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Now, m’lords and ladies, I walk a tightrope this week.On the one hand, I love good editorial services as much as I love apples fried in butter and cinnamon. Good editing is the rock on which all of Jericho Writers is built, and it matters hugely.But, but, but.Editing is advice. That’s all it is.And yes, the advice is usually right. And if you take it books get better.But you’re the writer. You’re the monarch of your text. In that little realm, your writ runs absolute. And in the end, the rule that matters is simply this: does a proposed change sound right to you? Or do you prefer it the way it is?When Elizabeth Gilbert was told by an editor that she had to kill one of the female characters in her A Signature of All Things, she said no. That character stayed in.In one of our Summer Festival webinars, Sophie Hannah was asked what to do if an agent told you that you couldn’t write the sort of book you wanted to write. She said (my paraphrase) to hell with that. Write the book anyway. It’s your life, not theirs.When a copy-editor wanted to change the tone of my writing (meaning, specifically, Fiona Griffiths’ maddeningly quirky voice) I said no. And, because it was a copy-edit, I had to say no about a million times.Insert a main verb into a sentence fragment, which I had deliberately wanted as a fragment? No. Stet.(Stet is the Latin for “let it stand” and has long been the traditional way to undo a copy-editing change.)Take a list of proper nouns and separate them with commas instead of, as I had done, with full stops? No. Stet.Take a series of abruptly short sentences and link them into one longer and more elegantly flowing one? No. No way. Stet stet stettety stet.And you. You’re the same.Let’s say you are wise enough to come to Jericho Writers for a manuscript assessment. We’ll come back to you with a long report on where we see problems and possible solutions.Your job is not to obey us.On the contrary, if an editor says to you, “I think there’s a problem with X and you should probably consider doing Y,” ask yourself how that feels.Mostly – I’d think about 60% of the time – you’ll think that the editor is right about both problem and solution. Great.Then maybe 20% of the time, you’ll think, shucks, I can see the issue, but I’d really like to do Z not Y. Also great.But in both these cases, you’re relying on your own gut. Your own sense of perfect. Your sense of this story and what it should be in that luminous land where all of your artistic goals are perfectly achieved.You’re not obeying an editor. You’re simply using that editor to refine your own sense of what your manuscript wants and needs.And that leaves the final 20% where you think, “You know what? I get why you think this denouement fails / this character is unnecessary / this twist is implausible, or whatever else. I get why you think that and I DON’T CARE.”When I’ve had those situations with my editors in the past – often with minor issues, sometimes with big ones – I haven’t apologised and usually haven’t even explained.I just return my manuscript with the changes made to my satisfaction. The 20% of issues where I’ve just ignored my editor – well, so what? If they want to cause a fuss, they can, but they never have. Their job is just to get me to deliver the best damn manuscript I can. It’s not to get me to check a series of boxes on some kind of Manuscript Approval Checklist.You’re the same. You’re the boss. You’re the monarch of your text.Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.All hail!

Over the past couple of months, we’ve released two books: GETTING PUBLISHED and 52 LETTERS. Reader response to those books has been lovelier than a basket of white roses brought to you by a unicorn.This week, we’ve released the third book in that trilogy. It’s called HOW TO WRITE, and it’s about – duh! – how to conceive, plan, write and edit your novel.It’s a massively practical book. With lots of “how to” and “how very damn not to” examples taken from a huge variety of actual bestselling books. If the book doesn’t help you write better, I promise to eat my own leg in penance.Now, as a way to celebrate the completion of the trilogy, and as a way to wave goodbye to the Summer Festival, for just a few days only, we’re making all the books as cheap as we can:HOW TO WRITEEbook $0.99 / Print $10.99 / Kindle Unlimited $0.00My best attempt to set down everything I know about conceiving, planning, writing and editing a novel. “I must have read 50 books on writing, style, editing etc, but I found Bingham\'s book in a way the most useful of all.”—Reader ReviewView on Amazon GETTING PUBLISHEDEbook $0.99 / Print $9.99 / Kindle Unlimited $0.00Your one-stop bible for everything to do with getting an agent, getting a book deal – and getting published well.“Truly, the best book I\'ve read on publishing. The truth and nothing but the truth no matter how hard hitting. It will save you much heartbreak.”—Reader ReviewView on Amazon 52 LETTERSEbook $0.99 / Print $8.99 / Kindle Unlimited $0.00A compilation of my Friday emails – mad, discursive, practical, and enthused.“Not since Stephen King’s On Writing have I so valued a writer’s writing on writing! These aren’t just 52 Letters—they’re 52 love letters.”—John David MannView on Amazon All prices ping back to full price on Sunday, so grab your bargains while you can. And just think. For just three crinkly little dollars you could give your writing library a fancy new lease of life. Be crazy not to, huh?Next week, I’ll have some data on this promo. What worked and what didn’t. It’s the first time we’ll have used Facebook ads at scale for a book promotion, so we’ll let you know how those went. As ever, we’ll be ruthlessly honest about our experience, so you can start to get a feel for exactly how online publishing works.As you know, I’m an author first and a Jericho Writers person second – and author-me would really love it if you went out and bought one or more of those books. I raise my hat to you, and will name my next child after you to boot.

For some reason – probably that we all love words – last week’s email generated the biggest response I’ve had for a while. A lot of you have a quite prodigious vocabulary and I raise my hat to you all. Or rather: I raise my hat, my cap, my boater, my beret, my trilby, my cloche, my helmet, my tricorn, my deerstalker, my pillbox and my elegantly laced yet somehow menacing fascinator.All your responses were interesting – they always are – but one really hit home. Someone tipped me off about a TED talk by Elizabeth Gilbert. (The link’s in the PSes, if you’re interested.)The gist of her talk was this:Writers get frightened of being writers.We’ll get too much success! The success will eat us. We’ll never be able to perform under commercial pressure. I couldn’t work with an agent, an editor, a publicist, a host of foreign publishers.We’ll get too much failure! We can’t do our best work thinking about those rejection letters, thinking about those bozo Amazon one-star reviews. We can’t create with joy and spontaneity when we have to tangle with the complicated limbs of the publishing industry.Or some other reasons. Or some set of mutually contradictory reasons.It doesn’t matter what, really. The point is: writers get frightened of being writers.This is, as Gilbert points out, a panic largely confined to the creative arts. Her dad was a chemical engineer, who never got frightened of chemical engineering. My father was a lawyer and a judge, who never got frightened of being a lawyer and a judge. I seriously if most plumbers doubt they can do their best bathroom-installation work under the pressure of a client wanting a new bathroom.So what’s going on? And how to combat the panic?Her take is interesting and, I think, has real merit.Back before the Enlightenment and, especially, before the Romantics, we didn’t think of people being geniuses, but having geniuses. Creativity and inspiration dwelled somewhere outside – as a Muse, perhaps, an actual spirit. In Latin, genius loci, the spirit of a place, was something that dwelled at a given site, the divine spirit given specific form and nature.The human’s work was therefore not to be the genius, but to listen to the genius. To catch the music and set it down.That sounds a little spacey if you put it as bluntly as that. And yet – you will all know what it feels like to be in true creative flow. The words just come. The vision. The characters. The dialogue. To be sure, it doesn’t come down perfectly: you still need to edit the damn thing. You still need to use your brain and craft to shape the material. But it feels like the origin of all that good stuff lies outside you – or, at the very least, way outside your conscious ownership or control.Contrast that experience with the post-Romantic concept of genius: It’s us! We’re special! We’re brilliant! We wear floppy clothes and drink laudanum!There’s a me-me-me quality here, which gets all the benefits of genius (aren’t I wonderful, darling?) but all of the costs as well (what if the damn work doesn’t come? What if it’s no bloody good?)Now I don’t really want to argue about the ontology here. (Ontology = the study of what exists.) So is there really an external genius? Or a part of our subconscious? Or just a free-flowing form of imagination we can access in the right mental state only? I don’t really care.What Elizabeth Gilbert suggests we do is just separate the things. You showing up for work: that’s the part you’re in charge of. The creative genius may choose to turn up that day, or may not. You know damn well that if you don’t come, the creative genius can’t.But you can’t control that part. You never could, never did. Your job is to show up for work and apply yourself.Just make sure to leave the window open a little, and maybe have a little dish of rose petals somewhere on the desk beside you. Geniuses love hard-workers – and who doesn’t love a rose petal? If you want to say a prayer - and that Liz Gilbert, she loves a prayer - then say a prayer. Invite the genius. Or swear at it. Or just communicate. You might just get blessed, once again, by that golden hand, that silver tongue.Go well my friends. Bite into those PSes. They’re chewy this week, but with a soft caramel centre.

One of the simplest insights in writing is that words matter.That sounds so perilously obvious that I ought to scurry away from it and come up with something a little more rewarding. Maybe a list of 100 Fancy Words that everyone ought to use more.InimicalCrepuscularUllulateChiasmusArborealSussurationDuctileCanticleColostomyBut – y’know – that kind of approach to writing mostly leads to unreadable rubbish. I’ve published over two million words in my career. I’ve probably used the word inimical from that list. Maybe ductile. Certainly canticle. I seriously doubt if I’ve used the others without a kind of ‘Oooh, look at me’ glitter in my eye when I did.The fact is that the vocabulary that you have – that you are genuinely master of – is almost certainly sufficient. You just have to use the right damn word.What’s more, the vocabulary you already have is a place of treasure. It is richer and brighter and with more movement and dazzle than you realise. But you probably aren’t using it. You are, quite likely, drawing from the easy first five thousand words, the ones you use all the time, every day, week in, week out. But native English-speakers typically have a comfortable range of 20-35,000 words. Those aren’t words you use all the time, yet they’re words that you can deploy perfectly easily when the need arises. (See the PSes for a brilliant website where you can test your vocab.)Here’s what I mean:How often in a year do I use the word cockle? Answer, very seldom. But when my older girl came home with a cockle shell she’d found somewhere, I knew what to call it. When my older boy was recently diagnosed with possible appendicitis, I knew perfectly well what the doctor meant, even though I might not have used the word once in the five years beforehand.So you have a broad vocabulary of words you understand perfectly well. But do you use them, my friend? That’s the whole soul and purpose of this email. Do you use the words you have?Right now, you can do this for me. And I mean RIGHT NOW THIS MINUTE, YOU LAZY DONKEY.Open up your current manuscript and bring up a random page. Not one with too much dialogue, but apart from that, any page you like.And ask yourself: are the words you use interesting or boring?Specifically, do your words feel like they’re all drawn from the Dull Five Thousand? Or the glittering parades that beyond those plodding, quotidian footsoldiers?So here’s a sentence made up of the Dull Five Thousand:A bird had somehow got into the room and, unable to find a way out, flapped feebly at the windows.Here’s a sentence that draws richly from the glittering parades:There was the ballroom, gleaming and empty, where once – in the chill of late autumn – Alma had encountered a trapped hummingbird, which had shot past her ear in the most remarkable trajectory (a jewelled missile, it seemed, fired from a tiny cannon.)This second sentence (from Elizabeth Gilbert’s brilliant The Signature of All Things) doesn’t use any fancy vocab in the sussuration sense of fancy. But – ballroom, encountered, hummingbird, trajectory, jewelled, missile, cannon – it draws happily and broadly and precisely from our thirty-thousand word storeroom and creates treasure on the page.And you can do the same. You know the word cannon. And ballroom. And trajectory. And jewelled. Those words aren’t even hard or obscure. They don’t live at the outer reaches of your vocabulary. They are yours to use.If you look at your manuscript and find your language feels a little dull, then pay close attention to the nouns especially. The dumb way to enrich your work is to take a boring sentence and shove it full of la-di-da adjectives, with one or two ridiculous verbs thrown in for good measure:A pulchritudinous bird had somehow inveigled its way into the grandiloquent room and, unable to find a manner of egress, flapped disconsolately at the unfortunately glazed windows.If you anchor your sentence with some excellent nouns (ballroom, autumn, hummingbird, trajectory, missile, cannon), the rest of the sentence kind of falls into place. You can use adjectives from the Solid Five Thousand (empty, late, tiny) and the sentence does fine. You can throw in some slightly more splendiferous items too (gleaming, trapped, jewelled) and the sentence remains beautifully balanced.Pay attention to the nouns first. The rest is easy.That’s it from me. Go and burrow in the PSes, though. There lie riches

OK. More dialogue today.Three little bits of housekeeping first.Number One. The Summer Festival was such a massive hit, we’ve decided to bring that vibe into our JW membership package – lots of regular, live material, from a whole range of different, brilliant speakers. You can see our autumn line-up here. We’ll be making big plans for next year as well. There’s no extra cost for any of this – it’s all free within your membership. Hooray.Number Two. We’ve always been keen to help people where we can and, to celebrate the end of the Summer Festival, we’re going to give 10 under-represented writers free memberships for a year. More about how to enter at the end.Number Three. We got into a fight with Jeff Bezos last week – and lost. Your email this week comes on a Friday. Next week, it might be either Thursday or Friday, and it will sizzle with good things.Right. Nuff of that.Dialogue.I was going to offer up a couple more snippets with comments this week, but I picked one to start with, and that one ran away with me.So just one snippet this week. Take a look at how contrary, how twisty this one three-hundred word chunk is. Look at how silence can operate in the same was as actual dialogue. How silence can push back at the reader, at the listener. And how the real thing being revealed by dialogue isn’t so much the content of what’s being talked about as the emotional reactions of the speakers to that content.Here goes:REBECCA / NO TITLEIda has recently lost her hand and had a vicious go at her best friend as a result of which she has locked herself away in her room. She set her maid outside her door to stop people from entering but her lover, who is also a military General, has come to see her.The door clicked shut and a momentary silence fell over the room. Why was he here?\"If you\'ve come to lecture me then you are too late,\" she said. \"I\'ve already had enough lectures for the day.\"It wasn\'t true. She hadn\'t had any. Agatha had come yesterday and given her an earful. She had told her \'This is not how a young woman behaves…\', and \'You should know better than to be so vulgar in public…\', that she had \'…been raised to be more tactful\'. They were nothing new, but coming from the woman who was more of a surrogate grandmother made them sting just as much as if Agatha had taken Ida over her knee and smacked her.\"That is not the reason I came,\" he said. \"Though all I will say on the matter is while Vastian was clearly not thinking when he opened his mouth, your outburst was inappropriate.\"Her fingernails dug deeper into the wood of the chair.\"No, the reason I came is to tell you, in case you didn\'t know, he\'s gone.\"There was a tightening in her chest. She did know. Aidric did not need to elaborate. She had woken early that morning and gone to her balcony for air. From there she saw Vass leave on his horse, its saddle bags heavily laden.\"I know,\" she said.\"He\'ll be back.\"\"I doubt it.\"Vass had only done what any sensible person would do if their friend had treated them in such a way.\"Of course he\'ll come back. Friendships don\'t end because of one argument.\"No, she guessed they didn\'t. Still this felt more final, worse than an argument.My commentsThe reason I picked this is because it’s a really nice example of how fluid and mobile and surprising even quite a short piece of dialogue-led text can be. It’s also a good example of how silences can register as effectively as sentences.Take the silences first. When Aidric enters the room, he says nothing. The question looms, “Why was he here?”. That’s a question for the character, of course, but it becomes one for the reader too. The silence is a little marker of the question’s importance. It’s like there’s something too holy, too important, about the question for it simply to be asked out loud.And, crucially, if you set up a question like that, you have to not answer it – or not answer it quickly.So instead, the speaker turns her back on the question. Instead of saying, “Why are you here?”, she starts telling him about lectures.Then, the passage that follows turns its back on the character’s own statements. (“It wasn’t true. She hadn’t had any.”) Then proceeds to give a true statement of events.So we start with a legitimate question about her lover’s presence. Then the character bats that question away with what she says. Then the text bats what the character says away, and takes us off into a little surrogate grandmother moment. (That grandmother moment has one bad sentence, by the way. The sentence starting ‘They were nothing new …’ is a bit of a mess grammatically. That happens weirdly often when a sentence gets over a certain length – this one is 34 words. The trick, of course, is editing with care and paying extra attention when a sentence starts to feel unwieldy.)But, OK, we’re now one hundred words into the snippet. The original question is still hanging, of course, but it’s got more urgency and interest than if we hadn’t – twice – turned away from it. Its charge has been increased, not reduced, by the delay.That’s nice.But then the military man drags the question back into the room – but still backwards. (“That’s not the reason I came. Though all I will say on the matter…”)So now we – the character and the reader together – know the real reason is about to emerge.Time for another silence. You need to approach these big moments slowly.As it happens, I don’t like the “fingernails dug deeper” bit. To me, those sentences feel like authorial shorthand, a type of cliché. (“Oh, shucks. I’ve got a moment of unbearable tension coming up. How do I signify that quickly? Oh yes. Fingernails digging into something. That’ll do. Bish bosh, OK, what next?”)All the same, I like the silence. We just need any little trench between Aidric’s first comment (“That’s not the reason I came”) and the comment that follows. We just need a way to extend the reader’s suffering.Lovely. And even better – that comment, “She did know.” This whole passage has played a kind of double game with us. The passage presents as though something of great significance is about to be revealed. Only – ta-daa! – it turns out that the protagonist is already well aware of it. And presumably was well able to guess what Aidric was about to tell her.Now all this might seem like a damn stupid way to convey information, except that the passage isn’t really there to convey information about the departed Vass at all.I mean, yes, the reader needs to know that Vass has left. And it does the job, right at the end, by saying, “she saw Vass leave on his horse”, nice and clear and simple.But really, that piece of information is secondary to the question of how does Ida feel about it? And that question doesn’t have a nice, simple, tidy answer. Ida is in a muddle and so is the text. She evades the question, she lies, she goes silent, she delivers information well after it was logically time to release it. And that’s how Ida feels.And that’s what dialogue does. It doesn’t just tell readers how Ida feels, it shows them. And the twisty, resistant, contradictory untruthfulness of the dialogue is reflective of a complicated mess of feelings in Ida. There’s no way you could tease those feelings out any other way.Dialogue? I love it. It’s probably my favourite-favourite thing to write and I have a lot of favourites. That’s all from me.I’m going to saddle up my horse and ride away from this castle. I’m pretty sure there’s a ghost in the Great Hall and its battlements smell of raven poo. Giddy-up.Let me know what you think about all this, folks. And again, if you\'re a JW member, do remember our fab, free line up of autumn events here. It includes me juggling eels live online, so - what can I say? - it\'s gonna be good. And if you are keen to grab one of our bursaries, then:To enter, simply email us at info@jerichowriters.comUse the subject line ‘MEMBERSHIP BURSARY ENTRY’Do this by 24 SeptemberTell us, in fifty words, why you want to join Jericho Writers as an under-represented writer. That\'s it. Toodle-pip!

OK, youse.It’s Dialogue Day – based on your submissions to Townhouse. I realise, already, that I’m going to have to write a little dialogue mini-series based on the submissions I’ve received, so we’ll be on dialogue next week for sure, and quite likely the week after too. So if your submission isn’t picked this week, I may be able to pick it up later.Oh yes, and no housekeeping to announce this week except that some of you will get next week’s Friday email on a Thursday. Which will be like opening your Christmas presents in November, but there it is. It’s a strange world.Right. Dialogue. Here goes … JJ Barrett / Triangle of TimeStefan is reliving the same life over and over again and must convince PJ of that fact…A quizzical expression appeared on his face as he refolded the letter and placed it back in the envelope. ‘That was quite accurate, up to half-way.’‘We’ll discuss that shortly. You know the game Paper, Scissors, Rock?’ PJ nodded. ‘An open hand is paper, two extended fingers are scissors, a fist is a rock. Scissors cuts paper and wins, paper wraps rock and wins, rock smashes scissors and wins. Why?’Stefan held out his right hand. PJ mirrored his action. ‘On the count of three,’ Stefan said.Their eyes were locked together. From afar it would have appeared as if the pair were about to fight, such was the intensity in their faces.Stefan counted slowly, his half open hand rising and falling in time with the count. PJ followed like a shadow. ‘One… Two… Three.’Stefan didn’t need to look. He knew they both selected scissors. ‘Again,’ he said. ‘One… Two… Three.’ This time both Rock.‘One… Two… Three.’ Scissors again.‘One… Two… Three.’ Scissors for a third time.Two more attempts and both times PJ and Stefan selected Scissors.PJ was looking extremely uncomfortable by now.‘Last one PJ. One… Two… Three.’ This time they both chose paper.My comments:This is slicker than it might first appear. The dialogue itself looks fairly ordinary – there are quite a lot of ‘one, two, three’s, for example – but dialogue is actually made up of multiple elements, not just the actual speech. That medley of ingredients includes:Speech itselfSpeech markers (he said, she answered, and so on.)Observations of emotional reactionSnippets of actionPhysical descriptionHere, the writer – JJB, I’ll call him or her – has thrown these things together with great deftness and terrific economy. Here’s the passage again, with my comments.A quizzical expression appeared on his face [very succinct way to note a feeling. I don’t like “expression appeared on his face”, mind you, because I don’t know where else an expression could appear] as he refolded the letter and placed it back in the envelope. ‘That was quite accurate, up to half-way.’[Little dab of intrigue. Why quite accurate? Why half-way? The reader’s interested.]‘We’ll discuss that shortly. You know the game Paper, Scissors, Rock?’[Brilliant refusal to engage. There’s an interesting question hanging – and the speaker immediately moves away from it. That hanging question therefore gives us a reason to read on. It also feels like a very peculiar subject to move on to – which is also intriguing.]PJ nodded. ‘An open hand is paper, two extended fingers are scissors, a fist is a rock. Scissors cuts paper and wins, paper wraps rock and wins, rock smashes scissors and wins. Why?’[Here, I think the writer is concerned that the reader doesn’t know what Paper/Scissors/Rock is, and gives a brilliantly compact explanation – try explaining the game in fewer words than that. It’s as though the reader knows the explanation is basically necessary-but-boring, so is trying to move on as quickly as possible. I’d have the same worry as JJB, but I’d probably reckon that enough readers knew the game that I didn’t have to worry. But this feels like a way to engage with the issue, no matter what.]Stefan held out his right hand. PJ mirrored his action. ‘On the count of three,’ Stefan said.[Again, very compact. The author wants to move us into the action and the game as fast as possible …]Their eyes were locked together. From afar it would have appeared as if the pair were about to fight, such was the intensity in their faces.[And of course the emotion! I’ve written elsewhere about how one of the easiest tricks in fiction is just making your characters really care about whatever it is you want the reader to care about. In my case, that means getting my detective character to really, really love murder investigations. Here, we, the reader, are really going to care about what happens in the game, because the players obviously do – they look like they’re about to fight, for heaven’s sake! The fact that that emotion is suppressed and silent is actually more powerful. It makes the bland ‘one, two, three’s that follow all the more powerful. And the way the author (unshowily) moves in and out of dialogue, transitioning easily between dialogue / emotion / physical action, is all very deft.]Stefan counted slowly, his half open hand rising and falling in time with the count. PJ followed like a shadow. ‘One… Two… Three.’[\"Followed like a shadow\" is good. It echoes the ‘eyes were locked together’ in the previous para. In some metaphorical way the two young men have been joined here – and the reader is joined in with them too. We’re bound in to whatever happens here.]Stefan didn’t need to look. He knew they both selected scissors. [More good stuff – unshowy, but good. The obvious thing would be to have shown them both choosing scissors. But that’s not the interesting thing here. The interesting thing is that Stefan knew they would choose scissors, so that’s where the author focuses our attention.]‘Again,’ he said. ‘One… Two… Three.’ This time both Rock.[So simple. But so compact. The utter economy of description is impressive. I’m an economical author too, and I love this!]‘One… Two… Three.’ Scissors again.‘One… Two… Three.’ Scissors for a third time.[Double ditto.]Two more attempts and both times PJ and Stefan selected Scissors.PJ was looking extremely uncomfortable by now.[Marker of an emotional change that has happened through the course of this oddly static action. Nice.]‘Last one PJ. One… Two… Three.’ This time they both chose paper.Verdict:The dialogue itself is almost painfully simple but the movement between the different elements of the scene gives that dialogue real weight and hypnotic force. That force is made greater by all those little touches – the two men as mirrors of each other, their intensity, the little dab of intrigue at the start, the way that intrigue is swiftly discarded. None of those things amounts to much on its own but, cumulatively, this reads to me like proper professional text. There are plenty of published novels that aren’t as well-handled as this. Karen Hough / no titleCate is 29 and deciding to be more responsible. Here she is with her financial advisor.He pulled up the Canadian Tire website and pointed out two coffee makers. One brewed coffee, one had all the bells and whistles and ground the beans, made cappuccinos and americanos and other frothy things. It was $800.[Minor points, but you’re contrasting two machines there and only giving the price for one. I think we need both. And an americano isn’t frothy. You need to use a different coffee-type there, or change ‘frothy’. But it’s basically a nice clean opening to the scene.]“That’s crazy. I can’t afford that,” I said. He pulled up a calculator. “Your $3 latte—” his eyes flicked to mine. I made a “higher” motion with my thumb. I tend to get a large. “We’ll stick with a small for our purposes,” he continued. “Add in two new travel mugs, a bag of beans every month, and some fancy syrup—”“And whipping cream,” I added helpfully. Another reason that I work out a lot.“…and whipping cream, and a dusting of cinnamon and chocolate shavings.” He was obviously the sort of man that took his coffee black and looked down on the rest of us. “And you will still have paid the whole thing off in less than a year.”“So you’re telling me to buy it?” I asked.“I’m telling you that you are spending more than $1000 a year on coffee. If you’re getting a large—”“Grande,” I corrected him.He looked pained. “If you’re getting a large cappuccino every day, you are spending upwards of $1500.”My comments:Again, this is mostly neat and slick. I like the way the scene neatly avoids dialogue in places where that dialogue would just be dull. So, he “pointed out two coffee makers”. Presumably, he did that by saying something, but actually noting what he said would have been dull, so Karen just reports, compactly, that he pointed them out. That keeps focus on what the reader will be interested in, and avoids the dull stuff.Nowhere does it say that if you write a page of dialogue, you have to report every word that’s said. Really smart authors often jump from direct speech (the stuff in inverted commas) to reported speech (eg, “he pointed out …”). That way you get the live, mobile feel of dialogue with all the boring bits trimmed.On the same theme, I like the way the conversation flits from oral (“Your $3 latte”) – to eyes flicking – to a movement of the thumb – to an observation from the first-person narrator about herself – and back to speech again. That’s so swift – it’s just two lines – but it accomplishes so much. The bit of self-observation, in this context, isn’t quite a joke but it’s a flicker of self-awareness that feels close to humour. It’s definitely part of what gives this dialogue a mobile, unpredictable surface.And then the conversation slides apparently sideways into a conversation about chocolate shavings and the narrator’s comment about working out … before ramming back to what appears to be a purely financial conversation … except then she corrects his ‘large’ to ‘grande’ and his eyes rebuke her for the pretension.Yes, all this is a conversation about finance, but it’s also a conversation about personalities and values. It’s a conversation about her. The iron rod of “you spend too much on coffee” is just a line from which any number of other curlicues and detours can be drawn.It’s a very good example of the mobility of good dialogue – the way you don’t quite know what’s going to happen next. And also the way it forces the reader to pay close attention. This is real show-don’t-tell stuff. You’re forcing the reader to pay close attention to the emotional movements of the  scene, because you’re not telling the reader what’s happening, you’re making them figure it out for themselves.Another passage that feels very proficient, really confident. Again, this feels like publication standard material. Bravo.***That’s it from me. More on dialogue next week. Sorry I couldn’t fit in more passages this week, but in my defence this email is 2000 words long already.Go well, my friends. I’m off to buy a $2,000 coffee machine. I shall pay for it with a selection of hand-curled commas and a few unneeded exclamation marks.If you want to add your dialogue snippet for review, just add it to the original thread on Townhouse here. Do just remember that by uploading your snippet, you may get your work seen by tens of thousands of people and, ultimately, it might appear in a book-form collection of these emails. There\'ll probably be a TV show and a parade as well. So: don\'t put your head above the parapet, unless you want it there. More on all this next week.

I was going to talk dialogue this week, only then I noticed the date. The last Friday of August, a tipping point for the year. The last golden breath of summer. The last week of vacation, before:Return to schoolBlackberry collectingApple scrumpingHello again to socksHedges gather little jewels of purple and red (haws, sloes, damsons, crabapples, all of which are abundant near me)Tints of yellow in the leavesThe long poles of cow parsley have dried outI live rurally in the fine county of Oxford and – if you have the misfortune to live anywhere else at all – my experience of late summer and early autumn will be different from yours. So, I don’t know, if you live in Australia, you probably associate this season with even more massive spiders than usual, yellow dust storms that last a month, the croc vs kangaroo Olympics, and the chatter of wallabies high up in the eucalyptuses. (Disclosure: I have never been to Australia, but I’m pretty sure I’ve got the country nailed.)Now we’re talking about time this week, but first a little announcement:DialogueWe’ll talk about dialogue next week, and we’ll do that via your own submissions.Give me some chunks of dialogue to examine next week. Here are the rules:Drop your offerings into the comments below this post.Max 300 words per submission, please.One submission per person.Make sure you give us a line or two of explanation first off, so we can understand the context of your scene.Don’t email me anything. If it ain’t on Townhouse, I ain’t looking at it. If you pop anything in the comments below, I\'m gonna assume you\'re OK me RIPPING YOUR WORK APART MERCILESSLY IN PUBLIC. If you\'re not, then keep your tin hat on and your head below that sandbag parapet.Specifically, your work and my comments on it may appear in an email to a lot of people, here on Townhouse and potentially one day in a book. If you don\'t want that happen, then please see above in relation to tin hats and parapets.I only pick work that I basically like, though, so if I pick your work, you\'re doing OK.Okiedoke ...Now back to time:Movies struggle with Big Time. They can do day to day stuff easily. We see a character going to bed. We see them eating a croissant and drinking coffee. The audience easily conjectures that this is the morning after. Boof.But Big Time? For movies, that’s hard. The old Hitchcock era movies used to handle those things by pages flipping off a wall calendar, shots of the changing seasons. (Wind! The universal signal of autumn. Snow! The universal signal of winter. And so on.)Now all that’s a bit crass, a bit heavy. These days, movie makers attempt something slicker, even if it’s just a caption at the bottom of the screen or a speeded-up, CGI of the wind-snow-crocuses model of passing time.You, a novelist, don’t have the same problem. If you want to tell the reader it was two years later, you can just say “Two years passed.” That’s simple, clean narration. It doesn’t have that CGI, calendar flying clunkiness. No one will resent your simple captioning.But time offers so much more. It’s not a problem to be dealt with, but a dimension to be embraced. Think of it like place, a silent character, a huge extra richness in your broth.Here are some examples of how you can use it – but there are a million more. Think of these examples as mere appetite prompters.Cold TimeChanges in weather is a technique so obvious, it could come close to a flipping calendar in terms of crassness. But it really doesn’t have to be like that. The novel of mine that made most use of the weather was Love Story, with Murders. There, I carefully seeded the earlier chunks of the book with hints of chill and forecasts of something much colder on the way.Then, before the cold had actually arrived, my character was fussing around with giant red snow shovels and the like, but in a context where those things felt odd and out of place.Then – the snow arrived. Canadian levels of snow and cold in a country that doesn’t normally get much of either. The snow wrought huge changes in the landscape, but also in Fiona’s life.Alone in a remote cottage with inadequate provisions, she is forced to adapt her diet:Make tea. There’s nothing herbal here, so I make do with a regular tea-bag. No milk either, so just brew a pint of hot, black tea in a huge pottery mug. Contrary to my usual habit, I add sugar, to take away the taste of the metallic mountain water, the strongly tannined tea. It tastes like sweetened bog-water, but is nevertheless somehow welcome. A comfort against the cold.That’s not strictly about either weather or time, and yet it is both. By compelling us to register change, we notice both the cold and the time. And those changes register not just in feelings-of-being-chilly and making-of-log-fires, but also in unexpected ways – earthenware cups and sweet, tannined tea. Time and the cold become multidimensional: they disrupt habits, force giant earthenware cups into our hands, change the taste of tea.And then, of course, time and the story proceed.Fiona almost dies in the cold. And then the snow melts, and she encounters her normal landscape, post-snow with its dirty urban water and gritted streets.Because the changes of weather were viscerally felt by the character herself, the timescape in the book also registered acutely. And the felt passage of time is so close to the actual experience of story, the reader ends up having a deeper experience than they otherwise would. It’s kind of magical, but it definitely happens.Big TimeMy Lieutenant’s Lover began a love story in St Petersburg in 1917 – separated the characters for a quarter of a century – then brought them together again in post-War Berlin.Any love story needs to achieve the ache of longing, and there are probably more subtle techniques than the one I used. But dropping two world wars, one revolution, plenty of gulag, and a thousand miles of separation between the two characters certainly did the trick. A character only had to glance back over that past – a sentence, two sentences – for the reader to feel the scale of the loss and the longing.And all those little markers of age – an attractive seventeen-year-old girl turning into a middle-aged Red Army sergeant – made that weight of time present on every pageAlso, my choice of time and place meant that the physical world always reflected the passage of time. The Berlin of my love story was a place of rubble. The factory that had once belonged to my male protagonist was so completely bombed out that virtually nothing remained. A youth using its slim remaining shelter christened it the Nichtsfabrik, the Nothing Factory.That book with its huge, tragic timescape, just felt big to a reader. It wasn’t (by my standards) massively long, but the love story took on an epic quality simply by virtue of the passing years – and the weight with which the readers felt those years.Precise TimeOne of my books, some time back, was struggling in its near-to-final draft. Everything that needed to be there was there. The story had no fundamental problems, but it didn’t yet have the iron hardness of something ready to print.A couple of things fixed that book. One was just hard editing. Literally, an edit that looked for and deleted spare words, eliminated unwanted sentences. My character’s voice is always taut, even if my writing’s only at 95%. But that extra 5% brought that tautness to a line of constant tension. A glittering brightness.But the other thing was: nailing the timeline. Figuring out if the gap between Event A and Event B was four days or five days and being explicit about it. The surprising thing about correcting that timeline was that I’d unconsciously been avoiding proper description, because I knew I was blurry about time. So if my character was out and about in central Cardiff, and I didn’t know what day of the week it was, I’d pull back from really describing the streets. A Wednesday quietness? Or a Saturday bustle? The hubbub of a rugby match at the Millennium Stadium? Or pensioners enjoying a discounted Thursday morning haircut?The precision of timing didn’t just help my readers sort timings through in their heads. More important, it helped me. That last twist of the lens helped achieve that final, defining focus.That book turned out a good ’un in the end.***That’s it from me. The blackberries are early this year, but not sweet. I think we need a day or two of sunshine. Which, oh my merry non-British friends, is something you can completely and utterly rely on in the fine county of Oxford.Don\'t forget I want to see your dialogue snippets. Chuck em below. Follow them thar rules above.

I’m a crime writer, a genre famous for its gritty realism. Raymond Chandler and his important predecessor, Dashiell Hammett, took the crime novel away from Agatha Christie’s country houses – with their butlers and colonels and candlesticks – and thrust it down the mean streets of 30s and 40s America.That transformation was wholly good for the crime novel and in the Christie vs Chandler wars, I’m Team Chandler all the way.And yet, though the crime novel was irrevocably changed by Chandler, I’ve been a poor student of his lessons.None of my crime novels is massively realistic and the most recent, The Deepest Grave, is a modern police procedural that concerns itself with the hunt for Arthurian relics. The book ends – massive spoiler alert – with an actual swordfight.Chandler would have choked on his lime juice and gin cocktail at that, and at much else. But you know what? I don’t care.I do believe in methodical research, but I also believe in imagination. In a contest between the two, imagination should always win. Or rather – to phrase the same thing more accurately – the story should always win. The story is the only thing that matters.So take one obvious problem with the modern crime novel. Here are two simple truths:Modern police services uses a wide range of specialists and a major investigation may well involve dozens of officers across a huge range of job roles.Readers want stories that involve a relatively tight group of investigators. If you started to have a dozen or more significant investigators, readers would lose track, stop caring and stop reading.How do I solve that problem? In a word: merrily.I just toss my policing manual out of the window and have my character do what I want her to do A well-known crime novelist, who is also a former police officer, once started reading one of my books. Two days after she started, she contacted me. She told me that she loved my writing (and thank you for that, ma’am), but she was unable to read the book because of the gazillion procedural errors I had committed in my first fifty pages.And – I don’t care. My readers don’t care. Indeed, even most police officers don’t care. I’ve also been told, by police officers, that my books capture the exact flavour of the police service – the rules, the hierarchy, the banter, the awkward shift of a macho culture towards something more twenty-first century in its habits.And, whether that’s true or not, I STILL DON’T CARE.I care about just four things: the story, the characters, the characters and the story.PlausibilityNow, it’s also true that, in caring about my story, I need to care about my readers’ reactions. Suppose I committed some obvious howler in my opening fifty pages – let’s say I arrested a character and held them for seven days without charge. That might be plausible in some parts of the world. In modern Britain, it’s inconceivable. Any crime reader would know that. They’d bridle at the story I was trying to tell.At the same time, my character operates best and most interestingly alone. Police forces often require officers to work in twos, because then if evidence is acquired, there are two eye-witness reports not one. So one of my constant juggling acts is to find ways to spring Fiona Griffiths away from the rules. Sometimes that’s her own rule-breaking. Sometimes it’s because a superior officer, short of resources, winks at a short-cut he or she expects not to matter too much. Sometimes, it’s simply the force of circumstance.I need to dance along the line of reader-acceptability and story-intrigue. Both of those things matter, always.There’s another thing too.DetailDetail matters. It’s often the little specks of quartz in a story that give it its dazzle. Some examples:The custody cell / Strange Death of Fiona GriffithsFiona, undercover, is put into a custody cell with a woman who has secrets to spill. I clicked around online to find out what those custody cells looked like and found two intriguing facts.One, they’ve built horrible little stainless-steel units that have a sink built into the top of the toilet. That means there’s just one appliance to install and one that’s pretty much destruction-proof.Two, UK rules require custody cells to enjoy natural sunlight, which you might think involves an actual window, except that the Cardiff custody suite has solar tubes bringing sunlight down from the roof into the depths below.Those weird little facts that gave a feeling of utter realism to those moment in the cells. And not just realism. They brought a kind of dislocated strangeness that was utterly right for the scene.Oil strikes / The Sons of AdamBack when I was writing historical fiction, I wrote a story about two brothers who were involved in the oil business. One struck oil in the Middle East, in Persia as it was then known. The other struck oil on Signal Hill in California and then, later, in West Texas.Those oil strikes weren’t really fictitious. I dug out accounts of the original strikes and kept very close to the actual facts of what happened. Oil strikes aren’t all the same and the real-life details I used – a hollow booming sound, a leak of gas, a dead goat, the violent upthrust of a genuine gusher – gave utter life and plausibility to my story.I also told readers in my author’s note that I’d kept close to the truth, so readers had a real sense of, yes, this is how it was, this is what an oil strike felt like, back in that golden age of oil-discovery.Detail, plausibility and the freedom to jumpI’ve talked so far about two big benefits of research – even if, like me, you are not exactly famous for the exactitude of your research.Keeping within the bounds of plausibility – that matters. The details research can give you – those matter even more.But I want to add a third ingredient too. The freedom to jump. Quite often, I think writers feel constrained from letting their imaginations rip, because they worry, “What if it’s just not like that? I can’t write about the Battle of the Whatever, because I don’t know if they used spears / slingshots / muskets / spiny molluscs / laser guns. Better just to skirt the issue.”So – find out about the Battle of the Whatever. Go read a book. You’ll be able to settle the spear / slingshot / musket issue. Better still, you’ll find out that, say, a rainstorm early in the battle caused a lot of problems with wet gunpowder and you might find yourself writing interesting details about how Musketeer Jones was grappling with the problem of how to open a paper-wrapped cartridge without ruining the powder inside. Your research is giving you a springboard into the story. Actively making an entrance, not passively permitting access.Weirdly, all this remains true if you’re writing SFF.Andy Weir’s The Martian was a work of pure imagination – but one that depended on intense, brilliant research.And, OK, he was limited by the chains of near-future science and technology, but suppose you were writing steampunk fiction involving the Battle of the Whatever.Brilliant! So on the ground you have Musketeer Jones grappling with her paper-wrapped cartridges. And up above, you have two warlocks in a zeppelin, hurling spiny molluscs down from the sky. The minute, detailed realism of the former somehow rubs off on the latter. Your actual historical research is lending a baffling kind of authenticity to your warlock / zeppelin / mollusc combo. Throw in some quick Wikipedia research on spiny molluscs, and bingo! You have a scene set to sizzle, my friend.(And hey. I just opened up a Wikipedia page on spiny mollusks and whaddaya know. Some species are cannibalistic and can eat through each other’s shells. Your scene just got better again.)That’s it from me. Summertime calls. I am off to barbecue a mollusc.What about you? Are you Trappist? Do you love a barbecued mollusc? Why would anyone want to bite a bullet? How can an oil strike kill a goat? Oh my, we have a lot of problems to solve, my friends. Let\'s get started.

This week, I had a plan. I had an actual plan for what to write to you about – a plan inspired by a publishing contract that happened to fly across my desk. (Or, OK, not fly, because those things are always overweight. It waddled. And panted. Then flopped.)Ah well. It was a good enough plan and that email will come to you some other time. But then, into my inbox, crept this little beauty from Cameron:Hi HarryInspired by your own recent releases, I thought it would be a fruitful exercise to compile a list of things I wish I had known before embarking on a writing journey. It has been quite liberating and given me great perspective on how far I\'ve truly come as a writer.But I am curious: Of the many hard-fought lessons you\'ve learned throughout your career, could you identify one as the single most important? Or, phrased another way, which one do you wish you would have learned first?The short answer, of course, is that I don’t know and can’t quite engage with the question.Most writing wisdom is born of experience and interlocks with every other piece of wisdom. So a question of characterisation is also one of plotting which is also one of theme which is also to do with sense of place, and so forth.So mostly I come out with some stupid line that gets me away from the question and we move onto the next thing.Only –Actually –It did occur to me that there is one big piece of writing wisdom that I don’t talk about as much as I ought to. It’s simply this:You are many writers.You aren’t just one.I started out writing books in the same broad vein as Sidney Sheldon and Jeffrey Archer. I hope there was a little more to my books than those comparisons suggest, but they were big, old-fashioned, non-violent romps, with plenty of family drama. They were fun to write.My first two books were contemporary dramas, but then, for no especial reason, I turned to a historical theme. The books were still in the same broad mould, but they had an extra richness because of the early twentieth century backgrounds.And then –Well, fashions changed and sales dwindled. My publisher would have been happy for more of the same, but not at the kind of advances I wanted. So I moved on again.I wrote popular non-fiction.I wrote niche non-fiction.I did some ghostwriting work. One of those projects was a really lovely one which hit the hardback and paperback bestseller lists. Another one sold in plenty of territories, made me a big fat bundle of money, and was just a joy to work on.And then, I changed again. I came back to fiction, to crime fiction this time, and found a character and niche I loved.I do still love that niche, but (as you may have noticed) I’ve also had time to update some old how-to books and republish those. And I’ve turned a bundle of these emails into a whole new book. Oh yes, and I have a mad-as-a-box-of-snakes literary project on the back-burner. And I get a glitter in my eye when I think of some new non-fiction work I’d love to write.I’ve also been traditionally published, self-published and am half-minded to flirt with digital-first publishing via a specialist firm.Almost none of that was in the game plan when I started out, and I’m not unusual.Yes, you have a few careers like John Grisham’s. His first book did OK. His second book (published in 1991) spent almost a year on the NYT bestseller list and sold a bazillion copies. After that, he’s bashed out a book a year, pretty much. His name has become almost synonymous with legal thrillers.And even so – Grisham has written non-legal novels. He’s written kids’ books. He’s written non-fiction. He’s written short stories.All those things are side dishes to the main thrust of his work – the raita to the tikka marsala – but I bet when he was writing those other things, he was fully engaged by them too. Even when you’re a hugely productive author who dominates your particular genre, it turns out you are multiple writers too. More than you ever imagined at the outset.So my answer to Cameron is simply:Be multiple.Find other stories, other genres, other wings.You can’t know yet what will work for you and what won’t. It’s not even a question of your ability to read the market. When my Fiona Griffiths series launched in the States, I had brilliant reviews from a ton of major outlets. Yay! My work was being published by the same editor who looked after Lee Child and Karin Slaughter. Yay! But my work bombed completely, because something to do with the cover or the marketing or the unknown something was wrong.As it happened, in that instance, I just bought back the rights, and relaunched the books, very successfully, as an indie author. But that had never been the game plan.Life, it turns out, is not that interested in game plans.And look, I don’t know your exact position. But I do sometimes see writers working for seven years, ten years, some huge stretch of time, in order to bring one piece of work to publication.And sometimes that’ll be the right thing to do. But mostly it won’t. Mostly you try one thing – learn lots – see if it works – and if it doesn’t, put it down. Try a new thing. Something else in the same broad genre or something totally unrelated.Your passions are like a pack of monkeys. They want to skip chattering across the jungle.So let them. Chase them with your notebook. Catch the fruit they fling down from the trees. Watch them in the rain and in their nests at night.You may not be the writer you think you have to be. That a frightening thought, but it’s also a liberating one. It liberated me, not once, but repeatedly.My guess? My guess is, that if your writing career has any longevity, you’ll find the same is true of you too.What\'s your experience? Have you switched genres abruptly and what did it feel like when you did? Tell us more ....

A friend of mine is a painter. He was in a grump the other day because he’d been working all morning on a new canvas, then decided the picture wasn’t going anywhere. His plan was to scrape the canvas down – scrap it, in effect – and start on something else the following day. He moaned about a morning’s wasted effort.Well, he didn’t get much sympathy from me.(I’ll tell you why in half a second, but the last of my triumvirate of writing books is out at the end of this month. It’s called HOW TO WRITE and – in its previous, Bloomsbury, incarnation – it got lots of nice comments from readers. We’re looking for people who would like an Advance Review Copy. The e-book will be yours totally free. Your only commitment is that you’ll leave an honest review on Amazon when we publish. More info in the PS. And here endeth the public service announcement.)Right. Back to painting and all that.Now, for one thing, a painter’s decision whether to commit to a project is just a much smaller deal. My buddy thought he had a good subject for a painting. He tried it out. He didn’t like it. He decided to do something different.For a painter, that’s a day. For a novelist, that’s a year. And – especially if you rely on your writing income for a living – that’s a year you literally can’t afford.That’s one reason why I make a big deal about elevator pitches. You just can’t afford to go bombing off on a project where the basic idea is flawed.But also – editing.My painter buddy can just step back from his canvas and see, at a glance, if he’s happy with it. He literally has to take one backwards step. That’s all.A screenwriter has more of a challenge, but even so, she has only 20,000 words to deal with – an easy hour’s read.You lot – you brutes – have work that often runs to 100,000 words or more. My first novel weighed in at 180,000 words. The final book was like a blue and gold brick. And don’t get me wrong. I love long work; I’m almost incapable of writing briefly.But the editorial challenge is huge, even at the basic level of evaluating your own project. Instead of the painter’s simple backwards step and visual assessment, we might have to spend six hours reading the damn manuscript. And having done that, we’ve got a ton of intersecting thoughts and issues. We’ve half-forgotten our opening thoughts by the time we get to our closing ones. And the implementation phase is even more arduous than the evaluation one.So: what to do?The obvious answer is: you just plunge in.Gotta problem with Character A? Dive into your 100,000 word swimming pool, find references to Character A, tweak what you need to tweak, then get out dripping and wet.Got a plot problem with that bit after the escape from the castle? Then dive in again, tweak again, do what you have to do.And so on. Given that you may have a whole string of editing issues to fix, that’s a lot of dives into your swimming pool – or, worse, you decide you’re going to deal with everything at once, which means you soon start drowning in word-porridge. You fix one thing but accidentally break two others, and because you can never just step back and see your manuscript at a glance, you don’t even see the breakages.Now, any pro author ends up evolving their own methods for handling these issues. (Common elements include: washing less, drinking a lot of coffee, sleeping at weird times, forgetting about your family and developing a tic.)But watching the magnificent Rachael Herron at the Summer Festival brought a new clarity for me.Assuming you’ve written your first draft, here’s what she suggests you should do:You go through your entire manuscript. You note down every scene and summarise it in a sentence. Like this:Jed and Tania argueTania drives to her mother’sArrives with mother – encounters sobbing ElinorJed smashes up holiday cottageAnd so on.That exercise, for the whole book.To make this work, it’s critical that your scene summaries are as brief as possible. A maximum of one line of text. That way, you can print off your summary of the book on two or three sheets of paper – and you can just see it. The whole damn book. The entire skeleton laid out before you.That brevity is illuminating. Take those little bullet points above. Do you need the “Tania drives to her mother’s” scene, yes or no?Well, OK, that depends on the story. If Tania, while driving, has thoughts / reflections / memories that shift her world a bit, so the Tania who gets out of the car is different from the one who got it, then the scene probably stays.But not all scenes are like that. Maybe, you just wrote the scene because you thought “gotta get Tania to her mother’s” and forgot you could just write, So Tania drove over to her mother’s house, where she …In that case, you certainly don’t need the scene – but that extraneous material only becomes obvious once you don’t have the texture of a fully-written scene to seduce you.Rachael Herron encourages us to take things a step further. She likes you to define your theme in a phrase: ‘Family is chosen’, ‘Love wins’, ‘Heroes can be unsung.’Now, I’m not sure my books would be happy to get reduced in that way. For me, theme is best understood more loosely. For me, it’s more like a collection of words and ideas, rich in opposites. (So underclass is a theme of my Strange Death of Fiona Griffiths, for example. But that also means power is a theme, because you understand the powerless via the powerful and vice versa.)So you can define your themes narrowly or loosely, but Rachael says you should take your skeleton outline and ask of every scene whether it somehow embodies or reflects on that theme.If it does, then great. The scene probably belongs in the book and your editorial task is simply to make that theme as strong as it can be. So that Tania-in-a-car scene might have her grappling with her “heroes can be unsung” thoughts and memories, in which case it certainly belongs. But if the scene has no thematic resonance, you ditch it.Or you change it.You might, for example, need a particular character to die to advance your plot. But then how to do they die? Is their manner of death one that harmonises with the moods and melodies of the book, or not? And if not, then what might work better?Personally, I don’t get quite as systematic as Rachael does, but I’m generally quite a messy worker, anyway. I also like my books to have some rough edges. Some elements that don’t quite fit into a system.What I do love, though, is the absolute clarity of her approach. Your book in three pages.I’m knee deep in my detective story at the moment. I’m at about 60,000 words and (because I never write short) I’m still a good 50,000 words from the end.But I already know that some of my earlier text needs redoing. There’s a character, Anders, who needs to enter the story way earlier than he does.In my pre-Rachael Herron life, I’d have just gone back and created the scene. My forward motion through my text would have been put on hold while I dealt that little episode. In Herron-world, I don’t need to do that. I just keep a skeleton log of my book as I go and enter a note or a post-it which says, “Introduce Anders here”. By the time I get to the end of my book, I’ll have a whole flapping horde of those notes, which I can just deal with one by one.And yes, those notes will breed more notes, but that three-page skeleton will remain the iron spine running through all the editorial work I do – the organising principle.I think that, thanks to these disciplines, I’ve just figured a midpoint sequence in my book that may yet make the whole damn thing hang together. (Think highly trained & physically capable psychos spilling out en masse across the Welsh countryside. Yum.)That’s it from me. The children think they’ve found a coronavirus in the garden and want me to come and look at it. It’s green, apparently, and the size of a walnut._______As mentioned above, we have some free e-copies of HOW TO WRITE to give away. It’s a really big writer’s guide to writing a novel, from first conception to final editing, with everything else included along the way. If you would like an advance review copy, then:Please email publishing@jerichowriters.com with “HOW TO WRITE” in the subject line pleasePlease let us know if you usually shop from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk or some other Amazon store. If you never shop at Amazon, then they won’t let you leave a review, I’m afraid.We will send you a free e-book, which will be yours to keep.Your commitment is that you will leave a review on Amazon promptly on the book’s publication at the end of this month (or, maybe, the start of Sept; we haven’t yet finalised details.) We’ll be in touch at the time to nudge you and we’ll tell you exactly how to leave a review.We’re are especially keen to get plenty of US reviewers for this book, so if you’re based in the States, do please get in touch.

Oh ye merry folk of writing, I have tidings to bring … but, in the best traditions of suspense, I’m not going to tell you just yet.Instead, a question:Suppose you were told that your book cover wasn’t allowed to centre on an image of any kind?Fine, perhaps you might be allowed a doodle, or watermark, or something clearly secondary to the actual text – but mostly, you’d be allowed words, colours and nothing much else.How would you feel?I think most of us would feel disappointed. Text feels a good way to communicate data, but a lacklustre way of communicating emotion. And, since novels are mostly about an emotional journey, a text-only cover seems certain to disappoint.And, OK, all my fiction covers use imagery of some sort. At times, that imagery has been very scanty indeed. The American cover of This Thing of Darkness features a cloud. That’s literally all. The US version of Love Story, with Murders features a tree in a snowy landscape and, again, nothing else. (The tree, by the way, plays no part in the story. It just looked nice.)But what you have to remember about really good cover designers is that they’re really good designers. They’re creatives. You have to tell them the outcome you want – roughly, “This is the genre, here is the emotion I want to generate, and here are some visual ingredients that may or may not be useful.”So when I talked to my cover designer about the Thing of Darkness cover, the basic mission statement could have been reduced to:Crime thrillerExcitement / dangerTrawler / storm / wavesI assumed we’d have some shot of a trawler deck, tipped at some terrifying angle, with black water sluicing across the deck. Throw a crimey-title in a crimey-font across the image and – badda-boom – there’s your cover.And sure. I’ll bet you a dollar to a dime that my designer explored covers like that. Dug out pictures of trawlers (from massive image libraries that have got shots of absolutely everything.) But in the end, a designer has to be guided by what works.Try trawler. Does it work? Dammit. Not quite. Explore lighthouse. Does that work? Dammit. Not quite. Try waves-smashing-on-rocks. Does that work? Dammit. Not quite.A creatively-led and experimental design process ended up with a cover – the storm cloud – that we hadn’t anticipated, but worked just great. Here it is:That cover, however, walked only halfway to pure abstraction; it didn’t go the whole hog. Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated, on the other hand, used text. And colour. And nothing else. Here it is:Ask yourself honestly: would this cover have been better with imagery? And what would the images have been? The book tells a heart-rending story of the Jewish experience of Ukraine – and of the Second World War. You could have had some sepia-tinted photos of some long-ago shtetl. But those images would have been reductive. They’d have limited the book instead of hugely expanding it.And ask yourself. What do you feel when you see the Everything is Illuminated cover? The black and white looks sober, but the billowing colour keeps telling you: yes, there is illumination, it is joyous, and it is magical, and this book will open those doors.Or look at this version of Ian Fleming’s The Spy Who Loved Me:It’s utterly simple. The title already sells the book. The font and colours hint at the book’s classic status. And the two singed bullet holes: they give you all the promise you need to pick the book up and starting reading. More would have given less.I make these points because, oh merry folk of writing, I have news. And the news is:I’ve written a book! And it’s just been published!And not to beat about the bush too much:You know what the book is – because you’ve already read it!The book is called 52 LETTERS and it’s a compilation of these weekly emails from me to you – but squidged into book form, drained of any residual marketing nonsense, and tied with a ribbon woven from rainbow beams and unicorn kisses.Now, I have to say, I love writing these weekly emails and I loved-loved-loved squidging them together into a book. An email, inevitably, a bit of a throwaway thing. Even if you read one and it really hits a spot, the likelihood is that you absorb some of the message, then move on. Forget it.A book just has more status than that. In the world, yes, but also mentally. Anything tucked up in a book is asking to be stored in a different way – read differently, absorbed differently.So though I remembered writing all those emails, the actual book feels like a different thing. Different and better. I love it already.But – gulp – to remove my (sober, black felt) writing hat and put on my (jaunty, yellow) marketing one: how the hell do you sell a book like that?I mean: it’s not a book about writing, or editing, or publishing, or marketing. It’s a little bit of all those things, plus a big fat helping of whatever nonsense is in my brain at the time.And what kind of image do you put on the cover to say: “here’s quite a general, discursive yet practical and entertaining book for writers?”A pen? A typewriter? A quill? An inkpot?If you browse the Authorship category on Amazon, you’ll find books that make use of all of those icons … even though damn few of us actually use a pen, or typewriter or inkpot to write with. They’re icons used by non-creative visual folks as a kind of angry shorthand: “You know that inkpot symbolises things-for-writers, so here’s a book with yet another damn inkpot on it. Now buy it, OK?”So. What did we do, me and my numberless colleagues at Jericho Writers Publishing?Well, the title we came up with – in the form it appears on Amazon – is:52 Letters: A year of advice on writing, editing, getting an agent, writing from the heart...But the actual cover delivers a much longer title / subtitle combo:52 Letters:A year of advice on writing, editing, getting an agent, writing from the heart, the world’s oldest book, marketing your work, battling copyeditors, the secret of style, probable vs plausible, what’s up with Barnes & Noble, cannibalism, empathetic characters, writing phonetically and much more.We liked that title because it told you what a rich, glorious, unembarrassed mish-mash the book contains. It feels like, at a textual level, a title that delivers the promise of the book.But in a way, by choosing such a massively convoluted title, we were giving our designer an even bigger problem than he might have had to begin with. Not only was the book hard to pigeonhole, but we’ve given him a title so long that it wouldn’t even fit on Amazon’s title box.But you know what? That wasn’t our problem. It was the designer’s. The sort of problem he loves to solve.We just threw a book description and our enormous title at our designer, Kelly Finnegan, and said, “Hey Kelly, here’s a ridiculously long title for a hard-to-categorise book. The book is about writing and editing and all that, but it’s definitely not a textbook. We think it’s useful but entertaining, practical but discursive. And also – well, hell, we want it to be joyous and inspirational and anarchic and personal and fun. So please can we have a book cover that says all that – and looks incredible? Thanks.”I had no idea what Kelly would come back with, but he came back to us with this:And honestly? I think that may be the best book cover I’ve ever had. Any country, any title, any edition.The fact is that, although Kelly’s used just three main colours, a watermark version of me, and the text, the result delivers exactly the message we wanted.What’s striking is just how much creativity there is in the design.We didn’t tell Kelly to make the actual book title (“52 Letters”) small; he just did it. We didn’t tell Kelly to put in the “Love from” before my author name; he just did it. And we certainly didn’t tell him to use that sprawling handwritten font for the subtitle, but his decision to do that immediately signified something personal, creative and fun.We sent some advance review copies out to people and got lots of lovely comments back, including this doozy from John David Mann:“Not since Stephen King’s “On Writing” have I so valued a writer’s writing on writing! These aren’t just 52 Letters—they’re 52 love letters, to and for writers of all stripes and stages of accomplishment.”Now that’s a lovely quote, of course. (Thanks, John!) But that ‘love letter’ comment feels absolutely consistent with the cover Kelly created. And when you have that kind of merger between what the cover promises to a reader and what it ends up delivering, you have a kind of sweet perfection – and one not of my making.Lovely.And finally, my little pickled pumpkin, because you are one of the people to whom I have addressed all these letters, we have made the book available at a small fraction of its normal price. The paperback ($8.99 / £6.99) is just about as cheap as we’re permitted to price it: we literally earn almost nothing at that price. The ebook too ($2.99 / £1.99 / or free via KU) is priced to be more like a giveaway than an actual purchase.So, please: I hope you pick up a copy, because it was written, quite literally, for you – and because you helped create it.The fact is, that if you lot weren’t such a totally brilliant audience, I’d never have written as many emails as I have done, and they’d have been a lot more boring too. You guys are the best.You can buy the book here.And please, buy it fast, because when the clock strikes midnight on Saturday, we shall ratchet those prices up higher than a stilt-walking giraffe on a stepladder.I think Kelly Finnegan is a wee bit of a genius. And best of all? No inkpots.

An interesting thought this week, arising from my Summer Festival conversation with Jenny Geras, the CEO of Bookouture, on Tuesday this week.If you’re a SFOW ticket holder and missed the session, do try to catch up with the replay. If you’ve no idea what Bookouture is, then it’s a British digital-first publisher, that went from being a one-person startup to selling almost 10,000,000 books a year, half of them in the US. Its success was born from aggressive pricing, fierce focus on data and experimentation, excellent social media and a willingness to advertise.In the course of our chat, Jenny said something that surprised me.Bookouture runs an open submissions policy. If you have an agent, your agent may well wish to submit to the firm. But you don’t need one. You can just send in your work.Now, that part I already knew. But – because I always like to know the stats – I went on to ask what proportion of those open submissions went on to get accepted. Jenny didn’t instantly know the percentage. (It’s a stat that matters a lot to writers, but is of little more than curiosity value to publishers.)I prompted her. ‘One per cent?’ I asked. ‘Maybe a bit less?’And she told me no, the acceptance rate wasn’t that low. From her response, I guess two or three per cent might be about right.Now, OK, not everyone has heard of Bookouture, so I’m going to guess that their submissions are of slightly higher quality than those going to the average literary agent.But still.Two or three manuscripts in every hundred submitted are good enough for Bookouture to take on.Wow! The equivalent stats for most literary agents would be about one in a thousand, with, admittedly, quite a broad range of variation in that proportion.And even when you get taken on by a literary agent, your chance of having your work taken up by a major publisher is perhaps not much better than 50% (with, again, a ton of variation.)Even allowing for fuzziness in the data, it seems clear that Bookouture is simply accepting work that the traditional gatekeepers never used to consider.What’s more, Bookouture has no underclass. It pays no advances and every book gets the same level of budget, love, and attention upfront. In Big 5 firms, there are authors who get the huge advances and the marketing budgets – and ones who don’t and don’t. That’s just not the case at Bookouture. All books get the same input – and it’s readers, nobody else, who determine the final outcome.In a way, that’s the most exciting, and most revolutionary, aspect of Bookouture’s model. Buy widely, invest equally, and let readers decide.Perhaps all along, those trad publisher gates were built too narrow. The issue wasn’t that good quality manuscripts weren’t there. Perhaps the issue was simply that in a world of limited shelf space – and very limited in the case of supermarkets – gatekeepers were forced to reject far more than they should.Interesting thought, no?And the practical takeaway from this? Well, maybe it’s this. That the standard you need to achieve is easier to reach than you thought. The gates that matter aren’t those held by the traditional industry, they’re the ones held by readers – does your book please them?That’s how it ought to be, right? And the goal is one you can achieve. That doesn’t mean you can discard all those disciplines around writing well and editing hard, but it means you can shift the entire project from “never gonna happen” to “yes, really quite plausible.”And that’s good, isn’t it? A hopeful message in a worrying age.That\'s it from me? What about you? Have you submitted work to Bookouture? What was your experience? And would you want to do it, or do you still prefer a bricks-and-mortar led strategy from a traditional publisher? Let me know, and we can all have a Heated Debate ...

I once saw a documentary about dog sledding in the Arctic. The show had (I think) three teams racing to the Pole using broadly the same kind of technology that the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen once used.The Norwegian team won the race (obviously: they were Norwegian), but the TV show focused mostly on the exploits and struggles of the British team, all of whom were strong and committed - but who had no experience of the arctic. Or huskies. Or dog sleds. Or the arduous cross-country skiing involved. Or indeed, anything actually relevant to arctic travel. I’m thinking about that documentary because (drum roll, cymbals, and your choice of other percussive instruments) I AM ONCE AGAIN WRITING A FIONA GRIFFITHS NOVEL. I’ve been so busy with all things Jericho for the past year or two, I just haven’t written much. I’ve had a half-written novel on my laptop all this time and not had the time or clarity of thought to drive it forwards. But now I actually do. And I’m 50,000 words into a novel that’ll be about twice that length when cooked, which means … I am about halfway towards the North Pole ... Any map I once had has long ago been shredded by ice and wind … I’ve no damn idea how long this journey is likely to take … And I would quite like to go home, curl up in front of a log fire, and see how many crumpets I can eat. The simple fact is that there is something unnerving about being a long way into a book but also a long way from that blessed THE END. Most first drafts just are a bit shite. That’s not an original observation, I recognise, but it is one that intrudes quite forcefully at about the 50,000 word mark. As it happens, I’m free of a lot of standard author-angst. I know I put sentences together quite nicely. I know my characterisation works. If I write a scene that lacks colour, I know how to revive it swiftly and effectively. I know that I have the tools to identify and fix most problems. But still. In my head, I can’t help but compare this current draft to all the perfected drafts of previous novels that have now been published. And this book is, at the moment, just plain worse than all of them. Hurtling forwards into that arctic gloom seems like the only thing to do - but also a rather pointless one. It feels like a somewhat painful way of making a big dull thing instead of a small dull one. So this is where we have to separate brain and instinct. My instinct just says: “Go home. Eat crumpets.” My brain says, “No, look, don’t you remember that you felt roughly this way with ALL your books? Or perhaps not every single one of them, but certainly most, and every single time you went on to fix the issues.” And my brain’s right. I even know that my basic premise is fine. (Secure psychiatric hospital on the west coast of Wales. Stuffed full of veterans with Special Forces experience. Lots of shenanigans. Perfect for my character and my readership.) So really, I just need to bash out a draft, list the issues with that draft, then start fixing them. And that’s right. That’s the right advice. That’s what I’m going to do. But. Two plump little buts to offer you. But the first. The first but is simply that this midpoint anxiety often generates little flashes of insights. As I was worrying about my book, I realised that I hadn’t properly made characters of the key doctors at the hospital. But since the shenanigans needed to involve them, they had to feature properly in the early part of the book. And I need to do that in classic Agatha Christie style - where readers all suspect the irascible Italian, only to discover that the avuncular parrot-keeper is the baddie. If I fix that issue in the book now, my first draft will be that little bit closer to target and, overall, I’ll save myself work. If I had closed my mind to the worry, I wouldn’t have had that insight. My journey to the pole would have been longer and frozener that it needed to have been. So worry’s good. It’s creative. But the second. The second but is more vicious than the first. It’s a yawning crevasse camouflaged by the tiniest bridge of snow. And it’s this: Sometimes you really are writing a terrible book. Sometimes, it’s not simply that your execution of the idea is standard first-draft bad, it’s that the idea itself is beyond saving. This is where I have a layer of shelter not available to most of you. I know that I have a readership for another Fiona Griffiths tale. I know this idea basically works for this genre and this detective. I know that I have publishers contracted to take the book I’ll give them (as well as a larger audience that comes to me via self-publishing.) But it’s not always like that. Not even for an author with a significant publishing history. The fact is that most writers, most of the time, have to ask, “Is this just a hideous mistake?” Sometimes the answer is yes, in which case the solution isn’t simply more labour, it’s the hard decision to abort proceedings. In that documentary I mentioned, the British team suffered with frostbite and wounds that needed antibiotics. But antibiotics hadn’t been available to Amundsen et al, so they weren’t available to the team. Continue or give up? It was a real question. As I remember it, one member of the team thought he could continue despite a nasty looking wound, and he was right. Another one - an international oarsman with a couple of Olympic golds - just took the view that his job was to continue marching, no matter what. Because his view was overly inflexible, he became detached from his team and would have been exceptionally vulnerable had he encountered a concealed crevasse, or picked up an ankle injury, or gone off route, or anything of that sort. He survived, but he might not have done. He made the wrong call. And you? I don’t know. I don’t know your book. But I will say that you must have an idea that works. That’s why I get so loud about the importance of a strong elevator pitch. That’s why it’s important to bake that elevator pitch right into the very essence of the novel. If you do that, if you have a powerful idea and your book truly delivers on that idea, you need to hurtle on to the Pole. Yes, you’ll have a draft with a whole frozen ocean of problems, but those things are fixable and you’ll get the job done. But if your idea is unworkable, then abort, abort, abort. Throw away your wooden skis. Discard that pemmican. Find yourself a helicopter ride back to somewhere civilised. Get home, light a fire, eat crumpets, start again. For me now, I’m confident in my idea. It really is just a word count challenge to complete the draft. Mush, mush, my lovable husky friends. That thing there, through the murk? That’s the Pole, that is. Onwards! But what about you, my fine parrot-keeping friends. How far are you towards your own Pole? What are your thoughts & feelings on the way And how do you get on with pemmican?

On Friday 26 June, we released a book: Getting Published, authored by me, and a major update on a book I first wrote ten years ago. (You can take a look at the book here, if you want to.)You might think that releasing a book was an occasion for a little hoo-hah and hullaballoo, but in fact we released it in perfect silence. We didn’t tweet, didn’t blog, didn’t post on Facebook, didn’t send an email.The one thing we did do was ask our Advance Review Copy team to submit their reviews for the book. Amazon, for obvious reasons, doesn’t permit reviews prior to the moment of publication, so you can only start to gather reviews in the day or two following launch.Over that weekend therefore – the 26, 27, 28 June – we quietly nudged our ARC folk to submit reviews. Those reviews built gradually over the weekend, to a total of more than 50. We didn’t solicit only five-star reviews. We didn’t even do the “if you hated this book, tell me; if you loved it, tell others” thing. We just asked people to report their honest opinions via Amazon.The result was that we got a mix of reviews. Mostly five-star. Some four-star. One three-star. Every author wants all five-star reviews of course, but the fact is that a mixture of opinions and comments lends absolute authenticity to the overall verdict. In the US and the UK, the reviews are knocking around the 4.7 to 4.8 level – highly positive, but just mixed enough to be real. Perfect.We had some launch weekend issues, of course. Amazon started randomly and aggressively deleting reviews for absolutely no reason at all. It has form on this, of course, and there’s nothing much you can do except complain.That wasn’t the only niggle.The book cover didn’t show up properly for a while, because we’d inadvertently uploaded one that was marginally too large. It also took us a bit of time to get the paperback uploaded and available for sale.But though we were working away behind the scenes, no one really noticed any problems – because the book, though published, was effectively invisible.At this early stage, Amazon didn’t know who to market the book to. It made virtually no sales. Our beloved book was simply buried in a pile of 8 million other titles. By the end of the weekend, we had sold precisely four books: none on Friday, one on Saturday, three on Sunday. Four books across the entire English-speaking world.But we didn’t care.We wanted to make sure that when people did finally start landing on our book page, there would be plenty of reviews telling them what to expect – and basically validating the impulse to buy. (No one loves being the first idiot to buy an un-reviewed book.)So over the weekend, we just sat tight and let our reviews build. Then, on Monday afternoon, we finally broke our weekend of silence. I started emailing you guys with a short email telling you about the book and inviting you to buy it. Some of you got the email on Monday, some on Tuesday, and so on through the week. As an extra little “buy it now” kicker, I told you that the price would double in a few days’ time.The aim of this staggered email campaign was to build a gradually swelling mass of sales. If we’d judged it perfectly, sales would have run something like this:Monday – 100Tuesday – 110Wednesday – 120Thursday – 130 Friday – 140The aim in seeking to build that kind of profile is to send three messages to Amazon. Those messages are: (1) this book is selling, (2) there is steady demand for the book, not some temporary one-off spike, (3) that demand is, if anything, increasing.And crucially, because you guys are all writer-types who love writer-stuff, we were in effect sending a critical fourth message too: (4) Look at the people who are buying this book; it’s that sort of person you need to market it too.In effect, the purpose of our launch campaign was less about actually selling books and more about teaching Amazon how to sell our book – and making sure that it wanted to try. The sales campaign was all about prepping the machine.How did we do? Well, I suppose we succeeded in achieving our aim, at least approximately. Our actual ebook sales profile looked like this:Monday – 125Tuesday – 141Wednesday – 95Thursday – 92 Friday – 145(Paperbacks, for some reason, started selling on the Wednesday, then increasing each day.)That sales profile showed Amazon that the book was selling, that it was selling steadily, and taught Amazon’s bots about the kind of people who were its most likely buyers. It didn’t quite demonstrate a steadily increasing demand, but our strong Friday finale probably did enough on that front anyway.On Sunday, we changed the ebook price from $2.99 in the US to $7.99. In Britain, we changed the price from £1.99 to £5.99.Obviously enough, the reason for launching at a low price (but one that still delivers 70% royalties) was to maximise sales in that launch week and to give the book the best possible start in life.The reason for switching to the $7.99 pricing was to give us a much better royalty on each sale - $5.59, in fact. At the same time, our book is still cheaper than its natural competitors (the ebook version of Writers Market retails at an exorbitant $19.99, for example.) So we’re both earning a good royalty on every sale – and making ourselves the easiest, cheapest entry-point in what is not a particularly cheap market.Good. Some ebook pricing decisions are complicated. This one feels relatively straightforward.We can’t play the same kind of games with paperbacks – printing costs just set a relatively high floor price – but we don’t really need to. Since ending the promo week and changing the price, we’re selling about 10-20 paperbacks a day and about half that number of ebooks daily.In the UK, we’re still nestling at or near the top of the relevant category bestseller lists. That means the book will pick up sales passively, without any especial love from us.In the US, we didn’t quite achieve the sales mass we wanted to in that first week, so the book’s visibility now is less than we wanted. For that reason, we’re about to start supporting the book with sponsored listings on Amazon. The purpose will be to drive sales to the point at which natural, organic sales can largely take over.And that’s it. That’s pretty much you need to know about launch week and where it’s left us.The key point from all of this? The absolute key? Simply this:Selling on Amazon isn’t so much about how many books you can sell yourself, it’s about teaching Amazon how to sell your book – and making sure that it wants to.That’s the trick. That’s the whole deal right there. If you really internalise that message, everything you do in terms of Amazon-selling will be easier and more fruitful than if you don’t.Bish-bosh.This email has yabbered on long enough. Me? I’m off to make a hashish and rose-petal jelly, which I will serve with mint tea and a dish of almond biscuits.Reminder: If you want a free review e-copy of 52 LETTERS - a collection of these blog posts and emails from me - then email my colleague Rachael via publishing@jerichowriters.com. Put 52 LETTERS in the subject line, and please don\'t forget to tell us which Amazon store is the one you generally use. We have only a limited number of copies to give away, and it\'ll be first-come first-served.

Really interesting feedback on our excursion into the present tense last week. More on that – sort of – in a bit. But first may we have:A toot on a trumpetA fat man thumping a kettle drumA peacock riding a donkeyA small elephant with a richly jewelled caparisonA cart full of slightly tired dancers in leotards and top hatsSome children handing out bottles of waterA rumpus, a brouhaha and a hullabalooBecause …It is the 2020 launch of our Ultimate Novel Writing Course.This course won’t be for everyone. It’s quite demanding and it’s quite expensive. But if you were thinking of doing an MA or MFA course with an emphasis on creative writing, then our UNWC is probably something to think about.I’ve included more about all this in a PS. We ran a course last year (it’s just finishing up now) and it was excellent. That said, we’ve learned stuff in the course of 2019/20 and we’re aiming for this year’s course to be even better. If you’re interested – and, to repeat, this isn’t for everyone – then do read more below. (Or just pop over here for more.)Righty-ho. That’s one thing.The next thing to say is that my Friday email next weekmay come to you on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday or Friday;it will be very short;it will ask you to take one simple actionAnd that’ll be that.Normal service will resume the week after – at which point I’ll tell you exactly what I was doing and why I was doing it.Right.Nuffothat.Let’s turn to the altogether more interesting topic of the walls of time and space.The big takeaway from last week’s excursion to the present tense was that you don’t have to isolate yourself in a little dot of always-on consciousness. You can just talk about the external world, and the recent past, and the near future, and your narrator’s thoughts and memories in a much more fluid, more natural sounding way.Now I got quite a lot of correspondence on that email. Much of it – oh, OK, most of it – was concerned with moustaches and tress-tossing. But a few people wanted to know if that I had similar observations in relation to the past tense.Well – kinda.On the one hand, the past tense doesn’t lure you into the same bad habits. But it’s still possible to write a past-tense story with the narrative viewpoint jammed at the same distance from the protagonist and the story the entire time.So perhaps we see everything at middle-distance focus – windows, coffee cups, mattresses – but see nothing that’s either tiny or huge, nothing either utterly intimate or broadly universal.Now if you handle things really carefully (and have a dab of genius) you might just write a wonderful novel that way.More likely, though, you’ll bore the reader.So mix things up. Cheat. And cheat merrily. As often and wildly as you like.So, let’s say your needs you to follow Character A and Character B through some fairly tedious city streets. Fine. So do that. But you can pull in anything from anywhere along the way.Take, for example, this little chunk narrated by my own little Fiona Griffiths:The bar is only a twenty-minute walk away and parking could be difficult, so we walk. After a couple of minutes, Buzz puts his arm around me and squeezes me in close. It’s a gesture that moves me every time he does it. Like I’m not just being hooked in close to one large and well-proportioned male body, but like I’m being gathered back into the world of the living.It makes me think of those astronauts dangling in space on the end of their tethering ropes. You think that those ropes are pipes feeding air to the space suit, but they’re not. They’re just ropes. If someone cut the rope or unhitched it from the spacecraft, the astronaut would be left dangling for ever, hanging a thousand miles above the Earth, waiting to die. Buzz’s enfolding arm brings me in from the void, through the airlock, back to the community of the human race.I usually become girly and affectionate when I feel these things. I become that now. On the one hand, this is just a comment about Fiona’s boyfriend squeezing her close and her warmly affectionate feelings about that.And on the other hand – wow!All he’s actually done is squeeze her close. But what she talks about is being an astronaut dangling alone in space, until Buzz brings her “in from the void, through the airlock, back to the community of the human race.” There’s such a huge gap between their actual situation (a normal, short walk) and the one in her head that we feel the power of his gesture far more than we would otherwise have done.And we’ve been able to skip a dull little description of early-evening Cardiff, because we’ve just thrown in an utterly unexpected description of dangling astronauts. No mattresses or coffee cups there. Note that the passage ends with the short sentence, “I become that now.” That “now” marks the transition from flight-of-fancy to dutiful-return to the actual present. I’ll give you another example.In this instance, Fiona is hooked up with a trawler captain (Honnold) by video link. Fiona’s boss wants to know if Fiona was the mystery woman on board the trawler. If Honnold answers truthfully that she was, her career as a detective will be over. Here’s how the moment goes:Jackson [Fiona’s boss] waves a hand.At me, at the chair, at the end of my career.I stand up, of course. There’s nothing else to do. Move towards my doom, but – a funny thing – have this almost literal sense of getting smaller as I approach. A kind of Alice in Wonderland experience, in which I find myself shrinking until, by the time I have somehow clambered onto that evilly rocking seat, I feel myself no bigger than a tiny white mouse, nibbling, and twitching, and combing my whiskers.I face the screen.Honnold’s face, but I’m so spacey, so gluey with apprehension, that I can read nothing at all in his expression, his tone, his smile.Somewhere beyond the orbit of Pluto, I hear Jackson say, ‘Can you see all right, Captain?’ Jackson adjusts the webcam at our end and rolls my chair forward.‘Aye, that’s fine.’‘And? Is this the woman?’There’s a pause.I feel the silence fill with the bones of a thousand winters, the death of galaxies. My limbs are lead. My mouth is glue.Again, this is as wildly different from that window-mattress-coffee-cup view as you could imagine. Fiona has become a small white mouse, travelled beyond the orbit of Pluto, waited a thousand winters and witnessed the death of galaxies – and she’s done all this, whilst making a very short video-call.Those vastly over-the-top comparisons are obviously a way to emphasise how much this moment matters. But they also turn time and space into a rubber that you can bend as far and as creatively as you fancy. I’ve done that here with a narrator using the present tense, but the same basic approach would work just fine with the past.Yes: my first-person narrator writes in a handbrake-off sort of way and you need a basic synchrony between the images you use and the person you’re dealing with, but the basic approach can be used almost anywhere.And also –A weird thing happens. Even though these two passages relate merely to (i) a conventional loving boyfriend-girlfriend gesture, and (ii) two people looking at each other via video, the whole book seems to have enlarged.The action seems bigger. The emotional stakes seem greater. The whole canvas seems enlarged and more alive. And a boring street scene / office scene takes on a colour and a charge that it could never have had with imagery drawn from the mattress-window-coffee-cup playbook. Those are a lot of cheap wins, right? Plus it’s fun to do.Remember to take a peek at the UNWC info.Remember too that next week you will be getting a very short email from me on a random day of the week. Everything will be explained (and back to normal) in two weeks’ time.Right now, though? That damn peacock has fallen off the donkey and the elephant has made off with one of the dancers. I’m off to deal with them.Give me one of your space & time bending comparisons / images. You get a double vodka if you beat a thousand winters. If you also travel beyond the orbit of Pluto, I will have the vodka brought to you by elephant.AND I\'M NOT JUST SAYING THAT. I REALLY WILL.

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, people used to write in the past tense. In the galaxy we live in today, people increasingly write in the present tense.I don’t know why. I used to write in the past tense. Now I use the present (albeit for a very specific character and for a very specific set of reasons.) You quite likely do the same.And if you do – fine. There’s nothing wrong with the present tense and for that matter, there’s nothing wrong with the past tense. If you’re a Past-Master, then fine. You can safely print off this email and hurl it, flamboyantly, into a burning waste paper basket. You may want to add a ‘huh’ of disdain or perhaps twirl the tips of your luxuriant moustache. This email is not for you.If you are a Present-Tenser, however – or (worse!) if you have no moustache to twirl – then then read on.OK. So:The thing about writing in the present tense, and especially first person in the present tense, is that it is the easiest way – the very simplest method ever devised – to write badly.F’rinstance, take this passage, which I have just concocted for your joy and delight:I enter the room. The door clangs shut behind me. Jared Coad is there, in shorts and a black T-shirt. Bare feet.I smooth my skirt and smile awkwardly. I move to sit and as I do I can feel his gaze on me. I feel the way my office-grey pencil skirt outlines the shape of my bum and legs.His gaze on me never wavers.‘You came back,’ he says.‘Yes, Jared.’‘Interview time.’ He says that like it’s a joke, but if so, I don’t know if it’s a joke I get to share. ‘You didn’t bring your boyfriend with you this time.’‘PC Price. He’s not my boyfriend as you perfectly well know.’I try to keep my look and tone professional, but I feel my cheeks starting to burn. I reach for the tape-recorder and my hands shake a bit as I try to get the tape into the machine. It’s only a distraction anyway. I try to distract myself. I want to get back on track. I don’t want to lose this interview before it even starts.I hope you realise this is not good prose. It’s not terrible, but if I were an agent or an acquisitions editor, this isn’t a book I would read any further. I already know the author isn’t one I trust. (And most agents would read on. I’m exceptionally picky.)And the reason? The primary reason? It’s all those “I + verb” constructions, especially ones that start sentences. Here’s the passage again with those things bolded and (at the start of the sentence) in capitals as well:I ENTER the room. The door clangs shut behind me. Jared Coad is there, in shorts and a black T-shirt. Bare feet.I SMOOTH my skirt and smile awkwardly. I MOVE to sit and as I do, I can feel his gaze on me. I FEEL the way my office-grey pencil skirt outlines the shape of my bum and legs.His gaze on me never wavers.‘You came back,’ he says.‘Yes, Jared.’‘Interview time.’ He says that like it’s a joke, but if so, I don’t know if it’s a joke I get to share. ‘You didn’t bring your boyfriend with you this time.’‘PC Price. He’s not my boyfriend as you perfectly well know.’I TRY to keep my look and tone professional, but I feel my cheeks starting to burn. I REACH for the tape-recorder and my hands shake a bit as I try to get the tape into the machine. It’s only a distraction anyway. I TRY to distract myself. I WANT to get back on track. I DON’T WANT to lose this interview before it even starts.That’s 15 uses of the construction in fewer than 200 words, and 9 sentences that start with it.What’s more, some of those sentences are quite awkward.There’s something quite blunt about the Simple Present in English (eg: “I try”). In ordinary speech, we often prefer the Present Continuous (“I am trying”) or the Present Perfect (“I have tried”). But because those forms don’t immediately leap to mind when we think ‘present tense’, we can easily end up grabbing for the most obvious tool in the box, even when it’s the wrong one.The result is sentences like “I try to distract myself”, when “I am trying to distract myself” sounds more natural – more fluent.You could say much the same about “I try to keep my look and tone professional.”That’s something she has tried to do since coming into the room, it’s something she is continuing to do, and something she will also do in the near future. And (cos this is English, the world’s most over-stuffed language), we have a tense for that – the present perfect. So that sentence would become: “I have tried to keep my look and tone professional …”Already better, right?OK, now because you’re in the zone, may I suggest you take a look at this sentence and figure out why you hate, loathe and despise it:I feel the way my office-grey pencil skirt outlines the shape of my bum and legs.You hate it because the real subject of the sentence is the skirt, and you’ve just shoved a totally redundant “I feel” at the start of it. So we just rewrite the sentence restoring the proper subject, so:My pencil-skirt outlines the shape of my bum and legs.Better, right? Not just better, but shorter. We’ve said the exact same thing in fewer words.I’ve gone super-specific in my niggles so far, and specific is good. It tells us we’re on the right lines.But there’s also a broader sense in which I want to yell, “Loosen up! Relax!”You can write first person, present tense in a very intimate, very interior way … but where the actual prose is much less me, me, me. For example, by having your narrator observe and relate telling external details, you can convey a lot about what’s happening inside.Here’s yet another crack at that interview scene – except this time, it’s a real extract from my current work in progress. My narrator is Fiona Griffiths, and she’s about to interview an extremely dangerous psychiatric patient. I’ve put some comments in square brackets as we go.Interview time.Jared Coad.Him again, me again. Except with just the two of us in his room, and no great apparatus of recording equipment, the space seems different. Bigger, certainly, but also more liquid. Brimming with possibilities that seem to lie round a corner, just out of sight.[This in a way is about Fiona’s interior feelings, but it’s delivered without a single use of the word ‘I’.]Coad is in shorts and a black T-shirt this time. Bare feet.His legs and arms are medium-hairy, and have the inevitable sheen of recent sweat. The smell in the room has a roughly even balance of recent perspiration and shampoo.‘You came back.’‘Yes, Jared.’I’m wearing a dark grey pencil skirt and an oversized jumper in a duck egg blue. His eyes rotate through my various different components. Memorising me, consuming me.We’ve now had Fiona’s observation of Jared physically and his of her. It feels a lot more intimate and sexual than in the first version of this scene, but the word ‘I’ has scarcely featured.My outfit is hardly provocative but, if I’m honest, it’s probably on the slightly sexier end of the not-very-sexy stuff I have with me here. Partly, it’s like a little gift I can bring. If Coad gets off on seeing my bum in a fitted skirt, then he’s welcome to the pleasure. But, as I enter his room, and turn slightly to adjust the cushions on my little bench before I sit, I realise I quite like his gaze. Quite like his admiration. I linger a half-second longer adjusting cushions than I really need to. Bend a little lower. Smooth my skirt as I sit.‘You didn’t bring your boyfriend with you this time.’‘PC Price. No, he’s not with me today.’‘And you haven’t brought your tape recorder.’‘No.’‘Which means you aren’t about to arrest me.’‘I’m not interviewing you under caution, no. And I’m not about to detain you either.’Coad interrogates me a little further with his eyes. That troubled gaze. He has a habit of moving his lips, almost as though speaking or externalizing thoughts, but no sound comes out. The effect, however, is almost as though he is talking to an unseen colleague. And if he were doing that, he could only be talking about me.That’s 330 words and the word “I” hardly features, except in the one paragraph where Fiona is intensely self-conscious of his gaze and her enjoyment of it. In that context, it doesn’t feel awkward, it feels part of the sexual tension in the room.The main lesson here? Just loosen up. Write naturally. Be suspicious of too many “I + verb” constructions. Be doubly suspicious when they start a sentence or feel awkward or introduce bodily sensations. All those things are fine in the right amounts. Just … don’t overdo it.That’s it from me. Now please find your pot of moustache wax and start twirling.I understand that some of you ladies receiving this message may not (yet) have a luxuriant moustache of your own, in which case you can Toss Your Tresses In A Haughty Manner. That would do absolutely fine.Till soon – twirl, twirl.OK. What about you? Do you write present or past? Do you want to expose some of your present tense writing to my Ultra Pedantic Gaze? Or do you merely want to practise your Tress Tossing? In which case, get a load of this ...

Quite soon, Jericho Writers is going to turn, in a small way, into a publisher. We want to source and publish really great books on writing, publishing and author-led marketing. And of course, you folks will get first dibs and the sweetest deals.We’re going to start simply. Ages ago, I wrote a couple of books for Bloomsbury, owner of the UK’s venerable Writers & Artists brand. The books were on Getting Published and How To Write, and were nicely received by readers, and – over time – sold plenty of copies.But since those books first came out, the world has changed rather a lot. For one thing, the text of Getting Published was creakily out of date. It really had nothing to say about e-books or about the digital revolution which was, back then, still only a looming shadow.For another thing, that revolution utterly transformed the way books like those are purchased.Back in the day, people bought niche non-fiction in bookshops, because there was nowhere else to buy it. So a bigger bookshop might have a section on writing, but stock selection was inevitably a bit hit and miss. The turnover of those sections was slow and a bookseller wouldn’t feel they had to stock everything. So a reader could easily turn up looking for books on publishing, and find only a fraction of what was available – and a poorly curated fraction at that, because booksellers wouldn’t have the expertise or incentive to research the niche in depth.Amazon blew that old system up completely – a good thing.If you want niche non-fiction, Amazon offers you everything. It allows you to compare rival texts at rival prices by rival authors. You can check book blurbs, and browse the text, and see reader reviews. For the two books I had out with Bloomsbury, my online sales as a proportion were at 85% of the total and rising. I’m surprised there were any offline sales at all, to be honest.So for these reasons, and others, Bloomsbury and I chose to part ways. (Which is nice of Bloomsbury, by the way. They aren’t under an obligation to revert rights, so it’s kind of them to do so.) I’ve utterly overhauled the Getting Published book and given a good old facelift to the How To Write one too. We’ll launch Getting Published properly in a couple of weeks – and we’ll do that modern-style. That is, instead of a book launch process designed around physical stores, our process be designed, from the ground-up, to be online-friendly.What does that mean?Well, a few things, and I’ll make sure you get some really good insights into the whole process over the next few weeks.Today I’ll tell you how we’ve approached book covers and how we’ve approached the whole business of securing reader reviews.Okiedoke.Book coversIn physical world, the art of the book cover is 50% “What book cover will most appeal to readers?” and 50% “What book cover will most appeal to supermarket retail buyers?”Yes, a cover has to work in every format and through every channel, but traditional bestsellers are built via volume sales through the supermarkets, so those retail buyers are key. Since those buyers are professional, and since they’re looking at every catalogue from every big publisher, it’s hard to game the system. That’s why so many covers in a particular genre look similar. Loads of publishers home in on the same solutions to the same question.And another thing: in physical world, you can’t change a cover if one doesn’t work. Publishers’ catalogues come out six months or more before publication. Orders are placed weeks before. By the time readers have actually encountered the book, it’s way too late to change it.That’s not the case in online-world. Sophisticated digital publishers like APub and Bookouture will simply trial a cover. If they don’t get the sales they want and expect, they’ll change the cover overnight and re-analyse the data. A cover is as much changeable and malleable as the Amazon blurb itself, which you can change just by entering a dashboard and altering the text.We wanted to take a similar approach. We developed five different covers from a total of three designers. I’m sure we all had views as to which cover was best, but honestly, it’s hard to know for sure. In particular, we’re not buyers for that particular book. We’re a tiny sample. Opinions vary. We could just be wrong.So we went to Facebook and created five advertisements. Each had the exact same copy, and just asked people if they wanted a free copy of the book. The only variation was the cover image we showed in the ad.That ad showed to a total of 8,000 people (all of whom were interested in writing and publishing – we’re able to select that audience using the tools provided by Facebook.) Of those 8,000, a total of 370 chose to get a free copy.Crucially, though, the different cover designs did not all perform the same. The best cover performed almost exactly 50% than the ‘worst’ cover – even though that ‘worst’ cover looked amazing and was by the same designer. Honestly, I don’t think we’d have predicted that result beforehand. We just didn’t know.And that’s it! That’s the whole technique right there. We have compelling data justifying our choice of cover, so we can launch confident that our sort of readers like that sort of look. It’s a brilliant way to handle things.And yes: it’s a somewhat costly approach – only not really.The Facebook ads themselves cost about £100 / $130. We stopped running the experiment at that point because the answer was already clear. And yes, we needed various different cover designs – but designers always offer you several anyway. I’m sure we spent less overall than a Big 5 publisher would spend on a regular cover.That’s cover design run in a modern, data-led, online-first way. We’ll do versions of that experiment many more times before we’re done.And now – Review teamsReviews obviously matter on Amazon. Partly, people want to know what other people have thought of a book, but also people just don’t like to be the first dummy to hit the Buy It Now button – just like you don’t want to turn up early to a party.Additionally, traffic to a book page on Amazon is typically at its highest around launch. Amazon works much harder to promote new books than old stock, so visibility generally spikes at launch and drops away after that.So you want your reviews to show very soon after launch.That’s a really big deal that will affect your launch sales, but also your book’s future trajectory – as higher levels of early sales will keep you selling for a long time after and will give Amazon’s databots a much clearer idea of who your audience is.Right. So you want reviews and you want them promptly after launch. But how do you achieve that – and achieve it in a non-spammy, ethical way?Answer: you go to your mailing list – that’s you – and say: “Would you like an advance review copy of my book, for free?”If people want the book - in ebook format - , they have to agree to post an (honest, genuine, sincere) review of it on Amazon within 48 hours of the book launching. There’s nothing spammy there. You may get some negative reviews as well as some positive ones. You’re asking people to write their genuine thoughts, not just automatic 5-star praise.Those reviews can populate quickly. The last time I brought a Fiona Griffiths book out, I had 50-80 reviews posted in a matter of days. Those reviews comforted newcomers to the series that it had legs and merit and have supported sales ever since.Yes: you do need a mailing list before this technique works with ease. But yes: there are ways you can do something similar even from a standing start.But since this email is already too long (gosh, what a surprise), I’ll leave it there for now.If you would like a free advance review copy of Getting Published, by me, please see info in the PSes below. It’s first come, first served, and we have 100 books on offer only. I’d love it if you chose to help.Oh yes: and the book’s quite good too. It’s Getting Published completely rewritten for the market of 2020 and beyond. I hope you love it. More on all this shortly.____________________If you want a free Advance Review Copy of Getting Published, by me, then do as follows:Email publishing@jerichowriters.comPut ARC PLEASE in the subject lineIn your message, tell us which Amazon store you mostly use – Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk.We will give ARCs to the first 100 people who contact us – 50 for those using the US Amazon store and 50 for those using the UK onePlease be aware that the review copy will be an EBOOK. We don’t have physical copies to give away, though physical copies will be available for sale at launch.If you are asking us for a review copy, you do need to leave an honest review within 48 hours of the book’s publication, please. We’ll contact you around the time of publication to nudge you.

Oh dearly beloved, I have news, I have news.This isn’t news of some new lovely Jericho thing; it’s the opposite. I’ve been busy for a long time with all things Jericho. Admin, tech, staffing, products, finance, blah. And now, those things are all still busy and thriving. But –Increasingly, those things don’t need me. I have people more capable than me in most of the roles that matter. When we have weekly e-meetings, and someone asks me, “Anything from you, Harry?”, I mostly now just say no.Oh the bliss of that no. Because, for well over a year now, I’ve had a half-finished Fiona Griffiths novel on my computer. It’s a novel under contract too, albeit contracts with deadlines that I’ve felt able to ignore. (Douglas Adams said: “I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.” – that’s never been me before, but Jericho hath made it so.)Any case, point is, I have some time available again and I have restarted work on the book that will one day be THE HOUSE AT THE END OF THE WORLD. It’s a joy to be writing again. It’s a joy to re-encounter the whole set-up I’ve built for myself – Fiona Griffiths has to investigate a crime that seems to emanate from a secure psychiatric hospital on the west coast of Wales. She’s had some bad personal experiences of psychiatric hospitals herself. And this one is stuffed full of ex-Special Forces veterans, with scrambled brains and a remarkable capacity for violence. And – well, there’s a whole plum pudding of ingredients, which I’ve assembled mostly because I think they’re yummy.So: it’s a pleasure to be back.The biggest pleasure? It’s to be with the characters again. Fiona especially – she and I have walked together for three quarters of a million words so far and there’s plenty of road still ahead of us.Coming back after this long away, I realise that the relationship we writers have with our characters IS a real relationship. That is, it has elements of actual love in it.You think that because the character isn’t real, the emotions can’t be either. But they can. It’s not like parent/child love, or romantic love, or human/dog love, or anything like that. It’s its own thing. It\'s writer/character love, and it’s one-way only, but it’s real. If by some weird twist of brain chemistry I was prohibited from “seeing” Fiona again, I’d have a real bereavement, a genuine loss. And now that I’m back with her, writing actively, not just thinking wistfully, it’s like an old friend has flown in from Australia after years away and we can pick things up again, almost exactly as they were when we left off.To have that kind of loving relationship on tap is a kind of gift. Writers have it. The rest of the world (poor saps) are forced to rely on real people, with all their flaws.That’s not the only pleasure. For me, there’s a pleasure in writing. There’s a painful pleasure – or a pleasurable pain – in plotting. There’s a lot of pleasure in editing and re-editing. I like most of the stuff around publication too, whether trad or self-pub. And, though I’ve been off the circuit just recently, I love the crime writing scene. I love the writers and the gossip and the booze and the inclusive insiderishness of it all.By about this point in an email, I occasionally check myself. Have I actually delivered any actionable and useful advice, or have I just waffled around talking about boxes full of elegantly dressed women and other such nonsense?Mostly, I pass my actionable advice test with flying colours. This email, so far, flunks completely.Useful advice for you to take home and cuddle at night:Nada.Zip.A big fat socially-distanced zero.Except, here’s the thing.Your happiness – your many and varied sorts of writing happiness – all matter. You need to cherish and nurture them. If you notice one of them wilting, you need to figure out what’s going on and fix it.Partly, that’s just a question of good life management. If a thing doesn’t make you happy, then twizzle it around until it does. That’s all the more important with things connected with writing. Writing is, in most cases, badly paid enough that you have to love it for its own sake. If you’re a hedge fund manager who doesn’t much love (erm) funding hedges, I’m sure the other compensations are plentiful. That’s not the case with writing.But also: you will work better and faster and with stronger outcomes if you love what you do. Take the editing process. If you love that, as I do, you’ll be reluctant to leave the task until it’s really truly done. Things that were not quite right in the first or fourth draft manuscript start to glitter and shine. If editing is just a chore to get through, you’ll almost certainly end up finishing a good bit before you should.So find your happy.That is the actionable advice of this email. Find your happy. If you love some parts of the writing process and hate others, then look to see how you can transform your experience of the parts you don’t like. Do you gamify it? (“Hmm. I don’t like editing, but today I’m going to see if I can find 5,000 words of unnecessary text to cut. Ready, steady, go…”) Do you just add kindness? (“Right. I don’t usually let myself work in a coffee shop, but while I’m editing, I’m going to do it with coffees and muffins every day until I’m done.”) Do you just add self-love? (“You know what? I didn’t like this, but actually I can see this book starting to take shape and I’m genuinely proud of what I’ve accomplished.”)Or whatever. But find your happy. Your work and your characters will be grateful for it.Here endeth the epistle.But what about you? Do you love writing? Or is it more pain than pleasure? What parts do you love and which would you willingly ditch forever? let me know in the comments, and we\'ll all have a Heated Debate.

I mentioned last week that I was reading Linwood Barclay’s Elevator Pitch, in preparation for talking to him as part of our upcoming Summer Festival.And – it’s big.It’s not super-long – I’m going to guess it runs to something like 150-160,000 words – but it has a scale that goes beyond mere length. It’s a thriller that encompasses the whole of Manhattan. The mayor. The son. The journalist. The daughter. The terrorist. The terrorist’s boss. The cop. The victims. The families. The ambassador. The FBI agent. And more.I haven’t counted the number of points of view, but the total is probably two dozen or more. So disposable are the POVs, you get whole (entertaining) chapters written from the perspective of someone that the reader, not the character, realises is about to die.The book is a big, fun, entertaining read. Though the thriller thrills as it should, it’s never nasty. There’s no gratuitous violence. No voyeurism of pain. A kind of compassionate humanity lives over the whole book.But it’s the POVs I want to talk about.Most of you will be working on a book with a single viewpoint, or maybe two or three carefully judged ones. You’ll agonise over whether one of your characters should be allowed her own POV, or whether she should have her little bit of fictional consciousness squeezed off the page altogether.And then Linwood Barclay just manufactures points of view as though they didn’t matter. He’ll pop someone in a lift (= elevator, oh my American friends), give us three pages of insight into that character’s immortal soul, then splat that character from existence.What’s going on? Why do you have to curate your characters with all this astonishing care, when Linwood Barclay can just manufacture and discard POVs with wild abandon?Well.Big question.(And OK, I realise in my head I was doing that “well” in a Sven-Goran Eriksson voice. The guy used to be manager of the England football team, and he turned “well” into a two-syllable, very considered, Swedish-accented word, whose role was to live at the front of every sentence. If you were in a car with him as navigator, every time you asked for directions, he’d have said, “Well,” with such depth of thought that you’d have sped past the turning before he had time to give you an actual answer. So, now that you know that part sounds like in my head, we’re going to do it again.)Well-ll.Big question, but it resolves quite easily into three rough choices.Utterly intimateIf you want to be utterly intimate with your main character and you want your reader to share that intimacy, you need a single viewpoint. It doesn’t matter too much whether that viewpoint is delivered first person or third, what matters is that the reader is living completely in that character’s shoes.I do it myself. I’ve written about three quarters of a million words about my little Fiona Griffiths and every single one of those words is written from her point of view. Never once do the novels peep even for an italicised page or two into another mind.The big win in this approach is depth and intimacy of characterisation. And it’s no coincidence that the element readers immediately foreground in my novels is the character. Yes, they’ll talk about the plots, but only after they’ve dealt with the character.The big loss in that approach is that you risk a kind of claustrophobia. In my world of crime thrillers, for example, the strictly one-POV approach is relatively rare, because you have no access to dramatic action unless your character is there. That’s tough: it’s the most limiting, most difficult constraint that emerges from the way I’ve chosen to write.My techniques for dealing with it are varied. They include: (a) locating my character at the point of drama more often than is actually credible, (b) making her a generator of drama in her own right, (c) giving her enough other points of interest – funny, crazy, romantic, interesting – that we don’t need non-stop drama, and (d) making those points of drama as long and intense as I can.Epic, broad-sweepThe Linwood Barclay approach is the exact opposite. One of his point of view characters is the Mayor of New York, Richard Headley. The insight into RH’s inner world is so scant, it’s only just there at all. At times, it can be quite hard discerning whose point of view a chapter comes from.That’s not bad writing. That’s careful, judicious writing.Barclay knows that RH is not one of his primary characters, in the sense that readers aren’t hugely going to bond to him. So a dab of paint here and there is enough. He’s not an automaton. He’s in charge of this chapter. But you don’t really care about him, so I’m not going to go all-in with this character. With the characters Barclay does care about (and that readers care about), we have a much more detailed inner-life portrait.The big wins of this approach are roughly twofold.One, you generate a sense of scale. A Dickensian sense of an entire city, crawling beneath the novelist’s lens.Two, you can jump to whichever piece of action is most dramatic, most involving. If you actually just traced the path of the book through one character’s journey alone, that character wouldn’t encounter nearly enough dramatic action to keep the reader involved.And the loss?Simply that none of Barclay’s characters register as intensely or in-depth as is possible with the one-POV only approach. They simply don’t get enough time on the page to generate that alchemy.What you win in terms of scale and flexibility, you lose in terms of intimacy. In both cases, good writing allows you to claw back some of your losses, but the losses are real, no matter what.Two or threeAnd then there’s an intermediate group of novels where there are multiple characters, but not in Linwood Barclays’s all-you-can-eat buffet kind of way.There are romantic novels where he and she each have a hand.Or historical novels where, the duke and the factory girl and (oh I dunno) the ship’s captain all have a role.These are the novels that, from experience, generate the largest number of anguished emails. Roughly: “Hi Harry, I’ve just organised all my chapters into a spreadsheet and the ship’s captain has only 20% of the total page space, maybe less if you exclude the flashback where he worked in the ship’s chandlery, and I worry if maybe I should scrap the captain and given the girl the scene on the ship where the storm arrives, only then …”And – I don’t know.I mean: I haven’t read your books, so I don’t know. But you have basically two lamps to guide you. (And these are Lamps of Truth, so they’re good ‘uns when it comes to the whole guidance thing.)Lamp the first: Don’t give your character a POV unless they have an actual story. That means a challenge, a crisis, a resolution. It means jeopardy. It means internal and external obstacles to victory. It means that all the plot ingredients needed for an entire novel are present, in miniature, for your point of view character too.Lamp the second: Don’t give your character a POV unless you actually care about them. If you don’t, the reader won’t.*** This whole business of POVs causes more anguish than almost any other, I reckon. And in the end, these general rules, while helpful, are only guidelines. Before you email me with one of your duke / factory girl / captain emails, just remember that I DON’T KNOW. The guidelines are helpful in terms of clarifying your thoughts, but the final decisions and judgements can only be made with a specific manuscript to consider.That is all from me.I will e-see loads of you at the Summer Festival next week and over the next few months. The rest of you will just have to sob bitter tears of remorse that you didn’t get your tickets in time. (Or – alternative thought – you could just go and get one. Details below.)That\'s it from me. And I don\'t think that my trio of duke / factory girl / ship\'s captain is a very good one. What trio of characters do you have? And which one do you worry should be for the chop ...? Chime in below and let\'s all have a Heated Debate.

Oh blinking blimey. I’ve got lots of things to tell you and I’m not quite sure what order to do it in.It’s like I’ve come home from a trip to Hyderabad by way of Phuket, Osaka and the Kingdom of Gog. I have eleventy-one interesting items in eleventy-one boxes (one of which roars and one of which sighs) and I can’t start to arrange my items until I’ve unboxed them all and stared at them a bit.There’s going to be a mountain of packaging that I’ll have to cope with somehow.Hey ho, and here we go.Box 1I did a webinar for Jericho members on Wednesday and there were almost 200 people there and it ran half the night. It was very interesting and I’m going to tell you more about this in a moment.Box 2Virtually all of our Summer Festival sessions are going out live and interactive, except that I did one with Adam Croft as a pre-record.He’s an indie author and, if you don’t read psych thrillers and you’re not in touch with Planet Indie, then you don’t know who he is.But when he brought out Her Last Tomorrow, that book sold so well he had paid off his mortgage in a matter of weeks.His previous books had each earned maybe a few thousand dollars in total.The shoutline for Adam’s breakout title was “Would you murder your wife to save your daughter?”Box 3I find nothing inside this box except a note from Sophie, our monarch of marketing, saying “Tell them about the 1-2-1s.”I always obey Sophie, so I comply:You lot gobbled up our first batch of 1-2-1 slots with literary agents so fast that we had to bake some more. You can find all the information right here:https://jerichowriters.com/festival-of-writing/one-to-one-sessions/Those cookies get eaten quickly though, so don’t wait too long.Box 4What is the elevator pitch for a book? I mean: what is it really?It’s not the shoutline. It’s not the blurb. It’s not the synopsis. It’s not your query letter. It’s not even a sentence from your query letter. (I mean it might be, but certainly doesn’t have to be.)So what is it really? And does it actually matter?You are not, in fact, likely to find yourself in an elevator with a Top Literary Agent, so why stress about what you’d say if you were?Box 5By strange coincidence, I’m interviewing the #1 international bestseller Linwood Barclay as part of our Summer Festival. I’ll be talking (among much else) about his current thriller.Whose title is Elevator Pitch.The book opens with a guy trying to pitch his screenplay while in an elevator with a top entertainment exec. The elevator goes up to the fortieth floor then – geddit? – pitches downwards.Closing lines of chapter 1:“The elevator was in freefall.Until it hit bottom.”The story is about a chain of induced elevator crashes in New York and the effort to find the person responsible.The screenwriter pitching his screenplay got as far as telling the movie exec his Big Idea before they were both splatted from existence. In his story, a character discovers a time machine, but the time machine can only move you five minutes forward into the future or five minutes back in the past.What would you do with that tiny superpower?Box 6This is the box that was sighing and is now making a small mewing sound.I poke some lettuce through the airholes and the mewing stops.The box has leaked very slightly and smells of wee.Box 7OK, so the elevator pitch for my first Fiona Griffiths novel would be something like this:Fiona Griffiths is a homicide detective in recovery from Cotards Syndrome. Cotards is a genuine psychiatric condition in which the sufferer believes themselves to be dead.You notice (because you are alert to these things) that this formulation isn’t at all slogan-y – you couldn’t put it on the front of the book.It tells you nothing at all about the plot. It doesn’t even say “this is a detective novel with murder at its heart” although you probably guess (correctly) that it is.And it’s not vague. It doesn’t wave its hands in a mysterious way. It gives you two facts. Fiona is a murder detective. And she used to think she was dead.I suppose it actually gives you one more fact – that her condition is a real thing from which real people suffer – but that’s really only to make it clear that this is at least a somewhat realist novel. It’s not fantasy. It’s not speculative.Box 8This box is very small and inlaid with a wondrous array of minutely carved woods.It contains nothing except this observation:“Harry’s elevator pitch doesn’t look like a marketing thing at all. It doesn’t have that gaudy, aspartamine-flavoured brightness. Maybe Harry is completely crap at marketing.”I do as it happens agree with the first two parts of that observation and maybe even the third – except I wish to dispute the word “completely”.Box 9This box is rather large and lists slightly. We need a stepladder to open it up properly, but there is nothing inside but a waft of scent.While breathing and enjoying that scent, we find ourselves thinking:“What would it like to think you were dead? How can an alive person possibly think they are dead? And wouldn’t it be strange to be caught between life and death like that – and be a murder detective. I’d like to know more about that book.”And aha!And snap!And all that Harry-is-rubbish-at-marketing tosh!My elevator pitch has snapped itself shut over your leg and now you can’t get yourself free.Box 10In the webinar, I said that the elevator pitch was two things, two vital things:It was a very short way to get someone to say, “Ooh, that sounds interesting, tell me more.”It was the soul of your book and every page of your book had to vibrate with that inner soul.Which were clearly interesting and powerful things to say, but no one actually knew what the second one meant.Including possibly me.Box 11Inside this box is a tall and elegantly dressed woman. She fixes me with a glittering eye and stalks away, out of the room and out of my life.When I look at the box more closely, I discover that the name and address on the packing label are not my own. I feel somewhat embarrassed. On a scale of 0 to 10, where 10 is “very embarrassed indeed”, I’d be about a 6.In the bottom of the box, discarded or forgotten, is a veil. It is very soft and has the pale grey of a pigeon’s underbelly.Box 12Twice, oh reader, have I been in an elevator TRAPPED right next to the Chief Executive of a really big publishing company.I didn’t pitch my book.I talked about the weather, or something dreary.Maybe I really am crap at marketing.Oh God. I mean: maybe I actually am.Box 13This is the one that roars.I have telephoned London Zoo. I hope they will come and take it away.There is a terrible scratching sound from within and the box does not look the strongest.I regret everything about this box. I should not have brought it home.Box 14OK, so one of the people on the webinar – a wise and noble human named Jon – said this in a subsequent comment on Townhouse:I’ve been thinking a lot about your description of the elevator pitch as encapsulating the ‘soul’ of the story.The ‘soul’ of my book, I think, is Membra’s growing understanding that what she sees as her flaws and imperfections, and her adaptations to them, have contributed to the strong, resilient and ‘worthy’ person that she is and always has been, and that removing them - i.e. achieving ‘perfection’ - risks her becoming a different, and perhaps less self-actualised person. She understands that imperfection has value and that perfection is a chimera. It is this that enables her to make the final decision she makes at the climax of the book NOT to use the Perfection Engine to revert the universe to its perfect state - both from a selfish perspective (she doesn’t want to lose the person she is) and from a wider moral perspective. So she (to use my ‘slogan’) ‘saves the world from paradise’.That internal journey is what I think the soul of the story is, and the primary candidate for the single focus of the pitch. It’s the ‘real’ story.Now if you are actually still reading this email, you should sit bolt upright and mark the moment somehow – perhaps you want to bark or hurl a teacup.Jon, mate, you are saying something important.I think you are saying something true.Box 15Contains nothing but a forlorn tune.There are no words to the tune, but the following words fit the melody in a hand-meet-handmade-kidskin-glove sort of way:Maybe the soul of the book (in my Box 10 / Ooh-tell-me-more sense) is intimately connected with Jon’s more profound take on the subject.Like maybe they’re the same thing, only in one case you’re just looking at the trunk and leaves and in the other case you get to see the roots as well.Aha!The tune lingers and is strangely pleasing.Box 16When you think about it, Adam Croft’s million-dollar shoutline (“Would you murder your wife to save your daughter?”) is everything in one:It is perfect copy for a Facebook ad. Like perfect copy. It was Facebook ads that propelled that book, and its author, to superstardom.It has the quality of intriguing specificity. You instantly want to know more about the story. It rings that Ooh-tell-me-more bell, ring a ding ding.It completely honours the book and vice versa. That shoutline echoes in every single page of the text.The shoutline itself is all wood and leaves, but you already have a sense of the roots. What happens when family ties are strained like that? What happens when that terrible moral choice is forced on what is already an uneasy marriage?Boom! Maybe the marketing soul of your book is just the soul-soul of your book wearing gaudy clothing. Maybe the “Ooh tell me more” bit is just a pathway (for you and the reader) to the deeper stuff.Box 17Contains a skitter of anticipation.I really want to know whether Linwood Barclay’s latest bestseller takes that 5 minute time travel superpower idea beyond the first chapter.I need to finish the book. I’m going to have a lot to ask him.Box 18Contains the soul-soul of my detective book, the one with roots as well as leaves:Fiona struggles to assemble her complicated and unwieldy parts into a functional human being. Because that process often fails for her, and because she has to work hard at it, we notice how much effort she has to make. And then we realise: we all face the same challenge and we face it every day. Fiona is us.Somewhere outside in the garden, a silver bell rings. That is the end of my boxes.I am still worried about Box 13.How about you? And what did you bring home of Phuket?Are any of you missing a tall and elegantly dressed woman?

Hi folks, If you\'re a JW member and were on the elevator pitch webinar tonight, then feel free to ask any questions here. Or just chat. What was your favourite pitch? There were some good uns!I\'ll dip in and out of this chat over the next day or two so keep an eye on it. NB - I\'ll post the replay link as soon as I have it

Hello JW membersAs per my email - can I have your elevator pitches please for the webinar next week. Webinar info here:https://members.jerichowriters.com/content/perfecting-your-elevator-pitch-with-harry-bingham/(That link does work - I\'ve just checked it - but you do need to be logged in to the JW site to see it.)Rules for the elevator pitch:One submission per person pleaseJW members only (sorry everyone else - but this is a members only event)Max 50 words per pitchBut aim for less. Most pitches can be done in <20 words, and often <10Hope to see loads of you at the webinar. I\'m looking forward to it myself ...

Some writers, or so I’ve heard, do not love social media. They do not love and adore creating websites. They would rather boil their feet than spend hours on Twitter.If you have ever checked out my Twitter account or Facebook author page, you will notice that I am like a Trappist monk when it comes to my use of those platforms. And – I survive: an Authorsaurus.The fact is, there are a million different routes to building an author platform and they’re all kind of fine. Here are some of your options.Do nothing – you’re still writing your bookIf you are still at the stage of writing and editing your manuscript, then quite honestly you are doing the most important thing in the world for you right now. I mean, you should probably check that you are still married and that your children haven’t gone feral, but aside from those things, you should just let the manuscript swallow your thought and your energy. You don’t need to do anything else.Do nothing – you just hate TwitterOK. Let’s say you’ve got to the stage of getting an agent or even a book deal. But you just don’t like social media. You aren’t good at it. You don’t want to do it.So fine. Don’t. If a traditional publisher loves your book, they’ll still buy it. They’ll structure their marketing campaign in a way that takes into account your preferences.I would say that you should still create a website and build a mailing list. You can just pay someone to perform the first of those tasks if you want. The mailing list itself just involves writing a reader magnet (a free download for your newsletter subscribers), then writing emails. And you’re a writer, so you’re not allowed to dislike tasks that involve only writing, right?If you’re trad published, it’s not obligatory to operate a mailing list, but I see a ton of authors who, after two or three books, realise they need one and start to construct one. Well: better late than never, but it’s a grievous waste to have let three book launches go unharvested. Knowing your readers is the greatest security you can have. Well, apart from being a global #1 bestseller, anyway. That’s good too.Use social media as a private networking toolI do not love or trust Facebook. If you look at my author page, you’ll see it hasn’t been updated in literally years. I simply never go on there or think about. But …There is one private group I use very often. It’s a private group for a bunch of crime authors, some very high profile. We share stories, ask advice, have a moan, shout hooray, and tell incredibly filthy jokes. It’s been one of the real joys of my authoring career and an endless source of easy networking.There will be networks of that kind that are there to support you. Finding them isn’t always easy – often you meet someone at a live event, who then passes you the online invitation – but they can be a real joy and a source of professional support. Fun and useful; the best combination you can get.Use social media as a public networking toolNetworking doesn’t have to be done in private though. In every ecosystem within publishing (crime, YA, women’s fiction, whatever else), there’s a constant chatter among publicists, agents, booksellers, bloggers and other industry types.If you like being part of that conversation (and I mostly don’t), then participate. The key here is simply enthusiastic, positively-tinted engagement with everything that’s going on. If your community is all lit up with the quality of a new debut, then read the debut, add your comments, share a cover image, and so on. Most of this chat is probably on Twitter, but you’ll easily enough locate it. Just follow the chat.You don’t have to be too strategic in any of this. Or rather: the strategy IS the participation, the fellow-feeling. If you have a track record of that engagement, it is vastly more likely that the community will support your debut when it comes out.Notice that this strategy doesn’t involve much direct interaction with your audience, though. You’re interacting mostly with the industry group that interacts with that audience. Going the logical next step Use social media as an audience interaction toolIf you are serious about self-publishing, you will almost certainly want to grow your own Facebook following. If you’re publishing traditionally, then it’s by no means obligatory – but it will certainly be helpful.Either way the principle is the same. You have to talk relentlessly and only to your core audience. If you write sweet historical romance, then the theme of your author page should be gentle historical romance. Snippets you found during your research. Images that move you. Books you love in the same genre. And so on.It’s easy to think that someone else has more likes / retweets / followers than you, so you should do more. The result of that thinking is that you start giving away prizes in exchange for likes. (“Like my page and get the chance to win enough biscuits to fill a swimming pool.”) The real problem with those gimmicks is that they work. You get a ton of likes. You deliver a lot of biscuits.The problem is that your likes are phoney. They have polluted your audience. Your organic reach will drop to nothing. You basically have to delete your page and start again.So, sure, if you want, if you want to be the most golden and least prehistoric of authors, run an active author’s page on Facebook. But stay true to your audience with every post and every engagement.What about you? What do you do? What do you avoid? And have you ever filled a swimming pool with biscuits (or, hell, cookies if you must - but I\'m British, so I say BISCUITS.)Biscuits. Biscuits. Biscuits. Biscuits. Biscuits. Biscuits. Biscuits. Biscuits. 

I live in rural Oxfordshire and, every Thursday, people assemble round our little village green to clap for the NHS (the national health system in the UK). Just recently, we\'ve been rounding that off with a sing-song ... with words doctored by me for the purpose. This week we\'re going to sing this:Mine eyes have seen the coming of the virus of Wuhan.It’s jumped from bats to pangolins, from pangolins to man. It’s infected every country from our shores to far Japan,     Yet it still goes marching on.Oh Corona, do not touch me! Oh Corona, do not touch me!Oh Corona, do not touch me! But it still goes marching on.They said that they would give us the protection of the herdBut as people started dying, the idea just seemed absurd.So now we have to lock our doors, like prisoners interred –     And it still goes marching on.     Oh Corona, do not touch me! Oh Corona, do not touch me!     Oh Corona, do not touch me! And it still goes marching on.They say we need a vaccine and they say we need some tests,But the vaccine isn’t working and the tests are not the best.And meantime, we’re just stuck here under perma house arrest,     While it still goes marching on. Oh Corona, do not touch me! Oh Corona, do not touch me!     Oh Corona, do not touch me! And it still goes marching on.Oh, it’s shuttered every business and it’s closing every school.And if you think it’s ending soon, then you’re a bloody fool.But here on our old village green, we make this solemn rule:      Oh, you may not march in here!     Oh Corona, do not touch me! Oh Corona, do not touch me!     Oh Corona, do not touch me! No you may not march in here.That\'s us. But what about you? Your parodies and pastiches, please. With a word about the tune if it isn\'t bleeding obvious.  Over to y\'all.

A day or two ago, I came across this quote from Virginia Woolf talking about Jane Austen: “of all great writers she is the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness.”And that’s true, isn’t it?Her plots were reasonably standard for her time. No innovations there. Her themes were comfortable and safe. There aren’t many quotable quotes. Her social situations are strictly limited. Her descriptive writing is almost completely absent.She is, in many ways, one of the least adventurous writers you can find. Even her comedy is of the wry smile sort. No one has ever guffawed with laughter or found themselves snorting cornflakes out through their nose.And yet –She’s Jane Austen. She sits in the very top rank of British writers. Her reputation has just grown steadily since her death.The heart of that invisible greatness?Her precision.Each character talks precisely like themselves, reacts precisely like themselves. Here’s a tiny moment from Mansfield Park. Fanny (the poor niece transplanted to the big house and prosperous family) has a ball thrown in her honour. Here is Fanny’s reflection:She could hardly believe it. To be placed above so many elegant young women! The distinction was too great. It was treating her like her cousins! … The ball began. It was rather honour than happiness to Fanny, for the first dance at least: her partner was in excellent spirits, and tried to impart them to her; but she was a great deal too much frightened to have any enjoyment till she could suppose herself no longer looked at.Here is her uncle’s attitude to the same moment:Thomas himself was watching her progress down the dance with much complacency; he was proud of his niece; and without attributing all her personal beauty, as Mrs. Norris seemed to do, to her transplantation to Mansfield, he was pleased with himself for having supplied everything else: education and manners she owed to him.And here is her aunt’s view:“Yes, she does look very well,” was Lady Bertram\'s placid reply. “Chapman helped her to dress. I sent Chapman to her.” Not but that she was really pleased to have Fanny admired; but she was so much more struck with her own kindness in sending Chapman to her, that she could not get it out of her head.There’s nothing so remarkable in the prose there. Yes, there’s a big of comedy in the last snippet, but nothing beyond what you could write yourself. And the characters aren’t so exotic either. You’ll find no huge act of the imagination at play here.Yet there’s not a word awry. Jane Austen isn’t about huge. She’s all about tiny.Take that last bit about Lady Bertram. Her reply is ‘placid’ – of course it is, because Lady Bertram has never been known to stir herself for anything. Her being ‘struck with her own kindness’ perfectly exposes the limits of her thoughts and imagination. And even that bit of dialogue is precisely right:“She does look very well” – a positive comment about her niece.“Chapman helped her to dress” – a thought about how come she looks so nice“I sent Chapman to her.” – ah! In three short sentences, Lady Bertram has reverted to her own favourite subject: herself.The childish simplicity of that 1-2-3 movement, and the sentences that carry the thoughts, give you an almost holographic insight into the good Lady B. It’s as though you could unfold that tiny bit of text to give you a complete insight into Lady Bertram’s every thought and feeling.The moral for us, as workaday non-genius writers?That genius doesn’t always look like genius. That paying careful, repetitive attention to the tiny details may not build some big fat obvious mountain of greatness – but it builds greatness all the same.And of course, you don’t have to jump back to Georgian England to find writers like that. Anne Tyler has the same gift. So does Elizabeth Strout. So does Elena Ferrante.And yes: I notice that I’ve just name-checked four writers in this email, all of them female. I do think, as it happens, that this virtue of precision is most often exhibited by women, but there are male writers (eg: Colm Toibin) who show you that the possession of a Y-chromosome doesn’t have to be crippling.That’s it from me, so it’s back to that locked-down grindstone, folks. Test every sentence, every word, for its ring-true-ishness, because those tiny disciplines can unlock vast pools of emotional power. And once you get into the precision game, you’ll find it absorbing, compelling and deeply rewarding – just how writing ought to be.Keep writing. Keep editing. Keep smiling. And stay safe.Hate Jane Austen? Adore her? Writing galaxy-destroying military sci-fi in the spirit of Jane Austen? Let me know what you\'re thinking and let\'s all have a Heated Debate.

A few weeks back, when Covid first struck, we ran a lockdown-friendly 14-day free membership offer. You could sign up for free and, if you liked it (and were wise and decisive), you could convert to a full membership. As an extra little sprinkle of stardust, we offered the converters a quick review of their opening pages.That’s always an interesting exercise, reminding one of the astonishing breadth of fiction. And one of the opening pages that floated my way - this one from a writer called Karen - opened with this brilliant opening phrase (referring, by the way, to a sack of tiny monkeys):Won from a fellow tar on the turn of a knave …You know instantly that you’re in the hands of an accomplished writer there, with poetry and vigour right there in the first dozen or so words. You also recognise that the voice is going to be distinctive, which it duly is. Here are some other lovely bits from Karen\'s first page:Earl reminded him sharply with a blow from his fist. The old dog would reap a bright forget-me-not on his temple as a reprimand.And what about this:Experience had taught him that encouragement in the softest of tones invariably succeeded in calming a frightened creature. Horse, woman, whatever. Part of the joy of these openings is the delicious realisation that we are about to witness a voice, and a character, that lies several standard deviations away from normal. You might think of published books like Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated:My legal name is Alexander Perchov. But all of my many friends dub me Alex, because that is a more flaccid-to-utter version of my legal name. My mother dubs me Alex-stop-spleening-me!, because I am always spleening her.That first sentence lulls you into a sense of security. Then my ‘friends dub me Alex’ catches you out and forces you to pay close attention to what’s coming. And then – bim-a-bam-bosh – you get your reward with the delightfully barmy phrase ‘a more flaccid-to-utter version…’.We’re just two sentences into the book and, if you were browsing in a bookstore, you’ve already made up your mind to make the purchase.Or how about this:Marsh is not swamp. Marsh is a space of light, where grass grows in water, and water flows into the sky.That’s the opening of Where the Crawdads Sing and it combines poetry with an immediately distinctive presence.In all these cases, the book announces itself with something distinctive, something that rejoices in language, something that doesn’t sound anything like the book next to it in the shop or online.And that sort of sounds like a recipe for success: invent something distinctive and glittery for the first page. Get the sale. Then tell the story.Except that to succeed, to really succeed, the distinctive thing you offer has to be baked into the story at the very deepest level. The Crawdads opening makes a promise about place and mood that the entire book lives up to. The Safran Foer opening likewise makes a big, bold splashy promise that the book also amply lives up to. (That book is multi-voiced, so there are multiple promises, in fact.)So maybe the right way to think about these distinctive voices is that they perfectly align everything about the book. Genre, mood, setting, character. Those things line up so that the reader ends up reading some perfectly presented whole. It feels impossible to detach any one part of the book, so completely is everything integrated.And that in turn means: no cheating. No shortcuts.A flashy opening sentence or vignette is fine, but if the flash dissolves into something without a coherent original vision, you haven’t necessarily gained yourself much.That kind of originality is hard to do. It took me five novels and nine or more books before I’d really nailed it. And of course, you can be a highly competent writer writing highly competent books without the bolt of inspiration that elevates your work to a whole different level. You never quite know how an idea will turn out until you’ve written the damn book.But this I think you can do: you can take what is original and distinctive in your voice or concept and lean into it. Encourage it. Invite it to display itself to the full. You need to stay disciplined, of course. (No sloppy phrases, no weak writing.) But even the act of inviting that voice to unfurl to its fullest extent is an act of bravery.And your bravery will be rewarded. Always. If you keep the discipline, then always.Find the heart of what you have, the most distinctive strand of your story-DNA and lean into that thing. Make the most of it. Put it at the very heart of what you do.I’d love to see snippets of text from anyone who thinks they are writing with a distinctive voice or an unusual, strong-flavoured character. If you reckon your text qualifies, then let’s share.Meanwhile – Stay safe and keep writing.Oh yes. And I’m going to have something AMAZING to tell you about next week. Stay tuned for that.Is your name flaccid-to-utter? Or are you just spleening me? If you\'ve got something you want to share, then share it below. Nowhere like Townhouse for winning a monkey on the turn of a knave.

I had thoughts, I really did. A useful laundry list of wonderful tips for making your prose shine and your plots glitter.But – maybe another time.I can’t help noticing that it is not merely Good Friday, but Good Friday in the Age of Plague. A lot of people are feeling isolated or scared. The wheels of history are grinding and they don’t care too much who they overrun.I’m not fearful for myself or my family. We’re comfortably isolated in the country. The weather is wonderful. We have a big garden and our village community is actually more active and friendly than it ever has been before. Likewise my brother and sister, my mother, their families, my in-laws – they’re all fine. They’re OK.But one of the things that fiction achieves is to take us to the edge of strange inversions and new recognitions. Fiction takes you to a place where you realise something unexpected – or actively impossible – is also true. In Pride and Prejudice, we know for sure that Lizzie doesn’t love Darcy. She makes it clear. She turns down his proposal with force and asperity.Lizzie does not love Darcy. FACT.But – boom – fiction does its thing, it turns its wheels, and we realise she loves him with all her heart, and all her soul, and all her mind. The Lizzie/Darcy love is as complete and perfect as any we could imagine. FACT.Fiction isn’t as crass as to say the first view of things was false. More like, it was incomplete. The old binary view of truth buckles a bit at the hands of good writing. Those inversions and completions are an essential part of fiction.But reality is pulling the same trick right now. We’re a celebrity obsessed culture, right? Any teenage YouTube vlogger can sell some weirdly huge mountain of books just because they know about (I don’t know) eyebrow threading or vegan yogurt.FACT.But cometh the plague, cometh the inversion. It turns out we have no interest in these posing celebrities. (Billionaire David Geffen putting pics of his yacht on Instagram as he outlines his isolation strategy. The moron.)We have an interest and respect for the people who work in healthcare, without acclaim and often enough without much cash either. We turn out in our city streets to clap and cheer and bang saucepans and say, these are our heroes. Not just today, but forever. We have loved you always and have only known to say it now.FACT.And we here at Jericho Writers are the same. We’ve had some emails from healthcare workers who have told us that they’d love to become JW members but can’t afford the fee.In more normal times, we’d act like commercially responsible businesspeople. Ones with budgets and targets and marketing plans.But you know what? Stuff that. Our budgets are have been completely shredded and our marketing plans are in the bin.So here goes:If you are a healthcare worker, then tell us – and we’ll give you 75% off your JW membership.We don’t care if you’re a trainee nurse, a top consultant, or a citizen volunteer. If you’re supporting the health service at this time of crisis, just tell us. All we need is a picture of some form of ID that shows you are what you say you are, and we’ll tell you how to get your 75% discount.This isn’t a clever marketing strategy, so there are no strings attached. No ulterior purpose. Just – the world doesn’t really need more writing mentors at the moment, but it sure as hell needs more nurses. This is our version of standing outside our homes and clapping.(I should probably also say that we won’t see your email before Tuesday at the earliest and we’ll have a huge backlog of emails to get through at that point. So if you do want to take us up on this offer, please bear with us. We’ll be with you as fast as we can.)That’s it from me – or almost.When I write these emails, I often discover something I hadn’t realised at the start. And that thing about fiction inverting an apparent reality to reveal a true one underneath – the Lizzie/Darcy love story, for example – I wonder if that is true of all great fiction? Or all fiction? I wonder if it’s true of mine.Just now, I don’t know, but it’s a damn interesting thought.Stay safe. Keep writing. Keep clapping.And tell me about your fiction. Does it achieve that inversion? I think mine probably does - or aims for it anyway. But I want to hear from you. Tell me about how your fiction upends expectations and makes the impossible true. Or do you disagree completely ? Either way, let\'s all have a Heated Debate.

Someone receiving this letter has (I bet) written a book about canning tomatoes and preserving lemons. If so, that book is currently dancing its way up the Amazon’s bestseller charts right now.If you happen to be a publisher that’s big on children’s study aids, you’ll already have sold out and be reprinting pretty much every text you have. Some of those reprint orders (in the US) are for a million-plus number of copies.Fiction is having a surge as well. Why not catch up on your TBR pile now? Seems like a good time to get stuck in.The book category that has most taken a ding is adult non-fiction, in categories unrelated to the current crisis. (Which you need to interpret broadly. Books on creating and tending a garden in a limited space have sold out. My children and I always plant potatoes and various other vegetables at this time of year. When we came to order seeds and seedlings, we found that our normal suppliers were completely out of stock. Dammit.)But all this leaves plenty of questions.If you have a manuscript that’s ready to go, is now a brilliant time to query agents? Or a really terrible one?Well, committed as we are to delivering the very best and very latest in news and information from Planet Author, we are happy to tell you that the answer is …Nobody knows.Publishing is one of those industries that can move easily to remote working, in theory – but there’s a lot of difference between theory and adjusting to the actual practice of it. An acquisition committee might be able to meet perfectly well on Zoom, for example, but they’re not used to it. It’s not how things have generally been done.That’s one thing, which suggests the industry will be more cautious. But there’s another which says it has to act as usual. Acquisition committees will be buying books now for publication in 12-18 months and for mass market release perhaps nine months after that. So the market these books will be launching into will be (presumably) a post-covid one. If publishers denude their pipelines now, they’ll be looking naked in 2021/22.So that says that publishers will, for the most part, be looking to acquire and process as normal.My own guess, in fact, is that publishers will struggle to release a full catalogue of books over the next six months, so some titles will get kicked down the road. That will mean that acquisitions now can be squeezed a little without discomfort.And agents?Well, agents will presumably be working from home, but that’s where plenty of agents work from already. Bigger agencies can easily work remotely. Not much change there.Except – kids.I’ve got four children at home when I expected them to be at school. Not just that, but the school, in the nicest possible way, is constantly bombarding us with home learning material. (Which of these 3-D shapes roll? Let’s take a look at this list of Tricky Words. Can you make a box with six oranges in it? You can have two oranges in that half and four in that half. Or … And don’t get me started on the Biff & Chip books for early readers. ’What is that?’ says Biff. ‘It’s a giant axe,’ says Dad. ‘But why do you have that terrifying glint in your eye?’ says Biff. ‘And why are you all spattered in red? And where is Chip?’ …)In short, agents may have more time than usual, but they most likely have less. And they still have to manage the affairs of their existing clients, which are probably more than normally turbulent.So I’m going to guess that somewhat fewer queries are going to be read and processed than normal. I’m also going to guess that new acquisitions by publishers are going to thin out a bit. Not much, but a bit.And yes, you do see some publishers on Twitter defiantly hanging out their “We’re open” messages. But I’m sceptical, as are others. In the words of Liz McKean, a US agent, “I know editors, on Twitter at least, are all like We’re reading! We’re buying! Agents, send us books! And that’s great! I love it. There are some editors, possibly those without kids at home, who may have more time to read. I love that, too! But while they might be enthusiastic and excited to read, they don’t have room on their lists to buy 10 more books than usual. Each imprint’s list is not going to expand. It might not necessarily contract, but it’s not like an editor is going to be able to buy six more books a year just because we don’t have to ride the subway to work right now.“As for what kinds of books agents and editors are acquiring – well, those acquisitions will largely ignore the current pandemic.Yes, if you are a public health expert and have something urgent to say, and if you can bash out a book in four weeks, people are going to be jumping on that text immediately. But the market post-covid? No one knows. Will people want lots of pandemic books? Or upbeat books, that mix tears, laughter and an uplifting message? Or will people just settle back into murder stories and psych thrillers and gentle romances, just like always?Because no one knows, there will be a spread of answers and you’ll see authors / agents / publishers placing their bets all around the great Roulette Table of Fiction.And, unless you are a very output and business-focused indie author, you don’t care anyway. You write from passion, and a deep understanding of your genre, and the market is what the market will be. That’s the bit you can’t predict or control anyway, so there’s not too much point in trying. You write from your heart.One other prognostication before we leave.Crises don’t reshape an industry. They accelerate trends that were happening anyway. Since you can’t now walk into a bookstore to buy books, you have to buy them online. Many of those online shoppers will return to bookshops when they can. Some won’t.Publishers will use the excuse of pandemic to trim their lists and lose some staff, but they won’t fatten their lists and rehire all those staff afterwards.Author advances will be put under pressure owing to ‘exceptional circumstances’, but you won’t see a rebound once things return to normal.In all those ways, the crisis of 2020 reflects the banking crisis of 2008. Things that were done in response to emergency just settled into place, the new normal.That’s not meant to be downbeat, especially. Readers will go on reading. Writers will go on writing. As long as those two things hold true, we writers don’t have to care too much about all the shenanigans in between. We’ll be OK.The best advice for people on the verge of submitting to agents now? The same as it’s always been. Write a damn good book. Make it as good as you can. Then get it out there.Good luck. Stay safe. Have fun. Keep writing.What has been your experience? What are your thoughts? Did you try preserving lemons too? And did you make them too salty like me? Give your views below and let\'s all have a Heated Debate.

Strange times, old buddies, strange times.It’s sort of nice to be at home with the children. We live on the edge of a village with tons of green space in every direction, so we don’t have any of that cooped-up / stir-crazy feeling that so many people must be having now. And the infection rate in our part of the world is low. Plus people round here are being very damn sensible with their precautions.So in many ways we’re fine. And in other ways? Well, the news has become kind of odd, hasn’t it? And the impact of covid on the business side of Jericho Writers is like its own little whirlwind of destruction. Not nice. We’re doing emergency rescue work where we can. We’ll grab some loans if we need to. We’ll survive.(And oh, if you fancy a manuscript assessment or the like, now would be a very good time to seek it! Do look in the PSes to see if anything there takes your fancy. We’d be much obliged.)But in all of this, one thing that has struck me very forcefully is the metaphorical power of huge global forces.Last week, I mentioned that King Lear was written (probably) while Shakespeare was in quarantine. Theatre-goers would have encountered the same kind of year that he’d had. And they’d be hearing the echoes loud and clear – a sense of end-times, things being split asunder:… Love cools,friendship falls off, brothers divide: incities, mutinies; in countries, discord; inpalaces, treason … We have seen the best of our time:But you don’t have to be Shakespeare or be writing poetry to grab the same kind of effect from the world outside. Some of the most obvious examples of the technique from 20th century literature would include:The Great Gatsby. Prohibition is just central to that book. It’s the flipside of all the prosperity and flash of the Roaring Twenties, the vicious little secret behind it all. You couldn’t have Gatsby without Prohibition. The actual historical facts of the era effectively deliver the moral, metaphorical tapestry of the book itself.The Spy Who Came In From the Cold. Le Carre’s spy fiction is all about love, trust and betrayal. Those are his themes and how better to play those out on a massive canvas, than adopt the entire Cold War espionage struggle as his emblem? If he had taken the exact same story – who loved who; who betrayed who – and played that in a totally different setting (boy’s boarding school, Kansas dairy farms), the story would never have felt as urgent, as necessary, as colossal.The Plague (La Peste). Camus’s 1947 novel tells of an epidemic sweeping the French-Algerian town of Oran. There was some historical underpinning for the book – Oran did indeed have a history of plague – but no reader in 1947 could read that book without thinking of Nazism and the great darkness that had come over Europe. Without that instant and obvious metaphorical connection, the book would have been half what it was.And what is all this to us?Well, it’s just a way of suggesting we look up and out for metaphor, not just down and small. It’s not something you can force into a book. It’s just something that, if offered by your story and its setting, you should grab with both hands.Sometimes, you’ll just walk straight into the centre of the Big Thing. So Hilary Mantel took a story of power and ambition and set it in the heart of the Tudor court. Everyone knows that Tudors are box office. Result: a trilogy of global bestsellers that far exceeded any of Mantel’s previous work in sales. It wasn’t that her writing had got better. It’s that her canvas had got bigger, the scale of everything was greater.Equally, you could walk straight into the Cuban Missile Crisis or the American Civil War or the Battle of Britain. Any story set in the heart of those things would effectively matter right away, because you’re just grabbing history as your story.If you’re writing SFF, the same thing, except you’re making up your Big Thing. One Ring To Rule Them All plus Mordor plus all that went along with those things – result: the seminal work of epic fantasy. It wasn’t the writing; it was the scale. It was the ambition. Same thing with His Dark Materials.But you don’t have to walk into the heart of things to get the same effect. Suppose your story was a kind of Godfather-style mafia tale set in New Jersey or New York. If you got your story to play out, at the same time as the Cuban Missile Crisis was playing out, you’d get instant depth, instant authority, instant echo from doing just that. It’s like the ‘great times, great decisions’ feeling about the actual historical facts would bleed downwards into the pages of your novel. You wouldn’t need to do much more than dripfeed the historical drama into the pages of your fictional one. The reader’s own brain will do most of the rest.And – well, we’re living in strange and overwhelming times at the moment. For what it’s worth, this covid epidemic doesn’t speak to the writer in me. I don’t get itchy fingers when I think about it. (Whereas – godfather-type story plus Cuban missile crisis? Yes, I could start writing that one tomorrow.)And you? Maybe your Great Theme is covid. Or the Cold War. Or something completely else. And of course loads of great books are written without some great backdrop of that kind. But as a technique to use, when the circumstances are right? It’s a no-brainer. You get instant depth and gravity. You get sales.That’s just about it from me. Do take a look in our PSes. But also do remember that we have a free membership offer for y’all too. We’ve had way over a thousand people take the offer up already and have had amazingly positive feedback too. We’ll be ending the offer soon, so grab it now:Access My Free 14-day Membership HereThat’s it from me.Stay safe. Stay happy. Stay writing.And what do you think? Reckon that King Lear is overheated codswallop? Are you already at work on the Ultimate Covid Masterpiece? Are you safe and well? Or going stir crazy? Or, heck, do you have a great internet meme to share. Put your glad rags on, mosey down to the comments, and let\'s all have a Heated Debate.

Folks, we can avoid the subject no more. Pandemic is upon us. Around the world, we’re closing our doors to the outside, stocking up on handgel, and worrying about our elderly and vulnerable relatives.We here at Jericho are all 100% OK.Over the last year or two, as it happens, we’ve worked hard to build a team that mostly sits in the same small office in Jericho, Oxford because we reckon that physical proximity forms bonds and culture like nothing else. That said, we can all work remotely and that’s exactly what we’re now doing. Everyone is safe and well. Long may it remain that way.I’m OK too. All the same, these are uncertain times. I have four kids under the age of 7 and my wife is immune-compromised and physically disabled. She is certainly in the vulnerable category and we have to hope that the waves of coronavirus don’t break too roughly on our little island here. I don’t think they will.My wife and I both have elderly relatives, all of whom are being as safe and sensible as can be, and all of whom, aside from their age, are in pretty decent health.I hope you and yours are spared any serious ill health in these next weeks and months. That, by far, is the most important thing. I’ll light a candle for you all.And after that … a long way after that … we’re still all writers. And Shakespeare took advantage of the quarantine restrictions brought about by the bubonic plague to write King Lear. And Macbeth. And (damn the man) Anthony and Cleopatra.If we’re safe, and our loved ones are safe, and we’ve watched enough funny Youtube videos about families surviving quarantine, our thoughts will start to turn to writing.We’re here to help.Same as before. Same as always.If we can help, we will. If you have a dumb question, we can probably answer it. If you need help with your manuscript, we can certainly help with that. Our online courses will run just as before. We’ll still be available by phone and email.What’s more, we’re giving serious thought as to how we can do still more to help people in an age when simply getting to the shops may be difficult.Over the coming weeks, you’ll get a stream of announcements from us about things we’re doing to help out. First and foremost, we want you to be secure. After that, if you need our support, we’re aiming to do more than we’ve done before, not less.In that context, I know a lot of you have wanted to try out JW membership. Perhaps you’re nervous of making a full-on commitment to an annual or rolling monthly subscription. Or perhaps you just want to nose into a few specific videos. (Want to get the detail on how to build a mailing list? Or need a refresher on how to produce great descriptive writing? Or get an insight into how big publishers work? Or use AgentMatch to build a list of agents. Or – well, anything really.)Anyway. Whatever. We’ve created a free, no-strings, 14-day membership for you. You can access it whenever you want. (For example, if the next week or two looks frantic for you, the offer will still be there in 2 or 3 weeks’ time. We’ll give you plenty of notice before we withdraw it.)And “no strings” means exactly that. The membership is free. We won’t ask you for a bank card. The membership won’t suddenly flip into a paying subscription. If at the end of the 14-day period, you choose to take out a full annual membership or our cancel-any-time monthly package, we’ll be delighted. If not, if the freebie was useful but sufficient for your needs, we’re also delighted. We’re here to help.Access My Free 14-day Membership HereThat’s it from me. We’ve got some other ideas that I hope you’ll all love.In particular, we haven’t forgotten our existing members. We want to do something lovely for you guys. Stay tuned. I don’t have anything to announce yet, but will do soon.Stay safe, youse. Then go and write King Lear, you slackers.You can add your draft ACT I below for scathing comment from the ghost of King James I. Or just chat about whatever the heck. We\'re all here.

My book of the moment is Amazon Ads Unleashed – a very useful guide to advertising your book on Amazon. Couple of warnings before you rush out and buy it. First, it’s written for more advanced users. If you just want a basic tour of Amazon ads, this isn’t the book for you. If a basic guide is what you’re after, you should head over to our Self-Pub course, which is free to JW members.The second warning is that Amazon advertising in general works only for indie authors. If you’re traditionally published, your per-book royalties will be so small that it’ll be hard to make ads work for you. Not just that, but there are other problems with the way trad publishers price and market their books which mean conversion rates are likely to be poor.So in a way, what I’m about to say won’t be of direct relevance to many of you … except that the heart of it is relevant to absolutely all of you.Here’s what Robert Ryan, author of that Amazon Ads book, has to say about his own genre:In my case, I might run an epic fantasy category ad. This targets all books listed in this category. That’s a lot. A whopping lot…But I write traditional-style epic fantasy. The category, though, is a mixed bag of other things. First there’s grimdark versus noblebright – the more traditional flavour of epic fantasy. People tend to read one or the other. Much less often they read both. So, in a category ad, my noblebright books are being shown indiscriminately to grimdark readers. And those folks are numerous…But things get worse. Extremely popular just at the moment is reverse-harem fantasy. It should have its own category, but it gets lumped in epic fantasy… And if reverse harem isn’t enough, litrpg fiction (literary role playing fiction) is thrown in with epic fantasy too.My noblebright book ad could be shown on all these books in a category ad. It potentially gets a massive impression volume, but perhaps only twenty percent of the impressions are on similar noblebright books. And that’s where the readers I want to reach are mostly hanging out.The point Ryan is making here is that seeking a wide audience for your books will always mean that you are chasing one that converts badly.Those reverse harem readers just won’t buy your Tolkein-style fantasy. It’s just not what they want.And, OK, that sounds like it’s just a lesson in how to use Amazon ads. But it’s not. It’s a lesson in book marketing, period.You can’t make money by advertising your books widely on Amazon. Or via Facebook. Or via Bookbub.If you seek to build your mailing list via large, indiscriminate giveaways, you will end up with a mailing list full of junk.If you seek to boost your Facebook likes by posting funny cat videos (assuming you are not an author of funny cat books), you will end up with a Facebook profile that is absolutely useless for any marketing purpose.If you go on a blog tour of 35 different blogs, where 34 of them are not perfectly attuned to the kind of book you write, you will be wasting your effort at least 97.1% of the time.And so on.Any kind of book marketing is about finding your most passionate audience and finding ways to make that audience adhere to you. (Of which, by far the most effective tool, is simply: write good books. If you can do that, the rest of your marketing challenge becomes a lot, lot simpler.)In a funny way, what we think of as advertising – the Superbowl ad, or huge outdoor posters advertising beers or cars – is the exact reverse of what you should be thinking about. Those ads are aimed at everybody, and they work because Mercedes (let’s say) wants to target everyone. Either people are potential Mercedes buyers (so great; they get some effective advertising.) Or they are not potential Mercedes buyers, in which case they are being taught what the meaning of the brand is … which means that everyone knows … which means that Mercedes buyers know everyone around them will understand the brand meaning of the car they drive. That actively deepens the commitment of those Mercedes buyers, because there would be nothing stupider than paying top dollar for a car if people didn’t know it was a top dollar car.Your book just isn’t like that. Your market is a niche in a niche in a niche and you just don’t need to establish some universal brand value. You need to find and talk to your readers. That’s it.And it’s so easy to be tempted by the numbers. “If I wrote on this blog, I could get in front of X,000 readers.” “If I ran this ad, I could accumulate X,000 impressions.” And so on.That way of thinking is always wrong.Passion and specificity matters in book marketing perhaps almost more than in any other market you are able to think of. How come? Because books are utterly individual. Your market isn’t the market for fiction. Or the market for adult fiction. Or the market for fantasy. Or the market for epic fantasy. If you start to think of yourself as in the market for noblebright epic fantasy, you are getting closer. But is your book about warriors? Or a coming of age story? Or medieval tinted? Or what? Truth is, you are probably in a niche of a niche of a niche.And that’s good – because that’s where passion, and readers, and success lies.That’s it from me. We’ve got a brilliant self-pub day in London tomorrow. Hope to see loads of you there. If you haven’t yet bought tickets (shame on you!), you can turn up at the door and we’ll see if we like the cut of your jib. Details here.Till soon.What do you think? How do you market your work? What works, what doesn\'t? And are you more grimdark or noblebright?

The book I’m reading in the bath at the moment is the controversial American Dirt. The controversy is a bit silly, I think, but I’m not going to talk about that here. Rather, what I want to look at is two different ways of writing.Here’s one way. The excerpt comes from the very start of the book – the mother (Mami) shoving her boy (Luca) towards safety during an attack on their home:Her hands are not gentle; she propels him towards the shower. He trips on the raised tile step and falls forwards onto his hands. Mami lands on top of him and his teeth pierce his lip in the tumble. He tastes blood. One dark droplet makes a tiny circle of red against the bright green shower tile. Mami shoves Luca into the corner. There’s no door on this shower, no curtain. It’s only a corner of his abuela’s bathroom, with a third tiled wall built to suggest a stall. This wall is around five and a half feet high and three feet long – just large enough, with some luck, to shield Luca and his mother from sight. Luca’s back is wedged, his small shoulders touching both walls. His knees are drawn up to his chin, and Mami is clinched around him like a tortoise’s shell. The door of the bathroom is open, which worries Luca.Now, it’s not just the content there which strongly suggests a thriller. The prose does too. In fact, this chunk has all the flavour of Modern American Thriller – clean, deft, unyielding. Writers in other genres and from other countries sometimes write this way, but there’s no question that American writers first constructed this way of writing and that they’re still the best at delivering it.But before we discuss it in detail, let’s try to understand the beast. The writing involved in this MAT standard is typically:Present tense.Factual and declarative – not many qualifications or uncertainties.Sentences are typically short.Vocabulary is typically uncomplicated.Point of view is often objective rather than personal. There are only two phrases in this passage which identify Luca as the point-of-view character (“He tastes blood” and “which worries Luca”.) Mostly, the viewpoint feels neutral and external.Centred on factual / physical reportage, rather than emotional / intellectual reflectionA collage of one-off snapshots, more than a broadly connected picture. So if you look at the passage above, you could remove almost any sentence or clause and leave the rest of it undamaged. So “He tastes blood” stands alone – a specific snapshot of a specific sensation. Yes, the sentence makes sense given what has immediately gone before, but you could remove this sentence and the passage would still make perfect sense. That’s true, give or take, of nearly all of it.It’s pretty obvious why thrillers work well this way. There’s something uncompromising in this kind of language. Something warriorlike. In battle, there’s no room for complex reflection or sifting through of what-ifs and maybes. You just need facts. You need to remove emotion from those facts. You tell it like it is.There is a kind of simplicity in this writing, but there’s a simplicity in the workings of a well-made handgun too. It’s the same kind of simplicity and has nothing to do with a lack of sophistication. George Pelecanos is a particular adept, but there are plenty of others. It’s like these authors have taken the lessons of Hemingway and Chandler and polished them up into a silver pebble, round and indivisible.But that’s not the only way to write. Here’s how you could take the same material and deliver it in a way that largely breaks those MAT rules:With ungentle hands, she propelled him towards the shower. Clumsy with shock, and her attention still pulled to the sounds of the intruders outside, she misjudged things, or Luca did. He tripped on the green tiled step and fell forwards, face-first, biting his lip in the tumble. Mami scooped him up and held him close, her body a shield for his. The blood from his lip looked astonishingly bright on the green tiles. Mami, automatically, wiped the blood away, but her thoughts were elsewhere. The shower had no door or curtain, only a low tiled wall that formed a kind of stall. It was pitifully little by way of hiding place. Nothing at all, by way of shelter.In that passage, the series-of-snapshots quality has largely gone. The sequence of actions and consequences is all made clearer and more smoothly joined. Mami pushes Luca. He trips. He cuts his lip. Mami cuddles him and wipes away the blood. They take stock of where they are, and its limitations. And the reflections / qualifications / uncertainties are there too. Why did Luca fall? Well, Mami ‘misjudged things, or Luca did.’ Reality isn’t always quite clear, and this kind of writing picks up on those unclarities.Is that rewritten passage, better or worse? Well, neither really. It\'s just different. Let’s call this kind of prose writing deep rather than flat; the equivalent of painting with oils rather than acrylics.Very broadly speaking, the more character-centred your story, the more you will tend to paint with oils, the more you’ll want to write deep.The more your interest is in action-reportage, and especially thriller-action reportage, the more you are likely to write flat.But you can mix them up. As your story floats in and out of reflective moments and action moments, you can adapt your prose style accordingly. Indeed, although I’ve quoted Jeanine Cummins / American Dirt for this email, most of her book isn’t really written in MAT. It’s more character-led, more reflective.And if your story is mostly ‘written deep’, then passages of ‘writing flat’ will be that much more powerful, that much more shocking. Your action scenes will gain a sense of edge and that exciting lack of compromise. The mild disconnectedness between the sentences can almost suggest a mild shock or altered emotional response on the part of your protagonist. Those are things you can emphasise a bit with your dialogue and your character’s other responses to the situation.My own writing borrows a lot from MAT and I have a lot of fun with it – including actual fun, as in making jokes. So here, for example, is my character, Fiona, who has just had an altercation with a couple of thugs. She’s broken the jaw of one of them, then ran away. She’s safe now, but in shock. She arrives at a bus-shelter, where there’s a man also waiting:‘Hi,’ I say.‘Hi.’After a bit, he says, ‘Are you all right?’I say, ‘I don’t know.’I want to ask him to punch me on the arm, to see if I can feel anything, but I don’t.He smiles and shifts his weight.We stand there together until I see a taxi. I try to flag it down, but walk straight into the glass wall of the shelter instead. My bus-stop buddy does the honours, flags the taxi and sees me into it. He handles me as you’d handle a figurine of antique china.Nothing there says, ‘I am in shock’ yet Fiona’s shock reverberates all through the passage. There’s no obvious joke / punchline in the text, but Fiona’s ability to walk straight into a glass wall is sort of funny all the same. Fiona doesn’t directly reflect on how she must look or is behaving but, because the man asks ‘Are you all right?’, we understand that she must be giving off something quite odd.And so on.This kind of writing fun comes directly from the tools and resources of MAT – writing flat, not writing deep. (More prose writing tips here.)Have fun with it. Tomorrow week, Saturday 14th, I’m going to be in London talking about self-publishing and author-led marketing generally. We still have a few tickets left for that, so do come along if you can.But tell me: how do you write? Do you paint with oils or acrylics? Do you write flat or write deep? Or do you mix em up? Tell me what works for you, and let\'s all have a Heated Debate.

In 1923, Coca-Cola’s CEO stated that he always wanted his product to be ‘Within an arm’s reach of desire’ – a terrific phrase.Since, very likely, the product you are trying to create is going to sit on Amazon, and since your likely buyer is sitting at a screen of some kind, you aren’t actually even trying to get your customer to move their whole arm. A hand movement – a finger movement, even – will be enough.Now, OK, there’s a whole Amazonian science of how to make sure that your book pops up in the right set of search results for the right kind of reader. There’s also work to be done in thinking about how to convert those readers once they click through to your Amazon page.But, for today, let’s just focus on that moment, on screen or in store, when a reader is browsing a dozen or so books. They get to see, for now, just book cover and title. The next step is going to be reaching for the book and taking a look at blurb / inside material. But you’re not there yet. You have to make sure that your cover and your title convinces the reader to pick your book out, not any of the others.What do you do? What should you be aiming to achieve? What’s your strategy here?Well, now. A few years back, the only way to answer that question would have been to assemble a roomful of publishing brains, in New York or London, and just toss out the question. The basic answer would have been, roughly, ‘Leave it to us; we’re the experts.’These days, however, we don’t need experts. We have data. And we have companies, like the Codex Group, which go out and collect it.And what the Codex Group did was to take 50 or 60 books and place them in front of 4000 readers. Then see whether those readers clicked the “Read More” button placed next to the book cover. I\'ve added the covers to this post, with some comments. We\'ll get there in a second. First, though, some general comments. (more comments on cover design here.)General Comments (Lt. Gen. 3-star)You can’t think of title or cover in isolation. Ideally, you are looking for a rich reverberation between the two. So your title ought to launch some kind of question. Your cover shouldn’t provide a direct answer, by any means, but it should offer an image or mood that seems to gesture at some ingredient in the likely answer.So one of the books explored was The Dressmaker’s Gift. Now that is pretty obviously a good title. It launches a couple of questions: who is the dressmaker and what is her gift?So far so good. Now a klutzy, dumb, close-down-those-questions kind of cover would depict a dressmaker making dresses. That kind of image would already kind of answer the first of the two questions. (‘Who is the dressmaker? Why here she is. We’ve provided you with a picture of her.’)In fact, the cover depicts a somewhat sepia-tinted view of the Eiffel Tower, complete with birds. And that is an interestingly complementary addition to the set of questions first raised.‘Who is the dressmaker? Don’t know, but Paris comes into it. The sepia suggests something from the past. Ooh, a book about a Parisian dressmaker maybe? 1950s? 1890s? I wonder what her gift is? That picture looks sort of romantic, but I wonder if it’s a bit sad?’By reverberating with the title and adding complementary, but open-ended, ingredients, the title goes from being good to excellent. And – thank you Codex Group – we don’t need to guess if the combo worked. We know it did.That’s one comment. The general rule for making any title / cover combination work.But here’s another.Obviously the Codex Group picked a bunchy of books by a bunch of different publishers. But one publisher won 8 out of the top 10 slots. 8 out of 10. Wowser.Want to take a guess which publisher excelled to that extent? Take a moment to guess. I’ll send you a biscuit if you’re right.And … drumroll …The winner was …Amazon Publishing, the publishing arm of Amazon. Penguin Random House and the rest of those guys were also rans.Now that’s kind of intriguing. Presumably creating titles/covers is, or should be, a core skill of trad publishers, but they’re out-competed by a tech company / retailer. Odd.Here’s how the APub creative director speaks of the creative process. (Text commentary is from Publishers Weekly.)Another key in creating an effective cover is ensuring that the design works with the title, said Amazon creative director Courtney Dodson. She explained that Amazon prioritizes “the interplay between the title of the book and the visuals on the cover, because when they interact in meaningful ways, readers understand the world and tone of the book—which helps us reach readers who will enjoy the book.”Dodson noted that, while there have been cases in which Amazon has changed a title to create a better partner for the artwork, the more common approach is for the team to look at how design “can support and augment the resonance of a title that we believe is right for its positioning message.”Though Amazon also uses available data to check trends and customer feedback, cover designs are very much a collaborative effort involving the author, editor, and marketing and design teams.“The cover has to work for everyone involved,” Dodson noted. “It is a rigorous process with lots of feedback.”You know what struck me in those comments? That the author is a part of the collaborative effort. I’ve published a lotta lotta books with the trad houses and I’d say that the effort has never really felt collaborative. The outcome has sometimes been good, sometimes not, but it’s never felt like the design team really wanted to involve me in their thought process.And you know what? An author is a creative soul who understands their book. Just might want to pick their brains. Just a thought.OK. Nuff from me. Here are the winning covers with comments from me. But what do you think? Let us know in the comment line below, and let\'s all have a Heated Debate.____________________AFTEROK. I have no idea why this came out a winner. It looks like pretty standard romance fare to me. I guess the \"After\" title suggests something a bit pricklier or more complicated than standard issue happily ever after stuff, but really, I don\'t know.THE SECRET OF LOST STONESOK, this is obviously an intriguing title, and the image somehow personalises it. There is a woman looking meditatively over a river. What is she thinking? What are the lost stones? What are the secrets? By adding a clear human element to in intriguing but impersonal title, I think the cover nails it. It\'s a beautiful image with nice fonts too. Always helps.THE VINE WITCHAnother beautiful, rich cover. And here, actually, the cover just takes the promise of the title and spills it out on a table. It\'s as though the cover is saying, \"No. Vine Witch. Really. We\'re talking spells and books and a kind of dark, lustrous beauty.\" Now the image is obviously not YA / fantasy fare, so we\'re looking at an adult book with some richly exotic ingredients. We want to know more about how the author is going to deliver the promise and the intrigue of the title. I\'d turn this one over for sure.THE DRESSMAKER\'S GIFTPerfect. Great title and a complementary / intriguing / atmospheric / beautiful image. Simple but bang on.LITTLE VOICESBrilliant, upside-down image takes a moment to figure out. The inversion and hint of drowning thrillerises what could otherwise be a rather gentler cover. The blue and orange/gold is very vogiush at the moment, but the combination does work. Likewise the very clear Open Sans / Helvetica style font is very modern thriller. The title is the one thing that really doesn\'t seem to yell thriller, but that\'s an element of intrigue in itself. I think this cover is quite bold in not emphasising genre more heavily. Brave, but clearly successful.DROWNING WITH OTHERSHere again, I\'m going to say this is Title 1 - Cover 0. All the intrigue comes from the title. The image is really just there to reinforce and deepen that promise. The car already provides a hint of what lies inside the book. Good, clear, effective.THIN AIROK. I\'m going to go out on a limb here and say that this cover is a good, efficient thriller cover, but nothing more. Frankly, I don\'t know why this cover outcompeted so many of its peers.WHAT YOU DIDNice to see Festival of Writing alumna, Claire McGowan, on this list. And here, the cover really, really builds on the relatively simple promise of the title. A smashed plate, shards still flying. And a hint of daggeriness in those shards, and blood in the colour of the font. Very simple ingredients, but you instantly want to know: What did she do? You have to click / turn the book to find out.THE LAST HOUSE GUESTThat blue and yellow again. And a great title. (Last guest because of murder? Or what? Why last?) The olde-worlde window panes suggest atmosphere but also prison bars. And the hint of landscape beyond give you something that\'s almost like the atmosphere of Agatha Christie\'s AND THEN THERE WERE NONE. All simple ingredients, but they kick off from that title.I\'M FINE AND NEITHER ARE YOUAgain, this is a title / cover combo whose genius lies 90% in the title itself. The cover just has to deliver the promise - then enrich it. So the woman (whom we can see more completely than the man) is both smiling and looking sideways at her partner. Is that suspicion? Curiosity? Knowledge? What? We already want to get into the relationship implied in that title and that sideways glance. Because the title is so crucial, it takes up nearly the whole cover.

This week, I’m still fishing in our Oceans of Jewels post. I want to present one more snippet from one of you. I’m going to comment on that, in the same way was I did last time, but I also want to draw attention to an issue that crops up in probably the majority of your pieces, and especially the ones that include some real descriptive writing. That issue is so prevalent and so crucial – and so easy to get right – that it’s worth spending real time with.So, let’s take a look at another one of your snippets, taken from this Ocean Of Jewels thread.The piece is from THE TAXI, by Helen Parusel, and it runs like this:My bare feet squelch in the cold, slick sludge that spreads vast and bleak before me. Linking arms with Stefanie on one side, and Anna on the other, I wonder if this was a good idea.Yesterday, Anna pointed at the events board, and looked at me, her jade eyes glinting. ‘You are not fully integrated in North German culture until you have experienced a Wattwanderung.’I’m not sure if trudging barefoot across the cold mudflats on the North Sea is a prerequisite for integration, but assured by Anna it would be a great laugh, I signed on the dotted line.We are a group of fifteen. Our guide, Guido, white bearded and crinkly eyed, tells us that when the tide recedes, the treasures of the Wadden Sea are revealed. But he has a warning: venturing onto the mudflats without an experienced guide with knowledge of the tide time-table can be fatal. We all nod, grateful to be in Guido’s capable hands as he leads us across the UNESCO World Heritage Site.With infectious enthusiasm, he splodges along with broad, brown feet, pointing at the scuttling crabs amongst the seashells, nuggets of amber and the heaps of sand-worm burrows scattered on the beach. Our feet make strange sucking sounds as tiny shrimps shoot out between our toes. We laugh and shriek. Despite cancer. God, this is good. The gusty wind flinging grains of sand and droplets of seawater against my face. My soul rising and dancing on the wind with the Oystercatchers, screeching above. Drunk on elation. I am here.There’s a lot of quality in this. The best bit is the paragraph about the scuttling crabs and the sand-work burrows. That kind of minute, specific observation forces you into the landscape precisely because it is so specific. Before reading that sentence, you probably didn’t know that sand-worms made burrows on tidal flats (I didn’t), but by calling attention to that detail, the author has brought the beach vibrantly to life. Indeed, even if you were actually on the beach, you might not notice the sand-worm burrows, so there’s a way in which this line of text makes you more aware of the beach than if you were there in reality. (More on writing evocative descriptions.)That’s what good prose does. It explains the world – life – back to us, in a way that just being in the world can’t always manage.OK, so good. As I say, there’s plenty of good stuff here, and I like it.But let’s have a think about that very first sentence. This one:My bare feet squelch in the cold, slick sludge that spreads vast and bleak before me.What do you think of that? Do you like it? Or hate it? Or are you carefully sitting on the fence? Just take a moment to see how it feels.And – full disclosure – I have a problem with it and my problem is simply this. That sentence feels like writing. And that’s not good.Now in part, that’s just the result of adjectival overgrowth: five adjectives in a sixteen-word sentence.My bare feet squelch in the cold, slick sludge that spreads vast and bleak before me.I also think the word ‘sludge’ is a bit imprecise here. Almost anything can be sludge – apple puree, radioactive gloop, a mudflat. I think that, especially, this opening description needs something more precise, more specific.So, OK, let’s fix the sentence to address those niggles. Something like this, maybe:My bare feet squelch in the chilly mud that spreads out before me.So, I’ve vaped three of the five adjectives, and I don’t really think we’ve lost anything. The phrase ‘spreads out’ implies extent, so I don’t think the word ‘vast’ added anything much. I don’t think we need the word bleak, because we’re on a North Sea mudflat which is – duh! – made out of mud. I think the bleakness is already baked in. And the word ‘slick’ – what is that really adding? How would you distinguish a slick sludge from any other kind of sludge? I’m not sure. Perhaps the writer is wanting to call attention to the smoothness and shine of mud that hasn’t yet been trampled, but the word ‘slick’ is just too compressed a way to suggest this.Oh yes, and I’ve changed the word ‘cold’ to the word ‘chilly’. How come? Well, no reason, really. It just felt better. But I think it’s mostly because the sentence is made up almost entirely of single-syllable words and it just felt rhythmically better to break that up.So the sentence has got better, but I still don’t love it and we’re now starting to get closer to my primary discomfort. The sentence has two chunks, which can be split up like this:My bare feet squelch in the chilly mud – focus is on the narrator’s feet.… the chilly mud that spreads out before me – focus is on the extent of the mud.So that one sentence has a dual focus. Now that’s not, as it happens, usually a good thing to do with sentences, but sentences are flexible things and I’m not going to say that sentences can never point two ways at once. They can.But, but, but.Do you feel the problem? (And honestly, honestly, I’ll feel a gooey little thrill of pleasure if you do.)The issue is this.The sentence purports to convey the experience of the narrator. And the sentence sort of shouts out the kind of lessons learned in plenty of writing workshops.Look, I’m speaking in the first person! And the present tense! And I’m using a full array of senses (squelch, chilly, spreads out)! I’m showing, not telling! I’m right here in the narrator’s head!But phooey, says I.And piffle, says I. And balderdash, bunkum, claptrap and poppycock.The thing is: this sentence reads like something constructed in a writing workshop to sound like it conveys the experience of an alert narrator … without actually conveying a true first-person experience.So let’s say you, right now, were transported to a chilly North Sea mudflat. Your shoes are torn from you (politely, of course; and you’re given a chit so you can reclaim them when you’re done.) You are then asked to walk out on the mudflat.I think you experience one thing at a time. I think you bounce between sensations and thoughts. And I think you assemble the whole experience relatively slowly.Indeed, I think your experience might run something like this:It’s a strange experience stepping out on the mud. The mud appears as smooth as whalebone and I first assume it to be firm. My first steps give the lie to that. The mud is silky soft and squirts away between my toes, until I reach the hard sand beneath. It’s cold, too, the chill of January seawater. And as we start to walk, the group of us, it seems like the landscape broadens as we move. Spreading wider and wider, as we leave the dunes and beach-huts for the huge, open horizon.And look: you could write that same passage in a hundred different ways, and they’d all be fine. But I think you do need to isolate one experience at a time. If that experience is a new, strange thing – the purpose of the paragraph, in fact – then I think you need to tease it out. I think it needs two or three lines, not just the one. I think you can only move onto the extent of the sands, once you’ve properly dealt with the feel of the mud. (Or vice versa, of course. I’m not fussed.)And the real thing here – the Secret of Everything, in fact – is YOU NEED TO KEEP EVERYTHING FROM YOUR CHARACTER’S VIEWPOINT. Every detail. Every shade of every word.That dual focus sentence didn’t feel like how we authentically experience things like walking barefoot on mud. And the only thing that really matters in that sentence is capturing that exact experience. Not compressing it. Or rushing it. But capturing it and expressing it.I call that the secret of everything, because the issue is so widespread and infects even pretty good writing. Here’s another tiny snippet from that Ocean of Jewels collection. (This snippet is from Gabster’s Finding Charlotte.) Her opening para begins like this:One minute the sky was clear, then dark clouds rolled in, casting ominous shadows. Flashes of lightning on the horizon; a sense of anticipation. She tugged her seat belt tighter as the plane plunged into a dense grey massNow, again, that extract comes from a page of perfectly decent writing. (It tells of Charlotte’s encounter with a peculiar character on a flight to Cambodia. If I were reading that page, I’d turn onto the next, wanting to know what happened next.)But the problem here is pretty obvious, right? Charlotte, from her airplane seat, won’t really be able to see clouds roll in. She might see them thicken up as the plane moves, but she won’t really be able to distinguish rolling-cloud movement from travelling-plane movement. Likewise, what are the ominous shadows? They’re cast on the ground presumably, which Charlotte can’t see, because she’s in a plane. She can’t see a horizon, either, not in its normal sense of earth-meets-sky. And then “the plane plunged into a dense grey mass” might be a correct description of what happened … but that viewpoint would require an observer positioned outside the plane, so therefore not Charlotte.And so on. The result is that we can’t stay close to Charlotte’s own experience because we are constantly being pushed out of it.I could find probably fifty similar examples from that Ocean of Jewels collection with similar issues.And the issues, by the way, arise because the writer is trying to do the right thing (get specific, get descriptive, get atmospheric) but in a way that detaches the reader from the character’s own experience. (More on developing characters here.)And better to have a bland sentence that is authentically from the character’s viewpoint than an interesting one from the wrong viewpoint.That, my friends, is the secret of everything.That’s enough from me. If this email runs on any longer, somebody will shoot me.Till soonHarryPPS: Now look, you probably know we’ve got some Lovely London Events on shortly. Tickets are starting to run short, so don’t be a chump. Do what you gotta do:1.    Come to The Getting Published Day. Don’t fail to get published because you’re doing the basics wrong. We’ll tell you what to do and how to do it. Learn more.2.    Come to our Self-Publishing Day. I love self-publishing. It’s magnificently powerful, But you must, must, must do it right and ninety-something percent of self-pubbers do it wrong. We’ll tell you what to do.PPPS: If you are a member of Jericho Writers, you can submit your work to the upcoming Slushpile Live with the Soho Agency. That’s right: you get to pop a chunk of your work in front of a real live literary agent who is actively looking for new clients. We film the whole thing and stream it live so you can listen – and ask questions. Sign up page – for JW members only – is here.And if you’re not a member of Jericho Writers, then what are you thinking of? Hurry over to this page and put things right at once. We do these Slushpile Live events regularly, but they’re members only, kids.

Blimey.Somewhere in the world today, there’s a bloke who woke up with a bit of a cough … and later figured out that he (or she) was the person who introduced a new coronavirus to the world. A little thing leading to a big one.Well, last week, I muttered something about a change of subject: “Blah, blah. Let’s turn to your work. Blah, blah. Hey, why not upload something to Townhouse.”Yeah. Good idea, Harry. I was expecting a trickle, perhaps even a decent flow. Instead – a deluge. More than 400 of you commented on that Ocean of Jewels post (here), and there are more comments still coming in. And that’s great. Really fantastic.So.I’ve picked out five of your pieces and given proper comments. Oh yes, and this post is all aboiut editing, right? If you want to read our thoughts on how to edit your book, you will find them here. If you want a proper manuscript assessment from one of our superpowered editors, you can get it here.Right then.Five writers. Five pieces. Five sets of comments from me. Here goes:Evolution\'s Leap, by Ross CorriganScene:  A failed attempt to track down a gifted individual:A bitter Swiss morning brought with it an overcast sky and the threat of further flurries. Earlier, snowflakes had tumbled and drifted in the headlights of passing cars, like fluttering white moths of frozen rain, and the accumulation had managed to drape a first winter jacket on the sloping shoulders of the town’s picturesque Alpine buildings. Well-heeled and suitably wrapped-up locals hurried by, though not before glancing and shaking their heads in dismay. The town of Zug was used to many things: Maserati drivers, Swiss and foreign directors of businesses domiciled in the local Canton, or state, and well-off tourists attracted to its pretty lakeside old town. What it wasn’t used to was a drive-by shooting of a foreign national—a young Chinese woman—right in front of the exclusive Park Hotel.Though the clothed body was obscured by the flapping, hastily erected cover, the corpse’s exposed head wasn’t. Disturbed by an ill-timed gust, the dead woman’s eyes stared lifelessly out towards the Metalli Shopping Mall. There was no doubting the cause of death. With the black humour typical of their secretive trade, the agents referred to it as lead poisoning—two shots: one to the chest, one to the centre of the forehead. My commentsThis is already good, and isn’t that far from really good.That final paragraph reads pretty much like a class piece of crime fiction. Good description of the corpse. Strong sense of place. Excellent bit of macabre police-humour at the end. (The one niggle in this paragraph has to do with a grammatical issue. The issue is that an adjective / adjectival phrase – “disturbed by an ill-timed gust” – is modifying the wrong thing. What the author wants us to think is that the cover over the corpse has been disturbed by an ill-timed gust. But grammatically, the sentence is saying that the dead woman’s eyes have been disturbed. I’m not normally one to fuss over grammar much, but the niggle in this case does create a tiny problem of comprehension, and those things are always bad.)But mostly, give or take a copy-editor’s slicing pen, that last para feels like crime fiction wonderfully well done.The first two paras – well, they’re almost there too. I’ve got one definite niggle there and one probable one.The definite one is that the first paragraph reverses on itself. So it describes the morning weather, then jumps back into the prior night (“Earlier, snowflakes had …”), then catches up again with well-heeled locals. And all this is by way of preamble to the actual corpse. I don’t mind time-reversals too much in principle, but when you put them into a preamble, it all ends up feeling a bit confusing and congested.So I’d definitely want to keep my timeline straightforward here: snow in the night, overcast morning, well-heeled locals, corpse. (And notice, by the way, that the author is slowly zooming in on the corpse. Going from large observations to increasingly specific ones, right on until you reach the dead woman’s eyes. That’s nice.)But I’d probably also want to take a sentence or two out of this. Without the broader context, it’s hard to say, but it felt maybe a little longer than necessary.Overall though: this feels like a book I’d like to read.Benjamin Tate Lives Among Us, by “Alan”The main character is a runner. Here, he is 18. His parents used to drive him to races, he now drives himself.It was different now that he had learned to drive. For the last few years he’d grown increasingly embarrassed to arrive at the track with his parents in tow. He was taller than his mother and stronger than his father. He’d walk in front or behind them, pretending to be alone, and then remain in the changing rooms a long time after his shower so there were fewer people to see them leave together. Eventually his parents began to withdraw. They no longer cheered loudly from the stands when he led down the straight, they kept their distance before races and waited for him in the car afterwards. Then one day his father handed him the keys and stood in the road with his mother watching him drive away. Ben had seen them in the rear-view mirror getting smaller and smaller.My commentsThis is really simple, and really strong. The best line here is the closing one about the parents getting smaller in the rear-view mirror. Because of the set-up in the first para, we know this isn’t just a comment about them receding into the distance. It’s also about them becoming a smaller factor in his racing life, and in his life generally.Another bit of skill here is the way the piece divides into three. First, some specific comments about the race track: walking in front, staying in the shower. That’s quite specific in focus. Quite close up. Then you have the bit that begins ‘His parents began to withdraw’. That withdrawal starts the process of exit. The parents are still at the track but physically distant. They are still in view of the camera, but this is a long shot, not a close up.And then, with the rear view mirror, the parents come to disappear completely – but the withdrawal (physical and metaphorical) has been going on all through this passage.No one sentence here reads like great writing, but this has the quiet skill of an Anne Tyler or an Elizabeth Strout. It’s class.Ascetic of the Sword, by ChimpledusFantasy short story about martial arts, mastery and obsession. The main character aspires to achieve \'the Perfect Cut\' in his swordsmanship but has severely injured himself in his narrow path to perfection.We continue in silence as the day brightens and golden rays gleam on the dewy rice stalks. I look at the age spots on the back of the monk’s head, waiting for him to ask a question.It does not come.“Venerable Father, I am sick,” I say.“Indeed? You look hale as a tiger. How are you sick?”“I…my body is sick. My hand shakes.”“So does mine.” The monk laughs gently. “I don’t see anything wrong with that.”“I cannot train. I am in pursuit of the Perfect Cut. I have attained it once, by accident, and I am unable to find it again. And now I am afraid I never will.”“Perhaps you are never meant to.”I pause. “Why?”“What is the Perfect Cut to you?”“The cut where the target is severed with such perfection that everything rings in harmony.”“Why do you seek it?”“Why train, if not to reach the epitome of skill?”My commentsI just like this! It has the feel of poetry. Very spare. Lots of clarity. The dialogue has just enough twistiness in it – an obliqueness to the turns of thought – to keep us interested, but never confused. If I was editing this, I’d just do one thing: I’d kill one of the adjectives in that first sentence. I’d probably take out ‘golden’ – my Perfect Cut.Untitled, by LizThis is the beginning of my ghost story set in the late 1950s on the border of England and Wales. The story starts 1st December 1956.And here I was, after a day of travelling and too many sleepless nights, back at the house where I had arrived as a newborn twenty-six years before. There was a neat symmetry to it, given the circumstances. Even in my exhaustion and misery I could appreciate the irony of a writer straying from her intended path in such a perfectly plotted, circular way. The thought was a useful distraction, if nothing else, as I climbed the last few yards towards the house, half-blinded by the stinging wind. The Black Hill was not a kind place on a December afternoon at the best of times, but winter had arrived early and resolute this year, storming down like an invasion from the north and blasting all traces of autumn away overnight. In London, fog had blunted the outlines of buildings and blurred the faces of passers-by, and I had moved from our rooms to the warmth of the library, on the tube, on buses, cushioned from the worst of the weather. Here, everything was sharp and cold. Gorse spiked above the rusty bracken. Hawthorns twisted spare, hoary branches towards the east. The bare mud of the track was frozen into jags. It was hard ground, even in the summer, with a meagre skin of soil over the old sandstone rock. My commentsThis feels like it wants a quick edit, but I know this part of the world well, and its physical details are beautifully nailed – right down to the hawthorns that have twisted, east-pointing branches. (The prevailing wind is from the west, and the mountain trees are all lop-sided.) Rather than make specific comments, though, I thought I’d just show you how I’d edit this piece, if it were mine. It’s already good though. What follows is just a wash-and-brush-up.:And here I was, after a day of travelling and too many sleepless nights, back at the house where I had arrived as a newborn twenty-six years before. There was a neat symmetry to it, given the circumstances. Even in my exhaustion, I could appreciate the irony of a writer straying from her intended path in such a perfectly plotted, circular way. The thought was a useful distraction, if nothing else.I climbed the last few yards towards the house. The Black Hill was not a kind place on a December afternoon at the best of times, but winter had arrived early and resolute this year, with a wind to tear away the last traces of autumn. My eyes streamed in the blast. In London, fog had blunted the outlines of buildings and blurred the faces of passers-by, and I had moved from our rooms to the warmth of the library, on the tube, on buses, cushioned from the worst of the weather. Here, everything was sharp and cold. Gorse spiked above the rusty bracken. Hawthorns twisted spare, hoary branches towards the east. The bare mud of the track was frozen into jags. It was hard ground, even in the summer, a meagre skin of soil over sandstone. Wishing on a Dream, by Patricia ThomsonNo intro – just “something I’ve been messing with for a while”.But we’re here in the States, playing some dates to make up for ones we had to cancel when visas got screwed up.  Tonight was our first show in Hartford, Connecticut, and now we’re on our way to Sayreville, New Jersey.  My hometown is about forty minutes south of there. We’ve played around New Jersey but never in it so this is being looked at as a homecoming show for me.  I look out the bus window into the streetlight-lit darkness, knowing familiar sights are out there and wanting to see them, to be in territory I know for a change.Then I see it, and just like when I was a kid I perk up.The red and white and gold revolving neon sign above the Anheuser Busch bottling plant in Newark glows against the orange-tinged night sky.  Seeing the stylized A with a bald eagle in flight behind it meant that we were exactly halfway between our house in Oceanville and Aunt Marie’s house in North Arlington.  Not that there’s no reason to go to either anymore.  Aunt Marie retired to Florida two years ago and I have better things to do than listen to my father go on about September eleventh being fake and why I’m running around Europe with a bunch of hippies.  “Where I’m from, not where I live,” I say into the night.And no matter where I go, I never feel welcome.My commentsReally easy, simple, terrific writing. The scatter of placenames already anchor the narrative in place. The Anheuser Busch bottling plant seems like a brilliant marker of location too.  That fine sense of place is matched by a nice sense of something like nostalgia – but more complex, because of the protagonist’s cautious self-distancing.That complex relationship to the past is threaded all the way through this snippet. (hometown … homecoming show … familiar sights … wanting to see them … no reason to go to either … better things to do than listen to my father.) That collection of thoughts and feelings prepares the ground for the character’s own two-sentence, two-para summary at the end. And even the summary feels unsettled: she’s not settled in the past, she’s got no new place to settle now.This is really strong stuff. My one real niggle? I think that compound word “streetlight-lit” should be run over by a steamroller and then pounded into dust. And then put on a rocket and fired at the sun.But this book has class written all over it. If I were an agent, I’d be salivating.That’s it from me. I’ll go back to these themes again next week. There’s a lot of meat here. I’ll also do my best to make these comment-athons a bit more regular. They’re clearly really working.I’ll shut up now. I am going to build a rocket, destination Sun. If you want to read more of these pieces, or to upload your own, then the Monster Upload thread is right here: https://community.jerichowriters.com/page/view-post?id=73 Till soonHarryPS: Oh heck. You don’t want a monster massive set of PSes. So I’m going to recycle this one from last week:1.    Come to The Getting Published Day. Don’t fail to get published because you’re doing the basics wrong. We’ll tell you what to do and how to do it. Learn more.2.    Come to our Self-Publishing Day. I love self-publishing. I think the modern Amazon- and ebook-led self-pub model has done more for authors than anything at all since the rise of literary agents. But if you self-publish, you have to do it right. We’ll tell you how.

OK. Next week, we’re going to change the subject completely. In fact, next week, it’s once again time to inspect your finest jewels. So, please, if you have a chunk of work – max 250 words – that you’d like me and the assembled company to look at and admire, please present it. We’ll do that via Townhouse, so everyone can see your chunk:Upload your work this Townhouse post just add a comment at the bottom.You won’t be able to upload your work if you’re not signed up, but sign up is free and easy, so don’t let that stop you. If you’re not yet on Townhouse, you can just sign up here.Right.That’s next week taken care of. First, though, a think I need to draw this little triumvirate of short and grumpy posts to an end.On the one hand, it’s been really good to share some annoyance with the crapper end of agenting and publishing. I know from your responses that those annoyances are more frequent than they ought to be. More persistent.But at the same time, I can’t help feeling that it would be wrong to leave it there. Publishing is an industry driven by passion above all, so it’s extremely common to find agents and publishers go above and beyond to bring work to market.I’ll give just two examples, but I could give a hundred.The first one is personal. I have a pretty fancy agent. He heads up London’s oldest independent literary agency. He has some pretty fancy clients, notably Hilary Mantel and George Orwell (or what’s left of him.) And I once came to him with a book project.I wanted to sell a “how to write” book to Bloomsbury, because I thought it would help get the word out about the Writers’ Workshop (the forerunner to Jericho Writers.) The project was never going to be especially commercial from my agent’s point of view. It was, in fact, going to be largely unrewarded.But Bill, my agent, didn’t so much as blink. His job is to sell books for his clients. He wasn’t about to push me to pursue something more lucrative. So I wrote the book. He sold it. His cut of that advance: £400. Once you make allowance for his support staff and his Central London offices, I would guess that Bill saw 25% of that, or maybe less.And the contract that this particular bit of Bloomsbury came back with was – shocking. It was just a bit of Bloomsbury that had never really encountered Planet Agent and still used the kind of contracts that Dickens would have recognised. The balance of risks and rewards was grossly biased in favour of the publisher.And Bill said no.Just no. He wouldn’t have one of his clients sign the contract. So he renegotiated it, line by line, for weeks. When it was ready, he told me I could sign it. I did so, and he got his (tiny) share of the (very small) advance.Now, over time, both Bill and I made more money via royalties, but still not vast amounts. And I grumbled to Bill that Bloomsbury weren’t supporting the book in the way that I’d expected. Bill looked into my grumbles and agreed that they were valid.So he took my mini-battle – over a small book and a tiny advance – all the way to board level at Bloomsbury. He was willing to put some of his key relationships on the line because one of his clients wasn’t happy. It didn’t matter that the book was a small one. It mattered that the publisher wasn’t properly keeping its end of the bargain.We didn’t, in fact, end up resolving the situation completely to our satisfaction. But by heaven, Bill tried.For an advance that would have bought a fancy lunch and nothing else.He didn’t do any of what he did for the money. He did it because I was a client and he had a duty towards me.He, like many many agents, acts out of a belief in the book (and the author) and a sense of honour.That sense of honour is still very frequent across publishing. (More on how to get an agent here. Oh yes, and our header image this week is designed to evoke a sense of honour and pride. That\'s my excuse for a totally random image, at any rate.)One more little story.Last year, at our Festival of Writing, we welcomed Anne Meadows, the Editorial Director at Granta Books.Granta is a very fancy literary publisher. It’s the kind of outfit you’d be proud to be published by, stuffed full of prize winners and other esteemed authors.But prizes and esteem doesn’t necessarily translate into book sales. And Granta still has to be commercially sensible. So it doesn’t often offer huge advances. Which means that literary agents are unlikely to keep themselves in Marc Jacobs and Laboutins by bringing their authors to Granta’s doors.But agents don’t care.They come anyway, bringing their authors. And Granta and agents and authors all work hard to achieve the best results they can, even though (in most cases, not all) financial reward will not be the thing that drives them.And what does?Well, simply bringing wonderful stories, wonderfully told, to the kind of readers that appreciate those things. That’s it. That’s the reason.Take away that sense of passion and the authors wouldn’t write, the agents wouldn’t agent, and Granta wouldn’t exist.In short, yes, there’s plenty to be grumpy at in the world of publishing. And because we at Jericho are, always, on the side of authors, we will go on venting our grumps rather frequently.But at the same time, we’re not idiots. This industry loves writers. And you’re writers. So it loves you too. Really truly. Big love and squashy kisses.That’s it from me on all matters short and grumpy.Don’t forget to upload a sample of your favourite work here.We’ll tuck into that lot next week.If you want to talk about short-and-grumpy things, then just pile into the comments below.

Folks, next week - on 14 Feb - I want to take a look at some of YOUR work. I\'ll pick out my tipple-top favourites for praise and commentary, but I\'ll get to as much as I can in the comments as well.To participate, please:FInd a chunk of work that especially pleases youUpload a maximum of 250 words via the comments below this postGive us a book title and a sentence or so to understand the characters / scene you\'re writing about.And also, please, feel free to comment (truthfully but constructively) on any work uploaded by others.You\'ve got all week to do this.On 14 Feb, I\'ll fish through the work you\'ve uploaded and pick out a few bits for my email that afternoon. I\'ll also add comments, where I can, to the thread below.That\'s it from me. Any questions? No. So hop to it. Your finest work please. I look forward to seeing it.

If ever I feel alone or friendless, or fear that these emails are falling into the Great Void of Unknowing, all I have to do is to write a grumpy email about agents and/or publishers. The torrent – the surge, the tsunami, the deluge – of responses tells me that you are out there, and listening, and care as much as I do.That surge of responses deserves a direct reply.Before I get to that, though, I do need to ask for your help, please. We’re trying to figure out what we’re doing right, what we’re doing wrong, and what you’d like from us. We ask you about courses, membership, events and more. The survey runs to just ten questions. Your responses will shape what we do next.Please take the survey here.Thank you. And now for some short-and-grumpy thoughts about all things Agent and Publisher.First:-A lot of you – and I mean a lot – wrote to me with stories broadly similar to those I mentioned last week. Probably the commonest tale was the one which, simplified, runs: “A literary agent took on my manuscript with a lot of gushing excitement, but then, as time passed, stopped communicating with me at all.”And I repeat: that’s not OK. Yes, they’re busy. Yes, until you have formally signed with an agent, you aren’t technically their client. You don’t have an actual contractual claim on their time.But –I don’t accept that as an excuse. I once had a shouting row with an official of the Association of Authors Agents. He claimed that agents owed nothing to non-clients, because they weren’t clients. I argued – and still do – that no honourable agent can treat the community of writers with disdain.I still think that’s obviously true.And don’t get me wrong. I don’t have a problem with agents rejecting work. I don’t have a problem with them doing so with the blandest and least helpful of form-emails. But if an agent engages in a personal way with your work – perhaps they ask for a full manuscript, or they meet you at a Festival and tell you how great they think your work is, or they ask for editorial changes, or anything of that sort – then they owe you a timely, personal and considered response.If that response is a “no, sorry, changed my mind” – well, OK. That’s not what you want, but if it’s honest, clear and timely, you can’t really complain. Just seize your manuscript and make it better.Too many agents, too often, fail to give that personal, timely response, and it’s not OK. (Our advice on getting agents here.)Second:-One or two people who have had bad experiences wrote to tell me that they have basically given up. They’ll write for themselves, but will no longer seek publication.People need to make their own decisions, of course, but I do think that’s a pity.The fact is, that for all its problems, Planet Agent is genuinely open to new and unknown writers. If the story you write is blisteringly attractive, it will be picked up. It will secure an agent. It will secure a book deal. From the perspective of the individual writer, these things may feel like a matter of black chance and blind luck, but they’re really not.At Jericho Writers, we see a lot of manuscripts and a lot of authors. When we see something that really dazzles, we basically know it will find an agent and a deal. Equally, some of the manuscripts we come across aren’t yet publication-ready. That doesn’t mean the author is an idiot. It just means they have more work to do. Those manuscripts, we know, are not yet ready to sell.And then, yes, there is an intermediate category of good-but-not-yet-dazzling. Those books are sometimes picked up. Sometimes not. In those cases, it is more of a dice roll.But the smart advice remains the same as it always has. Find a genius concept. Develop your craft. Tell your story well. Write better.Most of what we do at Jericho Writers is to help you do those things. Do them well enough and the whole getting published bit is reasonably easy.Third:-Avoid, avoid, avoid the vanity presses.Because it’s hard getting a literary agent, people are tempted into the vanity snake pit. As it happens, I think there’s a whole email’s worth of comments to make about those snakes, so I won’t say much now.Simply this: if a publisher asks you for money – via ‘partnership contract’, ‘hybrid publishing’, or whatever other term they prefer – they aren’t a publisher at all.Publishers make their money from selling books to readers.Vanity publishers make their money from selling dreams to writers.Please keep your money in your wallet and say no to the snakes. Vanity publishing, I do not love thee.Fourth:-Self-publishing is an utterly viable route to publication and readers. It’s not second best. It’s just different.The only real caution here is that you have to commit. You can’t just toss a book out onto Amazon and hope that it flies. It won’t. You must view your writing as a business and your publishing as a career. Your first book won’t make money so don’t expect it to. If you do well, though, then by the time of your third or fourth book, you’ll be seeing results that make you think, Yes, this writing lark might actually pay me. I am finding readers. I have a community of fans. I’m an author, and proud of it.Fifth:-Protect yourself.Even if you go trad, even if you have a wonderful agent, even if you have a terrific publisher, protect yourself.The single best way you can do that is to write steadily and build a mailing list. That list will, if properly managed, guarantee your access to readers and income for years and years to come. Don’t neglect it, just because your publisher looks shiny and the excitement is palpable. That mailing list is your rock. You may one day need it.Sixth – and last:-Don’t forget why you write.You never came into this game because you wanted this agent or that book deal. You came into this game because a story forced its way into your head and wouldn’t let you goi.The joys and challenges of that story are real no matter what. So are the rewards. We writers are lucky. We carry joy in our heads. That’s it from me. I promised you I’d be Mr Sunshine this week and – in a slightly undependable, British January way – I’ve delivered on that, at least approximately.(Oh yes, and the granular, golden header image to this post is a photograph of the surface of the sun. Each one of those little granules is about the size of France. My six-year-old sun is currently planning to walk on the solar surface. I said, \"Don\'t you think you might get too hot?\" He looked at me with the joy of a six-year-old outsmarting his father and said, \"Nooo. I\'m going to wear a special suit.\" One-nil to him, I reckon.)And again: over to you. What are your experiences? Your worries? Your hopes? Your beliefs? Are you bitter, hopeful, cautious, or just happily nuts? Tell me what you think below and let\'s have a Solar Heated Debate.

A short and irritable email this week, inspired by a trio of author-interactions I’ve had in the weeks since Christmas.Three authors. Three stories. Here they are.Author #1Sells her debut book to a Big 5 publisher for a reasonably good advance. Lots of excitement, lots of mwahs, lots of happiness.The excitement and happiness lasts for a while, but in the weeks before publication something in the atmosphere starts to fade. A cover reveal is mishandled on Twitter. A publicist is changed, a bit abruptly. Actual, tangible marketing activity seems hard to locate.The author happens to grumble – a bit – to me about it. I ask the author what the level of supermarket orders is. She asks her editor (with whom she still has a decent relationship.) Editor says, roughly, “No, a bit disappointing unfortunately but, yay!, orders from Waterstones are yadda yadda, blah blah, change the subject.”The marketing never materialised.That’s author #1.(Info on how to get published can be found here.)Author #2Has a reasonable track record over several books. Sales in one (smallish territory) have been good. Sales in the bigger, more influential markets have been weak, probably due to inattentive publishing. Reader reviews and critical reception has always been strong.Anyway, after a hiatus, Author #2 writes another book and gets a (perfectly fine) offer direct from a publisher.She goes to her agent with the offer. It is now that agent’s job to turn that offer into a contract, and to knit together a set of deals across the various English language territories, so that the author has a proper sales platform to work with.But – after weeks of delay – the agent dumps the author. Nothing to do with the author; more a change of direction for the agent.Now, it’s perfectly OK for agents to alter direction, of course, but that doesn’t, to my mind, mean that you can desert your existing clients at their moment of greatest need. On the contrary, you need to get the deal done, then move on. You take on those obligations when you take on clients. Like it or lump it.That’s one thing, but there’s another. In this case, the agent was and is part of a large and well-resourced agency with plenty of other agents. So if Agent X wants to change direction, she should damn well speak to her colleagues and say, “We can’t, as an agency, let our client down, so please can someone step in here for me.”That didn’t happen.The author – the admirable Author #2 – has a publishing offer that urgently needs attention and she’s been abandoned by both her agency and her agent. Great.(Info on how to get an agent in the first place can be found here.)Author #3This author email wasn’t even especially grumbly. It was just a “hi, how are you” from someone I last talked to years ago.But one snippet from that conversation struck me. Author #3 got an agent. Agent launches the manuscript at the Big 5 publishers and their immediate competitors. Some nice words came back, but no offers.The author then thought, “Well, that’s disappointing, but there’s a slew of smaller publishers who might be interested,” … only to discover that her agent had no intention of approaching them. Their relationship ended right there, over the corpse of an unsold book. And I don’t like any of this. Not one bit of it.Here’s what I think:Author #1: What happened here was that a big publisher killed its marketing efforts when it didn’t get sales from supermarkets. What should have happened was that the marketing effort pivoted to be Amazon-led, not supermarket led. But no such pivot happened. The publisher hasn’t yet come clean with the author, and likely never will, but when the supermarket orders failed, that author’s career was dead – even before the first book of a two-book deal was even published.Author #2. Agents can’t abandon authors when authors most need their help. It’s fine to part company, but you have to take the author’s needs in mind when it comes to timing. And big agencies should act like big agencies. If one agent is forced to step out, another should gladly step in. That shouldn’t be forced on the agency by a plaintive author. It should – obviously – be the way the agency wants to approach its business.Author #3. If an agent takes on an author, they should take that author on. Yes, a small publishing deal will earn peanuts for the agent, but it’ll quite likely be one of the most important things ever to happen to the author in question. An honourable agent should let the big deals pay for all the deals that never quite happened.And many agents, agencies and publishers are deeply honourable about these things. I don’t want to suggest that malpractice is rife across the industry. But it is too common.And I don’t like it.These things are almost never the author’s fault. It’s just crappy behaviour by people who should know better. But because authors are (weirdly) relatively powerless in their own industry, there are no effective sanctions against bad behaviour. These things come down to a question of honour. Of honouring the broader contract between author and agent, or between author and publisher.What can we do about it? Not a lot, except call it out when we see it.What can you do about it? Not a lot, except know that you haven’t done anything wrong. It’s not you, it’s them. Oh yes, and if you start to feel like you are being badly treated by your agent or publisher, then you are quite likely right to think so. It’s time to start making plans to move on.There.Rant over.As promised: it was grumpy.Alas, however: it was not also short. My bad. I can’t really do short. Sorry.I shall be sunnier next week. I shall be Mr Sunshine, with my tapshoes on. I have given you a sunny header image to brighten your soul.And what about you? I think this week we should scrap the Heated Debate and go straight into your experience of Planet Agent and the World of Publishing. What\'s been good? What\'s been bad? Let\'s eat an ice cream and talk about it.

In my last email, I talked about scene building and I spoke a little as if the only two structural units in a story are the scene itself and the plot itself.But that’s not really right. In the film industry, which gets a bit more technical about these things, they distinguish between the scene and the sequence. The scene could be very short indeed:Actor gets out of car at lawn. Walks across a dark front lawn. Knocks at a door.Something like that could easily come in at under ten seconds of screen time. But then you have the sequence, which is a chain of scenes that form a logical, coherent group of their own. So Jason Bourne style car chase in Paris is likely to have multiple, multiple short scenes. Something like this:Jason Bourne jumps in car. Drives nervously away. Police sirens start to wail. He stamps on the gas. Car chase stuff. Bumping down a flight of steps in a Mini. People shooting. Cars crashing. Then, tra la, somehow Jason Bourne gets away. He ends up, safe but shocked, in an underground car park.You can see that from a movie-maker’s point of view, there are a ton of scenes to deal with and film, but from the movie-goer’s perspective, the whole thing feels like one coherent unit – ‘the Paris car chase’.Now, last week, we spoke about how the scene itself has a kind of rhythm of its own. A question gets launched. The tension around that question increases. The stakes and sense of pressure rises. Then the question is resolved or transformed one way or another. That scene ends and a new one begins.All good stuff, right?Well, it can be useful to apply the same kind of thinking to the sequence too. And here, the inner unity of the sequence often comes down to this: are the story-questions launched in each scene intimately linked or not?So last week, we looked at a very short scene of 450 words. Fiona had just escaped from some baddies. She was looking for sanctuary. She came to her mysterious Russian friend, Lev, for help. He took her to his clean, but extremely basic, squat. She effectively rejected that as a place to stay. He agreed to take her somewhere else.That was the gist of the scene. But the unity of the whole sequence flowed something like this:1.    Fiona is just driving peacefully along a Welsh road, when – boom! – she gets abducted. That out-of-nowhere quality often signals the start of a major new sequence, a major new turn in the plot. The story question is now: why has she been abducted? What is going to happen?2.    She’s taken to a barn and interrogated with violence. She believes that, even if she tells everything she knows, she will be killed at the end of the interrogation. The story question is now: will she spill the beans? Will she escape?3.    She escapes, injuring one of the bad guys in the process. The story question is now something like: Will she make her getaway properly? Or will she be recaptured?4.    It becomes clear that she’s avoided recapture, but she is very worried about whether her ever-fragile mental state will cope with what’s just happened. The story question is now: will she cope?And so on.The sequence doesn’t come to an end properly until she is back at work having, roughly speaking, survived not just the violence, but the mental consequence of it. If you look at your own work, you’ll find other similar sequences naturally jumping out at you.And –And what? What are the actual practical consequences of these thoughts?Well, there might be a few, actually. For example, it’s very common to have a lovely time writing a sequence of scenes, such as I’ve just described. The story flows. The action moves. The whole thing is as fun and easy as writing ever gets. And then – you hit the end of the sequence. You have to find your footings again in the context of the wider story. And for a week or two, you thrash around, wondering why the work has suddenly become harder.And the short answer there is: worry you not. That’s just part of storytelling. Give it time.But also, it can be really worth thinking about your sequences in isolation. Are their highs or lows sufficiently high or low? Does there feel like a real structure there? (So think of the difference between a Jason Bourne car chase and a complex story-sequence like the Fiona abduction / escape one. The movie car chase is just plain fun and it doesn’t need much structure. Your work doesn’t have special effects and it doesn’t have Matt Damon, so you need the structure.)If the sequence as a whole feels flat or lacking in intensity, it’s most likely because you haven’t quite evolved an internal sequence-structure that fits. If that’s the case, then the very simplest bit of analysis is just to take what you’ve written, scene by scene, and see how your story questions evolve. If there’s a natural, powerful movement from one scene to the next, you’re doing good. If the movement seems abrupt or too slow, you need to alter your pacing accordingly (which might mean adding or subtracting entire scenes, of course.)But really, this email is a win if it makes you think about sequences as a story-unit in their own right. The problems and solutions in writing are often really, really obvious as long as you ask the right question. And sometimes those questions need to be asked about sequences.That is all from me. I am neither ill. Nor locked in a vault.That’s a win, right?How about you? What sequences have you written that were most fun to write? Or most problematic. Tell me what you think, and let\'s all have a Heated Debate.

Thanks all for your supportive comments last week, when – cough, cough – I was very poorly. I’m pretty much back in the saddle this week, and I thought I’d bring you something sweet, simple and very actionable – a practical start to the New Year, in effect.So: stories are made of scenes strung together in a plot. Let’s just assume for now that your plot is OK. In which case, the quality of your book is going to hang, to a very large extent, on the quality of your scenes. What makes a scene work? What are the tricks of the trade? What are the things you need to look out for?Well, the curious little secret is that these things are (mostly) obvious and simple. They’re just hard to do. So here are some rules:Jump to the action as fast as you canIf you want, you can jump right into the action, even at the cost of not quite making sense initially. You can then, 2-3 paragraphs in, go and back-fill the information the reader needs to make sense of things. So for example, you might start with dialogue, without the reader knowing where the characters are situated. Once you’ve got things going via dialogue, you can add the, “They were standing in the middle of a …, etc”. That often gives you a stronger more engaging start, than starting with a description could ever deliver.Leave the scene as fast as you can. You can always tie up any loose threads in the next scene … and you probably need to tie fewer things up than you might think.It’s often said that every scene needs to have a kind of conflict. I don’t think that’s quite right – or at least, it’s not the most helpful way of describing things. What IS true is that there needs to be something unsettled in the scene. Something mobile. A question that needs an answer.Your character’s emotions need to be engaged. If he/she doesn’t care, your reader won’t care.In general, but not always-always, you want a balance of scene description (so your scene is physically realised), dialogue (because that’s the most supple, alive element in any scene) and action (in the sense that we know what your characters are doing.)There should for preference be a useful reverberation between the action that’s taking place and the physical atmosphere in the scene. That can be obvious (a proposal in a rose garden) or contrasting (a proposal in a butcher’s shop), but you want some alive, interesting echo between action and place.And here’s a biggie: you structure your scenes much as you structure a story. You set up the question early on in the scene. You develop it. You reach a climax. You resolve quickly and move on.Now all that seems pretty wholesome. A good, wholegrain style menu for writing a scene. But because that kind of advice seems pretty damn bland taken on its own, here’s a mini-scene of my own, with comments in italics added.The situation here is that my character, Fiona, has just escaped from a damaging and traumatising situation. She has fled to a buddy of hers: a guy called Lev, who is ex-Russian Special Forces and not exactly a run-of-the-mill character. She trusts Lev to look after her, but Lev needs to find his range first. Here’s how things go: +++++++++I park where Lev tells me to, outside a cream-painted house, with a sheet of graffitied chipboard for a door.Very swift intro to the physical location. So brief, it hardly interrupts things‘Is here,’ says Lev.The door is held by a crude wooden catch. No lock.Fiona’s observation this. By noticing the crudity of the accommodation, she is letting you know, in effect, what she’s thinking. Lev opens the door for me – there are no hinges, so he has to lift it – and I step inside.I knew that Lev didn’t have a permanent home in Britain or, I think, anywhere. Mostly he sleeps in his car or on the floors of friends’ houses. But when he isn’t doing those things, and isn’t abroad, he uses squats.But knowing that and being here: two different things.Again: Fiona isn’t saying, “I feel X about this place.” But she’s letting us know all the same. Indirect access to character emotions is just fine.The downstairs room is lightless. The doors and windows have been boarded up front and rear. There’s a poor quality kitchen in place – white formica doors loose on their hinges, chipboard surfaces bubbling and splitting with damp – but I already know there’s no water in the tap, no power in the sockets.More physical description. But this isn’t done for its own sake. By now, it’s clear that the question raised by this scene is roughly: “Is this horrible squat going to satisfy Fiona’s needs for sanctuary? And how will her discomfort shift her relationship with Lev?” Those aren’t huge questions in the context of the story. But they don’t have to be. They just have to feel alive and important for the duration of a (shortish) scene.Lev says nothing. Just points me upstairs.Upstairs: two bedrooms, one bathroom, nothing else. Bare boards. No furniture. No heating. No bathroom fittings, even. Lev has taken over the larger of the two bedrooms. A military looking roll of bedding, neatly furled. A ten-litre jerry can of water. A wash bowl. A primus stove and basic cooking equipment, all clean, all tidy. A black bag, of clothes I presume. A small box of food. The front window was boarded, but Lev has removed the boards and they stand leaning against the wall.This is the first revelation of the accommodation proper. In that sense, what’s gone before has been just preamble. This is where the scene-question gets sharpened up further.Light enters the room in silence. Leaves again the same way.I don’t say anything.Don’t even step into the room, not really. Just stand there in the doorway.So everything’s hanging. At the moment, we’re reaching a moment of crisis in our mini-story. Will this squat work for Fiona? It’s not looking good. Her hanging back in the doorway (rather than stepping forward into the room) is as close as she gets to actual conflict with Lev. And that’s not much conflict. That’s why I don’t think focusing on conflict is especially helpful.I am not what you would call a girly girl. I don’t have a particular relationship with pink. Don’t revere handbags or hoard shoes. I don’t love to dress up, or bake, or follow faddy diets, or learn new ways to decorate my home. On the other hand, I have just spent the weekend being tortured in a barn near Rhayader and I was, I admit it, wanting something a bit homelier than this.Fiona humour! And for the first time really direct access to her thoughts / feelings. Again, this is pushing us closer to the point of crisis/decision/resolution.Lev stands behind me seeing the room through my eyes. Perhaps he was secretly expecting me to be thrilled. Perhaps he is thinking dark thoughts about decadent Western girls, our need for luxury.More humour. But here we have Lev’s position and Fiona’s. At the moment, these are two opposed, unresolved forces. We don’t yet know how this is going to resolve.He says nothing. Not straight away. We just stand there in the pale light. Even the tiniest sounds echo among these hard surfaces, so a single creak of a floorboard rolls around the room, like a pea in a shoebox.Tension ratchets up for a couple of lines. Then …Then Lev says, ‘Is not suitable.’That was halfway between a question and a statement, but I let it be a statement.Lev says, ‘We go somewhere else.’Boom! Done. We know that Fiona’s opposition has won the day. As far as we can tell at this stage, the Fiona / Lev relationship hasn’t been injured by that micro-conflict. And of course a new story question is immediately launched: Lev still seems willing to find sanctuary for Fiona, but what is he going to offer? Will Fiona find her sanctuary? And will that be enough to allow for her recovery? Those questions are immediately tackled by the scenes that follow. +++++++++++That’s it. As you can see, not a lot of heavy-duty story-freight hangs on that scene. In a way, you could cut it completely and the book would lose nothing much in terms of plot. But from the reader’s perspective, the scene is funny. It’s tense. And they learn something about Lev (the way he lives) that they may have been curious about for the space of about 400,000 words (ie: since the moment they first met him in book #1 of the series.)And one other thing: the scene is short. That whole thing notches up just 450 words, or about a page and a half of a paperback. But that’s still long enough to launch a question, develop it, build some tension round it, have plenty of personality / emotion / humour in the situation, then resolve it and move on. Do that enough times in the course of a properly plotted story, and you have a book, my friend.How about you? DO you have a way you like to write scenes? Recipes you follow? Rules you adopt? Let me know and we\'ll all have a Heated Debate.

Once upon a time, in a town far, far away, there lived two people, Sam and Elly. They were writers.Sam wrote fast-selling, humorous non-fiction, plus a dash of more serious journalism. Elly wrote lovingly crafted literary fiction.But the thing is, although they were writers, it turned out that, they had a flame that shone still more brightly again. They wanted to be publishers.But they didn’t want to be Sensible Publishers churning out me-too commercial fiction and hurling it at supermarkets. They wanted to be Real Publishers, finding books that they genuinely loved and bringing them to a small but appreciative audience.The books they loved were crotchety, contrary things. One of their authors Eimar McBride wrote sentences like this:For you. You’ll soon. You’ll give her name. In the stitches of her skin she’ll wear your say.Any Sensible Publisher could tell at a glance that a book like that was totally unsaleable, so they didn’t pick it up. But Sam and Elly – trading under the name Galley Beggar Press – did.That wasn’t the only horrendous decision they made. They also published a book called Ducks, Newburyport, which was also obviously unsaleable, not least because it was over 1000 pages long and composed, almost entirely, of just eight monster sentences.The thing is, though, this story has a happy outcome. (And an unhappy one. And then a happy one again.)Because although those books and dozens like it were obviously unpublishable, people LOVED them. In fact, the books put out by this tiny little publisher have gone on to be longlisted, shortlisted, or winners of pretty much every major literary prize you can think of. Prizes including the Women’s Prize for Fiction, The Wellcome Book Prize, The Goldsmiths Prize, The Desmond Elliott Prize, The Jan Michalski Prize, The Folio Prize, The Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and the Frank O’Connor Short Story Prize. Some of the books have sold in very large numbers too.But this is publishing, so wherever you find a happy outcome, you can be pretty sure that a freight train with failed brakes is hurtling down some track towards you, gathering speed as it approaches.And so it turned out.If a book is shortlisted for the Booker Prize, part of the entry condition is that a certain number of books have to be made available to one of the prize’s retail partners, The Book People. That’s not a bad thing. That’s a good thing. Because The Book People were going to pay £40,000 (around $55,000) for the books.So, that’s good, right?Well, yes.  Except that The Book People took the books and promptly went bankrupt. “Hey, you know that £40K we owe you? Yeah, well. In your dreams. Sorry ’bout that. Merry Christmas.”I happen to know Sam and Elly reasonably well. They have both done a fair bit of editorial work for Jericho Writers (under our previous moniker, mostly.) And I remember, not long after they moved to Norwich, that their plumbing collapsed. It was winter. They had a tiny baby. And no heating. Not good, right?So we told them to fix the heating and we’d pay what it took. They could pay us back in manuscript assessments. So they fixed their heating. We sent them manuscripts. And everyone, including our clients and including one tiny shivery baby, was happy again.Anyway, the point of that story was to indicate that Sam and Elly aren’t plutocrats who wear Laboutin shoes, drive Aston Martins, live in castles and dine off roasted swan. They’re the sort of people to whom £40,000 is rather a lot of money.It felt like, via The Book People, their entire world had collapsed.But this is Christmas. And this email tells a Christmas story.Because Sam and Elly asked the world for help. They didn’t just wander out into the Norfolk marshes and shout at clouds (though, you never know, that might have worked too.) They put an appeal out on the Internet. Here in fact:Help Fund Galley BeggarAnd the world responded. We at Jericho flung some shiny gold coins into their cyber-hat, but so did hundreds and hundreds of other people too.And a couple of days back, I had imagined that the gist of this email was going to be “Could you please help this gallant pair reach their very demanding £40,000 funding target.” But I’ve just been to the funding page now and they’ve already blown their way through that target and money is still coming in.But wouldn’t it be the greatest of all possible Christmas gifts if Sam and Elly actually got enough funding that their publisher could live on a slightly less precarious footing? What if they didn’t have to live, hand-to-mouth, knowing that a couple of failures could drag the bulwarks of their little ship down close to the waterline again?So, if you have a few pounds, dollars, roubles or rupees jingling in your pocket, how about you toss it into Galley’s outstretched hat. You aren’t simply funding Galley Beggar. You are funding literature.And literature needs you.Donations don’t have to be big. The small ones all add up. And everything makes a difference.Wishing you all a very merry Christmas. I’ll be back in the New Year.Go steal an Aston Martin and don’t overcook that swan. Chat about anything you like down below. If you have a wonderful recipe for Christmas food, I\'d love to hear it.