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Continue here for How I actually edit (IV) here.Over the last couple of weeks, in celebration of our new Introduction to Self-Editing video course, I’ve spoken about how I (repeatedly and compulsively) correct my manuscript before I ever get to the holy words, THE END. Once I do hit those words, I’ll do multiple edits thereafter – some of them with a single, targeted purpose. Other times driven by a much more general hunt for dissatisfaction. On those hunts, I’m always looking for something I don’t love. That’s it. Anything that offends me, or niggles at me. Sand in the shoe: that kind of annoyance, both minor and impossible to ignore. Every writer knows that, yes, yes, you have to delete surplus words. Stephen King (a former journalist) once tossed out the idea that the final draft needs to be first draft minus 10%. And, OK, that’s not a horrible rule, so SK’s first drafts were probably leaner than most, because he was a professional writer before he ever became a novelist. But SK clearly doesn’t follow his own rule these days, because his work has become quite baggy. And in any case, it makes no sense to set a target for deletions. You have to let your manuscript tell you how long it wants to be. I’d guess that a majority of you need to cut more than just 10%. Cuts of 20-30% are often, often essential. We once made a bestseller by doing a hands-on edit of a manuscript that took it from 180,000+ words to about 90,000. There are two reasons why this whole economy drive matters. The first is simply that the force of a novel comes down to this equation: Force = Emotional power divided by the number of words. If the first term remains constant, then just cutting the second one will always, always improve things. That sounds dully mechanical, but I’m repeatedly struck by how relentless cutting delivers a kind of magic. Sticky mid-book patches in a novel can throw a somewhat glum, depressed feel over the whole damn thing. Brutal, hard cutting can just relieve that at (almost) a stroke. Two to three days spent on deletions make more of a reliable impact than any other editing intervention I can think of. The novel lifts in the water. Feels harder. Sails faster. The whole craft has more purpose. Cutting does that every time. Wow. But the other big reason I love cutting is that it exposes the gaps. If your writing is flabby and unconcentrated, you can easily fail to notice that there may be huge things you aren’t saying. You have this background sense of “this writing is possibly a little baggy,” so maybe you make some cuts to address that issue, but you don’t go far enough, so the issue nags anyway. But –  Because you’ve used one paragraph instead of one sentence to get your characters out of the gym and into the taxi, and because you’ve used two sentences to describe clothing, and one to describe a coffee spillage, you think (correctly) that it’s high time you got your character to meet her partner for the Big Argument. So you rush her off to her Big Argument, but never realise all the stuff you haven’t done. Have you properly described the setting where the Big Argument takes place? Did you depict her emotions in the taxi? Did you add a hint of that past infideility which is colouring her perspective?The best way to find gaps in your manuscript is to cut so hard that there’s no excess verbiage to cover them. Once you strip back the word count, you start to feel where the novel feels empty – lacking. So you add those things back (but rich text, not duplicative, pointless text) and your novel stays lean – but takes on whole layers of new meaning. This is a beautiful discipline, because the stuff you cut is always tedious – unnecessarily long ways of saying things that are often quite boring in themselves. Needless dialogue. Statements about settings that really add nothing in terms of atmosphere or feel. And then – you see the gaps. Kayleigh is meant to be worried about her upcoming meeting with Jon, but she’s hardly given him a thought – all that clothes description and coffee spillage got in the way. And how could she be going through all this and not be thinking about what happened to her mother under the exact same circumstances 25 years earlier? And what was it like to enter a completely empty house, its front door swinging open and water everywhere? The gaps you find are always more interesting than the text you removed, so the whole passage (and the whole book) just gets more layered and dense and powerful. If you want more on this, I talk about it in my How To Write a Novel course and, in even more depth, in our Take Your Novel From Good To Great course. Both those courses are free to Premium Members, and if you haven’t yet caught up with the relevant bits, then I’d strongly recommend that you do. If you’re not yet a PM, you can get a taster lesson for free here. Or, why not become a PM today? It’s like wearing a rainbow in your hair, but not as damp. That’s it from me. Last Sunday, my girls had a football tournament. And look, I love my kids, and it’s great that girls are into football now, and there’s everything to be said for community endeavour, and there was a pizza van there and almost-adequate coffee. But – oh sweet Lord – we started before 8.00 am. And didn’t finish until after 5.00. And I had to watch every damn game. Every damn one, both girls. And now whenever I close my eyes, I see yards and yards of blue nylon, and sunshine, and kids air-kicking balls as they rolled gently along an empty goalmouth.I earned beer that night, and plenty of it. Til soon. Harry***FEEDBACK FRIDAYThis week, it’s Assignment Three from Debi Alper\'s Introduction to Self-Editing course. (It\'s FREE to Premium Members! And if you’re not a Premium Member, you know what to do: join us here,or buy the course as a one-off for £99 here.)So, Debi wants you to:Find a paragraph from your novel that has a strong voice, check for the points mentioned in the lesson, and post it in the forum.

Last week, I talked about my micro-editing habit. This week, we expand a bit. The kind of editing I’m going to talk about here is something I also do in the course of writing the first draft, but it operates at a less micro-level.I told you that I find it hard to make forward progress if I know that parts of the manuscript behind me are messy – and I write detective novels, whose construction is intricate. I don’t plot out my books in huge advance detail. (I might do, if I thought I could do it, but I can’t, so I don’t.)(Oh yes, and this email is all about editing, because Assignment Two of Debi Alper\'s Introduction to Self-Editing course is live and online right now.)The kind of things that might send me scurrying backwards are things like:Character changeIn one of my books, something wasn’t working – and I realised that by making a key character male, and in very male surroundings, I had lost something that I wanted. So I jumped back, and made that person a woman: a commanding, powerful, unsettling presence. That shift unlocked something for me; it opened narratives that wouldn’t have existed with a man in that same role.That’s an example of why I think that in-draft edits can be almost essential at times. Why charge on with writing your draft if you know that you made a misstep early on? Correct that misstep and then see what you have? Yes, you lose time in making the correction, but you’re going to have to make it anyway – and by making it early, you avoid compounding your error.Plot complicationsThe architecture of a complex mystery novel is at the outer end of fictional complexity. For me, a good detective novel should make perfect sense as you read it – and does, in fact, make a kind of mathematically complete sense if properly analysed – but readers should also be a bit challenged by it. Ask someone to summarise who-did-what-to-whom-and-why in, say, a Raymond Chandler novel and most readers would turn a little white.That’s a sweet, enjoyable challenge for the reader, but for me as author, it’s kind of head-wrenching. “Oh hold on, I need a way for X to have escaped from secure confinement, but he also needs to have chosen to go back in, but he needs to have done so in a way that Y couldn’t have known about, so ….”Those thoughts are crucial to good fiction-making and, for me, they’re ones I always deal with as they arise. Again, getting these things right are (for me) key to forward motion. If I just try to plough on knowing that there are tweaks to make behind me, it just complicates my whole onward plotting process. Solving the niggles when I see them basically removes them from my mental to-do list and makes it easier to focus on what lies ahead.SettingsSettings are like a character in my books. If a key setting is awry, that also feels like a block to forward progress, so I’ll go and scratch away at the issue until it feels sorted.Boring bitsAnd look, no first draft is ever perfect. My first drafts are pretty decent … but that’s only because they’ve been heavily revised before I even hit the final full stop. But, as I work, I’m also generally on the lookout for any material that just seems heavy, long-winded, dull, repetitive, undramatic – anything along those lines.The reason is partly my messy-room aversion. But it’s also because a boring bit definitely tells you that there’s a problem which needs addressing – but it also often indicates a fundamental plot problem that needs sorting out.So, let’s take the sort of example that I often run up against. We might have a situation like this:There’s a murder and an investigationThings go well for a bit, then the regular police investigation starts running into problems and looks like it’s going nowhere. (This kind of issue is basically compulsory in my kind of fiction. The only alternative is that the police are busily chasing up the wrong set of leads.)So there often needs to be an “oh, no, this isn’t working” bit … which can often look a bit dull, because it is frustrating to those involved.Now that’s all fine, except that what if the boring bit is too long? Quite often, the writer – me, for example – will create something dramatic in order to break the tedium. A man with a gun. An assault. A terrible revelation. And it’s easy to think, “Oh great, off we trot again. There was a dull bit, but it was only a few pages long, and now we’re on the road again.”And OK, that approach may be just what your book needs … but maybe 50% of the time what it really needed was you to go back and delete the boring bit. The added drama now just locks in that boring bit and sets you off on the wrong path.In the end, any bad bit in your book is telling you that there’s an issue and you may need to delete the last 5,000 words, say, to get back to the last bit where you felt truly settled. Plot is a sequence of stones laid one upon the other. If you sense a wobble, go back to the wobble. Sort it out. Then start building again.***FEEDBACK FRIDAYThis week, it’s Assignment Two from Debi’s Introduction to Self-Editing course. (Free to Premium Members. And if you’re not a Premium Member, then don’t be a Hufflepuff – slither in to membership here or buy the course as a one-off for £99 here.)So, Debi wants you to:Find a paragraph from your novel that focuses on one of your characters and post it in the forum.Check for the points mentioned in this lesson, and don’t forget to offer feedback to others.Til soon.Harry

With the first lesson of our brand new Premium Member course Introduction to Self-Editing launching this week, I thought I\'d share my own editing process with you. I honestly don’t know how much it helps to understand another writer’s process. What matters to you isn’t how I write best, but how you do. There’s not one way to play this game, there are a million. But if you’re interested, and in the hope that it helps, here’s how I edit. The first thing to say is that, in my case, there’s no real distinction between my writing and my editing. I self-correct all the time as I write. My paragraphs are very often short, but if I write a reasonably meaty three or four sentence paragraph, I’ll almost always tweak it and nudge it into shape before moving onto the next. Indeed, I quite often edit a sentence before I’ve even hit the final full stop. Why so twitchy? Well, a few things. I’m a natural fidget. I’m not at the threshold for ADHD, but I’m certainly that way inclined. But also, I’m like my wife. She can’t quite be content in a messy or ugly room. She’ll always seek to remedy what can be remedied before she can really make herself comfortable and turn to whatever it is that brought her there. Same with me and bad sentences. Asking me to write new text when there’s messy text just behind me? It doesn’t work. The nagging distraction of that baggy sentence, that poorly chosen word, will stop me fully attending to whatever’s next. Here’s the start of an upcoming Fiona novel: Imagine this. A cold night. A scatter of snow. Not much, but there’s a fierce frost, so the hard surfaces around here – paving stones, gravel, brick walls, iron gates – are glazed with diamonds. No leaves left on the trees, or not many, but the tree trunks have an iced glitter, as though constructing some new armour. The light? Not much. A little moon naked under scraps of cloud. Streetlamps shining their joyless yellow. The colour of the last rags of autumn, but dimmer. More suppressed. Draining colour, not revealing it. In the street: no cars moving. Almost none parked, if it comes to that. On this street, the cars – the BMWs and the Mercs, the Range Rovers and the Teslas – are sheltered behind walls, in garages, protected by the red blinks of security alarms. And a white van, its lights off. And two people moving. Not quiet, but not loud. Not furtive, but efficient. Dressed dark, dressed warm. Which, in this weather, is also a way to say that their shapes and faces are lost, muffled, disguised. That’s how the text looks now. It’ll change again before publication, but nothing there really annoys me. Here’s my editing journey to get there: Imagine this. A cold night. A scatter of snow. These words went down first thing and I haven’t changed them. The first two words are critical: it’s not normal Fiona-speak – she doesn’t normally address the reader in any way – but they matter here for a reason which will become clear much, much later. The cold / scatter of snow details are – for me – nice and easy: that way of giving physical detail is an established part of the Fiona voice. I like it because the voice is clear and well-differentiated, but I also love it because it’s so compact. For those writers who are still slave to the “Gotta have a main verb” dictum, the same seven words would have come out a bit like this: It was a cold night, with a scatter of snow on the ground. To my mind, all the additional words there are essentially dull and add nothing. So if I were a slave-to-the-verb kind of writer, I’d have added juice. Something like this: The night was cold, with a light scatter of snow hardening beneath the frost. And, OK, I like that more, except I’m always bothered by the word ‘with’ in this context – it’s just a lazy way to add bolt detail onto an existing unit. So I’d probably have replaced the ‘with’, by writing: The night was cold and an earlier scatter of snow now hardened beneath the frost. I’d be pretty much happy with that now – ‘hardened’ feels more active and, literally, harder than ‘hardening’ – but as I say, my Fiona-voice just skips over all that hoopla, and delivers all the information in two sentence fragments boasting a combined 7 words. Then we got to this bit: Not much [snow], but there’s a fierce frost, so the hard surfaces around here – paving stones, gravel, brick walls, iron gates – are glazed with diamonds. No leaves left on the trees, or not many, but the tree trunks have an iced glitter, as though constructing some new armour. I had to pick away at that bit to get it into shape. An earlier version used the word ‘frost’ twice and I kept wanting to glaze things. The leaves on trees bit is sort of dull, except that the reader has no idea yet of time of year, so this was my way of telling the reader that we were in November, not January. The list of hard surfaces – paving stones and the rest – is also dull, but it’s dull in a quiet suburban way, which is just right for the location. I do not love the ‘around here’ phrase. Where else would the hard surfaces be? So those two words need to go: an edit that still needs to happen. I like the ‘some new armour’ image: that’s true to Fiona’s voice, but it also delivers a sense of battle-readiness. The next paragraph also needed some tweaking and plucking: The light? Not much. A little moon naked under scraps of cloud. Streetlamps shining their joyless yellow. The colour of the last rags of autumn, but dimmer. More suppressed. Draining colour, not revealing it. Again, the first two sentence fragments (four words in total) just went down on the page and stayed there. The moon and cloud stuff is quite like me – I’ve probably used something like that phrase before – but I’m happy with it. Should it be a little moon or not? I don’t quite know, but it’s going to stay little for now. Also (I’m only just noticing now; I don’t observe these things as I write) I especially like it that we have these themes of battle and vulnerability emerging from the text. Although we’re really just describing a theme, we already have a hint of battle (armour), a hint of vulnerability (a naked moon) and references to draining colour – a disguise, not a revelation. All this means that the description has a kind of sprung quality. Nothing dark has happened yet, but you already know this is a crime novel, not a romance. Then I had to tinker quite a lot to get the next bit right. I want to paint the colour of a suburban street, with a little snow on the ground, not much of a moon, and sodium-type street lighting. I could just say ‘The street is it by yellowy-orange sodium lights’ or something like that. But the point isn’t really the colour, is it? It’s the feeling. And what is the feeling? Well, that’s the bit I had to struggle to get to. What I’ve ended up with combines joyless, rags, dim, suppressed and draining colour. Listed out like that, it feels alarmingly single-note, but I think it works OK on the page. In effect, we start out with a colour description (‘joyless yellow’) then work through a chain of thought to figure out that what’s really happening here is an emptying out of colour, not any kind of addition. Oh yes, and some editors would worry about the repetition of the word ‘colour’, but I’m not fussed. The repetition doesn’t feel accidental or obtrusive, so it’s fine with me. And so on. The two people in the white van dump a corpse in one of these wealthy suburban gardens and then vanish. The book is about the investigation and shenanigans that follow. The chapter doesn’t quite say ‘they dump a corpse’, but it gets reasonably close… and this is a crime novel, so readers assume (correctly) that murder is going to be on the agenda. All this is how my editing process runs, always. It often starts before I hit a full-stop. It usually starts before I reach the end of a paragraph. It is very pedantic. It cares about two unnecessary words or a not-quite-perfect word choice. It’s utterly hard-wired and instinctive. The act of writing and the act of editing are so conjoined, I don’t really think of them as separate. I don’t consult a style manual for these edits. In the end, what drives me is a sense of dissatisfaction with bad text and happiness with good text. My whole writing-editing journey is just about making 1,000,000 tiny choices that move me from a mostly-grumpy place to a largely-happy one.Next week, I’ll talk a bit about my more macro-edits. Till then, I have the moon to worry about. Little, or not little? Hmm… ***FEEDBACK FRIDAYFor the next few weeks, instead of posting into the Feedback Friday forum, I want you to post into the Introduction To Self-Editing forum. Remember, to log in first. The task I set each week will correlate with what Debi Alper teaches in that week\'s lesson, so if you\'re not a Premium Member yet and want to get the video teaching that goes along with the task, you can join here, or purchase the course as a one-off here.This week\'s assignment from the course:Share a plot summary (can be written out as a synopsis or just with bullet points) in the forum. Point out where you think tweaks to structure, plot, and pace might be required, and see if others agree.Til soon. Harry

This month, we’re talking editing. Indeed, if you’re a Premium Member, I very much hope you’ll trot along to my live-editing workshop this coming Tuesday. (Log in and find details here. Not a member? Join us today.)And I want to start the month with a short but important message. It’s one you already know, yes, but it’s a point we can all easily lose.It’s this:Writers are hopelessly vulnerable to Impostor Syndrome.That might be part of our psychological make-up (dreamy, introverted, bookish) – but I don’t think it’s mostly that. Perhaps it isn’t that at all.If I were a stone-walling guy, I’d drop my tools in the late afternoon and look at my day’s work and think, \'Yes, I just built that.\'If I were a drainage-contractor or a chimney-sweep, I could count my accomplishment in yards of drain unblocked, or so many vertical feet of chimney cleared. (I once cleaned my own chimneys, then set the house on fire, but it was only a little fire, and the fire brigade came, not once but three times, and the kids were all at home with friends, and got to watch everything, and the firemen let the kids try on their helmets and climb around the fire engine, and everyone had a very nice time.)And, OK, lots of white-collar jobs can’t be measured by the yard, but there’s still a rhythm of feedback: client meetings, reports, ad campaigns, emails. What’s unusual about the job of novelist is that you have essentially two ways to measure accomplishment, the first of which is phoney and stupid and you know it to be those things. So, novelists can measure accomplishment, via:Word Counts. Which gives you a sort of feedback, the way a dry stone wall gives you feedback as you build it, but if the words are sh*te, then the feedback is meaningless. And because you know that, you don’t trust the feedback. And because first drafts are first drafty, the words probably are sh*te, so you are right to be suspicious.Book deals. And yes, a book deal comes with an actual contract, signed by a serious and moneyed counterpart. And there’s money. And there’s the whole hoop-la of publication. So this is serious, meaningful feedback. Same thing with self-pub: you don’t achieve meaningful sales unless your work has been good, so sales is also a metric that matters. But book deals come along once in a blue moon. I mean, if you produce a book a year and work with a standard two-book deal, then you only get confirmation that you’re not an idiot once every two years. That’s a very long time.So authors get regular meaningless feedback (word counts) and very, very infrequent feedback that matters (book deal, or successful book launch.)And a lot of what we do involves creating a bad first draft so we can then turn it slowly into a good final draft.The result? Impostor Syndrome is endemic among writers. It’s endemic among proper published authors too. I know plenty of top 10 bestselling novelists who are pretty much guaranteed to feel like their work is hopeless before they (once again) do what they do and produce an excellent book.The solution? There ain’t no solution, except to recognise the problem. You will feel that your work is inadequate, because – right now – it is inadequate. And that’s fine. That’s a stage we clamber through to get to adequate and then excellent.The ladder from rubbish to excellent is Editing. It’s self-editing to start with and – even if you’re wise enough to get a Manuscript Assessment from us – it’s still self-editing after that, because it’s still you that has to choose how to react to your editor’s comments.So. Write, edit, publish, repeat. You may only get meaningful feedback on your output about once a year. That’s just the way it is. Other indicators may not be accurate. You are not an impostor. You’re a writer.FEEDBACK FRIDAYWe’ll get back to text-analysis next week, but this week, let’s just throw it open. Do you struggle with something like Impostor Syndrome? How do you solve it? Just open up about the issue; you’ll get a LOT of understanding, and you might find suggestions that help. Come and fake it till you make it here.***And look: in my defence, I did clean the chimney, and perfectly well. But some idiots had removed most of the flue, so the more I cleaned the chimney, the more the debris fell into a big pile of dry material that I couldn’t access, or see, or have any reason to believe existed. Two or three sparks and – fire. The kids arranged chairs as though for a pop-up cinema and watched the entire show with glee.Til soon.Harry

OK, battle of the clichés. Which is truer: “You can’t judge a book by its cover” or “A picture is worth a 1000 words”?Well, please pick your preferred platitude – but when it comes to book marketing, then the thousand-words cliché beats the can’t-judge cliché into a cocked hat. A cocked hat with gold frogging and a generously sized rosette.The fact is that, whether a reader is looking on Amazon or on a bookstore table, they start with only two really key bits of data. (I’m assuming, of course, that you don’t happen to have a name like Margaret Atwood or Dan Brown. If you do, I’d say that potential readers have three key bits of data, and the name wins out.)The two bits of data are:1. The book cover image2. The title.There may be shoutlines or puffs or subtitles on the cover too, but a reader doesn’t really grapple with those until they’ve assessed the first two items. And the hand doesn’t reach for the book, the cursor doesn’t move in for the click, unless those two things intrigue the target reader enough.So how do you get the click? That is, probably, the most single important moment in the entire marketing chain.This is a complicated question and every book and every situation is different, but my guidelines would be as follows:Communicate genreTake a look at these two images: Which is better? The first is the current book cover, the second one is from the movie DVD. Assume that the book is newly launched and can’t yet sell itself on name and reputation alone.And the answer, surely, is that the actual book cover does a very poor job. The book is a dystopian fantasy involving an all-action teenage heroine. The readers you want to attract are young adults who want a dystopian fantasy featuring an all-action teenage heroine. The first image is … what? A historical novel? A lament for vanishing wildlife? A literary meditation of some sort? It’s entirely unclear. (That’s not a criticism of the 2025 cover, though. The book has become iconic, so it can afford a purely iconic cover.)The DVD cover on the other hand does everything it needs to do. Dystopian? Yep. Fantasy? Well, probably, because most contemporary teenage girls don’t mess around with flaming arrows. Tough teenage heroine? Uh, yes. And the font says “speculative / future-set” not “Roman / classical / literary / boring.”So, that’s your cover’s first job. Communicate genre. Establish an immediate link with the reader you’re targeting.Communicate nicheWithin any genre, there are any number of sub-genres. Cosy crime has a different vibe and a different readership from mainstream police procedurals… and both of those feel very different from gangland, mobster-type crime.Your cover needs to find the niche within the niche. Your target reader needs to become curious with her very first glance.Ignore your bookOK, you don’t have to ignore what actually happens in your book, and if the image in the cover relates to the text itself, then so much the better. But the worst self-made covers I’ve seen all fall into the trap of trying to interpret, over-literally, the story and settings of the actual text.Perhaps those covers would be satisfying to people who had already read the novel and understood the allusions. But this is a marketing tool! People don’t know what those allusions mean. The cover has to attract people in – not provide an after-dinner mint to people who have just enjoyed your offering.Here’s a cover that has effectively nothing to do with the text of the book:The book is – duh! – not about moths and windowpanes. But who cares? It’s beautiful. Layer your messages Clare’s book cover also nudges a further point. The title has an opportunity to convey a message (or messages) of some sort. The cover art gives you a second opportunity to do the same. So don’t repeat yourself! Set up an interesting reverberation between the two. Suppose that book cover had shown an open hand and a moth flying away – that would have repeated the message of the cover… and produced something utterly bland. As it is, the cover here says, “Trapped.” The title says, “Released”. What’s going on? It’s that sort of question which invites further investigation. That’s the question which makes you read the shoutline. (“A tragic accident. A past you can’t escape.”) In effect, the reader is being led along like this:1. Beautiful image (of the right sort of mood) attracts the eye2. The title and the image kind of fight each other, prompting curiosity3. The shoutline (and the title, and the domestic image) confirms your hunch that this is a psych thriller and that there are interesting mysteries to explore4. You pick up the book and turn it over. Step 2 – the layering of the messages – is absolutely crucial to the whole sequence. In effect, the title and the cover are dancing a tango – but in loose (“open”) embrace instead of close embrace. You feel the linkage, but you also feel a distance.           The open question For the same kind of reason, the title / cover needs to invite a question. That’s why the classic romance cover (woman in big dress, man with very open shirt) invites derision. It’s so single note: a tune played with one finger. The best covers – even in the romance aisle, where readers are seeking a relatively simple happy ever after story – all play with two hands, a full range of notes. Books like these: Those covers are beautiful... they talk about romance and they intrigue. That book about summer yells about happy summer days – but then strongly suggests them ending. Huh? What happens to this happy, splashy couple? And a book offering a love story shouldn’t talk about endings, surely? So what’s going on with the pair in the Yulin Kuang novel? “Isabel and the Rogue” has a rather more typical romance title – naming both parties and suggesting the guy has some growing up to do – but the image subverts that. The yellow-dress woman looks very much in control. The nice chap sitting next to her looks very mannerly and not at all rogue-y. So what’s going on? The same title with an image that just repeats the ‘girl + rogue’ meme of the title would be killingly bad. In every case, it’s an open question which intrigues the reader and prompts exploration. I think it’s probably true that EVERY good cover creates that intrigue. Work at thumbnail size Whether you’re working with a trad publisher or whether you’re commissioning your own self-pub cover, you will find that your designer presents you with your cover image at the hugest scale the internet can deal with. Ideally, a designer would like you to view the cover at monster size in the comfort of your own home cinema. Which means that the first thing you should do is shrink that damn cover down to Amazon-thumbnail size and see if it still works. Every test I’ve suggested in this email needs to work at diddy-size as well as at full size. As a matter of fact, I always think it’s helpful to superimpose your draft cover on a screen grab of an Amazon search page to see if your cover holds up against the competition you will face.  Make a fuss My last command is for you, not your book cover. And it’s this: I know you are a very nice person. You’re like the gentleman seated next to Isabel, very nicely mannered, always ready to pass a bun and apologise for any crumbs on the carpet. But if your cover is weak, say so, say so, say so. You have a pram, I hope? Throw toys out of it. Throw your sticky bun on the carpet. You wish to hurl, not throw? Then hurl away. Hurl hard.  Do not accept a mediocre cover. I’ve done that too often in my career (publishers coax you into acceptance), but do not do it. Make a mess. Yell. Scream. Get yourself a decent cover. That’s easy to do if you’re self-publishing. Harder to do – but just as essential – if you’re trad-publishing. You can go back to being nice again afterwards. Feedback Friday is all on titles this week. Anyone can have a go. I’ll be around, offering feedback, but my feedback is only for Premium Members, so if you’re not a PM, you have a sad life ahead, unless you Do What Needs To Be Done. ***FEEDBACK FRIDAYWe’ll do titles this week. Tell us what your book is about in 2-3 sentences, and tell us the title you’ve chosen. If you have a subtitle or shoutline in mind, then tell us that too. We want to feel a ripple of intrigue – a question we need answered. Once you\'re ready, log in to Townhouse and share your work here.*** Til soon,Harry. 

I yap on a lot about novels in these emails: I’ve written plenty of novels; I like writing them; the vast majority of you guys are writing them too.But I’ve also written non-fiction: Five books under my own name, but I’ve been quite involved in ghost-writing or similar with several others.So: I like non-fiction too. And, within that, I like creative non-fiction: writing narratives that are essentially true, but using broadly the same set of literary techniques that a novelist brings into play.I’m bringing this up now, because we have a new course available: a 6-part a 6-part video course on an Introduction to Creative Non-Fiction. The course is led by Sam Jordison, a writer himself, but also the founder of the quite brilliant Galley Beggar Press. The course is free to our lovely Premium Members, naturally, but you can buy it for £99 if you really want to. (But why would you want to? You can get everything in Premium Membership for £150.) More info here if you want it.Of the memoirs I’ve worked with most closely, two come to mind.The first is West End Girls – a memoir by Barbara Tate. She grew up before and during the War. She had a terrible, flibbertigibbet mother and was mostly brought up by a stonily cold, icily respectable grandmother. So she emerged into the world of post-war London, a young and now-independent adult who had never really experienced love.And then – in 1948 – she met a glamorous, exotic, beautiful and warm woman, Faye, with whom she instantly bonded. Faye just happened to be one of the most hard-working and successful prostitutes working in Soho and she needed a maid. Barbara became that maid.Barbara’s book tells the story of that friendship. The author was in her 80s when the book came to us. It was vastly long and discursive. It didn’t really know what story it was meant to be telling. With a younger author, we’d have simply given guidance and let her do the work. Given Barbara’s age, I essentially took on the work myself, cutting out the excess material and stitching the remaining parts back together.Barbara had gone on from maid-ing in Soho to achieve plenty in her life, but when I told her that we’d sold her book for good money to a major publisher, she was thrilled. We sat in her sunny Ealing garden and she waved a cup at me and said, “Harry, this will be the crown of my life.”That book went on to be a beautifully well-published bestseller.Another book I especially remember was Please Don’t Make Me Go, a story with a lousy cover and a weedy title (both chosen by the publisher to line up with the Misery Memoir kitsch, then very much in vogue.)The author, John Fenton, was a tough, smart man. His book was a brutal, brilliant account of his time in a young offenders’ institution – he’d been sent there, on the basis of no actual offence, by a dad who just wanted rid of him. The book ended with an astonishing climax: just as things were going to go very badly indeed for the young Fenton, he managed to break into the office of the man who ran the place and found material so compromising that the outcome flipped in an instant, from very bad to very good.And? My conclusions from working with those books?Simply that pretty much every technique that applies to a novel applies also to non-fiction, of the kind we’re talking about.Dialogue? Yes, John and Barbara both wrote dialogue that could easily have lived in fiction.Scene construction? Definitely the same.Characterisation? Yes, of course.And the structure of the story itself? Yes, yes, yes. That’s key. Both the books I’m thinking of had this astonishingly novelistic structure – and in both cases with endings that just linger in the mind.Now, personally, I think it’s OK if non-fiction writers nudge their facts into shape a little. I don’t mean outright lie, but I do mean shape. Omit something if it occludes the structure you’re building? Skip over some things, bring others into much greater prominence? Yes to all that.Build your story.I do warmly recommend Sam’s course. (The guy is something of a publishing genius and it’s just brilliant that we can bring a bit of him to you.) But also:The reason why I talk so much about novels in these emails is that pretty much everything I talk about applies to you non-fictioneers too.Build your story. Write well. Have fun.***FEEDBACK FRIDAYIf you’re writing creative non-fiction, then let’s have the opening page of your book, or any chunk that represents a kind of manifesto for the book people are about to read.As soon as you\'re ready, log into Townhouse and post your work here.And those who are completing the Introduction to Creative Non-Fiction course too, don\'t forget to complete the lesson assignments and share your work in the course forum.If you’re not writing non-fiction, then you’ve got the week off. And a Happy Easter to you.***Til soon.Harry

All agents have passions. At our Festival once – late at night and after plenty of wine – one agent started listing hers. I know there were sharks on her list and haunted houses, and child killers, and twins, and (I think) anything Victorian, and definitely mistaken identity, and… the list went on. Somewhere out there, a perfect novel exists for her with all those things in one beautifully weird melange.But? Mostly agents want surprise. They want that sense of, ‘Gosh, I had no idea I’d want something like this, but now that it’s in front of me, I really, really do.’PitchI wrote a week or two ago about how the ghost of an elevator pitch needs to glimmer in your query letter. And it does. The ingredients for a compelling story need to be present. The agent needs to feel that intrigue from the very start.Because I plappered (my daughter’s chosen verb) about that recently, I’ll say no more now.Good writing / instant authorityAgents say they want a distinctive voice; of course they do. But if you try to analyse what that really means, I think it comes down to this. Agents want to read the first page of a manuscript and just know that the writer is in perfect control – of their sentences, their characters, their story.That control will, most of the time, come with a voice that sounds like that specific author, and nobody else – simply because you don’t normally get that level of control in over text, without putting your own personality into it.But does John Grisham, say, really sound so distinctive? Or Stephen King? I’m not sure they do. They are masters of their craft, of course, but it’s not really their voice that you’d want to pick out.So, I’d focus less on voice, and more on authority. Can a professional reader tell from the first page or two that you are in control, and that good things lie in wait? The answer needs to be yes.A plausible storyMost agents will regard your synopsis as the least important part of your submission package – which is just as well, because synopses are tedious to write and tedious to read.That said, synopses can be massive time savers. Let’s say I were a busy agent. I’ve read a query letter and I’m intrigued. I’ve read the opening page or two, and I feel the authority of the writing.So now what? I read 200 pages, only to find that the story massively disappoints 2/3 of the way into the book? Or discover that the basic theme is simply not marketable?Well, I should say that the clues given from the query letter and opening pages are generally more solid than that. Those authority-clues are powerful and they don’t often lie. But still. It takes four hours to read a book. It takes five minutes to read a synopsis.So an agent will mostly want to sense-check that synopsis for the basic story shape. The question is essentially: does this feel like a novel? Could this story fill out an 80,000 word book?An avenue to marketBut also, through all of the above, any agent will be asking themselves the one key question that will determine their decision: can I imagine how a publisher would market this?What kind of cover? What kind of pitch? What sales messaging to the putative retailer? What comparable books?Now, for clarity, you don’t have to be a marketing expert and you don’t need to come up with solutions. Or rather: it may be an asset if you can supply those solutions, but it’s not really your job to do so. (And if you do want to do so, then do so with tact, ‘In the vein of recent bestsellers, such as Robin Banks’s The Greatest Heist and Lottie Lightfingers’ The Wallet That Wandered...’)But the agent is a professional salesperson, and therefore also a marketing expert. They’re a saleswoman (or man) whose job is selling to editors. Those editors will then have the task of selling your manuscript to their team and then, if they’re successful, selling your book to retailers and, through them, to the public. In fact, the number of successful sales needed is significant:Sale #1: You to your agentSale #2: Your agent to an editorSale #3: Your editor to their acquisitions committeeSale #4: your publisher’s sales team to retailersSale #5: Your publisher’s marketing team to the public.Your agent knows your book only succeeds if all those lamps are shining green. It’s that sense of commercial potential which will, almost certainly, define the response you get back.A line of green lampsAnd for you to achieve that line of green lamps? Well, by the time you’ve written your book, you’re kind of stuck with it.But the advice never really changes. It all comes down to:Knowing your market. You need to be deeply involved, as a reader, in the market you want to end up writing for. That knowledge will insert itself into your text. It’ll ensure that you write for the market as it is today, not as you want it to be.A great pitch. I hammer away at elevator pitch a lot, because that pitch is just crucial. A so-so written book with a great pitch? That’ll sell. Most really big bestsellers are moderately written but with great pitches. If your pitch is weak, even great writing may not save you.Good or excellent writing. Great pitch + good, competent writing: that’ll work. Adequate pitch + genius levels of writing: that’ll work. Any sort of pitch + clumsy writing? That’s a fail, every time, as it jolly well ought to be.But that’s what we’re here for, right? To help you get to the point of pitching to agents, or self-publishing, with confidence.This thing that you want? It ain’t easy, but it is doable. And we’re here to help.***FEEDBACK FRIDAYAnother slightly left-field task this week. (Though I realise this is a sporting terminology, I don’t really understand. I mean, in cricket, we’d normally say leg-side, except that you’d need to say off-side if the batter was left-handed. And since bowlers bowl quite happily to left-handed and right-handed batters, there’s no big difference between a legside ball and an offside one. So left-field or right-field? I don’t get it.)Anyway. Here’s a different sort of task.1. Give me the pitch from your book, in any form you like (super-short / short / 2-3 sentences.)2. Find two or three books which are recent, successful and comparable. Give me the pitches from at least one of them.That’s an ouchy task: demanding to do. But if you can do it, and your book sits happily amidst your chosen company, then you have a marketable work on your hands.As soon as you\'re ready, log into Townhouse and post your work here.***I’m writing this email on Tuesday. It’s my birthday today, one that I share with my wife.The kids are being… not horrible. There is sunshine and there are tulips and much tea. Tulips are maybe my absolute favourite flower, except that I do have a soft spot for dog roses, and I’ve got enough of Wales in my blood that I am easily seduced by a daffodil.And cherry blossom? Hmm. But I think tree-flowers need a different category, no?Til soon,Harry.

As you’d expect, there’s quite a lot of research into what makes people buy stuff. And, as you’d expect, writers are mostly very, very, very not interested in exploring it.But that’s tough on you, because this email is going to tell you anyway. And yes, I know you want to write books and leave selling to someone else. But that’s not how it works. Even if you’re traditionally published, you’ll be asked to review blurbs, think about cover art, review social media yadda and email lists… and, if you self-publish, then you’ll be thinking about Facebook ads and the like as well.You don’t have to turn into the sort of person who wears a black shirt, and a gold medallion, and fake tan so thick it looks like a kind of golden yogurt. But you do have to engage with how your book strikes people on first view, not just on full view.And here are some tips. They’re all based on actual scientific research (hence the slightly weird precision in the data), so what follows isn’t just an opinion piece. That said, books are different from a lot of consumer products, so you have to adjust accordingly. (For those interested: here\'s where I got my data.)Say youAddress the reader as though they’re in the room with you. Say, ‘you’. The result of that direct address is that people feel around 20% more involved in your brand. Since you’re really trying to build that direct relationship, that involvement matters.Say IAnd be you. Don’t depersonalise yourself. Not \'This story was written to thrill,’ but, \'I wanted to thrill you.\' Keep the relationship front and centre.The difference between \'I\' and \'we\' in a study was a sales improvement of around 7%. My guess? With a brand that ought to be focused on you as author, the positive results are probably greater than that. The author-reader relationship has the potential to be way stronger than (say) the toothpaste-manufacturer / tooth-owner relationship.Here and nowFor the same sort of reasons, don’t jump into the past. Keep any marketing-type copy in the present tense. The stats say that this helps it sound up to 26% more helpful / compelling. And you want to compel.Be assertiveThere are different ways of being assertive. You can make firm claims rather than wishy-washy ones. (So ‘all’ or ‘always’, not ‘mostly’ or ‘often’.)Strong negatives also show assertiveness: \'you won’t read a better thriller this year\' just sounds punchier than \'this will be one of the best thrillers you’ve read for a long time.\'The effect of this kind of language can boost engagement by up to 18%.Avoid technical languageYes, your book may be a near-future SF story about a moon-mission gone wrong. But keep your blurb clear, not cluttered. If you write \'When the landing craft hit the rim of a crater…\', the reader knows instantly what you mean. If you write \'When the orbital descent vehicle foundered on the lip of an impact basin…\', you’ve lost your zing.I’m not talking here about the language inside the book – your book and your characters and your story will need to determine that. But don’t fail to get people through your entrance door. And that means, keeping it clear and keeping it simple.If you do clutter up your language, sales drop by up to 16%. (And, honestly, in the context of books where the nearest competitive product is only a click away, I think sales will drop a lot more than that.)The rule of threeAn interesting one this, because at first sight it doesn’t apply to books. The rule is: list three benefits, not two, not four, not five.Why? Well, three just beats any other number by 10.4%. It appears that three works because it establishes a pattern without seeming too fake.Additionally, there’s evidence that says if you list three excellent benefits of X, and then also two good benefits, consumers take a kind of average score and think, ‘Yeah, not so excellent really.’ Sticking only with the excellent options means that consumers were willing to spend up to 37% more.Now, you’re not offering a baking tin or a waterproof jacket. You’re offering a book, and the benefit of a book (assuming it’s fiction) is just that it’s good and will grip the reader. So maybe listing benefits doesn’t really apply.Except that… Netflix uses the rule of three all the time. Take a quite excellent programme – Harry & Meghan, for example: it’ll be described with a trio of adjectives – Captivating / Investigative / Social-cultural.I think the same applies to any time you try to intrigue a reader with your book. Take my Fiona books. If I used a trio of words, it might be something like ‘Intelligent, Intense, Suspenseful’. If I tried to layer things on top of that (‘Literate, dark, celtic noir, thought-provoking’), the pitch to the reader becomes so muddled as to be indecipherable.And that rule of three applies even where you might not expect. Let’s say you’ve picked the adjectives and themes you want to push. Everything needs to point at those specific things.So if you have a reader-review that chimes beautifully with the adjectives you’ve picked – then great, use it. But quite likely, you also have a reader-review that says something positive, but not aligned with your core themes. In that case, including the review is muddling the message. It’s leaving the reader uncertain about what you’re offering.So pick your themes – three of them – and work those hard.Syntactic surpriseAnd here’s an interesting (and more writer-y) piece of of advice:According to research shared by Thomas McKinlay, simply using a surprising sentence pattern in your copy can help you get a 127.5% increase in click-through rates (CTR).So here’s your expected sentence structure:Red Bull will give you energy for hours.Take a trip anywhere you feel like going.Uber Eats can deliver a delicious meal to your door.Boring, right? And here’s the same thing, made a little less expected:Red Bull gives you wingsBelong anywhere. [AirBnB]A delicious meal at your door, by Uber Eats.There used to be a way to calculate ‘syntactic surprise’, but the online calculator tool seems dead. That’s a shame, but you’re a writer – you don’t need it. Making nice sentences is your thing, right?And a 127% increase in click-through rate? Wow. That’s the difference between an Amazon bestseller and one that’s nigh on impossible to market profitably.Use these tools. Use them well. Be happy.***FEEDBACK FRIDAYOoh, a challenging task this week. It comes in two pieces:Give me an Amazon book description of 150 words or less.Give me a ‘shout line’: a phrase or sentence (max 12 words, and ideally under 10) suitable for the front of your book. So for example: \'Every family has secrets – some more deadly than others.\'We’re going to be looking for clear and compelling, mixed with a dash of syntactic surprise. A hard task this one, but a goodie.As soon as you\'re ready, log into Townhouse and post yours here.***That’s it from me. Til soon,Harry.

Last week, we talked about query letters and I asked you to pop your draft letters up on Townhouse for feedback.That’s always an illuminating exercise, and on the whole, what I saw was pretty convincing.But one topic I did want to address was this: your query letter absolutely wants to deliver your core elevator pitch... but you probably don’t want to state your elevator pitch in the letter.Now yes, that’s sounds puzzling – and I’ll explain – but I should also say that it’s easy to overthink these things. For one thing, personal tastes differ. Some agents will relish what I or other agents would not advise.More important, though, a query letter itself isn’t terribly important. You need to talk about your book in a way that interests the agent – but the default for an agent is to read the first page or two of your work. It’s way better to have a drab query letter and some excellent opening chapters, than to have a dazzling query letter and drab text. The latter manuscript will never be picked up. The first one almost certainly will be.So, please don’t get stressed. If you want more help with the query letter, last week\'s Lesson Three of How to Get a Literary Agent course will tell you EVERYTHING that you need to know. (If you\'re a Premium Member, log in to access this course for free. Otherwise you can purchase the course for just £99).OK. So. Elevator pitch and query letter.As you know, I love a very tight elevator pitch:“A Cardiff-set crime novel, featuring a detective who used to think she was dead.”That’s 14 words and I wasn’t even really trying to go as short as possible.I don’t even mind elevator pitches that just collapse into a list of ingredients. For example, here are some that just list ingredients but still have a relish to them. (The first pitch describes my Fiona series, of course; the other two are just invented.)“Murder mystery + detective who used to believe she was dead.”“Antarctic research station + troubled oceanographer + ghosts”“YA story: Victorian circus + orphan boy + murder story”But an elevator pitch is, first and foremost, for you. It’s so you can define and understand the purpose of your novel. It’s so you can keep the text on the iron tracks that will deliver commercial (and actually artistic) quality.From that point of view, the scantier your pitch, the more clearly you yourself understand what you’re dealing with. But a query letter has to dress like a query letter. You can’t just toss out a dozen words, like ham knuckles on a plate, and expect to whet an agent’s appetite.So you need to introduce your book in a paragraph or two, and those paragraphs need to have nice tidy prose, and they need to ensure that they’re delivering information on genre, and setting, and anything else that an agent might want to know before she tucks into the manuscript.And the elevator pitch needs to shimmer behind all that – the gold behind the veil.So to take that (invented) book about the Victorian circus, my query letter might say.“Oscar is an orphan. He never knew his father and his mother (a lady’s maid) died when he was eight. For two years, he lived a harsh and semi-feral life on the streets of London, until a kindly trapeze artist at one of London’s largest circuses took him in. His life at the circus is comparatively idyllic until one day, when tasked with clearing out the animal cages, he finds evidence that the lions have recently dined on a human – and, quite possibly, Lady Pamela Dulverton, whose recent disappearance is the talk of the town.Drawn into the resultant investigation, Oscar is forced to grow up fast – and finally learns family secrets that will change his life forever.”Now, you can absolutely feel the elevator pitch there: Orphan. Victorian circus. Murder. Boom! That’s a book we want to read. The rest of it (the trapeze artist, the lion’s cages, the status of the murder victim) are all just dressing on top of that basic skeleton. If the murder victim had been trampled by an elephant or tossed from a trapeze or skewered by a strongman, it wouldn’t really affect the story. It would be equally unimportant who took Oscar in. The elevator pitch, however, you can’t alter at all without fundamentally changing the story itself.Oh yes: and the ‘family secrets that change his life forever’ – that’s also not really part of the pitch. Of course, a YA story has to deliver some major form of life-changing outcome, but it doesn’t have to be a family secret. If an orphan came into money or some form of real job security or decided to set up shop as a freelance investigator, any of those things would also complete the story in the necessary way. The pitch is iron and can’t change (unless you decided to write a different story altogether.)So, the elevator pitch is all present and correct. The agent will feel its presence.At the same time, you can feel that the extra dressing just helps the pitch appear at its best. It’s as though your query letter is saying, “Look, our pitch is basically orphan + Victorian circus + murder mystery. You gotta love that, right? But if you want help understanding how those ingredients cohere into an actual story, then let me tell you about Oscar, who …”So, yes, your elevator pitch needs to light up your query letter – it needs to be felt.But no, the pitch alone is insufficient.So do what most of the Feedback Friday people did last wee. Write a fluent paragraph or two. Make sure the elevator pitch is there behind the curtain. And write a paragraph that engages the reader.It’s that simple.And don’t stress. If you can write a book that’s good enough to be published, you can definitely write a query letter. (And download the query letter and synopsis builder. It’s good.)***FEEDBACK FRIDAYSince we’re doing agent-y things at the moment, we may as well do synopses too.If you haven’t already posted your query letter for feedback, then I suggest you do that this week here. If you posted your query letter last week, then let’s take a look at your synopsis instead.I will say that reading back-to-back synopses is a task about as interesting as eating a plateful of brick dust, so I won’t get stuck in too deeply. What I will do, though, is take at least one synopsis from this week\'s assignment of Lesson Four of How to Get a Literary Agent and give in-depth comments in the forum for that course (and I’ll make my post sticky, so it’s easy to find.)  ***That’s it from me. Brick dust is yuk, because it lodges between the teeth. A bowlful of gravel though, with fresh milk, and a little grated dandelion? Yum.Til soon.HarryPS: Premium Members have been enjoying our How To Get a Literary Agent course – lessons are released weekly and we’re now on week four, all about how to writing a winning synopsis. The course is free to Premium Members – or you can buy this course as a one-off for £99. But don’t be a silly billy. It makes no sense to buy a one-off course, when you can get an entire suite of courses (and everything else in membership) for just £150 a year (or, for cancel-any-time flex membership, just £30/month.) Membership info here.

Last week, we dealt with hyper-intelligent beings in the form of robots. This week, we turn to… literary agents.The gist of this email is short and easy.Agents are there to sell services to you. Over the years, if your career does well, you’ll certainly hope to spend thousands (of pounds or dollars) on those agents. With a little luck, you’ll be spending tens of thousands. If your career really flourishes, you could easily be spending six digits on all that agenting.Don’t get me wrong, that money is bloody well spent. I’m hardly ill-connected in the world of agents and publishers, and I have in fact sold books for Jericho Writers clients in the past. (Under exceptional circumstances only, and no, I won’t do it for you.) But an agent lives in that market, day in and day out, and there’s no question that they do a better job than I would.As you know, I’m a big fan of self-publishing and if you want to go that route, you stand an excellent chance of making more money than you would by going trad. But if you do want a traditional publisher, then the 10-15% commission you spend on your agent will be rewarded many times over by the uplift in revenues you’ll collect. I’ve never thought that agents are overpaid.But – You pay these people. They work for you.And OK, this is a two-way deal. They don’t offer representation unless they think the deal will work out for them. So yes, you have to pass a kind of audition. But in a way that’s even true of plumbers. If they don’t fancy your bathroom renovation job, they either won’t do it, or they’ll quote a sum that induces you to say no.Forget about the audition stage. It’s irrelevant. These people work for you and, if things work out, they will make a lot of money from you.So treat them like plumbers, not gods.If an agent stops responding to perfectly legitimate emails, then they’re behaving childishly and unprofessionally. Move on.If an agent asks for editorial changes that you’re sure are wrong, say no.If an agent’s submission process is unnecessarily fiddly or non-standard, then either ignore their requests or choose a different agent.If an agent’s contract has some pissy little clause that you don’t like or seems unfair, then say so. Negotiate.Most standard advice tells you to approach an agent with a kind of genuflection in your query letter. (“There are 1400+ literary agents in the world, but I’m writing to YOU because you bedazzle me in the following way …”) And, for me, that’s horse-poo. The things that people say in those letters almost always come over as inauthentic. In most cases, you know pretty much damn all about an agent, and you’re writing to them because you don’t totally hate their face, the agency seems OK, and you’ve got to bang out a dozen query letters anyway. If I were back in agent-querying world, I wouldn’t do that little genuflection. I’d just say, “here’s my book. If you want to represent me, let’s talk.” I mean, I wouldn’t phrase it quite like that, but I wouldn’t curtsy.Also – send out multiple query letters. Agents used to promote a kind of sequential process: first one agent, then another, then another. That process served their interests very well and yours not at all. You wouldn’t do that with plumbers. Don’t do it with agents.Ask for information. You should expect to know which editor at which publishing house has received your work. You should expect a submission strategy to be worked out with you in advance. Don’t ask for those things timidly. Expect them. Require them. A plumber needs to check with you before selecting bathware. An agent needs to check with you before selecting editors.And that’s the message. They’re not gods. They’re plumbers. Expect good behaviour, and you’ll (probably) get it. All being well, you’ll have an excellent professional relationship that lasts for years. You’re paying the money, so you’re within your rights to have expectations.Ask for what you want.Be polite and professional.And don’t curtsy.***FEEDBACK FRIDAYBiff boff. Your task this week is to show me your query letter.Despite what I say above, I’m perfectly happy if you do insert the “I’ve chosen you because….” language. I’m just saying that I don’t think it’s obligatory.If you’re not at the querying stage, then do the exercise anyway. It’s always helpful to think about your book from an agent’s perspective. When you\'re ready, share yours here.That’s it from me.Til soon,Harry

Well, golly gosh, I thought last week’s Feedback Friday was interesting - and brave for the good souls who took part.We asked people to post an excerpt from their manuscript – plus the same scene, as delivered by an AI tool. (You can see the full results here, and I do urge you to take a look. If the link gives you a “whoops” message, that’s because you’re not a member, or not logged in. So either log in, or join us completely free. You get load of good stuff if you do.)Just for fun, here’s part of the scene that I posted. Fiona (a police officer, but working undercover) is meeting a senior member of a criminal gang she is seeking to penetrate. They meet in a wine bar:My version of the sceneVic emerges from behind a raw oak pillar. My face must change somehow, because the waiter swings round, sees Vic. Some look is exchanged, and the waiter waves me over to where Vic has a table waiting.‘You made it,’ he says.He clucks around me, a fussy uncle. He wants me to remove my coat, but I keep it on. Take off my hat, but keep it close.He wants me to choose a drink. Pushes a long wine list at me, tells me to order anything. I ask for water. He tells me again to order anything, meaning that water doesn’t count, so I say orange juice, a small one.He orders another glass of red wine for him, a bowl of olives, toasted ciabatta slices and olive oil, a selection of antipasti, and my orange juice.I sit there with my bag on my lap. The bag is wired for sound. So is my coat.‘Filthy day, isn’t it? I don’t mind it cold, but this is vile.’I don’t say anything. Maybe shrug. Look sideways.‘Listen, love, you’re frightened, aren’t you? And that’s my fault. I think I frightened you yesterday. Let’s just get to know each other a bit maybe.’AI version of sceneThe soft clink of wine glasses blended with murmured conversations around me. I’d chosen my outfit carefully – a worn blazer and faded jeans that screamed low-wage worker, a direct contrast to the polished mahogany and crystal elegance of the wine bar. Vic sat across from me, his pinstripe suit a silent declaration of power.“You’ve got a reputation for being… resourceful,” he said, swirling a glass of Cabernet. His steel-gray eyes never left my face, measuring and calculating. I could feel the weight of his assessment.I kept my posture slightly hunched, the defeated stance of someone desperate for work. “I go where I’m needed,” I replied, my voice low and neutral. “Cleaning’s not glamorous, but it pays the bills.”A thin smile crossed his lips – predatory, knowing.Comments on thisFor me, the AI scene is desperately crude. Conversations (inevitably) are murmured. Wine glasses (inevitably) clink softly. The bar is (for sure) polished mahogany, even though that wood feels like a somewhat Victorian choice; it certainly isn’t high style today. And of course the eyes are steel-grey and calculating.The trouble here is that there’s no sub-text. The reader isn’t being asked to do any work at all. “Hmm, I wonder how we should think about Vic Henderson? Well, he’s predatory and calculating so he’s probably Bad News, right?”That’s so crude.My version of the same man is almost the opposite. He clucks around Fiona like a fussy uncle. He nudges her into ordering something. And he accepts blame for her feelings: ‘Listen, love, you’re frightened, aren’t you? And that’s my fault. I think I frightened you yesterday. Let’s just get to know each other a bit maybe.’But the reader knows this isn’t the whole Henderson. Not only do we know for a fact that he’s the face of a criminal enterprise, but we see him rejecting her request for water. There’s compulsion here and it’s the compulsion that we feel.Some of the comments on this pair of scenes was:“the AI writing here isn’t good. I don’t think it has the capacity to be indirect. It overexplains with tired language. And it has that generic voice.”“There is always a lot of telling description that gives AI away. ‘Low and neutral’ ‘ thin smile’ ‘predatory’ ‘hands trembled’. The revised version has a lot of flowery descriptions. However, with your excerpt, we are picking up things as readers and not being told what to think.”I think those comments are just right.And just to finish, here’s a chunk (edited for length) from Sally Roone’s Intermezzo. The monologue comes from Ivan, a gifted chess player. He’s watching an arts centre get set up for a 10 vs 1 chess tournament, where Ivan is the 1. He then meets Margaret, the attractive arts centre organiser.Sally Rooney / IntermezzoStanding on his own in the corner, Ivan thinks with no especially intense focus about the most efficient way of organising, say, a random distribution of tables and chairs into the aforementioned arrangement of a central U-shape, etc. It’s something he has thought about before, while standing in other corners, watching other people move similar furniture around similar indoor spaces: the different approaches you could use, say if you were writing a computer programme to maximise process efficiency. The accuracy of these particular men in relation to the moves recommended by such a program would be, Ivan thinks, pretty low, like actually very low…A woman enters. She happens to be noticeably attractive, which makes her presence in the room at this juncture all the more curious. She has a nice figure and her face in profile looks very pretty … She works here, the woman named Margaret, here at the art centre: that explains her sort of artistic appearance. She\'s wearing a white blouse, and a voluminous patterned skirt in different colours, and neat flat shoes of the kind ballerinas wear. He begins to experience, while she stands there in front of him, an involuntary mental image of kissing her on the mouth: not even really an image, but an idea of an image, sort of a realisation that it would be possible to visualise this at some later point, what it would be like to kiss her, a promise of enjoyment simply to picture himself doing that, which is harmless enough, just a private thought.Do you play chess? he asks.Nowhere does this say, “Ivan is a chess geek.” Nowhere does this say, “Ivan is certain to be awkward around women.” Nowhere does this say, “Ivan will not come across as sexually impressive.” But we know immediately that all these things are true. We also know that Ivan would slaughter us at chess and also be far more likely to remember the formula for a Gaussian probability distribution.The point here is that the reader is being made to work. They have to bring their own knowledge of the world (geeky men / arts centre-y women) and build out their understanding of the scene from facts they’ve acquired about the world. The AI text almost assumes that we have no knowledge of the world, so if an observation isn’t in the text, it doesn’t exist.But it does exist! It’s the most interesting part of the text. The joy of reading Sally Rooney isn’t Sally Rooney text alone. It’s ‘Sally Rooney text plus our own human wisdom.’ A robot couldn’t read Sally Rooney and form any real sense of what makes it worthwhile.You don’t believe me? Well, I asked a robot to ‘rewrite and improve’ Rooney’s passage. The result is in the PS below. But suffice to say – I do not love it.And nor should you.***FEEDBACK FRIDAYOK, here’s a rather different task from what I normally hand out – but still on the theme of this email and the last.Post a 200-250 word excerpt from your manuscriptIn [square brackets and italics] add your comments wherever you detect the kind of subtext that you would not expect a robot to pick up.Once you\'re ready, log in to Townhouse and post yours here.I’m going to like the excerpts that have lots of italics!***That’s it from me.My massive Viking longship was handed in to school and duly admired. It’s now sitting in my garage. When summer comes, I’m going to find a petite red-headed Viking and launch her off into the biggest lake or river I can find. The ship is papier-mache and is likely to dissolve, but wotthehell. The Vikings sailed to America, right? I reckon they’ll manage the Thames.Til soon.Harry***PS: Here’s the AI version of that Sally Rooney passage: which scrubs all subtext with a total lack of self-reflection. Ms Rooney has nothing to worry about just yet:Standing in the corner, Ivan observed the chaotic rearrangement of furniture with detached analytical interest. His mind, perpetually seeking patterns, calculated the optimal sequence for transforming this random scatter of tables and chairs into the intended U-shape. It was a familiar mental exercise—one he often entertained while occupying the margins of rooms like this, watching people execute with human imprecision what could be solved with algorithmic elegance. He estimated the efficiency of these particular men at perhaps thirty percent of optimal—their movements dictated by intuition rather than calculation, by conversation rather than silent computation.A woman entered the space, and Ivan\'s algorithmic thinking stuttered. Her presence was an unexpected variable in what had been, until now, a predictable equation. She moved with confidence through the disarray, her figure drawing his attention with a force that felt almost mathematical in its inevitability. Her profile cut a precise silhouette against the institutional wall—high cheekbones, a determined chin, eyes focused on something beyond the immediate disorder.Margaret, he recalled from the program. She worked at the art center—an explanation for both her presence and the deliberate aesthetic of her appearance. Her white blouse provided sharp contrast to the chromatic explosion of her skirt, which moved like liquid as she navigated between half-arranged furniture. Her ballet flats made no sound on the floor, adding to the impression that she floated slightly above the mundane proceedings.Without warning, his mind produced not an explicit image but a theoretical construct—a placeholder for a potential visualization involving the pressing of his lips against hers. Not even a fantasy so much as a mathematical proof of a fantasy\'s possibility: If x equals proximity and y equals mutual attention, then z could equal... He felt a curious satisfaction at the mere architecture of this thought, this harmless private equation that would never require solving.\"Do you play chess?\" he asked, the question emerging from some calculation deep beneath his consciousness, a gambit whose purpose even he couldn\'t fully articulate.

For a long time, I’ve held off writing about the impact of AI on what we do. Partly, none of us knows the answer and I have no special expertise in the area. But also, the impact still seemed quite remote. AI has seemed like something that might impact relatively tedious tasks (writing Google-optimised articles about vehicle maintenance, say) but not more obviously artistic / complex ones – like writing a memoir or a novel.But – well, here’s a story.Or rather, here WILL be a story, except that I want to put a shout out for Harry Harrison’s book THE WELFARE. I never met Harry, but he was a loyal Son of Jericho – always kind, always helpful, and a wonderful writer. He died recently, unexpectedly soon and with perfect bravery and grace. His book was unfinished, but his lovely writing group helped complete his book. It’s available now, in paperback. Harry Harrison was a beautiful man; this book is a lovely memorial.OK. The story:My kids were given an extended homework task that involved writing a ‘day in the life of’ story about a Viking.My older boy, who is no huge fan of the written word, settled down, rather glumly, to perform the task.Sometime later, he showed me his story. It was typed, which is fine: he’s happier with the keyboard than the pen. He had written about 200 words. And the story was really quite good. It had a simple dawn / voyage / battle / rest structure. The prose was simple, but clear and effective (“The air was cool, the sea was calm.”) There were no typos or punctuation errors, but Tom explained he’d used the spellcheck tools to get rid of them.He seemed genuinely proud.I was, I have to say, sceptical. I put the text through a plagiarism checker to make sure he hadn’t just lifted it wholesale from somewhere. But he hadn’t. I even checked his internet search history. Honestly, I ended up thinking that he’d done the work and I was proud of him.He hadn’t, of course.He’d used the copilot tool in Word (which I’ve never used myself or shown him how to use) and just had AI create the story lock, stock and barrel. That story, alas, was better than anything Tom was capable of writing himself.Now, we’re talking about a 200-word story ‘written by’ an 11-year-old. We’re not talking about novels, let alone novels for adults, let alone anything with aspirations to art.But take a look at the following chunks of text. One was written by AI, one by my (text-averse) son, one by my (text-ophile) daughter. Oh, and just to make it more fun, I’ve included a fourth chunk of text which represents a second excerpt by one of those three writers. The order is random.Text AIt was lunchtime, when the cook Eirik was calling me. I climbed down from my platform and went to eat. There was freshly caught fish and sour milk. After a while I went back to my platform.Suddenly, I thought I saw a ship.“I’ve seen a ship,” I shouted.Text B\"Hold the net tight,\" his dad told Leif as they rowed out. They spent a long time catching fish in the sun.At lunch time, they came back with lots of fish. Leif helped his dad put salt on some fish to keep for winter. Later, in the middle of the village, an old man got everyone to sit around the fire. He told stories about Thor\'s hammer and brave fighters who sailed to far-away places.Text CI smiled. I had no doubt our boat was queen of the seas. No one doubted it, except for Arne our old, wrinkled cook. He cooked amazingly, though sometimes pieces of hair from his long grey beard swam in the stews he concocted. His beard was so long, and he was so ancient, that people believed many generations of ravens, with feathers as black as charcoal, had roosted within its tangled mass.Text DThe new ship was getting nearer by the minute. It was here. I swung across to the other ship.I started by killing the weak and feeble, then moved on to the hulks and the better fighters. I so nearly got killed, but Halfdan saved me. Phew, that was close.Just take a moment to sort through who you think has authored what.OK.I think it’s not hard to determine that Text D is my son’s work. That just feels eleven years old, right? A boy wants a battle scene but has only the very vaguest notion of how to choreograph it, and Text D is the alarmingly hotch-potch result.Text C clearly belongs to my daughter. It’s just too bananas, too off-piste, to have been generated by a machine. That’s true of the whole raven / beard image. But it’s also true of the details – ‘pieces of hair’ rather than ‘tiny hairs’, for example.Then Text A versus Text B? Well, I’m not sure there are many tells here – except that Text A more obviously joins to Text D, so we can figure out that Text B belongs to a machine, A and D to a rather small human.And what does all this tell us?Well, I think it tells us that the current, still immature, generation of models is weirdly powerful. No news there.I also think it reminds us that AM – Artificial Morality – is not even in its infancy. It’s unborn and barely thought of. From what I understand, my son basically asked a machine to help him cheat and the machine did so without a moment’s pause. The machine did not say, as any vaguely sensible adult would have done, ‘Look, are you sure? Wouldn’t it be more helpful for your education if you actually did this work yourself? Maybe you could do it and I could nudge you when you get stuck?’AI without AM seems like a dangerous path to me. That’s also not exactly a novel observation.But I also think this whole episode tells us that, for now, what those models are good at is generating the kind of text you expect to see because it’s the kind of text you’ve seen before. Because the internet isn’t full of people like Tom writing breezily about killing the weak and the feeble before moving on to the hulks (!), the models don’t pop that kind of sentence out.When Tom is writing (Text A) in the way that he’s expected to write for this assignment, the machines (Text B) keep almost perfect pace. In fact, from a pure prose perspective, the machine is writing just that little bit better, albeit still in the range of 11-year-old vocab and sentence structure.But text C? With its generations of ravens and pieces of hair? In the end, what AI models are doing is stunning, but the heavy lifting is still, in the end, a kind of creative statistical analysis of huge volumes of text. Almost inevitably, it tends towards the median, the average – the expected.Clearly, as models get better, they’ll get more capable and the range of uses will become more expansive. Suppose, for example, you wanted to create a primer on German-English grammar along with some vocabulary lists suitable for early learners. I think you could probably create a very good first draft of that book in about a day, relying on AI to do the heavy lifting for you.That says to me that already, at the most mechanical end of the education market, AI is capable of (very largely) replacing the work now done by (underpaid) authors.But what about next year? Or in 5 years’ time?I don’t know. But:The more distinctive your voice – the further away from that median line you tread – the longer it’ll take for a machine to catch you up, and perhaps it never will.The stronger your relationship with your actual readers, the more impossible it is that any machine could ever replace you. That relationship needs to be founded on delivery of value of course (great writing), but it’s also supported by just being a nice human in regular communication – we’re talking about mailing lists, here, or at least an active Facebook page.And all that syncs with everything I say anyway. Write well. Write distinctively. Ditch generic ways of expressing yourself in favour of ways that are loaded with character and enriched by layers of subtext.Build that mailing list.Be you. Be human.***FEEDBACK FRIDAYA different sort of task for Feedback Friday this week: Take any 150-200 word scene from your book.Ask any AI chatbot to write the same scene. (Tell it who the characters are and what\'s happening, and give it the same 150-200 word limit.)Upload both scenes - and comment yourself on how hard or easy it is to distinguish between the two!Scary, but fun. I\'ll pop an AI-Fiona and a real-Fiona scene up there, too.Once you\'re ready, post yours here.That’s it from me. Crocuses are going over, daffodils are coming. Springe is icumen in. Lhude sing cuccu.Til soon,Harry.

A new air, a fresh day, the first narcissi and a sense of spring.The Write with Jericho course no longer occupies these emails – hooray – but it’s still there for Premium Members to enjoy at any time.And (’pon my word – how we do spoil those fellows) we have a whole new course for Premium Members to feast on: the Crime Writing for Beginners course.If you’re not a Premium Member, that course is available for a mere £99. But why on earth would you pay that? Become a Premium Member and you can get it for free, tra-la.But enough of Mere Commerce! The Muse summons us.Thought One: televising a novelNow, when my first Fiona novel was adapted for TV, the production company hired a fancy screenwriter to produce a script. In an early draft of that script, there was a direction which ran something like this:“Fiona remembers her harrowing years in hospital as a teenager.”To be clear, that wasn’t introducing a kind of flashback moment, where we saw images of the hospital, Fiona as teenager, things that were harrowing, etc. It was just an acting direction. Hey, Sophie Rundle, here’s what we want you to show in your face.The excellent Ms Rundle was not quite sure how to deliver that moment, and the direction was altered.Thought Two: novelising a screenplayOK. Hold that thought, and let’s turn our attention to this (lightly abbreviated) chunk from the script of Casablanca:Ilsa: But what about us?Rick: We\'ll always have Paris. We didn\'t have – we lost it until you came to Casablanca. We got it back last night.Ilsa: When I said I would never leave you.Rick: And you never will. But I\'ve got a job to do, too. Where I\'m going, you can\'t follow [...][Ilsa lowers her head and begins to cry]Rick: Now, now...[Rick gently places his hand under her chin and raises it so their eyes meet]Rick: Here\'s looking at you, kid.Now, if I’m honest, I’m never sure that Casablanca deserves its haloed status as Greatest Screenplay Ever Written. But it’s clearly a more than decent script and this is THE key moment from that script.And obviously a novel can in principle handle such moments. But not (I hope) like this:Ilsa said, ‘But what about us?’‘We\'ll always have Paris,’ he answered. ‘We didn\'t have – we lost it until you came to Casablanca. We got it back last night.’‘When I said I would never leave you.’‘And you never will. But I\'ve got a job to do, too. Where I\'m going, you can\'t follow [...]’Ilsa lowered her head and began to cry.‘Now, now,’ he said, and raised her chin with his hand until their eyes met. ‘Here\'s looking at you, kid.’That’s the exact same scene, no? Same dialogue, same actions, same content, same everything.And – the scene is terrible. It’s not moving. It feels perfunctory and limited and mechanical and pointless.OK, hold that thought too.(You now have two thoughts in hand, right? One about Sophie Rundle and a difficult-to-execute stage direction. Two about novelising Casablanca. And, OK, you want to go and check out that crime writing course, so you have three thoughts to hold onto. Plus, you’re a writer, so you quite likely also have a cup of tea. Hold steady.)Thought three: the magic of the reaction shotNow someone somewhere once said something like this:The greatest special effect in cinema is the ability to have the star’s face in close-up on a giant screen.Few of us get to hang out in real life with (say) an Ingrid Bergman at her peak of beauty and acting prowess. But even if we did, normal etiquette would mean we couldn’t just stare. And even if we did, she’d presumably be life-size, not large enough to fill the screen of whatever cinema we might happen to be in.But screenwriters do get to use Ms Bergman’s face. And that face means that the little screenplay moment works perfectly. Our poor novelist – who had no beautiful giant face to play with – wrote a drab and forgettable version of the same thing.So what to do?Well, it all lies in the reaction shot.On screen, we just need to see a charismatic face doing some Acting. “I’m not just sad, I’m noble and sad. In fact, I’m noble and sad and regretful and loving (and also beautiful and perfectly lit) and you will never forget this moment.”In the novel, we can’t do that, but we have something more powerful. The interior reaction shot. Cinema can’t handle that Sophie Rundle stage direction – not without some very clunky backstory footage. But a novelist can do so with ease. You want to convey a complex reaction to something? Convey it, buddy. Want to reflect on the past? Go right ahead. Want to tease out the difference between this kind of noble-but-sad feeling and some other sort? You tease away.And, OK, all this is a long way to say that in a lot of the work I see, writers are too busy rushing forward to deliver a proper reaction shot.But cinema doesn’t make that mistake: the whole emotional punch of cinema is delivered in two steps:Concoct a plot and characters that result in a character feeling something powerfulShow the character having that feeling – up close, on screen.Your job as a novelist is the same:Concoct a plot and characters that result in a character feeling something powerfulShow the character having that feeling – by jumping into their mind and heart and telling us what’s there.Don’t go to all the hassle of (1) without collecting the revenues that you get from (2). That’s where the gold lies.A word from our writing guruI’ll end this cinema-themed email with a quote from that fountain of wise writing advice, Clint Eastwood. He once said:My old drama coach used to say, \'Don\'t just do something, stand there.\' Gary Cooper wasn\'t afraid to do nothing.That’s my advice to you. Let your novel stand there a moment. Let your camera rest on the character. What are they thinking / feeling?Tell us and tell us properly.Only then should you move on.***FEEDBACK FRIDAYNice obvious task for Feedback Friday this week:Find a scene from your novel when you deliver a proper reaction shot. Max of 200-250 words. Include just enough that we know what your character is reacting to – then show us the character’s reaction.Once you\'re ready, post yours here.That’s it. And I bet that some of you realise you often don’t have reaction shots that last more than a sentence or so. If so, try beefing that moment up and seeing if it works better.***That’s it from me. Half-term is over: a relief.The school has given the kids a project to build a model Viking longship in 3-D. My older daughter has built a ship in papier-maché that will be a full three meters long, by the time its dragon figurehead is finished. And when I say that she has built it, I mean of course that I built it with the most minimal assistance from her.Til soon.Harry

This week is a good and beautiful week, but also a sad week; a week that enters with the last note of a bugle fading on the evening air. Why? Because it is week four of our Write with Jericho course, and therefore the final week of the course. Premium Members will be sad because WWJ is drawing to a close, but they will also be happy because there are a host of other courses they can relish - and because new courses will be popping up all through this year like mushrooms in a damp October. And yes, non-members will have an extra sadness because they\'ve missed so much excitement of late... Except that they know doing this one small thing will give them abiding and highly cost-effective joy. (Also: if you\'re a non-member and want to enjoy week one of Write With Jericho for FREE, then go on. Enjoy it. It\'s open to all.)In this week\'s final lesson, my colleague Sophie Flynn is teaching about showing & telling, which is a topic that kinda drives us mad at JW Towers, because so many people get it wrong.The rule is “show, don’t tell,” and it’s a good rule. I like it. It’s always helpful to have at the back of your mind.But it’s also a terrible rule, because it’s so often false.Sophie gives an example of this.  Telling: “It was now midday.”Showing: “The short hand was already more or less pointing at the twelve and Josie saw with panic rising in her throat that the long hand was now all but upright too.”That second version is terrible in so many ways it’s hard to count. For one thing, it’s mystifying. It’s so obvious what “it was now midday means”, whereas the second sentence needs a kind of anxious decoding… And even once decoded, it leaves the reader with a slight well, that was weird feeling. Of course, the second version is also far baggier and less efficient than the first. What\'s more, it still uses telling, because it tells the reader that poor old Josie – trapped as she is in a terrible novel – has panic rising up her throat. On a strict show-don’t-tell model, you’d have to somehow show that panic rising. How you’d go about doing that, I just don’t know.So, the Idiot Version of the rule is just plain false.         In a way, I’d prefer it if we replaced that formulation with a simple command to dramatise. Suppose Jane Austen had written the following:Telling: “Mr Darcy proposed to Elizabeth Bennet, but she refused him with some asperity.”That’s a perfectly accurate account of one of the most famous scenes in English literature – but also quite clearly a terrible replacement for the scene that Jane Austen actually wrote.Dramatic action needs to unfold in what feels like real time to the reader. Everything else can just be neatly stitched in with brief but accurate snippets of telling.I won’t talk about this more – Sophie does all that in her course video – but I’ll do again what I’ve done throughout these Write With Jericho emails and just take a look at what one of my own scenes does. I’ll use the same scene as I used last week which, if you remember, I just picked at random.So here we go again. The scene itself is in bold. My comments are in italics. Where possible, I’ve shortened the text for brevity.Dad is talking about the security issues that his clubs have faced recently. Nothing out of the ordinary. The occasional idiot with a knife. The odd binge-drinker who gets violent.This is telling: Fiona’s swift summary of something that isn’t that interesting and doesn’t need to detain the reader for long.I don’t premeditate the thought, just blurt out, ‘I know. I sometimes think I should get myself a gun. You never know what might happen.’That’s all I say. A stupid thought that wouldn’t have lasted out the minute. But Dad’s on to it straight away.‘What do you mean, love? You want to become an armed officer, is that it? Are detectives even allowed to carry guns?’This is showing – dialogue always is. Even here, though, Fiona doesn’t try to show that her statement was a a stupid thought that wouldn’t have lasted out the minute. That’s not something that can be easily shown. It’s not dramatic. So she just tells it in a perfectly straightforward manner.I backtrack straight away. No, I don’t want to join some armed response unit. No, I can’t see the South Wales force thinking that DC Griffiths would be the right person to wave the heavy weaponry. No, it’s probably a stupid idea.This is still probably showing. We’ve dropped the direct speech, but Fiona is summarising reasonably accurately what she actually said.‘You mean have a gun at home? A licensed thing? But you know, these days, you can get a shotgun or whatever for going out hunting. Air rifles, that sort of thing. But they won’t let people carry handguns. Not off a shooting range. And quite right too. The number of crazy people there are. If I could ban the whole damn lot of them, I would.’‘Yes, me too. I’m not really saying anything. Just, like you say, there are some idiots out there.’‘You worried about something, Fi girl? If you are, you need to say. Maybe the police isn’t the right job for you. I mean, don’t get me wrong, you’re fabulous. CID bloody lucky to have you, never mind what I might have said. But you mustn’t take risks you shouldn’t, you know.’Dialogue = showing. This is the dramatic heart of this (tiny) scene. But just feel how flat the scene would be without this dialogue at its heart. The heart of ANY scene should be showing, That’s where the drama is.He pauses, the shadows of our old arguments crossing our lamplit present.His suspicion of anything to do with the police. His fear. My determination to pursue the career of my choice. Two obstinate people, digging in.And to be fair to Dad – and I didn’t perhaps understand this as well as I should have done – he was worried about me too. He’s always been protective of me, doubly or trebly so during my illness and afterwards… even when my life was all put back together again, he felt that a career in the police force was absolutely the wrong one for me. Too much danger. Too much stress. Risks physical and mental…Anyway. The present pause compresses that whole debate into a few seconds of silence. It’s Dad’s way of saying that I can always quit the police, come home, take a job with him. My silence is my way of saying, ‘Thanks, Pa, but no way.’ Our argument unfolds in a few beats of nothing at all.All telling.But there’s absolutely no way to show this past history without diving into entire chapters of pointless backstory. Those chapters would have murdered any forward momentum in the plot, whereas three or four paragraphs of reflection work perfectly fine – especially because the reader will by this point be very curious about that past of Fiona’s. (They’ll still be curious, because Fiona still hasn’t talked about The Big Thing that makes her the way she is.)Then it finishes. Finishes with a truce.‘You look after yourself, love. If you need anything, you just say.’‘I will, Dad. Thanks.’Back to showing.It’s bedtime. I feel oceanically tired. Tonight, I know it already, I’m going to sleep well. I’m home.Back to telling.REFLECTIONSIn a way, there\'s not much to reflect on this week. For me, two things stand out:The movement between showing and telling is constant and seamless. A reader wouldn’t remotely notice the movement from one to the other.The dramatic heart of the scene is shown – in this case through dialogue, but you could imagine something purely physical instead, a fist-fight, for example.Really, the choice between showing and telling is a choice between Efficiency (telling) and Drama (showing.) Altering the reader to the fact that it’s midday? Probably better told. Darcy proposes to Elizabeth Bennet? I’d show that if I were you.***FEEDBACK FRIDAYOnce again, Feedback Friday comes straight from the Write With Jericho course this week. Sophie has asked you to:Rewrite a scene from your novel or non-fiction project, focusing on when to show and when to tell.Choose 250 words of this scene and share the before and after over on Townhouse. Once you\'re ready, post yours here.***That’s it from me for this week. Til soon,Harry

This week is a good and beautiful week, one of the best weeks ever.And why? Because it is Week #3 of our Write with Jericho course. (Which is free and exclusive to Premium members.)And just because we love ALL of you not just our lovely Premium Members, you can catch the replay of lesson one of the course for free. Enjoy the mighty Becca Day on adding BOOM to your scenes.This week is all about dialogue and subtext and internal reflection, which are all things that are vast fun to play with and also vastly effective on the page.Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve beaten one of my scenes to death, so no more of that. Instead, I’ve picked up another scene from the same book. As before, I’ve chosen this at random – literally just moving my cursor at random through the text until it plopped onto some meaningful dialogue.So: let’s review this little scene thinking about subtext. And internal monologue. And what the spoken words tells us about the two characters involved.The scene is set in Fiona’s father’s study-cum-lair. Her dad is a former criminal, but charismatic and warm towards his family. Fiona’s in a bad head-place. She’s just been physically assaulted in her own home and has returned to her parents’ place for a sense of security. This is now late in the evening.Bold text is from the scene. My comments in italics. I’ve shortened the text here and there, just for brevity.Dad is talking about the security issues that his clubs have faced recently. Nothing out of the ordinary. The occasional idiot with a knife. The odd binge-drinker who gets violent.That is: the scene opens neutrally. Whatever her dad is talking about has no relevance to the story.I don’t premeditate the thought, just blurt out, ‘I know. I sometimes think I should get myself a gun. You never know what might happen.’That’s all I say. A stupid thought that wouldn’t have lasted out the minute. But Dad’s on to it straight away.‘What do you mean, love? You want to become an armed officer, is that it? Are detectives even allowed to carry guns?’Now, there’s quite a lot of code going on here. The surface text is clear. Fiona says, “Should I get a gun?” Her dad takes that thought and remodels it as, “Oh, you want to become an armed officer?” (In Britain, police officers don’t routinely carry firearms.)But there’s also subtext.Fiona knows damn well that her father was (or is?) a criminal who may well have used illegal firearms in the past. So is her ‘blurted’ thought really just the expression of a woman in shock? Or is it a trial balloon sent up to see what her father might offer her?And then the dad: he’s no shrinking violet when he comes to violence, but he (deliberately?) turns aside from Fiona’s obvious meaning to explore a legal / official way in which she might get access to a weapon.I backtrack straight away. No, I don’t want to join some armed response unit. No, I can’t see the South Wales force thinking that DC Griffiths would be the right person to wave the heavy weaponry. No, it’s probably a stupid idea.Notice here that there’s some implied dialogue which is just summarised, rather than written out in full. Rotating between direct speech and indirect speech is a way to keep the rhythm of your scene nicely varied. It’s also just quicker: Fiona’s backtracking would probably have taken up more page space than this quick summary.Note that the dialogue has reversed already. First, she says, “I want a gun” and then she says, “No I don’t.” Fiona may be in shock, but she is very smart, very strategic. What is going on here?‘You mean have a gun at home? A licensed thing? But you know, these days, you can get a shotgun or whatever for going out hunting. Air rifles, that sort of thing. But they won’t let people carry handguns. Not off a shooting range. And quite right too. The number of crazy people there are. If I could ban the whole damn lot of them, I would.’But her dad isn’t dropping the idea, even though she just told him to. But he’s shifted it from, ‘Oh, you want a gun at work?’ to ‘Oh, you want one at home?’The gun idea has become a little more personal, a little less official.And this former gangster is saying he’d ban all handguns – really? Or is this cautious man, who has a police officer daughter, just playing things extremely safe in the event that someone was recording his words?‘Yes, me too. I’m not really saying anything. Just, like you say, there are some idiots out there.’Fiona is now steady with the ‘Oh, no, I don’t really want a gun’ message. But she did put the idea out there. And she did blurt the thought to perhaps the only person she knows who might be able to lay his hands on an illegal handgun. So how real is her denial?‘You worried about something, Fi girl? If you are, you need to say. Maybe the police isn’t the right job for you. I mean, don’t get me wrong, you’re fabulous. CID bloody lucky to have you, never mind what I might have said. But you mustn’t take risks you shouldn’t, you know.’Her dad has now crept from ‘armed officer’ to ‘licensed shooting range’ to ‘are you in trouble?’ He often uses a kind of burble of white noise – happy, positive chat – to disguise his strategies, and he does so here. But he’s saying: (A) don’t take risks, and (B) are you worried about something? That’s like any dad to any daughter … except that she’s a police officer and he’s a (former?) gangster.He pauses, the shadows of our old arguments crossing our lamplit present.His suspicion of anything to do with the police. His fear. My determination to pursue the career of my choice. Two obstinate people, digging in.And to be fair to Dad – and I didn’t perhaps understand this as well as I should have done – he was worried about me too. He’s always been protective of me, doubly or trebly so during my illness and afterwards.  … even when my life was all put back together again, he felt that a career in the police force was absolutely the wrong one for me. Too much danger. Too much stress. Risks physical and mental. …Anyway. The present pause compresses that whole debate into a few seconds of silence. It’s Dad’s way of saying that I can always quit the police, come home, take a job with him. My silence is my way of saying, ‘Thanks, Pa, but no way.’ Our argument unfolds in a few beats of nothing at all.This is quite a lot of internal reflection that makes sense of the current pause. And this is a lot of revelation: more information than we’ve ever had on the father / daughter relationship during her troubled teenage years. Because the reader STILL doesn’t know what Fiona’s illness is, this scrap of text will be carefully scrutinised for any clues. And it emphasises her dad’s protective nature. And she just asked and then un-asked for a gun. What does a protective and criminally inclined dad do with that request/not-a-request?Then it finishes. Finishes with a truce.‘You look after yourself, love. If you need anything, you just say.’‘I will, Dad. Thanks.’This is a bland ending. Except that the subtext is still here. After all, the gun question hasn’t really been resolved. And Fiona could have chosen to respond to the ‘Are you worried?’ question, but she didn’t. If she had said – credibly – ‘no, I’m not worried’, then maybe the whole gun question could have been genuinely laid to rest. If she had said, ‘yes, I am worried’, then it would have looked like she was asking her criminal father for the use of a weapon.But – both parties just evade the question. Lay it to rest with platitudes.It’s bedtime. I feel oceanically tired. Tonight, I know it already, I’m going to sleep well. I’m home.And – we’re done. ‘I’m going to sleep well. I’m home.’: that suggests some emotional issue has been settled … but we’ve just had a bit of dialogue that raised an issue – then denied it – then evaded it. What’s been settled?Well, at this stage, the reader doesn’t know. But before too long, Fiona’s dad sends a workman round to her house to fix some cupboards that barely needed fixing. The workman chatted as he worked. In the course of that chatter, he mentions an unlicensed shooting range and gives Fiona directions on how to find it.Fiona does indeed drive to the firing range at night and finds a gun laid out on a bale of straw. With bullets. She fires off a hundred or so rounds, trying to get the feel of the weapon. Then an unnamed man arrives, gives her some basic instruction in how to shoot. She leaves the range with the gun and ammo.And by the end of this firing range scene, we finally know how to interpret that father-daughter gun conversation.Fiona came to her gangster-dad and said ‘I want a gun.’But gangster-dad can’t say to his police-officer daughter that, sure, he can find handguns no problem, so he evades the question.Fiona, being a police officer, has to deny her own request, so she does – repeatedly.The gangster-dad tests out various neutral options, none of which get an, ‘Oh yes, that’s what I meant’ from his daughter, so he asks her if she has fears for her safety.She can’t say yes, because that would be like affirming that she wants a gun, so she evades. But she hasn’t said, ‘no, I’m not worried’, so gangster-dad comes away with three messages: (A) his daughter is afraid, (B) she wants a gun, (C) she wants an illegal, deniable weapon, because if she didn’t, they wouldn’t have had to go through that whole rigmarole.And because gangster-dad loves his daughter and is very good at what he does, before too long a handgun is put into Fiona’s possession … but via a route that can’t possibly connect back to her the man who put it there.REFLECTIONSIf you scan the italics and the bold above, you’ll see there’s way more of the former. And the beautiful lesson there is that subtext is much richer and more encoded than the text itself. To unravel the subtext, we need to spend more time and words than was present in the text itself.And how enriching this all is!A beautiful and unexpected plot strand is surfaced by this little bit of dialogue. (And of course, this illegal weapon ends up being used in the book’s climactic shootout.)And our understanding of both characters are transformed by this little scene. Not necessarily during the scene itself – but once the handgun is produced, and we reconsider the dialogue that prompted its production, we realise that both these two characters are very strategic, very risk-averse – and vastly effective. Fiona asked for a handgun and her dad supplied one. And the two of them secured this outcome without ever saying anything that the Chief Constable him- or herself could take issue with. This is the first time in the series we see quite how subtle and potent Fiona’s dad is. It’s also the first time that we see quite how risk-averse he still is, even with his criminal past (probably) behind him. The whole incident adds a darkness, intrigue and depth to both characters … still without either of them having said anything so remarkable.That’s the beauty of subtext and the beauty of dialogue. I love everything about writing, but if I could only go on a date with one aspect of it, I’d take Dialogue out to dinner, in her shimmering green gown and unreliable smile.***FEEDBACK FRIDAYOnce again, Feedback Friday comes straight from the Write With Jericho Course this week. Laura has asked you to:Share 300 words from your scene, making sure to incorporate subtext and internal dialogue. You’ll get extra points the richer and yummier your subtext is. Once you\'re ready, post yours here.***That’s it from me. I shall wear a smoking jacket in royal blue and bring with me a deck of marked cards and a two-headed coin.Til soon.Harry

This week saw the launch of Week #2 of our Write with Jericho course. (It’s free to Premium members, naturally. If you’re not a member and are curious, just take a look at what membership offers here.)This week is officially The Best Week of the Course, because it’s the one where I get to tell you about adding atmosphere to your scenes. I don’t want to go over everything I talk about in the course video, but I do want to pick out one small – but tremendously powerful – technique that you can use pretty much anywhere and for pretty much anything.The idea is to find descriptions – of people, of places, of moods, of anything – that are both literal, physical descriptions AND suggestive of something emotional or personal or even some kind of foreshadowing. Descriptions like this are acceptable to the reader because they’re just literal, right? They’re conveying useful information. But because they also smuggle a whole lot more into the scene, they enrich it vastly.Last week, I just took one of my scenes and checked it against Becca’s “a scene must develop questions” template. This week I’ll do much the same. I’ll take the exact same scene as we looked at last week and pick out any descriptive language that straddles something physical / literal, and something more suggestive too.Bold text comes from the actual scene. Italics are my comments. If you remember, the scene last week involved Fiona meeting a dodgy ex-cop, getting a key to a suspect’s home, and entering that property (illegally). Fiona finds a stack of presumably illicit cash, then gets quickly out of the house.OK. Here goes:Speed bumps in the road and cars neat in their driveways.Does this count? I think it probably does. On the one hand, this is a very literal description of a street. But also – the speed bumps are emphasising a modern safety-consciousness, and the cars stand ‘neat’ in their driveways. Both observations suggest that in this environment, people are cautious and law-abiding. They don’t drive too fast and they park their cars with a rectilinear exactness.Now that clearly doesn’t describe Fiona at all – the reader already knows her. So really, this description is, yes, picking out some simple physical details, but it’s also telling us, “Fiona does not fit here.” Again, we already know that Fiona isn’t the backing-down type, so if she enters a cautious and law-abiding environment, whatever happens next is likely to be the exact opposite.In effect that tiny bit of description is foreshadowing the darker material to come – like writing, ‘it was quiet, almost too quiet’, only not a terrible cliché.There’s an unloved dark blue Toyota Yaris parked up‘Unloved’, as applied to a car, presumably just implies rust-spots and the like. But the car’s owner – dodgy ex-cop Brian Penry – hates himself enough that he stole enough cash to get himself caught and (soon) jailed. We learn shortly that Penry even used the stolen money to buy himself a piano that he never played. So it’s not just Penry’s car that’s unloved, right? It’s him.He gets a key out of his pocket. A brass Yale key, which he holds up twinkling in the half-sunlight.Why ‘half-sunlight’? I mean, yes, that’s a description of a part-sunny, part-cloudy day. But this whole part of the scene is on the edge of something. Just as the key is in half-sunlight, so too Penry is preparing to unlock part, but not all, of what Fiona needs to know.And Fiona is only half-sunlit herself. The sunny part is that of a clever detective doing her job. The very-much-in-shadows part is that she’s about to enter a house illegally and without her boss knowing.A little later, Penry ‘half-smiles’ at Fiona, then ‘half-salutes’ her. This whole scene is teasing, not committed. The whole scene is teetering on the verge of something – until Fiona enters the house, and then the tone darkens decisively.The street is empty and silent. The sunlight occupies the empty space like an invading army.This is a bit more fanciful than anything we’ve had so far – the first time anything feels writerly in the scene. And again, it offers a description that does dual work. The sunlight fully occupies the space (so we’ve moved away from half-light to full-light. Even my pedant-brain doesn’t mind that though: light conditions can change.) In literal terms. I guess we’re being asked to imagine a scene sun-drenched and simple. But the ‘invading army’ is a totally extreme image suggesting foreboding and the threat of violence. So we have quite a peaceful scene (a neat suburban road in sunshine) and something almost recklessly violent alongside.There’s been an ‘is it or isn’t it?’ type equivocation in the scene so far, and this description merrily sits tosses fuel onto both sides of the fire. ‘Oh, yes, it’s peaceful, all right. Look at the speed bumps and the sunlight. But, yeah, this whole thing is going to blow up in a second, THERE’S AN ENTIRE ****ING ARMY RIGHT HERE.’If you said that thing directly, it would just seem nuts. But metaphors play by different rules; that’s why they’re fun.I approach the door, insert the key, turn the lock.I feel a kind of amazement when the lock turns. It’s like turning the page in a fairy story and finding that the story continues exactly as before.At one level, this is saying something simple about opening a door and feeling surprised. But – this is Fiona – the imagery sometimes goes way over the top. Why is this like a fairy story? I don’t completely know, in all honesty, but I think it’s that there’s been a sense of unreality in this scene so far. The neat suburban close should not contain darkness and terror, but there is a sense of something very dark lurking close. So there’s a contest between apparent reality and lurking (but imagined?) darkness. The fairy story image makes that explicit.In the living room, three fat black flies are buzzing against the windowpane. A dozen of their comrades lie dead beneath them.On the one hand, this is just a description of flies. On the other hand, this refers back to the invading army and the possibility of violence. Because we’re only dealing with flies, we can suggest a lot of violence without breaking the rules of the actual place we’re in.[After Fiona finds the illicit cash and exits the house] I’m sweating and cold at the same time. I try to go back to that feeling I had on the print-room stairs [when she was talking happily with her new boyfriend]. That feeling of being somewhere close to love and happiness. Living next door to the sunshine twins. I can’t find them anywhere now. When I stamp my legs, I can hardly feel my feet when they hit the floor.The sunshine twins: it was sunny in the close before Fiona entered the house, but there’s no reference to sunshine now that she’s come out. So the ‘sunshine twins’ is a reference to love and happiness – a phrase she used when we had the scene on the stairs with her boyfriend – but it’s also a reference back to how the world was before she found the dodgy cash. In effect, when Fiona says ‘I can’t find [the sunshine twins] anywhere now’, she’s saying that she can’t go back to the past boyfriend-happiness state OR the sunny street of ten minutes ago, before she had irrevocably entered a house illegally and found the cash.This passage strongly hints that the consequences of leaving that sunny state may well involve something quite dark and dangerous. And of course, the novel does start to tip into an ever darker mode from here on.REFLECTIONSLast week, I said:‘A lot of writing advice is generated because people have to generate something. They have a blogpost to write, or an email to send, or a course module to fill,But the only advice worth anything is advice that helps you solve problems in your writing. So when I read or listen to advice, I always ask: does this actually describe what I personally do when I’m writing well? Does this advice actually generate insights that will help me when I get stuck?’And honestly, I think if you took the literal-but-not-really-literal element out of my writing, you’d lose a really big chunk of what makes it worthwhile.The technique is so rewardingly simple: ‘Cars neat in their driveways’? Any idiot can come up with that, right?You just need two things to make this approach work for you.One, you need a ‘handbrake off’ approach to your writing. A willingness to put near-nonsense images into your work. (Sunlight like an invading army? That’s ridiculous. Welsh sunlight is never like that, but try it. Write it down. See if it fits.)Two, you need the judgement to figure out what works and what doesn’t. That’s a matter of gut feel rather than the kind of analysis we’ve just done here. I honestly never thought about this scene in this hyper-analytical way until just now. I did bring a kind of gut feel test to every sentence, though. That’s usually enough.***FEEDBACK FRIDAYFeedback Friday comes straight from the Write With Jericho course this week. I asked WWJ students to do this:Share 250 words from your scene. I’m looking for:Atmosphere / physical descriptionSome observation (or action) which bridges the physical & the emotionalEverything 100% consistent with the character.Because this email has been all about the middle one of those bullet points, I want you to make sure that anything you share has at least one example of that technique. If you want more background, then my course video will explain all. Once you\'re ready, post yours here.***That’s it from me. I am as hungry as a boar and as lean as a pencil. I don’t know why.Til soon.Harry

Novels are necklaces. We talk a lot about the structure of a plot, and stress about it, and we’re right to talk and stress because plot matters so intensely and is so hard to get right.But a book is just a chain of scenes, right? And yes, it’s a carefully sequenced chain, but each scene has its own story and its own structure.Write with JerichoNow, as you probably know, as part of our MAGA policy (Make Authors Great Again), we’re launching a new-and-improved version of our Write with Jericho course. Lesson One – Making Each Scene Purposeful – drops this week, led by my colleague (and psych thriller author), Becca Day. Next week, I’ll be teaching about building atmosphere in the scene. My colleagues (and authors) Sophie Flynn and Laura Starkey will also lead lessons.The course is free to all Premium Members and the above link tells you more about how to participate. It also tells you what to do if you’re not.So: take the course, listen to Becca, and think about scenes.How one scene worksNow, I’m not going to repeat all the things that Becca speaks about, but what I do want to do is to take one short scene and see what it’s doing in terms of:Opening with some questionsAnswering those questions and replacing them with othersDeepening and complicating thingsThe scene – which I’ve chosen literally at random from Talking to the Dead – is one where Fiona arrives at the home of a man called Huw Fletcher. She suspects him of real wrong-doing, but knows he’s missing. She doesn’t have a way to get into the house … but she does have a strange kind of friend/enemy relationship with a bent copper, named Brian Penry.The bold text is the scene itself. The italics are my comments. I’ve made some minor edits for the purposes of brevity.Modern brick houses, double-glazed and comfortable. Speed bumps in the road and cars neat in their driveways.The scene opens with several questions. One, what’s happened to Fletcher? Two, how does Fiona expect to get into a house when she has no means of entry and no search warrant? And three, what’s in the house?Nothing remarkable about any of it, the house or the street, except that there’s an unloved dark blue Toyota Yaris parked up in front of Fletcher’s address, window wound down, and Brian Penry’s darkly haired arm beating time to some inaudible music.I’m not surprised to see him. I don’t altogether know what the dark lines are that connect Rattigan, Fletcher and Penry – though I’ve got my ideas – but [I had ways to send signals to him and did what I could.]I wasn’t sure that any of that would bring Penry, or what I’d do if it didn’t. But I don’t have to worry about that. Here he is.Penry gets out of the Yaris and leans up against it, waiting for me.OK, so a new question now jumps out at us: what is Brian Penry’s connection with any of this? As far as the reader’s been concerned, he’s under investigation for an entirely different crime. But notice also that one of the questions we started with – how does Fiona get into this house? – already feels different with Penry’s presence here.‘Well, well, Detective Constable.’‘Good morning, Mr Penry.’‘The home of the mysterious Mr Fletcher.’‘The mysterious and missing Mr Fletcher.’Penry checks the road. No other cars. No other coppers. ‘No search warrant.’‘Correct. We’re making preliminary enquiries about a reported missing person. If you have any information that might be related to the matter, I’d ask that you disclose it in full.’This is fencing, and it feels like it. Neither party is saying what they actually think or feel. But notice that Penry is now making that question about access to the house explicit. He’s basically saying, “You can’t legally enter that house because you don’t have a search warrant.” And he’s right. That question is now centre stage.‘No. No information, Detective Constable.’ But he gets a key out of his pocket. A brass Yale key, which he holds up twinkling in the half-sunlight. ‘I want you to know that I have nothing to do with any of this. I made some money that I should not have made. I did not report some of the things that I should have reported. I fucked up. But I didn’t fuck up the way that idiot fucked up.’ He equals a jab of the index finger equals Huw Fletcher.I reach for the key.He holds it away from me, polishes it in a handkerchief to remove prints and sweat, then holds it out. I take it.Now both our starting questions get attention. Penry for the first time acknowledges that he is in some (still mysterious) way linked to Fletcher. That’s the first time two major story strands have been formally connected in the book. And the question about access – well, he has a key. Him wiping prints off the key emphasise the not-very-official nature of what’s happening.‘Time to find out what kind of idiot you aren’t,’ I say.Penry nods. I’m expecting him to move, but he doesn’t, just keeps leaning up against the Yaris and half smiling down at me.‘You’re going in there alone?’‘To begin with, yes. Since I am alone.’‘You know, when I was a young officer, a wet-behind-the-ears DC, that’s what I’d have done too.’‘Junior officers are required to use their initiative in confronting unforeseen situations,’ I agree. I don’t know why I start speaking like a textbook to Penry, of all people…The access question is solved by the key, but that question is instantly replaced by this one: are you going in there alone? That’s partly a safety question (is it safe in there?), but it’s also a legality one. Fiona doesn’t have a warrant. Does she intend to break the law?Penry says, ‘You’re like me. You know that? You’re like me and you’ll end up like me.’‘Maybe.’‘Not maybe. Definitely.’‘Can you even play the piano?’‘No. Not a single bloody note. Always thought I’d like to, but I get a brand-new piano in the house and I never touch it.’‘That is like me,’ I nod. ‘That would be just like me.’Penry is now saying, “Yes, you will go in there illegally and you’ll end up like me – a bent copper who’s about to be sent to prison.”When Penry stole money, one of the things he bought with it was an upright piano, which Fiona saw earlier at his home. The non-playing of the piano shows how pointless the thefts were. Penry destroyed himself for no gain, and is telling Fiona that she’ll do the same. It’s not quite clear if Fiona even disagrees.So now we have a new question – and one much bigger than those we started with – which is: can Fiona manage her future in a way that doesn’t destroy her? And, in fact, because we know she’s about to enter the house illegally, the question has edge. It looks like she is on the path to self-destruction.His half-smile extends into a three-quarters one, … then vanishes. He gives me a half-salute, slides back into the Yaris and drives off, slowly because of the speed bumps.So the Penry-related questions are closed off (for now). The questions about this house-entry loom large.The street is empty and silent. The sunlight occupies the empty space like an invading army. There’s just me, a house and a key. My gun is in the car, but it can stay right where it is. Whatever’s in the house isn’t about to start a fight, or at least I hope it isn’t.I approach the door, insert the key, turn the lock.I feel a kind of amazement when the lock turns. It’s like turning the page in a fairy story and finding that the story continues exactly as before. At some point, this particular tale has to come to an end.This is a pause, but it’s weaponised. The invading army, the gun, the fight – all those words add menace to this moment. In a somewhat metaphorical way, the story is telling us that things are starting to turn serious. The stakes are rising.The house is . . . just a house. There are probably twenty other houses on the same street that are exactly like it, near as dammit. No corpses. No emaciated figures of runaway shipping managers chained to radiators. No weapons. No stashes of drugs. No heroin-injecting prostitutes or little girls with only half a head.OK. So far, so nothing. But there’s no release of tension. Slightly the opposite. The reader knows that something’s about to happen – there’s been too much made of this house entry for there to be nothing inside.I tiptoe round the house, shrinking from its accumulated silence. I’ve taken my jacket off, and wrap it round my hand whenever I touch handles or shift objects.I don’t like being here. I think Brian Penry is right. I’ve got more of him in me than of, say, David Brydon [a very upright police officer, and Fiona’s first proper boyfriend]. I wish that weren’t true, but it is.Another reminder that Fiona is acting illegally, and that her future is in doubt. That question feels even sharper now. Fiona’s two possible futures are personified: the upright Mr Brydon, and the self-destructive Mr Penry.In the bedroom, there is a big double bed, neatly made with white sheets and a mauve duvet cover.In the bathroom, just one toothbrush. All the toiletries are male.In the living room, three fat black flies are buzzing against the windowpane. A dozen of their comrades lie dead beneath them.More stillness. More waiting for whatever The Thing is that’s about to show its face. But also – those dead flies. A little drip of reminder about the darkness that lies here.In the kitchen, I open cupboards and drawers, and in the place where tea towels and placemats are kept, there is also cash. Fifty-pound notes. Thick wodges of them. Held together with rubber bands. The drawer below holds bin liners and kitchen foil, and even more bundles of notes. These ones are stacked up against the back of the drawer, making multiple rows. A little paper wall of cash. With one finger, and still through my jacket, I riffle one of the bundles. Fifties all the way down.Ah! Here’s the thing. That third question – what’s in the house? – is now fully answered. But that also means it’s instantly replaced by a “and what are the consequences?” type question.I don’t like being here at all now. I don’t like being Brian Penry. I want to go back to plan A, which was to practise getting ready to be Dave Brydon’s new girlfriend. To experiment with my putative new citizenship of Planet Normal.I close the drawer and leave the house. The lock clicks shut behind me. I find an old terracotta flowerpot in the garden and stow Penry’s key underneath it.OK, so we’re done with questions about the house. The questions about Fletcher remain, but now he’s not just missing. He’s a missing person with tons of surely illicit cash in his home. But what about Fiona? She shouldn’t have gone in there. She did. She found something which her less rule-breaking colleagues surely need to know about.Back in my car, I find that I’m sweating and cold at the same time. I try to go back to that feeling I had on the print-room stairs. That feeling of being somewhere close to love and happiness. Living next door to the sunshine twins. I can’t find them anywhere now. When I stamp my legs, I can hardly feel my feet when they hit the floor.I call the Newport police station. It’s all I can do, and I feel relieved when the silence is ended.OK, the scene – which has been low-key emotionally – ends with some big emotions. Fiona is a long way now from ‘the sunshine twins’. The darkness of these crimes is enclosing her.But she does at least call her police colleagues. She’s doing something to restore legal / official order to affairs.But notice what’s happened to our opening questions. They were:What’s happened to Fletcher?How does Fiona expect to get into the house?What’s in the house?The first of those questions is still a big Don’t Know – but the question has become deeper and darker as a result of what’s just happened.Question 2 has been answered, but it’s been replaced a much bigger and more interesting one: “Will Fiona destroy herself the same way as Penry did?”Question 3 has been answered, but it’s been replaced by a “What the hell is going on with Fletcher?”And notice two more things before we finish:The Fiona / Penry relationship has just become deeper and more complicated. In this little scene, they found a kind of kinship, but based around Fiona’s capacity for self-destruction. That’s interesting – but we also want to know how that strand plays out in the future.The stakes have risen. Although this scene was very quiet, there was an invading army, twelve corpses (only flies yes, but still symbols of death), and Fiona seems close to collapse.The story after this scene ends is more complicated, darker and deeper than it was before And this was a short scene. And nothing much actually happened: a man gave a woman a key. And she found some cash in a drawer. That’s not much by way of actual action.ReflectionsA lot of writing advice is generated because people have to generate something. They have a blogpost to write, or an email to send, or a course module to fill,But the only advice worth anything is advice that helps you solve problems in your writing. So when I read or listen to advice, I always ask: does this actually describe what I personally do when I’m writing well? Does this advice actually generate insights that will help me when I get stuck?And, without talking about everything that Becca discusses, I have to say that, yes, her insights described exactly what was happening in this scene. Not just that, but it was surprising to me to see how mobile the scene-questions were. How they changed, not even from page to page, but every few paragraphs. That’s presumably why good writing feels alive, mobile and unpredictable, and bad writing feels stagey, dull and dead.Anyhow: I hope you enjoy the Write with Jericho course. More info below if you need it.***FEEDBACK FRIDAYNo feedback from me this week. Becca takes over. Her Lesson One video (available to Premium Members only) contains an assignment to do and upload to Townhouse. In addition to feedback from your peers, there might even be a chance of getting feedback from Becca. If you aren\'t a Premium Member, then you can sign up, and join the course, immediately and for free.***That’s it from me.Til soon.Harry

Last week’s email was all about staying close to character and I ended, in a way I seldom do, by being a bit mean about another author’s work. Specifically, I wasn’t keen on the amount of clenching, contorting and panicking that went on. We wanted to rustle up other ways to convey inner state. I gave some examples in that email, but today I want to give a more comprehensive, more fully ordered list of options. Honestly, I doubt if many of you will want to pin those options to the wall and pick from them, menu-style, as you write. But having these things in your awareness is at least likely to loosen your attachment to the clench-n-quake school of writing. So. Let’s say that we have our character – Talia, 33, single. She’s the keeper of Egyptian antiquities at a major London museum, and the antiquities keep going missing. She’s also rather fond of Daniel, 35, a shaggy-haired archaeologist. Our scene? Hmm. Talia and a colleague (Asha, 44) are working late. They hear strange noises from the vault. They go to investigate and find some recent finds, Egyptian statuary, have been unaccountably moved. In the course of the scene, Asha tells Talia that she fancies Daniel … and thinks he fancies her back. In the course of the scene, Talia feels curious about the noises in the vault, feels surprise and fear when she finds the statues have been moved. And feels jealousy and uncertainty when Asha speaks of her feelings for Daniel. We need to find ways to express Talia’s feelings in the story. Here’s one way: Direct statements of emotion Talia felt a surge of jealousy, that almost amounted to anger. Bingo. Why not? That’s what she feels, so why not say it? No reason at all. Some writers will panic that they’re telling not showing, and they’ve read somewhere that they shouldn’t do that (at all, ever), so they’ll avoid these direct statements. But why? They work. They’re useful. They help the reader. More complicated but still direct statements Somewhere, she felt a shadow-self detach from her real one, a shadow self that wanted to claw Asha’s face, pull her hair, draw blood, cause pain. That’s still saying “Talia felt X”, we’ve just inserted a more complicated statement into the hole marked X, but it still works. And that dab of exotic imagery gives the whole thing a novelly feel, so we’re good, right? Even though technically, we’re still telling not showing. Physical statements: inner report Talia felt her belly drop away, the seaside roller-coaster experience, except that here she was no child. There was no sand, no squinting sunshine, no erupting laughter. Now as you know, I don’t love text that overuses physical statements as a way to describe emotion, but that’s because overuse of anything is bad, and because the statements tend to be very thin (mouth contorting, chest shuddering, etc). If you don’t overuse the statements and enrich the ones you do make, there’s not an issue. Notice that here, we have Talia noticing something about her physical state – it’s not an external observation. But both things are fine.Physical statements: external observation Colour rushed into Talia’s face. She turned her head abruptly to prevent the other woman seeing but Asha was, in any case, more interested in the case of funerary amulets. Here, we’re only talking about physical changes that are apparent on the outside, and that snippet is fine too. It doesn’t go very deep and, for my money, it feels like a snippet that would best go after a more direct statement. “Talia felt a surge of jealousy, anger almost. Colour rushed into her face, and she turned her head …” Dialogue “Daniel?” said Talia. “But he’s so much younger. I really doubt that he’d …” Dialogue conveys emotion. It can also provide text and subtext in one. So here, the overt meaning is Talia’s doubt that a mid-thirties Daniel could fancy a mid-forties Asha… but the clear sub-text is a catty jealousy on Talia’s part. And readers love decoding those subtexts, so the more you offer them, the better. Direct statement of inner thought “Daniel?” said Talia. “But he’s so much younger. I really doubt that he’d …” Doubt what? That he’d fancy the glamorous, shaggy-haired Asha, with her white shirts and big breasts and pealing laughter? The second bit here is a direct statement of Talia’s actual thought. We could also have written: Doubt what, she wondered. That he’d fancy … That inserts a “she wondered” into things, but as you see, we can have a direct statement of her thoughts with or without that “she wondered”. Either way, it works. Memory Talia remembered seeing the two of them, at conference in Egypt. Holding little white coffee cups on a sunny balcony and bawling with laughter at something, she didn’t know what. Asha’s unfettered, unapologetic booming laughter and all the sunlit roofs of Cairo. That doesn’t quite go directly to emotions, but it half-does and we could take it nearer with a little nudging. And, for sure, if you want a rounded set of tools to build out your emotional language, then memory will play a part. Action When Asha spoke, Talia had been holding a small pot in elaborately worked clay. It would once have held a sacred oil with which to anoint a new bride. Talia felt Asha looking sharply at her, at her hands, and when she looked, she saw the pot was split in two, that she’d broken it, now, after two thousand three hundred years. OK, is that a bit on the nose? Breaking a marriage pot. Well, maybe, but it’s better than quaking, clenching and contorting all the time. Use of the setting They were in the vault now, marital relics stored in the shelves behind them, funerary relics and coinage on the shelves in front. Leaking through the walls from the offices next door, there was the wail of Sawhali music, the mourning of a simsimiyya. At one level, that snippet is only talking about hard physical facts: what’s stored on the shelves, what music they can hear. But look at the language: we have marital and funerary in the same sentence. The next sentence brings us wail and mourning. This is a pretty clear way of saying that Talia’s not exactly joyful about things. Every reader will certainly interpret it that way. And there are probably more alternatives too, and certainly you can smush these ones up together and get a thousand interesting hybrids as a result. I said you probably won’t want to pin this list up on a wall anywhere, but honestly? If you do read back a clench-quake-contort passage in your own fiction, then you might want to (A) delete nearly all of that that clenching and quaking, then (B) check back here for alternative approaches. Your writing will get better, instantly, if you do that. And – you’ll have more fun. *** FEEDBACK FRIDAY Take any passage in which you’ve got excessive dependence on physical statements about your character and rework it, using any mixture of the tools here. You’re welcome to keep some physical statements in your scene, but make sure you keep a nice balance overall. We want to get a rich and rounded sense of the character’s emotion – written in a way that doesn’t make me want to scream. What I need: 250 words from your scene 2-3 lines of introduction as needed I’ll give feedback to a good handful of you. All are welcome to participate, but I’ll only offer feedback to Premium Members. When you\'re ready, upload your material here. If you’re not yet a Premium Member but would like to be, then you can join us here.*** That’s it from me. We have a new puppy in our lives. He’s called Dibble, and he’s a black-and-white poodle / papillon cross. He has four white socks, a white bib, a touch of white on his nose, and the end of his tail looks like it’s been dipped in white paint. The little lad is an absolute darling. My girls are smitten, but I’m not exactly unsmitten. Til soon. Harry 

One of the bits of feedback I give most – and really, I’d want to give it almost all the time, on auto-repeat – is: stay close to character.Sometimes that means simply reporting what a character thinks of something.The coffee shop was white, vaguely seaside-y in its timber and flaking paint, over-priced and, Niamh thought, pretentious. That ‘Niamh thought’ simply plops the character’s view right into the description without feeling a tad out of place.But character can and should sneak in anywhere.The bickering couple moved away from their seat in the window, and the rain had left, and there was sunlight on the wet street, shining off car windscreens and fallen magnolia petals.And, yes, in a way that’s just description: a matter of stating simple facts. Except why is Niamh observing these facts? There are other observations she could have made. In the same place at the same time, she might have chosen to observe:The door to the toilets wasn’t properly closed and the sound and smells of plumbing eased through. Coffee here was four pounds a cup, and the most prominent aroma was pine-scented disinfectant.One of these snippets suggests one mood. The second delivers quite another. And we all know that if we’re depressed, we see the world differently from if we’re not. Our views of people and situations are coloured by our own mental state.It’s the same in books. If I’m describing sunlight on a wet street, I’m offering you something (however hard to put into words) about the character’s mental state. If I’m passing on facts about the price of coffee and toilet smells, then I’m suggesting something quite different.But character can invade even more directly than this. Take this:The coffee arrived. Each cup came on its own copper-trimmed wooden tray, with a small glass bottle of milk and an oat-biscuit about the size of a large button. The waitress, inevitably, paused to tell them about the Colombian estate from which the coffee had come.That whole chunk is factual narrative, but always filtered through the observation of a particular character. The ‘size of a large button’, for example, tells us about the character’s range of reference. ‘Button’ is quite homely, quite domestic in nature. A ‘good-sized poker chip’ would tell us something different. A ‘heavy-duty washer, the sort you’d use in roofing’ would give us something else.But look a little deeper. The little snippets I’ve created for this email are all voiced in the third person. We have an unnamed, impersonal narrator whose job is mostly just to describe facts: what happened, what Niamh said and did, what she thought and felt, and so on. The narrator knows as much as we choose for them to know. For all I know, in the next chapter, the narrator will be talking, not about Niamh, but a burly Polish roofer called Lech. But no matter who the narrator is talking about, he or she is basically impersonal. A being of no interest.Look back at that oat-biscuit snippet. It says, “The waitress, inevitably, paused…” That word, ‘’inevitably’, belongs to Niamh, not the narrator. It’s her sarcastic comment about the café’s pretentiousness: the narrator doesn’t really have a view.In effect, you can write third person, but your character should still infuse the entire text, with every observation, with every choice of word.Now all that sounds as wholesome and good as an artisanal oat-biscuit. So why make a big deal of it?Well, the reason is that plenty of text just feels like … words.Here for example:Before Sarah has time to find an excuse, they\'re standing inside the dark entrance hall. She shudders. It\'s as cold as the grave.The man [an estate agent] fumbles on the wall beside the door and clicks the light on. A single bulb spreads a sickly glow around the room. Sarah takes in the parquet floor and wooden panelling and the smell: mould and cat pee. She can see the man properly now. Close up, he looks older than she\'d first thought. Fine lines score his face and she wonders if his luxuriant dark hair is quite natural.\'Do you have a place to sell yourself?\' he asks, his voice casual. ‘I take it you\'re on the move?\'She focuses on his face, concentrating on keeping her eyes steady and her mouth from contorting. She tells herself she must try to appear normal, even if she feels far from it.\'Yes, probably, quite soon,\' she says, her voice unnaturally bright.He smiles, a professional smile, still probing. \'Is it in the area?\' He shakes his umbrella and slips it into an oak stand beside the door.Her fists clench involuntarily. She\'s not going to tell this man that her life has imploded. That only a few hours ago she walked out on her husband with just three suitcases and a couple of tea chests to show for fifteen years of marriage. How can she talk about it to this stranger before Alex himself knows - even though she owes him nothing? Panic washes over her …Now, look, that chunk is lifted from a book called The Orphan House by Ann Bennett, and it’s got lots of lovely reader reviews, and I haven’t read it, so maybe the book has depths that I can’t assess from this passage. Sorry, Ms Bennett.But:I do not love this writing. I do not love prose that works like this.In this short passage, Sarah shudders. She concentrates on keeping her eyes steady and has to work to prevent her mouth from contorting. Her voice is unnaturally bright. Her fists clench, though she doesn’t ask them to. Panic washes over her. That’s a truly vast amount of shuddering, panicking and clenching, while at the same time keeping the voice bright and the eyes steady. It’s such a barrage of information, it’s not quite clear we can meaningfully assemble it, except in a very basic “oh, she’s feeling emotional and upset” way. I don’t even think the author has any more precise conception of her own. If she had, she’d have given it to us.The factual observations give us nothing either.The house is as cold as the grave, which might mean that the character has her mind filled with death and the end of everything … but is much more likely to reflect the unconsidered use of a tired old cliché.An old, unheated house smells of mould (normal) and cat pee (not so much, unless the place is so derelict that there are ways for cats to enter the property.)The light is sickly. But what does that mean? Normally, that would suggest a greenish light, but why would a house have bulbs any different from anyone else’s bulbs? The observation isn’t followed by anything, which makes me think that the word ‘sickly’ is used simply in order to convey a very general “this property doesn’t look all that great” message.In short, we have a passage that is NOT invaded by character. The author doesn’t use the tools she has to deliver character via back-door routes, and she compensates with a whole barrage of shuddering and panicking.The result feels both flat (because of the deadness in the observation) and over-coloured (because of the babbling, quaking character on the page.) That’s a bad combination.My advice? Don’t write like that.My further advice: Stay close to character. Always and everywhere.You’ll like it if you do.***FEEDBACK FRIDAYWell, it’s clear what we need this week: 250 words from your text that is infused by character. We’re going to be looking especially for factual observation that conveys something about the character present. Extra bonuses if there are places where the character sneaks control from the narrator.If you’re writing first person, then all of this is easier and more natural, but that also means the demands rise. Every word of your passage needs to belong to your character. We need to be smelling him or her in every line.Please also give us the title of your book, and a line or two of introduction, so we can make sense of the scene.When you\'re ready, post your work here.***That’s it from me. I am going to clench, shudder and panic my way over to a coffee pot and see if caffeine will help. It surely will.Til soon.Harry

Most nights, I watch a bit of TV with the missus before bed. She does not get ready as fast as I do, so I usually have 15 or 20 minutes watching something on my own before we settle on something that works for the two of us.And, out of curiosity really, I just started watching (in 15 or 20 minute chunks) David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia. I’m not sure how widely known that name is outside of Britain – but the guy was an Oxford scholar of the Middle East who ended up uniting the – normally squalling – Arab tribes in a revolt against their Ottoman overlords. This happened as part of World War I, and since the Turks were allied with the Germans, them bashing the Turks in the Levant was (a bit) helpful to the overall cause.OK, that’s the historical background. The film history is that David Lean – already a well-known filmmaker – brought the film out in 1962 and was nominated for 10 Oscars in the 1963 awards, winning 7 of them.The film runs for 3½ hours. It’s perfectly willing to have long, long takes that show little more than figures (and camels) moving through a landscape.It involves a sexually ambiguous hero, who is (it is implied) raped mid-film.The story doesn’t have a happy ending, as Lawrence’s dreams of Arab independence collapse as a result of individual greeds and colonial realities.Could the film be made today? I doubt it. A niche historical drama of that length? With no superhero character, no bestselling source material, and not even a well-known lead, I think the film would stand no chance of securing the necessary funds.Is it a masterpiece? Well, don’t ask me; ask the American Film Institute, who have the film ranked #7 in their list of the 100 best ever movies.A masterpiece, that no one would make.And don’t lay the blame on the passage of time. 1962 is not so long ago. We’re not dealing with the cultural distance of Shakespeare. We’re talking about the cultural distance of Bob Dylan and the Beatles.And books?The same, the same, the same, the same.There are any number of great and successful books from the past which wouldn’t be bought today.Sometimes, it’s just that something has been done to death. (Imagine trying to sell Twilight now. Publishers would groan at something so stuffed with genre cliché, and with so few twists on a theme.)Other times, politics would come into play. Part of the problem with making Lawrence of Arabia today would be having a white man in a rescuer role. Publishers have become nervous and – some would say – oversensitive in their approach to navigating similar issues in the twenty-first century.Then, perhaps, there’s just a sense that something has dated. So, for example, I don’t think my Fiona Griffiths books will date quickly – they’re not especially wedded to their period. But my first book, The Money Makers, felt dated within years of arrival, because of its setting in the 1999/2000 financial industry.But looking at all the great books that could not be published today misses the point.The publishing industry is not in some sort of collapsed state. Old tropes die and new ones are born. If Shakespeare had been reborn in Victorian times, he wouldn’t have written the works of Shakespeare – he’d have been a Dickens. If Dickens were writing his first book now, it wouldn’t be Bleak House or Oliver Twist. It would be – well, we don’t know, because the man was a genius and geniuses aren’t predictable.And you?What about you? Because this email isn’t about Dickens, or Shakespeare or David Lean. It’s about you.And you, my friend, are going to use this glorious great stretch of 2025 – a whole big, loping, empty year – to write something wonderful. Or to complete the wonderful thing you’ve already started.And you’re not going to complain about the broken state of publishing because (A) it isn’t broken and (B) there are more ways to find readers than there ever used to be. But also, and mostly, because (C) you are writing your book in the glorious year of 2025, and every sentence you write is embedded in the culture of today – with all your knowledge of what people are writing about, responding to, watching, getting annoyed by and so on.Believe in that culture. Be part of it. And, for sure, you can yelp about the stuff that annoys you, or subvert current tropes for something you think is better. Take yesterday’s idea and twist it in a way that makes it shipshape for tomorrow.But whatever you do, apply your bum to that seat.And write.***FEEDBACK FRIDAYFirst up – apologies. At the end of last year, I asked you for your agent questions and then got too overwhelmed by the onset of Christmas to answer properly. I’ve remedied that now. If you had a question about agents and all that, then check out the forum again, and you’ll find an answer there from me.As for this week, it’s a New Year, so let’s make that the theme. Please give me:The opening page (max 300 words) from your current project. As always, give us enough background that we know what kind of book we’re dealing with.If you’ve submitted an opening page recently, then just give us something new – a chapter beginning, for example. Again, just give enough of an intro, that we know what we’re dealing with.When you\'re ready, post your work here.Do please be as generous as always with your comments for others. Don’t forget to give useful, specific feedback as well as positivity and encouragement. The latter is nice; the former improves books.Til soon,Harry.

My last email was grumpy. Bah humbug. A silver cane waved menacingly at orphans.This email is festive. A Merry Christmas to us all! A shower of sweets for street-children, a fat goose for chilly clerks.Just two things to say:One, aren’t we lucky? Aren’t we as writers lucky, to have this thing we love doing? Laying down sentences on an empty sheet. It’s free. It’s creative. It’s reliably joyful.And yes: this whole game has its arduous aspects, of course. All good things do. Getting an agent? Hard. Getting sales? Hard. Writing well enough to deserve either of those things in the first place? Yes, also hard.But that’s not the core of what we do or why we do it. It’s writing things like this:I’m Homer, the blind brother. I didn’t lose my sight all at once, it was like the movies, a slow fade-out. When I was told what was happening I was interested to measure it, I was in my late teens then, keen on everything.Or this:When I think of my wife, I always think of her head. The shape of it, to begin with. The very first time I saw her, it was the back of her head I saw, and there was something lovely about it, the angles of it. Like a shiny, hard corn kernel or a riverbed fossil. She had what the Victorians would call a finely shaped head. You could imagine the skull quite easily.I didn’t write either of those paragraphs. (EL Doctorow did in Langley and Homer, and Gillian Flynn did in Gone Girl.) But imagine the joy of writing those things. Not all at once, of course, but getting there slowly, chipping away at a paragraph – chip, chip, chip – until the exact right pattern of words made itself felt.We get that pleasure, you and I, and all we need is a laptop. Lucky us.That was number one. My number two thing to say is, are you a member of our Townhouse community? If not, you ought to be. It’s free and it gives joy and companionship… and, as it happens, it’ll give you useful feedback, support and encouragement too.Just go to the Join Us page on our website and select the FREE option.If you aren’t yet a member of Townhouse, you are genuinely missing out. You have friends there; you just haven’t met them yet. Make that a little free gift to yourself this Christmas.That’s all from me.***FEEDBACK FRIDAY:Your Feedback Friday exercise this week is simple: eat so much Christmas pudding that your EYES BULGE. In my view, it is perfectly acceptable if you get the same effect from eating mince pies. My wife likes Christmas pudding so much, she buys 12 of them at a time. They line a whole shelf and wink at me each time I open the cupboard, whispering softly of puddingy secrets.When it snows, at any time of year, we get a pudding from that cupboard, walk up into a snowy field and eat it there, with squirty cream from a can.And so, as Tiny Tim said: \"A Merry Christmas to us all; God bless us, everyone!\"Til next year.Harry

Friday email – Friday 13 December Subject: It’s not them. It’s you.   Hmm. We’re getting close to Christmas and this email has a bit of a bah, humbug tone – but I’m also writing on Friday the 13th, so I think I can get away with a little cheer-spoiling, so long as I don’t err again soon. And –  I saw a blog post recently, from a guy in the fitness niche. He’d been asked about why someone wasn’t losing weight, even though they were controlling their diet and exercising properly and doing everything right. And he just said, BS. It’s not possible that you’re doing everything right – over a period of weeks and months – and not achieving the desired outcome. Like: you’d actually have to break laws of physics if you eat (say) 1800 calories a day and spend (say) 2200 calories a day, and then not (over time) notice weight loss. That’s not the way our blogosphere normally goes. On the whole, telling customers or readers or users that they’re completely wrong isn’t a brilliant way to attract customers / readers / users. But, OK, sometimes people are wrong and it helps to say so. In our niche, the myth I most often hear is some variant of: “I know my book is fine [because of Made-up Reason X], but agents don’t want it because they only give book deals to friends / they can’t handle conservative viewpoints / they only want books by pretty blonde thirty-somethings / they only want books with violence / or whatever else.” All assertions of that kind are basically false. Agents want books they can sell. They want books that they can plausibly sell to Big 5 publishers, or to the kind of independents that can compete financially with those guys. It IS true that agents will be dubious about taking on niche literary fiction. There are excellent, tiny imprints that do a great job with more demanding, niche, or experimental novels. But “great job” in this context does not mean “generating huge amounts of moolah”, and agents working with this kind of fiction are essentially doing it pro bono. It’s also true that agents may well be dubious about working with digital-first publishers. Those guys can create huge sales, but they don’t always, and advances are small. If an agent thinks that a digital-first imprint is your most likely destination, they may say yes anyway, but they will be thoughtful. And there are niches – certain sorts of fantasy or science fiction, for example – where self-pub is so dominant that Big 5 publishers don’t really compete. So yes, there are examples of good, saleable books being rejected by agents. But that doesn’t mean there’s a conspiracy. It just means you’re knocking on the wrong door: you’re a fisherman trying to sell your catch to a cheesemonger. If you want an agent, you have to make sure that agents basically want your type of thing in the first place. But that’s not mostly what I hear. Mostly, I hear authors who have written, let’s say, a standard issue crime novel complaining about being rejected by agents. And if you’ve written a crime novel, and you can’t place it with agents, then EITHER: You haven’t yet tried enough literary agents (10-15, let’s say) OR Your book isn’t good enough. Assuming an even basic level of professionalism in your approach to agents, then one of those two answers WILL apply to you. And the commonest, commonest, commonest reason for being rejected by agents? Your book isn’t good enough. It’s not them, it’s you. We’re not really supposed to say that in the blogosphere. It’s not the most supportive, friendly thing to say. But it’s true. And, actually, it IS the most supportive thing – because it’s the only message that will really alleviate your issue. At Jericho Writers, we do of course have a ton of services aimed at helping you make your book better. (The gold-standard service? It’s manuscript assessment, of course – or the Ultimate Novel Writing Course if your book is still a work-in-progress. Call or email us if you want honest advice, tailored to you and your exact needs.) However, the paid-for service part of things comes second. The first part lies with you. You need to recognise that your book may not yet be strong enough to sell, and that fixing this issue lies in your hands. Honestly? If I could choose between working with a gifted but feedback-resistant writer and a less gifted, but feedback-responsive one, I’d choose the latter every time. Write a book. Write it better. Edit it harder. Market it professionally. And don’t complain about agents! Good luck, and I promise I’ll be less mood-spoily next week. ***  FEEDBACK FRIDAY:   Let’s use FF this week to just consider all any questions you have about literary agents. If you have experience of submitting, then share it, even if you don’t especially have questions arising from that. Let’s just share experience, unearth your questions, and see if we can help each other. Log in to Townhouse, then post your thoughts here whenever you’re ready. *** The missus is reading the kids a (somewhat edited) version of The Sons of Adam, my third novel from way back. It’s a historical romp, set mostly in the oil industry of the 1920s and 30s, but flanked by world wars at either end of the book. The kids are loving it, especially the war stuff. Tucking the kids in one night, I literally couldn’t find two of them, and was blundering around in the dark trying to find them. Then two blond heads poked up from a little crawl space in between the end of one bed and the wall. ‘We’ve built a dug-out, and we’re going to sleep here.’ Honestly, the kids are small but the space they’d made for themselves was tiny. They spent the whole night there and refortified their den in the morning. But – the power of fiction, eh? The loveliness of imaginative play. I was thrilled. Til soon Harry PS: If you’d like 1-2-1 feedback from a literary agent on your submission package, we can help with that, too! We’ve just released a batch of sessions spanning January to April 2025. Find out more about what’s on offer and how to book here. PPS: On a similar note – if the word of traditional publishing bewitches but also baffles you, why not consider our Path To Publication course? In eight weeks, our expert tutor Kate Harrison will teach you everything you need to know about the inner workings of the publishing industry 

Lots of things in writing are hard. One thing in particular is very, very easy… but it’s astonishingly neglected by a lot of writers.Here’s an example of getting something wrong, using an extract I’ve invented for the purpose. In my mind, this extract might stand at the start of a novel, but it could be anywhere really. So:Dawn woke her – dawn, and the rattle of trade that started to swell with it. Barrels being rolled over cobbles, a cart arriving from the victuallers’ yard, men starting to bray.It had been a cold night and promised to be a cold morning, too. Her feet found the rag mat next to the bed. She washed hands and face briefly, and without emotion, then lifted her nightgown and began to bind her breasts, with the white winding strip she always used. Round and round, flattening her form.She continued to get dressed. Blue slops. Bell-bottomed trousers, a shirt, a waistcoat, a blue jacket, loose enough for her shoulders to work. Just for a moment, she looked at her hands. They’d been soft once, and were coarse now, hardened off by the scrambles up rigging, the hard toil on ropes.Caroline – Charles as she was known to her fellow ratings – had been forced to take work as a man when her father died two years ago, right at the start of this new war against Napoleon. She had tried taking work as a seamstress, but the pay had been poor, and she had a younger sister always sickly to look after. In the end, she had found herself forced to dress as a man and work as a man, here at the great bustling port of Portsmouth…I hope you can see that this passage is kinda fine… and kinda fine… and then disastrous.The first paragraph here is fine: it starts to establish the scene.The second paragraph is intriguing: why the flipping heck is this woman (clearly not a modern one) so keen to flatten her chest?The third paragraph inks in a bit more of the mystery: OK, so this woman works on ships of some sort in the eighteenth or nineteenth century. So why is she disguising herself as a man?And then –The disaster –The writer makes the horrendous mistake of answering that question. The story was just beginning to make fine headway. We wanted to grip our reader and thrust them forwards into the story. Our first three paragraphs set up a fine story motor, which was already starting to chug away. Then by completely solving the mystery, we destroyed almost every shred of momentum we had.By the end of that extract, we still have an interest in seeing what happens to this woman, but we don’t yet know her very well as a character. We can’t at this stage care very much about her. But we did care about that mystery. And the author just ruined it.The lesson here – and the easiest technique in fiction is – take it slow. If the reader wants to know X, then don’t tell them X.That’s it! That’s the whole technique.A much better approach here would have been to simply follow Caroline/Charles’s morning. I’d probably have given her some kind of problem to solve. Perhaps, she owes an innkeeper money that she doesn’t have and needs to slip away unseen. Or she has to collect some belongings from one part of town but has to get back to her ship in order not to miss the tide.That way, one part of the reader is asking, Will she get back to her ship in time? But that’s just a top layer to the more interesting underlying question of Why is she disguised as a man?Indeed, we’ll study the whole rushing-about-town episode with extra interest, because while we’re not that fussed about whether she misses the tide or not, we are interested in that second question – and we read about these ordinary story incidents as a way to uncover clues about the bigger issue.The key fact here is that readers love solving mysteries. They like reading a text to find clues and hints and suggestions that lead them to an answer. I think for most readers that process has an extra impetus if the mystery is embedded in something very personal to a key character.So the technique you need to adopt is:Create a mystery. Then,Don\'t solve it. Whenever you find chunks of text – perhaps only a paragraph, perhaps only a line or two – that delivers mystery-busting information, ask yourself if you can withhold it. Does the information need to delivered now, or can this safely be left until later?In my Fiona Griffiths books, I took the biggest mystery about her (Why is she so weird?) and didn’t answer it until the very end of book #1. I have some minor mysteries (What colour are her eyes?) that I’ve never answered.In Caroline’s case, I don’t think you could plausibly avoid telling the reader about the need for male disguise for as long as that, but a good strategy would be:Get readers intrigued by her need for disguiseGet readers involved in the other details of her life (which they\'ll love because of item 1)As we start to involve readers in those other details, you can slowly reveal the money problems, the sickly sister and the restBy this point, readers are now engaged in worrying about the money and the sister, and so you have another functioning story motorThat means you can slowly give up your first one and it\'s safe to start revealing the reasons for the male disguise. That’s one way to look at it – and a good one. But you should also ask: what does my character reflect on or think about right now?In our sample chunk, Caroline did think about flattening her chest, because she was in the actual act of doing that. She had just washed her hands, which made her think about her hands. But she had no reason to start thinking about the whole reason she’d taken on male disguise. On the contrary: she was up at dawn, she had lots to do, she had problems to solve – those are the things that would have dominated her mental landscape.So another way to put things is simply this: narrate what matters to your character in the moment that it matters.Gosh, how easy that is.And honestly, if you go to your manuscript with these thoughts, I’ll bet that 90% of you will find places where you give away information too early, or in a way that clashes with your character’s own focus of interest.Create a mystery. Then don’t solve it. The easiest technique in fiction.*FEEDBACK FRIDAY: Creating (but not solving!) a mysteryToday\'s challenge neatly follows on from what you\'ve just read.Find a passage - 250 words or so - in which you create but do not solve a mystery. Post yours here when it\'s ready. Give whatever context we need to make sense of that passage. And please also tell us how many words / pages / chapters it will be until the mystery is solved.(By the way, I\'m approaching a million words on Fiona and haven\'t yet given away her eye colour, so beat that. I\'ll send you a plateful of cherries if you do.) The challenge is open to anyone who wants to do it, but my feedback will be reserved for Premium Members. If you want to become one, I have good news! We\'ve extended our 30% off November promotion into one last weekend, so now is the perfect time to join us. *** My Year 5/6 children performed in their school play this week - a version of Dickens\' A Christmas Carol. And golly gosh, what an old pro Dickens was. It\'s not just his literary gifts I admire, though I do. It\'s his joyously unembarrassed commercial instinct. \"I want your florin, and by God I intend to get it.\" He\'ll use every tool he has to secure your attention. The idea that literary fiction has to be boring to be acceptable? Bah, humbug.Till soon,Harry

A short one today. And a little bonus.The bonus is that I’m doing a FREE webinar today at 12.00. The theme is elevator pitches and specifically how to:Build a pitch that fully expresses the DNA of your novel;Use that insight to help your novel fully express the delicious idea at its heart;Use that work when it comes to selling your bookI’ll give you a clue right now: Part C is the easy one.If you\'re a Premium Member, you may already have done our Take Your Novel From Good to Great course. If so, you can ignore this offer as the content of the webinar is very similar to module one of that course. If you aren\'t a Premium Member and haven’t done that first lesson, then this is a good opportunity to scope it out! As I say, it’s completely free - just sign up here to register.Now then...Last week, I ended a long series of emails on selling with a question to you all, via Feedback Friday. Or four questions in fact:What matters to do you in writing?What do you want to get out of this?What do you think the biggest obstacles are?What would help?It’s really worth taking a look at how people answered.On the first two questions – what matters – people mostly agreed. “Just seeing my books out there in some form or other would be cool.” Entertaining readers was a near-universal goal. People often wanted to be able to sustain themselves by writing, but no one had dreams of vast wealth from it.Other comments that spoke to me:A lot of people spoke about “the pure joy writing inspires, the fun we have putting pen to paper.” That’s true for me too. It has remained the one absolute constant through my career.“Recognition. The biggest buzz of all is when readers tell me they laughed or cried, or felt that constricted feeling in their throat — the feeling of something that *really* matters.” And yes, same here.“I want to be traditionally published and have a readership that likes my stories.” A lot of you were in that rough area, although I noted an increasing awareness of the various upsides of digital-first and sel-publishing options.“I’m already getting what I want out of this. It may sound crass, but all I ever wanted was to get my stuff out there. I’m achieving this now [via self-pub].”And a special mention for this comment, which we can all relate to:\"What matters to me in writing? I love it. Even when I hate it, I love it.\"On obstaclesComments that struck a chord were:“It is my first time writing, and turning a passion and an interest into something commercially marketable with no prior knowledge of the industry, standards, expectations, process, etc. – it’s terrifying.”“Second guessing every decision is really slowing things down and stopping me writing fresh stuff.”“Time. There is never enough time to write, to research the market, do the marketing, without all the things that Life throws at me.”“The system. Agents are the gatekeepers and agents are human. They pass certain things I would throw out. The publishers publish certain books I would never buy, but they regard as commercial. Thank goodness there are Indie Press and self-publishing routes.”On what would helpSome really good feedback here:“A little marketing genie would be good.”“Time. Money … But also actionable advice, feedback, safe spaces to ask questions. Knowing I’m not alone … Community has been more of a help than I realistically ever thought it would be.”“Help would help. Much like people who climb Everest, I would really appreciate the help of a Sherpa. Someone who’s seen and done it all. Someone who knows the secrets and can guide my feet over the dangerous terrain. I’m happy to do the hard yards. I want to get to the peak and plant my flag. But I can’t do it alone.”“A guide on what makes a good story and how to slice and dice away nonsense.”“Blue skies and sunshine …Someone to do all the advertising. Marketing, promotional stuff.”“What do I think would help? A kick up the arse. I’ve had some wonderful feedback on my work from some lovely people here. I’m deeply grateful for their kind words. They inspire me enormously.”“Access to professionals at a reasonable cost to those of us who are struggling to find the spare cash. I think JW already do this with their [premium membership service].”And look, we know where you\'re coming from.We\'ll use your insights to shape Jericho Writers Premium Membership for the coming year. We have a strong sense of what you want, and will be making some really huge improvements in 2025. We won’t announce anything until we’re closer to launch, but we’re aiming high.If you\'re not already a Premium Member, remember: today is Black Friday: a day of dark commercial magic, where we try to make your wishes come true! If you join us today, you’ll do so at the best price we’ve offered all year - and your writing, as well as your chances of publication WILL improve. We\'d honestly love to welcome you, because this community gets better, the more voices it has.*FEEDBACK FRIDAY: An Especially Lovely OneAnd because it\'s a special Friday, let\'s have an especially lovely Feedback challenge.So: I want a passage of yours (about 250 words) that you really love. Give us any context we need, and tell us why you love it. That\'s it.Post yours here when you\'re ready.***My two daughters are, just possibly, turning into writers. They love starting novels – all called “Murder in the Stableyard”, or rough variants on that. Then they write a cast list, which involves perhaps half a dozen individuals, notably girls 2-3 years older than my two. Then they extend the cast list by adding about four horses. Then they ask me to praise them. Then they write a first sentence or two. Then … they start again with a new novel.Some of you giving comments on Feedback Friday last week, noted that writerly procrastination did at least deliver a very clean house and a punctual approach to on-coming chores.I have not noticed the same effect with my kids.Till soon,Harry

We\'ve spent seven weeks thinking about how to sell books. In my last seven emails to you, we have reviewed: The split in the books market between ebook and print How print books are sold by publishersHow you can maximise your chances of success when working with a trad publisherHow to sell via AmazonHow to use book promo sites to sell your ebooksHow to use FacebookHow to build your mailing list. If you are confident you want to self-publish, you can probably afford to (mostly) ignore emails 2 and 3 from the list above.If you are confident you want to be traditionally published (and are also confident that you’ll get the chance to do that) then emails 5 and 6 are less relevant to you – though email 7 is very relevant, and you’d be nuts not to properly absorb the lessons of email 4.But I want to end with some thoughts on mindset. All that follows, but two things first. One, please can EVERYONE take a look at Feedback Friday this week. I\'d love as much involvement as possible. And two: NOVEMBER ALERT!It\'s November. This month, you can become a member for 30% off our normal prices. Members get: An entire suite of video courses. On How to Write, on taking your novel From Good to Great, on Getting Published, on Self-Publishing – and more. You could easily spend well over £1,000 on individual courses and not get as much useful information as you do from these. A huge collection of masterclasses. We have hundreds of hours of masterclasses: on craft, on finding agents, on working with publishers, on marketing your work – and much more. If you’ve got a concern about writing or getting published, we almost certainly have an expert to answer it. A vast range of live events. From “Ask Us Anything” to themed months on Build Your Book and Getting Published, and now including an online Writers Retreat, we have a ton of events to keep you educated and motivated – and in community with other writers. AgentMatch – a proprietary database of 1400+ agents, complete with detailed profiles and easy search / filter tools. Feedback Friday and query letter reviews - plus discounts on our other services. And more! Most of all, you get to be in a community of expertise and passion. I was in an internal meeting the other day with three of my Jericho colleagues. And – I noticed that all of us, all four, were published authors. We’re in this business because we care about it – and know a heck of a lot about it. With Premium Membership, we aim to make that knowhow available to you. You can sign up today at 30% off our normal prices. Info here. I really hope you do. We love serious writers and that includes you. BACK TO MINDSET...Right: mindset. Writing books is not easy. Many of you will therefore set the endpoint of your dreams to getting published: getting an agent, getting a book deal. After that, presumably, the whole show is in the hands of grown-ups who know what they’re doing, right? And you can kick back, and write more books, and let the adults do their thing.Except –That’s not reality. Writing books is hard. Selling them? Also hard.There are (estimated to be) well over 12,000,000 ebooks on Amazon. There are probably over 50,000,000 books of all varieties and formats on Amazon.How many of those actually get sold? A minority. It’s probable that at least half of ebooks have made no sales at all. Not one. And if you set even a very low bar for acceptable sales – a few dozen, say – then well under 10% of books will ever reach even that hurdle.Having a big publisher is certainly some sort of protection against these frosts. If you have a Big 5 publisher, you will sell some books, for sure, and not just in the low dozens.But…Print publishing is still a matter of 12 portly gentlemen running for the same door. On ground that’s slippery with rain, and in a high wind.My first Fiona Griffiths book was published by one of the best editors, at one of the best imprints, at maybe the best publisher in New York. The book was a Crime Book of the Year in a couple of major US newspapers. It was positively reviewed in the NY Times. It got starred reviews in Kirkus and Publishers Weekly. It had a halo around it: it was destined to do well, no?But it failed. The hardback didn’t do great, but the paperback was so shunned by retailers that it sold fewer than 1,000 copies across the entire United States. It was that failure which led me to buy the book back from the publishers and to self-publish instead. Buying the book back cost me $10,000 but within a short space of time, as a self-publisher, I had vastly expanded my readership and was making over 4 times the money I’d earned by way of advance from my trad publishing.The moral of this story?Not that self-pub is good and trad publishing is bad: they both have strengths and weaknesses, and the right choice for you depends very much on your book and your situation.No. Rather, the moral is that you will always need to stay in control of your own sales destiny – or as much control as you can possibly retain. With that in mind, here is some final advice before I end this chain of emails and turn back to the happy busyness of the Writer’s Craft.MindsetWriters – myself included – tend to want to skip the boring bits.Writing – that’s fun. Editing – well, I hope that’s fun, because it’s desperately important. Getting an agent and a publisher? Well, that’s fun and it’s glamorous and you get paid, so that’s a particularly good bit. And being published? Seeing your book on a shelf somewhere? Dropping the book in your mum’s kitchen waiting for her to go all pink and shiny with pride? Also good bits.But to turn that book contract into sales success relies on lots more.And yes, among other things it relies on luck. But focus on the parts you can control.Ask yourself:Is your book cover good? Not just good in itself, but good in comparison with its immediate competitors? This issue is so important, I’ll revert to it in a moment.Is your blurb strong?Is the pricing of your ebook realistic?Does your Amazon book page look OK?Have you been sent a proof of your ebook? And is that ebook laid out in a way that will boost your mailing list and encourage sales of further books by you?If physical bookstores don’t take your book in any quantity, does your publisher have a meaningful Plan B – which would need to place Amazon and your ebook at the centre?Does everything – the cover, the blurb, the other marketing materials – line up with the pitch that you’ve spent so long thinking about and honing?Is there anything you can do to foster your relationships with booksellers, with retail buyers, with book bloggers, with reviewers, with festival organisers and so on?One of the most professional authors I know used to visit bookstores in every town she went to. She introduced herself. She offered to sign books. She bought a coffee. She made nice.She also never let her publisher send out proof copies without including a handwritten note from her.She also wrote – always – to thank festival organisers and the like for events she’d attended. She made sure to know the names of book bloggers, and to find out about them, and to ask them about their children / dogs / pet iguanas the next time she saw them.Her mindset was right. Every detail mattered. No detail would even add 1% to sales, but if you take care of enough details, these things start to add up.You can have the right mindset and things can still go badly wrong – but your chances improve, and improve drastically. Don’t sit back. Don’t let the grown-ups take care of things, unsupervised. These are your books. You care more than they do.Lean in.Mailing listI spoke in the last email about how to build your email list, but I didn’t say this:Your mailing list is your strongest insurance against disaster.If you have a robust mailing list, you kind of know that you can sell books and make money. (Not if the books are terrible. Not if you publish them unprofessionally. But if you do those things right.)And that means, even if you are traditionally published and want to go on being traditionally published, you still need that list because of the protection it confers. It will be helpful if you (slightly) change genres. It will be invaluable if you switch publishers.Build that list. Cherish it.The book coverIt’s odd, but no one – including me – ever talks enough about book covers.However, those covers are INSANELY important.They matter in print publishing, because retail buyers are picking from a flipping catalogue. They are looking at one page of yadda about your book to see if they want to order it. The brightest, most attractive thing on that page is your book cover. They have essentially no text of yours to look at. The book cover (and your elevator pitch) matters hugely.And in a bookstore: readers are hesitating over which book to pick up. They can’t yet see the back of your book. What else do they have to go on, aside from its cover?On an Amazon selection page, the issue is even more devastating in a way. Users can’t even see a full cover, they can see a squashed-down icon of a cover. They see that, and book title, and price, and a summary of review ratings.The cover is vastly influential at that first moment of choice – and a bad cover can easily crush your sales conversions here severalfold. A good cover (and title) can increase conversions severalfold.And it’s not just that first moment of choice. It’s everything else, too. Your other visual marketing material will be (or should be) keying off that cover. You can’t, for example, create a good Facebook ad unless you have a strong cover. I mean, literally, you cannot do it. Because if you place the book cover on the ad, it looks weak, because the cover is weak, and you won’t get clicks. And if you don’t place the cover on the ad and use something more visually attractive instead, then you will get the clicks, but you won’t get the conversions when people land on your unattractive Amazon page.So, your book cover matters.If you’re an indie author, you sort of know that already and will have put proper time in to getting the cover right.If you’re trad published, it’s very easy to be seduced by the grownups-know-best thing and to accept the cover you’re given. (And everyone will try to massage you into accepting that cover; publishers do not love having to redo something that’s been settled internally, even if they secretly know that the settled-internally option is not yet good enough.) So trad-published authors need to be on their guard. If that cover seems off to you, it is off. Fight for a better one.Take your time When you’re writing and editing a novel, it’s almost a matter of pride amongst authors to boast about how many drafts they’ve done. How many times a paragraph gets re-written.But with marketing, it’s often the other way around. We like to get a job done so we can move on to the next thing that’s calling – maybe, some damn paragraph that wants another rewrite.Do not be like that.I’ve found when I mock up (say) Facebook ads on Canva, that I do something, and I like it. Yes: I like it after trying this element here or there, and this colour or that one, and this font for another.But I’m quick to like something.If I come back to the same task again the next day, I’ll do something better.And if I come back the next day, I’ll do better again. By this point, my first attempts don’t look amateurish exactly… just not quite good enough.And, realistically, for a lot of tasks – and definitely Facebook ad creation – you don’t need one utterly professional looking ad, you need loads. One of those ads will outperform the rest, but you can’t tell which one it’ll be until you try ‘em out.So take your time. Do multiple versions. Pick the best.And – good luck. Writing is hard. Selling is hard. And I hope these emails have helped.*FEEDBACK FRIDAYAn odd one, this week, but a good one to do.What matters to do you in writing? What do you want to get out of this? What do you think the biggest obstacles are? What would help? Let me know. I think it’ll be an amazing conversation.See you there.Til soon,Harry

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Last week, I said:“As you write, and as you edit, you are faced with 1,000,000 choices: again and again and again. Are you happy with this sentence? What about this one? Does the attacker strike your heroine? Strike her with what? Does he hurt her? Does she hurt him back? Does she escape? How does she escape?”And –Well, just casually, almost by way of an aside, I’ve assumed it’s just fine to write about violence against women. But is it? Pretty obviously, violence is bad, and male violence against women is especially unlovely … and making an entertainment out of all this? Isn’t that a bit Ugh?One approach is to say that violence of this sort should never be used for entertainment.A British screenwriter, Bridget Lawless, in fact set up a prize – the Staunch Book Prize – which rewarded novels that did not feature violence against women. The prize sputtered on for a few years before closing.The prize was never without controversy, though. Women thriller writers, Sarah Hilary and Julia Crouch, both noted that women do in fact suffer violence by men. Crouch said, what the “prize immediately knocks out is the lived experience of millions of women in this country.”That’s true of course … women do suffer violence, so we should talk about that rather than conceal it. And that feels like it might be a let-out, except if I’m being super-duper honest, my last book involved a contemporary detective running around searching for artefacts linked to King Arthur. The one before that involved an extended caving scene and some (literally) mediaeval monastic practices. My books aren’t really attempting to take the ‘lived experience of millions of women’ and make art out of them. They’re attempts to provide bloody good entertainment using stories which aren’t, quite frankly, all that plausible in the real world.I don’t think that I’m especially keen on having dead women, rather than men – I think I’m an equal-opportunities killer. But, yes, my books do involve violence against women. Fiona suffers ill-treatment in every single book and in many cases, other women are also victims, often dead ones.So do I use murder for entertainment? Yes.Does that include murder of women by men? Yes.Are my books intended to represent a carefully considered view of the actual ‘lived experience’ of women? No, definitely not.So, bluntly put, am I exploiting stories involving violence against women for pure entertainment purposes? Yes, I am.But do my readers, including my female readers, mind about any of this? No, they don’t. Or at least if they do, they care in such small numbers that the issue would seem not to matter all that much. And, I should say, I’d guess that at least 60-70% of my readers are women, maybe even more.Now, assuming that you (A) like writing books and (B) think that men whacking women is generally a Bad Thing, we need to figure out what’s going on here.The first thing to say is that books do generally need a splash of darkness. They don’t absolutely have to have an episode of violence at their heart, but an awful lot of books do. And it’s not surprising. We don’t want to read books about the everyday. We want our books to operate like really high-class gossip: “Gosh, no! Really …?” That reaction almost always derives from transgression of some kind and the blackest sort of transgression (especially in a sexually permissive age) is violence.The second thing to say is that there are ways of writing violence that are just … ick.Any time where the camera lens is pressed up against violence with a kind of glee is, for me, unreadable. (Indeed, I won’t even read on; I know I’m not going to like that book or that author.) Where the violence involves sadism or anything with a sexual edge, then any hint of glee or pleasure in the moment is, for me and, I think for a lot of readers, just a hard no.And for me, that’s what is always comes down to in the end.Does the way you write end up commoditising violence – making a kind of porno reel out of it?Or does your writing try to deepen our humanity? Does it try to enter those dark moments and speak truthfully of the fear, the grief, the compassion?I think if you do that, you’re OK – no matter what your genre, or story, or purpose in writing. There’s a moment in my upcoming book where Fiona comes across a corpse. The man has been hit hard with a frying pan, then shoved into a freezer, where he froze to death. That’s an ugly (albeit off-screen) dying, but it wasn’t played for laughs. It wasn’t played for sadistic thrills. The murder delivered a moment of quietness – reflection. And Fiona then went to see the dead man’s father and brother. And felt their shock and grief.None of this is filtered through some ‘holier than thou’ lens. The difference between my books and a sermon in church? Quite detectable, I’d say.So, for my money at least, entertainment is fine. Violence as part of that entertainment is fine. But – stay human, not icky.A good life rule, that....FEEDBACK FRIDAY: Be Bloody, Bold and ResoluteLast week, I asked for 250 words of happiness. Today – violence.The crack of a silver candlestick – Colonel Mustard falling – blood on the library floor. A country house aghast.Take any episode of darkness from your manuscript and let’s have a peep at it. Remember: we don’t mind a bit of blood and gore. But stay human, not creepy, please.Post yours here.Til soon.Harry

Who do you write for?I mean, readers, yes, obviously. But who? Your mum? That old English teacher you loved? Crime fans in general? People who love Patricia Cornwell in particular?There are two reasons to ask these questions. The first is marketing. If you’re writing people who want a fresh take on the Patricia Cornwell vibe, that would suggest a certain approach to book covers, titles, marketing slogans and so on. You might even refer directly to Cornwell, or her most famous character, Kay Scarpetta, in your marketing yadda.The second reason has to do with the choices you make as you write the book itself.As you write, and as you edit, you are faced with 1,000,000 choices: again and again and again. Are you happy with this sentence? What about this one? Does the attacker strike your heroine? Strike her with what? Does he hurt her? Does she hurt him back? Does she escape? How does she escape? Is her breath ‘hoarse and rasping’ afterwards? Or does it come in ‘juddering heaves of relief’? What phrase do you prefer? And what does she do next?Now, obviously, you’re going to make all those choices on the basis of what seems right to you – you have no other option. But at the back of your mind, there’s always a sense that you’re writing for one set of readers rather than another.For example, if I were writing forensically-led crime fiction, I’d have to assume that my readers knew Patricia’s Cornwell work and would be wanting me to break new ground. I couldn’t just reprise Cornwell’s tropes and expect success myself.Indie authors – intelligently analytical as they are – often take this further, and try to conceive of an ‘Ideal Reader’ – a dog-loving, mother-of-two Kansas 40 y.o. housewife, with plenty of friends, love of hiking, watches true crime shows on Netflix, reads mostly crime, but will cry at soppy love stories too.The idea is that if you know your ‘Ideal’ reader, you can craft your book and your marketing material to appeal perfectly to that one person.     And? OK. Very smart writers I know do just that and they say it works for them. In part, it works because book marketing works best when it’s micro-targeted. A good campaign is one that gets excellent conversions happening amongst a very tightly defined group of readers. A bad campaign is one that starts so-so conversions from a much broader group. So: a hyper-detailed picture of your Ideal Reader keeps your marketing focused.But I have a somewhat different take.I think you have to turn yourself into your own Ideal Reader.Partly, that means bringing your own tastes to bear. As I say, when it comes to editing, you don’t really have a choice.But you also have to ensure that you become your own readership. What books do you expect your readers to have read? What authors do they love?You need to have read that book and know those authors. If you’ve read Patricia Cornwell as keenly as your readers have, you won’t just repeat that stuff. In the end, your desire for novelty will be the same as theirs.These things go deep.I know, for example, that more of my readers are American than British. So I have a particular love of giving my American readers a taste of Wales that’s very Welsh. So, for example, a few miles from where my Mum lives, there’s a village called Newchurch. Easy to say, easy to spell, right? But I’d pretty much never use that placename in one of my Fiona books. Near Newchurch, lie the settlements of Rhosgoch, Glascwm, Llanbadarn-y-garreg, and (where my kids go riding) Bryngwyn. I’d use any of those placenames instead, joyous in the knowledge that Kate from Kansas and Ali from Arkansas will struggle to pronounce any of them.Or again: I wrote a book that had to do with the archaeology of the British Dark Ages. I know my readers to be literate and intelligent. Plenty of writers might have avoided a ton of ancient history detail, but I knew my guys would like it. (I know I like it. I’ve become them.) So the book is spattered with chunks of Latin, and late Celtic poems, and mournful Romano-British monks, and factoids about Anglo-Saxon vs British burials. (The main difference being that the Anglo-Saxon invaders were pagan, the ancient Britons were Christian, so their burial rites looked different. I am English, but I’m still on the side of the ancient Britons. Twll dîn pob Sais.)One last example:How fast or slow do you take a scene? Do you hurtle through? Offer a reaction shot or two, but still move at pace? Or do you allow yourself a paragraph or two of considered reflection?My writing creates my readers, but my readers also create my writing. I know that my readers relish the Fiona character – they want more of her, not less. So, while I’m hyper-sensitive to anything that feels boring or self-indulgent, I’m happy to allow proper space for reflection. On the whole, my scenes go slow but deep, not fast and shallow. That’s respecting my readers, not ignoring them.Over time, any difference between you and your readership gets snuffed out. You learn from them what they do and don’t respond to. You learn what books and authors they like. You follow down those trails.You don’t have to like everything that every one of your readers like. I’ll get book recommendations from readers (either via email, for example, or from names cited in an Amazon review) where I read the book and don’t like it. But that’s fine too. What matters is knowing (roughly) the universe that your readers inhabit, and using that knowledge to shape your tastes and your choices. The process becomes a rolling, laughing, respectful conversation with a multitude.And if you follow that path, things become easy.Your Ideal Reader? It’s you.***FEEDBACK FRIDAY: HAPPINESSModern Fiction often feels like it honours the dark over the light, the grave over the upbeat.And, OK, I don’t have a fight with Modern Fiction. But, just for this week, let’s lighten up. Give me a passage of 250 words that shows happiness. Anything upbeat. A moment of relief or laughter or gladness.Let’s share those excerpts and give feedback one to another, till evening falls.When you\'re ready, post yours here.Til soon.Harry

Last week, I threw out a Feedback Friday challenge based off the first volume of our Good To Great course.The essence of that task, and of the course material, was to consider your book’s elevator pitch not as a final thought – a sticker glued on to the book cover at the final minute – but as a blueprint for production. What’s the book’s DNA? What are its most essential ingredients, the elements that make it up? If your book is to succeed, that answer has to be compelling. Your book will stand, naked, on a bookstore table (or an Amazon page) that’s crowded with repeat bestsellers and authors much better known than you. There’s no way to win that contest except by having an idea that shines so bright and attractively that your book compels attention.The course video (which I urge you to watch; it’s free) talks about how to start with an ultra-short pitch/blueprint – a list of ingredients even – and how to build out from there. To characters, to settings, to themes, and so on.The aim here is that every aspect of your book should be firmly founded on your core idea – and that the idea itself should be so compelling that the book can’t not sell. The absolute key is to make sure that every part of your book lines up behind a single great idea.Pitching backwardsNow, I hope it’s obvious that that’s a sound way to build a book… and yet – have I told you too late? Almost all of you reading this email have already written all or part of your manuscript. So me telling you now that you should have done something 60,000 words ago may not exactly strike you as terribly helpful. (One of you on Townhouse said that “pitching backwards feels like a feat of gymnastics” – which is a fair comment.)And yet –It is helpful. These things are helpful at any stage and every stage. If you know what you’re aiming at – a book where everything lines up perfectly behind one stellar idea –you can always navigate from where you are to where you need to be.The trick is to navigate without cheating.What you mustn’t ask is:“How do I take the material I have already concocted and make it look as though it obeys these rules?”What you must ask is:“Honestly – does my material feel like it all lines up in this way? And is the idea strong enough? And, having thought these things through, are there adjustments I should make to the stuff I’ve already written, even though I know it will cost me weeks of work to make those adjustments?”Anything else, you can bodge if you like. You can have a character who’s a bit limp, a scene that’s a bit weak, a plot turn that’s a bit contrived, a setting that’s a bit bland. All those things – and your book can still sell. None of my books has gone out into the world with no bodging anywhere.But a weak idea? Or a book that doesn’t manifest the strong one that you started with? That book won’t sell. And it doesn’t deserve to.So yes, pitching backwards is an arse-over-tip way to do things. (That lovely phrase comes courtesy of my sister’s long-ago riding instructor, a woman so sweary, she’d make Princess Anne look genteel.) But if you didn’t do the exercise properly when you started out, you need to do it properly now.Is your idea strong enough?Is there total unity between that idea and everything else in the book – characters, themes, settings, everything? Are those things so tightly glued together that your book feels somehow inevitable, necessary?Those are the questions you must ask.They matter.And pitch backwards if you have to.Standing stones and character VerdictsWhen I set these Feedback Friday tasks, I’m often surprised at what comes back. Those surprises are always positive; I always learn something.Last week, I realised that we build character up in layers. To we humans, the top layer is the one that matters most. To a pitch-concerned novelist, it’s the bottom layer.Here’s what I mean:Who is Fiona Griffiths? How do we describe her? Here’s how I think about forming an answer:Standing StonesI start with some key facts – rocks projecting unmissably from the landscape. They’re the things that any explanation of Fiona has to acknowledge. Any triangulation has to start from there. So:Fiona had Cotards Syndrome as a teenager (she used to think she was dead).Fiona doesn’t know her true birth mother or father. She was found in the back of her adoptive father’s car when she was about 2 years old. For a long time, she was mute.Her adoptive father was (is?) a criminal.Fiona can be violent. (A creepy witness once felt her bum. She broke his fingers and dislocated his knee. She was a police officer at the time.)Fiona has a double first in Philosophy from the University of Cambridge – and won a university philosophy prize to boot.At the start of the series, she’d never really had a proper boyfriend. When at university, she had a phase of thinking she was lesbian.Fiona is a detective.All these things are facts. They’re not things that are up for argument or discussion. They refer back to things that happened or are true in the present. They’re standing stones, your rocks, the first and most critical layer of character-formation.(And in parenthesis: my character is quite big and highly coloured. If your character’s own standing stones are a little lower to the ground, that’s fine. You’re just writing a different kind of book.)DispositionsNow we get to the next level up – dispositions, ways of summarising your emerging character.So, again for Fiona, we have something like this:Fiona is electrically intelligent. She’s Sherlock Holmes level bright.She adores murder investigation. It’s one of very few things that fully engages her.She’s a dunce about many things-in-the-world. Her knowledge of pop culture is near-zero. She’s a hopeless cook. She has no dress sense. If there’s a glass wall in an office or a bus shelter, she’s quite likely to walk straight into it.She’s funny. She’ll make you laugh.Dead people calm her. She likes them. She feels them to be friends.Yes, novel-detectives are always mavericks. But Fiona really is. Illegal handguns? Growing and smoking her own weed? Solo mission to shoot up some bad guys? Throwing Russian baddies off a cliff? Yep, that’s Fiona. (And that’s just book one.)These things are facts, too. I mean, you couldn’t reasonably disagree about whether Fiona is intelligent or not. But this set of facts doesn’t have that standing stone like quality: single, obtrusive, unmistakable, un-ignorable – the marker-events of a person’s life.This second list of ours – ‘dispositions’ – doesn’t comprise things as singular as our standing stones. You don’t really know whether Fiona is genuinely funny until you’ve heard her for a bit. If she makes you laugh once, that could be a one-off. But if she does it again and again, then you have to say, yes, she’s funny. Same thing with her intelligence. Same thing with her dunce-in-the-world-ness.So, our second level of character analysis gets to things that are definite facts, but they’re not singular facts. They’re more like dispositions – repeated observations of a trait.And then, we get to our third level –VerdictsIs our character conscientious?Does she have a sense of right and wrong?Is she loyal?Is she open to new things, or does she prefer the tried-and-trusted?Is she valiant – or, perhaps better, what is it that brings out her valour? When does she show her courage?We as people like to discuss these things in relation to others, and as novelists we like to discuss them in relation to our characters. (And roughly: Fiona is not conscientious, she has a strong sense of right and wrong, she is loyal, she is open to the new, she is valiant in almost any context.)But?I don’t think these things should form part of your character analysis, or not really. I think something like the opposite is the truth. You build your character on the basis of your standing stones and your dispositions. Then you follow that character through the course of your story, writing her as carefully as you can. Then you can stand back and judge. Conscientious, yes or no? Valiant, yes or no?As it happens, I think that in most cases, those questions won’t even have easy answers. I just gave a quick-fire set of responses in relation to Fiona, but they’re not very good.Is Fiona conscientious? Yes: she goes way beyond expectations in anything murder-related. But in other spheres, she’s hopelessly unreliable. So: going through endless phone records because there’s just possibly a lead buried in there somewhere? Yes, she’ll do that, and without being asked. But: filling out a simple pension form, because someone in her office needs her to do it? Nope, she’ll avoid that until someone pretty much forces her.Why I’m even talking about thisThe reason why I’m plappering on about this (this word, courtesy of my elder daughter) is that when I asked you to give me your pitch / theme / character details, a lot of you shot straight through to the character verdict level. And I don’t want that. When you’re putting together the blueprint for your novel, the standing stones are way more important. The dispositions are next most important. The character verdicts don’t really matter at all – they’re something to argue about once the novel is finished.I hope that makes sense. In any case, since this week’s Feedback Friday is going to hammer away at this topic, it’ll make sense before I have done with you, or I’ll want to know the raisin why.This email is too long, so I will not tell you about the extraordinary encounter I had just yesterday with – but no. This email is too long.***FEEDBACK FRIDAY: STANDING STONESRight. Character. I want you to outline your character’s:Standing Stones. Big, singular, formative events or facts in your character’s life.Dispositions. Unmistakeable traits that run right through the book.Verdicts. What do you make of the character you’ve just created. (And, psst, I don’t really care about this bit of the answer. Nor should you.)Do you want an extra bonus point? You do? Then also please tell me:Your ultra-short pitch or list of ingredients.What we really, really want to see here is a lovely reverberation between the pitch and the standing stones. We want to think, ‘Oh yes, that character with that past in that story situation and that setting? Sounds glorious. Tell me more.’ If you do that, you’ve won. When you\'re ready, post yours here.Over to you.Til soon.Harry

There’s a sweet sadness about early September, isn’t there? The leaves aren’t quite turning, but they’re thinking about it. It isn’t quite cold enough for socks again, but my morning toes aren’t always so sure about that. The kids go off to school again, bravely, marking off their little transitions towards adulthood. And holiday mess is either put away, or lying around in piles, eyeing us balefully, awaiting disposal.I mostly like the season – I just don’t want the kids to get a day older, really. I’d happily glue them into some groundhog present, where school always involves projects on the Vikings, and science classes revolve around magnets and things dangling on string.And as for you? Ah me and oh my gosh – you’re to go back to school too, my hearties, and starting RIGHT NOW. Because, this week, we have a new course out, and it’s a goodie.Specifically, we know that most readers of this email are reasonably seasoned writers. Few of you are hesitating over the very first pages of your very first manuscript. Far more of you are deep into your first novel, or working on your second or third. You’ve mostly wrestled not just with writing a book, but with editing it too. Plenty of you have made a serious assault on Planet Agent, and are planning further raids with some sober expectation of success.This course is for you: the serious, competent, experienced writer. We call it Good To Great, because that’s the hurdle you now need to clear. You need to go from acceptable competence to writing something so compelling that an agent (or editor, or reader) can’t refuse the proposition you offer.That’s a big ask. I’d say that plenty of people – if they’re serious, competent and committed – can end up putting together a decent novel. Something shipshape and watertight. A novel that feels tight and well-fashioned.But none of that is enough. The competition writers face is heinous. If you’re a debut athlete, you work your way through multiple lower-level competitions until you’re expected to face an Olympic final. If you’re a debut writer? You get no kindness at all. No mercy. You are sent in to compete, immediately, against the most famous writers of the day. Your books are sold at the exact same price. And those other writers have a vast advantage in terms of sales footprint and brand recognition and marketing oomph. So, yeah, good luck.This course is my best attempt to give you that luck.Our aim is to help you, the competent writer, bring your book to the point at which an agent has to take it seriously. Yes, personal tastes and market movements will always play their part, but quality is still the most important factor in what gets bought and sold. Quality is the thing that kicks open doors, that arrests the flow of an acquisitions committee.The first lesson in the course is free to all and I honestly think it’s one of the most useful teaching tools I’ve ever produced. The lesson is entitled ‘Pitch, Theme, Character’, but really it’s about how to lay out the foundations of your novel so that saleability is built in from the very start.Most people (the merely competent authors) write the book that they want to write then consider their pitch as a kind of marketing sticker to be glued on top.You, my fine furry friend, are not aiming at the merely competent. Your pitch is not going to be glued on; it’s going to be foundational. And it’s not just the story idea that matters here. We’re want to ensure that absolutely everything lines up behind a stellar pitch: plot, character, themes, settings – everything.If you can do that – find a compelling pitch, and centre every aspect of your novel on fully delivering that basic promise – then the only remaining challenge is one of execution. And, OK, execution is a challenge, but it’s a doable one (and one which other lessons in the course will attack in plenty of detail.)The first lesson is, as I say, free. You can find out about it here. The whole course is available to Premium Members and I’d just love it if you took the whole lot.Feedback Friday this week is going to pick up on the task in that first video, so do please get stuck in. With any practical accomplishment, it’s never enough to read, or listen to, theory. You have to put it into practice. Actually shaping the words on a page or screen IS part of the learning activity. And when you team that up with Feedback Friday – where lots of intelligent and constructive writers in the same basic place as you offer a ton of thoughtful feedback – well, the learning impact is doubled, or trebled, I’m certain.The leaves are on the turn. It’s back to school time. Your toes are cold. Let’s up and at em.***FEEDBACK FRIDAY: PITCH, THEME, CHARACTERYou need to register for the course here to get your first lesson free.Watch that video; the assignment won’t really make sense without it.Then, I want:A total of about 300 words that comprises your:Very short pitch for the novel. (Nothing fancy or clever or abstract please. A short list of key ingredients is fine.)Notes on theme, character, settings, and anything else that seems relevant to you.I want to see a great pitch and a set of notes which tells me that your book will be firmly centred on those strong foundations.This could, just possibly, be the most important and transformative writing exercise you ever do, so jump to it.That\'s it from me. Post yours here.Til soon.Harry

Last week I said this:Next week … I want to look at how very basic plot summaries can give us important clues about the entire novel. If you’re doing our How To Write in 6 Weeks course, you’ll know just what exercise I’m talking about and (I hope) how illuminating it is.What I asked people to do was to write a very short plot summary of their novel, either in 1-2 paragraphs or as bullet points: Status Quo, Inciting Incident, Midpoint / Developments, Crisis, Resolution.Obviously, that kind of treatment is nowhere close to being an actual plan for a book. Writing a plan would take several pages of text, even if you were being quite compressed in your summary. I’ll also add that I pretty much never write a plan; it’s not how I work. It seems to me that a detailed plan is optional; a general sense of shape and purpose is not.And, OK, it’s all very well performing an assignment, but what is it for? What are the lessons you’re likely to get?The short answer to that is that you need to test your plot for seaworthiness – and doing that at book length is (a) extremely hard and (b) extremely time-consuming. Asking the key questions of a micro-summary isn’t going to give you all the answers by any means, but it does give you a fast, reliable way of understanding the basics.Here are some of the things you may well find:BlandnessHere’s a plot:Status Quo                           Woman (45) is dissatisfied with her lifeInciting Incident                  Her best friend pressures her to go to a pottery classMidpoint                               She resists the pottery, but ends up entering a competition, and failing badlyCrisis                                      She decides to give up the class and revert back to her old way of lifeResolution                            Her new friends intervene and make her realise that she now has a group of friends who love her; she’s turned her life aroundNow, I hope it’s obvious that something like this genuinely describe an important turning point in someone’s life. But as a novel? It’s hopeless. It’s just too dull, too lacking in bite to be picked up by anyone – agent, publisher, reader. Nearly all novels need a splash of the dark – and losing a pottery competition is not dark.ScaleAnother thing to ask is whether a novel has genuine novel-length scale. So take this example:Status Quo                           Karob is a prince – the king to be. He’s had a sheltered life and a loud, dominant fatherInciting Incident                  Dragons prey on the northern territories. Defence is the traditional task of the crown princeMidpoint                               Karob fights the dragons and failsCrisis                                      The king is ailing and courtiers are moving to prevent Karob from taking the throneResolution                            He returns to the north with a larger force and defeats the dragons.And, OK, that has darkness. But does it have scale? Does that feel like a story that could sustain 100,000 words of prose? At the moment, it certainly doesn’t. It feels more like a middle grade story that might run to 30-40,000 words.It’s always hard to be sure of these things when giving feedback to others. Is there more to this story than we’re seeing in those bullet points? Maybe.But if you’re doing the exercise for yourself, you know whether there is or is not meant to be more. And at the moment, that story is just too compact, too simple – too dull – to sustain a whole book. Basically it amounts to: X fights Y and loses, then fights again and wins. A book that can be summarised as briefly as that isn’t really a novel. You have to be sure your outline has enough scale to build on.TanglesThe last big route to failure is writing a novel that doesn’t know what it is. The first two examples might be hopeless, but at least they know what they’re doing. That’s not always the case:Status Quo                           Jax (27) is in a job that offers geopolitical risk assessment. Even she doesn’t know what that is and she’s kind of bored. Her last partner broke up with her 6 months ago and she’s wanting to find someone.Inciting Incident                  Yuri persuades Jax to help with his Azerbaijani import/export business. Jax also meets Luigi, a very good looking Italian personal trainer. Jax’s mother gets ill.Midpoint                               Yuri is working with the CIA but had KGB roots and Jax isn’t quite sure who she’s helping. Meantime, she’s dating Luigi but he becomes very controlling. Jax can’t get to see her mum, even though the mum has a dementia diagnosis.Crisis                                      There’s a major shootout in Baku. Jax is wounded. Luigi tells her that she has to stay at home and be an old-fashioned housewife. Jax’s mother goes into a home.Resolution                            Jax hands over her secrets to MI6, who give her a job as a central Asia analyst. She breaks up with Luigi. She sees her mum comfortably settled.And – erp? What is that story? Who is it for? Is it a rom com? An action romance? Is there any connection between Luigi and Yuri? Quite how does the mother connect to all this? It’s not that you couldn’t slot a romance into a geopolitical spy story – of course you can – but there’s a theme about coercive control that just doesn’t seem to fit into anything else. It’s like there are three stories here and none of them have ever met before.You usually get this kind of issue when a writer just wants to write about their chosen subjects and doesn’t take any feedback from the story itself.TruthAnd in the end that brings us to the essential element in this exercise – or really any writing exercise: truthfulness. You need to look at your work with a third-party eye, an unforgiving one. What, really, would an agent say about any of these three submissions, assuming they were being completely honest and not caring about the author’s feelings? They’d say: “boring”, “thin”, and “total mess”.One of the advantages of an artificial exercise – like this bullet point one – is that it puts distance between you and your work. That distance should help you get as close to the truth as possible.PitchAnd one more thing:Do you feel your pitch echoing through your plot summary? You should. If your pitch isn’t there in the DNA, then your pitch is probably just a marketing sticker that you’re gluing on after the fact. That doesn’t work. The pitch IS your book, or should be.That’s all from me. I’m going to take the rest of August off in terms of emails, but Feedback Friday will run as normal – and we’ll give you some of my greatest hits so you still get your dose of Friday yumminess.The kids have built a massive fort in the garden, including a toilet (“but only for wees”) and a bath, which is a wheelbarrow full of water. So far, they’ve used a puppy crate, a guinea pig hutch, a ton of fence posts, an umbrella, two brooms, some towels and quite a lot of scrap wood. I’m not allowed to look too closely because if I try, they tell me they’re throw a spear at my head.I don’t want a spear in my head.FEEDBACK FRIDAY: How to Write a Novel / Module #5 / ToolsWatch the lesson here (available to Premium Members)Do your assignment:Tell us what your themes are, and give us a passage (250 words) that shows them in action.A great assignment, by the way. So get stuck in! Upload the result to Townhouse here.Til soon.Harry

The kids are off school. Yesterday was – complicated. And right now, I have seven kids in the house with me as the only (vaguely) capable adult.So –A short email today, but one with a useful moral.On Wednesday night, I did (for our beloved Premium Members) a LIVE EDIT session, in which I took four short pieces of work and started to edit them much as I would if they were my pieces of text.When I do these things, I don’t pre-plan my edits: the point really is to offer a stream-of-consciousness view into how I approach things. And each time I start one of these webinars, I always wonder if I’ll actually have anything useful to say.I mean, I can always find trivia – this word repeated, an over-focus on bodily movements or sensations, a tiny muddle as to just how quiet a particular location is. At the outset, those things always seem to offer rather slim pickings. Good to correct, maybe, but perhaps not worth a webinar.Except – and Wednesday evening was no exception – these little things normally lead to something bigger. So here, for example, is the first paragraph from one of the passages we looked at:Aside from the weather and the hooting of an owl in the distance, it’s deathly quiet. Exactly what I wanted. But if that’s true then why do I ache for the comforting buzz of Jon’s Bar? Knowing he was asleep upstairs made me feel safe somehow, like I was alone but not really. Now there’s nobody, just me and the forest. Rain beats the roof above me in place of Jon’s footsteps on old floorboards, wind the only other breath for miles.Now, this was from a really quite good passage and the key emotional transition which followed was well and movingly handled. The author, Rian, stands a decent chance, I think, of writing something which agents will need to give serious consideration to in time.But? Well, the bit that niggled at me first was that damn owl.The first sentence here says, “it’s deathly quiet,” albeit that the place isn’t totally quiet because of some (undefined) weather and a distant owl.Only then, the last sentence says “Rain beats the roof above me.” It doesn’t say “patters lightly and almost without sound”. It says “beats”.So which is it? Beating rain or deathly silent? It can’t be both.And then, Jon’s bar is bamboozling too. Is the soundscape of that bar:a) A comforting buzz?b) Silent, because Jon is asleep upstairs?c) Nothing from the bar below, but footsteps from Jon walking around above, presumably after the bar has closed for the night?The answer seems to be all of the above.Now, these niggles are – I accept it – utterly trivial. The first sentence said “Aside from the weather,” so it did, if we’re being strict, make some allowance for the rain. And the thing about Jon’s bar? Well, obviously, the soundscape of that bar varied with time of day, but the woman is perfectly capable of remembering each bit of it. We as readers are also capable of figuring these things out.But these niggles lead to another. The structure of the piece at the moment is this:Deathly quiet hereComforting buzz of bar (past)Me and the forestJon’s footsteps on floorboards (past again)Wind the only breathSo we loop back twice to Jon, in the space of eighty words. That means that none of these soundscapes can be properly described or absorbed – we’re just shuttling to and fro too often. And what’s the emotional movement here? It’s got a bit lost in the shuttling.So, on Wednesday, we took these niggles and arrived at this:It’s quiet here. There’s the sound of rain on the roof, and dripping off trees, and somewhere an owl, hooting unseen. Otherwise, nothing – a forestful of silence.Exactly what I wanted. But if that’s true then why do I ache for the comforting buzz of Jon’s Bar? Knowing he was there, either serving beers or, after hours, moving around on the old floorboards upstairs, made me feel safe somehow. Like I was alone but not really. Now there’s nobody, just me and the forest. Me, the trees, the owl and the rain.That’s ten words longer, but clears up the niggles around what exact sounds we’re dealing with. More important, it cleans up the structure: we start with the forest, then we feel a pang for the buzz of the place left behind, then we consider again our solitary state here with the trees and the owls.In bringing a bit of order to these smaller points, we also get greater emotional clarity. The new passage now shows a flow from external observation (“it’s quiet here!”) to an emotional one (“Wow! I’m really alone here.) That movement – a deepening – goes via a contrast (in terms of sound, and aloneness) with the world the character has just left.This matters! The character is about to plunge into a howl of pain over her lost baby. The paragraph before that happens needs to set that up just right.The new passage does just that. It gives us silence – nostalgia – oh crikey, I’m on my own … The whole paragraph is now getting us ready for what follows.That, roughly, is how editing almost always works.You start with a fairly low-level worry – in my case it was beating rain vs deathly quiet.In solving that worry, we found others (was Jon’s bar buzzing or silent or footsteppy?).And in solving all those things, we got to something that:a) No longer suffered from those minor niggles, but alsob) Gave us a powerful and emotionally compelling route into the howl of pain which is about to come.Little things lead to big things. That’s how editing works. That’s why jumping on trivia is almost always important: it opens doors to things that you might not otherwise have sensed and found.For me, the activity has a free-form quality. Sometimes, I enter my text with a mission. (Turn character A from male to female. Improve setting B. Solve the plot conundrum in chapter X.) Often, though, I just read the text and respond to it.I find a niggle and tease away at it.Little things lead to big ones.The text improves.Next week, I want to do something a bit similar in terms of plotting. I want to look at how very basic plot summaries can give us important clues about the entire novel. If you’re doing our How To Write in 6 Weeks course, you’ll know just what exercise I’m talking about and (I hope) how illuminating it is.FEEDBACK FRIDAY: How to Write a Novel / Module #4 / ProseWatch the lesson here (available to Premium Members)Do your assignment:Take a scene. Cut it brutally. Layer it up the way we did in the video. Then present your before and after efforts. (The “after” version should be a max of 250 words, please.)Upload the result to Townhouse here. I’ll be very keen to see the results of both the cutting and the layering up. I’m expecting beauty and wondrousness here, folks. Oh yes, and we’re at the one year anniversary of our Feedback Friday sessions. I’ve loved them. Thanks for participating.Til soon.Harry.

I once wrote a book about payroll fraud. (Yawn.) The fraud in question involved some kind of messing about with employee tax deductions. (Snore.) The fraud was perpetrated using online tools for sabotaging corporate databases. (Dull, dull, dull.)At one level, that book should not possibly have worked. It was like being trapped inside your very worst admin nightmare: dealing with government tax codes AND horrible tech stuff, both at the same time.Suffice to say, I don’t think the book did fail – or at least, certainly not for that reason. Because I knew that the underlying subject matter was profoundly tedious, I basically avoided it. I mean, I couldn’t avoid it completely, because the crime was the crime, but I never did anything more than basic window dressing. So, for example, a character at one point says this:“It looks like the basic mechanics of the fraud were initially set up by Kureishi. He installed software that gave external access to payroll. We’re confident he was not the ultimate beneficiary of the fraud. We simply can’t find enough money or signs of heavy spending. And the set-up looks remarkably professional. The fraud involves over a hundred and fifty dummy UK bank accounts. The money siphons via Spain, Portugal or Jersey to Belize. The Belize bank account is fronted by nominees and owned by a shell company in the British Virgin Islands. That shell company in turn is owned by a foundation in Panama.”That’s pretty much as specific as I ever got. “He installed software” – well, shucks. That doesn’t really say much of anything. Dummy bank accounts, money siphoning to Belize – well, I have no idea how to do that kind of thing and I never got even close to an explanation.In effect, my aims with speeches like the one I’ve just quoted were threefold:Make the whole crime setup look plausible.Make it look big and meaty – something that matters enough for my character to be deeply committed to the investigation. (I did that partly with the number of bank accounts, but more importantly with corpses – by this point in the book, my Kureishi character was very, very murdered.)Avoid boring the reader with too much technical jargon.You may not be writing about payroll systems yourself, but you quite likely are writing about something that involves technical knowledge – and if you are, you have some decisions to make.Where your knowledge is actually interesting, then share it. I also wrote a book about the early oil industry and readers wanted to know how wells were drilled, what happens when you strike oil, what happens when gas leaks from a well, how wildcatting operated in those days, and so on.Because of the intrinsic interest of the topic, I read a lot about it and shared plenty. Several specific accounts of striking oil in the book were drawn from actual strikes at the time – from huge gushers to small, but highly indicative, indicators that oil was close. Plenty of readers wrote to me saying how much they enjoyed that stuff. The former head of a major oil company wrote to me to tell me that he had an interest in the technology of the early industry and that I’d got my technical detail pretty much right. (Phew.)But –The reason I’m writing this email –But –Phones. Whatsapp. Messages. Facetime. Emails. Login credentials. Twitter. Who follows who. DMs. Verification issues. Instagram. Lost passwords. Account recovery process.For all of us now, a lot of our social interaction is mediated through tech and much of that tech is basically horrible and boring. As a matter of fact, I think that one of the reasons why people pick up books specifically is to avoid the specific negatives of tech involvement.With a book, the attention commitment is long not short – hours, not minutes or seconds. It’s emotional in a broad, deep, complex way, not in a “catty remark on Instagram” way. If we’re reading in print, then we’re doing so because we don’t want a screen in our hand.All this says: you need to avoid talking about the detail of tech in your book wherever possible. If you need “convincers” – as I did with payroll fraud – then stick them in. But the purpose of those convincers is really just to say “I know this is boring, so can we please agree that I know what I’m talking about, and we can leave it at that?” That means, as short as possible, as little as possible.You may think that this doesn’t apply to you – perhaps your book is a domestic noir psych thriller, not a book about payroll fraud or the oil industry.But in fact, domestic noir psych thrillers are precisely the kind of area where this issue crops up.Compare these two passages:Tech-ledShe looked at her phone and traced the unlock pattern to gain access. She navigated to Whatsapp and checked for unopened messages. There were a dozen or so messages in a school-related chat she was signed up to, but nothing from Emma. She tapped the search icon to bring up messages from Emma and was about to text her, when she saw a notice saying that the user had blocked her messages …Emotion-ledShe checked her messages – and found that Emma had blocked her. Why? Because of the Croissant Incident? But surely not. She’s already apologised for that and Emma didn’t seem like the kind of person to bear a grudge, no matter how covered in golden pastry flakes she might have been …I hope it’s blisteringly obvious that one is terrible and one is good. My mother could basically understand the second piece of text, but she’d have no idea what the first one was going on about. Now, OK, it’s not your job to write for my mum, but the point is broader. One piece of text places tech-navigation at its centre. The other one places emotion and relationships at its centre.You need to do the second, not the first.These comments are acutely relevant to the kind of smartphone technology we all have in our lives now, but they’re also relevant to any kind of Boring Tech – like my payroll fraud.If you’re writing about something interesting – navigating an ice-breaker, a 1930s gusher, Napoleonic artillery, the newsroom of a contemporary newspaper – then go for it. Find the rich detail and give us that. If you’re writing about something dull, give us the bare minimum and move away fast.In my oil book, I remember I had a roughneck fall out of an oil derrick, bounce off the tin roof of the power-rig, and lie on the ground saying, “Would someone find a cigarette for this broken-assed sonofabitch?” I didn’t make that bit up: I just took it straight from eyewitness reports at the time.The real gold? It’s reality – edited.FEEDBACK FRIDAY: How to Write a Novel / Module #3 / PlotWatch the lesson here (available to Premium Members)Give me your plot summary, as either:Five bullet points (Status Quo, Inciting Incident, Midpoint, Crisis, Resolution), or1-2 paragraphsEither way, stay short. We’re focusing on the basic shape of the plot here; the detail can come later.I know you’ve already done something towards plot, but I want you to get deeper and more specific this week. I’m looking for a further iteration of the work you’ve already done. If that means sharing something a bit more detailed than I’ve suggested, that’s fine.Upload the result to Townhouse here. I’ll see you there. Everyone welcome.BONUS FEEDBACK FRIDAY: 250 Words / Live EditI’m doing a live feedback event next week, so your task this week is really simple. Premium Members can register for it here. I want, please, 250 words (max) that you really like. Also, title and genre.I’m going to give live feedback on this stuff next week, so if you don’t want your work torn to shreds in front of a baying mob, please mark it: NO LIVE FEEDBACK.(Truth is, I only pick work I already quite like and I’m never that mean. But if you don’t want the live experience, then please just tell me so.)Share your work here.Til soon.Harry

We had a good week last week: a flood of good replies, both in relation to “What do you want from writing?” and in relation to our Planning Your Novel module (which is the first lesson in the How to Write a Novel video course and completely free: access it here. You can still do the assignment and get feedback too.)And –I always learn something from this work. Last week was no exception.There was a tremendous amount of interesting work in response to the Planning Your Novel assignment (you can see people’s work here.) And look: the entire point of this module and this assignment is to encourage a kind of safe play. You need to sketch out your idea for a novel, so you can see it and feel it – and change it.In that sense, if someone gives me a page from a completed draft and I see obvious ways to improve things, then that page has weaknesses. It contains mistakes. But if someone gives me a sketch of an idea, then it can’t contain mistakes. Its job is just to exist – to make itself available for inspection. If you instantly see a way that the idea could be improved, that’s perfect. The sketch has done its job.The planning process is always circular (plot, characters, settings, themes, plot, characters, settings, themes …). And it’s experimental. Would this story work better in Sweden? Yes? No? Or kind of? OK, so maybe not Sweden. What about Iceland? Or Greenland? A village set up to support oil drilling on the Greenland west coast? Better?The fact is that you don’t get to the right ideas unless you give yourself permission to have the bad ones. And the bad ones don’t properly exist until they’re written down. You need to see and feel the plan taking shape in front of you.So – no criticisms in what follows. Just observations.First:The pitch matters. Always.Place your ingredients on a page in their barest, simplest form. Do you want to read that book? Would other readers want to read that book – remembering that your book will be sat next to hundreds of excellent books by authors much better known than you?Look at these pitches:Paleontologist + Murder + Theft of dinosaur bonesJane Eyre + Lesbian romance + more enlightened approach to mental healthNew intelligence agency + Run by women + New international crimeNow, I don’t know about you, but the first of those is obviously commercial. A murder story revolving around a niche-but-real area of crime, and one that’s of obvious interest? Yep. That works.The next two pitches are (for my money, but you may think different) almost but not quite there.Jane Eyre + lesbian romance: yes, perfect, it’s almost what the book is asking for. Adding a romance like that feels like an act of completion more than anything. But I got shivers of the wrong sort from the enlightened approach to mental health bit. I mean: yes, let’s in practice treat the mentally ill well, of course. But novels that have a “wouldn’t it all be better if we were nice to each other?” tone seldom make good reads – and agents and publishers know it. Now, I don’t think that basic idea needs a whole lot of tweaking to be right. I’d just want to scrub away any trace of the too-worthy from the pitch.The last idea: yes, I’m intrigued. But the ‘new international crime’ doesn’t mean anything to me. And why is a women-run intelligence agency even needed? What’s the bigger idea underlying its creation? Again, I’m halfway there, but – if I were the author – I wouldn’t embark on writing the book until I’d got some decent answers to those questions.Second:Density matters. Almost always.I came across at least two really interesting examples from your work:One involved a couple running a teashop in the North of England, but involving some kind of story involving Welsh dragons. Now that’s potentially a nice contrast – the homely teashop, the wild dragons. But why separate them geographically? Almost certainly the book gets better if the teashop is relocated to the Cambrian mountains where (as everyone knows) the world’s best and most ancient dragons still live. The book gets better because, even when you’re in the teashop, you’re still in a location where the possibility of dragons exists. You’ve given every object in the teashop world some kind of ambiguity. Is this only a teacup? Well, yes, maybe, except that beneath those mountains outside lie dragons, and so nothing in this world is ever quite ordinary. If the dragons are a four-hour car journey away, you lose that sense of ambiguity. The book has lost just a splash of energy.Another example: someone sketched out a novel running from the 60s to now about a mixed-race marriage in the UK. Now, there’s obvious interest there, but the story (as sketched and at least to me) felt a bit baggy – without obvious journey. That doesn’t work. So an author has roughly two choices. One, focus in on a particular time and place. Early 60s? The era of the Beatles and the miniskirt? A mixed-race marriage, with the couple based somewhere not obviously cool (ie: not Carnaby Street, London)? Yes: that clearly works. A lovely retro period feel combined with the iron tang of racial cruelty and complexity? Perfect.The other way you could justify a 50-year stretch is by giving that journey some kind of purpose. Let’s say the couple has a daughter who goes wild – rejects contact with the mother – before reuniting as the central couple reaches old age. That way, the book is, on the surface, about the mother-daughter relationship, even though in practice the book will also study the evolution of race-attitudes in the UK.In any case, density nearly always matters.Geographical density. Density of relationships (a cast list that looks much the same by the end of the novel as in the first quarter). Density of time. When planning a book, it’s nearly always a good plan to close up gaps where you can.And third:Darkness matters, nearly always.There was one planning assignment offered by a more experienced writer with an intriguing idea at its heart – a car crash, a ‘brother’ who’s really a son, a commune, some mental health strangeness. But … who or what was the antagonist? What did the whole story lean up against?The writer was aware of the issue and had some (perfectly reasonable) hesitations about the exact solution I offered, but … darkness matters. Some external darkness is nearly always important. Even in what is a elegant and morally centred comic romance – Pride and Prejudice, for example – the shadows are present. (The family’s potential poverty. The potential destruction caused by the Lydia Wickham elopement.) That book without those shadows? Basically inconceivable.So.Pitch. Density. Darkness.And plan – revise – plan – extend – plan – revise …If you haven’t yet joined our How To Write a Novel course, you’re missing out. The peer feedback is abundant and excellent. Always encouraging, always thoughtful. Premium Members can just register here for free. If you’re not a PM, you can always join us.FEEDBACK FRIDAY: How to Write a Novel / Module #2 / CharacterWatch this video (available to Premium Members)Do your assignment: Give me a 250-word scene that shows a rich, rounded character – we’re looking specifically for inclusion of multiple dimensions in the one scene. Everyone is welcome to take part and upload the result to Townhouse here. I’ll see you there. Til soon.Harry

Hello writers, we have TWO tasks in this week\'s email. If you want to take part in this week\'s Feedback Friday, keep reading to find out how to get involved - Jericho TeamSuperquick housekeeping to start off with: My How To Write A Novel in 6 Weeks course kicks off NOW. Anyone taking the courses gets a weekly video, an assignment, and peer-to-peer feedback via Feedback Friday.The first module (on planning) is free to all. I hope you get stuck in and make maximum use of it. More information in the PSes below about what to do next.After this first module, you’ll need to be a Premium Member to complete the course. If you’re not a PM and want to take part, check out our membership options here. I hope you join us.Righto.And today, I want to start with a simple question: What do you want to get out of writing?Don’t give me the ‘in your wildest dreams’ answer. We all know what you dream of: agents stalking you, publishers sending you limos with huge bunches of flowers, a bestseller list electrified by your presence, surging crowds at festivals, your own skincare range, Margot Robbie pestering you with requests to be in your movie, Ryan Gosling inviting you to his island birthday bash …And, OK, I’m sure that’s all bound to happen, but let’s have a sober version of your aspirations too.If you want to answer just that simple question, then do. We’ve put together a Townhouse forum, and please – everyone, not just Premium Members – get involved. The short version of the question is just this: What do you want to get out of writing?If you want to be more discursive (and please do!), then you might want to address any of the following questions which seem relevant to your situation:Do you think your basic idea for a book is strong enough?Are you going to finish your book?Do you intend to get help with the book (eg: via a manuscript assessment)?Do you intend to get help with your skills (eg: via a writing course)?If you’ve finished your manuscript, do you think it’s strong enough to market as it stands?What’s your preferred publication outcome: Big 5 traditional publication? Niche trad publication? Digital first publication? Self-pub?What will you do if you get your book out there and agents aren’t interested?What will you do if your self-publish your book and sales are miserable?What financial outcome would make everything worth it to you? Give us a figure.What other factors would make everything worth it? (eg: seeing your book in a bookshop. Holding a book in your hand. Getting some emails from readers.)Does critical acclaim feel important to you?Does feedback from readers feel important to you?Do you intend to write more than one book? If yes, then will you be writing in your current genre or multiple ones?Do you want to make a full-time career as author (ie: earn enough to live on from books alone.)Do you want to make a substantial part-time career as author? (Like loads of the team at JW, in fact.)Does a film / TV adaptation feel important, or is that just fantasy-land stuff for you?Don’t feel confined to that list. If there’s something I’ve missed that seems relevant, add that into your answers.And …Well, when I started writing, I definitely wanted a big 5 publisher. I definitely wanted an agent. I definitely wanted to make meaningful money.But I think the biggest thing for me was simply being a writer. I’d wanted to be an author since I was about 10 years old; I just always assumed that’s what I’d do. So being a writer for me was mostly about becoming me; anything else would have felt a bit strange, like having been born into the wrong body.I have had my work adapted for TV. That didn’t make a big difference to me, either emotionally or financially.I have had my work sold all over the place. That’s been gratifying, for sure, but not in an especially deep way. It’s fed my ego, not my soul, and these days my ego isn’t that fussed either.I’ve generally had very positive reviews from critics, but, honestly, that means less to me now than it might have done once. I feel that I know reasonably well how good or bad my books are. I’m not massively affected by what some third-party thinks. If someone doesn’t like my book, that’s as likely to be a matter of personal preference as it is to be something more fundamental.Getting really committed, insightful communications from readers? Well, that’s always been special and it’s become much more frequent in the internet age and (especially) with a bit of self-publishing.I’ve always enjoyed trad publishing (though it has also, often, frustrated the heck out of me) but I’ve always liked self-pub too (which has been much less frustrating and more reliable in terms of income.)I like writing fiction and non-fiction, but fiction is definitely harder – a lot harder, in fact.I definitely want to publish more books, but I don’t have the same fever around it as I used to. (Nor, admittedly, the same financial pressure.)I’ve never taken a writing course, but I have done courses on self-pub (well worth it) and no book of mine has ever been published without deep, professional editorial input.So: those, roughly, are my answers.What are yours?Write down your answers and actually give them some kind of sense check. If you have things like “Explore merchandise range to accompany my middle grade novel”, then ask yourself how many authors you know who have successfully done this. If your answer doesn’t get further than ‘JK Rowling’, you may want to reconsider things.The fact is that writing is hard. Getting published is hard. Not getting published is more common than getting published … and getting published in a small way is more common than getting published at scale.So, what\'s the point of all this? Well, we\'re not in the business of daydreaming. I want you to think practically about your writing future. If you have a goal in mind, it\'s much easier to reach if youknow what that goal looks like andhave concrete steps that will bring you closer to achieving it.Ask yourself: what does that journey look like? What can you do today, this very minute, to bring you closer? This could be any number of things but some ideas include: Clearing a set space in your week for writingImproving your home-writing set up to remove niggles or distractionsFinding beta readers (Try Townhouse)Getting formal expert feedback (Try a manuscript assessment, but do this only after you’ve worked hard at self-editing your work. It doesn’t pay to rush in.)Really structuring what your book is trying to be. Getting specific about things like your elevator pitch, your plot outline, your character plans, and so on. (That means writing things down, by the way. Thinking about these things while walking dogs won’t achieve the same thing.)Cultivating a writing community (Feedback Friday is a great place to start)Improving your writing craft. Why not dip your toe with this week\'s How to Write lesson? If there\'s another area you need bolstering, hit up our Masterclass library (available to Premium Members). There are also more rigorous, structured options like our flagship writing course. It really depends on where you are at and where you want to be.Doing the scary stuff. Not sure if your manuscript is ready to be marketed? Try sending it out to agents. See what response you get. Or book an agent one-to-one and ask for direct, truthful feedbackFor now though, that first step could be as simple as writing out your answers to the above questions and making sure every goal has a first step you can realistically make in the near future.Post your writing goals and next steps here. Don\'t want to share with the wider world? Reply to this post and let me know.FEEDBACK FRIDAY: HOW TO WRITE / MODULE #1 / PLANNINGWatch this video (this is the first lesson in the How to Write a Novel course. It’s free to watch, the rest of the course is for Premium Members)Do your assignment:Your pitch in <20 wordsWrite 1 short paragraph of plot summaryWrite 1 paragraph on everything else (notably character.)Upload the result to Townhouse here. I’ll see you there. Everyone welcome.Til soon.Harry

Righto.Now, last week, in Feedback Friday, we were looking at your mysteries – not detective novels, for the most part, just places in your book where a mystery intrudes, presses itself at the characters.And one of the things I noticed was that there’s very often a sense of something sacred about the actual places or artefacts involved in these mysteries. So a letter, written in 1944 and being read by people in 1948, can have the quality of some treasured relic – a saint’s bone, a lock of Mary Magdalene’s hair.Place too can acquire this sense of being close to something magical – inhabited by spirits. As though a deserted house gathers some of the spirits you might expect to find at Stonehenge during Solstice, or Glastonbury Tor, or Tintagel Castle.That sense of powers that lie beyond the ordinary and known can enter any book at all. You’re likely to find those passages:In portal scenes – any time that your character steps from one world into another, less known, world where the rules seem shifted. This could be a really ordinary type transition – a working class student entering some high end and ancient university for the first time, for example – in which case, the sense of the sacred clearly exists in the character’s head alone. Or it could be more clearly linked to the spiritual – a Western adventurer entering some tribal burial ground, for example – in which case, the sense of the sacred is at least partly ‘owned’ by the space itself. Either way though, there’s a transition which needs marking.Where you have some kind of relic. That could be a Dark Ages sword, obviously, but is more likely to be a family letter, or a heavy iron key, or a set of war medals. But the meaning and history attached to that relic can give it weight, no matter how ordinary the object or how (relatively) recent its past.Where you have a place around which some special sense hangs – a mystery, the past presence of someone important, a place heavy with memories from a different time.Where you have a person that – even just temporarily – seems to shimmer with something a bit unworldly: a tiny flash of superpower, a hint of the mage.Once you find these moments in your book, I think it’s good to ask yourself the question, ‘Am I making the most of this?’ If you’re not writing fantasy, you can’t jump straight into magic, but you can borrow some of the tones of magic. You can introduce a note of the strange and perhaps the sacred too.A very talented kids’ author, who used to work as an editor for us, once told me that whenever he wrote a portal scene in one of fantasy novels, he always wrote it as poetry first, before tucking it back into prose. It’s that sort of attitude that I think any of us can use.Here, by way of example, is a chunk from my The Deepest Grave. Th characters are in a remote Welsh church. They have just interrupted a robbery and are trying to figure out what the thieves had been looking to find. So far, they’ve found nothing. Then:The light now has failed almost completely. The two men won’t be found unless they’re the stupidest or unluckiest criminals this side of Oswestry.The uniform goes. The forensic guy goes. The church lighting somehow just emphasises the darkness. It thickens the air into something yellowey-orange. Gluey.We regather in the vestry, just because Katie’s left her coat there.Bowen lifts the 1953 fish-restaurant newspaper out of the wooden wall box.‘I suppose that can go.’He looks glumly at the mess behind the cupboard, knowing that it’ll be his job to clean it. Katie looks into the box, now missing its newspaper floor.Glances once, then looks more sharply.‘No, that’s not right,’ she says, and starts picking at the bottom with a fingernail.I already looked under the newspaper and saw just the pale, bleached colour of old pine – pine that has never seen the sun – but that was me being dumb. Me not knowing how to see.Katie picks at the bottom and it comes away.A sheet of paper, blank on the upper side, but with writing in clear purplish-black ink on the lower.Latin text.A hard-to-read medieval hand.Bowen stares. I stare. We all stare.‘Katie,’ I say, ‘This paper? We can get it dated, presumably?’In the gluey light, she shakes her head.‘No. No, we can’t.’‘We can’t?’There’s something about this light, this thickened silence which makes everything seem slow, unnatural.‘We can’t test this paper, because it isn’t paper. It’s vellum. A dead sheep, basically, scraped clean and stretched out thin.’On the one hand, this is a cop and archaeologist just doing their job. But those comments about the ‘gluey’ light and ‘this thickened silence’ give the moment the quality of something like the discovery of a sacred relic – as though some other, more ancient, world were suddenly touching this. That’s sharpened up, I think, by a sense of these layers of history: from a 1953 newspaper to Latin text, from a sheet of paper to a sheet of vellum.Those are the signals that, if you like, lie in some external reality. But the characters’ reaction also expresses their sense of transition: ‘Bowen stares. I stare. We all stare.’ The way everything come to ‘seem slow, unnatural.’Because the characters are feeling that, the reader does too. And what could have been an ordinary moment in a detective novel, temporarily at least, wears the clothes of something deeper, older, stranger and perhaps more magical.Poetry, then prose. The magical, in the ordinary.That is a power you can seize, if you choose to seize it. I hope you do. There’s another chunk from the same book that operates as a proper portal moment: a transition that, in this case, involves a literal door. Again, I didn’t write that passage thinking about portals and fantasy and magic … but those things are present nonetheless. I’ve popped that chunk into the relevant Feedback Friday forum, so you can see it for yourself.Don’t forget about that How To Write Course. I’ve done all-new videos for it, and the feedback from the first viewers has been all positive. You can take the first lesson for free now, the rest is available for Premium Members only. Details on how to join here.FEEDBACK FRIDAY: Fantasy / MagicalThree weeks back, inspired by historical fiction, we looked at research. Two weeks ago, inspired by romance, we looked at the Absent Beloved. Last week, inspired by crime, we asked you to find mystery. This week – inspired by fantasy or any kind of magical realism – I want you to find a moment where some sense of the magical or sacred intrudes into your book. That could be:Discovery of a ‘relic’A portal momentSome shifting sense of a character possessed of a not-quite explicable powerA place that has a touch of something beyond the ordinaryIf you are writing out and out fantasy, then those moments will be easy to find, obviously. If you’re note writing fantasy, then those moments still probably exist.What I will say is that you may well find (let’s say) a portal moment in your book that slightly misses or underplays its sense of magic. So do please feel free to edit / rewrite those moments before uploading them to Townhouse. Try pushing the magical gas pedal a little and see if people like the results. You could even try writing the scene as poetry first, before putting it back into prose.I think Sofia Samatar talking about ‘the strange, the weird, the speculative’ is quite inspirational here. It almost feels more fun to me finding the strange in a book that is basically not strange.So what I’m after this week is:TitleGenre1-2 sentences of explanation, as needed250 words where something a bit like magic intrudes into your book. Some sense of a dimension beyond the ordinary. I really don’t mind if what we’re seeing here is a trace – a hint – a suggestion and nothing more. Just something to suggest that dimension beyond.I’m kind of interested to see what you make of this task. I’m quite interested to think what I’d find in my own books too.That’s it from me. We’re getting our one week of English summer this week – with actual sunlight – and the kids are celebrating by running around half-naked and building barricades in the garden. Teddy told me, quite peaceably, that he needed a better weapon, and marched off (mostly naked) to find one. He came back with an eight-foot fencepost. I didn’t intervene, but am mildly worried as to what will happen next. Post yours here.Til soon.Harry