This week, I tell you that we’ve also tossed in an extra event, for free. October sees the launch of our Build Your Book month (info here). We’ve got twelve events aiming to help you turn your book into a masterpiece. In effect, it’s the self-editing complement to our super-successful Getting Published and Self-Publishing months, which take place in spring.All this stuff is, and will remain, completely free to Jericho members. If you’re not a member yet, we’d absolutely love to have you (how to join). You also get full access to all our 1000+ literary agent profiles on AgentMatch. You also get access to our 400+ films and masterclasses (info). You also get access to our amazing (and expanding) range of video courses (info). You also get free weekly events throughout the year (info). We’ve also got further yumminess coming up, but I can’t tell you about that now, because I’m bound by the terrifying code of Jerich-o-merta …Okiedoke. Back to Planet Agent. Here are Nelson’s fourteen reasons why agenting has got tougher:1. More agentsNelson reckons there are more literary agents around now than there used to be. I can’t quantify the degree to which that’s true, but certainly there don’t seem to be fewer agents, even though most publishers have cut the size of their frontlists.Verdict: she’s got a (smallish) point here.2. Agents as editorsBack in the day, agents used to be able to hawk a manuscript that had clear potential – and clear editorial needs. These days, with the competition as it is, it would be a dumb agent and a dumb author who took that approach. Instead, agents have tended to get involved in editorial work prior to submissions.(And if you think that because your agent has given you editorial feedback, you won’t need an extensive editorial process with the publisher – well, think again. Everyone gets to give their thoughts; you get to do the work. The good news: books usually get better as a result.)Verdict: She’s right3. Less agent visibilityNelson comments that, years back, it was quite easy for an agent to be noticed via your blog or Twitter feed, just because so few agents did anything like that. Well, that may be the case, but you don’t find many agents complaining about a shortage of submissions – and I know plenty of successful agents who don’t spend any real time on social media.Verdict: Hmm.4. Agent as publicistNelson writes, ‘In today’s publishing landscape, agents have to do so much more marketing/publicity management to optimize client success.’Really? Aren’t publishers doing that? And how many agents are actually pro publicists? And if they are, why are they selling manuscripts for a living? I think most agents do take on real editorial work. I think the good ones do a lot to manage a career and guide the author/publisher relationship. But honestly, most agents don’t do a ton of marketing work and they probably shouldn’t. It’s not their skillset.Verdict: Hmm.5. Email mountainsNelson comments that ‘three hundred emails is a light day’. Jeepers. There’s no question that email volumes have vastly increased – and it can’t actually be healthy or make for efficient business that any one person has 300 emails to deal with in a day. (Before they’ve actually read a word of their clients’ work, or anything from the new submissions pile.)Verdict: I’m very sympathetic.6. Indie PublishingWhen I started writing, traditional publishing was the only meaningful route to making money and finding a relationship. That’s no longer true and that also means agents are aware that their clients can scarper sideways into a game that’s fertile for the writer and arid for the agent.Nelson writes, intelligently, ‘I’m hugely supportive of authors and indie publishing, but the loss of talent to the indie sphere does impact an agency’s bottom line.’Verdict: She’s right, of course. Not a big problem for authors, though :)7. Publisher paymentsBack in the day, advances were split into two or three chunks – typically, on signature, on hardback publication, and on paperback publication. These days, some publishers insist on four or five instalments, and have pushed some payments back to well after publication. (So they’re not advances any more – perhaps ‘late payments’ would be a better term.)Nelson notes that this practice makes life harder for agents, which is true. I also note that it’s effectively a way for billion-dollar companies to boost their cash flow at the expense of authors, which doesn’t seem very graceful to me.Verdict: She’s right again8. The Great Contract SwampPublishers have always been slow in negotiating contracts, which is pitiful when you consider that the vast majority of contracts deal mostly in boilerplate. But they’ve got slower.I’ve known authors with roots in more businesslike professions write to me concerned when they haven’t seen a contract within two or three weeks. What’s going on, they ask, is there a problem?And the answer is no, there isn’t a problem, except that publishers understaff their contracts department and deliver too little authority to editors to sort out issues. I once wrote an entire book in between agreeing the deal (orally and by email) and the publisher actually delivering the contract. And which do you think ought to take longer: writing a 100,000 word book, every word of it original, or writing a contract of about a dozen pages, with almost every word of it boilerplate?Verdict: I’m with Team Nelson here. And I think the publishing industry should do a lot, lot better.9. Then there was onePublishers keep eating each other. First Penguin and Random House married. Now they’re going all menage a trois with Simon & Schuster. Meantime, Hachette is currently gobbling Workman, its sixth US acquisition in eight years. And so it goes.The fewer big publishers there are, the less the competition for authors. And yes: there are some terrific micro-publishers and they do a great job. But if you want cash in your pocket, you need one of the big guys. And there aren’t as many as there used to be.Verdict: Team Nelson all the way10. The Great FloodEditors see a lot of submissions. They say no to a hell of a lot. And because they see a lot, and say no a lot, it takes longer for editors to get back to agents.That makes it harder for an agent to mount an effective auction and means a lot more chasing to get anywhere at all. Nelson comments that that’s made life harder for agents and, since trad authors have their fortune yoked to Planet Agent, that means it’s worse for writers too.Verdict: Yep, right again11. The death of the editorYea, verily, back in the time when the flood waters receded from the earth, editors were allowed to choose books because they liked them. These days, editors are second-guessed by acquisitions committees and marketing folk who sit on those committees, with the result that the whole process has become more tangled, more bureaucratic and (I bet) no more effective.I’d like to say that Nelson is right about this, but remember marketing people and other execs were deeply involved in acquisitions even twenty years back. So if she is right, she has a longer memory than I do.Verdict: Hmm.12. Blockbuster or bustBack in the day, there were authors like Ian Rankin whose first books didn’t sell especially well and weren’t perfectly formed. But they grew into their careers and became serial bestsellers.These days, publishers lack the patience to grow an author in that way. If an author’s debut two-book deal doesn’t pretty much earn out, there’s every chance that author will simply be discarded. That’s nuts.Verdict: I’m Nelsonian – one-eyed and one-armed.13. The Death of the Mass Market FormatNelson writes, ‘Back in the day, so many agents got their start representing authors in romance, mystery, and urban fantasy—all genres traditionally launched in the mass-market format. Fantastic glory days were when I would sell in a debut romance author for six figures.’ These days, she says, mass market editions have subsided in favour of e-books, which haven’t given publishers anything like the same income.That’s all true – but also a misdiagnosis.The reason e-books haven’t given trad publishers a huge payday, compared with the mass market editions of the past, is that the areas concerned – romance, genre mystery, YA paranormal, SF, and much else – have been very largely colonised by indie authors, who have made a killing.So, on this topic, the impact for authors has been highly positive – so long as they’ve gone indie.Verdict: I know what she’s saying, but …14. The Change that Wasn’tOh Jeepers. Nelson also says this: ‘Publishers, despite emphasis on social change in the last couple of years, have not expanded their readership outreach or marketing to reflect the current cultural landscape. This continues to mean fewer opportunities for agents and authors of Color. This should be the one area where it’s better for the agents of today, and it’s not.’This is real head-in-hands stuff. If not now, then when? As it happens, I think a change that has been very long overdue really is beginning to happen – but it probably won’t finally bed in until the mid- to senior ranks of publishing start to resemble the cities that house them: the highly multicultural London and New York.I’ve been publishing work for more than twenty years. I’ve had more editors, publicists, marketing people and others involved in my books than I can easily count. But, from memory, only one of them – ONE! – was a person of colour. Ye Gods. It really is changing though. It really is.Verdict: She’s horribly right.Don’t forget to check out our Build your Book month. And n\'oubliez pas that the Summer Festival is now free to Jericho members. Interested in joining us maybe? Course you are.Oh and you don\'t know what I mean, one-eyed, one-armed? Tush and pish. Inform yourself.

Folks, today is International Pennebaker Day; I have so decreed it. And, lucky you, I plan to tell you all about Pennebaking, but not until I have told you this:We started our Summer Festival of Writing last year because our plans for our regular, physical Festival were thrown into disarray by the pandemic. Then, partly for the same reason, but also because the Summer Festival was such an obviously brilliant thing to do, we ran it again this year, with fifty or sixty live events running across the whole summer. We’ve now taken the decision that the Festival is so awesome, we should make it as widely available as we possibly can. So from now on, the entire Summer Festival will be free (and exclusive) to Jericho members. That means, if you’re a member, your membership has just become a whole lot better. If you’re not a member, then you have about fifty or sixty additional reasons for feeling sad.OK. Nuff of that. Back to International Pennebaker Day:James Pennebaker, a US psychologist, was interested in trauma. He knew that trauma of any kind is associated with bad health outcomes, but what if those suffering trauma were good at talking about their ordeal? Would that make a difference?Pennebaker decided to investigate. His first thought was that some traumas carried more shame than others. (So, for example, the death of a child by suicide might be more shameful to the parent than a death by car accident.) So perhaps the nature of the trauma would be highly correlated with outcomes?He investigated and it turned out that the exact nature of the trauma was essentially irrelevant. Instead, what mattered – and it mattered a lot – was what people did with that trauma. If you had a bad experience and talked about it with friends, or family or a support group, you were largely spared the adverse health effects. If you stayed schtumm, you were much more likely to become physically ill.That was interesting enough, but what if you didn’t talk about your problems? What if you just wrote about them?Again, Pennebaker investigated. He asked a group of people to write – for fifteen minutes a day, for four consecutive days – about the most upsetting experience of their lives, preferably one they hadn’t shared extensively with others. A control group undertook a similar exercise, but wrote about their homes or their workdays, or something else forgettably bland.A year later, and with permission, Pennebaker got hold of everyone’s medical records and found that those who had written about their trauma got much less sick than those who did not. An hour’s unstructured writing had yielded major health benefits – a remarkable discovery.But further research got more interesting still.If people were asked to describe their emotional difficulties via music, or dance, or painting, they got no benefit. What’s more, if people came to the writing exercise already fluent in their description of their trauma, they obtained no particular benefit to writing it down. The people who benefitted were the ones who made progress over the four-day period; who gained in insight, who built a story.Now all that is interesting in itself – blooming interesting, if you ask me. But we’re writers, either already professional or with aspirations to be published.What does Pennebaker’s research mean for us?Well: I don’t know, but here are some things that occur to me.First, if you have experienced major trauma, you should write about it. It doesn’t matter whether that trauma was newsworthy or not, of public interest or not. All that matters is that you write about it, for your own mental or physical health. You’ll be glad that you did. It’s an amazing thing to do and you’ll definitely feel better for doing it.Secondly, I should probably tell you now that memoirs of personal trauma usually aren’t saleable for a mixture of reasons. There are some significant legal obstacles – libel and privacy – for one thing. I know of one really strong memoir, well-written and shocking at the same time, which found an agent, but which publishers declined to take on for fear of the possible legal consequences.But, look, what publishers do really doesn’t matter. That’s not the point. You’re the point. Write it for you.Third, I do wonder whether all novelists don’t in some way write books in order to deal with some deep psychic issue – or more accurately, our life experience simply smuggles itself into our work, whether we want it to or not.John Le Carre spoke somewhere (I haven’t been able to find the quote) that he found himself always writing about love and betrayal. It’s the theme that resonates through his work and one born of childhood insecurity: a conman father, a mother who deserted him. When you read things in Le Carre, like “Do you know what love is? I’ll tell you: it’s whatever you can still betray.”, you know you are reading about the author as well as the character.If you notice things like that happening, let them happen. The richest novels always have deeper themes stirring beneath the surface. I don’t even think you need to analyse those themes beyond a point. I always love it when I’ve written three-quarters of a book, or am doing my tenth edit of a completed draft, and then think, ‘Dang me, I’ve been writing about X all along and never noticed before now.’ Sometimes that X is a directly personal thing, but often it isn’t, or at least not so obviously as in Le Carre’s more colourful case.And all this makes me wonder: does writing novels have a health-protective effect? If we sublimiate our emotional difficulties and work them out via space opera / detective stories / Regency romance / literary fiction / dystopian YA, does that work as well as doing the Pennebaker exercise, the way he set it out?I’m going to guess not, but (A) I bet it does something beneficial, and (B) it does seem, from Pennebaker’s work, that there really is something special about words, as opposed to paint, music and all that. (The ‘lesser arts’ as we can agree to call them.)Which gives us a conclusion of sorts, I think.If any of you have real trauma to deal with, I think the Pennebaker exercise looks genius. Four days. Fifteen minutes a day. Just write, don’t judge. The science says you’ll be wiser, happier and healthier for that (tiny) investment.And all of us: if traumatic events smuggle themselves, subliminally, into our fiction, then great. Our fiction is likely to be the better for it. As you know, I can be quite analytical about fiction, but when it comes to that personal/fictional interface, I tend to be quite incurious. I somehow feel that if my unconscious wants to work a few things out via my story and characters, I’m probably better off leaving it be. I’ll look after the story. My unconscious can look after its Pennebaker-chores.That’s it from me.In this week’s, Kids Being Barmy news:I screwed some castors onto an old wooden pallet and added a rope to pull it along with. The four kids pull the pallet up the road outside the house, then ride it downhill with the younger boy shouting, ‘Crash coming up! Crash coming up!’His predictions generally come true within a few seconds of being issued. So far, no major injuries.

What’s the point of metaphors, similes or other such imagery? Yes, they add colour, but a one-legged Russian general with an odour of bear and a bellowing stutter would add colour too, and I bet you don’t have one of those.Really, I think a good metaphor does three things:The writer introduces a pause – the purpose here is to make you, the reader, stop, look and reflect.The reader recognises something. The feeling is roughly, “Yes! It’s just like that.” But at the same time ...The reader is surprised. The feeling here is roughly, “But I never thought of it that way before.”That means, I think, that plenty of more showy and self-conscious metaphors don’t really work. Shakespeare had Romeo say, “But soft, what light through yonder window breaks? It is the East and Juliet is the sun.”But honestly, have you ever looked at a teenage girl and ever thought of her as a sun? Iis your view of Juliet in any way deepened or extended by that idea? I seriously doubt it.(And, uh-oh, I’m coming close to dissing Shakespeare here, which is a punishable offence under the Don’t Bad My Bard Act of 1843. So let me hasten to say that I think Shakespeare probably gave Romeo a strikingly naïve metaphor to tell us something about the boy, not about Juliet. Phew!)More effective imagery might work something like this:… in the early days, when our love was settling into the shape of our lives like cake mixture reaching the corners of the tin as it swells and bakes. (Max Porter, Grief is the Thing with Feathers.)Sometimes I have loved the peacefulness of an ordinary Sunday. It is like standing in a newly planted garden after a warm rain. You can feel the silent and invisible life. (Marilynne Robinson, Gilead.)You couldn\'t make yourself stop feeling a certain way, no matter what the other person did. You had to just wait. Eventually the feeling went away because others came along. Or sometimes it didn\'t go away but got squeezed into something tiny, and hung like a piece of tinsel in the back of your mind. (Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge.)In each of these cases, the author starts by describing the thing he or she is talking about in ordinary language: love settling into the shape of our lives, the peace of an ordinary Sunday, how you can’t make yourself stop feeling a thing. But that first description, although accurate and efficient, doesn’t quite clinch the deal. If there hadn’t been a metaphor to follow, you wouldn’t, as a reader, have stopped to take stock of the thought being presented. The reader’s inclination is, always, to hurtle on without that moment’s thought.So the first thing a metaphor needs to do is slow the reader down – to arrest them in the moment. The incongruity of the metaphor does that instantly. The reader has to pause to assimilate the sudden incursion of (in these cases) a cake, a garden, and a piece of tinsel. It’s almost as though the reader has pinned a red flag to the piece of prose that’s just gone, saying, “No. Look at this. Consider it properly.”But you can’t, of course, just stick any old flag in place. The flag has to add something. It has to deliver that little click of recognition, but also add something to the thought that has just gone before.So ‘Love settling into the shape of our lives’ is clear, but functional. It’s dry. Add the idea of a cake starting to push into the corners of a cake tin and you have a sense of the gradualness of the process, the way crevices get slowly filled. You have also that phrase ‘swells and bakes’ which tells you that the love is growing (something that the earlier language had omitted) and that’s it’s baking, or curing – becoming mature. All that, plus you have the sense of something turning golden and smelling nice. Something functional and dry has turned into a literary moment that you want to break off and eat.Same thing, give or take, with the other bits I’ve quoted.Which brings us to the question: how do you do that yourself? How do you gets bits of writing like the ones above into your own text?Well, I have two parts of the answer, but there’s a crucial third which I’m missing – and which may not exist.The first part is that you need to be alert, yourself, to the moment in your tale when you want to arrest the reader. You might well, for example, have a moment in your book when your character is enjoying an ordinary, peaceful Sunday. I suspect that your vocabulary comfortably extends to each of those three words. So the first bit of the Marilynne Robinson quote is definitely within your grasp. So your job now is to notice that you want or need to do something more.You need to have the thought, “Hmm, yes, I’ve described that experience efficiently enough, but I need a dot of colour to flag the moment for the reader’s attention.”If you have that thought, you are already halfway there. Noticing that you have a job to do is probably the single most important step in actually doing it.The second part of the answer is that, to find the right image, you have to loosen the handbrake. You can’t find the right image by analysing too closely. You find the right image by detaching a bit – blurring your gaze, not sharpening it. It\'s like a word association game, or one played when you\'re under the influence of a mild hallucogenic.It’s like you go into the feeling (peaceful Sunday) and let yourself forget what you are actually talking about in order to find the image (garden / rain) that it most resembles. Once you have that basic image, you can then start to mess around with the right words (mature garden? Newly mown garden? Spring garden? Newly planted garden?) to find the formulation that works best. Once you have the actual idea (peaceful Sunday = garden after rain), the best way to phrase it is a matter of trial and error, pushing words round to see what fits best.The third part of the answer is the one where I can’t really offer you much help. How do you release that handbrake? What if the handbrake is jammed on? Where do you find the damn thing? What if the instruction manual for finding the handbrake is written in Japanese, or Cornish, or Kashubian, or Klingon?Well, I don’t know. All I can say is that my own handbrake has loosened up the more I write. These days, the damn thing is so loose, I can’t park on a hill without running into a parked car or (once) tumbling over a quay into the sea.I so also think it helps if you lose any sense that you might be ridiculous, or that an image is just silly. (Love? Like cake mix? Don’t be absurd.) And yes, of course, your first three ideas might not work. But that doesn’t mean your fourth one won’t.Notice when you need a dab of colour. Grope around for images. Tinker with them till their right. And free up that damn hardbrake.Oh yes, and even if you follow all the advice in this email, you probably still won’t write like Marilynne Robinson. She’s a god.

Planets are boring; they only have two poles. Books are interesting, because they have at least five or six poles, which define the shape of the whole.Here they are:External jeopardyIn a huge number of books, the possibility that a big bad thing happens animates the entire reading experience. If you’re reading a thriller, or anything in that zone, the external jeopardy (eg: will the baddies blow up the White House?) is likely to be the single dominating component of your overall structure. The question provoked in the reader is, roughly, what happens next? That’s the basic question underpinning all suspense novels.MysteryIn pretty much all crime novels, but in plenty of other books too, there’s also a big element of mystery. Here, the question isn’t what happens next, but what did happen? Who killed Colonel Higgins in the library? Why where there no footprints in the flowerbed? Why was the butler seen with an unwaxed moustache and an unbuttoned waistcoat? Why did the library smell of burned almonds and gently warmed honey?Mystery is not as powerful a driver of story as suspense, but it’s still reasonably powerful (ask Agatha Christie) and it’s particularly successful when combined with plenty of suspense.EmotionMost books involve a bit of love interest, or some other powerful emotional centre – a missing child, a dying parent.Plenty of novels have that emotional interest as their object of overwhelming concern. So, yes, most romances will have some notes of external jeopardy: for example, in Pride & Prejudice, there’s the question of whether Wickham will debauch the silly Lydia and ruin the family. But these things are deeply secondary to the big emotional question of whether he/she is going to get it together with him/her.These emotional questions are one of suspense – that is, they look forward, not back – but they’re worth separating out from the issue of external jeopardy, simply because most novels (including all of mine) have issues of external jeopardy playing alongside more traditional romance. They feel like, and are, different elements.MoralityPretty much all novels (and again, all of mine) also run up against significant moral questions. Those moral questions are typically entangled with other aspects of story. So, in romances, the Mister typically needs to prove his moral worth (eg: ride to Lydia’s rescue) in order to give the romance its final delicious bite. Or in crime novels, the detective/investigator is typically confronted with taxing moral challenges en route to solving the crime.BeautyAt the more literary end of the spectrum, there’s another element to take into account: how beautiful is the writing? How deliciously quotable are the sentences? This is book as objet d’art: something you almost want to hang on the wall and coo at.HumourLast and probably least, there’s humour. A bark of laughter is so different from everything else we’ve considered, that it’s worth teasing out into its own category. A romance or a thriller or a ghost story or a literary novel could be glumly serious from start to finish, or it could make you gurgle with laughter. You can have romantic comedies, and romantic tragedies, and romantic adventures, and they’ll all have a different feel. Same thing with any other genre. Some books make you laugh, others don’t. There’s another pole right there.**Now I mention all this partly because it’s of interest in itself to lay these pieces out on the counter for inspection.But I was also inspired to write this email by watching my kids cook. They are still of an age where they think that more of any ingredient must be better. We made lemon and ginger tea this morning, for example. Lemon is good, so they added plenty of that. And honey, so plenty of that. Ditto ginger. And obviously mint is good, so handfuls of that were added. There was no sense of proportion, balancing this ingredient against that one, so the result was a very full saucepan and a brew so thick it needed loads of dilution before it was actually palatable. If I’d let them add salt and mayonnaise and pineapple chunks, they’d probably have added them too. After all, who doesn’t love mayonnaise?Now I’ll admit: my approach to writing is broadly the same. Humour’s good: I want plenty of that. Romance: yep, bring it on. Mystery? I write detective novels, so I need plenty of that. But my books need to thrill, so I want a very high jeopardy climax. And I want my writing to shine stylistically, so I work at that too. And inevitably, given the kind of stories I write and the character I write about, moral issues creep in there too, and I do what I can to make real space for those too.It’s probably true that my books are above all suspense novels: if they weren’t exciting, nobody would read them. It’s the proper delivery of that element which allows me to get away with everything else.And that basic model does work. In fact, it’s probably the primary way to write a book. Choose your lead element (suspense in my case, with a heavy dash of mystery) then see how much you can ratchet the other things up.But it’s not the only model. If you write a really funny book, for example, the laughter is likely to drown any more subtle shades. Likewise, you can certainly slot a romance into a thriller with some end-of-the-world type hook, but the romance is almost certainly (and ought certainly) to be secondary. More interestingly, there’s quite a lot of high-end and critically lauded literary work where the beautiful writing tends to shove aside everything else. I’ve just finished reading a book, Lanny by Max Porter, where the writing is unquestionably stunning. It’s original, poetic, versatile, funny, surprising – everything you think you might want from a literary novel.But the book told a story about a boy vanishing from his home, and possibly abducted. The denouement reveals the true story and delivers (small spoiler) a happy ending. But honestly? The writing overwhelmed the story and the characters too. The boy himself never quite felt real. The parents’ own feelings creaked under the weight of lovely writing laid on top of them.To my mind, those failures spell disaster. If you tell a story about an abducted child and you don’t feel much resonance with either the child or the parents, then something’s gone wrong. (That is, I accept, a personal view: plenty of people love those books, or say they do, or give literary prizes to them. But how many of those people actually read every word of those books, I wonder?)The question I have for you is where does your story score on each of its dimensions? Are you a shove everything in kind of writer? Or do you have one very clear lead element with the others left trailing in the background.I suspect that most of us should take one of two approaches:Choose a lead element and make it exceptional. If it’s about beautiful writing, then be really beautiful. If you’re writing a thriller, then make it utterly thrilling. If your book isn’t going to be roundedChoose a lead element or two, and see how much of the other elements you can bring in without breaking things. The trick here is keeping the coherence of your lead elements intact, while bringing other things into play. It’s good if your book is funny – but you can’t let too much laughter kill your high-jeopardy denouement, or take away the sweetness of that finally fulfilled romance.And one of the purposes of this email is to nudge you if there’s anything you’ve forgotten.There’s some Woody Allen film where he’s getting ready for a big night out. We see him checking his jacket, adjusting his hair, building his confidence. Then he’s ready – he leaves the room – the camera stays running – and we see him rush back in: he’s forgotten to wear trousers.This email is asking you to check that you are wearing trousers. Have you just forgotten to tease out the morally difficult areas of your story? Is there a mystery you are neglecting? Is your handling of that secondary romance just lacking?Because, as writers, we concentrate so hard on getting our lead elements arranged correctly, we can som1etimes forget to think about all those other things. So think about them, right?Add mayonnaise.And pineapple.

Here’s a thought:You will, consciously or unconsciously, have a philosophy of writing, a set of assumptions or beliefs that underpins everything you do. But what is that philosophy? And is it helping you? Or (more probably) does it partly help you and partly block you?I had that thought because I’ve definitely had a philosophy that has partly helped and partly hindered. My first novel (The Money Makers) was a playful, enjoyable, highly commercial romp. I started the book while still working full time in the finance industry and, before I’d been in finance, I’d studied economics and philosophy at Oxford.I came to writing fiction deeply aware that all my recent training – Oxford and finance – was deeply unhelpful when it came to writing popular fiction. I needed to chuck out the long sentences, the jargon, the fancy words. I needed to bring in tight, clear, physical, compelling writing.So I developed the habit of checking my prose for readability – literally checking my readability score for each chapter. The metric I used was the Flesch-Kincaid score which looks at sentence length and complexity of vocabulary, then gives you readability measure in terms of what high school grade would be capable of reading read what you’ve just written. I aimed for a score in the 6-7 range, meaning that kids of 11-12 would in theory be able to read the book. In practice, of course, it was an adult novel, but beach reads ought to be nice, easy, fast reads, so that’s what I aimed for.In practice, I probably overdid it, but my theory was sound. I managed to erase my past training and sprung into print as a fully formed commercial writer.I developed some other ideas too. One was an absolute horror of boring the reader. I wanted something on every page to prick the reader’s interest. That might be a plot movement. It might be some snappy dialogue, or a joke, or anything else – but I wanted to sustain the reader’s interest from very first page to the very last.As a result, I also became relentless at tightening my prose. A nine-word sentence that could equally well be a seven-word sentence struck me as baggy and weak.Many of those habits stuck with me. I’ve become a much better writer over the years, but I still have that horror of being boring. And it’s mostly worked out for me: my books have sold for decent amounts and my readers have enjoyed reading them. That’s a win, right?Except that even healthy habits can become limiting. What if I took the risk of a few slower or less vibrant pages, in the hope of gaining some deeper reward? Gone Girl, for example – which is a commercial novel in my genre – took those kind of risks, and the risks paid off massively, not just literarily but commercially as well. You could say exactly the same about The Talented Mr Ripley. You could say the same, in fact, about Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. I’m not saying I could have written those masterpieces under any circumstances, but my “gotta be interesting at all times” credo meant I was never even in the game.Other things too. I used to believe that I had to write / think / edit my way into fluency. I sometimes had an eight-hour writing day and often enough, four hours in, I’d thought plenty, and tinkered with some of my previous prose, and tried out two or three approaches for the next chapter … but not actually got any meaningful new text down on the page. I thought that this three- or four-hour approach march was just the way my creativity came.Then, along came the kids. I never had an eight-hour writing day again. If I even managed five or six hours, in bursts, over the course of a day, that was a highly unusual day. So out went my arid approach march. I just got more productive.Another example: I used to think I wrote old-school adventure fiction. (Plenty of excitement, but not much violence.) Then that career dwindled, because my book sales didn’t keep pace with my advances. So I undid my previous belief about what I could write, and turned to non-fiction. But I’m a fiction writer at heart, so I came back to fiction again but in a markedly different genre and written in a markedly different style.And all this makes me wonder: what beliefs or methods do you have that help you and simultaneously block you? Here are some possibilities:“I can only write in genre X”. I bet that’s not true. I don’t think that’s true of any really passionate writer.“I have to get this book agented before I can start another.” Maybe. But what if this isn’t going to be your breakthrough book? At a certain point, you have to ditch the project and start another.“I would never self-publish: it’s beneath me.” Right. Mark Dawson was published by Macmillan, who sold very few books. Now he self-publishes and he’s sold millions and is one of the highest-earning authors on the planet. But sure. Of course, you wouldn’t want that outcome. Think how awful it would be.“I have to write the kind of prose that my university workshop group would admire.” Right. Except those guys aren’t the ones handing out contracts, are they?“I have to write Great Literary Art. I wouldn’t stoop to anything less.” But debut literary novels need to sell. If you aren’t thinking commercially (as well as artistically) your Great Literary Novel is likely to entertain the contents of your bottom drawer and nothing else. That box of pencils and those day-glo Post-It notes will love it, though.“I like books from the 1930s / 50s / 70s / 80s and I want to write like that.” People sometimes think that because (let’s say) Agatha Christie was and is a huge bestseller, they could write a book like that and do as well. But of course they can’t. If people want a Golden Age crime novel, they’ll turn to Christie or one of her peers. If people want contemporary fiction, they’ll buy something recently published. By all means, write Golden Age crime fiction with a contemporary twist, (The Seven Lives of Evelyn Hardcastle being an obvious example.) But bring something of the now into anything you write.“I need to write with hand-turned pencils in a badgerskin notebook in only my favourite café and only in the morning and only if they’re playing Chopin on the music system.” Yeah, right. You aren’t actually going to write anything then, are you?Those are some commonly held, and unhelpful beliefs, but I’d be genuinely interested to know what ideas you have that may or may not be helpful … or, better still, which are both helpful and unhelpful, useful and limiting.So tell me. Or – better still – tell each other on Townhouse. These beliefs are really fruitful if they stimulate. They’re destructive if they restrict. And they’re not static. Something that was helpful last year might be holding you back this year … and quite likely, you haven’t yet noticed.So notice.Here endeth this epistle. Oh yes, and they’re charging us by the word for PSes this week, damn their eyes.

Here are nine Odd Things about the market for books.Odd Thing the FirstConsumers are fantastically finicky about books. If you like tomatoes, you like pretty much any tomatoes. Sure, you might have a preference for ones that are vine-ripened, local-sourced, certified organic and picked by the light of a full moon. But, really, you just like tomatoes.It’s not like that with books. It’s not even like that with genres. You don’t think to yourself, “Hey ho, I like historical fiction, so here’s a work of historical fiction that I haven’t read, and the price seems perfectly OK, so I’ll buy it.”On the contrary, you think, “Yes, that’s a Renaissance-set book, and I like that period, but I’m tired of all that Florence / Rome / Siena intrigue, and it looks like there’s a boring old romance at the heart of this, so no: I ABHOR AND REJECT YOU, book, even though I like books and I like historical fiction and I even like historical fiction set in this time period.”Another reader, with tastes highly similar to yours, may fall on that selfsame book and love it.Like I say: readers – finicky.Odd Thing the SecondBooks are cheap.That may seem like not such an odd thing, really. Tomatoes are cheap too. So are (random list) flip-flops, toilet bleach, china cups and cauliflowers.But those things aren’t passionately hand-made. They either come from giant factories or commercial nurseries or whatever the product’s factory-equivalent is.Books are hand-made from the ground up. You choose your story. You slave over it. You handcraft it. You subscribe to excessively wordy emails that may – may – help you improve your work. Then you find an agent (whose tastes and judgements vary widely) and an editor (ditto), and at each stage there’s a devotedly microscopic attention to relatively minor matters – right down to the placement of a comma.Most things that are made that way are expensive: compare a pot sold by a ceramic artist with a vase you buy at your nearest supermarket.But books are both handmade (by you) and mass-produced (by a printing press). And they’re very cheap. That’s odd.Odd Thing the ThirdWriters are badly paid, with insecure jobs, with no pensions and terrible prospects.That’s not the odd bit, however. After all, other jobs like that exist and, in less wealthy parts of the world, there are loads and loads of jobs like that.Rather, the odd thing is this: people really, really want to do the job. You do. And (often but not always) the people who most want to do the job are ones with an excellent education and the ability to secure terrific jobs in other, more prosperous sectors.Oh yes, and if I’m allowed to have an O.T. 3(b), then I might add that almost everyone involved in the production and sale of books sells their time for less than they could get elsewhere, Jeff Bezos being one notable exception.Odd Thing the FourthNormally, a prestige product costs more than its more ordinary counterparts. An Aston Martin costs more than a bottom-of-the-range Volkswagen. (I bought my first car for less than £1000 / $1500, and very rubbish it was too. It was bright yellow and once went ninety miles an hour, but only going downhill with a strong wind behind it.)You can buy 250g of loose-leaf tea from Fortnum & Mason’s, a posh British grocer, for £12.95. Or you can buy 80 tea bags (a similar quantity, in terms of cups produced) from any old supermarket for as little as £0.75.But books? To Kill a Mockingbird, one of the greatest books of the twentieth century, is currently being sold for £6.55 on UK Amazon. A Time to Kill – a good quality, but still not exceptional, legal thriller – is selling for 12% more at £7.37. I also managed to find a debut legal thriller written by no one you’ve ever heard of selling in paperback for £11.99, an 80% mark-up on Mockingbird. That debut book may be almost twice as good as Harper Lee’s classic, but I’m going to guess otherwise.It is, admittedly, true that if you look at ebook prices, you’ll tend to see a slightly more orderly lineup, with prices that better reflect prestige, but only slightly more orderly, even then.The big point here is that highly rated and well-known products don’t really compete on price. As a   rule of thumb, book prices are basically determined by what kind of packaging you choose. That’s like tomatoes that cost twice as much if you buy them in a paper bag than if you buy them in a plastic one.Which is odd, right?Odd Thing the FifthMost fiction is digital – that is, most fiction is consumed as either ebook or audiobook. There aren’t any public and up-to-date figures for how much adult fiction is digital, but about 70% would be a reasonable guess. If you add in print books sold online, the total would be more than 75%.So you’d probably guess that a bestselling ebook would have more cachet than a bestselling print book. And guess, furthermore, that a bestselling paperback would probably have more kudos than a bestselling hardback.You’d probably also guess that stores which only sell physical formats don’t have real authority or weight in the world of books. An analogy might be the world of music, where, sure, it would be nice if your album topped the vinyl charts. But you and everyone else knows that the vinyl charts are a quirky little throwback, and what you’d really most want is to lead the way in downloads or streaming.Only, this is the world of books, where everything you’ve just guessed is dead wrong. It’s almost perfectly true that the less economic weight something has, the more likely it is to have prestige. Huh?Odd Thing the SixthSuppose you went to a concert and more than 50% of people walked out halfway, the composer or orchestra would presumably be considered useless, right?And if people went to an exhibition of art, and a large majority of people left without seeing half the rooms, you’d think that the artist must be a load of rubbish.But it’s commonplace for people to abandon books unread. Data from Jellybooks, an analytics company, suggests that most books are unfinished by most readers. Of the books that Jellybooks have tested, only 5% are finished by more than 75% of readers.In other words, most books disappoint most of the time.And that’s after intense scrutiny by agents and editors and all the other people who try to make your book great. And some of the least-finished books are amongst the most-critically lauded.Which is odd, huh? Oh yes: and if Book X had a great critical following, but then word got out that particularly few readers finished that book … that information wouldn’t alter the critical consensus one iota.Which is weird, right?(Almost as weird as the fact that we use the word iota, a letter in the Greek alphabet, to signify insignificance. The phrase not a jot comes from the same source.)Odd Thing the SeventhIn the music industry, streaming pretty much slaughtered older physical formats.In the news industry, countless papers have gone bankrupt or have lost a ton of profitability.In photography, grand old names – hello, Kodak! – went bust, bankrupted by digital.In pornography, a monster wave of digital content pretty much eliminated the commercial structures that had been in place before.And in publishing – the industry looks much the same as it always did. Yes, the big publishers now report a steady 25% or so of sales in ebooks. (Self-publishers and digital-only publishers explain why the total share-of-ebooks is so much huger than that.) But really, the experience of a published author today is much the same as it was twenty years ago. The firms are still the same. The production process is still the same. The industry itself considers itself to have been through wrenching change, but that’s code for “wrenching by the standards of publishing.”Which isn’t that wrenching.Odd Thing the EighthThese days, any old idiot can self-publish a book. Assuming you have a cover and a manuscript to hand, you can, in theory, upload your book to Amazon in about ten minutes. A day or so later, that book would be available to essentially every reader in the world.At the same time, firms exist which do much the same job and don’t always do it better. The only extra wrinkle: they also have the power to sell books through bookstores and supermarkets (though there’s no guarantee that physical outlets will ever actually take your book.)Those firms have long heritages and, of course, brand names. But as brands go, those brand names are virtually meaningless. People might trust a breakfast cereal because it said ‘Kelloggs’ on the box. Almost no one carries a book to a shopping till on the basis that it has been published by X rather than Y. Readers care a lot about the book and the author. They care about the publisher so little, they barely notice it.So those brand names have no significance, right?Well, actually yes. The people who care most passionately about the brands, are the authors who are willing to give up 100% of net royalties from ebooks (which they’d get if they self-published) in exchange for 25% net royalties (which they’d get from their trad publisher), plus the authority of one of those brand names that consumers truly don’t care about.Somewhat Odd Thing the NinthYou care enough about this whole damn game that you’ve read yet another stupidly long email from me, even though it doesn’t actually tell you anything that will help you write, edit or market better.Jeepers. One of us here must be crazy.Ah well. We’ll get more “how to”-ish soon, I promise

The Guardian newspaper ran an interview yesterday with a South African author, Karen Jennings.In one way, the article offers a standard literary tale. Roughly this:“Author writes book, this time about a lighthouse keeper and a refugee who washes up on his little island. Publisher buys book. Publisher publishes book. Book gets nominated for a major prize (in this case the Booker). Book increases its print run ten times over. Author suddenly starts to get a ton of positive attention. Big newspapers like the Guardian run flattering features. Life turns on its head.”You’ve already read a version of that story a million times, except that on this occasion there’s more honesty on view, than often. The interview also tells us that Jennings finished the book in 2017. She didn’t (and doesn’t) have an agent. She found it very hard to get a publisher. When she did find one, (British micro press, Holland House), the team struggled to find anyone to endorse the book or give them a quote for the blurb. Prospects were so meagre that Holland House put out a print run of just five hundred copies (and it’s essentially impossible for anyone to make money at that level of sales.) When the book came out it was met, very largely, with silence.Just pause there a second. That rather glum experience is as common as nuts. Loads of writers struggle to get an agent, struggle to get published, struggle to sell books, struggle to get that book noticed. That is pretty much the norm for our odd little industry.And, OK, on this occasion we’re talking about a micro press that is well used to dealing with small numbers. But the same phenomenon is common enough with the Big 5 houses as well. Yes, advances are generally larger and yes, sales expectations are consequently higher. But if your book gets a mediocre cover, it’ll die all the same. You don’t hear a lot about the books that just curl up and die, but there are a lot of them out there. The reason you don’t hear about them is (duh!) they’ve curled up and died.This experience often calls for sacrifices. Karen Jennings is quoted as saying, ‘I’ve been really poor for a very long time. I don’t have much of a social life either. You know, I don’t have fancy clothes. I don’t have a car. I don’t have a house. I don’t have a career the way other people have.’Now that outcome, it seems to me, is optional. I urge writers – and I mean YOU – to look after your income sensibly. That mostly means: get a job and write in your spare time. Or marry someone rich. Or win the lottery or strike oil in your back yard. Please don’t make the mistake of looking to writing for your livelihood. But, OK, Jennings wanted to go all in on writing. She took that gamble and now her book is Booker-nominated and making waves.Great. Good for her. It’s easy to read that story as one of belief. She believed in her writing. She gambled everything on it. The path was hard. Success didn’t come right away. But she hung in there – and one day the world opened up and started to give her all the things she’d always wanted.But that’s the wrong way to read it. There are a thousand books out there as good as Jennings’s. Most of those will just sell a few copies then be forgotten. It’s perfectly likely that Jennings’s book will perform decently, but not win the Booker Prize, and then she, and her nascent career, may look little more robust than before.Critical attention isn’t just fickle. It’s also wildly erratic.Take a book that did win the Booker Prize: Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending. That’s a major author winning a massive book prize – so it must be a great book, no? I mean, there can’t be any doubt about that, can there?Well, yes there can. Geoff Dyer, writing in the New York Times, commented: ‘This was not one of those years when the Man Booker Prize winner was laughably bad. No, any extreme expression of opinion about The Sense of an Ending feels inappropriate. It isn’t terrible, it is just so . . . average. It is averagely compelling (I finished it), involves an average amount of concentration and, if such a thing makes sense, is averagely well written.’Personally, I agree with Dyer. I think the book was obviously mediocre.So why did the book get so heavily praised? Well, media likes to work with memes – idées reçus, to use an older term. Once the media has formed an idea about a novelist (or, actually, an anything), it struggles to overturn or challenge that idea.So the Julian Barnes meme says, “Julian Barnes is a great novelist. Here he is writing about some Big and Important Topics. So this must be a Big and Important Book. Let’s say how great it is.” Easier to do that than to read the book and do some real critical thinking about it.Let’s summarise some of these thoughts.One: you can’t trust that excellence alone will bring you to national or international prominence. That may well not happen. Excellence is not enough.Two: you can’t rely on critics to determine the value of your book. For one thing, the critics are mostly unlikely to read or comment on your book. For another, what they say is often nonsense, or a basket of conflicting opinions.Three: once an opinion has formed, that opinion is likely to hold like iron, no matter what the actual reality of the situation.Which is all good. It sets out the landscape for us as writers:You need to enjoy the process of writing, because you may not earn money or fame.You need to enjoy the process of publishing, for the same reasonYou need to trust your own inner assessment of the book, because you may not get any meaningful external commentary – and what you do get may be unhelpful anyway.It’s not just writers who have to find their own rewards. Think of the Olympics. We focus on the medal-winners, of course, but most athletes coming to the Games end without a lump of metal round their necks. And very few athletes make it to the Games. In fact, there’s an entire pyramid of endeavour which exists because people love the endeavour.So love the endeavour. Find your treasure in the here and now. In my experience, that’s the only enduring way to proceed, the only way to a settled satisfaction.That’s it from me. The picture in the header this week? That’s the kids doing pre-Renaissance devotional art. Roll over Cimabue. There’s a new brush in town.

Determined as I am to add value to my readers, always  – I’ll start by telling you the easiest way to write a plot twist.Answer: you don’t. You write a compelling, interesting narrative that doesn’t have a plot twist anywhere.This is advice I live by. If I think back over my fiction, I can think of almost nothing that boasts a honest-to-God plot twist. In all my books, I have only one proper plot twist (and even then, I don’t think most readers or critics commented on the twist specifically; they gave a broader view about the entire book.)Now, admitting that my books mostly don’t have plot twists is not at all the same thing as saying they’re dull. I blooming well hope they’re not. On the contrary, I hope they’re full of surprise and hope my readers never quite know where the book will be going next.But a twist is different from a surprise. Here’s the difference:A plot surpriseSomething happens that is perfectly in keeping with what’s gone before. There may even have been some kind of foreshadowing. But the surprise does not unsettle a reader’s expectation, because the reader had not formed any particular expectation in relation to this particular issue.Examples of this kind of surprise are plentiful. In The Dead House, Fiona spends a long time draining a boring-looking pond. The reader has no idea what she’s going to find. When she finds the (previously flooded) entrance to a cave, the reader is surprised. (“Good heavens! A cave! I never expected that!”) But they’re not unsettled. They simply had no idea what the whole pond-drainage thing was leading up to.Readers are gripped because they want to know what significance the cave has. But they’re not confounded or startled, because they didn’t have any prior expectations about what might be the case.A plot twistFor something to count as a plot twist, the plot movement needs to surprise, of course. It also needs to be perfectly consistent with what’s gone before. There may well have been some rather subtle foreshadowing that only makes sense in retrospect.But in addition – and this is the new element – the plot development needs to overturn, and violently overturn, an assumption that the reader had previously held with total confidence.There are a ton of examples of twists such as these. In Hitchcock’s Psycho, we simply assume that Janet Leigh – the huge star at the heart of the film – will at the very least survive to the last 10 minutes. (After all: she’s a huge star, she’s box office gold, and the first half of the film centres on her almost completely.)It’s not that the viewer consciously wonders whether Leigh will survive or not. They simply assume they know how movies work, and you don’t kill the film’s obvious lead character in the middle of the film. But Hitchcock did exactly that – and the film swerved off in an utterly unpredictable direction.In Clare Macintosh’s debut hit, I Let You Go, we assume that the lead (first person) character has one particular relationship to a dead child. It turns out that the relationship is very different from what we think.In Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, we assume that Amy’s diaries (in the first half of the book) can be taken at face value. In the middle of the book – well, we discover something different.And so on. Why readers love plot twists – and whether you need oneNaturally, a surprise that comes with the added force of confounded the reader both seems more surprising and also carries a whiff of technical bravado. (“You want a twist, baby? Look at this little beauty!”) There’s something of the circus trick about them, a difficult manoeuvre carried out with dazzle.That performative quality is why, I think, readers love twists and tend to comment on them. With works like Psycho, I Let You Go and Gone Girl, you just don’t hear critical commentary that doesn’t home in on the plot twist itself.And of course, if you want to think about embedding a twist in your book, the place to start is always with the reader’s own expectations.The one time I’ve written a book with a proper twist, I worked hard to embed the expectation – and then overturn it. The sequence ran roughly like this:Get the reader to think that art-thieves have stumbled onto real-life evidence of a major Arthurian artefact. (‘King’ Arthur was almost certainly not a king, but it’s perfectly plausible that there was a major British warlord of that name who fought and won a major battle against the Saxons. So for someone to find archaeological evidence of his existence would be unlikely, but not at all absurd. For what it’s worth, I think that warlord probably did exist, it’s just that no one can prove it.)Reinforce that expectation by making it clear that other people around Fiona share it – and grown-up people too: academic archaeologists, the police, and so on.Foreshadow and hint at the truth, but in a way no one could possibly understand.Boom! Overturn the expectation abruptly and unexpectedly.At the same time make it clear that, if you look carefully, there’s only one way to read the sequence of events up to this point. So the view that the reader (and lots of others held) was actually impossible to sustain.Develop the book along the new lines. More surprises may follow, but (probably) no more actual twistsIf you like the whole twist idea, it’s worth taking time just to think through what expectations your reader has – or could have, if you went to the trouble of building false expectations. The more solid and unquestioned those expectations, the more enjoyable the act of exploding them will be.Once you have that basic notion, you just need to backfill with everything else: embed those expectations as carefully as you can, foreshadow the real truth, detonate as explosively and loudly as you can.That, my old buddies, is the art of the plot twist. As I say, it’s not actually a route I’ve travelled down all that much and it’s definitely not essential to writing a great book – not even if, like me, you dwell in crime-thriller-land, where twists are much talked about.That’s me done for this week, old buddies. Have a lovely weekend.

I’ve never really been a sailor, but I’ve done some mucking around in dinghies on lakes and on the coast. At one point, my dad, thinking that I should actually learn something about the craft, gave me a book about it. I don’t now remember the difference between a halliard and a shroud, but I remember one section quite clearly. There was a long and patient discussion of rights of way on the water – who gives way to whom, and that sort of thing. The discussion ended with this verse:Here lies the body of Mike O’DayWho died maintaining his right of way.He was right, dead right, as he sailed along,But he’s just as dead as if he’d been wrong.It’s a ditty that I urge you bear in mind. Here are three reasons why:CopyrightA lot of authors, especially indies, are anxious to Protect Their Copyright. Back in the day, people used to mail themselves sealed, dated packages containing their manuscript. More sensibly, you can register your work with the US Copyright Office, at the cost of some manageable fees and some tiresome form-filling.And OK, if you want to do it, do it. (Any competent publisher will do the legal basics for you, and you can always check to see that they have.) But here’s the thing: let’s say you have the world’s most bullet-proof copyright registration in the world. Let’s say you have film of Barack Obama solemnly testifying, his hand upon the Great Seal of the United States, that he watched you and you alone write your manuscript. Ok, great – but so what?If your book is popular, it’ll be pirated. Sleazy crooks, probably based in Russia, will rip off your book and make pirate copies available online.What then? What do you do? It’s not like there’s some Interpol of Copyright staffed by a combination of Daniel Craig, Tom Cruise and the like. There’s literally no one who’s going to help you. So, sure, you could sue, but you’d have to go to a Russian court to do it (and good luck with that.) And even if you did that and won, the crooks would just pull down one pirate site and pop up a duplicate site two weeks later.I can prove to you that you won’t defeat piracy, as follows:You’re not as well-resourced or experienced in fighting piracy as Penguin Random HousePRH books are pirated all the timeSo your book will be pirated too, assuming anyone can bother to do itWhich all sounds terrible, except that almost no one gets their books from pirate sites and plenty of people make plenty of money from books. So the problem can’t be that bad.ContractsYou sign a contract with a top publisher. They make various commitments and you take those undertakings in good faith.But it’s not unheard of for big publishers to break their contractual commitments. It’s happened to me, more than once. It used to be really quite common. Now, I think, it happens a bit less than it used to, but it still happens.So let’s say a publisher breaks a contract with you. Let’s say, they commit to publishing three books. They publish one and it doesn’t do well. They bring out the hardback of #2 and it doesn’t do great. Meanwhile, corporate shenanigans mean the entire imprint is being reduced in size, so you get an email telling you sorry, there won’t be a paperback of #2 and they won’t bring out book #3 at all. That story isn’t made up. That exact thing happened to a friend of mine.(And what’s more, the whole communications round the episode were terrible. It would be one thing for you editor to call, or take you out to lunch, and say, “Look buddy, I’ve got terrible news and I feel awful.” Quite another to get a blunt email from someone in Contracts you’ve never even met. I might also add that there was nothing wrong at all with the books – the same author has a great career elsewhere now. The sales failure was entirely on the publisher’s side.)So what do you do?You have in black and white a contract signed with full faith and credit of a very large corporation, undertaking that they WILL do X.You could – you really could – go to court and seek an injunction compelling the so-and-sos to do what they’d promised. But in the first place, the publisher would probably deny they’d caused commercial harm. In the second place, a publisher forced by court-action to publish a book is hardly likely to do a great job with it. And third: what next? The great publishers of the world are unlikely to want an author who’s willing to sue them.In other words, there’s damn all you can do. (Or almost damn all: you should make a big, bloody fuss because someone might offer you some apology-money, and because you thoroughly deserve to have your feelings known and recognised.)But legally speaking? You are Mike O’Day: right, but powerless in your rightness.AgentsSame thing here. With agents, the issues don’t tend to be contractual exactly, as the author/agent contract is often pleasantly brief. But there IS an implicit contract, nevertheless, which runs as follows:You will sell your work only via the agent (with a little carve out for direct-to-reader selling, via self-pub – and even then, that should always be talked about first.)The agent will represent your work and manage your careerIf anything happens to disturb that understanding, you’ll both talk about it like grown-upsOften though, that’s just not how it turns out. I know of well-known agents at absolutely first-class agencies who have simply discontinued any kind of comms with no-longer wanted authors (even, in one case that springs to mind, when that author was actually a bestseller in her own country.)So, quite possibly, the agent you think it going to take care of your career simply exits, stage left, with no proper discussion or handover. And even though your contract is with Big Agency, LLC, not with Jane Jones of Big Agency, LLC, it turns out that Big Agency has literally no interest in taking care of you if and when Jane Jones decides to wash her hands of you.Is that fair?It is not.Is there ‘owt you can do about it?There is not.Sandy O\'DonnnellSo where does that leave you? You should sail your career like a wiser Mike O’Day. You take care of your copyright, your contracts, your agents and all the rest of it as professionally as intelligently as you can.You will do that, and people may still – unreasonably and uncontractually – mess you around. You are welcome to scream. You are welcome to feel peeved. But the thing you do after that is get back to your desk, so you can start writing another book.Here lies the body of Sandy O’DonnellWho never again would write a novel.An agent betrayed her, a publisher lied – And instead of just working, she sat down and cried.Do not be like her.

Last week we were all set to talk about time, when Markus Dohle of PRH and some Italian pigs’-bladder-kickers got in the way.This week, however, we’re back to our favourite dimension and how to use it. Oh, and incidentally, although I always talk about novels as though that’s all that matters, the issues here are deeply important in narrative non-fiction too, where they tend to crop up a lot.The idea for this email arose from my self-editing webinar the other day. One of the pieces we looked at was particularly well-written. It had some really good phrases in it, good use of vocabulary, and a great little story to tell. (Ordinary Yorkshireman in the late sixteenth century is called up to fight in a foreign war. He doesn’t want to go, but is compelled to do so.)But the particular snippet under our microscope didn’t work. The prose had great content everywhere you looked, but the air leaked out anyway, a tyre too flat to pump up.The problem is common. The solution is easy. And the technique for solving it is universal. Here goes:The problemLet’s say there are three chunks of time you want to talk about. Just to mix things up a bit, let’s say our story is about Melinda. She’s a pharmacist’s assistant in Alabama. Her husband, Bill, is a forklift driver, but also a former serviceman who is technically still a reservist for the US Army. The army wants him to go to Afghanistan. He doesn’t want to go, but he’s gotta. Off he trots, leaving Melinda at home. To add a little cajun seasoning to all this, Melinda and Bill haven’t long been married and Melinda is pregnant.The sequence we need to manage is therefore as follows:The period after getting married. Bill’s merrily forklifting around. Melinda’s happily getting pregnant, assisting pharmacists and planting dahlias. This period is maybe six months, or something like that.Bill gets called up. He tries to fight the summons – tries to get a court order, or something. There’s some kind of legal process, but he never stands a chance. All this evolves over a month or two.Bill forks off to Afghanistan. Melinda’s left at home, heavily pregnant, looking at her dahlias and feeling that life has already gone off the rails.Now, to be clear, none of this stuff is THE story. It’s effectively a prelude to the action that the author really wants to talk about. But all these elements of the prelude matter, of course. Quite clearly, Bill and Melinda’s feelings about their situation would be utterly different if they were in the midst of a tangled divorce and Bill couldn’t wait for any opportunity to get away.So we need a way to lay out these elements in a way which prepares us properly for the story to come.Here are three ways we could do it.The method condensedWe could handle the entire sequence in a single paragraph or so. Crucially, we’ll avoid any real attempt to give depth of flavour to any of the individual segments. The result will be that the whole thing reads like a single episode – perhaps something like this:Those first months of married life contained the joys and annoyances usual to the state. [One or two sentences describing that period.] All that, however, was ended – abruptly, rudely, even – by an envelope bearing the insignia of the US Army Reserve Corps. The letter inside informed ‘Sgt. Gates’ that he was being called up for a six-month tour in Afghanistan, the tour he had been promised would never happen. They fought, of course. Launched an appeal against the summons. But the appeal was brushed away. The cruel date arrived. Bill, in uniform, left the house. Melinda cried. Bill promised to write. They told each other that six months wasn’t really that long. But Bill drove away and Melinda was left behind. She was five months’ pregnant.That’s all fine.You might, optionally, wish to break that out into two paragraphs, and of course you’ll edit and adjust that prose as much as you wish.But look what we haven’t done. We haven’t got specific about place and time until the very end of the period in question (“the cruel date arrived. Bill … left the house.”)The result is that the reader hears “Ah, yes, some good general blah about what things are like after marriage, and NOW – when we get specific about place and time – that’s when our story properly kicks off again.” In effect, the story uses a bit of compressed telling-type language (telling the reader about those post-wedding months) followed by a jump back into showing (time and place specific) at the end. The jump into specificity signals to the reader, \"Here\'s where the story restarts.\"That strategy works.Here’s another way to do things:The method discursiveThis is the opposite strategy.You take each period – post marriage / fighting the call-up / departure for Afghanistan and the months after that – and give them proper page space. How much is up to you. I’d say a good length paragraph would be the minimum, but if you wanted to write a page or two on the honeymoon period of the marriage, that would be fine.If you adopt this approach, it’s fine to drop some specifics in there. This sort of thing:It was a broiling August day. Melinda was rocking on the porch, eating grits, brewing moonshine, fixing her pickup truck and generally demonstrating her hatred of deep South clichés. The postman arrived, as ever with a wad of chew-tobacco tucked inside his lower lip. ‘Seems like the Army got some business with your Bill,’ he drawled…You can get away with that dab of specificity, because you have given yourself the space to deal with the specific moment, then pull back to a more general discussion of the aftermath, before moving on to the next period.That strategy also works. Whether you use this option or the one before is really up to you. What’s the right balance for your story? Only you can feel your way into answering that question. (And, by the way, your answer may well change as you come to re-edit the book as a whole. When you first answer the question, you can’t feel the weighting of the whole book. When you do have a sense of that, your first guess about what works may prove wrong.)But there’s one more strategy you might choose to follow. It’s this:The method calamitousThis is where you try to combine the two approaches. Where you seek to handle everything in a condensed way, but still try to insert real specifics about time, place, and mood.This approach always fails. It induces a kind of sea-sickness in the reader. And the reason is that you are making multiple very frequent switches between telling-type prose (condensed, summary, economical) and showing-type prose (time- and place-specific, detailed, discursive.)Of course, every book can and does switch between those two modes, but you can’t switch too fast and too often in a limited space.The Method Condensed works, because you basically avoid showing-type language until the very end of the section – that is, when you are ready to dive back into your story proper.The Method Discursive works, because your switching between modes is quite widely separated – by several paragraphs, perhaps even a page or two.You almost need to think about the showing / telling switch in the same way as you would handle a switch between character viewpoints. You can do it, yes. But you can’t do it abruptly. You can’t do it screechily, with smoke coming from your handbrake.That’s it from me.I have a cunning idea for folding time in on itself which should give me an extra two hours lie-in on Friday mornings. I’m going to need a large amount of liquid helium and a docile test subject …

I was going to write an email today about time, and how to write it. But then –A group of eleven Englishmen managed to kick a pig’s bladder into a white net once more often than a group of eleven Vikings.I read about a speech from Markus Dohle (CEO of Penguin Random House) about reasons to be happy.So – we’ll talk about time next week. This week, let’s look at the Dohle Six – his reasons to be positive about the future of publishing.Reason Number OneThe global book market is growing every year.That means people are spending more money on books. More money is coming into the industry. Yay!Now, those statements do need to be expanded a little. The US and UK book markets are very highly developed and better described as flat or mature rather than growing. But they’re certainly not shrinking and more books are being read in parts of the world that have had too little cash (or sometimes literacy) in the past to support a mature books market.My take?Yes. A good reason to be happy. Even a flat / mature / stable market is something to celebrate. Ten years ago, nobody knew if the internet would simply kill books. Why not? In Stewart Brand’s famous formulation: “On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it\'s so valuable … On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.” Which would win? In music, free mostly won. In newspapers, free has bankrupted a ton of local presses and is placing unprecedented pressure on many, even highly established, titles.But in books: free has not won. There is a lower cost ebook market and a higher cost print one. Both are orderly. Piracy is minor. The original publishing model has adapted – but held strong. Reason Number TwoThe industry has a robust business model for both physical and electronic distribution.Publishers have strong stable relationships with all parts of the retail ecosystem: Amazon, other e-stores, supermarkets, flagship booksellers (B&N, Waterstones), and independent book stores. All those parts of the ecosystem are doing OK. Nothing is tottering.My take?That’s true – just. A few years back it was genuinely unclear if B&N or Waterstones would survive. I think that, in the longer term, the fate of those chains is still not completely clear. Will the shift to online selling just decimate ordinary retail? Those flagship chains survive because people go to the High Street or the mall to buy other things and pop in for a book at the same time. You don’t need many people shifting from physical to online buying to jeopardise a huge swathe of physical retail, including the bookstores.But that’s a bit too doomy for our present mood. The fact is that, as of today, all the key sectors are OK. The publishing industry has been through the most wrenching ten years of its half-millennium history and it’s done just fine. It’s making more money than ever. Reason Number ThreeThe physical / digital split seems stable rather than precarious.As with all big publishers, print books account for about 80% of PRH’s global sales. Physical sales remain the anchor product of the entire market.My take?Well, I have two reactions really.The first is that he’s right. When you think of a book, you think of a thing you can whack a spider with, or hurl at your TV screen if a Viking kicks a pig’s bladder into an English net.That’s no longer true of music. You think of a song as something you find on your phone or stream through your iPad. You actually have to strain to remember music as something that lay embedded in grooves laid on vinyl, or spooled on tape, or weirdly curled up somewhere in the shine of a CD.My second reaction is irritation, as always, when grown-up publishers just pretend the self-publishing market doesn’t exist. The 80% physical / 20% digital split is true of traditional publishers only. But just this year, as part of our regular JW member events, I’ve interviewed, or am about to interview, Marie Force (10 million copies sold), Mark Dawson (4 million), Amanda Prowse (untold bazillions.) Virtually all of those sales have been self-pub or with Amazon Publishing. Virtually all self-pub and APub sales are digital. Markus Dohle knows this perfectly well but, like all publishers at his level, he pretends to forget it when talking in public.That said, the fact that this enormous digital market exists while the traditional one is still healthy is a powerful endorsement of Dohle’s basic contention. Now is a good time for publishing. It’s a good time for authors. Reason Number FourThe addressable audience is growing.The world population is growing. Literacy is booming. More and more people are earning enough to be able to think about books.My take?Well, I’m not absolutely sure that more humans is a good thing. (If you asked our planet, it might very politely ask for rather fewer monkeys, pretty please.) But, OK, Dohle’s talking economics not mass extinction, and of course he’s right. And the fact that many, many more people are able to read and can afford books is an unalloyed good. Reason Number FiveEver since Harry Potter, children’s books have been the fastest growing category in publishing.Reading habits are formed early, so that means more and more children are becoming adult readers. That means we can already be confident in the reading appetites of the future.My take?He’s right. My kids are aged 7, 7, 5 and 5 and they’re all addictive readers. I’ve noticed how their language improves, how their imaginative play is enriched, how their horizons broaden. The gift of reading is a huge one and it’s embedded young. Reason Number SixAudiobooks are booming.You can listen to audiobooks in a car, or while cleaning, or in the bath, or wherever. That means the number of attention-minutes available to publishers has increased. And it turns out that audiobooks have expanded the overall market for books. They have not cannibalised it.My take?I’m not an audiobooks fan. I haven’t even listened to my own books on audio. But again: boom. He’s right. In a way that no one predicted, digital has expanded the for-sale books market, when plenty of people thought it might actually kill it. And because it’s our duty and our pleasure to out-perform expectations, here’s one more reason to be happy just for you:Harry’s Bonus ReasonThere have never been more or better paths to market for authors. There have never been more or better ways to market and establish yourself.Self-pub and digital first publishing are wholly new routes to market. They earn a hell of a lot of money for authors. They provide an amazing way to access a huge number of readers.Micro presses and very specialist presses are having a golden age. In literary fiction especially, some of the best work comes out of the smallest spaces. If big publishing has grown a bit conservative (and it has), that hardly matters when experiment and passion at the micro level is stronger than it’s ever been.Same goes for marketing tools. Mailing lists have an extraordinary power. Ten years ago, virtually no authors have them or deployed them well. These days, we know just what to do and just how to do it. Those lists (and other tools, such as ad platforms) give authors a power we never had back when publishers controlled everything.Oh, and the heck with it, here’s one more reason too. If you happen to be Italian, you may want to look away now.Harry’s final reason to be happyThe England football team are going to win the Euros. We’re going to beat the Italians 19-0. Our pig’s bladder kickers are better than theirs. It’s coming home, football’s coming home.

My missus and I are currently watching a Netflix drama, Orange is the New Black, set in a women’s prison in the US.And – it’s OK. The show has kept us entertained. We’ve stayed watching. (Still on Season 1, mind you. We’re years behind.)At the end of the most recent episode, however, the following little drama unfolded.A nasty prison officer (called ‘Pornstache’ in honour of his facial hair) is escorting a drug-using inmate, Tricia, through the jail. He wants her to start distributing drugs for him. She doesn’t want to do it. He applies some pressure, then leaves her alone in a small room, for no very obvious purpose.Tricia swallows the entire packet of drugs that he’s pressed upon her and overdoses.Pornstache, returning to the room, finds Tricia dead. Not wanting the investigation that would surely have fingered him as the source of the drugs, Pornstache makes it look as though Tricia hanged herself. In the next episode, we’re told, in a somewhat offhand way, that the prison authorities had had the body cremated quickly to avoid a bothersome investigation. And that, more or less, was the end of that story thread.I bit my lip and said nothing, but my wife – who is not a crime author and doesn’t know her way around the bureaucracy of death – said, ‘That’s ridiculous, isn’t it? Surely there’d have to be an autopsy?’And yes, there would. In England and Wales, the jurisdiction I know best, there’s a simple rule which would require autopsy in the case of any homicide, suicide or unexplained death. In the US, the rules are complex, and vary state by state, but – duh! – you can’t just burn embarrassing corpses. Of course, you can’t.In other words: the story was rubbish. It simply didn’t hang together.I’m sure that the screenwriters knew this perfectly well. They had, as consultant to the series, Piper Kerman, on whose memoir the series was based. And – this was a lavishly funded Hollywood production. If they’d needed to pick up the phone to a lawyer or coroner, they could have done so with ease.So the writers clearly just thought – “Hey, a murder plus a faked-up suicide would drive the series forward nicely. No one will know it’s all unrealistic, and if they do, they won’t care. So we’ll do it.”But, but, but …Look, you guys know me. Detail-oriented to a fault. (I once had to return the “World’s Biggest Pedant” Trophy, because, as I was obliged to point out, I’m the World’s Most Pedantic Pedant. I’m not, however, especially large.)There’s no way I’d have brushed off a fake suicide as easily as these writers did.In one way, that’s annoying, because care for the facts can be annoying. Telling your story gets harder, because you have to work your way around obstacles.But pedantry – care for the facts – doesn’t just make your storytelling harder, it also makes it better.Go back to the Pornstache / Tricia story. If I’d been writing that episode, I’d have had to consider a whole set of different options:Pornstache makes a mess of the fake murder scene and is arrested for itPornstache bribes or threatens any investigating officersThe coroner or medical examiner is drunk or incapableThe coroner is corrupt or willing to do some illicit deal with the prison wardenThere is some family relationship between Pornstache and the coronerPornstache finds a way to tamper with the evidence so as to make it look as though Tricia’s corpse has passed any toxicology testsPornstache realises he is about to be charged with murder and kills himselfOr something else. There are a million possibilities.There’s not a right or wrong here. The point is that there are solutions for any problem. (And to be clear, we’re not necessarily talking about reality here. We’re talking about solutions within the realm of your fictional universe. Even Star Trek has rules.)But these options are complicated, all of them. They’re not things you can dispose of in two minutes before you start off down your next storyline. And that’s true of most of these fact-induced diversions. They push you off the road you had wanted to walk down.And yet: your story gets better.The detail takes you into better realised scenes, characters and plots. When you think of a properly top-class drama (Breaking Bad, let’s say), you’ll notice the acute attention to detail. How is a drugs factory meant to operate? It has to be clean, right, so what kind of cleaning is involved? What kind of filters? What kind of protective gear? Those thoughts pushed the series creators into an extraordinarily well-realised depiction of a crystal meth operation. As a viewer, you felt utterly convinced by the presentation. And the result of that conviction was that you were more absorbed, more engaged, more intent.This is true about big things – story, scenes, characters, settings – but it’s true about tiny things too. Imagine a conversation between two of your characters over coffee, and the same conversation as they are rigging up an air purification system for their meth lab. Because the second scenario is fascinating in itself, the conversation itself takes on an extra glitter. In novels, the vocabulary that detailed research gives you adds precisely that same lustre.OK. So that’s the positive reason for caring about detail: you get a richer, more engaging book.But it’s worth thinking about the flipside as well.What happens if – like that scene from Orange is the Only Black – you choose not to bother with the detail? What do you lose?In the end, you can find the answer by watching your own feelings when you read or watch a scene that just doesn’t convince. You end up feeling something like, ‘Oh, they’ve just brushed that away, haven’t they?’You might continue to read / watch, but something lethal has happened all the same. That tight attention you once had – scrutinising dialogue and incidental detail for implications about character and story – just loosens. Why bother to scrutinise something with care when the author can just pretend the rules-of-this-world don’t exist for a spell?So you might go on watching – we’re continuing to watch Orange – but the relationship has shifted for the worse. Truth is, the author has probably lost that deep, careful attention for ever. The story you’re telling has gone from being memorable and precious to something more like bubble-gum pop music: something you happily listen to, and forget as soon as you have.So pay attention to detail. It is annoyingly obstructive and brilliantly rewarding. Both those things, always.That’s it from me. If you’re a JW member and you want to see me in Dr Pedant mode, then do come to my self-editing webinar on Tuesday 6 July. There will be bears.

Here’s how writing works:You get an idea for a story (or, actually, a book of almost any kind.) You write it down.In one way, what you have is a bit rubbish (because it is a bit rubbish.) And in another way what you have is perfect, because it exists. So then you start to edit and prune and change characters and reknot your plot points. As you do all that, you do have a general sense of craft. Economy with language is good. Plot needs to be in constant flux. Beware of creating too many viewpoint characters. And so on.In the early stages of your writing career, that craft knowledge is really important. It’s a compass that prevents you skedaddling off on long journeys to the wrong place. As you get more experienced, the craft knowhow still matters; it’s just that it becomes more like second-nature. You don’t think about it as much.But the thing that ultimately steers your editing isn’t some manual on How To Write, but it’s your own sense of what feels right on the page. Take this random paragraph from a work-in-progress:The bears love any excuse to go shooting. They make long trips into the hinterland. The sound of their musketry echoes across these plains, echoing over the flat earth. This fire isn’t particularly accurate – most of the carcasses have been not shot, but clawed to death – but it’s an impressive haul. Four elk, three reindeer, any number of geese, some cormorants. salmon. A mangy wolf.That feels interesting, doesn’t it? A book you might to read more of. But it’s also, to my mind, not quite right.There are some obvious – technical-type – problems, such as the repetition of echoes / echoing. But there are also some things that bother me, that might not bother somebody else. Is hinterland quite right here, for example? It’s a geographer’s term that came into use at the end of the nineteenth century, and then mostly in the contexts of industrial planning or economic geographies. The setting of this little paragraph is mid-sixteenth century and very far removed from that kind of context. To me, the word just feels wrong. It might perfectly well sound fine to you.And while I like the list of animals at the end of the paragraph, it feels underwhelming. I’d want to enrich it.Also: “any excuse to go shooting” feels a bit pallid to me. These are actual bears with actual muskets and that sentence doesn’t quite seem rich enough to honour that set-up, so I’d want to find more interesting words there. Trips, likewise, seems a bit bland.And the sort-of joke about the bears and the inaccuracy of their shooting seems a bit muffled, somehow. I’d want to make more of it.Some of these feelings seem purely personal. Others seem like ones that most editors would agree with. But, either way, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is the editorial judgement of you, the author. That’s it. That’s the whole deal.So if I were scrabbling away at this paragraph, I’d end with something more like thisAs for the bears, they love any excuse to get out their muskets. They make long forays into the back-country. The sound of their musketry echoes across these plains, whistling over the thin earth and flat rock, a pebble skimmed over water. It’s not clear how accurate this fire is – most of the carcasses that eventuate seem to have been clawed or bitten to death, not shot – but the heap of the dead is impressive nonetheless. Four handsome elk and a pair of skinny calves. Three reindeer, one of them pregnant and with two kids inside her. Any number of geese. Some cormorants. Salmon. One mangy wolf.That definitely feels better – that is, more reflective of me. If you had your hand on the same paragraph, you might have had some similar concerns but ended in a different place. (And do notice that on this occasion my edits made the paragraph longer, not shorter. There’s no rule that says editing can’t add text as well as subtracting it.)That’s an example of editing in microcosm, but not all editing happens in microcosm. In fact, one of the most interesting aspects of the editing process is the way you learn to understand your own book.Yes, you might start a project with some broad idea of why your Big Idea has resonance. But as you edit your book into shape that broad idea will take on a ton of detail. You’ll find, almost certainly, that there are more depths to your book than you had ever realised.Here’s how things have panned out with my current Fiona Griffiths novel, the one that’s been delayed about a million years.That book is set in a secure psychiatric hospital. My character was, as a teenager, hospitalised with mental illness and she has an abiding fear of such places. OK. So far, so good. It’s pretty obvious that the setting and that character make for a nice complementarity.But how exactly? I wasn’t sure how to bring those two things together. In particular, the end of the book caused me real problems. I knew I needed a big climax but nothing I quite put on the page seemed to deliver. Then – duh! – I realised that my character needed to experience drug treatment at the hands of a hostile doctor. She needed to be give psychotropic drugs being given for malign reasons – and her sense of self needed to fracture under the load.That’s really different from most of my endings, which are a bit more pow-biff-bam than that, but it was obviously the right one for this book.If I plot out how that understanding actually came to me, it’s roughly like this:Write 80% of the novelFeel dissatisfiedFiddle away at the part I’ve written, try different strategies, fix things that need fixing. All this was self-editing, albeit work done before I’d completed the novel.Feel dissatisfiedSketch out possible endings, most of them involving big all-action drama, along the lines of my previous workFeel dissatisfiedScratch away a bit more. Drive the plot forward. Edit old sections.Then realise that I’d never properly picked up or understood my own theme. I’d had Fiona reacting really badly when she first arrived at the hospital, but that story had no proper ending. My chief baddie in the book is a doctor; I had to get that baddie injuring Fiona in the way that Fiona most feared.Relief! Delight! A sense that I know what I’m doingFinish the bookFeel pleased, because I now know this book has legs / Feel dissatisfied because there’s a lot of work still to doGo back and start the editing process yet again. (I’ve done lots already.)Come to bits that I had never quite liked in the past, but didn’t know what to do with. For example, my hospital had never quite felt isolated enough, or like its own little kingdom. But now I knew how Fiona would be ending up (as a patient in that selfsame hospital, with her life very much at risk), it felt much more obvious how I wanted to deal with the hospital’s isolation. Scenes that had baffled me before just fell into place.There’s lots more still to do. Lots of plot smoothing, lots of simple writing edits. But now that I have my keystone in place – Fiona gets drugged; Fiona almost dies – I know that everything else is just a matter of time and work.The lessons from these reflections? Well, a few actually, but including these:Editing is big and small. It’s about changing individual words and it’s about getting massive ideas about how the end of the book needs to work, with consequential changes for absolutely everything else.Your ability to be dissastisfied and remain dissatisfied with your text is key. It’s that “not yet right” feeling which guides you to a better book. It’s probably also why writing can be so arduous as well as so joyful. That relentless dissatisfaction with your work – that’s the very feeling that makes it better.Bigger ideas often guide the smaller scale ones. So take that work involving bears and muskets. Food and cannibalism are themes in that book, so the the list of game – food, in this context – needed elaboration, and the pregnant reindeer with kids inside her was, in a way, a graphic, if ghoulish, representation of cannibalism. It’s not that readers will notice such things exactly, but the more you look to add those touches, the richer and more coherent the final manuscript becomes. A perfect manuscript has a kind of holographic quality to it: the whole embodied in the part, and vice versa.But also: smaller scale ideas often guide the bigger ones. It was writing a scene between the doctor-baddie and Fiona that made me realise, she needs to be drugged. Specifically, I was fidding around with the scene, because I was dissatisfied with it. That dissatisfaction with how the scene was playing out sentence by sentence led me to the realisation that would end up solving The Big Problem with the book.And: it’s work at the coal-face that fixes things. Yes, I believe in long, thoughtful dog walks as a way of solving plot conundrums. But most of the actual breakthroughs come when you are mucking about with text – actually writing it, or actually editing it.This long and baggy email is, in a way, a big fat preamble to one final message:I’m doing a self-editing webinar – for members only – on Tuesday 6 July. If you’d like me to rip your work apart, like a bear savaging a reindeer, then send me a chunk in advance of the session. Do that by adding a comment to the \"self-editing webinar\" blog post here. And remember the event is for members only. If you\'re a non-member, please don\'t submit work as we won\'t be able to use it.Thankee!!

Hello folksWe\'ve got another self-editing webinar coming up on 6 July at 19:00 (UK time.)If you want to submit some work for me to RIP APART WITHOUT MERCY then:a) Mwah-hah-hah. I look forward to feasting on your bonesb) Please give me a chunk - maximum 300 words - in the comments below. Please include your name (or I\'ll just use your Townhouse handle.) Also the title of the piece, and just one short sentence telling us what kind of book it is. (Plus something about the set up of the snippet, if we need to know.)I won\'t be able to use everything. In the past, I\'ve been able to get through 3-4 pieces in the hour.Please don\'t submit your work below if you\'re not a JW member: we won\'t be able to use it.Please also don\'t submit your work unless you are comfortable having it discussed publicly, cos public discussion is exactly what\'s gonna happen.All clear? Yes? No?Yes! Tremendous. Look forward to seeing you there.

It’s easy to think that because life permits something, then story must too. After all, stories are allowed things like starships, unicorns and Dr Evil, so it would seem that stories are more capacious than life, holding everything life offers, and then some.Well, yes and no.Yes: stories get to have starships and unicorns, while life does not. But then again, life is permitted randomness, which stories basically may not have.So let’s say you were writing a Manhattan-set rom-com. You’re getting to the denouement. Mr Lovely is racing through Central Park to greet his girlfriend, Fraulein Gorgeous, and ask her to marry him. We all anticipate that Fraulein G is going to say one ditzy thing, do one charming thing, and then say yes. We’ll laugh a little, shed a tear, then move on, happy.But Life might have other thoughts. So, let’s say, in reality, Mr Lovely was racing through the park, when – oh, I don’t know – a subway tunnel collapses, or an ice cream truck hits him, or (why not?) an overflying airplane accidentally releases some blue ice, which falls 20,000 feet and splatters his romantically-inclined skull.(Blue ice? Um. It comes from aircraft toilets and it shouldn’t leak, but sometimes does. In the 1970s, some blue ice struck a chapel in London and caused so much damage, the building had to be demolished.)Now, because Life can and does release blue ice over major cities, there’s no reason in fact why the Lovely / Gorgeous romance might not be ended by a lump of falling waste. But a story can’t handle that.Story demands a unity of logic and (ideally) a unity of theme too.Take the logic part first. Although things can and do happen for essentially no reason, stories are our way of putting the meaning back in. That reason can operate within the boundaries of strict logic. (The detective got DNA results back from the lab, which led her to Bad Guy’s house, which allowed her to …) But it can equally well operate within almost purely metaphorical ones – ones that deliver thematic coherence to your story.Take, for example, the war film, Bridge over the River Kwai.In that film, Colonel Nicholson (the Alec Guinness character) is a British officer who has become a prisoner of war, held by the Japanese. The POWs are ordered to build a railway bridge to help the Japanese war effort. Nicholson – as a way to maintain his self-respect? as a way to show off the skills and resourcefulness of the British army? – becomes obsessed with building the perfect bridge. When Anglo-American commandos then prepare to sabotage the bridge, Nicholson becomes conflicted, seeking to protect ‘his’ bridge. In the concluding firefight, he is wounded and falls onto the detonator’s plunger, thereby destroying the bridge.In one way, this is just a causally coherent explanation for how the bridge came to be built, then destroyed. But no viewer simply experiences it like that. There’s something about Nicholson’s journey – the obsession, the perfectionism, the death, the explosion – that gives a kind of coherence to everything that’s happened before. If you took out the two minutes of film around that final firefight and the destruction of the bridge, you’d have essentially nothing. Lots of prettily filmed events, but no story.So the Lovely / Gorgeous romance + blue ice killing just doesn’t work as story. Yes, you could make that an opening scene. (The rest of the novel then becomes about Fraulein Gorgeous coming to terms with the random death of her beloved.) And indeed, life-changing random events provide the kick-off for plenty of stories.Generally though, you are always – via strict causal logic, or metaphor – seeking to pull events into an orderly shape. In the end, you’re about creating emotional journeys and a sense of derived meaning.Life just doesn’t offer that neatness.Journeys don’t end until you die. And meanings come from us, and our story-making desire, more than from life itself.The more dense you can make your storytelling – neat causal logic plus an overlay of metaphor and character journey – the stronger and richer your final story will be. In short, life is great, but it’s baggy. If you want your story to look right, I recommend the corset. Breathe out, lace up tight – and don’t eat.

Back in the day, a top author – such as Henry Fielding, who died in 1754 – would enjoy giving some of his characters names like Mr Thwackum (a savage clergyman and schoolmaster) and Squire Allworthy (a man as virtuous as his name suggests.)Charles Dickens, a century or more later, wasn’t quite as direct, but you can still hear the character suggestion come through pretty clearly in names like Ebenezer Scrooge (a miser), Uriah Heep (an unctuous sycophant), Tiny Tim (the one to generate the tears), Thomas Gradgrind (a fact-obsessed school superintendent), Wackford Squeers (a cruel headmaster), Estella (beautiful, but distant – like a star), and so on.These days, we generally don’t do that. The problem with those names is that they hang a huge placard round the neck of the character. “Hey, I’m Allworthy. You don’t even have to think about who I am – you don’t have to scrutinise the way I talk and act and make choices – because look at this great big placard. I’m ALL-WORTHY, right? Look how great I am.”In effect, the name compresses the space in which the character can operate – and a book without characters isn’t going to be worth all that much.Dickens’s names aren’t quite as blatant as Henry Fielding, but the sheer improbability of a ‘Wackford Squeers’ announce the author’s intention almost as directly. The placard is smaller, but it’s still there.The modern approach therefore tends to be sadly dull, You might have a Gradgrind-y type character, let’s say, but you’d call him or her something like Mark Pettigrew or Samantha Anderson. Your ideal name is just interesting enough to remember, but just boring enough that it’s not calling attention to itself (Jabberwocky Jones or Bianca Blanco.)Likewise, you’ll think not just of your star players, but your team sheet as a whole. You might love the name Rhodri for a friend of your protagonist, but if you already have a Rhys, a Rob, a Rhian and a Rhydian, your reader is going to get seriously confused. This advice so far has all been very sensible, but, but, but …Isn’t there a halfway house, perhaps? Something that could add flavour without simply depriving the character of space in which to operate?And the answer, surely, is yes. The trick is to add a bayleaf or two, not the whole damn kitchen cupboard. (I learned this trick from my colleague, Sarah Juckes, by the way, then realised I’d already been doing something similar, but unconsciously.)The idea is that you choose a character’s name that refers, even in the most oblique way, to some deep-lying essence of the person. So, in Sarah’s Outside, her characters are trapped in a single, horrible room. The name Willow suggested something of the outdoors – the yearning for it, as well perhaps as the slender-but-tough whippiness of a willow stick. It’s a lovely way to encapsulate a feeling – but at the same time, the name is common enough that it doesn’t break the basic Mark Pettigrew / Samantha Anderson naming convention.What’s more the name does make a difference. You can almost feel the energy the book gets as a result. If you doubt me, just try giving Willow the name Samantha Anderson. You’d never choose to make that switch, would you?I used to think I don\'t play a lot of those games in my Welsh fiction, or at least that I did so only very sparingly. In the first book, I allowed my main character, Fiona “Fi” Griffiths, to meditate on her name:Fi. That’s ‘if’ backwards.Griffiths. Nice ordinary name, but two more ‘if’s lurking at the heart of it. My name, literally, is as iffy as you can get. The only solid sound, the only one you can actually hang on to, is that opening G, and it’s not to be trusted.Elsewhere, I don’t muck around much. My other series characters are really named just to be plausibly Welsh (in most cases) and of the right approximate generation.But when I explore more closely, I do often end up with names that carry a scent.In my current (much-delayed) WIP, the doctor in charge of a secure psychiatric hospital is called Etta Gulleford. That is a striking name, of course. It commands attention, just as the woman in question is also striking and commanding. Is the name a bit disconcerting, perhaps? Hard to place? Probably, and if so, that fits with her character too.The inmate in that hospital that Fiona is most interested in also has a non-standard name, Jared Coad. Again, that’s not quite so unusual it challenges the boundaries of realism. And I mostly chose it because it was plausible and yet memorable. A two-syllable name to remember.But, thinking more about it, I think there’s more going on there too. Jared is an Old Testament biblical name. The character is a damaged warrior, but with depths of virtue. A dangerous prophet? An ancient Judaic king? Those echoes do work for the character on the page – magnificent, avenging, doomed. The splash of antiquity somehow adds a useful dimension to an otherwise very twenty-first century character.I\'ll quite often change characters names as I write a draft, twisting this way and that way until I have something that feels right. That feeling comes by touch and feel: I\'m not at all programmatic about it. And sometimes, to be honest, the names never quite feel right. They nag at me long after publication.(Which brings me to a further tip, actually. Unless you are really sure of your choice of name, only use names where you can use the Find and Replace tool easily. That means avoiding a name like Jo, because it forms a part of too many ordinary words (jogging, banjo, and the like. If you use a name like Joely, you get the same kind of flavour but the Find and Replace tool will still work for you.)I’d really love to know how you name your characters and, in particular, how you manage to add a hint of character or depth into a name that still seems like a plausible choice for the character concerned. And no, fantasy authors, you don’t get the day off. I want to know how you pick names too. Voldemort isn’t a name you’d give to a good guy, is it? I guess the “mort” part of that name is bringing hints of death, but I probably wouldn’t lend my wallet to someone whose name began “Volde” either. So, yep, SF and fantasy authors too: I want to know how you come up with names.Don’t email to tell me. Share your thoughts in the comments below. Let\'s have a heated debate ...

Last week, I totally forgot about my Friday email until the deadline was starting to loom in a scarily loomy way. (Overhanging by 5 or 10 degrees, and offering thin holds on sketchy protection – that kind of loomy.)So I dashed out an email that had a single thought at the heart of it. This one:Creative writers and, really, creators of almost any sort,are often asked to perform their best workwithout any kind of support.That email then turned into a kind of mission statement. Very roughly: “we can’t alter the basic difficulty of your situation, but we can and will be as supportive as we can.” There wasn’t really any practical, actionable advice in the email. When we sent it out, it felt like some underweight homework rushed out to meet a deadline.But you lot told me otherwise.I always get plenty of responses to these emails, but last week I got double the normal volume. The general gist of those answers was summed up in one email that said my message felt like a hug, necessary and comforting. And, good: consider yourself e-hugged (in a way that respects your personal boundaries and all covid-regulation protocols in your country of residence.)But it struck me, as I read your replies, that there are two phases to our acts of creation and each phase makes a different demand.First, there’s a purely creative phase, one that’s all about production.This is where we dream up the idea of the story. It’s where we nudge and tweak that (still theoretical) story into shape. It’s where we write our openings chapters (in a rush), our middle chapters (slowly and in pain), our ending chapters (with relief.) The end of this creative phase is marked by delivery of a complete manuscript, starting on page 1 and running all the way through to the beautiful words, “THE END”.For that birthing process, I strongly recommend an attitude of slightly crazed positivity. And I do mean crazed. It’s not enough to think, “Oh, sure, I think this novel will probably be good enough to be looked at with some interest by a literary agent.” In my experience, you need to be ludicrously positive. You need to be dreaming of that multi-publisher auction, your book piled high in supermarkets, your name on bestseller lists, foreign rights deals flooding in. Whatever works for you.You don’t have to be reasonable. Just give yourself whatever drug gets you through. You’ve got a daydream about being invited onto Oprah? Or getting a call from a certain Stockholm-based prize committee? Then good. Dream away.Those hopes may well be unrealistic. After all, the brutal statistics say, you aren’t likely to be published. If you are, the outcome – critical and commercial – may not be all that astonishing. But those true and reasonable facts are hardly likely to sustain you through months of creative endeavour, hard labour, and false paths.So leave realism aside. For the creative phase, be as unreasonable as you want. Give yourself whatever dreams you need to inspire you. And remember this dictum of Jane Smiley’s: “Every first draft is perfect because all the first draft has to do is exist.”She’s right. Block out the negative. Dream your dreams. And write.But then comes the second phase, the editorial one.For most first-time novelists, I’d say completion of the first draft marks – very roughly – your halfway point in the whole creative process. The editorial process is likely to take as long, or maybe longer, as the writing phase. It’s equally critical. I’ve never once seen a first draft manuscript that was in good enough shape to find a publisher. My own first draft manuscripts (which I edit heavily as I go) would not be ones I’d be happy to send out.And now you need to switch from the forgiving / dreamy / inspirational you to the pedantic / critical / perfectionist one. You need to transform from loon to prison officer.Everything you have just written is up for review. Everything.Your basic idea for the novel. Is that sharp enough? Attractive enough? Fresh enough? Does it infuse the entire book? Is it saleable?Your basic plot arc. Is it clear? Does it compel the attention? Does the ending satisfy? Does the basic plot machinery work?And does your main character engage the reader? And do your settings exist and have atmosphere? And what about your secondary characters? And was your first person / third person choice correct? And do you have the right number of viewpoints in play?Oh yes, and does this sentence really need all ten words, or could you say the same thing just as well in eight?For this phase, in my experience, you more or less have to drop the Oprah daydreams. Forgiving optimism isn’t the right spirit to bring to the task of constant fault-finding and error-correction.Quite the contrary. In that first phase, you needed to praise yourself as the word counter ticked slowly up. Now you need to do the reverse. “Yay! I deleted 3,000 words today. Well done, me.”In the first phase, you needed to think, “Yes! You know what? My Best Friend character really is funny, quirky and a delight on the page.” Now you need to ask, “Is that actually funny? Or is it just lame? Would the balance of this scene feel better if I just cut the banter?”This process, always, is trial and error. You try one thing and see if it feels better. If not, you try another and another till you find something that pleases you.A solid grounding in writing craft will unquestionably support this process – you’ll work more efficiently and produce a better outcome. But every editorial decision still comes down to a question of which sounds better to you, X or Y? Perhaps you settle on Y, and complete this new draft, then come back to the same place during a new round of editing, and you’ll find yourself asking “Y or Z? Or was I wrong to abandon X? Now what I’ve changed the Auntie Prue death scene, maybe I’d do better to stick with X here?” The process only ends when you read the manuscript and think that, yes, you like what’s written there. You can’t find a way to improve it.Emotionally speaking (and in my experience, at least), the thing that sustains you through the editorial phase isn’t wild-eyed optimism, it’s a sense of relief.You knew the first draft was problematic – of course you did. That’s why you had to keep telling yourself good-fortune fables to keep your spirits up. Now, with the editing, you can start addressing problems, and you feel the book starting to lift.For me, that experience is of finding a faster, lighter, more purposeful book emerging from the manuscript I started with. It’s almost like you are pulling heavy, sea-going timbers from a boat, to find a sleek fibreglass hull underneath. That’s what allows you to be a brutal critic of your own work: you can see that the criticism leads to a better reading experience. You actually see it happening in front of you.I don’t want to pretend that these observations are universal. They may not be. In the end, you need to arrange your emotional landscape in whatever way best suits you and your life and your project. If wild optimism is what keeps you going though that editorial phase, then please – be my wildly optimistic guest. If you like to edit your book as you write (and I do), then by all means bring something of the prison guard to your writing phase as well as your purely editorial one.But forgive yourself. Find the process that works for you, and permit it. There isn’t a right or wrong as regards process. There’s only a good or bad in terms of the final manuscript. If you can navigate your little craft to the Harbour of Good Writing, then North Pole / South Pole / Panama Canal? Just take whatever route works for you.Happy sailing, happy writing.

A short email from me today, with a single thought in it. Here it is:Creative writers and, really, creators of almost any sort,are often asked to perform their best work without any kind of support.No financial support: you have to write and edit and perfect an entire damn novel before you get to find out whether anyone wants it or has a use for it. For most us, that’s like asking us to do one year’s worth of work before finding out if we’re going to get paid anything at all.No institutional support: you’ll be doing your work alone. There’s no big surrounding environment to say, “Yes, we’ve asked you to do this difficult thing, but don’t worry, there are career structures for people like you, here is a team which is made up of people like you, and here’s a canteen that offers cheap lattes because we know you like them.”No tech or knowhow support: If you’re self-publishing, there are quite a few tech dashboards to deal with. If you’re not, you still have to grapple with the intricacies of agent-hunting, which involves a certain knowhow, a knowledge of what to do and how to do it. Either way, there’s a whole lot of technical knowledge which you don’t have, and other people do, and which you will need to master in order to succeed.And often the support of our loved ones is passive rather than active. “Oh, Joan? Yeah, she loves writing. She’s upstairs now tapping away. I think it’s something about orcs this time? Or is it medieval sailors? Or something to do with tsetse flies? Anyway, yeah, I’m sure it’s great.” I don’t want to knock that kind of support, because that’s necessary too, but there’s a big gap between that and the sort that really sees your project and understands and endorses your passion for it.And – jeepers. That’s a big ask, right?In any well-run office, we recognise the need to bring new members of staff onto the team with care. An introduction to the job, to the team, to the tech, to the staff parties and the in-jokes and all the rest of it. Mess that stuff up and you very likely won’t get the best from that newbie – and the newbie, very likely, will be wondering whether to look around for a different job.And at one level, that basic isolation doesn’t change. I’m playing around on a new project at the moment – very literary, very quirky – and it’s completely unclear whether anyone at all will want to buy it. So am I writing for myself or an audience? For free or for pay? I don’t know. The process of finding out is still months away.And in the end, Jericho Writers can’t solve that problem for you. No one can. The essence of it is hard-wired into our industry.But we will do what we can. We ask our Writer Support people to be friends and guides first. We ask them to be absolutely honest with anyone who rings up or emails in. We set them absolutely no sales targets. They aren’t there to sell; they’re there to help.We also want to enrich our community – and will have a lot more to share later this year. Membership of that community will remain free to all. I know that plenty of writers have come to depend deeply on friendships and relationships first formed in that community.And then there’s the matter of ethos too. Of course, we aim to work with professional editors, and professional tutors, and so on. We demand a high standard of work and are constantly monitoring it. But do our editor-tutor-mentors just deliver the work and move on? Or do they actually care? Are they invested in the work and the people whose work they nourish? In the end, we don’t ask for mere professionalism. We also want to work with people of genuine passion.So that’s the thought. This writing game of ours is tough. It’s isolated. It’s probably doubly hard in the context of a global pandemic. Plenty of people have struggled.We can’t change that basic struggle. Writing is tough because it’s competitive and difficult. It’s tough making the Olympics too, and for essentially the same reason. But we can recognise the challenge. And many of us know what it’s like from our own experience. We’re on your side.

I once wrote a book – The Lieutenant’s Lover – which was a historical novel set mostly in the St Petersburg of 1917 and then, after a long gap, in 1945/46 Berlin.(The book was my first and only proper romance, though it had big elements of historical adventure too. The heroine was forty-something by the time of the Berlin chapters. She was also a sergeant in the Red Army and had just experienced a pretty bruising thirty years. The cover designer chose to represent her as an extremely elegant young woman, with immaculate make-up and a jauntily fashionable chapeau. I don’t think he knew a lot about the Red Army.)(Oh, and look, am I allowed two parentheses, even right at the start of an email? Yes? No? Yes. OK, so I also want to tell you that my German publisher liked the book but said that it was a bit different from my earlier fiction, which hadn’t had been primarily romance. So they asked, could I please adopt a penname for the work? I said yes. My full name is, as it happens, Thomas Henry Bingham, so I suggested that Tom Henry might work fine. They said OK, but they were thinking a woman’s name might be better …? I quite liked that idea, and was going to publish under the name Emma Makepeace, which I still think is a GENIUS name. Unfortunately, something happened to foul up the deal and that book was never published in German. I still have the petticoats though, just in case.)Anyway, the point of this email is neither cover design, nor pennames.I want to talk research. In this case, my research had to do with two well-studied historical periods, but really any kind of fiction might call for research. If you’re writing a psychological thriller where one character works in an advertising office, you need to know how advertising offices work. If there’s a bit of ocean-sailing adventure, you need to be able to tell port from starboard. Even if your work is totally speculative – full of androids working uranium mines on prison planets – you need to know something about uranium and the technology behind those androids and have a working model of the gravity / atmosphere / geology of your planet.To do that research, you’ll naturally hit Wikipedia and you’ll pick up some books.In my case, I learned a lot about the very interesting politics of Germany’s post-war occupation. The Western allies took very different approaches to the management of their sectors. The Soviets had, from the start, a no intention of anything other than a complete takeover of theirs.I like my history and I gobbled up plenty of textbooks and learned loads. But there’s a huge difference between regular history and the stuff that’s of interest to a novelist. So yes, you need to know the broader political history of a time. (Or a bit of formal geology, if you’re researching uranium mines. Or a bit of marketing theory if you’re researching ad agencies.)But ultimately you are in search of detail.So take my characters in 1946 Berlin. I knew a lot about the politics. I knew a lot about reconstruction of the city and the teams of women chipping mortar off fallen bricks so the things could be reused. I had some curious little family details. (My wife’s grandparents were German/Poles who ended up in Munich at the end of the war and lived in a refugee camp for years.)But none of that answered my questions. What did characters eat? What did they cook on? What occupation-bureaucracy did they have to deal with? With paper money almost worthless, what did they barter with?The best answers to those questions didn’t come from formal history books, but from ordinary diaries and memoirs. It didn’t even matter if those memoirs were badly written. They just needed to be chatty, discursive, full of detail.Those details are the ones to pounce on.Same thing with uranium mines. It’s all very well to read things in Wikipedia like this: “In conventional mining, ores are processed by grinding the ore materials to a uniform particle size and then treating the ore to extract the uranium by chemical leaching.”Good. You need to know that. But that doesn’t get us close to the felt experience of being a uranium miner. Uranium is radioactive. Humans need sheltering from the exposure. Open-cast uranium mining is therefore mostly done by miners operating inside sealed cabs in order to prevent them breathing in radioactive dust.But what happens when the sun shines on one of those cabs? Do they get hot? Are they air-conditioned? Does the driver even have the ability to open a window? What are the washdown procedures after work? What happens if you have a mechanical breakdown and have to leave the cab?Answering those questions will get your fictional miner ever closer to a believable character with a believable set of experiences.And you’re not just looking for details. You’re hunting for words. With uranium, it’s words like yellowcake, roll-front deposits, Geiger counter, shear zone, gamma ray spectrometer, heap leach, contamination, haul truck, primary crusher, and so on. With a vocabulary like that, you can already feel the credibility of the story beginning to build.Another trick: have your characters toss those words off as though they’re ordinary, not needing more explanation. It doesn’t really matter whether your reader completely understands the nature of yellowcake or knows how a primary crusher operates. If your characters use those terms with the fluency of the very familiar, your entire setting gains in authority. You’ll actually get more colour and credibility that way than if you burrow into a detailed description of the crusher. (Unless it matters of course. If you’re about to drop an aggressive robot into a primary crusher, then yes please, tell us about it.)And accuracy?Well, look, I’m an imagination-first kind of guy. If I’m considering whether or not to read a novel, the recommendation that “it’s very accurate on the topic of post-war Berlin / modern ad agencies / uranium mining,” is likely to make my heart sink. In the end, I think Imagination needs to dominate poor old Fact, the plain Jane of that sisterly pairing.But the more you know, the more your imagination can leap. Very often, you’ll find yourself holding back from a sentence you might want to write because you don’t quite know the factual detail needed to support it. So accumulate the facts, then leave them behind. Or, if the facts are wonderful, place them front and centre. I once wrote a book about the 1920s/30s oil industry. There were two or three major oil strikes described in that book and they were all closely based on the actual facts of what happened.And often fact just trumps anything that you might have dreamed up. A tiny example: in my research for the oil book, I read about a driller who fell out of the derrick onto the roof of the pumping shed and from there to the ground. He broke multiple bones but, while he was waiting for medical help, he said to his co-workers, ‘Well, ain’t you going to find a cigarette for this broken-assed son-of-a-bitch?’That’s such beautiful colour, you can’t help but want to use it.Even Plain Jane has her moments in the sun. Grab em. Use em. Have fun with them.What are you researching? What bountiful colour and detail has Plain Jane given to you? And who out there writes under a penname of the opposite sex? Maybe one of you is actually called Emma and writes under the name Butch Ribeye, or something. I\'m really hoping so.

It’s conventional to talk about publishing as split into two camps, two rival poles:There is Trad Land, populated by literary agents and Big Publishers and imprints whose colophons drip with history and just a little (nay, more than a little) snobbery. Back in the day, those places smelled of tweed and pipe-smoke. Women wore earnest glasses and looked mildly frazzled. They felt like places where you could talk about sentence structure without being laughed at and where all but the very rawest publicists had a hundred tales about Embarrassing Incidents involving Major Authors.Then there’s Planet Indie. (And yes: I’m muddling up my poles, lands and planets in a giant astro-geographical soup. But phooey to you. I live in a world beyond Lobachevsky and out here, in my universe, everything makes perfect sense.)On Planet Indie, things don’t smell of tweed and pipe-smoke. No one really knows what a colophon is. The only person who wears earnest glasses is you, if that happens to be the look you’re rocking. Planet Indie doesn’t have an assembly of gleaming towers in London and New York. It has – well, it has your bedroom and your living room and, quite often, the coffee shop you most often go to for caffeine / company / an internet connection that doesn’t curl up and die on you.Both places produce an awful lot of books and an awful lot of sales.Fiction is largely read electronically these days. Perhaps about seven-tenths of all fiction is consumed digitally (mostly e-book but a good splash of audio.) Add in the print fiction that is purchased online and cyberspace accounts for more than three quarters of all fiction sales. That’s territory which indie authors can compete for very successfully indeed. During our Self-Pub month (for members), I spoke to Marie Force who has sold ten million books, the vast majority of which she’s sold as an indie and the vast-vast majority of which will have sold in e-form.And yes: it’s still true that traditional acclaim tends to accrue to trad-published authors – print media doesn’t review indie authors, for no good reason beyond simple laziness. The result is that “authors you’ve heard of” and “authors who’ve sold a gazillion books” are non-identical sets. There’s plenty of overlap, of course, but media hoo-hah is not even remotely a reliable guide to book sales.Now all this, really, is by way of preamble, pre-canter, and pre-gallop, to the thing I really wanted to say. Namely this:Lots of IDIOTS – myself included – often talk as though there are only two ways to get published. Trad-land and Planet Indie. So when writers get rejected by literary agents, they often have a tendency to think of self-pub as their primary fallback.But, oh my friends, I have led you into grave error. There aren’t really two types of publishing, there are three.There’s Trad-land, with its agents, its colophons and its gleaming metropolitan towers.There’s Planet Indie, with its book sales, its productivity, and its faint smell of pyjamas.And there’s a whole scattered archipelago, the Micronesia of Publishing, populated by innumerable little micro-publishers, each of whom publish rather few titles and sell rather few books.But, of my friends, in those islands there be riches. Some examples:Risky literary fictionThe bigger publishers need to sell a reasonably large volume of any title to justify the launch costs. That now tends to rule out more challenging or more experimental fiction, except from authors already famous enough to sell pretty much anything.So a slew of really excellent literary micro-publishers has sprung into being. We’ve had as it happens a long association with the two principals behind Galley Beggar Press, a tiny publisher whose authors have won, or been short- or longlisted for, pretty much every major literary award you can think of. In terms of sheer quality of output, I doubt if there’s any Big 5 firm who could compete.But Galley Beggar isn’t unique. It’s part of a vigorous international constellation of such firms. They are producing some of the best fiction in the world today.Niche non-fictionLet’s say you’ve written a really important book about the history of needlework in the early Colonial period. Or – a book I kinda want to buy – a history of bilge pumps from 1500 to the present day. The world needs projects of passion like that, and no sane person would ever judge the worth of such books by the volume of sales they generate.No agent will touch those books. A 15% commission of Not Very Much is – um, let me get my calculator – approximately Not Very Much At All. So agents don’t want them.But you might not want to self-publish, and why should you? There’ll be a micro-publisher somewhere whose range on the history of maritime technology is badly missing something on bilge-pumps. They need your book.Niche memoirOr let’s say you’ve written a memoir with a mental health theme. Or an Iranian one. Those books may well be too niche to grace the front tables of a major bookstore. The big publishers aren’t well set-up to sell them. Agents don’t want them, for that precise reason.But there’ll be a publisher out there who absolutely does want those books and has an audience greedy to read them. You won’t reach a large volume of readers, but you will reach the readers you most want to reach. Those publishers too do a great job.***These reflections remind us that a lot of the advice out there on the internet – and a lot of the advice we give as Jericho Writers – is simply ignoring one of the most important ecosystems in publishing.We ignore it because the collective volume of sales is not that huge, but also because the geography of this archipelago is so hard to define. We at JW can point you at all the literary agents in the world. We’ve placed clients with all the Big 5 on multiple occasions. But we don’t know even 10% of the micro-publishers out there. No one does.You, as author, simply have to navigate your own seas. You know your niche. You can find out the publishers who publish work for that niche. Dig out contact details. Address them direct. You don’t need an agent. You don’t need to feel timid or underqualified. If you’ve written that book on bilge-pumps, then someone wants it. Find them. Do a deal. Get published.And if you do get published, then I bow to you. There’s as much honour and majesty in getting your book on bilge-pumps published by a passionate and knowledgeable house as there is in getting your samey police procedural published by a big house that publishes a million other samey police procedurals.I’ll probably slip back into dividing the world into trad and indie, just because the habit is so ingrained. But please don’t forget that when I do so, I LIE. There are three broad camps, not two, and they all count.

One of the strangest experiences in any author’s life arrives the moment they sign their first two-book deal. (And yes: fiction is normally sold in chunks of two. There’s no rigorous logic operating there, except that the first book is the one that attracted the publisher and the second one gives them another opportunity to profit from the success of the first. It also, incidentally, gives them the opportunity to compound their loss if the first book loses money, as most first books do. And yes: Publishing Logic is not really the same thing as actual Logic-Logic.)Anyway: we were talking about strangeness. And your first book almost certainly came to you in a rush of inspiration. Yes! I have to write that story. My head is full of these characters, these events, and I have to set them down.That opening burst of inspiration eventually produced a manuscript, some rejections, an acceptance and a book deal. Well done you.But it also produces, right now, the expectation – indeed, the contractual obligation – that you will write another book of the same standard.Yikes! That inspiration? Where did it come from? How do you invoke it? How do you ask it to strike again, in the exact same spot as before, and in a timely enough way that you can meet the date written into your contract?The ask seems impossible. Seems – and sometimes is. I know a couple of authors whose second books simply didn’t meet the levels of their first. In one case, I know the author simply bashed out a serviceable but uninspired second novel because she didn’t know what else to do. Her career never recovered.But there are solutions. There are ways for you to invoke that inspiration. To find it reliably and, as it were, to order.The trick is to forget about the bolt of lightning. That’s not what you’re looking for. You’re searching for the tickle of interest, a quickening of interest, the red thread lying in the blue.Here’s a news story that tickled me today:The sheriff’s office announced Monday that [a woman from’ Salt Lake County], who had been missing since before Thanksgiving, had been found alive in an area not far from where she was camping. Authorities said the woman, who had yet to be publicly identified, “had lost a significant amount of weight and was weak” when she was found. She was lauded by the sheriff’s office as “resourceful,” living off grass, moss and water from a river.“We now believe she knowingly chose to remain in the area over the months since November 2020,” the sheriff’s office said in a news release.The bit I love about that is the grass and the moss. It’s such a great novelistic detail. “Living off squirrels, edible tubers and insects” would have given a totally different and (to me) less interesting tale.Or another example:I was with a friend yesterday, who told me that she’d had a spate of burst tyres on her car. Each time she had a burst tyre, she got a call the next day from her (rather dodgy) ex, asking how she was. When she became suspicious at these coincidences, she checked her car and found a tracking device fixed to the inside rim of her wheel arch.Or – Well, when I was wondering what to write about for my last book, I started browsing the website of the National Crime Agency and other similar outfits. There, I saw some references to antiquities fraud, which intrigued me. That criss-crossed with the idea that King Arthur was a genuine figure of the early Welsh Dark Ages. And what if …?What you notice here is that the story never arrives fully formed. It doesn’t even really present itself as a story, exactly. Not even the raw material for a story. At most, it presents as a kind of doorway into something. A portal.It is your task to bundle your way through that opening. To be active, not passive.So the woman in Utah with the moss and the grass: why was she there? What was it like for her? Was she running from something? Or to something? Who missed her? Who was looking for her?I don’t have much interest in what the actual answers to those questions are. Personally, I tend to discard the actual facts of any real-world story pretty quickly. It’s your answers that matter, not the actual facts of the case.Take that friend with the dodgy ex. The person in question threw the tracker away, changed her phone number, cut any kind of contact with the nutter. That was the end of her story, but your story would leave the actual facts almost immediately. Maybe she put a tracker on his car? Or started to mess with his head by popping her tracker onto the side of a lorry bound for France. Or …?The moral here, really, is that life – and your reading, and your existing interests – already furnish you with a million ideas for stories, far more than you could ever write.Your task is to notice those trembles of interest, then explore actively. Discard anything that doesn’t open out into something yet more inviting. Explore the pathways left open as deeply and actively as you can. “Actively” here means reading. It means writing. It means starting to write notes on possible stories.Inspiration can strike anyone, anywhere. But it only kindles fire when you’re at your desk, ready and working.

Last week, we talked about how you can manage your affairs effectively even if you feel daunted by the potential scale of the marketing challenges involved in modern bookselling.This week I want to pick up the thought I ended with: leaky pipes and thirsty sweet peas.Let’s assume your book is on sale on Amazon. Let’s assume you can throw as much traffic as that page as you could reasonably wish.I don’t know whether your book is for sale yet, but the second assumption is certainly true. You can throw traffic at your Amazon page. As much as you want. You can buy advertising on Facebook, on Bookbub and on Amazon itself. There are dozens of other traffic sources available too.So the two basic needs for any sale campaign are perfectly doable. You can create the product and you can generate a flow of potential buyers.So is there anything to stop your book selling well, pleasing readers and putting money in your pocket?Well: yes and no.No: there’s no reason why that shouldn’t be possible in theory.But yes: most indie authors (and plenty of trad publishers) foul it up in practice. And it’s not too hard to figure out why. Let’s start with a simple thought experiment. What would it be for a book’s marketing campaign to run perfectly? What would perfection actually look like? And to simplify the thought experiment, let’s refine that a little. Assume all your book sales are on Amazon – or at least, let’s ignore other retailers for now.So, a perfectly tuned marketing machine would look like this:Have you visible on any Amazon search page where your readers are likely to gatherConvert 100% of those readers to visit your book pageInduce 100% of those readers to buy your bookCompel 100% of those readers to read your book right to the endComplete their journey by (a) reviewing the book, (b) buying the next in the series, and (c) signing up to your readers’ clubGet readers to open and read every email you sendGet 100% sales from your mailing list when you next launch a bookIf 1000 people saw your book listed on an Amazon search page, that would convert into 1000 sales, 1000 reviews, and 1000 additions to your email list.Now, OK, that won’t happen, but the thought experiment is still useful. Let’s look again at the marketing funnel and identify what the key conversion points are:Have you visible on Amazon search. You need to fully optimise your title, subtitle, categories and keywords to achieve this. That means identifying the key bestseller lists where your readers are likely to assemble and figuring out what search terms people actually use to find books like yours.Persuade those readers to visit your book page.The only conversion tools you have here are title, cover, price and reviews. Price isn’t really a factor on its own, in the sense that you’ll be competing against other similarly priced titles. Equally, you’re not very likely to stand out from the competition via title alone or (in the early days) reviews. So that says that getting your cover right is a vastly important factor. Perhaps the single most important one in selling your book.Induce 100% of those readers to buy your book. OK, so now you have got potential readers to leave the search page and arrive at your book page. Great. That’s a key step in your conversion channel. And please note, that while a lot of readers will find your book page via some kind of Amazon search, plenty of readers will arrive directly at your book page from somewhere else completely: a social media post, a link in an ebook, an email, a blogger talking about your book, or anything else. So for some readers at least the Amazon leg of the marketing journey starts right here, with your book page.Amazon, of course, controls most of the real estate of your book page, so you have a limited number of elements under your direct control. The key ones there are: cover (again, and in a larger size this time), title, blurb, price and reviews. Of these, the two critical ones are going to be blurb and cover.Oh yes, and for plenty of readers, but not all, the purchase decision will be swayed by a quick visit to the “Look Inside” view of your book. The key conversion factor there? A blindingly good bit of opening text.4. Compel 100% of your readers to read your book right to the end No doubt about what the key factor here is: does your book please the reader? Most books aren’t read. According to data gathered by analytics company, Jellybooks: “On average, fewer than half of the books tested were finished by a majority of readers. Most readers typically give up on a book in the early chapters. Women tend to quit after 50 to 100 pages, men after 30 to 50. Only 5 percent of the books Jellybooks tested were completed by more than 75 percent of readers. Sixty percent of books fell into a range where 25 percent to 50 percent of test readers finished them.”That’s scary stuff. Most readers don’t finish most books. But the absolute key conversion factor in terms of your longer term career is simply this: Does your book get read? Would anyone want to buy another book by you?5. Get all your readers to (a) review the book, (b) buy the next in the series, and (c) sign up to your readers’ club Writing an amazing book will be the biggest conversion factor here (and by a mile), but how good is your ebook at performing those other chores?It’s not uncommon, still, for trad-published books to do an appalling job of hooking readers in for the long haul, but plenty of indies mess up as well. If you only have a timid “Please subscribe to my newsletter” somewhere in the copyright notices and other boring rubbish at the back of the book, then no one will subscribe. So your mailing list won’t grow. Similarly, if you don’t ask for reviews at all, or don’t ask in the right way, or don’t supply a one-click link to the relevant review page, then you’re not likely to get reviews.6. Get readers to open and read every email they send It’s not uncommon for big publishers to have a single-digit open rate on their emails. Open rates for individual authors writing to their readers should be thirty percent or more. A really well-curated list can manage 50%. And those open rates matter, because when you come to send out the email that really matters to you – the launch email, the buy-my-book one – it’s not the number of names on your list that matters. It’s the number of people who bother to read what you’ve sent them.What makes the difference here? It’s how much value your emails generally deliver, plus some technicalities around avoiding users’ spam filters and that kind of thing. Mostly though, it’s content, content, content. Do you write stuff that readers want to read?7. Get 100% sales from your list at launch The conversion factor here will be an accumulation of everything else. But really? If people love your books and open your emails, they’ll buy the next book when you tell em it’s ready to go.Now, pretty obviously, no one has the perfect marketing system, or anything close.If your book page converts at even 20%, that will be an excellent result. (In other words, 1 in every 5 readers will end up buying your book having landed on your book page.) If you are selling your ebook at $4.99, you would do well to achieve even that conversion rate.If 75% of readers actually finish your book, that will place you amongst the most successful titles out there.As for email list sign ups, you would do well to get 1 in every 10 people signing up for your list.An open rate of 40% on emails would be strong.And what about the percentage of people who, having bought book #1 in your series, go on to buy books #2, #3 and #4? That’s a massively important stat. If you have a series that is three or more books long, then you should be aiming for a series readthrough of 50% or better. (ie: if you sell 1000 copies of book #1, you sell at least 500 of book #3.)These things matter a vast amount.Go back to the idea we started with: you have a book. You can easily generate traffic to the relevant sales page. Bingo. Your career is made.Except that it costs you money to generate that traffic. And whether that traffic will end up generating revenue depends entirely on how leaky your sales system is.And when do you think paid advertising is likely to work the best:When your marketing pipes are leaking paid traffic all over the place?Or when each one of those joints in your marketing network are as watertight as humanly possible?Put like that, it’s really obvious that advertising just can’t work if the rest of your system is leaky. Indeed, since the price of ads will be driven up by professional authors who have a non-leaky system, there’s no chance at all that authors with a badly leaking system can make money.And that’s why, in almost every case, when people tell me “I tried advertising but it didn’t work”, the principal issue doesn’t lie in the advertising itself. It lies in all the stuff that has to be right before any kind of marketing activity is going to succeed.That’s why most people fussing over their blog tour, or their social media posts, or their CPC on Facebook ads are simply looking at the wrong thing. Those things matter only if the rest of your system is already up to scratch.These considerations are most keenly felt by indie authors, as they have all the levers of marketing power under their own direct control. But trad authors face the same basic challenge: building a leak-proof marketing system. Yes, it’ll be their publishers who face the challenge of driving traffic to a page, but in the end, it’s the author who cares most about the end result.Is your book good enough?Is your cover strong?Is your blurb attractive?Do readers sign up to and engage with your mailing list?You need your answers here to be emphatically positive. If you are an indie, and you recognise that you could do better on these issues, then your first task is to fix them.If you’re trad-published, and these things aren’t right, then you need to do what you can to secure the changes you need. (Which will be harder, because you don’t have direct control.)These things are hard. And they are time-consuming. And some of them cost money. (Primarily editorial help and book covers.) But you have to do them anyway.If your irrigation pipes leak, your plants won’t get watered, no matter how wildly you turn the tap.If your irrigation pipes are reasonably watertight, then watering your plants is child’s play.Sermon over.I am now going to supervise my children using a real and actual hose to water some real and actual sweet peas. My prediction? We will all get very wet.

I like tea and I need reading glasses.I mention this only because both activities require some basic accessories: a china cup in one case and a pair of glasses in the other.But those accessories aren’t actually glued to me and I often put them down. Because I’m absent-minded, I often forget where I put them or, indeed, that I had them with me at all.The result? I leave a trail of tea mugs and reading glasses wherever I go. When I’m on the phone, I’ll often walk into the garden or down the road outside the house. (Walking is good for brain activity and conversations, in my opinion, happen better outdoors.) Trouble is, I’ll often have a cup of tea in my hand, put it down when it’s finished, then forget that I’ve done so. It’s perfectly common for me to find a mug of tea in our vegetable patch, a pair of glasses on a box hedge, or any empty cup, with a pair of glasses in, on the verge outside our gate.This sounds like a mildly chaotic (if agreeably bucolic) way of life, and I suppose it is. While more organised people buy designer glasses for eighty pounds the pair, I buy my glasses from Amazon, ten pounds for three. So when the kids sit on a pair, or I leave them in a café, or a hedge somewhere just grows over their carcass, I don’t really mind. Just chalk the cost up to me being me.Now, I mention this because earlier in the week I talked to Rachel Abbott about her career in self-publishing.(Short recap if you missed the webinar: she built a tech company, sold it and retired. But when she retired she wrote a book that became the #1 bestseller on Amazon for eleven weeks. That book launched a whole new career and Rachel has been a huge-selling author ever since.)And:Rachel is organised and productive.She has self-pub books, books with Amazon Publishing, and books with a Big 5 firm. She sells overseas in multiple languages. She has an agent and multiple editors and a virtual assistant in Serbia.She divides her marketing efforts up by type of reader. (Red-hot: her passionate fans. Warm: people who have read a book or so, but aren’t yet addicts. Cold: people who haven’t yet read her stuff.)She thinks about ad platforms and her Facebook page and her Facebook group and email lists.She manages multiple series. And has to write the damn books. And deal with edits. And do all that while (in theory) retired and enjoying the gentler life.All this is kind of intimidating to the rest of humankind.What if you’re not quite so superhuman? What if – just to pick an example – your kids are quite likely to come in from the garden having found your glasses in the strawberry bed? Or rescued from the roof of a car before it drove away?Well.A few thoughts.First, this isn’t just about self-pubCertainly, self-pubbers have more on their plates than trad-authors do, but any really high-profile author is juggling a lot. I know of one reasonably successful literary author, who has mastered the art of being a literary author. Hanging out at the right parties, knowing the right people, popping up on the right talk shows, and all that. Her books aren’t actually all that good, but she’s parlayed a middling level talent into quite a successful career by just working her own specific channels as hard as she can.The short message is that flourishing careers involve complexity, whether you’re trad-published & literary or self-published and genre. You can reduce the challenges by going trad, but you certainly don’t eliminate them.Second, write wellBeing a good writer always, always helps. Marketing bad books is a pretty much impossible exercise. (Not quite, but almost.) Marketing good ones ought to be, and is, a much simpler exercise. The heart of any writer’s job lies exactly where you want it to: putting the right words in the right order.Third, focus on what works for youWhat works for you? What things are you good at? What do you enjoy?If you love the chatter and hubbub of Facebook, then go for it. Use it strategically, and with a clear plan in mind, but you can certainly make that the centre of your marketing work.If you like the mix of creativity (ad creation) and geekiness (ad dashboards) involved in advertising, then ride that tiger.If you like direct communication with your reader – which you should; you’re a writer – then a mailing list should certainly be at the centre of things for you.And so on.You can’t be good at everything and you don’t need to be good at everything. You need roughly three reliable traffic sources to succeed. In self-pub, those sources might be your mailing list, promo sites (like Bookbub) and one paid advertising platform.In trad-land, you need decent supermarket uptake, plus a good presence on Amazon, plus some additional means of driving interest in your books. (A successful publicity campaign can work, but don’t just assume that what your publisher does will be sufficient. It usually isn’t.)Fourth, get the basics rightAny marketing, whether trad or indie, will basically fail unless you have the basics right. I started to write a checklist and why it matters so much, then realised the topic was big enough – and important enough – for a whole separate email.I’ll write that email another time but, for now, just know that getting the basics right is critical. Do you love your blurb? Is your cover stunning, and appealing to the exact right audience? Is your pricing right? Do you have authentic book reviews (or a plan for getting them)?You don’t have to have a Rachel Abbott level of organisation to achieve those things. You just need to realise that they matter and you need to go on worrying at them until they’re right.Cheer for the disorganisedSo yes, if you are a Monarch of the Spreadsheet, an Empress of the List, you’re lucky. I’m not.If you are capable of hanging onto a cup of tea or a pair of glasses for an entire day without losing them, then you’re lucky. I’m not.But writing well, focusing on what matters, and finding a small handful of things that you can do well? That’s enough. Trad or indie, that’s enough.And the heart of it all? The bit that matters most? It’s the ability to put sentences together in a way that pleases readers. Nothing else.Now I’m off to go and find tea mugs amidst the bindweed. It’s sunny here and the tulips are out.

I wrote an email before this one – reread it – didn’t like – and scrapped it. So here instead is a workhorse of an email. A sixteen-hand carthorse with shaggy fetlocks and a willingness to pull heavy farm implements in the rain.Because we’ve just relaunched our own website, the theme of this email is what your author site needs to do – and the most practical way to do it.Rule the first: get a site.If you’re even half-serious about making a living from writing, then you need a site. No real author-led marketing can happen without it.Rule the second: Build like you mean itEveryone knows what to expect from the domain name of an author site. You either want to be harrybingham.com (or.co.uk, or whatever) or – if you share a name with someone more famous than you – something like jamesdeanauthor.com.Don’t go for something funky like crazypinkrabbits.com, no matter how appealing that is to you. Your most basic bit of branding simply needs to identify your site as the thing that readers are looking for when they search. That means either just yourname.com or yournameauthor.com. Save the jokes for your author bio.Equally, although you can get free hosting if you choose a site like yourname.wordpress.com, you should spend the (fairly small) additional cost in direct hosting – that means cutting out the “.wordpress” part of that domain address.Rule the third: Simplify yourselfYes, I know. You are a complex human creature with thoughts and opinions on the poetry of Robert Frost, how to bake sourdough, the state of coffee farmers in Nicaragua, bluegrass music, eighteenth century epistolatory novels, and women’s soccer.But shut up about it.Your website is not a platform for you. It is a platform for your books.If you want to discuss all the poetry/sourdough/soccer stuff, then feel free to do so – but somewhere different. Your author website is a marketing asset. Keep it that way.Rule the fourth: Use the right toolsThese days, you need to WordPress. There are simple drag-and-drop website builders out there, but they will all limit you in the longer run if you seek to develop your site. WordPress is insanely powerful with a tool for every need you could possibly have. So use it.WordPress comes with a million different themes on offer. (The website theme is the bit of code that acts as the chassis for everything else.) Don’t get bogged down in trying to choose and don’t let your web designer just pick something he or she is familiar with. The best theme for your site is Parallax for Writers by GoCreate. When you buy the theme (for $600), you’ll get most of your site set up for free. More info here.Rule the fifth: if in doubt, pay someoneTen years ago, I didn’t have a website. I didn’t quite see the point.Then I got a contract for my work in America. I flew out to New York to meet the team. And someone said, “Oh, you need a website.” So I built one. In an afternoon. And quite a pretty site it was too.The whole thing cost me a few bucks a month.But it was still limited. When I redeveloped the site, I wanted a few add-ons that I couldn’t get from my simple site. So I paid someone about a grand, because I didn’t want the hassle of doing the work myself. On the one hand, that’s quite a lot of money. On the other hand, no serious author is without a properly designed and properly functioning website, so it’s money you need to spend.The short message is that you either need to do the work yourself, or pay someone. You can’t just avoid the issue.Rule the sixth: brand for the futureA lot of authors, seeing their first ever book cover, decide to place the cover art at the centre of their entire site design.And then – the paperback looks different from the hardback.Your US cover looks different from your UK cover.Your second book uses different colour and cover art.Your fancily designed website soon loses touch with the books that readers are actually looking at.The answer to this conundrum is simply to make sure that your website embodies your brand, not your book. So if you’re writing cosy crime, your site will feature quilts and grannies and cats and the like. If you’re writing second world war historical fiction, you’ll have soldiers and tanks and planes of the right vintage. If you’re writing gritty police procedural, you’ll use monochromes and cityscapes with splashes of bright acid colour.Do that, and your site art won’t need to change every time you change a cover.***Now all of this sounds like – and is – sensible advice, but I’ve so far skirted the issue of what a website is actually for. And you need to understand this, because most authors – and most publishers – get it wrong. So listen carefully as I tell you:The Golden RuleThe purpose of your website is to collect email addresses.That’s it. The core purpose.Yes, you may also achieve other things. (Provide a way for your readers to contact you. Provide a way for media opportunities to reach you. Provide a bio for those interested. Provide a longer guide to your books than Amazon offers. And so on.)But all those things are ancillary. The thing that actually matters is that your website is a stellar way to collect the email addresses of the people who land there. That way, you can communicate directly with them whenever you want.As it happens, I’m doing a (member-only) webinar on mailing lists tonight. If you can listen along then do. If not, then catch up on replay.But, long story short, mailing lists are the most powerful tool any author possesses. They have driven my own self-pub career. My own trad career. And they drive Jericho Writers too.My author website picks up email addresses from about two thirds of the people who land on it. If I hadn’t made that email collection central to the design, my conversion rate would be far lower – perhaps in the low sing digits – and my author career would have been far different.I won’t talk long here about how to optimise for email collection, but I will say that you need a proper landing page (ie: one stripped of all normal navigation tools). Therte’s a bit more on this in the PSes if you want to know more.That is all from me.This carthorse of an email intends to plod steadily towards a barn full of hay, a bucket of warm water, a groom with a curry comb, and heaps of fresh straw.If you\'ve got questions about websites, then ask away in the comments and I\'ll do my best to answer. Oh yes, and if you can, hop onto the mailing list webinar this evening. The topic is a very important one.

As you know, I’m on a George Saunders kick at the moment, and this email closes a trilogy inspired by his Swim In A Pond In The Rain. More about all that in a second – but first up, just a word to say that there\'s some important housekeeping material in the first comment below this post. All important stuff - and you\'re quite likely to be affected, so do take a look.Righty-ho. Editing. Writing and editing:-I want to start with something Saunders says at the very beginning of his work. He says this:Years ago, on the phone with Bill Buford, then fiction editor of The New Yorker, enduring some painful edits, feeling a little insecure, I went fishing for a compliment: ‘But what do you like about the story?’ I whined. There was a long pause. And Bill said this: ‘Well, I read a line. And I like it … enough to read the next.’… I’ve taken a lot of comfort in this idea over the years. I don’t need a big theory of fiction to write it. I don’t have to worry about anything but: Would a reasonable person, reading line four, get enough of a jolt to go on to line five?In a way, that’s the whole deal, right? If someone enjoys our writing enough to read it through at a happy canter, we’ve won. Some readers will find more in a book than others. Some people will rank us higher or lower than some other comparable authors. But don’t be fussy. If someone reads our work, line by line, to the end, we’ve done what we came to do.In the past week or two, I’ve run a self-editing webinar where I live-edited about 1000 words of text, over the space of about an hour. We also spent time, you and I, with that white chairs / green terraces exercise, where we all spent a lot of time trying to find a way to say something simple in about ten words (without, I think, yet finding a completely satisfactory answer.)Many of you will have felt a little frustrated by the amount of time I’m willing to spend on apparently minor things. (Does whitely work as an adjective? Can Dan talk about his sister standing outside his door, when he doesn’t actually know if she’s standing or not?)And, just to be clear, I really am willing to spend time on minor things. When I fuss over minutiae on a webinar, I’m not putting on a show simply because I have an hour-long gig to deliver. I’m doing in public what I do all the time in private. The truth, indeed, is worse than you fear. In an hour-long webinar, I’m conscious of the need to entertain and keep moving. At home, with no one watching, I’ll just redo the same damn sentence as long as it takes to make me happy.So yes: I am picky. And yes: I too subscribe to the Buford Theory of Fiction (BTF): If sentence N is good enough, they’ll read sentence N + 1, and …According to that theory, micro-blockages in a piece of text can accumulate to lethal effect. If you write a sentence that forces the reader to pause and re-construe the sentence in her head, you’ve created a momentary interruption in the flow. A few such interruptions in the course of a book are perhaps inevitable. But two or three such blockages on a single page? That book is one that the BTF tells you will never be read.So editing is good for that reason.But Saunders says – let’s call this the Saunders Theory of Fiction, the STF – that editing is also the process that creates highly organised fiction (or, if you prefer, simply good fiction.) Here is Saunders again:We can reduce all writing to this: we read a line, have a reaction to it, trust (accept) that reaction, and do something in response, instantaneously, by intuition.That’s it.Over and over.It’s kind of crazy but, in my experience, that’s the whole game: (1) becoming convinced that there is a voice inside you that really, really knows what it likes, and (2) getting better at hearing that voice and acting on its behalf.(I always like Gore Vidal’s way of saying something similar: ‘Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.’ That’s simple, reliable advice. Just apply it – and boom! Twenty years later, you’ll be a good writer.)But Saunders presses home a wider point, which is that the repetitious action of read / react / change / re-read ends up building into something that is you, but is also bigger than you. More humane. Funnier. More observant. More insightful. More nuanced. More coherent.On the one hand, you’re not that funny, that observant, that nuanced – but you can be a bit of all those things, sometimes. So you capture the funny when the funny is there. Four paragraphs later, a phrase floats onto the page that has more deftness, more nuance than the thing you replaced. Your page still isn’t that funny, or that nuanced, but what the hell? You’re only on round #4 of the editing. You’ve got lots more opportunities to find the humane / observant / funny / tender, etc. Each time you adjust the manuscript, the book will have more of you breathing in it, but a better, perfected sort of you.What’s more, as the book takes shape, your story starts pushing things at you. The decisions you make about sentence 8 on page 197 are informed by the 196 pages you’ve already read and the 112 pages that follow (and whose content you already know.)An example: my current work in progress is based in a secure psychiatric hospital on the west coast of Wales. The hospital has something of the air of a ‘fortress built by Nature for herself’, but my description of the hospital never quite found a way to make the surrounding ocean feel present and alive. There’s a scene where my character first arrives at the hospital, and I’d already reviewed and rewritten that scene a dozen or more times without finding a way to get the sea in there (or, indeed, realizing that I needed to.) But by the time I’d finished the book and had the whole of it, so to speak, in my hand, I felt precisely what the deficiency was and started – Saunders-like – to scramble towards a solution.As that process continues, the themes and metaphors of the book will start to take shape and cohere, by themselves. I won’t be thinking, “Gee, need to make more of the sea-as-metaphor.” I’ll just react to sentences and scenes, and go on making my fiddlesome little corrections, until I start to get happy. And, based on past experience, I predict that when I get happy enough to say ‘Finished’, the book will have taken on enough complexity and coherence to be something of value in the world.That’s all from me, but do remember to take a look immediately below in the comments, because there lurk truffles.

I mentioned last week that I was reading George Saunders’ A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, a book about reading and writing. It’s a very good book and I recommend it.At one point, Saunders writes:I’ve worked with so many wildly talented young writers over the years that I feel qualified to say that there are two things that separate writers who go on to publish from those who don’t.First, a willingness to revise.Second, the extent to which the writer has learned to make causality.I’ve probably worked with as many writers as Saunders has. (Though, young? Tush! The oldest client of ours to become a top 10 bestseller was the 84-year-old Barbara Tate. You don’t need to be young to have something to say.) And on that willingness-to-revise issue: well, he’s right.The most frustrating writers I’ve ever dealt with are ones who come to us with a really strong manuscript, which they then don’t revise. I remember one writer in particular who had a genuinely interesting and well-written manuscript. It needed a brisk haircut, three or four weeks in the workshop, and it would have been ready to meet some agents. And – it never did. It never got there. I’d look at version N+1 of the manuscript and be genuinely perplexed. Had I in fact received version N by mistake? And then I’d look and I’d find that, no, sure enough, a few specific paragraphs had changed in response to very specific comments by me.But those comments had always been simply illustrative of more general points: “Your characterisation is sometimes sloppily general, for example on page 243, where you say …” The issue on page 243 might have been fixed, but the manuscript just didn’t reflect the broader comment I’d been struggling to get across.I think it’s probably true to say that not one of those authors has ever been published. And honestly? They didn’t deserve it either.Really, though, I want to focus on Saunders’s other issue: causality.He writes:Making causality doesn’t seem sexy or particularly literary. It’s a workmanlike thing, to make A cause B … But it’s the hardest thing to learn. It doesn’t come naturally, not to most of us. But that’s really all a story is: a series of things that happen in sequence, in which we can discern a pattern of causality …This is important, because causation is what create the appearance of meaning.“The queen died, and then the king died” (E.M. Forster’s famous formulation) describes two unrelated events happening in sequence. It doesn’t mean anything. “The queen died, and the king died of grief” puts those events into relation; we understand that one caused the other. The sequence, now infused with causality, means: “That king really loved his queen.”And yes: just yes.Causality gives stories meaning, which gives them purpose. You can’t have a memorable or interesting story that doesn’t have layers of meaning – and rich causal relationships.But I want to pick at this a bit more, not least because Saunders addresses himself, in large part, to literary writers. But we genre authors are in the same old boat, with the same sails, ropes and steering tackle.We have the same aim: write an engaging story! And the same means of propulsion: characters at move in the world, events connecting up via chains of causality.Yet things only start to get interesting when the causality gets complicated and (preferably) a little but murky too.An example:Let’s say you want your detective novel to end with the baddie taking your protagonist, an unarmed female detective, hostage down at the now-deserted docks. OK, good. That sounds like a perfectly good strategy to me.But why would your unarmed female detective go and explore those dark and deserted docks by herself? Those of us who write police stories have an eternal battle: we want drama, but police forces really don’t. The author solution to any plot-climax is: get the protagonist one-to-one and face to-face with the baddie. The police solution is: deploy overwhelming force so the baddie has absolutely no chance to get one-to-one and face to-face with anyone.The classic authorial response involves some kind of side-shuffle. Damn! The detective’s phone is out of signal. Damn! She’d call for help, but she’s in trouble with her boss, so ... Damn! She would call for help, but she has a stone in her shoe and …And, OK, you do probably need a thing-in-the-world type solution like these. Such things help.But they can’t be all. That can’t be your everything.Saunders, remember, links causality with meaning – and a lost phone signal doesn’t deliver any kind of interesting meaning at all. So you need to pair up your thing-in-the-world solution with something fuzzier, darker and more capable of complex interpretation. So:Your protagonist is half in love with the dark marauder at the docks.She feels that dark marauder is her – that he embodies a part of what she is.She thinks the dark marauder may be her father; she doesn’t know if she wants to capture him or free him.Or something elseIn one of my novels, The Dead House, my character investigates a number of disappearances. It turns out that the victims have been forced into a life of religious service, that they did not invite and cannot escape. At the crucial point in the book, my character, Fiona, has pieced together about 80% of the mystery. She knows enough that she could escape it – but doesn’t. Her investigation leads her – alone – down a dark country path. There she finds the clue that completes her understanding of the case, but also leads to her capture. She too is about to be forced into a life of painfully narrow religious service.So why? Why does she go alone?Well, yes: I provided the reader with enough thing-in-the-world type explanations to satisfy the most basic objections. But that wouldn’t have been enough. That would have delivered an excuse, yes, but no meaning. So I tried to write the relevant scenes with a sense of longing as well as one of horror. After the book’s denouement, one of the rescued prisoners (a Russian woman) sits and talks with Fiona. Here’s a (very trimmed down) version of what happens:We sit.Opposite each other at a short refectory table. Like staring into a mirror, except that she is taller than me, and very pale. The skin and eyes of a land close to the High Arctic.Her kirtle is beaded around the neckline, where mine is plain, but the bootstring lacing at the front is the same. The grey cloth is the same. The weight of scratchy wool. The thin, almost sheer, undershirt.I say, ‘Last night. You saw me through the glass? I thought I felt it.’‘Yes. You are a police?’‘A police officer. Yes.’‘Last night, when I see you, I—’‘Yes?’I think this is what I wanted to know. The reason I asked to see this woman. I want to understand what she felt. What she saw.She says, ‘I don’t know. I have two thought. One is, you are real one. You are really here to do this thing [life as a religious anchorite].’ She sweeps her hand from wimple down towards the hem of her skirt. ‘You have this in your face which say, “Yes, I am come to really do this.” But also, I think, this woman make us free. How, I don’t know, but . . . this woman make us free.’And that’s causality operating the way Saunders means. It’s not really the click of billiard balls he’s after – a pattern that could be fully described in mathematics alone – it’s the murk of human-to-human causation.Was Fiona there to rescue prisoners? Or submit to a life of religious service? In the end, she chooses the rescue option. (Of course. Duh! I have a series to write.) But we feel the temptation of the other course too. The terrible beauty. The way it could attract a character like mine.So why did she let herself be caught? Because she wanted to be caught. Even phrasing it like that is too crass, too simple – but that basic pull of attraction was an essential ingredient in the cassoulet.So, folks. Revise lots. Work with causality yes, but make it complicated. Dodgy phone signals are fine, up to a point, but your deeper meanings – your story purpose – those will always lie buried in a complex human heart.And how about you? Are you struggling with a problem of causation where your thing-in-the-world solution just feels insufficient. Or have you read something which inspired you to dig out deeper, more ambiguous connections in your own work? Let me know below, and we\'ll all have a Heated Debate.

A few weeks back, one of you excellent people recommended George Saunders’s book on reading and writing, A Swim In A Pond In The Rain. I bought it and I’m enjoying it muchly.In the back of the book, Saunders produces this little exercise. He lists five translations of the same sentence from a Russian author, Isaac Babel. Here they are:In verdure-hidden walks, wicker chairs gleamed whitely.Wicker chairs, gleaming white, lined paths overhung with foliage.White wicker chairs glittered in walks covered with foliage.Wicker armchairs dazzled white along green-shrouded promenades.In leafy avenues white wicker chairs gleamed.Same sentence, five versions.Now think about them. Which do you like the best? Which the least? And why? Why do you like the ones you like? Why dislike the ones you dislike?And suppose you were writing that sentence, not relying on the services of a translator, what would you write?Now, neither Saunders nor I have actually read the Russian original, but that doesn’t really matter for the purposes of this exercise. Here are the ingredients we need you to toss together:Chairs, made of wicker and coloured whiteA path or pathsTrees or bushes overhanging the pathsSunshine (implied, I think, in the glittering / gleaming verbs)A contrast between white / green, shade / brightWe’re all friends here and this isn’t an exam, so you don’t get extra marks for accuracy. Trees, shrubs or bushes? Mention the wicker, yes or no? Path, walk or terrace? I honestly don’t care.Along with those ingredients, we also have a constraint, namely that Isaac Babel didn’t give this little micro-scene a ton of attention in his text. The longest of our translations runs to just under ten words, so I’d suggest that we set ten words as an upper limit for our own endeavours.OK? So have a go. Have a think about the sentences above, then write out your own version of it. I’ll do the same myself. Meanwhile, we’ll have a short intermission.** Tea and biscuits are served **** A chamber music quartet plays Debussy **** Writers suck the ends of their pencils and scribble quietly **** A cat stalks through the room and mutters, “Jeez, Writers!” in darkly accented cattish. **Right.OK, so which sentence did I like? Well, none of them, really. Some of them felt overly compact and almost cryptic, like a crossword puzzle clue or someone forced to pay for text by the letter:In verdure-hidden walks, wicker chairs gleamed whitely.“Verdure-hidden” is strained as an adjective. The adverb, “whitely”, is even worse. And “gleamed” is a perfectly fine verb in most contexts, but the hopeless adverb pretty much murders it here.Much better are the versions that just say, plainly and accurately, what’s going on:Wicker chairs, gleaming white, lined paths overhung with foliage.White wicker chairs glittered in walks covered with foliage.Take the first sentence of that pair. It tells us there are chairs. They’re wicker. They’re a bright white. They’re lining paths. Those paths are overhung with foliage.Boom. Nice and easy. Totally clear.The second of those two sentences attempts the same plainness, but does so less successfully. “In walks” sounds a bit odd, for one thing. The chairs are surely on a path, not in one. And “covered with foliage” has a sort of Palm Sunday feel – fronds laid upon the ground underfoot. The word “overhung” is surely more precise here.Anyhow, that’s the first part of our challenge. We have decided we like clarity, accuracy and plainness. (And yes, sometimes we want a sentence that detonates like a firecracker. But not here. This is a one-line description in a story that’s hurrying on to more important things.)So what did you come up with? Please tell me – just drop your versions into the comments below, along with any comments you have on the exercise.Here’s what I produced, my first version:White wicker chairs, bright white, lined gravel paths, overhung with foliage.That takes the version I liked the best but inserts “bright” for the slightly more forced “gleaming”. (Forced to my ear, that is; your tastes may differ.) And I popped in the word “gravel”, I think because the sentence feels like it needs shaking out and loosening up.In fact, if you really wanted to get the bright / shady distinction going here, I think you’d do so by giving one sentence to each thought:A row of wicker chairs stood bright and white in the sunshine. Behind them, the paths, heavily overhung with foliage stretched away, dim, green, remote.The real key to getting a version like that right will be to hit exactly the right note in the final word. I went for “remote”, but there’d be something better there, depending on the context. Enchanted? Inaccessible? Alluring? I don’t know, but that final word will be the clincher.On the other hand, you will by now be hurling broken biscuits at the Debussy quartet and yelling: you said only ten words!And OK, I did. And also – I’ve not been quite straight with you, because I don’t actually write like that last pair of sentences anyway.The frustration we had with the five original sentences were that they all used verbs (gleamed, dazzled, glittered) that really wanted to be adjectives. The fact is the chairs weren’t really doing anything. (That’s why the verb “lined” was the pick of the bunch.) And personally, I think, descriptions sometimes work most powerfully when you simply present the ingredients to the reader. So if I had a sentence like this in one of my Fiona Griffiths novels, I’d have handled it something like this:White chairs. Green-shaded paths. A luminous quiet.That’s only seven words (eight, if you don’t count that cheaty hyphen), but I’ve given myself room for a whole new thought, the luminous quiet.It’s perfectly true that I haven’t explained how the chairs relate to the paths – but who cares? Not me.It’s also true that this feels like - and is - a sort of flat-pack description. You have all the parts to hand, but the task of assembly is all yours. Again, that would be a problem for plenty of novels and novelists, but my (somewhat bold) solution is just a shrug and another ‘don’t care.’If you want to see how my technique feels in an actual novel, here’s my “description” of Fiona’s journey through Wales in This Thing of Darkness:Trawsfynydd, Dolgellau.Llanbrynmair, Llanidloes. [These are Welsh placenames, in case you thought you’d just fallen into a different language.]Low hills, green valleys.Grey farmhouses and sheep-studded fields.Bridges.Rivers flowing fast under alders. Trout-coloured water breaking over rocks.Near Llanwrthwl, I stop for fuel.And look: we started out thinking about a descriptive sentence, and we seem to have ended up in a place where sentences have almost entirely collapsed into their raw materials. That word “bridges” does triple service here as a word, as a sentence, and as a paragraph. To put it mildly, that is not a normal way to write – and I use it not just because it’s a solution to the puzzle of how to write elegant, yet compact descriptions, but because the jerky, dissociated prose style reveals something crucial about my narrator’s jerky and dissociated consciousness.But that last point leads us to one more thought – this too borrowed from Saunders – before we finish:We started out simply by thinking about how to fit our various ingredients into the confines of one short sentence. We encountered some fairly technical obstacles (the failure of whitely as an adverb, for example), and those obstacles pushed us to consider a longer version of the description – a two-sentence one, that worked hard on the light / shade distinction.But in doing that, we came to sense that we couldn’t quite nail down our description until we knew more about the story itself. So did those paths want to be “dim, green, remote” or “dim, green, inaccessible”? Or something else?Descriptions are never neutral. They always act as a bridge between the world-of-the-novel, the story and the experiencing character. That’s why my descriptive writing in the Fiona novels often collapses down to a set of raw materials: because the experiencing character undergoes those collapses in herself.In the example I just quoted above, you can feel the hand of Story playing its part as well. Fiona doesn’t yet know it, but she’s about to be abducted by bad guys and put in a place where the looseness and freedom of “rivers flowing fast under alders” will just be a lost and scrambled memory.So what started out as a simple exercise in writing technique – a ten word sentence: that’s all we asked! – has ended up us:A simple exercise in writing techniqueA window into the experiencing characterAn opportunity for story to creep inA statement about how we want to approach the entire bookThat’s why writing is hard. And that’s why writing is fun. And that’s why I urge you to be utterly pedantic about every sentence you write. That obsessive, repeated scrutiny is the route to better writers and better books.Oh yes, and I still don’t really like ANY of the versions of that sentence I’ve presented in this email. If they were in my first draft text, I’d edit again before I’d let the manuscript out in public.Did you do better? I hope you did. Let\'s see your offerings in the comments below.

One particular joy I have as a writer and a reader is sentences that work, because they don’t. Here’s an example (from Dodie Smith again, but I’ll stop banging on about her soon). The narrator is talking about her brother, Thomas, and observes that he can be both older than his years, and absolutely consistent with them, almost in the same minute. She exclaims:               Really, the puzzlingness of people!Puzzlingness isn’t a word and there are obvious, easy ways to rephrase things to avoid that clumsiness. Smith could have said, “How puzzling people can be!” Or, “What a puzzle some people are!” Instead of just inventing a word – and a rather clumsy word at that – she could have used a regular noun or a regular adjective in precisely the regulation way.So why didn’t she?Here’s another little oddity, from Gillian Flynn / Gone Girl:So I know I am right not to settle, but it doesn’t make me feel better as my friends pair off and … as I go to endless rounds of parties and bar nights, perfumed and sprayed and hopeful, rotating myself around the room like some dubious dessert.In that case, the oddity isn’t quite as blatant, but it’s still there – lurking in the phrase rotating myself around the room.Mostly, we use the word rotate intransitively – that is, without a direct object. (“The spindle rotated furiously …”). The most common transitive equivalent is the verb, to turn. (“I turned the wheel …”)And, OK, in this snippet, it’s clear we want the word rotating not the word turning, but we surely don’t need the word myself. Why doesn’t Flynn just write: “rotating around the room like some dubious dessert”? The meaning of that is totally clear. It avoids the awkward “rotating myself” construction. It just works.So why didn’t she write that? She’s (by a mile) the best crime writer of her generation, so she presumably had the ability to find the easy, natural, grammatically unobjectionable option.While you consider that, I’ll offer you one further example from another (less classy) crime writer. Here’s my very own Fiona character talking about a “World’s Best Mum” silver cup that her father has given her mother, and then placed on a shelf above the kitchen door:On the way through into the kitchen, we had to stop to admire the ‘World’s Best Mum’ trophy, which now looms over the kitchen door like something about to collapse.There’s no grammatical problem there, as such, but the phrase that ends the sentence (“like something about to collapse”) feels almost like a placeholder, just there to fill space until I actually find the image I was after (“a landslip waiting to fall”, for example.) And look – none of these three writers, myself included – are dummies. We put words on a page because we think they’re the right words. I don’t know about Gillian Flynn’s creative process, but Dodie Smith spent more than two years painfully editing and re-editing I Capture The Castle, so I’m pretty damn sure she didn’t write puzzlingness just because she was in a rush and couldn’t be bothered to retype.So what’s going on?I hope you sense the answer already.In Dodie’s Smith’s case, she wanted to achieve a sense of how knotty and intractable it is to understand others. She could have delivered that thought via a fluidly grammatical sentence – but then the sentence itself wouldn’t have been knotty and intractable. So she placed a knobbly, awkward block right at the heart of the sentence: There! People are knotty and awkward, just like this word.With Flynn, the same thing.Amy, the narrator of that little quote, doesn’t go to those parties with the ease of someone wholly comfortable in her surroundings. On the contrary, she approaches those parties self-consciously, as though clumsily executing a plan in which she does not fully believe.And how to achieve that sense of awkward self-manipulation? Why, how about using a verb/noun pair that embodies that awkward manipulation: rotating myself around the room. It sounds as though she’s heaving some recalcitrant piece of machinery around, not her own beautiful self.It’s that phrase that really gives the sentence its coherence and its wit. She starts out perfumed and sprayed and hopeful – but hauls herself around like a clunky machine part – and ends up as popular and wanted as a “dubious dessert”. It’s the bit in the middle that lends utter credibility to the transition from perfumed to dubious.Crucially, it’s also the bit that identifies where the blame lies. So it’s not the other party-goers who are at fault for being too aloof or too drunk or too whatever. It’s her own damn fault, because she wields herself like a lump of machinery, instead of just being a wonderful human. The grammatical faux pas manages to identify precisely where and why the party-experience is going wrong.Same thing with the “thing about to collapse” phrase. Fiona wants to suggest that the shelf is rickety – and, more than that, she wants to convey that the whole idea of giving a fun trophy to her mother was a terrible one in the first place. And what better way to convey a ramshackle bad idea, than using a clumsily ramshackle and provisional-seeming phrase to end the sentence?Boom!Building it bad to build it right.As I say, I have a stupidly fond spot for anything like that. I actually prefer a prose style that takes the risk of messiness. It feels more alive and more creative, though I acknowledge that’s a matter of taste, not an Ultimate Truth.Although “building bad” as a technique will tend to work only when you are dealing with something that is bad / awkward / puzzling / self-conscious / ramshackle – those things have a billion different shades of use, which means a billion different ways to express yourself, gloriously well through glorious badness.And you? If you have an example of “building bad to build it right” from your own work, then drop your examples into the comments below. I’m agog.And Britain needs gogs.

Imagine opening a fresh jar of instant coffee. Think about popping through the film that seals the jar and smelling the aroma underneath.What do you smell? Remember the sensation. Hold that thought.Now:To George Akerlof and the market for lemons.Akerlof is an economist, best known for his development of the idea that some markets are impeded by asymmetric information.What’s the big idea there? Well, in classical theory, everyone knows everything. So if you’re selling tomatoes, I know how fresh they are, how they taste, how likely they are to squish before I get them home, and so on. For any repeat-purchase, we do indeed possess that information. Unless you change the type of tomatoes you’re selling, I know everything I need to know from my prior experience. So you stick a price on your tomatoes and – if the price seems fair – I buy em.Akerlof noticed, however, that plenty of markets don’t work that way. His particular example was the market for used cars.Let’s say that Umberto Upright is selling his motor. He’s driven the car carefully, serviced it correctly, fixed any problems. For a car like his, a price of $10,000 would be eminently fair and reasonable.Unfortunately, Crookedy Clara is also selling her car. It’s the same make and model, but she’s never serviced it. The oil hasn’t been changed for 25,000 miles. At top speeds, something horrible rattles. And the rear fender is badly dinged, but so cleverly patched you won’t really tell until winter exposes it.Clara’s car needs a good $7,500 of repair work to get it in anything like the shape of Umberto’s car, so a fair price for Clara’s car is probably $2,500.But, as a buyer, you can’t tell the difference. What do you do?You think Umberto is Upright, but you aren’t sure, so you should offer him $9,000 to take account of the risk. Umberto sees your $8K and thinks, “Well, if that’s all I’m going to get, I’ll keep the car.”Clara sees the $8K and is all over that deal, so you end up vastly overpaying for something that Clara would (in a perfect market, with perfect visibility) have sold for very much less. Next time, you might not make a purchase at all.Akerlof called that ‘the market for lemons’, and he won a Nobel Prize for a short – if somewhat more technical – exposition of that exact problem.And, OK, used cars: everyone knows that’s a problematic market. That’s why you can end up paying an expert third-party to give you an opinion before you buy. Why there are specialist warranty contracts you can purchase to protect you.But there are huge markets where the same basic problem exists. Health insurance, for example. You might want to buy insurance, but are you a heart attack waiting to happen? Or a health nut who’ll live to a hundred? The insurer doesn’t know. Any uniform price is too low in the first case, too high in the second.Which brings us neatly to the market for books.Let us say that your book – your debut novel, no less – has been bought, and is being widely stocked, by Barnes & Noble, or Waterstones, or whatever the flagship bookstore is in your most excellent country.You know everything about your book. So does your editor. So does your agent. So does everyone else who’s worked closely on it.But the reader knows NOTHING.They have at their disposal the following ingredients:The fact your book sits in an illustrious and selective bookstore (which doesn’t apply if the store in question is Amazon.)Your coverThe blurbSome basic pointers as to genreAny puffs from fellow authors or advance reviewersRecollection of any mentions there have been about you and the book in the pressAs much text as the reader feels like reading in-store (ie: not much at all.)The price (which is essentially a flat price across all print books of the same format)In other words, they know almost nothing of the book itself. You’ve worked unbelievably hard and long to make this book the best possible version of itself, and the reader has almost no knowledge of any of that. It’s like the tomato seller is just selling a sealed box marked “vegetables, various” and asking you to pay $17.99 to take it home.Fortunately, books are cheap, so plenty of readers are prepared to take the sealed-box / Crookedy Clara risk. But although the problem isn’t a high stakes issue, it’s still an issue. No one likes paying money for rubbish, even the money involved is fairly small.So readers often use strategies like these:Buy what’s on the front tables of a big bookstoreBuy another book by an author whom they’ve read beforeBuy a book that is clearly in a genre which they tend to enjoyBuy something (probably an ebook) if it’s heavily discountedBuy something if a friend or newspaper or other trusted authority has recommended itThese strategies work well enough, but they tend not to help debut authors:The vast majority of authors won’t get to be on the front tables of the big bookstores. (I often have been, but sales don’t’ always follow.)No one can buy “another book” by you, because this is your first.The “buy genre X” rule is so weak that it doesn’t really help differentiate your book from 10,000 others.In the world of print, heavy discounts are rare, except at the very end of a book’s life, and most trad publishers are still reluctant to discount ebooks properly.Word of mouth is slow. Your book will have long left physical bookstores before it has the chance to operate. And press coverage of new books is scanty. Yours will quite likely to receive no reviews and, in any case, the link between reviews and sales is feeble.So what do you do?Well, there are no good answers: that’s Akerlof’s point. In markets with asymmetric information, good solutions just don’t exist.But you can do some things, all right.You can fight tooth and nail for a cover you love. Those books of mine that have done best have had great covers. And contrariwise. Covers matter hugely.Less important, but only just less, you can perfect that blurb. Be perfectionist. Pursue the thing until it shines.If you’re self-publishing, you have direct control over those things, so get them right. Put in the hours. Pay the money. No excuses.If you’re trad-publishing, you’re working with a machine that doesn’t always value your input, so you need to be as obstreperous as you need to be to get the outcome you want.But better still – and this gets right to the very heart of your brand distinctiveness – you can do this:You can have a killingly good elevator pitch at the heart of your book. You can – and must – express that pitch in every page and line of the book. The book has to be the perfect fulfilment of the pitch you first imagined all those months and years ago.Then the job of the cover is easy: it needs to express that pitch.The job of the blurb is easy: it needs to express that pitch.Your choice of any puffs or review quotes or similar is easy: pick the ones that best express that pitch.Hell, if you took this idea to extremes, you’d apply it to yourself too. How to dress? In a way that expresses the pitch. How to cut your hair? The pitch, the pitch, the pitch, the pitch.(I’ve not gone down that road myself, but I think brothers in crime Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman do, or did. They’ve sold a book or two between them, so maybe that’s an idea to explore.)I’m doing a webinar, at the end of next week, on elevator pitch. (Open to Jericho members only, and available on replay if needs be.)Understanding elevator pitch is like getting close to the DNA of bookish perfection. The longer I’ve been in this game, the more I tend to think that elevator pitch is the secret of almost everything – even plotting, even character, even the stuff that seems a mile away from marketing claptrap.So: if you can come, please do. It’s going to be fab.That’s it from me – almost.Bur first: do you remember that jar of coffee? What did you smell as you opened that jar?Fresh, deep coffee aroma, right? The very essence of why you bought the product in the first place.Except, get this: coffee granules don’t smell.The manufacturers put the scent in artificially, and quite separately. They do that because they know that every aspect of the experience has to live up to the brand promise – the elevator pitch – of the product itself.So yes, some marketing things are just added on (coffee scent, book cover) at the last minute and quite independently from everything else. But they only work if they describe an inner essence that runs right through the core of the product.And that essence needs to be right. When perfect pitch meets ready customer – that’s where you get sales. That’s where you defeat Akerlof’s asymmetry.See y’all at that webinar.

As youse know, I’m reading Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle at the moment. (I’m three-quarters of the way through and still enjoying it.)And there’s a critical scene in it. The seventeen-year-old narrator, Cassandra, has an elder sister, Rose, who has an inner anger or ruthlessness together with a detestation of her family’s poverty. She is also, true to the book’s Jane Austenian roots, very beautiful and of marriageable age.The Man With Money – the Mr Darcy role – is played by Simon, a charming American with pots of cash and an unfortunate beard.  Rose has been – crudely at first, then more cleverly – seeking to win Simon’s heart. And eventually she succeeds. In the scene I want to talk about, Rose persuades Simon to shave. He asks her to marry him. She doesn’t say yes, but asks him to kiss her. He does so. She then says, yes, she’ll marry him.OK, so the facts are clear. But the interpretation of those facts is anything but.Simon’s brother, Neil, thinks he knows. He yells at Cassandra, ‘She’s a gold-digger. And you know it.’Cassandra hotly denies this – then reddens, because perhaps she thinks it too. Then, after things have calmed down a bit, Neil accepts that maybe Rose has fallen for Simon. In due course, the always-truthful Rose tells Cassandra that she really does love him. Phew!Except –Those conflicting initial responses to the news never really leave us. What are Roses’s real motives? How authentic is her passion? It’s those questions (and Cassandra’s own emotional rollercoaster) that dominate the next chunk of the book.And the book works because it leaves these questions open.Pretty much any book of quality will hang on scenes where some story situation just isn’t wholly resolved. The reader is presented with all the available evidence, but that evidence can still be argued both ways.And ideally, the picture is ambiguous not simply because the data is fragmentary, but because the actual truth is shaded and complex.So, yes, Rose is a gold-digger. She wants money. She’s perfectly capable of acting manipulatively to achieve her ends.But also – she’s a young woman encountering her first real love and with enough self-awareness to doubt herself. (Hence getting Simon to kiss her before she answered his “Marry me” question.)She’s both things at once: gold-digger and young woman in love.Interestingly, the reason why ambiguity works so well – and why it’s so important for your fiction – is that it forces readers to work.Now that sounds like it might be a bad thing to do. Books are meant to be entertaining, right? So why make readers work? We should be helping them to sit back and relax, no?But making readers work is the whole deal. It’s everything.Readers are gripped by a book when they are intensely engaged by it. That’s your purpose in writing it: intense engagement.Since readers – most of them – are human, they are hugely engaged by the act of trying to interpret ambiguous but consequential human behaviour. The more you can sustain the ambiguity and deepen the consequences, the more you force that intense engagement.I can’t think of a really good book that doesn’t, somewhere, make use of that basic tool. I think, in fact, it’s central to good writing.Macbeth? He murdered a king, but his moral awareness is still what illuminates the centre of that play.Hannibal Lecter? He’s a multiple murderer and a cannibal, and is anyone’s definition of an awful human being. But he was also, once, a terrific psychiatrist and he is the only one who can find a way through to the dark heart of what troubles Clarice Starling, the novel’s FBI protagonist.And, strangely, ambiguity is the gift that keeps on giving. I write series fiction, which puts one character on the page for a series that has now passed the 750,000 word mark. Yet I still play the same games. On one page, Fiona is infuriating. On the next, she’s funny. Then brilliant. Then hopeless. Then heroic. Then back to infuriating.How do you read her? How does your understanding encompass her?It’s not easy and it’s meant to be. The result (I hope) has a kind of coherence – because chaos isn’t ambiguous or rich; it’s just chaotic – but I keep making the reader work.A hard-working reader is a reader who’s gripped.So ambiguity and rich contradictions are your friends. Keep those things alive through the book. Rock your reader to and fro over that hump of uncertainty.Rose is a gold-digger? Rose is not a gold-digger?She loves him? She loves him not?Whatever your story-question is, you want to keep both answers alive and – often – find a way to say “yes” to both opposing readings.It’s a fun way to read, but it’s also a hell of a fun way to write.

My wife doesn’t often recommend books to me, but she did recently. The book is I Capture The Castle, by Dodie Smith, written in America during the war, but not published until 1949, after some years of anxious revisions.I’ve only read about a dozen pages of the book and already know I’m going to love it. That sense is, admittedly, helped along a bit by knowing that the book was an instant hit on publication and has remained a word-of-mouth treasure ever since. But it’s more than that.Here’s the opening sentence:I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.The narrator continues:That is, my feet are in it; the rest of me is on the draining board, which I have padded with our dog’s blanket and the tea-cosy. I can’t say that I am really comfortable, and there is a depressing smell of carbolic soap, but this is the only part of the kitchen where there is any daylight left.Since we’re in the quotation mood, here are a couple more bits from those first few pages:[My sister Rose] is a pinkish gold, very light and feathery. Although I am rather used to her, I know she is a beauty … I am no beauty, but have a neatish face.[My stepmother Topaz] paused on the top step and said: ‘Ah, girls …’ with three velvety inflections on each word.Now she [the stepmother] is in bed and is playing her lute. I like the idea of a lute, but not the noise it makes.Now, quoting snippets isn’t really the best way to present a novel. A novel is the best way to present a novel. But I hope you feel that, even chopped up into morsels, there is something instantly seductive here. Instantly moreish.And the question I want to ask is: how come? What’s the secret? What do you have to do on the first few pages to write a novel that will still be read with warmth and affection, seventy-five years after its creation?Simple good writing is a part of it, of course. I talked a month or two back about Elizabeth Gilbert’s use of an ordinary-but-wide vocabulary in her book, The Signature of All Things. Dodie Smith does the same here.So anyone might talk of someone’s complexion being pink and gold, but it takes a little flash of genius to add the word feathery. That suggests downy and soft and touchable, but also perhaps the hint of a caress or an artist’s brush. And at the same time the word works because it’s odd enough – controversial enough – to spark consideration of why it deserves its place.Those velvety inflections work in roughly the same way. Can you yourself find a way to say ‘Ah, girls’ with three velvety inflections on each word? I doubt it – and yet the slight provocation somehow deepens the effectiveness of the phrase.As for the idea of the lute versus the noise it makes – that’s just plain funny.So, OK, we have on our check-list so far:Write wellBe funnyIn Dodie Smith’s case, we might add also:3. Be warmClearly, that advice won’t work for every book, but it’s notable that there is a kindness to these opening pages, which is simply pleasant to be around. So the sister is pinkish gold and feathery. The stepmother is very kind and the narrator is very fond of her. Even the dog ‘gazes at me with love, reproach, confidence and humour.’Yes, we go to fiction for things other than kindness and warmth, but if we happen to pick up a book and find ourselves in a warm bath of laughter and affection and gentle teasing, it’s not all that likely we’ll want to put it down.But I think we get nearer to the mark if we throw in this:4. Get personalI Capture The Castle is narrated by seventeen-year-old Cassandra Mortmain. Her personality is alive in every sentence. You already have a sense of that personality from the bits I’ve quoted. If you’re writing third person, then you won’t be able to deploy your protagonist’s own voice in quite the same way, but you can still snuggle up as close as you can to that protagonist and get his or her personality blooming as soon and as vividly as you can.There are, however, several further ingredients of the Smithian stew, I think.One is certainly:5. Be quotableThat first sentence about sitting in a sink is often seized on as a Famous First Sentence. And the thing about lutes & music is deliciously perfect too.At the same time, and though quotability is a factor here, it’s not one I’d want to get too hung up on. A lot of newbie authors like to adorn their first pages with flashily quotable lines. Things like – oh, I don’t know – “Killing a man is easy. Keeping his blood off your shirt is hard.”That has a strut, a look-at-me quality, that probably does do something to attract the reader’s interest. But if it doesn’t derive from real personality – if it’s written for that movie poster, and nothing else – it won’t have staying power. So, for me, the “get personal” message is always more powerful and more enduring than the “be quotable” one. It sticks longer in the memory.One more of Smith’s ingredients is something like this:6. Be curiousCassandra Mortmain is live-writing a diary, reporting life very much as it happens. And she’s sweetly, naively excited to be writing at all. She looks forward to being able to talk about everything. She doesn’t attempt a full description of their crumbling castle home on page two, because ‘I won’t attempt to describe out peculiar home fully until I can see more time ahead of me than I do now.’She writes her book in a kitchen sink, then on the stairs, then in her bed (the remains of her only dressing gown wrapped around a hot brick.)Because Cassandra is zestful about the act of writing and reporting, we become zestful about the act of reading. It’s as with my murder stories: my detective loves murder. All corpses please her, but good corpses delight her.Delight is contagious. Infect your main character and you will infect your reader too.So far, we seem to have collated a reasonably doable list of action points. That doesn’t make it simple, mind you. ‘Write well, be funny’: it’s not like those things are easily done. But still. They are, in principle, things you can work at.But, being truthful, I think we have to throw one extra ingredient into the mix:7. Be magicalDodie Smith wrote other books, other plays. Apart from I Capture The Castle, only one of those works had enduring success … and you’re much less likely to have read Dodie Smith’s book than to have seen Walt Disney’s adaptation of it: One Hundred and One Dalmatians.Presumably, Smith didn’t suddenly get extra helpings of genius for her Capture The Castle book and lose them all for everything else. Equally, John Le Carre became a better novelist in the years after he wrote The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, but if you could only save one JLC novel from the inferno, then that would probably be the one.The fact is that, as authors, we arrange our ideas on a table as we are deciding what to write next. When we find a configuration that feels right, we let rip. We spend a year or however long writing that damn novel. Then we edit it hard. Then we have what we have.Sometimes that novel is a perfectly workmanlike, entertaining, decent read. And good. We’ve done our job; we’ve earned our crust. And other times, the same set of skills applied to other ingredients just product something of magic. A matter of chemistry, really.And quite why does I Capture The Castle have that chemistry so abundantly when Smith’s other adult novels didn’t? Well, we don’t know. You can’t know until you’ve written the thing.So write your book. See if it’s magical. If it’s not, write another.That’s all from me. We have a skip in the garden and the children are currently inside it, having a picnic.

Plenty of writers stress over genres:What genre is my book? Yes, there’s a death, but it’s not really a crime story. And there’s a romance, but it’s not really a love story. And it’s set in the 1980s, which makes it historical, but nobody wears a corset or says methinks, so it’s not really hist fic either. Help!The answer, really, is simple. Genres don’t matter, but readers do.To understand what I mean, just walk into any large bookstore. The nearest big store to me – Waterstones in Oxford – has fiction dominating the ground floor. There’s a niche set aside for crime fiction and one or two other specific genres.Mostly, though, the label above the shelves is simply “Fiction”. You’ll see Jane Austen snuggling up with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Delia Owens making nice with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Jojo Moyes deep in conversation with Saul Bellow.Most novels just aren\'t sold under a particular category label. Readers are smart enough to know that Saul Bellow will offer a very different sort of read to the one provided by Jojo Moyes.That seems clear enough and yet agents – curse them – always want to know how to bracket your book. The result is that we quite often see query letters say things like, “my novel is a Coming of Age Novel / Romance with a fashion industry setting”, with capital letters strewn around as though trying to manufacture a genre where no genre actually exists.And no: there isn’t a genre like that. There isn’t a category on Amazon which matches that. There most certainly isn’t a set of shelves in any physical bookshop with that as its sign.And yet – there are books like that, The Devil Wears Prada for one.And look, agents want to know something about your book before they start to read it, in much the same way as you want to know something about a film on Netflix before you start watching. Is it a thriller? Or a rom-com? You might be happy with either, but you just want to set your expectations before you start.It’s the same with agents. If you tell them that a book is a thriller, they will read with their thriller head on. They’ll be thinking, Does this feel like the start of a thriller that publishers could sell successfully to a large audience? If you tell them your book is a rom-com, they’ll think about that market instead.And if your book has a nice clean genre, then tell them. My books (now) do. They are in increasing order of specificity: crime fiction, detective fiction and police procedurals.But most books don’t have those nice clear categories. So just describe the book in a sentence or two, much as you would if you were describing it to any reader.“The novel tells the story of Andrea Sachs, who becomes junior assistant to Miranda Priestly, the fashion world’s most powerful – and feared – editor. Andrea struggles to accommodate the demands of her boss, the fashion world, her love life and her own desire for a meaningful purpose.”Bingo. That’s the book. You haven’t described a genre, exactly, but you have successfully described what kind of read you are offering.That’s all agents need. They’ll adjust their expectations accordingly and read with interest.Same with editors. When they read a manuscript, they’ll be thinking, “How can I package this book to achieve a strong level of sales?” They’ll be thinking about covers and comparable authors and recent hits and possible marketing approaches.In order to get a good set of answers to those questions, editors do need a good two-line summary of the book – the sort that we’ve just given – but they don’t especially need any genre categorisation at all.As a matter of fact, I’d go further than that. Genre descriptions can be so restricting that I’d want to throw them off, at least partly. So yes, my novels are contemporary police procedurals with murder stories at their heart.But they’re also not some of the things you might expect them to be. So although my novels are technically procedural, they show an almost total disregard for actual police procedure. There’s not a lot of shooty-bang-bang stuff. The action is slow, not fast. And the crimes being investigated are, in many cases, so extravagantly unlikely that nothing like them has ever actually happened.So if I were writing a query letter – or an Amazon book blurb – I’d want to hint at the ways in which my books run contrary to genre, not with it.Because, in the end, it’s not genres that matter. It’s readers. You do, I think, need to have a really clear idea of what kind of book yours is. What’s the heart of its appeal? What’s that appeal expressed in a sentence? What kind of cover sings about that appeal? Where on Amazon will your very best readers most likely gather? What other authors do those readers love?These questions matter. Genres don’t. You will, I hope, find liberation in that thought. I know I do.

Today’s email landed in two quite distinct set of inboxes.One group of inboxes belongs to a group of (friendly, relaxed, good-spirited) people who thought, “Oh, look, here’s another email from Harry.”The second group of inboxes belongs to a ferocious tribe who noticed, and were instantly enraged by, the grammatical mistake contained in the phrase Between you and I.What is the mistake? Ah well, though English doesn’t have a host of grammatical cases – unlike German with 4, Russian with 6, and a surely unnecessary 7 in Polish – there is still a difference between the nominative case (“he” or “I”) and the accusative case (“him” or “me”.) And prepositions like their complement to be in the accusative. So I shouldn’t have written between you and I. I should have written between you and me.Although plenty of English-speakers don’t bristle at errors like that, you lot are different. You’re a bunch of writers. You’re attuned to these issues and mostly don’t make them in your own writing. I’m not sure I get enraged by such errors any more, but I do certainly notice them. Every time.And, look, I think it’s still safe to say that using a nominative pronoun after a preposition is an error. But let’s just remember what that means. All we’re really saying is that most language users still use the preposition + accusative structure. Not to do so, places us – somewhat – as a non-standard user.But for how much longer? The who / whom distinction (another nominative / accusative issue) has largely vanished from our language. Or, to be more accurate, it’s just started to get awkward. Take a look at these examples:               The agent, to whom the manuscript was sent …               The agent, to who the manuscript was sent …               The agent who the manuscript was sent toDo you like any of them? The first is technically correct, if we’re being old-school about it, but it does have a somewhat fussy flavour today. The second option just sounds wrong. The third just sounds clumsy. So mostly, today, we’d rewrite any of those options as The agent who received the manuscript. By making the agent the subject again, we can get rid of that correct-but-fusty to whom construction.Another example of a grammar which still exists, but patchily, is the which / that distinction. Technically, the word that introduces a clause which defines the noun being described. Like this:Manuscripts which contain murders are always excellent.That sentence wouldn’t be right if you took out the “which contain murders” bit. Clearly, that sentence is saying that the presence of murders in a manuscript is what guarantees their excellence. In these, definitional-type clauses, you always need a which.Other times, it’s clear that a clause is just adding information which could, in principle, be dropped entirely:Manuscripts, which authors have slaved over, are wasted on agents.That sentence is essentially saying “manuscripts are wasted on agents”. You could drop the clause about authors’ hard work and the essential meaning remains unchanged.So OK, we know the difference between which and that. Whether or not you knew the rule, you probably don’t mess up in a really obvious way.But, but, but …A lot of rules look clear on the pages of a grammar book but dissolve on contact with reality. Take a look at these actual examples from my current work in progress:Peter looks at me with that soft-eyed affection which is the special preserve of older uniformed officers contemplating their younger, bossier detective colleagues.I spark up. Inhale. Open the window enough that I can blow smoke through the dark slot which leads outside.I park down by the beach which, out of season, has an abandoned quality. Windswept and forlorn. The first of those examples is clearly correct in terms of the grammar. The police sergeant’s affectionate look is defined by the (sarcastic) clause that follows, so I got that right.The next one? Well, I don’t really know. You could argue that the “which leads outside” is definitional, but you could argue it the other way too. And I know for a fact I wasn’t guided by grammar in making the choice there, but sound. The sentence had just had a double th-sound (“through the“) and it probably didn’t need another. So I went with which.And the last example – the beach one – is just wrong. There’s only one beach, so the clause which talks about its abandoned quality can’t be defining it.I’d be very surprised indeed if a British copy-editor were to correct that mistake, however. We Brits are just more relaxed issues like that. A good American copy-editor probably would correct it, however. US copy-editing standards are more demanding and more precise. (Another example? Brits will often use a plural pronoun, they, to refer to a singular noun, like the government. It\'s not that Americans never do that, but they do it so little, it still strikes plenty of American ears as simply wrong.)But you know what? I still like the way I wrote that sentence about the beach, even with that “erroneous” which. It just sounds better to me.The fact is, I trash conventional grammar all the time:I use a lot of sentence fragments.I start sentences with conjunctions.I drop the subject from verbs.I use words that don’t exist.I often do all that, back to back, in one sweet jam of Offences Against Grammar. Here’s one twenty-four-word excerpt that merrily commits enough crimes to send the Grammar Police into a spin:Clean shirt. Early start.I make tea. Fire up my computer. Kick my shoes off, because my feet aren’t in a shoey mood.And in the end? Well, I suppose I still adhere to the kind of grammar rules which remain largely unbroken, by most people, even in informal contexts. So I wouldn’t say “between you and I” because that strikes my ear as wrong. But I’m more than happy to shatter other rules (the sentence fragment one, say) and bend others (the which/that distinction, for example.)You, of course, don’t have to do as I do. Your job is to find your own writing voice and tune that in a way that suits you best. If that involves technically excellent grammar, then great. If it doesn\'t, that\'s really fine too.About once a month I get an email from someone who frets that they don’t know enough formal grammar to be a writer. And to hell with that. If it sounds right, it is right. That’s all you really need to know.

Last week, oh ye hungry seekers of knowledge, we talked about publishing contracts and the snares that lie therein. If you missed that email, you can catch up with it here. But I left the biggest problem aside so we could get properly stuck into it this week.The issue is simple: rights reversion.Let’s say you sign up with Megacorp Publishing Inc. All parties sign in good faith. Megacorp believes in your book. It has every intention of marketing it hard. All good.But – life happens. Maybe the book cover was poor, or your timing unfortunate, or supermarkets just weren’t buying your book for some other reason. Any case, the book didn’t sell. Megacorp lost money. Your contract isn’t renewed.And just to be clear: that’s not a one in a hundred outcome. That’s what happens in maybe 6 or 7 cases out of 10. Most works of fiction lose money. Two or three breakeven (but those contracts will be negotiated down or not renewed.) One or two successful books make enough money that the whole merry-go-round continues to spin.So, OK, your work is one of the unfortunate ones. You spun the wheel and lost. What now?Well, in the olden, olden days, when books were made out of paper, reversion was standard and easy. A publisher had to keep the book in print. If they didn’t, the author could say, “republish the book or give me the rights.” Publishers generally just reverted the rights, and life went on.But of course, these days, e-books never die. And print-on-demand means that even paper books never have to die. So the old reversion clauses dropped away and were replaced by ---- nothing. Or if they were replaced, their replacements were so weak as to be meaningless. I’ve seen contracts where publishers insisted on retaining rights to a book so long as annual sales were in excess of 20 units. A book can be essentially dead and still beyond reach of that author.Why does that matter? Well, you might not care about reversion now, but that doesn’t mean you won’t at some point in the future.You might want to self-publish commercially. (I reverted some rights from Penguin Random House and was making $100K from the series within a couple of years.) Or you might just care about the book and want to rejacket and relaunch it, without any great expectation of profit. Or you might just want to own the book, because it is yours, and you gave it birth, and you still love it.For any of these reasons, only some of them commercial, you might want to revert the rights.Well, lots of you will no doubt be thinking that there’s a fairly obvious and uncontentious solution:Megacorp now has no meaningful financial interest in your book: if it didn’t sell during the launch window, it’ll never really sell, ever. (Not in the hands of Megacorp, that is: they’re not in the business of trying to revive failed books.) So in a rational world, you’d wait two or three years, then say, “Hey, Megacorp, things didn’t work out. No worries, but can I have the book back? I’m happy to pay something for the small amount of ongoing revenue you’re likely to lose.”Megacorp would charge you something like 4-5x the income the book had brought in over the last 12 months. (That’s what units of the big publishers charge each other when books move around internally.) You get your book back. Megacorp gets some cash. Everyone’s happy.But, oh ye hungry seekers of knowledge, we do not live in a rational world.Actually getting your book back from Megacorp can be insanely hard. Or impossible. Or so expensive as to make no sense at all.I once tried to revert some rights from HarperCollins. My editors had long since left the firm, so my only point of contact was a nice bloke in Contracts. But he had no authority to make a deal, so he had to talk to his colleagues in the two imprints that held my various books.But the people in those imprints didn’t know anything about me or the books and they had no incentive to make a deal. If they earned a few grand from selling the rights, no one was going to congratulate them. If it turned out they sold the rights for a few grand, when I had some massive film deal about to be announced, they might even be yelled at.So even to have the negotiation took months. And the proposed outcome was ludicrous: so expensive and hedged around with qualifications, that I simply gave up. They own some books that earn them no money. I don’t have books that I would love to have. A dumb outcome.You need to sort these issues out upfront – in the contract ideally.That’s harder than it sounds. Your agent won’t care, because they have no interest in self-pubbed or non-commercial books. Rights reversion is one of the few areas where your interests diverge sharply from those of your agent.Megacorp will have some strategy decided at corporate level, that is desperately difficult for you to sway.And, worst of all, YOU may not care – not in this first flush of excitement, with a publisher offering you actual real money to publish your work.All I can say, my friends, is that you need to care. You need to surface the issue. You need to push for whatever you can get.The ideal would be a clause that gave you a defined right to revert the rights after a specified period (probably 5 years) at a specified price (most likely a low multiple of recent sales.)But publishers are brutal. They won’t give you that. So talk to your editor and your agent and raise the issue. Ask for a good-faith understanding of how reversion will be handled when and if the time comes. You’ll be fobbed off. People will try not to answer. But push. Do your best and get something. When you get that something, pop it into a simple email to your editor. “Hi Aquilegia, thanks for that chat about reversion this morning. As I understand it, we agreed …”That email will give you a point of leverage if push comes to shove at some point in the future. If you can get something sensible in the contract itself, all the better.And don’t be embarrassed. The Megacorps of this world have absolutely no rational commercial interest in depriving you of your work. You have every legitimate interest in recovering access to your book if and when Megacorp has no further use for it.So fight for that access. You’re right, they’re wrong, and everyone knows it.Oh yeah, and if you want to know what the Very Most Annoying Thing is in my Little Box of Annoyances, then it’s this:It’s when publishers tell you, “Oh, we can’t negotiate this, because our policy is to have a completely standardised contract.”They only ever say that when the contract is grossly biased in their favour. Publishers are, as humans, the friendliest, loveliest bunch you can imagine, but don’t be fooled. The contracts are put together by multibillion corporations, whose only interest is their own profit and glory. The resultant contracts stink. They’re not fair. They’re not meant to be fair.Far too often, and with bigger authors as well as smaller ones, publishers take actions that – to my author-centric mind – represent abuse of power and nothing else. We can’t stop that abuse. We’re just little old us; they’re multibillion dollar corporations. But we can know what we want and what’s fair. Push hard to get it. Here endeth the lesson.

Every now and then, it so happens that I get to see the contracts offered by publishers to (mostly) debut authors. And, for the most part, they look much the same. Long. Written in Legalish. Needlessly complicated.And one-sided.For obvious reasons, I most commonly see contracts when the writer concerned doesn’t have an agent. And, again for obvious reasons, publishers don’t feel obliged to play nice if they don’t have someone scary and experienced negotiating opposite them.And, look. If I were an unagented author keen to get into print, I’d be willing to sign pretty much anything. Publishers know this, so they don’t exactly try to play nice.But you don’t have to sign the contract that is put in front of you. You really don’t. It’s not poor etiquette to negotiate. Doing so marks you out as a smart author, not a difficult one. You just have to know where and how to direct your fire.This email will start to give you a map. It’s not a complete map and I don’t know your specific circumstances. So caveat the first is simply that you should get your contract checked out by the Authors Guild (US) or the Society of Authors (UK).The second caveat isn’t really one of those modest legalistic qualifications. Think of it more like someone shouting at you, using a bright red bullhorn, from a distance of about eight inches. It’s simply this:IF YOUR CONTRACT INVOLVES YOU PAYING THE PUBLISHER, WHAT YOU HAVE IN FRONT OF YOU IS A VANITY PUBLISHING CONTRACT.AVOID, AVOID, AVOID.But let’s say you get an offer from a totally legitimate publisher. Maybe a big 5 firm, maybe a reputable independent, or maybe a digital-first imprint of some sort.Now, OK, you are probably nice and somewhat uncomfortable with confrontation. Which is fine, but you’re not going to be confrontational. You’re going to be professional. And remember: editors are perfectly well used to literary agents hammering away at every detail of a contract. So negotiate. With that said, let’s take a look at my little box of annoyances. First up, we have:The Right of First Refusal (RFR)This is one of those clauses that has a perfectly innocent and acceptable idea at its heart, but can quickly morph into a beast.The innocent idea is simply this. You and Megacorp Publishing Inc work happily together on your book. It’s published. It sells reasonably well. You write another book. What then?Well, it would probably make sense for Megacorp to take first look at your new book and, potentially, make you an offer. If that offer is acceptable, you take it. If not, you politely refuse and take the book elsewhere.That arrangement recognises that Megacorp are in the front of the queue, thanks to your prior relationship with them, but doesn‘t bind you into a longer term relationship that you may not want.That innocent RFR clause, however, turns into a fang-toothed beast as soon as it starts to take on more layers.So for example, you’ll sometimes see clauses which say that you may not accept any offer which is of a lower value than that first Megacorp one. Well, why shouldn’t you? Suppose your experience with Megacorp has been universally bad. And suppose that a brilliant and passionate indie publisher is desperate to publish your book. Why wouldn’t you take a lower offer from the latter if you want to? It’s your book, your life.Or take another (very common) example. An RFR clause might say that Megacorp has the right to match the top-bid in any auction and walk away with the book.Now that might sound almost fair, except that the existence of the clause will kill any auction. If other big publishers know that Megacorp can just swoop in and take your book, their incentive to make a play for it collapses.Think of this from the editor’s point of view. To get a firm on board with an aggressive bid for a book, your putative editor is going to have to do a lot of internal marketing, potentially soliciting support as far up as the CEO. It’s one thing to do that if you stand an equal chance of success. It’s quite another if you know you are handicapped from the very start.So: the naked RFR is fine. Anything else is a big no-no. The Non-Compete ClauseLet’s say you are an expert in family law. You have just written The Big Book of Family Law and sold it to Megacorp. Megacorp don’t want you selling The Jumbo Compendium of Family Law to a second publisher and Divorce for Dummies to a third.So they put in a clause saying that you can’t sell competing titles to third parties. Then some corporate lawyers look at that clause and point out that it’s a bit ambiguous as to what is and isn’t a competing title, so they add a rider like “which, in the judgement of the Publisher, may compete with the Author’s Work …”And boof: at a stroke, they give themselves an ironclad protection against you selling work to others.The corporate lawyer goes home thinking, “What a very clever lawyer I am and how well I have protected our well-stuffed corporate coffers.”But you hope to make your living (at least partly) by selling books about family law.So don’t bind yourself. If other rival publishers want to publish books on family law, they will find people to write them. So Megacorp has not, in fact, done anything at all to protect itself from competition. They have just severely curtailed your chance to earn a living.Don’t be bound.If you are writing fiction, then there just shouldn’t be a non-compete clause in your contract at all, ever. I can’t think of an exception to that rule.If you are writing non-fiction, then any non-compete clause needs to be very narrowly drawn – for example, it might expire after three years, or once book sales have dwindled beyond a certain point.Again: a non-compete clause offers almost no benefit to the publisher and it does, potentially, do a lot of harm to you. So just say no.The next thing to fly out of my Little Box of Annoyances is …Movie rights & other land grabsA publishing contract is there so that someone with a clear intention to exploit a particular right (namely: publishing your book in all the normal formats) has the ability to do so.But Megacorp didn’t get to be the giant corporation is it by being timid. So let’s say your digital-first publisher plans to:Publish your manuscript in e-book form in the English language, worldwideDo the same in a print-on-demand editionConsider the possibility of issuing a hardback or trade paperbackMaybe consider an audio version, if sales seem promisingThat’s quite likely it. In effect, they’re saying “We need to be able to publish your book across all normal book formats and we’re the right people to do it.” That’s probably true, and that’s why you’re in the happy position of having a contract offer in the first place.But Megacorp may also seek:The right to sell your book worldwide in any languageMovie / TV and other dramatization rightsBut why should they get these? They’re yours. If they have a specific, defined plan to exploit these rights – and they can share it with you and give you a named person to talk to on the subject – then fine. You may well wish to sell these rights under those circumstances.Nearly always though, the company has no plan for these rights. Yes, Megacorp will go to the Frankfurt Book Fair with a list of books available for translation in its suitcase. But you won’t have any direct contact with the person selling. You’ll get no regular updates. You’ll have absolutely no way of knowing if any serious selling activity has ever been undertaken.So simply reserve those rights. Say – politely, professionally – that if Megacorp presents you with a plausible plan for the exploitation of those rights, you’ll be very happy to consider selling them. But – no plan, no rights.You wouldn’t normally hand something over for free just because someone asks for it, so don’t do it here.Oh yes, and a literary agent selling those rights on your behalf would earn a 20% commission, so that’s the right amount to offer a publisher. Quite often publishers will demand the rights and ask for a 30% commission on sales. Which is greedy. And greed is bad, right?***This email is already ridiculously long, which means – alas – that I haven’t yet told you about the thing you most need to know about.Ah well. I will come back to this subject next week. Until then, I shall just sit on my Little Box of Annoyances and try to stop it flying open.

I got an email recently which asked a perfectly sensible question: Does Jericho Writers keep a list of affordable but effective PR and marketing companies for books?That question is one that gets asked by plenty of self-publishing authors who find – bizarrely – that just uploading a book to Amazon does not cause it to sell by the truckload.It’s also asked by anyone with a micro-publisher that just doesn’t have the wellie to get the book at volume into bookstores.It’s also asked, often enough, by authors whose traditional publishers don’t actually seem to do very much marketing at all. (A cover reveal? On Twitter? That’s your marketing?)The answer, I’m afraid, is very simple:There are no affordable yet effective PR & marketing companies for your books. Such companies don’t exist. And can’t.Here’s why.Let’s start with the way that traditional big publishers hope to market books. The effort starts, not in fact with marketing, but sales. The sales team will try and place your book with as many big, physical retailers as possible.In the old days, you could come to Barnes & Noble or Waterstones in the UK waving a big chequebook. You’d buy space on the front tables, and you knew that your product would be highly visible to its core audience. These days, both firms (sisters now, with the same boss and the same owner) have done away with such practices. Local store managers choose what to display, which is great for readers, is better ethically – but was a real blow for publishers.Instead, publishers today will focus heavily on the supermarkets (and, in the UK, WH Smith). Those retailers don’t stock a vast number of titles, but they love to sell at a discount and their footfall is huge. You could write a deeply mediocre book but, if it was selling at a good discount across all the supermarkets, it will sell well, for sure.So let’s assume that your book has reasonable physical distribution nationwide. That’s the point at which publishers’ marketing and publicity teams will really get going. There’ll be campaigns on social media. Lots of work with bloggers. Lots of work with newspapers and magazines. Perhaps a bit of TV and radio if you’re lucky.And what’s the point of all that press? You might think it’s this: ‘Inspire people to go out and buy that book.’ But it’s not. People aren’t inspired in that way, or not in anything like the volumes that matter. In fact, the purpose of that marketing is much more: ‘Plant a seed in someone’s mind so that, when they are in a bookshop or supermarket and happen to see your book, they think, Oh yes, I’ve heard about that …’In other words, trad publishers’ marketing only works if the book already has decent distribution. That’s why you hear so many trad authors complaining that their publishers are doing no marketing at all. Those complaints are (mostly) perfectly justified. Publishers know that only a certain proportion of the books they buy will end up getting good physical distribution. Those lucky books will get all the marketing love. The others will be – politely, evasively – sidelined, because even the world’s biggest publishers can’t successfully promote a book which isn’t widely available for sale.(And, by the way, self-publishers have a further disadvantage, namely that a lot of self-published books are crap. Newspapers and the like don’t want to promote a book that might be crap and they can’t be bothered to read your book to find out if it is or isn’t. So the easy call for them is to show interest in publicity calls from the big publishers but to ignore calls about anything self-published. That’s not really fair – you want a book to be judged on its merits – but that’s how it is.)And, for a very long time, that was the only way that books could be marketed successfully. The rise of Amazon and the e-book has created two more:1. You are signed up with a really good digital-first publisherIn that case, the publisher will have curated relationships with bloggers in your niche. They’ll have carefully tended mailing lists of readers in your niche. They’ll have extensive engagement with your target readers on social media. They’ll also have deep knowledge of such things as metadata, cover design, blurb writing, pricing strategies, and so on.Those things will successfully win readers on Amazon, but the publisher isn’t going to start offering its resources to third-party books, because why would it? Those resources are needed for the publishers’ own authors. No marketing company can pay to create those resources, because they’d never generate enough income to repay the cost.2. You are an effective self-publisherSelf-publishing is much the same as having a really good digital-first publisher – except you’re the publisher. And what you lose in scale (number of bloggers emailed, number of followers on Twitter), you can easily win back in laser-targeting and readers thrilled at direct connection to the author.***So those are the only three ways that books sell:Traditional PR and marketing running hand-in-hand with extensive physical distributionDigital marketing by firms with deep audiences in your nicheDigital marketing by you (probably centred on your mailing list and topped up with nimble advertising on at least one ad platform.)Third party marketing firms do exist. Many of them are ethical. I’m sure a lot of them try hard and do good things. But they can’t succeed. Not really. They may boost sales, for sure, but they are highly unlikely to boost them by enough to repay you for the cost of doing so.My advice to authors remains the same, always.Whether you work traditionally or self-pub or as a hybrid, work to build your own mailing list. Make sure the people are on it for the right reasons. (They love your books, not because you give away biscuits.) Stay in touch. Write more books. Rinse and repeat.If you do that, you won’t need third-party marketing. It won’t matter Whether or not LoPrice Supermarkets Inc stocks your book or not. You’ll have your own reliable marketing tool that will grow stronger the more you use it.That’s it from me.The news is full of some weird story from America. Old guy in Washington moves house. Jeepers. You’d think they’d find something bigger to focus on.

I’ve just finished reading a book. I’m not going to name the book, because we don’t need to get into all of that. But it’s a traditionally published book by a very well known author. Probably one you’ve read yourself.In my opinion, the book offers an excellent reconstruction of a historical period. The characters are vivid. The book is a thoroughly decent read to anyone who wants their tale of domestic bliss to have a bit of Soviet-era menace.And the plot? Well.There is a plot, but it’s thin. Because I’m not naming the book, I won’t tell you the story – but suffice to say, I tried summarising the plot just now and found I could do so, comfortably, in 20 words. That twenty-word summary really left nothing of substance out. Sure, there are further details you could add. (“Jude goes to Gretta’s house, seeking help, but Gretta warns Jude that …”) But honestly? You can summarise the entire plot in twenty words.By contrast, I don’t think you could summarise one of my plots at the same bare level of detail in fewer than a hundred words. Realistically, you’d need a whole lot more.What’s more, even if you summarised one of my plots as tautly as you could, you still wouldn’t have everything. My readers want complex mysteries which operate like brain teasers. Ideally, my plot logic should be too large to be seen in one view. If you could comprehend my story in a single glance, I haven’t done my job right.Now I write the way I do for many reasons, but one of them is a near-panic about the possibility of being boring. I don’t want to bore my readers, ever. The simplest, surest safeguard against being boring is writing characters that people care about in a story that keeps changing.I don’t know how the author of this book thinks about things, but their priorities are surely different. They’ll happily spend fifteen hundred words having their character travel to a nearby place to bury something. On their way, they’ll think of their family, their life during the war, their times with past partners, and so on. And whereas in one of my books, burying something would unquestionably feature subsequently in the plot, (would they be found, or escape capture, or what?) in this book, the buried item never features again. The whole episode could drop out of the book and the story would be perfectly intact.Now, this author is commercially and critically successful. They don’t sell in huge volumes, but they sell plenty and critics love what they do. So my strategy works. And so does theirs. And yet in some ways, they’re each other’s opposites.Their core strategy is “go deep”. Mine is “keep moving”. Their readers don’t get bored, because the ‘being there’ experience is rich enough to sustain interest in its own right. My readers don’t get bored because I have characters that readers care about in a story that always moves.So when I worry about being dull, my thoughts will turn first – usually – to plot. If they have the same worry, I would guess that their thoughts turn first to texture.Which brings me to the big thought that propelled this email:I think this book would have been better if the story had contained more bite, more snap. At its heart, there’s a sweet story about a happily married couple being happily married and everything being just fine and no real emotional challenge to their integrity as a couple.And with my books:I work tremendously hard to put as much texture in them as I can. Sense of place. Of changing season. Of minor characters. Of office and family dynamics. And I know for a fact that enriching my books in these ways makes them better. (And not just better, as in “more likely to elicit praise from critics.” But also, better as in “more likely to sell.”)So I want to suggest this:If you are naturally a plot-led writer, you should put a lot of conscious effort into enriching the texture of your books – anything to deepen that sense of “really being there”.Equally, if you are naturally a texture-led writer, you should work hard to enrich the plot structure of your books – anything to enhance that sense of “what’s going to happen next?”By working against your natural grain, you will most likely get the easiest wins, make the biggest difference, and do most for the all-round excellence of your manuscript.I know for a fact that’s true of my own work. I’m pretty darn sure this other author would have written an even better book if they’d done the same. I’m pretty damn sure the same thing will be true for you too. Do you need to choose between the two? That’s a dumb question. You want both.Oh yes, and if one piece of presidential-grade, impeachment-proof writing advice isn’t enough for you, here’s one more to complement it:Keep your processes separate.If you’re a plot-led writer, you’ll probably finish your first draft with a whole bunch of plot-tangles you need to sort out and a whole load of texture-enrichments you want to work on.Good. Bravo. I applaud you. But do those two things in separate edits. Do the plot stuff first (because it’s structural.) Focus on the structure. Get that tidy. Then take a second run through the MS and tackle the textural things. That way, you’re looking at one thing, not two (or six). You can also get your head in the right place to tackle the task at hand.All this, for me, is not very theoretical at the moment. I’ve 105,000 words into my first draft of Fiona #7, perhaps just five thousand words from the finish line. I know that there are several quite significant plot strands I need to sort out and I also know that my textural stuff isn’t yet quite solid.Sense of place is going to be really important to this book and I’ve a feeling I haven’t quite got it nailed down. But my first edit will be for plot alone. The next will be all for texture.That’s it from me. Go well, sweet people.Til soon. 

As you know, I have about a million kids and they spend half their lives treating me as a climbing frame. My eldest daughter likes to climb on my head. I’ll quite often have one child on my lap, one on my head and one sliding down my shoulder.Inevitably, in the course of this, parts of me get squashed, stepped on, or generally bashed about. When the kids ask if any of this hurts, I tell them, no, of course, not, I’m a man of steel. My younger girl takes that seriously enough that when I went swimming in the sea once, she was alarmed. Steel and seawater: even five-year-olds can see that’s bad.Anyway. A month or two back, my missus decides – sensible woman – that we should both get broad spectrum blood tests. The sort of thing you do to check your general health, rather than to investigate a specific condition.My tests were basically OK. Heart, fine. Vitamins, fine. And so on.Except – ferritin.My iron levels are through the roof. My transferrin saturation level (an indication of my remaining iron-absorption capacity is) stands at 91%. It ought to be somewhere between 25-30%.Or, to put it another way, MEDICAL SCIENCE HAS PROVED I AM INDEED A MAN OF STEEL. At the very least, I am exceptionally – nay, dangerously - ferrous. Since learning the news, I have stayed well clear of industrial magnets and, during thunderstorms, I hunker down indoors beneath a rubber blanket.There’s more investigation to follow, but it looks probable that I have haemochromatosis, a genetic condition, common in those with Celtic ancestry.The bad news is that the condition is incurable. I’m just going to continue collecting iron forever, like a Soviet era tractor plant that never gets decommissioned.The good news is that the solution is simplicity itself. Eighteenth century, in fact. I just need to bleed lots. If I lose my iron-excessive blood, the body makes fresh blood that has no iron in it. Easy.Now you can lose blood in any number of ways. You can do it eighteenth-century style with cupping and leeches. Or any competent nurse can draw blood and discard it. Or I can just donate blood to any blood bank. It’s win-win. My blood will strengthen anyone who doesn’t have my specific iron problem. And I get stronger from giving it. And that, my friends, is your metaphor for today.Almost every kind of writer-to-writer exchange is enriching for both parties. It makes you both stronger. Here are some examples:I act as a beta reader for you. You act as a beta reader for me. We become better writers and (just as important) better readers too. (Townhouse is a good place for these kind of exchanges. It was built to do that.)I mention your (genre-suitable) books in my newsletter. You mention mine in yours. We get more readers.I buy you a drink at a literary festival. You buy me one. We talk. We bond.I’m unsure about whether a particular agent (or publisher, or publishing model, or whatever) makes sense for me. You share your experience. I share mine. We both grow wiser.Some bit of lit-tech is doing your head in. I share my knowledge. You share your knowledge of whatever-the-heck. We both become more capable authors.Some particular bit of agent ****wittery (or any other sort of wittery) annoys you. Your author-buddies don’t just listen politely. They really understand your issue and why it bothers you. They might even have some suggestions about what to do. They know you’ll be there for them, if and when positions are reversed.All that – and friendship.Yes, you lot probably each have a million friends. I bet you go to all the best parties. I bet you call Harry and Meghan ‘Hazza and Megs’, as you lounge in their Californian infinity pool swilling their own house champagne. You and your beloved probably roll your eyes when Barack Obama texts you to invite himself round. Again.But author-friends are special friends. They are impassioned by the same things that impassion you. They care about the same things. Their stock of knowledge will be the same-but-different. Giving knowledge, giving time, giving thought, giving an ear – all those things will build friendships, and fast. Take it from me that author friendships start easier and last better than any other sort.And how do you get started? Well, as with most things, it gets easier after publication. You just hang out at festivals – ones specific to your genre, for preference – and drink yourselves silly with your fellow-authors. (Or at least, this is the technique employed by crime authors. I expect sweet romance authors just get together for cucumber fingers and a fresh mint tea. The hist-ficcers either slash at each other with broadswords or dance elegantly while talking in polysyllables.)And if you’re not published yet – well, hooting heck, don’t moan at me. We built Townhouse for you, didn’t we? There’s room there for hist-ficcers, and sweet romancers, and space opera impressarios, and everyone else in the writing world too.And honestly, my hope would be that, as well as connecting with one and all on Townhouse, you find your own writing buddy there. Someone who you work with privately, offline. Supporting each other. Believing in each other. Critiquing each other. Helping.Giving blood will make me stronger. It’ll also strengthen those receiving it.Writing-love works just the same way. Please give generously.

My normal emails are, as you know, long and baggy. They tell jokes. They digress. Sometimes (goat folding – pah!) they have no practical purpose whatsoever. This email, born as it is, in the clarity and cold of a New Year’s Day, is short and to the point.Friends, it is time to commit.What do you want to achieve, as a writer, in the next six months?That’s not a rhetorical question. I actually want you to answer me. I want you to tell me – tell the world – what your intentions are.I don’t want answers that may be unachievable. So, yes, lots of you will want to say something like:“By 1 July 2021, I want to get a six-figure deal from a Big Five house.”, or“By 1 July 2021, I want three books self-published on Amazon and a monthly income of at least $2,500.”And sure, lots of you will have aspirations like those. But I want commitments that definitely lie within your capability. If you don’t achieve the goal, I want that to be because you haven’t done what you said you would do.Put another way, we’re not, today, in the business of lifting a prayer to the universe. We’re in the business of building a To Do list that we will systematically execute.So the kind of things I want to hear from you might be things like:“I will completely my current manuscript. I will self-edit it hard. I will get a third-party manuscript assessment (from Jericho Writers, obviously 😊). Then I will submit the work to at least 12 properly selected agents. I will have the book out on submission to those agents no later than 30 June 2021.”A newer author might make a commitment more like this:“I will read at least three books on writing. I will watch and absorb all of the Jericho Writers’ video course on How To Write. I will spend at least 7 hours a week on writing, every single week. I will write at least 50,000 words of my current project. I will get beta-readers to look at 2x chunks of the book. I will commit to offering feedback to at least 12 other writers, so I contribute my share to the community. I will do all this by 30 June 2021.”Someone who’s heading for the sunlit Land of Self-Pub might say something like this:“I will complete my manuscript. I will get editorial feedback on it, complete my edits, and get the whole thing copy-edited. I will select a cover designer, deliver a brief, and get a quality cover that I’m happy with. I’ll research my metadata and make the choices I need. I will write and produce a lead magnet that will act as the basis for my mailing list. I will do all this by 29 June 2021.” [Why the 29th? Because self-pubbers always work harder and faster than trad authors.]OK. You get the picture. I’m after specific commitments by you, that lie within your power to execute in the next six months.Yes, you can simply write those on a sheet of paper and glue it above your computer, but public commitments work better. I want you to enter the public square and make your commitments visible to all.I’ll do the same. So please make your commitments right here on Townhouse. (If you’re not a member, then become one. It’s fast and free to do so.)That’s it from me. I promised short. Here’s short:Make your commitment.Make it here on Townhouse.Do it now.On Friday 2 July, we’re all going to check back on your promises. See how we’ve done.Onwards!

All this time – and after more than a hundred emails – I’ve been writing to you under false pretences. I’ve spoken as though I’m an active professional author sharing thoughts with you … but in practice, I’ve been so busy with all things Jericho that it’s been years since I published a work of fiction.And yes, my spell of inactivity wasn’t all that inactive. I did major rewrites of How To Write A Novel and Getting Published. I put together 52 Letters: A Year of Advice on Writing. I inched forwards with Fiona Griffiths #7 (The House At The End Of The World.) And I re-committed to my crazy-but-fun The Lamentable True Historie of the Sailor, Gregorius.So by the standards of people who don’t write, my spare time was still very full with writing. But Jericho (and four kids and a disabled wife) didn’t leave me with a lot of free time. I felt a bit jammed creatively. I just didn’t have the spare time and clarity of thought to unjam.But, as the business grew, it approached the happy place where every job that needed to be done could be better done by someone other than me. In weekly meetings, I sat listening with interest – but contributing nothing very much. I wasn’t the one doing the work.So, quietly, and little by little, I returned to work – my writing work, my real work.I came back to find a Fiona Griffiths adventure stuck at 40,000 words. For a long time, I picked away at the text. Revising. Adding a bit. Tinkering away.I felt committed to the book, but knew it hadn’t yet found its mojo. I tried different lines of attack, but wasn’t satisfied.Then – ta-daa – I really committed. I had more time to spend on it. I spent the time. I just pushed forwards through that ugly and difficult middle section. And I had a breakthrough. Two actually.They were:I was holding a belief about the way the book needed to be structured that was quite simply false. (I was imagining I needed some wham-bam mid-point adventure, but actually the book isn’t going to have one. It doesn’t need it.)The thing that the book really, really needed was the thing that had been obvious from the start. I can’t even quite explain why I didn’t see the strategy from the start. It’s clearly what the book needed.I’m now bombing my way through the text, loving every minute I get to spend on it, and hoping that blooming Christmas isn’t going to get in the way of my hours at the laptop.And – very closely connected with that sense of joy – is the belief that what I’m writing has value. That readers will enjoy it. That it’ll enhance the series. That the book and the series has some artistic depth, some enduring worth.And, because it’s a time of year for sharing tidings of comfort and joy, let me offer you these three thoughts from my own recent rebirth into the land of writing:One: If you feel stuck on a project, push on with it. Break through. Abseil down that wet and dripping cliff. Just add word count. You will probably solve your problem, but you will certainly release yourself from the current pickle. Editing is easier than writing. Just make progress. This was the theme of my abseiling email a few weeks back. I didn\'t mention it then, but that email was born of raw and recent personal experience.Two: It’s bewilderingly common, in my experience, for the thing that a book needs to be kind of obvious. In my present case, Fiona finds herself conducting an investigation in a secure psychiatric hospital. She has had severe psychiatric problems herself. Clearly, she needs to undergo a collapse of some kind, a major one. That’s obvious.And so often, the solution IS the obvious one. I don’t know if it’s just me, or if we sometimes resist the obvious. Or we block ourselves with objections that don’t actually stand up in practice. Or if an over-crowded life just manifests as difficulty in doing the obvious thing.In any case, my advice to you is simply this: if you find yourself stuck, then ask yourself, “What is the obvious solution to this problem?” Or alternatively, “What is my elevator pitch? What does my elevator pitch tell me about this particular block?”In most cases, the answers to those questions will be the right ones. And if the answer comes straight from your elevator pitch, the book is that much more likely to be commercially appealing – and memorable to read.And three: Write with joy. Relish the joy.You and I and this whole Jericho community is a happy place because we have a reliable source of joy that isn’t open to everyone. Make space for it. Share it. Enjoy it. Be grateful.I am – this year as much as ever before.Go well, my old buddies, and see you in the New Year.

Last week, I spoke about fashion and literary hemlines. I talked about the overreaction that tends to set in during these swings and suggested some techniques for ensuring your work has the flexibility to adapt.I got a lot of interesting responses, as I always do, but one theme stood out. I’ll put this in the eloquent words of DM Costa, who commented on Townhouse thus:I don\'t think it is advisable to \"write to fashion trends\" because there are so many variables and a non-static timeline. The target audience is also a moving target: always shifting opinion and taste.Some professional writers try to write to trends, but how many do succeed? Most of the novels that have jumped on that bandwagon have missed the train completely or if they manage to get on it briefly, they don\'t stay \"fashionable\" for long. They quickly fall off into the depths of oblivion.On the order hand... some of those who dare to write the novel they absolutely want to write, and write it the best way they can and with all their passion, do tend to succeed. Even in this fiction-crowded world.And, look, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:You have to write what you love. It’s that simple. Write what you love.I’ve almost never written a book I haven’t wanted to write. (The exception? The second book in a two-book non-fiction deal for Fourth Estate, when they were unbelievably slow about actually defining what they wanted. I wanted to get that second delivered, so I could move onto other things, and honestly, I’d have written about anything at all. A history of teaspoons? The life cycle of tapioca? I’d have written about anything at all.)There are chunks of the self-pub market – in romance especially – where books are written by people who just don’t care. Those books are often expertly marketed and sold and the principals involved make money, but that’s an exception. On the whole, DM Costa is absolutely right that successful books emerge from passion. As they should.So write what you love.But most of you will also want to get published and sold and find readers. That’s a good ambition – and it’s one I completely share. The ambition is liberating too, because if you make enough money from writing, you can give up your day job and then your hobby becomes what you do for a living. That’s the dream – and it’s one I’ve lived.But publishing is an industry. There’s a market for books. If you write without any thought of what the market actually wants, you do risk being stuck with something beautiful – but unsaleable.So I’d urge you to think more broadly. There isn’t just one project you love. There are dozens. First-time writers can sometimes get so close to the nuts and bolts of the project they’re working on right now this minute that they forget all the other amazing stories that could occupy them.If I were to list the books that I’d love to write, or start writing, in 2021, they’d certainly include:Fiona Griffiths #7 (almost done. Really loving it.)Fiona Griffiths #8 (probably the series finale. Looking forward to that.)A totally mad book to be called The Most Excellent and Lamentable True Historie of the Sailor, Gregorius. (A title which, by the way, will be my second title to contain punctuation.)A Fiona Griffiths series spin-off to be voiced by Lev, her mysterious Russian friend.A psychological thriller with a courtroom aspect, to be voiced by an elegant and compulsive liarSomething big, bad and geo-political. Something that involves Russian missile commands, and cyber-warfare teams based in Langley, and an inept British minister, and submarines gliding beneath the ice north of Murmansk. It would be like a 2020s era Gorky Park (only not as good, because Gorky Park was amazing.)A non-fiction book about story (which I started before once and really, really want to do properly.)And that’s the short version of my list. That’s the list of books that I actually want to start (or finish) writing without delay. I don’t even let myself dream too widely, because I could so easily get hooked on other projects as well. (I have a brilliantly mad project about Donald Trump that I actually started writing at one point, but it was really pretty bananas and, in any case, the time for it has passed. Oh, and I’d love to do a somewhat fictionalised biography of somebody famous, but written in dozens of different contributory voices. And I’ve got a lightly magical children’s book that could easily entice me. And …)How will I choose which among these projects I should pursue?Mostly, I’ll let the market guide me. If I think I could make proper money from the Lev story, I’d write it. If that book were to end up being just for me, I probably wouldn’t bother.So as well as this rule – write what you love – I’d like to offer you this one too:Write what the market wants.Personally, I wouldn’t ever compromise on either thing. And I never have. Not once.And some of you will already be hurling peanuts at your laptop and yelling, “You just said you wrote a book for Fourth Estate simply as a way to satisfy a contract. You told me with a straight face that you’d have been willing to write a history of teaspoons as a way to get out and move on.”And yes. I did say that. And the book that they asked me to write – a book about global capitalism – wasn’t one that had ever figured in my lists of books I wanted to write. But within about half a day of starting the project, I got really into it. I loved writing it. My agent loved the manuscript when I delivered it. My editor too. I was very fond of that book for a while.So write what you love.And write for the market.Don’t think of that as a compromise. It’s not a compromise. Every book you write should have your heart and soul and personal artistic spin on every page. And you are a big enough person – a broad enough artist – that you have multiple projects inside you. They’re all wonderful. You have the capacity to love each one. But how you choose among them? It’s OK to think about the market. That’s not selling out. That’s giving yourself space to make a career and make a life out of this game.That’s all from me. You’ll hear from me again next week, but then not until January, because I shall be making a mince pie bigger than my head and then eating it.