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Folks, this is the last Friday in April, which means it’s the last Friday in our self-editing month, which means that this is the last of our editing-themed emails. Outside my window, there is a chorus of sad ukelele music, accompanied by one sorrowful kettledrum and a blackbird with a nasty ear infection. The blackbird is consistently one semitone out of tune – but, you know, it has an ear infection, the poor thing. And who doesn’t love a kettledrum?And, you know what, last week’s feedback Friday asked people to ADD text to a passage from their work in progress. Unusually for me, I thought that pretty much everyone doing the task ended up improving their passage. Sometimes that meant going from good to excellent. Sometimes it meant going from OK to better. But no one’s passage got worse. Not one.But it’s also nearly always true that when people focus hard on deleting surplus text, that text gets better. Again, when we’ve done one of these exercises, there’s nearly always been a consistent improvement.And at its heart, maybe 80% of editing comes down to just these three tasks:AIMIf you don’t know what your elevator pitch is (the one that’s just for you, not for an agent or for anyone else on earth), it’s hard to check that your book is on track.So yes, I think you need to understand your pitch before you start writing anything. But inevitably the act of writing the full text will change your understanding of that pitch, so you need to check, refine and tweak it before you get too stuck into editing. Remember the boxes, remember those imps.SUBTRACTKill surplus text.Be utterly perfectionist. Two unnecessary words in a 16-word sentence is a massive issue and those words have to go. Three descriptive sentences will in most cases be at least one too many. Figure out what the best bits of that description is and make it more compact.Anything approaching a cliché should be treated in the same way as surplus text. It’s like a little bit of dead wood. A place where the reader’s eye is likely to skim forwards waiting for the narrative to engage properly again.Nearly all this skimming happens on a near-microscopic level. Two or three words here. A sentence there. An underpowered image over yonder.But those things are like plastics in the ocean or low-density cholesterols. The damn things cumulate. Slowly the poison the whole bloodstream fills / The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.Don’t let that happen to you – either the verbiage, or the cholesterols or (if you’re a porpoise) the whole sea-plastics thing.ADDThen figure out where your work is underweight. At key moments in your book, you need to linger to get your reader to feel the depth of what happens. What does your character think about what’s happened? What do they feel? How does this connect with other things on their mind (a husband, a loss, a quest)? What is the experience like of having this thing happen to this person in this particular setting?The challenge here is about layering. It’s about adding relatively small amounts of text in a way that adds whole layers of depth to the passage. We had our refresher on layering last week here.And that’s it. Aim. Subtract. Add. I’m not saying that’s all that’s involved, but it is definitely most of what’s involved.Grr. Attaboy. Attagirl.Those ukeleles are starting to annoy me.Feedback Friday: Edit, Edit, EditSo, your choice of challenge for this week:Aim: Give me your (just for you) elevator pitch plus a pretty one (for agents). Keep em short, please.Add: As for last week, give me a 200-word passage to which you have added 50 words or so. The aim is for that extra material to add richness and depth to the action which you already have on the page.Subtract: Give me two versions of the same passage, please. The first one needs to be 300+ words. The second one needs to be 250 words or fewer. And they both need to say the same thing. I’m looking for editing that produces no meaningful loss of content.As always, give me title, genre, and a word or two of explanation if needed. This exercise is always open to all, but I’ll only give feedback to you lovely Premium Members. If you happen to think ‘Odzooks and Jiminy Cricket, given that the whole membership paradise is available for just £12.50 a month (approx. US$15.50), I really would have to be duller than a country-turnip not to avail myself of all this writerly goodness,’ you can just scuttle over here and do what needs to be done.That’s it from me. Post yours here. I’m off to re-home a blackbird and murder some ukelele-ists.Til soon.Harry

This week – on Tuesday if you really have to know – I did a live event for Premium Members, in which I did some live editing of people’s work. Massive kudos to the people who put themselves up for such things; hat tip to each and every one of you.There were some lovely pieces of work, include a mental-but-joyous piece on time travel and British sarcasm and anger management and English as spoken by Czechs. It also used ‘you’ as the narrative voice, which is a very rare choice but, honestly, I think it worked. (And I’m not usually a fan of fancy footwork for its own sake.)Anyway. One theme which came out of the event is, I think, worth sharing more widely.It’s this:We’re often told, as writers, that novels should be pacy. The idea is that if a novel is ‘pacy’ readers will keep turning the pages. Indeed, that proposition is so close to universally accepted that ‘pacy page-turner’ feels almost like tautology.I don’t agree. Yes, there are pacy page-turners. James Patterson is the most prominent practitioner of this approach. Pages seldom go by without a gunshot, a kiss, an escape, an explosion.But other approaches are possible. Harlan Coben (a talented guy, who’s much funnier in real life than he chooses to be on the page) writes high-twist / high-event fiction, but he pauses much more. There’s more time for character and setting to bloom. Most commercial authors follow a template more like Coben’s than Patterson’s.In the end, people turn the pages of a book, because they’re engaged in the story. Lots of explosions generates one kind of engagement, but really caring about characters generates another. The best books combine decent story with rich characters: that is, they are not-especially-pacy page-turners.Okie-doke. That’s a long preamble, but now take a look at this. (From the Countess Elizabeth von Billigerkaese. She had a uniformed flunky cross the North Sea in a rowing boat to bring us the text; she thinks email is for poor people.)Pam realised the landlady had mistaken her pause as a compliment. ‘I used to stay here with my husband. The last time was just before he became.., before he died. I think we were in this very room. It’s certainly changed a lot. I mean the rooms didn’t have an en-suite then,’ she added.‘I’m so glad you liked it here enough to come back. Your last stay would have been when my aunt and her husband ran it. I took it over three years ago. I probably even still have the visitor’s books from when you stayed. Auntie kept everything.’‘She was so kind and a great cook. The breakfasts were what kept us coming back.’The landlady nodded. ‘She loved the business, not that she remembers much about it all now.’‘Oh, I’m sorry. Dementia?’Now this is good (and the passage gets better. Turns out the landlady believes in the spirit world and ‘communicates’ regularly with the dead. She assumes that’s why Pam is here: to reach her husband.) The piece is simple, but deft. Even from this tiny fragment, we feel Pam keen to please, to say the right thing. The landlady is played just right too. Not purple veils and rings on every finger. Just – a woman who really believes she can talk to the dead.Good stuff.But? For my money (and it’s always hard to judge these things out of context) we want a tiny bit more here. So Pam says to the landlady, ‘she was so kind and a great cook…’ That’s clearly Pam’s version of the socially necessary politeness. Oh, it was your aunt who used to run this place? You probably quite like her. I should say something positive.But that doesn’t tell us what Pam really thought, so that’s something we might want to add. And what about Pam’s dead husband? He’s in Pam’s thoughts, because she’s here, in a place where they used to stay, remembering their last visit. And the room has changed its décor. And were the breakfasts all that good anyway?Now, we can’t just fill in every detail that occurs to us – we don’t want to drown the text – but we can do something.I wrote something impromptu on Tuesday, which I can’t now recover, but it went something like this:‘I’m so glad you liked it here enough to come back. Your last stay would have been when my aunt and her husband ran it. I took it over three years ago. I probably even still have the visitor’s books from when you stayed. Auntie kept everything.’‘She was so kind and a great cook. The breakfasts were what kept us coming back.’Pam wasn’t sure that she had been a great cook. The breakfasts were abundant and full of meat, and her husband had loved them. But the only time Pam had cleared her plate, she ended up feeling rather like the new bolsters on the bed: overstuffed, yellow, inert. A slight sheen.The landlady nodded. ‘She loved the business, not that she remembers much about it all now.’That’s the addition of 50 words. That’s hardly going to capsize things, but here we have:1.      Pam’s real thoughts as opposed to her purely social ones.2.      Something connecting this dialogue back to her husband (whom she is surely thinking about.)3.      Something that connects to the physical setting.4.      And something that connects to the theme here. Those references to meat and inert bolsters put a little scent of death into this scene, without our needing to name it.Now, of course, I don’t know the book and maybe this added piece of text is quite wrong for Pam, or her husband, or for the theme, or whatever. But assume that Countess Elizabeth sits down in her Schloss and adds 50 words of text to her own specifications that picks up the four elements above – inner Pam, husband, setting, theme.Her book has just got a little less pacy, and a little bit more layered. Less shortcrust, more puff pastry.Has it got better or worse? I’m pretty diddle-dum-certain that her book’s just got better – and not least because this is a significant passage. It’s the one where the book’s Big Idea is about to be introduced.Layering matters, and you can do a lot with a little.That’s it from me.The Countess Elizabeth is annoyed with me. She handwrites her book on vellum made from calves reared on the Billigerkaese estate. Each time she makes a correction, it’s a lot of rewriting – and a lot of calves.Feedback FridayThis is self-editing month and the task this week picks up from the event on Tuesday – and this email.Please pick a passage where you sense a bit more layering is needed, and add those layers in, just as I did above. Aim to add about 50 words to a 200-word passage, but you can add 75 if you really must. You get points for lovely writing, of course, but in particular, we want to see you adding a lot of layers in as few words as possible. My 50 words above added four new layers to the text. See if you can do the same, or better.What I want is:TitleGenreA line or so of explanation, if needed.A 200-word passage with 50-75 words added in bold. The text you add should add layers of depth and richness to the passage you started with.Got that? You’ve got that.That’s it from me. Post yours here. I’m off to rescue some Bavarian calves … Til soon.Harry

A slightly niche topic this week, but an important one.On the whole, new writers think, “I have to make sales. It doesn’t matter who I’m selling to. I just need to sell as much as I can, and the more I sell, the more booksellers will love me, and the more publishers will love me, and the better my chances of being asked to write another book.”That sounds terribly logical and, in bricksandmortarland, it is logical. Sales are sales. A supermarket doesn’t know or care whether Customer X is or is not the ‘right’ customer for the book they’ve just bought. If it turns out that your gran went shopping without her glasses and accidentally bought your sweet historical romance instead of the blood and guts Viking-monster-horror stuff she normally buys – well, that’s her tough luck. She discards the book unread. The superstore has its money. No one (except you) cares much about your gran.But.Amazon.Amazon doesn’t work like that or think like that, and you need to be careful.So let’s just say that you have a sweet historical romance to sell. Very imaginatively, you have called your novel My Sweet Historical Romance. The cover depicts a maiden dressed in white lace looking shyly up at the duke who will (by chapter 33) be thoroughly smitten with her.Let’s also say that you are (I know you are) particularly kind to your gran and her circle of Viking-monster-horror-loving friends.You ask your gran if she wouldn’t mind buying your new book. She’s happy to oblige. Her friends are also happy to oblige. You get a couple of dozen sales early on, when your book is newly launched.Not bad, huh? I mean, two dozen is only two dozen, but Rome wasn’t built in a day, a journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step, and a ragbag of other assorted cliches to boot.Except Amazon has a new product to offer and it has to figure out who might want it.At first (judging from the cover, the title, your book blurb and all that), Amazon guessed that your book would mostly appeal to people who liked sweet historical romance and shyly smiling maidens and all that. But then a wave of Viking-monster types charged in and bought the book. So Amazon tries offering it to other people with those reading preferences.At that point, one of two things happens.Either, loads of people are shown the book and don’t buy it, so Amazon thinks the book must be rubbish and stops marketing it.Or, people do buy the book, find it different to what they were expecting and to what they usually read, and stop reading the book partway through – and perhaps leave lacklustre reviews to boot.These outcomes are both catastrophic.The Amazon-stops-marketing-your-book option is bad, because you’ve just lost the services of the biggest and most sophisticated book retailer on the planet.The lacklustre-response option is equally bad, however, because Amazon knows (via its huge Kindle-reading base) how much of an ebook gets read. If your book doesn’t get finished, Amazon will prefer to market what it sees as better products. Further, those lacklustre reviews are going to be a stone around your neck for years to come.Either way, getting the wrong readers into your fiction early on will cause lasting (and very hard-to-reverse) damage to your sales.If all this sounds a tad theoretical, then stay tuned.Plenty of (mostly indie) authors aim to make money by using ads to direct traffic from Facebook to Amazon. What could possibly go wrong, right? For relatively small amounts of money, you can fish in the largest pool of users in the world and send them to your very own page in the world’s largest bookstore.But unless you are careful to get Facebook sending the right readers your way, you’re going to end up sending the wrong ones. And, OK, you probably won’t find that you are sending Viking-monster-horror readers to your My Sweet Historical Romance bookpage, but you might find that you are sending (say) lovers of billionaire romance to your book page. Or lovers of raunchy romance. Or other readers in nearby but definitely different niches.Any such misalignment of traffic and product will be just as injurious as the Viking-monster-horror example I started with.You’ll get weak conversions, poor reviews and people failing to finish your book.This email was sparked by a message from Dave Chesson at Kindlepreneur, who was running a profitable Amazon ad. (Or Faceboook ad; I forget which.) At one level, the arithmetic was simple. Chesson was spending X. The ads were generating X-plus-something. Everyone a winner, right?Except that the ad was badly targeted. He noticed he was getting poor reviews – and reviews from people who clearly were not his target reader.It’s not that easy creating an instantly profitable ad, but Chesson had done it. Yet he saw that the ad was doing him long-term injury, so he killed the ad. Protecting the quality of the book’s traffic was more important than making a few dollars of profit in those early days and weeks.He was absolutely right to take that step. I’d have done the exact same thing.Now, to be fair, there’s a big qualification here – namely, that once you have a decent sales record with Amazon, the beast will essentially know your readership and a few left-field readers won’t especially impair its ability or willingness to market your book. After all, readers are eclectic, and Amazon knows perfectly well that sometimes Viking-horror readers do also like a shyly smiling maiden or two. (And not just to sacrifice.)But you have to approach the Amazon sales process in order, always. Train the beast carefully. Then feed it.You’ll know when you have it nicely trained: your “customers who read this book also read” list will look like a nice collection of comparable authors. The sponsored ads (“Based on your recent views”) will also look, for the most part, like a logical collection.This advice comes in large flaming letters for indie authors. For trad authors, who just don’t have much control over what their publishers choose to do, it makes less difference. But even there, just remember that bad sales are worse than no sales, especially early on.Here endeth the lesson.Feedback FridayI’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.)That’s it from me. Post yours here. I’m off to slay a sea-monster and plunder a couple of Lincolnshire villages.Til soon.Harry

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

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

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

Today I am wearing:Gleaming leather boots, in blackSilk pantaloons in duck-egg blueA ruffled shirt worn open to mid-chestA tattoo, only somewhat visible, of a humming-bird in flightA wide leather belt worn with a pistol and a scabbard shaped for an estoc-style stabbing swordA black hat so wide of brim that passers-by are frequently startled, as though by an unexpected eclipse.None of this is relevant, however. I’m talking about marketing.Specifically (and this is now about number 5 or 6 in my ‘walking the talk’ series of emails), I’m talking about how I’m intending to market The House At The End Of The World.We should start, I suppose, by clearing up the misconception that selling self-published work involves a huge amount of self-promotion on social media.I do as it happens have accounts on both Facebook and Twitter (though not Insta and not, yeugh, TikTok.) But I haven’t posted on either place for years and have no intention of breaking that godly habit now.No. Marketing a book is about four things:1. A very good book2. A very clear elevator pitch3. A set of marketing assets (notably book cover, title and blurb) which honour that pitch, while at the same time recognising their own specific role in thingsAnd then:4. Getting traffic to the relevant Amazon book page.That’s it. That’s the whole deal. Everything else is essentially footnotes.If yelling about myself on Twitter worked, I might have a go at doing that. But it doesn’t. I have a friend who had a tweet go viral – a million plus views – while he had a pinned post beseeching people to buy a very well-reviewed ebook, then on special offer at $0.99.A million views. A special offer. And …He sold ‘low single digits’ extra books. Maybe he sold none at all, in fact, as the possible bump in sales was so small it could have been just noise. In short: nonsense on Twitter just doesn’t work.So, I need to get traffic to Amazon. Social media won’t do that. What will?Here’s what I’m planning to use:1. Email. This is still the bedrock of every indie author’s marketing. It’s still by far the most powerful and controllable tool that exists anywhere.2. Promo sites. There are book promo sites which tell their users (by email) about hot new offers. I’m planning to grab a bit of that loveliness.3. Facebook ads. These aren’t the highest converting ads in the world (people go to Amazon, not Facebook, if they want to buy a book), but the ads are easy to build and the potential traffic is more or less infinite.And that’s it.What’s more, I’m not going to spend much time with this stuff. I mean, yes, there’s some prep needed to get ready, but my actual marketing campaign will last a week, then end. I’ll probably aim to do a Bookbub promo later in the year (across the whole series) but the actual launch campaign will last a total of seven days.That may sound weirdly short to you, but:1. The most powerful book-marketing system in the world is Amazon. Your job is not build an alternative to Amazon. Your job, as author-marketer, is to prompt Amazon into doing what it’s best at: marketing books, and yours in particular.2. Amazon’s marketing bots get going when they see a title achieve sales from outside of Amazon’s system.3. But those bots don’t love one-off sales spikes. They love steady and (ideally) growing traffic over 4-7 days.4. If you create that kind of sales curve for Amazon, Amazon will take over and do the rest itself.Now, it’s true that sales success on Amazon is a fairly short-lived affair, but that short-livedness is deeply embedded in its system. Short of being an EL James, your book just will have a relatively short time in the sun. That doesn’t matter. The secret of successful burst-marketing on Amazon is: Do everything you can to boost sales (in a steady way) in that first week, end up with high visibility all across Amazon’s system, then enjoy the profits as you gently float down the sales rankings.Indeed, it’s perfectly OK if my first-week marketing loses money. I hope it won’t, but I really won’t mind at all if it does.That sounds like a bad approach to take, but hear me out.The traditional way of figuring out whether an ad makes money or not is this:1. Figure out the cost of 100 people clicking on an ad;2. Figure out the number of those people who end up buying the book (probably 5 or so);3. Figure out the revenue you earn from those 5 or so people;4. Compare those revenues to the cost of achieving them.That number is quite likely going to show a loss.But …Some of the people who buy my latest release will fall in love with the character and the series and dive back through the six previous novels. That’s extra money for me.And how much visibility I’m getting on Amazon has to do with my overall level of sales. So if I artificially boost those sales via Facebook, my overall visibility will improve, which will bring me a host of organic (no cost) sales that I wouldn’t otherwise have had.And of course, the higher I manage to drive sales during that launch phase, the longer and richer the post-launch sales trajectory will be.And my books are enrolled in Kindle Unlimited, so it’s not just sales that will come my way but income from KENP page reads.All these things will definitely earn me money. So that early burst-marketing can’t sensibly be measured simply by the amount of cash it makes during the week of launch itself. And, look, I should also be clear that if you’re a newbie, your mileage will vary. I already have a good footprint on Amazon and Amazon knows exactly who my readers are. It just takes time – and books – to build that footprint. There are no shortcuts.And the really glorious thing about this plan of mine?Burst marketing is intense, but it’s short. I don’t have to worry about finding evergreen ways to make money. I’ll hardly even bother (unless I happen to find a miraculously successful ad.) I’ll just blitz for a week, then let everything drop. If I secure a Bookbub promo later in the year, I’ll run the whole cycle again then. But two weeks of marketing effort in a year? That seems more than acceptable to me. Honestly, it’s harder work being trad published: you’ll spend more time interacting with your publisher than I’ll spend this year on marketing.If you’re interested, we’ll do a somewhat deeper dive into the art of the Facebook ad in a week or two.FEEDBACK FRIDAY | FEEDBACK FRIDAYThis week, we love our Premium Members so much, they’re going to have Feedback Friday not once but twiceWrite with Jericho / Week #9 / Self-EditingHomework link here (Premium members only.)And tis with a sob and a sigh and a hi-de-hi that we come to the end of our Write with Jericho course. (The good news: we have fab things starting next week, and we’ll keep going with the goodness all year.)The challenge here is simple-bimple. We want the first 250 words of your novel, beautifully self-edited, and wearing its best frock.Specifically, please, I want:TitleBrief genreYour elevator pitch: either the one you did before or a polished up version of thatThe first 250 words (ish) from your manuscriptReflections or Questions. I’d love to get any feedback from this course. What worked? What didn’t? What did you get from it? We’re going to run an even bigger and more in-depth course later in the year and we’d love to learn from your experience of this one.Share yours here as a ‘New Discussion’ and include a sensible title, eg: ‘Title of your WIP, Genre of your WIP’.Getting Published / Week #1 / Query LettersThis week, please take a look Becca’s Query Letter Workshop (here; Premium Members only) and then post your query letter here for review.As always, the best feedback comes from you all, so please don’t just post your query letter – be generous in offering others constructive advice. He or she who giveth is also he or she who receiveth. Becca Day (our marketing queen, but also a published author) will be offering her feedback too.And, since I’ve disclosed what outfit I’m currently wearing, I think I should tell you that Becca is equally glam. She’s wearing a floor-length dress adorned with a mass of faux ostrich feathers in brilliant white. She looks amazing, but we have a major problem with static electricity and are working to unstick her from the ceiling right now.Til soon.Harry

Today, I put on a pair of deerskin breeches, a red coat with tails, and a kepi, adorned with a fistful of white ostrich feathers. Thus adorned, I present:An extremely short, but beautiful emailOn Cover Design –This is the fourth email in a loosely bundled series on Walking the Talk: an attempt to show you guys how the things I yap on about in these emails actually translates into the decisions I make as a writer.So: cover design.In my boxes, owl & imp email on elevator pitches, I wrote:“The cover quote and the book blurb and the cover design and the query letter and all those things: they are the daughters of your elevator pitch. They spring from it, but they are not it.”That’s true. The elevator pitch is the magic juice which underlies everything else. Literally every time your manuscript touches the world, the elevator pitch should inform what that touch looks like.But the pitch doesn’t necessarily have to dominate – it just has to play its part.Cover design is probably the single clearest illustration of this. Yes, a cover design can’t be at war with the elevator pitch … but the first job of the cover design is to get someone to explore the book.Cover designers (understandably) always want authors to look at the full, 4 quadrillion megabyte version of their cover image, and ideally on a 96” screen. That, for sure, is the best way to admire the cover designer’s art. But in practice, the most significant role of the cover design is as a thumbnail on an Amazon selection screen.At that stage, the thumbnail’s job is mostly: “Induce someone to click through to the book page itself.”You can’t completely ignore the elevator pitch: if you stick a sign in your shop window saying “Brilliant new summer dresses at 75% off”, there better blooming well be some summer dresses inside the shop when people walk in.Same thing with the cover design. There needs to be reasonable continuity between the promise made by the thumbnail and the more detailed view offered by the book details page.But if you had to rank the order of priorities here, it’s something like this:#1 Goal Attract readers in your genre(ie: get the click)#2 Goal Honour your elevator pitchBoth goals matter, but the first is more important.I write gritty crime – so my genre is something like Celtic noir / police procedural. Because my book is #7 in a series, a lot of the design decisions are already set. That said, my elevator pitch (covering both the book and the series) is something like this:Homicide detectiveUsed to think she was dead (Cotards Syndrome)Murder investigationSecure psychiatric hospital50 special forces veterans as inmatesI want a cover design to (a) fit in with the other covers, (b) attract readers in my genre, (c) be consistent with the promise that will be made on the book details page itself.And …?You can see the results here:https://harrybingham.com/fiona-griffiths-book-7-cover-decision/You like? You not like? Do let me know.Oh yes, and an interesting issue came up with my designer.Actual hard-copy printing is done using a four-colour system: CMYK, which comprises cyan, magenta, yellow and key, meaning black. What you see on screen is RGB-based, namely a mix of red, green and blue.My designer couldn’t get the “pop” in CMYK that he could get in RGB: the colour was more muted. That said, he thought that maybe the more muted colour looked classier overall, more stylish. He thought maybe we should tone down the ebook / RGB version of the cover.And …?Viewed as a pure design matter, he was probably right. (He usually is.) But remember that selection screen, where all you have is a thumbnail. I didn’t want muted, I wanted the pop, so we went for the zingier version. The first job of that cover is to secure the click.Again, you can see the book cover choices we made, and a couple we discarded on this page. Let me know what you think.Feedback FridayWrite with Jericho Week #8 / Show Don’t TellIf you’ve registered for the course, you’ll already have received the course material.If you’re a Premium Member and you haven’t registered, you can find the course material here. You can register yourself, for free, to get the same material by email.If you’re not a Premium Member, and want to be, here’s what you need to do next.Whether or not you are a Premium Member, I’d love you to participate.Here’s what I’m after:TitleGenreA passage of 250 words. Take any scene from your work, and convert it into a screenplay. No interior monologue. Nothing in the script that you couldn’t film.Then give your own feedback on the scene. What has it gained? What has it lost? What (if anything) did you learn from the exercise?That’s it from me. Share yours here as a ‘New Discussion’ and include a sensible title, eg: ‘Show Don’t Tell, Title of your WIP, Genre of your WIP’. Also, if you’re looking for some top tips to help you search Townhouse better, take a look at this thread.Til soon.Harry

An odd topic this time: the author’s note. I’m currently writing a note for The House at the End of the World and realised that it’s a topic almost no one ever addresses.That note is not something that anyone ever seems to care about. It seems less consequential than a synopsis or query letter – and, in any event, much easier to write.But you have to think about what you want from writing and how you expect to achieve it.Maybe, you’d love to get one book accepted by one publisher and that’s it. Perhaps you don’t want or expect to make a living from writing. You may not want or expect to be writing a book a year. Perhaps the idea of marketing your own work fills you with horror.And that’s truly fine with me. Those aims are perfectly honourable and your life is your life. If you’re one of those people, then this email is not especially aimed at you.For everyone else – everyone, that is, who wants something like a career from writing – then the author’s note matters.It matters for two reasons.First, because it gives you a chance to make a personal connection with the reader. Your text itself is your product. People want (let’s say) a crime novel. So they go to Amazon or a physical bookstore and buy a crime novel. A huge proportion of novels are never finished by their readers (especially literary fiction, ahem.) But that means, if someone gets all the way to the end of your novel, then chooses to engage with your author’s note, they’re well on the way to being fans.What do you want to do at that point?If you were at a physical book signing, and someone asked you to sign a book, telling you that they were a fan, what would you do? Would you scribble your name on the inside cover, tersely hand the book over, and yell ‘Next’? Or would you engage in a couple of minutes’ conversation? Would you seek to cement the relationship which the book itself has started?Of course, you choose the latter option. I mean, if you have the sentience of an amoeba, then of course you do.You do that because you are a naturally nice person, of course. But you also do it, because you are more likely to get a repeat purchase from someone who has bonded with you, no matter how glancingly.The author’s note is a place to create that bond.It’s not as good as face to face, of course, but one note can reach tens of thousands of readers. It’s a place to be personal, revelatory, funny, honest. It’s a place which can show your personality, shorn of the constraints placed on you by fiction.If you do it right, people don’t just think, ‘Oh, today I finished a great crime novel.’ They think, ‘Oh, today I finished a great crime novel and I feel that I made some little personal connection with the person who wrote it.’ That’s the start of a relationship which leads to multiple purchases over multiple years.That’s the first reason.The second reason is that you can parlay that moment of connection into an actual marketing tool.Every serious author today ought to run their own email list. It can be very cheap and easy to set up. (Use MailerLite if you’re starting out, Convertkit if you’re more ambitious and more techie.)And your author’s note can say, “Hey, folks, if you liked this novel, then join my Readers’ Club.” Best practice is to offer a little gift in exchange for any sign ups. Roughly speaking: if you give me your email address, I give you a story that’s free and exclusive to club members.Remember that in ebooks, that invitation – join my Readers’ Club – can use a clickable link to take readers straight through to your sign-up page.And once you have readers on your mailing list, you can stay in touch. You can tell them jokes, share news and enthusiasms … and, of course, announce book launches.I won’t get into the details here, but suffice to say a small but well-run email list can generate sales well above the size of the list itself.There are multiple ways to seed your email list with names, but no question at all, the very best technique comes from harvesting enthusiastic readers who have just finished and loved your book. Those are, pretty much by definition, the very best emails to have.So use that note.Don’t be crass. Be seductive, not pushy. Be authentic … but maybe, be your best-authentic self, not your woke-up-on-a-rainy-Friday-with-a-headache authentic self. And ask for readers’ email addresses.They’ll be happy to give them to you.Feedback FridayWrite with Jericho Week #7 / Point of ViewIf you’ve registered for the course, you’ll already have received the course material.If you’re a Premium Member and you haven’t registered, you can find the course material here. You can register yourself, for free, to get the same material by email.If you’re not a Premium Member, and want to be, here’s what you need to do next.Whether or not you are a Premium Member, I’d love you to participate.This week, the task is important … but optional. It’s really focused on anyone who’s not sure about their POV choice. If you’re happily first, or third, person, then just go with that. There’s no especial reason to rethink it. I’ve never once thought about writing my Fiona novels in anything other than first person, and the result is about 800,000 words all written, first person and present tense, from the inside of Fiona’s head.But, OK, plenty of people are worried about the decisions they’ve made, and this exercise is for them. Here’s what I’m after:TitleGenreA line or two of explanation, if neededA passage of 300 words or so. Choose a passage where you’re not too certain what Point of View feels right. Pop that passage (max 300 words) on Townhouse and say what your issues are. Let’s see what others think. And if you want to offer the same passage with two different POVs, then please do. Just make it clear what you think your preferred version is!That’s it from me. Share yours here as a ‘New Discussion’ and include a sensible title, eg: ‘POV task, Option X, [Title of your WIP]’. Also, if you’re looking for some top tips to help you search Townhouse better, take a look at this thread.Til soon.Harry

For Feedback Friday last week, we wanted to look at whether your characters are multi-dimensional.We asked: does your character have physical sensations? Memories? Characteristic patterns of behaviour / speech / thought? Do they have real-seeming interactions with other characters, where those interactions honour the individuality of each person? Does the character have a sense of humour? And so on.It’s a hard task, actually, because it would never make sense to cram every character dimension into a single 300-word passage. Quite the opposite. Those multiple dimensions are there to be called on as and when the story demands. If the story doesn’t demand (say) the character remembering stuff from their childhood, it would make no sense to try and insert some Interesting Recollection, just for the sake of it. My forthcoming novel might have, I don’t know, perhaps a dozen significant memories in the space of 10,000 words, and that feels plenty.Also: although we tend to separate things like Character and Settings for the purposes of teaching people how to write, those things should always bleed into each other.If you’re seeing an autumn wood through the eyes of your character, the reader should experience both wood and character. It’s always X’s experience of Y that the reader wants to encounter.So – and again as part of my ‘walking the talk’ series of emails, I thought I’d take an extended chunk of my forthcoming book and talk through how I personally handle these challenges.The point here isn’t so much “I’m a really great writer so you should do these things exactly like me.” It’s more that I feel queasy about lecturing about things if I don’t show some ability to exhibit those things in my own work – and, at the very least, I ought to try to do those things.So here we go. Here’s a chunk from towards the end of The House at The End of the World. Fiona, a detective and my lead character, is walking in the grounds of a secure psychiatric hospital with one of its patients – Jared Coad, a former Special Forces soldier with severe mental health challenges. The situation she’s in should be acutely dangerous, but she doesn’t quite feel it that way. The passage follows, in italics. My comments are in square brackets and bold.You might want to read the italicised passage first, before coming back to the comments.There’s an outcrop of limestone at the tip of the headland. Glittering and pink. Orange lichen. Moss. A hardy little mat of stonecrop, a few whitish flowers still holding on.[It looks like this paragraph is pure description, albeit voiced in Fiona’s characteristically terse manner. And, OK, it mostly is pure description. But when you really look at it, the description echoes the title and the elevator pitch. The “tip of the headland” – that is, the very outermost point of this strip of land, which itself lies ‘at the end of the world’. And that thing about the hardy mat of stonecrop and its flowers is an observation about survival – about life and death. That is the deepest theme of the entire series.]We scramble up the rock. I hardly need assistance, but Coad offers a hand and I take it. He lifts me with that startling physical ease. A power that finds it hard to calibrate itself against my sub-fifty kilo weight.[Coad is a very strong, fit man, so this passage characterises him a bit, but it also brings Fiona’s own physical being into play. She’s a small woman. He’s a strong man. This tiny bit of action observes those physical facts – and does so in a way that’s totally consistent with the moment.]‘I served with a girl once,’ Coad tells me. ‘Special Reconnaissance Regiment. Part of the set-up in Hereford. She was good. Very fit. Didn’t take any shit.’I wait for anything further, but nothing more comes. But perhaps that’s all Coad needs by way of summary. Good. Fit. Takes no shit.I score two out of three, then.[This is Coad’s way of talking – and Fiona’s way of not talking. It also gives voice to Fiona’s interior observation – and the reader will know Fiona well enough to know that she is good, doesn’t take any shit, but isn’t especially fit.]‘Have you thought what you’ll do?’ I ask.‘What? After you fuck off to whatever you fuck off to next?’‘Yes.’‘Yes. As in: yes, I’ve thought about it.’‘And?’‘Fuck knows. Staying here was never in the plan.’‘No.’[In fact, what happens is that Jared Coad decides to swim out to sea and drown himself. This bit of dialogue is setting up that future. But again, I hope the dialogue feels realistic, or realistic enough, and has the personality of the two participants in it: Coad’s sweary military directness, Fiona’s intelligent but economical language.]We look at the sea for a while. There are rolls of wire out here too, but we’re on the highest point of the headland here and the wire lies below us, not out of sight exactly, but almost. Enough that it doesn’t have to bother us.We watch for a while. The gulls. The waves. The rolling print of the wind on the water. Stippling squalls that turn the sea’s smooth watercolour into something jumpy and agitated, like the surface has been rubbed with gorse.[Jumpy and agitated? We are approaching the climax of the book, so the sea here is providing a visual image for the mood of the story itself. And there’s something else here too. This bit of land is beautiful – a lovely part of coastal Wales – but is also, effectively, a prison with more-than-Supermax levels of security. Is it hell or heaven? It hovers between the two, but here, the wire is out of sight which means that the heaven version tends to dominate. Again, there are shades of the ‘house of the end of the world’ theme here, and the ambiguity in what the end of the world might signify.]Coad: ‘You know, you think, if you could get out, you could just stay away from trouble. You know, like you live on some remote Scottish island or something like that. You’d be OK.’I nod. ‘Yes. I can see why you’d think that.’‘But then, you know, you’d meet other people. Someone would do something to piss you off. Not even a big thing. Just, you know, something.’I think of Rashford and Edwards. Or the two builders he assaulted. The guy with his head in a cement mixer. The other tossed into a roll of razor wire.I say, ‘Yes. Something would come along.’‘So …’He says nothing further, and I nudge him.[More dialogue. Coad is worried that he wouldn’t be safe out in the world, so, for him, leaving this hospital is probably not an option. Fiona agrees with that opinion, but here a little fragment of memory comes into play – remembering the violent incidents that brought him here as patient – and her here as detective.]‘I should get going. It’s almost twenty to seven.’‘OK. Yeah. OK.’We walk back to the hospital, taking a looping route to stay clear of the admin wing, the view from their windows. Coad says that before seven o’clock, there won’t be any staff activity on A-Wing itself. That we’ll be in the clear.That’s all very well, but as we arrive back, the patients are still at their windows. There’s more clapping. Also, a few mimed suggestions as to what we might have been doing out on the headland.[The other patients – also psychiatric inpatients with a history of violence – can observe Fiona and Coad on their walk. The ‘mimed suggestions’ are obviously crude and, given the men involved, probably very crude. Fiona is conscious of the sexual chemistry between her and Coad but she’s also a woman with an appropriate sense of her personal boundaries. That phrase picks through those issues as well as she can – but in doing so acknowledges herself as a sexual being – yet another dimension of character.]Coad says, ‘Don’t worry about those arseholes. I’ll deal with them.’‘Does “deal with them” mean “beat them senseless”? If so, maybe you could just leave it.’‘Sure?’ he asks, as though querying a takeaway order.‘Yes, Jared. I’m sure.’‘OK. That’s good. Swinford’s a big fucker.’That makes me laugh. I’m not an unqualified admirer of all of Coad’s choices, but he has a basic integrity that I like.I say, ‘Oh, I bet you could take him.’[There’s some authority here from Fiona – authority and wisdom. She understands what ‘deal with them’ is likely to mean and steps in to avert some unnecessary acts of violence. Also: we see Fiona here (and Coad) as moral creatures: each operating according to their own code of integrity. The moral dimension is pretty much essential to any deeply considered character.]I butt his upper arm with my head and reach for his hand. We walk hand in hand to the hospital. I can’t quite look directly, but I have this sense that Coad is going red. But he clearly likes it. He holds my hand in a grip that’s too firm, but also gentle. We feel like a boy and a girl on their first date. Not a modern one, even. Like some pair from the fifties, where he’s come round to fetch me from my parents, calling my father sir, and bringing a little gift for my mother. I’m the same. I’m in my flared skirt with a short-sleeved blouse and bobby socks and hairband. I am a thing of pastel prettiness and line-dried cotton, and Coad is a young man of seventeen, with short hair, meticulously gelled, and a smart jacket, and an ironed shirt, and no injuries, no damage, no war, no history.[This is pure fantasy, of course. Coad is about to die and Fiona’s life too is about to be in serious danger. Also, Fiona is about as far from a thing of ‘pastel prettiness and line-dried cotton’ as you can get. She knows that perfectly well too. So what is this passage about? I think it has to do with a yearning for a simplicity greater than either of these two can manage. And yes, there’s some sexual desire going on here, but the desire for a world without violent complication is even more prominent than that. It’s like the whole ‘house at the end of the world’ idea has been scrubbed away and replaced by this lovely – and utterly impossible – fantasy.]I’m acutely self-conscious, saved only by the belief that he’s the same. He squeezes my hand in an on-off-on rhythm that’s meant for my reassurance, I think, but is also for his.We march stiffly to the door at the base of A-Wing. He opens the door – with his keycard, of course. Except for my presence here, this is all within normal hospital limits. He holds it open for me, a good boy, attentive and courteous.I go through. My card, the regular one, permits me to exit any red-zoned area. It gives me access to my staircase and my tower and my room and my safety.I am on the threshold of my parents’ house again. There are moths fluttering in the porchlight. My hair-gelled beau has delivered me safely home and I have a decision to make.I stand on tip-toe and kiss Coad on the mouth, again. Privately, just for him, no one watching, no public display.More than a sister. Less than a lover.As I pull away, I give him real eye contact too. His grey-blue eyes fix on mine. The intensity is there. The troubled quality. But something else too. A softness. Gratitude maybe, although I have as many reasons to be grateful to him.[And we’ve returned to the world of the hospital with its keycards and red-zones and all of that. The kiss seals some kind of deal that they have. Some kind of sexual/romantic agreement, but also an agreement that has to do with the remaining action in the story. The gratitude they feel to each other is another character dimension in operation.]Doing this exercise surprised me, in fact. I was startled to see how deeply and repetitively the themes of the novel emerge in the text: that hardy stonecrop and its flowers that just about manage to survive. I didn’t put that in because I was thinking about my elevator pitch. But I’ve so deeply absorbed and understood that pitch, it just pops up whether I’m thinking about it or not. That’s nice to see.And when I started this, I thought, “Oh gosh, I’m not going to find that many character dimensions in any one bit of text.” But this chunk (about 900 words in total) has physical observation of the landscape, thinks of Fiona as a physical being, as a sexual one, as one with memories and gratitude and humour and authority and morality and desire. Now, OK, this is an important passage between the book’s two most important characters. It needed to be fairly rich. Other passages of equal length might be significantly less rich in dimensionality.But that, roughly, is what character multi-dimensionality should look like. Not something to be forced into the text, but something that arises naturally when you write well and know your character intimately.Feedback FridayWrite with Jericho Week #6 / DialogueIf you’ve registered for the course, you’ll already have received the course material.If you’re a Premium Member and you haven’t registered, you can find the course material here. You can register yourself, for free, to get the same material by email.If you’re not a Premium Member, and want to be, here’s what you need to do next.Whether or not you are a Premium Member, I’d love you to participate.Whether or not you are a Premium Member, I’d love you to participate.A really brilliant task this week.I want you to choose a scene (max 300 words) between two different characters in which each wants something from the other and are trying to get what they want (eg: money, information, intimacy, etc).The key here will be not just the conflict, but some sense of subtext heaving under the surface. I’m really looking forward to seeing what you come up with.I want:TitleGenreA line or two of context for the scene & charactersThe scene itself, max 300 wordsThat’s it from me. Share yours here as a ‘New Discussion’ and include a sensible title, eg: ‘Voice Task, Option X, [Title of your WIP]’. Also, if you’re looking for some top tips to help you search Townhouse better, take a look at this thread.Til soon.Harry

As you know, I’m a writer – or I used to be.But a little while back, I had the idea of making the Writers Workshop (as we once were) into a bigger, sleeker, better Jericho Writers. I wouldn’t say that the idea was a bad one exactly – I’m fantastically proud of the work we do – but it had more of an impact on my writing than I had expected.Now, and thanks entirely to the incredible team we have at the top of JW, I’m in a position to step back and write some books.And that means that …Finally ….I’m getting very close to …The release of a new Fiona Griffiths book: THE HOUSE AT THE END OF THE WORLD.Given how long it’s been since the last Fiona book graced the shelves, that feels like a very big ta-daa. It will be the seventh book in the series – and the penultimate one. The next book will be the big, and series finale when all the storylines from the series will finally come together.I’ve adored writing these books and, if it’s not nuts to say so, I’ve adored knowing Fiona. She and I have enjoyed our time together.It’s great to be back in the saddle, but I’m also pleased because I’ve never much relished the sight of writing tutors who don’t write. If I offered to teach you carpentry, you’d rightly want to see a table I’d made. If my table was rubbish, you’d draw the obvious conclusion.So, in the run-up to publication, I want to talk you through different aspects of how I conceived the writing and publishing of the book. The point here is simply to connect these (somewhat theoretical) Friday emails to the (intensely practical) topic of how I actually approach my writing.We’ll start this week at the very beginning: with the book’s basic elevator pitch. (If you want to remind yourself about my thoughts on that topic, this email is probably the best place to start. It’s the one involving 11 boxes, 2 imps and an owl.)OK, so what’s the pitch?Because this is a series novel, it has two pitches: one for the book and one for the series as a whole.As you know, the pitch for the series is something like:A homicide detective is in recovery from Cotards Syndrome – a genuine condition, in which sufferers believe themselves to be dead.If that feels too baggy, the pitch works fine like this:A murder detective who used to think she was dead.I probably prefer the longer version: it’s important that these are not fantasy novels and have no speculative elements. But hey ho, you can choose. I don’t care.The past novels in this series have sold well and have an established fanbase, so a lot of those readers will buy this book just because they trust me to deliver. But each time I release a new title, completely new readers enter the series, decide they like the book they’ve just read, then start back at the beginning.In other words: the pitch for the new book matters too. And that pitch goes something like this:A Fiona Griffiths murder mystery set in a secure psychiatric hospital, populated by special forces veterans.If you put the two pitches together, you get something like this:Murder detective, who used to think she was dead, has to solve a crime originating in a secure psychiatric hospital, populated by special forces veterans.That’s 25 words long, which is longer than I generally recommend for pitches, but seems acceptable, given that this pitch is explaining both the book and the series.As you know, I also don’t mind pitches that just collapse into a list of ingredients. With this book, that list runs roughly like this:Homicide detectiveUsed to think she was dead (Cotards)Murder investigationSecure psychiatric hospital50 special forces veterans as inmatesYou only need to assemble that list to notice two things. (1) A secure psychiatric hospital is likely to pose specific and extreme challenges to someone with Fiona’s mental history. (2) The special forces guys are probably quite dangerous and probably don’t much want to be locked up for the rest of their lives.I hope that you look at that setup and want to know more. And that’s the point of any pitch, right? To prompt further investigation. If you’re a fan of crime novels, I’d hope that this pitch piques your curiosity. If it has, it’s worked.The Daughters of the PitchI’ve written before that the elevator pitch is for the author, and only the author. That’s why my own pitches are notably rough and ready. I don’t really come up with the same formulation any two times in a row. I don’t bother to come up with a line that could sit comfortably on a book cover or a movie poster.But the pitch has many daughters, and those daughters all need to honour their parentage.The daughters that any author needs to consider include:TitleBook coverFront cover quotes / shout linesBack jacket blurb / Amazon book descriptionBack jacket quotesQuery letter [if you’re not agented and want to be]Other marketing material: social media content, social media ads, email content, and so onAll those things need to line up behind the pitch. They can’t be inconsistent with it, and they should do what they can to broadcast it (while at the same time, performing their own specific role.)If all this sounds a little vague – well, that vagueness is deliberate.Take my title, THE HOUSE AT THE END OF THE WORLD.Clearly, no title can cram an entire ingredients list into a few words. If I had to try, it would be something like CRAZY COP IN PSYCHO HOSPITAL DRAMA. That ticks more boxes, but it’s a terrible title. Remember that a title needs to do several things:Work well with the chosen cover design,Be suitable for the genre – that is, appealing to the right group of readers,Honour the elevator pitch.None of those three things are optional. If you choose a genre-unsuitable title, for example, your book just won’t sell. That’s not a requirement where you can compromise, even a bit.Likewise, the title really has to work with a cover design: two elements that work in tandem. It’s not uncommon for a cover designer to come up with a brilliant cover, which then prompts a change in the title. This has happened, in fact, with several of my books.For all these reasons, a title need only hint at the elevator pitch. It’s part of a “first impressions” package, where cover design is the other absolutely key ingredient. (I’ll talk cover design for this book in a later email.)With this book, I hesitated over the title and, ultimately, was torn between whether to use the word HOSPITAL or HOUSE. I went with the latter, largely because the word ‘hospital’ is arguably misleading. The word conjures up normal hospitals, not a place heaving with hyper-fit special forces soldiers. Also, the word ‘hospital’ somehow pulls the book away from the crime genre: they’re places of healing, not multiple murder, and I want a sense of murder to lie heavy over the book.Obviously, though, it’s the final phrase which does the work. Those words – THE END OF THE WORLD – allude to a lot of things:To the hospital’s remote location,To murder: for a number of the characters in the book, this story really does bring about the end of the worldTo Fiona: for her, this case does almost spell the end of the world, because of her mental vulnerability,To the situation of the special forces veterans themselves: when they were sent to this place, and with no prospect of release, their lives were effectively ended.Now obviously, the words in the title alone don’t convey all that. But there’s a limit to what any title can ever do. And a pitch, remember, is there to prompt further investigation. Nothing more. So if someone is intrigued by the book cover and title combo, all we want them to do next is explore the blurb. That’s where the pitch can start to expand from mere hints to a fuller presentation of what the book offers.More of all that in another email.Oh yes, and I did just want to say that the whole Write with Jericho / Feedback Friday thing is being intensely brilliant. We launched the current course as a bit of an experiment but the level of engagement has been just fabulous. We’re going to do more and go bigger. If you’re already a Premium Member, then do get stuck in. If not – well, do think about joining us for our next big course.Feedback FridayWrite with Jericho Week #5 / CharacterIf you’ve registered for the course, you’ll already have received the course material.If you’re a Premium Member and you haven’t registered, you can find the course material here. You can register yourself, for free, to get the same material by email.If you’re not a Premium Member, and want to be, here’s what you need to do next.Whether or not you are a Premium Member, I’d love you to participate.A difficult one this, just because character is something that expands and finds its range over the course of 100,000 words. Trying to find a passage of c. 350 words that does everything in one place is definitely a bit artificial. I’m a decent character-writer myself but would struggle to find a single passage that displayed everything in one place.That said, here’s the exercise.Choose a passage of (absolutely max) 350 words, which shows off your character as being fully alive. Some of the questions we’re interested in is whether your character feels:Distinctive (not clichéd)?Lifelike?Multidimensional?In a nest of relationships?In the physical world?Has a full set of emotions?Coherent?Surprising?Choose ONE passage, to a maximum of 350 words, and share it. Please also include:TitleGenreBrief context for your passage, including why you like it and what your doubts might be.Remember always to give feedback on other people’s work while you are there. Can I ask that you offer at least 5 comments on other people’s work? That way, you put out good juju and good juju will surely seek you out.That’s it from me. Share yours here as a ‘New Discussion’ and include a sensible title, eg: ‘Voice Task, Option X, [Title of your WIP]’. Also, if you’re looking for some top tips to help you search Townhouse better, take a look at this thread.Til soon.Harry

Here’s a challenge that we all experience, a challenge that in some ways grows larger the more imaginative and effortless you are.The challenge is simply this: what do you set down as your next sentence? Of the thousand and more things you could say, what do you need to say now?So let’s say for example that you have an army veteran teaming up with a homeless guy to buy a lottery ticket. They discover that the ticket is worth £1,000,000. (This example, as so much else in these emails now, is inspired by something from Feedback Friday. That said, the way I develop the example here is all mine, for the sake of illustration only.)Let’s say that the setting is on the street outside the shop where they bought the ticket and that your point of view character is Ed, the army veteran. How do you proceed next. Here are things you might consider talking about:The view down the street, perhaps ending in a view of docks, the glitter of water.Or the same, but ending in a row of boarded-up shops and the loom of a huge cylindrical gas-holder.The look of the ticket itself. The feel of it in the hand.A memory of childhood povertySomething to do with odds: more likely to be struck by lightning than to get a big win, that kind of thing.Something to do with odds, but from Ed’s army days this time. A companion-in-arms killed by a freak shot, perhaps.Or Ed’s own role as an army trainer, always calling on the men to consider the risks of any action or non-action.Or something in the relationship between the two men – a laugh? An embrace?Something to do with a future of money. A holiday Ed might have dreamed of. Or a burden of debt that can now be shed?Something purely random. A seagull that flies into a patch of sunlight on an awning, holding a stolen cherry in its mouth.Something that touches a romantic or sexual nerve – Ed thinking of a former girlfriend? Or a woman he fancies but has been to shy to properly talk to?And so on. You could go in any of these directions and none of them are wrong.In a funny way, you only have to list them out and you build a scene that starts to cohere in a somewhat collage-y, scrapbook-y way. Somehow, even the contradictory views (the gas-holder and the glitter of water) can be assimilated into something that feels real.So what? Do you put them all down, then scrap the bits that don’t feel so strong on the page? Or just write the first three sentences that come into your head? Or you set yourself a rule? One line on setting, one line on action-in-the-present, one line on memory or reflection?In looking at your Feedback Friday stuff, one of the commonest issues I see has to do with this exact issue. What people choose to set down in their text isn’t wrong exactly, but it’s not exactly right.Sometimes the issue is that the reader is being asked to look in five different directions all in one paragraph and the result is confusing. Other times (and most lethally) the reader is being asked to look in a direction where the character would not be looking, with the result that the scene in question pulls away from the character and diminishes them.As a reader, you feel that issue in your bones. One page like that, you can manage. Three, and perhaps you’re still reading. Ten pages like that? And – well, no one knows, because that reader is no longer reading that book.And that’s the solution. Your golden thread.Stay close to your character. Always. No exceptions.So take our lottery-winning veteran, Ed. He’s just won the lottery. He has a ticket in his hand.Be him.What does he see? Think? Say? Do? Experience? Remember?You could still go more or less anywhere. Any of the bullet points we started with could plausibly go into this moment. But how you do it still matters.Here are two passages that pick up on that seagull / awning / cherry image. First, a version that works fine:Ed looked across the street. A patch of sunlight had struck the white awning over the greengrocers. A seagull was perched in the sunlight with a glossy red cherry in its mouth, a cherry stolen from the crates below.Ed felt the curl of the ticket in his hand. The seagull. The light. The cherry. The ticket. None of it quite felt real, except for the booming wash of a tide which kept saying, “you’ve won, you’ve won.”That passage gives the reader a dissociated Ed, one where the shock of winning means he’s no longer thinking or feeling quite straight. Not just that, but by combining a bird, some sunlight and a stolen cherry into a single image, we offer up some good metaphorical meat to the reader. Free as a bird, something stolen, a glossy round fruit, something about to take flight? You can mix up the exact sauce as you fancy. That might or might not be how you’d want to write this scene, but it’s a perfectly viable route.Next, a version that doesn’t work.Ed looked across the street. A seagull was sitting in a patch of sunlight on a white awning. It had stolen something, a cherry, from the greengrocer’s shop below, and had the fruit in its beak, owning but not eating it.Stolen fruit. In Fallujah once, Ed had been patrolling with a comrade of his, a sapper called Aaron. Some IED had blown the corner of an old bank building apart, injuring a couple of people and killing the stallholder who had sold fruit from a wooden cart just outside. Ed and Aarron had picked up some fallen fruit – a pomegranate, Ed remembered, some oranges – then got into an argument about whether that counted as theft as not. Aaron had been from a dirt-poor background, always treated Ed – pharmacist dad, nurse mum – as something like a Rolls-Royce driving toff. Aaron had had his arm torn off five days later. A mortar attack from a house that had supposedly been cleared. It had been Ed’s job to tell Aaron’s parents.None of the content there is necessarily wrong for the book in general. But where’s the lottery ticket? How is Ed thinking about Aaron and mortar attacks and fallen oranges right here, right now?We’ve basically lost the character and that means we’ve lost the thread of any actual story.That’s one kind of failure, but the possibility of failure is endless.Here’s another example.In one of my books, Fiona is in a cave. The cave is flooded – it’s a big lake, essentially, but an underwater tunnel leads to the outside, so she dives through the tunnel and escapes.Suppose I had just written, “I saw there must be a passage out, under the water, so I emerged onto a little patch of sandy soil under a low cliff.” That feels wrong, no?Fiona is not some all-action Special Forces type for whom these things are standard, so it’s absolutely critical to my explanation of her movements that she reflects on the experience of swimming underwater through a tunnel of rock. If I don’t put that reflection into her mind, then the reader will be just perplexed. It’ll feel to the reader like a scratch on a record, some important bit of information simply missing. I was going to quote from that passage here, to show you how I do it in practice, but that tiny moment – escape from the cave – runs to more than 400 words, because the swim mattered to Fiona so it had to matter to the reader.Follow the character. Your golden thread.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This email is something of a follow-up to last week, so if you didn’t like last week’s missive, I strongly suggest you ditch this one IMMEDIATELY before you LOSE ANY MORE OF YOUR LIFE to what I can only honestly describe as PURPOSELESS NONSENSE. If that means you aren’t sure how to spend the next four minutes, let me offer you:My daughters’ favourite guide to different horse breedsSudoku for idiots, and I do mean idiotsA collection of botanical reliefs by the mighty Rachel DeinA discussion of the philosophy of Jacques Derrida.An excellent video that gives you a step-by-step guide on how to set fire to your hand, or indeed any other part of your anatomy. [My 7-year-old safety adviser says: “No, not your head.” She’s right.]Right, then.Knowledge and ignorance.We all know that it’s important to give your characters character. So, we think about:Physical appearanceThe way the person dressesTheir close relationshipsTheir jobTheir childhood and family backgroundTheir special skills (riding? Martial arts? North Siberian dialects?)Their memoriesTheir objectivesTheir valuesTheir personalityAnd so on.And good. All this is good. It’s necessary. If you haven’t done this good, patient, multi-dimensional work, you need to do it. The more you know the character, the more that knowledge will flood your writing.Some of the things you know about your character will almost certainly enter your writing directly. (Your protagonist had a hideous car accident on a level crossing when a teenager? An accident where he was at fault? Where others were seriously injured? You’ll almost certainly want to let that life-defining incident seep into your story somewhere.)Other things may not directly enter your writing. Your character grew up in a Wiltshire village? He can still remember the blue curtains with yellow flowers? The lumpy bed? The low cottagey ceilings? The hens from next door who used to invade their summer games of cricket? Well, some of that might get into your book, but a lot of that knowledge is simply there if you need it. It’s on hand, accessible.The simple guideline is: Your knowledge of a character is sufficient, when anything you care to reach for is immediately present.To be sure, there’s a sleight of hand involved here. It’s not that you create a stock of knowledge before you start to write and are limited to that stock as you proceed. On the contrary, it works more like this: you develop your imaginative knowledge of your character to the point at which the thing you need (the memory, sensation, response, clothing choice, observation) leaps to mind the moment you need it. It’s as though you reach up to get a cup from a shelf and the act of reaching creates the cup.The thing that’s key here is simply: is the option supplied by your imagination right for the character? For the story? Has a specificity that seems personal rather than general? So there are plenty of people, for example, who grow up in English villages, but there’s something unique feeling about the exact blue-and-yellow curtains / lumpy beds / cricket ‘n’ hens combo.OK. All this is good, wholesome stuff. But what I really want to talk about is ignorance and uselessness.When I made a list of character traits above, you won’t have balked at my inclusion of ‘special skills’ on that list. If you made some kind of character inventory before starting to write, you almost certainly ticked that box.But what about ignorance and incompetence? No one is a genius at everything. No one is even ordinarily competent at everything. The great philosopher may be a dullard in the kitchen. The martial arts ninja may have terrible taste in clothes. Or (to think of a character close to my heart) a genius detective may well also be:A terrible cookAn underwhelming girlfriendForgetful of extremely basic facts about her own lifeA very undependable cleanerUnnervingly unpredictable in conversationAs infuriating as she is brilliantAnd so onThe gaps are at least as interesting as the superpowers, and perhaps more so. If you create a character with one or two superpowers (a martial arts ninja who is also an acclaimed sushi chef) that character will inevitably seem a little flat if there are no deficiencies to offset the accomplishments. Your character will always have an air of fantasy about him or her, and that air of fantasy prevents proper connection with the reader.Another issue is the loss of the opportunities for humour that idiocy offers. There’s a particular joy in relishing a character’s idiocy just a page or two after you’ve relished their brilliance.And –Really, the secret of good writing is to force a reader to engage deeply. The deeper that engagement, the more attentive the reading, the more fully that book will satisfy its audience. And if a story keeps tacking between “Wow, how did they accomplish this?” and “What kind of an idiot would do that?”, the engagement is more or less guaranteed.Now, to be sure, I work with a highly coloured character and these things are more visible with such characters. But still – an illustration may help make the point, even for people who run with more everyday characters. So, I once wrote a fight scene that had Fiona in ninja mode: breaking a bad guy’s jaw with astonishing speed (and after astonishingly little provocation.)Those kind of fight scenes are standard thriller-fare. But then Fiona gets incredibly shaky. Walks to a bus shelter. Has an inane conversation with the only other person there. (Him to her: ‘Are you all right?”. She to him: “I don’t know.”) Then she walks smack-dab into the Plexiglass wall of the shelter and bruises her forehead. Goes home, has a bath. Smokes a joint. Does some real detectiving (phoning round hospitals to see if she can find the man with the smashed jaw.) Keeps pressing the bruise on her forehead because it reminds her that she’s real. Then calls her boyfriend and has a flirty conversation with him, which she knows is somewhat fraudulent (she’s only high because of the fight and the shock afterwards.)It\'s just not possible to steer an orderly path through this lot. You can’t just go, “Oh, Fiona’s great at everything” or “Fiona will certainly behave like X”, because the truth is that she’s just not predictable that way. The deficiencies in Fiona’s character keep setting potholes in the way of a more orderly progression.It’s the same with knowledge. Fiona’s knowledge of the law and police procedure is exemplary. Her knowhow around certain sorts of law-breaking is alarmingly high. She knows plenty about cannabis cultivation. She has pockets of surprising knowledge – history, geography, books – but there are huge gaps too. She knows not the first thing about cooking. She’s ignorant of anything mechanical. She has no dress sense and no interior design sense. She doesn’t know anything about popular culture. (In a very early tale, she had to puzzle out, slowly, that Clint Eastwood was a movie star.) Her grip on office politics and gossip is erratic at best.The result of this is that the reader can’t predict my character’s journey. Not from the start to the end of the book, but not even from the start of the page to the end. That means the reader has to pay close attention, or they’ll miss something. The more predictable your character is, the easier it is for the reader to start skimming.And skimming is death.That’s more or less it from me, except that – while we’re on the subject of death – please do read the PSes below before you start setting any part of yourself on fire.Oh yes, and it’s Good Friday next week, which is an actual holiday, so I’m going to take an actual holiday. That means no email from me next week. Normal service resumes the week after.Til soon.HarryPS: That setting yourself on fire thing? It’s real. I have set my arm on fire and it’s fun. I can’t advise you to have a go – in fact, please don’t do it, because it’s obviously unsafe. But if you are fool enough to do it, then do it outside. Make sure your arm is thoroughly wet (with ordinary water, not butane-spiked water) before you start. And have a plunge bucket (again, ordinary wet water) ready for emergencies.But, yeah, better not to do it at all.

Right. So:In one of the Bond movies, Bond and The Girl (in this case, Madeleine Swann, played by Lea Seydoux) are standing at a rail-stop in the desert when a car approaches, shimmering out of the dust. Swann says, ‘What’s that?’, which is not a dumb question, because the vehicle is barely visible. Bond lets the car get a little closer, then says, with a kind of satisfaction, ‘That is a 1948 Rolls Royce Silver Wraith.’And look: this is a movie, not a book.And look: a Bond movie is more of a fantasy movie, than it is a realist one.And look Bond is Bond. We appraise Bond movies according to a general scale of Bondishness. Ordinary critical tools are not strictly relevant here.Nevertheless, Bond is a useful way to explain the temptation. Bond’s comment there tells the reader that he loves vintage cars and is at least somewhat expert in them. In other movies, Bond shows a similar expertise in wines, in Russian military secrets, and much else.The movie makers (and Ian Fleming, the author) are at pains to characterise via expertise. Bond knows about the good things in life (wines, cars, watches). He knows about the violent things in life (guns, weapons, and the rest.) The viewer or reader understands something of Bond’s character from the knowledge he chooses to display.But – Bond is a fantasy, given licence by its fame. Your novel does not have that licence. Let’s say an author creates a character who is (why not?) a professional escort with ambitions to become a spy. She’s with a client and comments ‘He wears an Alexander McQueen double-cuffed shirt, with custom-made silver links. A Patek Philippe Nautilus gleams from beneath the cuff …’What are your thoughts as a reader?The author, I think, wants you to have two things in mind. First, this character lives in a world of exciting luxury and, second, that she has a kind of enviable expertise to share. The knowledge she has lends her a kind of class.I’m not sure that either of these things is achieved. As a writer, you want to get the reader feeling present in this world of luxury. For me, and for most readers, that will not be achieved by a list of brand-names. I can’t picture a Patek Philippe Nautilus. I’ve no idea how an Alexander McQueen shirt looks different from any other kind of shirt. As a reader, we don’t think, ‘Yes, I feel present here …’. We think, ‘Oh, the author wants me to know that this is all very luxurious.’ That second thought is a hopelessly poor substitute for the first.Once upon a time – when Ian Fleming was writing, for example – technical knowledge did, I suppose, bring some cachet. “Oh, Ian Fleming must know plenty about wines if he says that the Petrus ’54 was markedly better than the ’57.” But today? Phooey. We all have Wikipedia at our fingertips. We can all know as much of anything as we want. (Even my nine-year-old has achieved a strange degree of expertise in her chosen discipline: “Which horse has more stamina, a Morgan or a Connemara …?” “How many hands is a Welsh cob?” “Is a Friesian horse good for beginners …?” My wife and I have promised to buy her a horse, once she has saved up enough to buy a field to put it in.)The really severe problem, however, is that in most cases the rush to brand-namery ends up emptying the character. So, honestly, how many people can tell from a brief glance at a watch peeping from beneath a cuff, what make and model it is? I’d say almost none. Even the Patek Philippe-wearing crowd wouldn’t be able to do that. Presumably a seller of posh watches could tell one from another. Ditto anyone deeply involved in the industry itself. But who else? Virtually no one. So either our escort has a side-hustle as a saleswoman. Or she’s just peculiarly interested in watches. Or (in practice) the author is simply steam-rolling the character in order to get a brand-name in.You can’t do that. Your character is the most important element of your whole book. The most delicate. If you crush her – however temporarily – for the sake of a brand reference, you have diminished your reader’s attachment to the person whose job is to get the reader through the book. That’s never a choice worth making.If you want to show that your escort character is comfortable with this kind of environments, you need to do so in a way that reflects who she is. This kind of thing, for example:“He spends a lot of time adjusting his jacket, his shirt cuffs, the gleam of his watch. Before the end of the evening, he’ll have to mention what kind of watch it is. The less classy types – that is, most of them – tell me how much it cost. The lowest figure I’ve been given is eight thousand pounds. The highest is nearly hundred grand. To begin with, I assume they were bullshitting me, that these numbers were all part of the brag. Now, I think the numbers are pinpoint accurate. Money is the only metric for these people, the one thing they never lie about.”That passage still shows expertise of a sort: an expertise in sleazy rich guys. It also displays a useful sliver of ignorance. She doesn’t really know about the prices of these things. Her judgements are to do with people, not watches. The result is that the passage enhances her credibility as a character. We’re further into a fictional world, not pushed out of it. We feel the world that the author wants us to see, but we encounter it in a way that places character first. That’s the way to do it, always.I don’t write about high-luxury environments myself, but I have included in the PSes a chunk of one of my Fiona Griffiths books, in which my character (operating undercover as a low-paid, semi-homeless cleaner) enters an upmarket winebar. The bar is not remotely at the Patek Philippe level of luxury, but the step from Fiona’s current life-level to the bar is a big one. I don’t mention a single brandname in the chunk below, and don’t need to.You’ll need to read the passage to see if it works, but if it does, it achieves its effect by:Using simple, telling detail – a hole in a boot, a sodden foot.Using descriptive language that explicitly avoids excessive knowledgeImagery that emphasises distance, not belongingGetting the character to behave in a way that’s wrong for the place she’s in.Simple to say and, phew, simple enough to do.I once bought a knock-off Rolex in New York’s Chinatown for $10. It looked really nice until all the gold rubbed off, but even then it had a kind of charm. If I had $100 million, I still wouldn’t buy a fancy watch. My little Tabby might get a pony though …Til soon.HarryPS: Here’s the chunk. My comments in square brackets.I was here early. Six twenty. Have been walking up and down since then looking in at the warmly lit windows and feeling out of place. One of my boots has a hole in the sole and my foot is sodden. [Simple indicator of poverty]But in the end, I go in.It’s a smart bar, nicely done. Dark wooden floor. Scrubbed wooden bar. Lots of heavy fittings: oak casks, brass nautical lamps, a huge glass bowl filled with wine corks and dried hops. [Nothing resembling a brandname, let alone expert knowledge. The opposite, in fact. These are observations that anyone at all is capable of making.]I stand, dripping, in the entrance area as men in suits and women in tailored outfits talk, laugh, fiddle with their phones. [Again: the opposite of brandnames. The emptiness of that phrase, tailored outfits, almost says, ‘Look, I expect other people would know how to describe those clothes better, but I don’t, because I’m not of that world.]A waiter with a stubbly beard and a blue neckerchief approaches. He’s wearing a smile but I have this vision of him simply clearing me away, the way you might if you came into your kitchen and found a dead pigeon or a stray drowned mouse making a mess of your scrubbed limestone floors. [A characteristic Fiona-ish image, but again one that emphasises the huge gulf between her and this place.]I stand there, dripping, waiting to be tidied. Wet cotton mops and metal buckets.But I’m not tidied. Vic [the person she’s here to meet] 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. [She does the wrong thing, socially, in this environment. It’s not just the badness of her clothes. She doesn’t know the right way to behave.]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. [Ditto!]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. [Vic does know the right way to behave and his unfussed accuracy of behaviour is a better clue to his social milieu than the kind of watch he chooses to wear.]

Benjamin Jowett was a Victorian professor of Greek, a theologian and a college reformer. Photos of him have a somewhat stern and whiskery air, but he is responsible for one of my favourite quotes ever:We have sought truth, and sometimes perhaps have found it. But have we had any fun?I love that. As writers, we’re not all that interested in truth, so perhaps we can rephrase: We have sought a decent story, and sometimes perhaps have told one. But have we had any fun?That quote is in my head because it occurred to me this week that perhaps my best books are also the ones I most enjoyed writing. It’s certainly true that the ones I most laboured over ended up proficient enough, but less joyous in the reading.For example:My first ever book, The Money Makers, had less craft in it, less knowledge of writing technique, than anything else I’ve done. But it was powered by a great concept and burned with a kind of pleasure. That pleasure does, I swear, transmit itself in the reading. You end up just plain liking the book and, as a result, you’re inclined to forgive its lack of sophistication.My non-fiction history book, This Little Britain, was a passion project for me. I had to write it at extreme pace (big advance, short deadline) and the book somehow benefitted from the resultant lack of reflection. I had to dig in, write fast and enjoy the ride. A longer writing time would have delivered a smoother read, but a more engaging one? Maybe not.Of the Fiona Griffiths novels, the one I probably enjoyed the most was The Deepest Grave. That book is plain bananas: it’s a police procedural about a hunt for relics of King Arthur. The novel ends up with a swordfight in a cave. There’s no writing manual on earth which says you can write a realistic modern-set police procedural about such things, but I did, and I loved it, and my delight in the subject matter echoes through the book. Of all my FG novels, that’s probably the one that has most resonated with readers.Overall, I think it is true that a joyous writing experience leads to a better reading experience.That’s nice to know in one way. Most writers could make more money in other jobs – or indeed, use those other jobs to fund their writing time – so it definitely matters that writing is fun.But …Life ain’t always easy and writing isn’t always pleasurable. What happens if you are finding the writing a slog? The joyous writing = good writing rule is a comfort if you’re having fun. But doesn’t that also mean that painful writing = bad writing? In which case, the rule seems to double your troubles.I think maybe it does.I do strongly believe that you should write mostly for the fun of it. If you’re not actually under contract to a publisher, then why write if you hate it? Of course, in any book, there’ll be tough patches that you just have to push through, but that’s the same as any challenging hobby. Overcoming those challenges is part of the joy.But some books have the joy/challenge balance wrong. The joy’s never quite enough, the challenges rather too constant.So what to do? As usual, I don’t really know the answer, but my personal cocktail of solutions includes the following:KBO. This was a core part of Winston Churchill’s philosophy on life. If women were around, he expressed it as “KBO”. If they weren’t, he said it plainly: Keep Bu**ering On. (I’m only putting in some coy little asterisks there, by the way, because I reckon this email will end up in your spam folder if I don’t. I’m sure you could handle a pair of missing Gs.) In the end, an ability just to push through the tough patches is the single most important quality of any writer.If possible, take a break. And the breakier the break, the better. A sharp change of routine – a holiday, a love affair – is going to work better than “everything the same, but no writing”.Related to the above: if you have a life problem to deal with, then deal with it. I know that’s easier said than done, but it is often the shortest and best way.Figure out if there’s a technical flaw somewhere. A big one this, especially for less experienced writers. So often enough, you start a project with enthusiasm. At about the 30,000 word mark, that enthusiasm starts to dissipate. Then you write more text, but it just seems pointless. You don’t like what you’ve written. You give up. And often, often, often it’s because of an identifiable and fixable technical fault. So it could be something you’re doing wrong in terms of points of view. Or your sense of place. Or your plotting. Or almost anything. Those things will make your writing seem bad (because in this one specific way, it is bad). Then, since you don’t know what the issue is or how to fix it, you just give up. That’s where better skills help massively – and a JW manuscript assessment or a writing course will most likely sort you out.Cut. Oh my goodness, this is so simple and so powerful. If you are telling a good story in 120,000 words that you could express equally well in 90,000 words – and it’s very, very common to see such things – then you have attached a huge drag anchor to your narrative. It can never leap free because you are burdening the reader with 30,000 purposeless words. Cut, my friend. Cut more than you think you can cut. Take joy in cutting. You will feel your manuscript lift and surge forward in the water. It’ll love you for the surgery. Be ambitious.The dagger in the table. And sometimes, simply enough, a narrative starts to drag because it’s a bit draggy. The set-up is great. The ending you have in mind is fantastic. But the bit in-between? It’s all a bit ho-hum. So kill someone. Or have a bank robbery. Or have someone get abducted or buried underground. Offer a mid-story incident that shatters the shape of the story that the reader was expecting. Write a novel with two climaxes. Plunge the dagger into the table and watch it quiver.Ask yourself: have a nailed the basic concept for this novel? If you don’t have a stellar concept, your novel will never be stellar. If your concept – your elevator pitch – just isn’t all that strong, the novel will essentially be unsaleable no matter how many nice little plot turns you have in chapter 22, and no matter how quirky you make Aunt Maisie. And if you have embarked on a novel with too little zizz, then add it. You don’t have to scrap what you’ve written and start again. You just have to find the ingredient – a ghost, a murder, a secret letter, a splash of magic, a something – that gives life to all the rest.That’s it from me. This is now the second day of a school strike. We had seven kids in the house yesterday – my four plus three others – and five today. School returns tomorrow. School and quietness …Til soon.Harry

I’m reading a book at the moment that came recommended, a psychological thriller about a small, close group of friends.I’ve started the book. I’m seventy pages in. I already know I won’t finish it.The problem, a terribly common one, is that I haven’t bonded with the characters. They don’t feel like real people. If I’m honest, I can’t tell one from another, or not really.Now, quite likely, part of the problem is me. I’m TERRIBLE with names and faces. Always have been, always will be. I forget character names in my own books. I fail to recognise people I know and have chatted with extensively. My uselessness in real life probably carries over into books too.But good characterisation should still overcome reader idiocy. Perhaps I might be slow to assemble the characters in my head, but I should still get there in the end, no? I shouldn’t be fifty pages in and still have no meaningful idea of who these people are.Also – alarmingly – this book has avoided all the common pitfalls. So, the author has:Been sure to give the characters distinctive names. They’re not all Amy, Anna, Alice and Andy.Given them distinct physical characteristics. We have (inevitably) the pretty sexy one, the hunk, the dark scowling one, and so on.Put a bit of zing in their dialogueEndowed them with plenty of interpersonal history, likes and dislikes, divergent backgrounds and so on.It looks like the author has done all the things she’s meant to have done – all the things that the writing books suggest. All the things that, erm, helpful weekly emails on writing advice are likely to suggest.So what’s the problem? Why do some books never quite ground themselves? Why do some characters end the book still feeling two-dimensional and unreal?The short answer – I’m not sure.The longer answer is threefold.First, I’m confident that you can’t just introduce your characters in a rush. When you’re at a party, that “Harry, meet Amy, Baz, Charlie, Dino and Esmerelda” thing doesn’t really give you a chance to remember who everyone is. But if you get five or ten minutes chatting with Amy before you get to meet Baz, and so on, you’re likely to win this game. Amy is no longer just a face and a name. She’s now someone who comes stored with her own little fact-file. When you meet Baz, you have enough data on Amy that she can safely be put into storage as you meet Baz.I think the same rule applies in books. Slower introductions are better. And if, for example, your book just does have a group of characters turning up in a cluster – a group of friends meeting up for a long weekend – you can still split them apart. Amy and Baz can hike to the house from the rural train station. Dino and Charlie can score a cheeky snog in the kitchen. Esmerelda can just be late (she’s always late) and arrive in a flurry at the end of chapter two.And then too, I think you need to look away from, not directly at, the issue.What I mean here is that you don’t solve the problem of character identification by aiming to provide a torrent of quick data. “Hey, reader, you haven’t met Charlie before, so here’s a quick summary of what you need to know. She’s the tall, blonde, pretty one, OK? Gifted at university (studied English), but wasted in a sort of glam-but-dead-endy PR job. Blah blah blah.”That kind of introduction, especially if it comes amongst a spatter of other such introductions, is likely to wash over and through the reader. I think they just don’t work.Instead, just show your characters in action. Then it’s simple: just tell the reader what the reader needs to know to make sense of the action. So let’s say that two or three friends have gone out to dinner. Leaving the restaurant, Charlie breaks a heel. You now have a perfectly sensible opportunity to describe her clothes. You might well use the chance to describe her appearance more generally. (“I could see passers-by looking over at us. A woman, blonde and pretty, in a silver sequinned dress, lying on the pavement. You can tell they thought she was drunk, and perhaps she was a bit …”)You’re still conveying data to the reader, but you’re not doing so by presenting an index-card of facts. You’re doing so by telling a story. The reader doesn’t feel engaged by the index-card approach (it feels like work), but they do feel engaged by story (it’s why they’re reading.)The third trick, I think, is that you can do much less than you think. It’s easy to think that you need to do it all: How tall is our pretty Charlie? What’s her eye colour? What do her mum and dad do for a living? Can she ride? (I bet she can ride.) Was she academically strong? Is she lazy? Does she love kids?The more facts you shove at the reader, the more the reader is likely to resist.And – it doesn’t matter.Your mantra can be simply this: tell the reader what’s necessary for the story. Not more, not less.That way, you’re not asking the reader to keep track of data that they don’t need. You’re giving them only what they do need, when they need it, in a way that slots logically into your story. Right at the end of the PSes, I’ve put a chunk of text from early in a novel – a group of five people going out to dinner.What’s interesting to me, reading that chunk back in the light of this email, is how brusque I am. Two of my five characters aren’t relevant longer term, so I essentially discard them. I tell the reader next to nothing about them.The other three do have longer term relevance, but even here I present virtually no character-data unless and until it becomes relevant to the moment in question. So one of the characters – David ‘Buzz’ Brydon – is a fit, intelligent, capable, courageous police officer. He’s not introduced like that, until it becomes relevant. Then, when the story needs him to run, Fiona says simply, “Buzz, who’s superfit …” That data slots so naturally into the story, that the reader just absorbs it with the story. There’s no sense anywhere of an index-card being presented.With Buzz’s colleague, Jon Breakell, it’s the same thing to start with: appearances don’t matter. Then Fiona asks him to stay with the two women and he “puffs out his not-very-mighty chest and indicates his willingness to protect the women from all perils and dangers of this night.” That’s still hardly a complete physical description, but you already have something about him that’s memorable and presented in a way wholly congruent with the story-task at hand.Buzz and Jon Breakell start to take shape as the story takes shape. The reader’s expected knowledge of those two keeps exact pace with the story itself.You can do the same. Go slow. Stick with story. Do less than you think you ought to.That’s it from me. I’m off to buy a coffee and have a swim.Til soon.HarryPS: Here’s a chunk from a (not yet published) Fiona Griffiths novel. The chunk presents exactly the conundrum we’ve been talking about: five characters to introduce early on. My comments below [In square brackets and italics] show how I’ve been thinking about things …I know this that a crime has taken place because a group of us have been out to dinner.Me.Buzz – Sergeant David Brydon – my first proper-proper boyfriend and the man to whom I was once engaged. [Boom. One piece of data here and it’s a big one – hard to forget. But nothing about appearance or anything else. Just a single fact.]Penny Haskett, the blushing damsel who will, next summer, step into the ivory satin shoes that I vacated and trip fetchingly up the aisle to become the first Mrs Buzz. [Penny Haskett doesn’t really feature in the novel, so I just offer the key bit of data – Buzz’s fiancée – and move on. I don’t care if the reader forgets her name. I haven’t bothered to do hair colour and all that, because it doesn’t matter.]Also two fig-leaves: Jon Breakell, a colleague of mine in Major Crime, and Jade Harding, a friend of Penny’s whom Jon is courting. Jon and Jade will make a good couple, I think, but they’re here mostly because the whole me / Buzz / Penny triangle can still feel a bit weird at times, so we try to dilute the experience wherever possible. [Jade also has no longer-term story relevance, hence no real pretence at an introduction. Jon Breakell is a character who emerges again, but he isn’t relevant in the story NOW, so there’s no need to deliver data now.]Anyway. That’s our fivesome. We’ve been to a bar, then on to a pizza place.Pizza. Puddings. The works. A nice enough evening, except that it’s got to the point where everyone wants to go home.So we troop up the Hayes, beneath a soft night sky and the first hints of oncoming rain. We’re talking of nothing much, when Buzz’s phone bleeps a text. He looks at the phone and says ‘Crime report. Up here.’His finger points us up the Hayes, where it forks off into Victoria Place. He starts walking faster. I can see he wants to run, except he doesn’t want to abandon his Intended.I say, ‘Jon, can you stay with Penny and Jade? We’ll meet you up by the castle.’Jon nods. Puffs out his not-very-mighty chest and indicates his willingness to protect the women from all perils and dangers of this night. [As soon as Jon becomes relevant to the story, he starts to take shape. Fiona is characteristically colourful in the way she speaks about him, and we still don’t know hair colour or family background or that kind of thing, but we start to feel Jon because we see and feel him in the setting of a story.] Buzz and I jog, then outright run, up Victoria Place, then down Church Street.Buzz, who’s superfit, says, ‘Double assault. Ambulance on the way. Uniforms present. Sounds nasty.’ [Now we start to get more data about Buzz – he’s fit, he’s efficient in a police-y sort of way – but again, we only get data relevant to the situation.]I don’t comment, just run. The truth is, if the scene is already being attended by police and ambulance services, our services aren’t really required. Buzz isn’t even a detective these days. He now runs a Data Intelligence Team which helps the force direct its resources to where they’re most needed.But still. Buzz is the kind of man whose boots run towards disasters, not away from them. My own, more elegant, boots share that same basic mentality. [More data in these two paras. Again, directly relevant to the matter at hand.]Victoria Place.Church Street.The NCP car park on Quay Street looms into view.Two ambulances there, lights lazily flashing. Patrol cars too. Uniforms taping off the street. [That’s it. Only a few hundred words, but we already have a loose sense of the emerging protagonists and – because the two spare women have already been discarded – we’ve also been effectively told who it’s safe to forget about. Very simple. And I bet you remember who’s who.]

Some thoughts that have been skittering around my brain-pan like:Kittens on a polished floor.Dried chickpeas in a Bedouin caravanCorks on the eddy beneath a weirA flapper girl dancing at the Ritz with her caddish beauThe final stages of the flea high-jump OlympicsSelection of simile is according to customer choice and on a first-come-first-served basis.Before those thoughts, I will just say that a lot of you have been irritated by some slow and somewhat glitchy behaviour on our Townhouse community. It doesn’t affect everyone, and has been getting better, but it’s still annoying when it happens to you. We are aware of the issues and have got a team of boffins working on them. I hope there’ll be a major improvement by the end of this month. Here endeth the housekeeping.Thought the firstA while back, I had a chat with my agent about an author who had just been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. I said that I’d read the book and just didn’t think it was much good. No particular prose excellence. A slightly silly story. The whole thing feeling more like a performance than a story you could invest in.My agent agreed, but said that the author in question was very good at playing the literary game – essentially, she knew how to act the Grand Literary Author, so people had a tendency to believe her act.Thought the secondA while back, I mentioned that I’d been reading Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These, a novella about the Magdalen laundries in Ireland. (The laundries were run by convents, mostly, and took in prostitutes or, indeed, simply unmarried girls who had become pregnant. In theory, these places offered rehabilitation, but in practice often kept their inmates for life, and in very restrictive conditions. The system collapsed in the 1990s and the Irish government formally apologised in 2013.)There’s no question that Keegan is an excellent prose writer: understated, subtle, deft, confident. But at the same time, there’s something a little strange going on, isn’t there? The book was published in 2022 and told a story set in the Christmas of 1985. The book was nominated for, and won, the Orwell Prize for political fiction.And, OK, I liked the book, though probably not enough to give it any kind of major award. But an award for political fiction. Huh?Politics is, presumably, a system for allowing society to sort through its choices. Higher tax or less tax? More immigration or less immigration? More pay for teachers, less pay for teachers, or all teaching staff to be paid exclusively in biscuits?In any interesting political conversation, there’s something to be said for both sides. Indeed, for any interesting political conversation to happen at all, there have to betwo sides – or more.When it comes to the Magdalen Laundries, however, there aren’t two sides. There’s just the one. Absolutely everyone in the entire world, including the Irish Taoiseach and the Pope and Bono and probably every priest in Ireland, thinks that the Magdalen Laundries were a Bad Thing.So a political prize has been awarded to a book that is arguing something even less controversial than “War Can Be Rather Nasty” or “Democracy is Quite Good Really”.Why? Why bother? Why even call the book political, when it clearly is nothing of the sort?Thought the thirdOne more thought – an alarming one.What if you can’t escape your own branding? Or rather: what if you can’t escape the branding that you’re given by Publisher Island & Media Land?Anyone looking at my own publication history will see some decently reviewed commercial fiction, some odds and ends of non-fiction (at the less hefty end of the scale), and that’s it. But what if – as I do – I have a highly literary project to sell?Literary fiction needs reviews in a way that commercial fiction doesn’t, so the stuff needs to appeal to reviewers. If I had spent the last ten years traipsing around the literary salons of London and saying the right things about the right books, and mwah-ing plenty with the right editors and critics, and having minor spats with the sort of people that I was meant to have minor spats with, wouldn’t my profile be very different from what it actually is?And sure: you can definitely go from Major Literary Figure to Writes Crime Novels for Fun and Money. But can you make the move the other way around? Won’t reviewers worry that if you’re a lightweight crime novelist at heart, any supposedly literary undertaking will have an emptiness at its centre, a fundamental unseriousness?***Well, I don’t know.I do think that authors and books which carefully set out to please to the New York Times are (unsurprisingly) more likely to please the New York Times. And since the NYT is massively influential, you don’t just win that one newspaper, you have an excellent chance of establishing a particular opinion about you in Media Land generally.That’s why, I think, books like Claire Keegan’s get so heavily praised. Being any kind of reviewer or critic involves exposure. “I’m tempted to think X, but what if everyone else thinks Y? I’ll be like the only child who dressed up as Tinkerbell for World Book Day, when everyone else was doing something from the Hunger Games.”So if the opinion you’re being asked to hold is an utterly safe one (“Magdalen Laundries? Ooh, ooh, I know the answer! They were baaaaad …”), there’s a kind of relief. You won’t be the only Tinkerbell in the playground. You can safely rest assured that all the other kids will come as Tinkerbell too. The equation is roughly:                Claire Keegan = Good Author                Claire Keegan’s prose = definitely Good Prose                Theme of the Book = Ooh, yes, we definitely agree with everything here                Overall Judgement = Must be a good book, right? It must be safe to say so.And that’s why someone (I don’t mean Claire K) who writes a rather moderate book but has spent ten years acting the Great Literary Author has a competitive advantage over someone who has spent a long time writing about corpses and shootouts and things that are, y’know, actually fun.I’d like a world where what mattered was the quality of the book itself, with no distractions about who the author has or has not air-kissed, or even about who the author has or has not thrown off a (fictional) cliff or near-drowned on a (fictional) trawler. I bet you’d like that world too.But that is not the world we have and that’s a shame. On the other hand, the problem I’m talking about here is one that doesn’t really afflict debut novelists. For most of y’all, youse and you plural, this snow lies virgin, unprinted by boot, hoof, claw or tippy-toe.That said, if you want to make of yourself a young literary cub, then go for it. Write for an acclaimed (if largely unread) literary magazine, help run a literary festival, get into a Twitter spat with someone. Those things will help.If you want to write YA fiction, then it does truly help to be in the conversation. That might mean going to the right festivals, or engaging with agents / editors / booksellers / bloggers etc on Twitter, or it might mean some other form of engagement too. Those things too will definitely help.And yet …Well, the main thing is still the quality of your writing. I’ve never yet failed to sell a book that I really wanted to sell. I’ve not always looked like the person who ought to be writing it, but your writing alone should be enough to dispel those thoughts.In the meantime, though, I’m going to go and write a book about how Global Warming Could Be Quite Bad. I’m going to follow that up with my bestseller on Why Big Tobacco Might Be an Itsy Bit Dodgy.

We’re working on a major revamp of our courses programme at the moment. Lots to do but, in due course, plenty to announce. One of the things that we’ve been thinking about a lot is simply: how do we learn?A good, obvious first stage answer is simply: deliver useful information appealingly presented.Hence, our blogs, our books, our (premium) video courses. Those things obviously appeal, because the blogs get read, the books get bought, the courses get taken.But?The learning model that underlies that basic approach feels, in some ways, a bit Victorian. It feels like I’m a Victorian schoolmarm, sweeping up and down a dais in my long skirts, telling a whole room full of silent pupils what they are meant to do. And that’s the issue: the pupils in this model are silent, not doing.So we adapt our model.We combine instruction with doing. So, here’s a particular topic (characterisation, or plotting, or prose style or whatever) and here is an assignment which will help you develop the skills in question.And good, that’s already better. My How To Write video course (available to Premium members) doesn’t have homework assignments exactly, but it does hugely emphasise the practical. The approximate message is, “Here’s an easily learned technique which you can apply to your manuscript right now and which will definitely improve it.” The feedback I most appreciate on this course is anything which says, “I had to stop watching the video so I could mess around with my manuscript.” That’s perfect. That’s exactly the kind of reaction I wanted to generate.But …?Our schoolroom has got better, but it’s still imperfect. The ranks of kids (grubby-kneed boys, some alarmingly pinafored girls) are now bending over their schoolbooks and practising their skills, but isn’t there something strange about the silence?A modern classroom isn’t quiet. It’s noisy. It’s productive. It’s social.It’s a commonplace to say that writing is a solitary activity, and I suppose it is. But writers are generally a tad introvert (I am) and the idea of a solitary activity being a bad one has never really made much sense to me. I like writing. That’s why I do it.But writing is one thing, learning is another. The social element in learning brings a kind of glue. My kids run off to school eagerly each morning, not because they’re desperate for another spelling test, but because they want to see their friends. If learning becomes a social task, it becomes easier to do. Less an act of will than a pleasure in itself.There’s something else here as well.Analysing weaknesses in your own book is an emotional endeavour. Your instinct is to avoid finding fault. But with your friends and fellow students? Ha. Let’s be honest, finding fault is part of the pleasure. “Ah yes, love that extract, but I did wonder if maybe …” (Insert knife, twist, repeat).The opportunity to look at work other than your own gives you a kind of safe-play area. The more you practise, the better you get. That’s why our peer-to-peer courses (like our Write With Jericho one, again just for premium members) offer a step-up on the basic model. We have instruction, we have assignments, we have a social, interactive peer-to-peer element as well.Great.But …?There’s a reason why we have teachers, not just classrooms. My kids’ teachers are not about to replaced by robots spewing videos and homework assignments.And what is the teacher there to do?Yes, they’re there to deliver the course material, but what else?The easy answer is that they’re there to give feedback on the students’ work. And, OK, that’s important. But the thought which has been most enlightening for us is this one:What if the teacher is largely there to give feedback on the feedback?In a peer-to-peer course, people will be offering advice to one another, but the quality of that advice is vastly important. Compare these two comments:GENERIC: “I loved your piece because I thought it was very atmospheric, but I didn’t really get the feel that your character was really scared.”SPECIFIC: “Great. There were some lovely words here (mullioned, brocade, umber) which lent a really rich, somewhat creepy atmosphere, but your character’s emotions were indicated entirely through rather cliched bodily responses (her teeth chattered, hairs rising on the back of the neck). I wonder if you could reduce or get rid of those bodily comments and just describe exactly what your character was feeling.”It\'s obvious that the second type of comment is of greater value to the recipient. But it’s also helpful to the giver.The more you practise the effective (detailed, specific) analysis of text the more instinctively you’ll bring those skills to your own book.There’s a comment from James Mitchner which gets a lot of play on the internet: “I’m not a very good writer, but I’m an excellent rewriter.”That’s helpful, but in truth these skills merge. Writing, editing, rewriting: there comes a point where all those things blur together. You start out by writing a sentence on the page, coming back to it two months later, rewriting it, and so on. As you get more experienced, you edit the sentence as you lay it out on the page – tweaking it multiple times before you hit that full-stop.  And then you find that the edits happen in your head before you even hit the page. Yes, of course, you go on editing afterwards, but it’s the same basic activity.So, for our courses, we’re going to work to see that people learn feedback-giving skills as well as what looks more obviously like writing-skills. Giving great feedback and writing better – it turns out that’s more or less the same thing.And yes: courses are a great place to learn that stuff, but you don’t have to take a course. Any time you read a book, or a chapter, or a page, or a line that doesn’t quite hit the mark, just ask yourself why. The right answer will follow the SPECIFIC model above. The GENERIC one is next to useless.That is it from me. I have a schoolroom to tidy and a cane to polish …Til soon.Harry

Last weekend, I went to a friend’s birthday party. The friend’s husband works in the music industry, as band leader for a number of very well-known pop acts. He’s toured everywhere and played at every stadium and venue you can imagine.The result, inevitably, is that the standard of live music at the party was insanely high. Also inevitable: the number of genuinely cool people at the party was insanely high. Also inevitable: I was not amongst that number.A short housekeeping digression begins …I’m going to talk more about Cool People in a moment, but a couple of spots of housekeeping first, if you don’t mind.Number one, next week, on 21 February, I’m introducing a webinar, hosted by the good folks from the Self-Publishing School on How to Write the Story You Were Meant to Tell. The presenter, Ramy Vance, started writing seriously in 2014, and has since published over 60 books on Amazon.That’s a bewilderingly huge number, of course, and it made me realise that we at Jericho have really very little experience of that kind of high volume writing and publishing. So partly I wanted to hear from Ramy about how that experience works for him. But also, and mostly, I want to know whether this is an area that you guys are interested in. If you are, it’s an area we’ll develop in the future. If not, we’ll leave it mostly to one side. More details in the PSes. But if you’re even half-interested in that model, then do show up. I’m going to be intrigued to hear what you think.That one point. The other is that we’re in the process of hiring a new marketing whizz. If you whizz and market, and can do both things at the same time, then please take a look at the PSes to see more about the position and the applications process. Thankee kindly.And ends.Right – back to the party.I suppose the very first marker of Cool is what people are wearing. My wife is cool in some strange way that’s at complete right angles to what anyone else wears, so she rocked up in a vintage 1960s dress with white fur cuffs and white fur collar and a general whiff of Marilyn and Jackie and Audrey and Dusty and all that.I’m just a middle-aged bloke with no depth of cool at all. So I wore nice jeans, a clean pink shirt, some nice shoes. Done.Things I did not wear:A pork pie hatA shirt that looked like it was made of cheeseclothJeans that looked like they had been shaped for some quite other personA tweed waistcoat, worn openActually, any sort of waistcoat, worn any way at allJewelleryA shirt unbuttoned to the mid-chestExotic facial hairGlasses that looked like installations from a design museumI wasn’t all that fussed about my lack of hats / beards / waistcoats / cheesecloth. In fact, I thought the opposite.I tried to imagine myself as these others were, supposing I had access to the exact right kit. Not a new tweed waistcoat, but one aged and worn to the exact right degree. The right kind of shirt. The right trousers. The right everything.If I’d had all that stuff, and worn it – I still wouldn’t have passed for one of the Cool Hordes. I wouldn’t have moved right. I wouldn’t have spoken right. Honestly, and this sounds daft to say, I don’t think my face would have been right.There was one person there in an old blue shirt worn over a T-shirt and a pair of vaguely sculptural glasses. I do have shirts in my wardrobe much like the one he wore, so I could in theory have rocked that look. Except, his face said, “I am at home with gigs like this. Indeed, I have a huge stock of gig-experience, a world of knowledge and a depth of understanding. When I move my head gently to the beat, I do so in a way that betokens deep music wisdom.”I’m not saying that with any sarcasm. He did have that experience and I did not. I couldn’t have faked that sense of being at home in this world.Now, none of this bothered me at all. On the contrary, we had a nice time at the party and came away happy. As we drove home, I said to the missus that I thought I was probably the least cool person there.She said – and these are the words of wisdom on which this email centres – “It’s not what you wear. It’s whether you wear it with confidence. That’s what being cool is.”And she was right! She always is, bless her. She always is, damn her.And in fact, it made me realise that the clothes have nothing to do with it. Those music industry types weren’t cool because of the clothes they wear. They just are cool. They are, roughly speaking, the group that our culture uses to define what it is to be cool. The equation, in fact, is roughly this: These people are cool; they wear what they wear; the result is that people think that those type of clothes are cool.But in the end, what appeals to people is a kind of centred confidence, that has nothing whatever to do with dress.OK And the relevance of all this to you, your manuscript, your anxious pen?It’s simply this. You can’t fake what you’re not. You shouldn’t even try. The trying and failing is way worse than not trying in the first place.So let’s say you want to write a thriller. You think, yep, Lee Child is as good as it gets. His style is pared back. His hero knows everything about guns and military techniques and police procedures and all that. So I need to write like that.And, OK, maybe. That’s one route to a good thriller, for sure. But is that your style? Or your imitation of someone else’s style?If it’s yours, then fine. Thrillerland is easily big enough to accommodate a few Lee Child type series.But what if that style isn’t really you? Then you’re making the mistake of being a Nice Pink Shirt wearing type rocking up to a party in a look stolen from somebody else. You won’t suit that look. Somehow, in ways you can’t even describe, you’ll betray it. At some surface level, it’ll look like you’re ‘doing Lee Child’, but you’ll never fool the reader. Not for long.At that party, I wasn’t one whit uncomfortable in what I wore. People would have looked at me and thought, “He’s clearly not a music industry type, but he looks completely confident in his own skin.”That’s what you want to aim for. When I wrote my Fiona series, I was obviously very conscious of what other crime writers were doing. But as often as not, my crime series turned its back on their choices and happily did its own thing. That wasn’t dissing their choices – simply they weren’t mine.I think, roughly, that’s the model for how any writer needs to write. You need to know your landscape. You need to know what the classic books of the genre are. You need to know what’s being written today. You need to know something of what’s going on in your genre’s nearest neighbours.But then you put all that aside and Just Be You. If that’s a pork-pie hat and a beard, then be that person. If it’s a Nice Pink Shirt and Proper Shoes, then be that person.The full confident expression of your vision will always work better than any attempt to imitate someone else.That’s not a licence to break the rules. You still need an elevator pitch that appeals. You need to understand where you fit in the market of today. Your plot still needs to cohere. Your witing needs to be strong, or not less than confident.(Why do I feel the need to add that caveat? Because we still get manuscripts that are clearly unmarketable for one or all of the above reasons. When challenged the writer often says, “yes, but this is how I want to write. This is my personal vision.” And, OK. It’s your personal vision. But you’ll never get published.)That’s it from me – your very own Mr Cool.Til soon.Harry-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------PS: That Ramy Vance webinar. It’s titled “How to Tell The Story You Were Meant To Tell Without Taking Years to Do So (or Compromising on Quality).” But really, for me the bit that’s intriguing here is the scale of Ramy’s output. He’s been writing seriously since 2014 and he’s authored, or co-authored, over 60 books.Clearly, my own output is nothing remotely like that. But no question, that high-output, self-publishing approach is a proven way to make a good living as an independent writer. It’s not an area we know a ton about. Ramy does. And I’m really looking forward to what he has to say.I’m introducing the webinar. Self-Publishing School is hosting it. The webinar kicks off at 6.00pm London time, 1.00pm EST.If you want to register, the link is here: selfpublishing.com/jerichowritersAnd if you attend, do please let us know what you think. I’m intrigued to know whether you think this kind of model we should be exploring more than we do.PPS: We’re hiring a new marketing manager. If you’re interested, there’s more information here: https://jerichowriters.com/jericho-writers/about-us/meet-the-team/#current-vacanciesWe’re a damn nice bunch to work with, and we look forward to welcoming the right candidate on board soon.PPPS: If you’d be interested in being Cool at some parties – we have TWO face-to-face meetups happening in the coming months. The first takes place in London on April 21st, the second in Leeds on April 28th. Both run from 18:00 to 23:00. More information here.

Forty years ago, A British TV network produced a major TV adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. The show was named after and centred on a family living in a vast stately home. The series was an international smash hit and regularly features on a list of greatest TV shows of all time.A dozen years ago, the same network brought Downton Abbey into the world. It was also an international smash hit, earning a record 27 Emmy nominations in its first two seasons. That show is also named after and centres on a very large house. (Highclere Castle is the real-life Downton. When asked how many rooms it has, the countess of Carnarvon, whose home it is, says, “I’m not sure. I suppose if you know how many rooms you’ve got, you haven’t got a very big house.” So, there you go, you small-house-owner, you.)Now obviously, Brits are good at wandering around giant houses in corsets. Quite obviously, the rest of the world likes watching Brits wandering around giant houses in corsets.That’s hardly an end of the similarities. Both shows had a kind of love for their big house, and for the community and continuity it represented. Both shows made much of their love stories. Both shows had a basic decency to them: a sense that the people at the top, however flawed and fallible, fundamentally wanted to do the right thing.Yet I think there is one very telling difference between Brideshead and Downton, and one that really does tell us something about our changing cultural landscape. The issue I have in mind is this:Downton’s interests were essentially romantic, social and psychological. It was happy to ask emotionally searching questions about (say) the Lady Mary / Matthew Crawley relationship. It was perhaps even more nuanced and careful in piecing together the Mr Carson / Mrs Hughes one. The landscape of servants and served in a changing Britain was carefully and intelligently done.Now, Brideshead was hardly idiotic in psychological terms, but it was strikingly less inquisitive. The most memorable relationship in Brideshead was between Sebastian Flyte (young, beautiful, wealthy, drunk, gay) and the Jeremy Irons character, Charles Ryder. Ryder was young, not as beautiful, infinitely less rich, and infatuated, for sure, but not gay. Was there a struggle for Ryder in this relationship? Well, if there was, it was hardly shown. What underlay that relationship? Why did Ryder fall where others didn’t? The show paid that question very little interest. Why was the gifted Flyte a confirmed drunk? It would be easy to say that being gay in a homophobic age was hard, and surely it was. But we didn’t see Flyte struggle with the issue at all. It wasn’t raised.Instead, Brideshead presented the relationship of its two central male characters as more or less a done deal – “it just is”. Flyte’s challenges weren’t analysed. They just were. Neither the book nor the show made any real attempt to provide an explanatory architecture behind those things.Instead of psychology, Brideshead placed something else at its very centre: God. Or perhaps not God exactly, but morality, honour, soul, religion – a broader and deeper sense of the Good than anything Downton cared to offer.Indeed, the story at the heart of Brideshead is, in today’s terms, almost perplexing. Without giving away too much, Brideshead turns on the fact that Mr X loves Ms Y, and Ms Y loves Mr X, and there is no earthly reason why they shouldn’t live together and be happy forever – except that God says no. The result is that both parties end up renouncing their happiness for essentially religious reasons – and one of the two wasn’t even religious.You could perfectly well imagine some story like that appearing on Netflix today. You could imagine scripting, for example, a drama about a romance in the New York orthodox Jewish community, in which the two principals refused to marry for essentially similar reasons. But that Netflix drama would inevitably focus on the psychology lying behind that refusal. (Parental pressure? Fear of commitment? Fear of exclusion?) Brideshead doesn’t give a damn about the psychology. What it takes seriously was the religious morality lying behind its refusal.If you want to characterise the shift that’s taken place, it’s from soul/morality to psychology.And no, I don’t mean that there weren’t psychologically focused and highly intelligent dramas before Brideshead. And no, I don’t mean that there aren’t any soul-focused dramas now. But for all that, I think the shift is a real one. We now have a tendency to think that psychological exploration just IS the point of higher-end fiction.And it isn’t. It’s one possible purpose of higher-end fiction. There are others.In my own fiction? Well, I don’t know. Mostly, I just like writing the best entertainment I can. But on that soul versus psychology issue? Well, I probably lean as much towards soul as I do towards psychology.Soul may not be a fashionable theme, but Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and the rest are beyond fashion. They’re forever.And Brideshead vs Downton? Brideshead is better.Til soon.Harry

The start of your book is a delicate, beautiful thing.It has a joyous quality for sure. Something like cracking open an egg, the peep of new sun, climbing on board a train, feeling the flap of a sail, a rope straining at its mooring. You only get that feeling once per book, and it’s worth relishing.You can go big, if you want to. You can start in the middle of a bar-room brawl, with bottles flying and chairs thwacking. Or you can start with something apparently small, except that the wriggle of a little story-worm catches the reader’s attention and, dammit, they find they’re hooked.But, of course, there’s another issue with beginnings, a bothersome one. Because agents, blast them, start books from the beginning too and they are very unusual readers indeed. Partly, yes, they’re unusual in that they’re professionals looking for work they can sell. But also, they start reading literally thousands of novels a year. How many first pages does an average agent read? Maybe two thousand. How many actual books does an average agent read? Well, probably roughly as many as you do – or a few more, because they’re pros.Because agents read so many opening pages, they are deeply – horribly – familiar with the clichés of the genre. That means, they are exquisitely sensitive to badness in openings.What’s worse is this: the opening of your novel may well be the first thing you’ve ever written. It’s where you’re at your least experienced, not your most. That’s true in general, but it’s also true of this particular story. Midway through your book, you’ll know your characters better, your story better, your themes better, your voice better – everything better.Which means that when an agent picks up your book it’s effectively an encounter between a Story Opening Super-Analyser and a scarily undercooked Story Writer. Not fair, right?And look: nothing I go on to say in this email is absolute. You could pick some horrible cliché to open your novel with but, if you deliver that opening in a confident and well-written way, then any sane agent will read on, with interest. For everything I say below, you should bear in mind that there’s almost certainly a classic of world literature that takes the cliché and rebuilds it into something wonderful.At the same time, clichés feel wrong for a reason. If you can avoid them, you probably should. And with that said …DreamsThere’s something horribly schoolchildish about any story that starts with a dream, before, two or three paragraphs later, admitting, “Then I woke up.” It feels cool, but cool in much the same way that my kids think that making pots of green goo out of ordinary kitchen ingredients is cool. Once your age hits double-digits, it’s time to move on a bit.I think there are also two more specific reasons for concern. One is that dreams are totally unboundaried. Not rule-governed. And that doesn’t just break the laws of life, but of stories too. Even kids’ fantasy fiction has rules that govern its fictional world. Opening without rules feels disappointing – the difference between a park kickabout and a World Cup tie.The other is that, once you get two or three paragraphs in, you play that limp trick on the reader: ha, ha, fooled you, it was only a dream. That yields a feeling akin to disappointment. “You made me read this, on the premise that it mattered, but it didn’t matter. Oh.” I’d gently suggest that this is not a feeling you want anyone – still less an agent – to encounter on the first page of your novel.BedsMore generally, one agent once told me that a stunning proportion of all manuscripts she read – she reckoned well over ten per cent – opened with a character in bed. She reckoned she’d almost never, perhaps literally never, offered representation for such a book.There’s nothing obviously wrong with that. You could imagine some Beckettian novel that opens with a character in bed and keeps that character in pyjamas for most of the story. But … again, I think there are two specific issues here.One is that you don’t want to bracket yourself with the ten per cent of novels that an agent is most inclined to reject. The other is this: why is it that so many authors start with a character in bed and (usually) waking up?I think it’s that the writer themselves are warming up. They are aware of embarking on something new. Of introducing a new character to the world. So they start at the beginning: the opening of the day. As they move their character through toilet / shower / coffee / conflakes, they limber up, like your pre-gym warm-up.And: don’t warm up. Or, if you do, don’t do it on page. Don’t do it anywhere that the reader is going to see it.Poetry & prologuesThe fantasy manuscripts we see start with a snatch of poetry by way of prologue. Or if not poetry, then myth, or incantation, or something similar.And again, you’re going to tell me that Tolkein did this all the time, and maybe he did. But poetry (and myth and the rest of it) is, almost by definition, harder to penetrate than prose. An opening needs to gently lift the reader into your story vehicle and get them drifting away from the bank, the train gliding away from the platform.Forcing the reader to wade through a couple of pages of (often quite dodgy) poetry is the opposite of that gently lifting model. It’s like you’ve built a low wall in between the reader and the railway carriage you want them to get into.I talked about prologues a couple of weeks back, and they usually generate the same kind of issue. The definition of a prologue is roughly, something detached from the main story. That means you are having to gently lift the reader into your prologue and then, in the chapter following, you’re asking them to get out of that first vehicle and into another. You’ve just doubled the obstacles in the way of full reader engagement.Too much, too soonPersonally, I’d vastly prefer a dream-story, starting in bed, and written in poetry, encased in a prologue, than the beast I’m about to describe.My least-favoured story opener is with highly extreme emotion of any sort. Often some horrible situation (a prisoner under torture), but really any sort of extreme emotion, conveyed with a plethora of emotional superlatives.The reason why this doesn’t work is that stories have the quality of new social situations. You’re meeting characters for the first time. If your best friend had a terrible heartbreak sob story, you’d be prepared to listen to the whole thing, dishing out biscuits and tissues as needed. But if you had just for the very first time met a new parent at the school gate and you got the same excessively tearful download, you’d just want to pull away.A reader doesn’t care about an emotional drama for its own sake. They care because they care about a character. And that means learning them, building them, creating the knowledge that will generate sympathy.That’s the ‘too much’ error, and it’s a particular bogeyman of mine. But there’s a ‘too soon’ error as well.That error is giving away your punchline much too early. You have a world where gravity can be rubbed away via a smartphone app? Or memory works only for twenty-four hours? Or your character, a woman, is working, disguised as a man, on board an old three-master?Then great! I love it! What great ideas!But don’t tell me about them. Not on the first page, nor even the third, nor anywhere in the first chapter. Yes, of course, you scatter tantalising clues. A coffee machine that has to be pulled down from the ceiling. Reminder post-its on the mirror. Some odd piece of behaviour by a ‘seaman’ apparently remembering a husband.The clues are what tantalise. They’re what drag a reader through the story. Once you deliver your punchline (“An anti-gravity app! 24 hour memory!”), that particular sequence of clues carries no more force. For sure, other things will come along – you’ll start introducing the full Technicolor complexity of your story – but we’re talking about openings. If you want to get the reader into your story-vessel and pulling happily away from shore, then those tantalising clues are a brilliant way to maintain engagement. In time, as the reader bonds with your character, you won’t need the clues any more. But during this first chapter, don’t give the game away too early. Use the clues, delay the punchline.***That’s it from me. My overcomplicated week last week has floated into the past. The first yellow crocus nosed into the garden this morning. It’s probably regretting its impulsive decision: early February on an Oxfordshire hill is a bit unkind, even for croci. But what the heck, m’deario, and what the heck, my dearies? Where one crocus boldly goes, spring will surely follow.Til soon.Harry

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

Utopian fiction is a diverse and fascinating genre. It\'s an ideal form of literature for these trying times.In this guide we will: Clarify what utopian fiction is Discuss the difference between utopian and dystopian fictionExplore the different types of utopian fiction that are availableDiscover some examples of published utopian fiction Consider how you might set about writing utopian fiction So let’s begin by considering the genre itself. How is it defined? What Is Utopian Fiction? A utopia is an imagined, perfect world, often set in the distant future. In utopian fiction, the author has created a setting which is seen as fair, idealistic and harmonious. Its society will be striving for perfection and will seem to have no obvious flaws.  Utopian science fiction often explores the question – \'are perfect societies even possible?\'. However, this question is an interesting one in itself – as many utopian fictions will often expose the flaws involved with a ‘perfect’ and ‘fair’ world. Is there something that is sacrificed in the pursuit for perfection and complete equality?Utopian and dystopian fiction have characteristics of both science fiction and fantasy, but the emphasis is often placed on the emotions and perceptions of the characters living in these conditions. Sir Thomas More Sir Thomas More was a lawyer, judge and social philosopher and is seen as the first writer of the genre. He even invented the word ‘utopia’ from Greek roots when writing his first book of the same name in 1516. Interestingly, utopia in Greek can either mean ‘no place’ or ‘good place’ depending on the roots used. More’s Utopia imagines a perfect state and utopian society on an imagined island that has been cut off from Europe for over 1,200 years.  To fully understand utopian fiction, we also need to understand how it compares with its sister genre – dystopian fiction. What Is The Difference Between Utopian Fiction And Dystopian Fiction?  Dystopian and utopian fiction can often be confused, and the lines between them can be blurred. In this section we will explore the main differences between utopian and dystopian Fiction. In utopian fiction, we are imagining society that is true perfection. However, in dystopian fiction we are exploring a world where society has gone wrong. It is the direct opposite of utopian and is often chaotic, challenging, unfair and disruptive. The problems that might be affecting our world today (for example war or disease) are often more extreme in dystopian fiction and its depiction of an often anarchist society.It is interesting that in many utopian worlds or settings it will start as a perceived perfect and well managed world but will soon turn in a destructive and harmful dystopian world once the individuals in the setting find flaws in the utopia. A perfect example of this is found in Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, where the State has total control of a supposed perfect state. Another example is George Orwell’s 1984. Simply put, one explores an ideal society (utopian), the other an anarchist society that lacks justice and fairness (dystopian).So now that we\'ve considered the difference between utopian and dystopian fiction, let’s explore the different types of utopian literature available. Types Of Utopian Fiction  The different types of utopian fiction include:Ecological  In these types, society is working in harmony with nature to avoid producing waste and pollution, and nature is prioritised.EconomicThese types of work were popular after the 18th century and explore the concepts of Marx and Engels to explore self-sustaining utopian economies that benefit everyone.  Technological In these types of modern utopia, technology meets all human needs and functions, to improve their quality of living. Religious/Spiritual  In these societies, people are living in religious harmony without conflict or warfare. Scientific Similar to technology, in these settings science has helped to improve living standards, cure illnesses, and perhaps even help human beings avoid death. Examples Of Utopian Fiction  Here are some examples of utopian fiction across the centuries. They are all considered excellent utopian works and will help to provide a fuller understanding of the subject.As discussed before, some of these examples – for example Brave New World – are utopian novels that become dystopian, but these genres often blur.  Utopia- Sir Thomas More (1516) New Atlantis- Francis Bacon (1626) The Blazing World – Lady Margaret Lucas Cavendish (1666) Gulliver’s Travels- Jonathan Swift (1726) Erewhon- Samuel Butler (1872) Gloriana – Lady Florence Dixie (1890) News from Nowhere – William Morris (1890) Looking Backwards – Edward Bellamy (1888) Mizora: World of Women – Mary E Bradley Lane (1991)  Woman on the Edge of Time- Marge Piercy (1976) The Culture- Iain M Blanks (1987 – 2012) The Dispossessed  - Ursula K Le Guin (1974) The Ones who Walk Away – Ursula K Le Guin (1973) Star Trek – The Original Series (1966)Herland – Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1915) Brave New World- Aldous Huxley (1931)When it Changed – Joanna Russ (1972) Afterland – Lauren Beuke (2020) The End of Men – Christina Sweeney-Baird (2021) Now we have shared some utopian examples to explore, let’s consider how you might start to write a utopian novel yourself. How To Write Utopian Fiction  In this section we will explore some key tips and considerations to make when writing utopian fiction.Explore Theme & Issues Consider the theme that you want to explore in your utopian fiction. Is there an issue happening in society today that you can explore further in your fiction? Maybe your book will join the group of increasingly popular feminist utopias.Which type of utopian fiction is it likely to fall under? Scientific? Political? Environmental? Or a combination? What could provide an ‘ideal solution’ to the problem you have considered, and how will your society feel harmonised? Build Your Utopia Once you have understood what themes you will explore in your utopian fiction, it’s important to understand the setting and the people that will sit within it.Do you need to draw a map of your utopia? Is there a manifesto or guiding set of rules for your people to follow? Are there any compromises to consider?Have fun creating and playing with your world and thinking about the types of characters that sit within it, and the sacrifices they might have made. Read! The best way to understand the utopian genre is to read books on the genre. This will fuel your imagination and get those creative juices flowing. So there are no excuses, pick up that book! Frequently Asked Questions  What Is Utopian Fiction In Literature?  Utopian fiction in literature explores an imagined or perfect world, something that we aspire to, or dream of. In these settings society is seen as fair and just, and people are living in harmony and without fear. Utopian fiction often poses the question, \'is a perfect society or world possible?\'.What Is An Example Of Utopian Fiction? One example of utopian fiction is the first utopian work, Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, in which he imagines a perfect island state.  What Is The Difference Between Dystopian And Utopian Fiction? In utopian fiction we are imagining a society living in harmony. However, in dystopian fiction we are exploring a world where society has gone wrong. It\'s the direct opposite of utopian and is often chaotic, challenging, unfair and disruptive.Writing Utopian FictionI hope that this article has helped with your understanding and knowledge of the vast and interesting genre of utopian fiction. It is extremely beneficial to read and understand this genre, as it poses so many thought-provoking philosophical questions – such as ‘what is a perfect society?’ and ‘can it be truly possible to live in complete harmony?’. Utopian fiction can also help to explore human flaws and weaknesses in a perfect setting.  Utopian fiction is great genre to read and write as it crosses into so many other areas and often blurs into many great works of dystopia.It may seem like a difficult genre to write, but it is such an inspiring one – as it often produces work that makes the reader consider deeper questions. So, if you feel inspired by this, there is no excuse. Pick up that pen and begin to create that new utopian world! 

A few days ago, we began a new evening routine. At about 7.00 pm, the whole family sits in the living room and my wife reads a chunk of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone to the kids (two sets of twins, 7 and 9.)This is the children’s first exposure to HP and, predictably, they’re liking it very much.But interestingly, they didn’t immediately fall in love. Because kids are demonstrative, it’s easy simply to watch how engaged they are. More fiddling, more looking around, more playing with cushions – all those things are signs of weak or fading interest.And what I noticed was interesting.We all know the basic Harry Potter story. In the first book, especially, it’s mostly: Orphan goes to wizard school. Yes, there’s a whole Voldemort story being born, but the thing that grips you in that first book is the transition from boy-in-the-cupboard to student-wizard.And the very first chapter of the very first book is, in effect, a prologue. The focus of that prologue is, initially, on the (boring, repressive, Muggle) Mr Dursley. He sees some odd things – people in cloaks, a map-reading cat, too many owls. He disapproves. He thinks about drills.Then the chapter transitions to a long dialogue between Dumbledore, Professor McGonagall and Hagrid. That dialogue has plenty of sparkle and interest, of course. (Hagrid is a giant with a flying motorbike, Professor McGonagall was a map-reading cat, and so forth.)But?My kids were losing interest. We’d told them that this was a great book and that they’d love it, but they were visibly losing interest.All that changed with Chapter Two. In effect, the second chapter still has something prologue-y about it. There’s still no mention of school. The actual story (Harry goes to wizard school) hasn’t yet started. All that happens is we get to see Harry’s strange living arrangements and we learn about a trip to the zoo.This chapter, however, did engage the kids. If the first chapter was losing its audience, the second one captured them. It did that via Rowling’s plentiful humour. It did so by shocking the kids with the basic unfairness of the Dudley / Harry setup. It did so via the bizarre escape of a snake.Now, I’ve got a few things to say about all this. The first is that there’s something quite remarkable about JK Rowling’s pacing here. My own Fiona Griffiths stories are aimed at adults, and a pretty literate group of adults at that – but, by heck, I get my stories started in Chapter One. That doesn’t have to mean a lay a bloody corpse out for the reader’s delight (although I might), but there’s certainly a drop of blood in the water, the first tickle of story.JK Rowling, on the other hand, writes for kids. Her chapters are longer than mine. And she gets her story properly underway, only in Chapter Three. That’s remarkable and it’s a tribute to the excellence of her writing that she gets away with it, especially here, in the opening book of the series, which couldn’t rely on reputation to get its readers over humps in the road. In effect, Rowling presents three prologues to the readers in turn:Vernon Dursley’s owl-ridden day Three (strange) adults talking about something momentous Harry Potter takes a trip to the zooObserving my kids, I’d say that the first two prologues didn’t quite work, while the third one absolutely did. And bear in mind, that this is JK Rowling. She’s funny. She’s warm. She’s surprising. She’s inventive.If she’s starting to lose kids’ interest, that’s not because her writing is flaky. It’s because there’s something structurally awry.The first most obvious point is that Chapter One managed both to have a relatively dull central character (Vernon Dursley) and to have no central character at all – Dursley being pushed aside halfway through the chapter by the Dumbledore / McGonagall / Hagrid trio.So who were the kids meant to be focusing on? Because they didn’t know, the answer that emerged for them was, No one. Simply throwing in flying motorbikes doesn’t solve that problem.Likewise, the whole chapter was just too long, a total of 18 pages in the edition I’m looking at.A third problem: the Dumbledore / McGonagall / Hagrid scene didn’t involve drama – it involved adults talking about drama. No matter how big, important or strange that drama was, people talking is still just people talking.My kids were starting to wilt. The next evening, we kind of had to force Harry Potter on them. They’d rather have had a few minutes of telly.As soon as Harry Potter himself entered the book, that changed. We’re still in somewhat prologue-y territory – we have a proper central character now, but still no hint of school – but the kids had someone to bond to. They had an unfair situation (boy in cupboard) to inflame them. They had some kind of conflict (Harry vs Dursleys) to watch and engage with.Then all Rowling’s warmth and humour and inventiveness could work its magic. Although we weren’t quite in the story proper, it didn’t feel like that. The kids were off, and flying, and wanting more.Writers often, often struggle with prologues. I have done myself. But here are some rules that don’t often go wrong:Avoid them if you can Keep them short Don’t, for heaven’s sake, double up: Don’t jump from Dursley to Dumbledore inside one prologue. Talking about drama is not drama Know why you’re prologuing at all. What’s the purpose? A really bad purpose is “the first few chapters are a bit dull, so I want to tell the reader it gets more interesting later.” A really good purpose is “use the prologue to alter the way the readers understand what happens next.” For all its excess length and talkiness, Rowling’s first chapter does in fact do that: it shines a kind of lustre on Harry, that the snake-in-the-zoo chapter couldn’t do.In the end, readers want to meet their central character sooner rather than later. They want to reach Story sooner rather than later.JK Rowling is a wonderful writer and that first book of hers deserved everything that later happened. But the over-prologuing? In the hands of a less engaging writer, that weakness could have toppled the book before it started.Me, I doubt if I’ll ever write a book with a prologue again. Most of the ones that cross our editorial desk here should just be deleted.And me? Tis a frosty day with lots of sunshine. I am going outside to find an owl.