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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Punctuation for Writers of Fiction and Creative Non-Fiction Punctuation matters. Correct punctuation tells the reader how to read the words you have on the page: where to put the pauses, how to make sense of your sentences. It’s not too much to say that bad punctuation will kill a book. It’ll get rejected by agents and readers alike. Trying to sell a badly punctuated manuscript is like going on a date wearing last week’s jogging pants. The underlying problem is the same in both cases. The badly punctuated manuscript and the dirty jogging bottoms both say, “I don’t care.” I don’t care about you, my hot date. I don’t care about you, my precious reader. Any sane date will just make their excuses and leave. A reader will do the same – and quite right too. So here goes with a quick guide to the major punctuation marks. In each case, we’ll talk about: The basic ruleThe most common punctuation errors that writers makeMore advanced ways to use the tool Most of you reading this will know the basic rules. Even so, it’s likely that you’ll be committing at least some of the errors some of the time (a few of them are very common indeed.) And pretty much everyone will get at least something from thinking about how to use punctuation marks in a more sophisticated, writerly way. The Period, Or Full Stop (.) OK, you know when to use this little beast. You use it at the end of sentences, so long as those sentences aren’t questions or exclamations (in which case you’d use the “?” or “!” instead.) Easy, right? The Most Common Error One of the most prevalent errors in manuscripts written by first time writers is the so-called run-on sentence. It looks something like this: She was a breath of fresh air in our little town, she came into school on her first day with a bunch of garden flowers for the teacher and home-made candy for us, her schoolmates, it should have looked cheesy, but we fell in love with her on the spot. The error here is simple. The writer is using commas (“,”) where they should be using periods. The result is like someone just gabbling in your face, yadda-yadda-yadda, without giving you a chance to draw a breath or reflect. The solution is simple. You chop the sentence up with periods, to produce this: She was a breath of fresh air in our little town. She came into school on her first day with a bunch of garden flowers for the teacher and home-made candy for us, her schoolmates. It should have looked cheesy, but we fell in love with her on the spot. Phew! That’s a mile better already. Notice that there’s still a comma dividing two of the sentences (“It should have looked cheesy” and “we fell in love with her.”) The grammar-reason why that comma is OK is that you have “but” – a conjunction, a connector word – joining the two sentences. In a way, though, I’d prefer you to forget about the grammar and just listen to the rhythms. Say the first snippet out loud, then the second one. If it feels right, it is right. That’s pretty much all the grammar you are ever going to need. More Advanced Ways to Use the Tool Back at school, you were probably told to avoid sentence fragments – the name given to sentences that lack a main verb. (Like this one, for example.) That’s rather old-fashioned advice in some ways, and it’s certainly unhelpful advice to offer when it comes to writing fiction or creative non-fiction. Take my own work. My narrator is jerky, tough, awkward, abrupt. Her voice is all those things too, and the consequence is that her prose makes use of a lot of sentence fragments. For instance: There’s a woman at the wheel. Forties, maybe. Blonde. Shoulder-length hair held back in a grip. Blue woollen coat worn over a dark jumper.I kick the door. Hard. I’m wearing boots and kick hard enough to dent the panel. Pretty clearly here, the periods are dividing my language up into units of meaning, not into sentences. The words Blonde and Hard are just words, after all. They’re not even attempting to be complete sentences. Equally clearly, my narrator’s language forces that kind of punctuation on the manuscript. If you wanted to follow the “period = end of sentence” rule, you’d have to rewrite the text so it looked something like this: There’s a woman at the wheel. She is in her forties, maybe. Her blonde, shoulder-length hair is held back in a grip. She wears a blue woollen coat worn over a dark jumper. [and so on] That’s not just differently punctuated. It has a different tone, a different mood. It’s perfectly fine writing … but it’s not what I wanted. The “correct” punctuation ends up destroying the voice I worked hard to create. As a rough, rough guide, literary fiction will tend to have relatively few sentence fragments, while crime thrillers and the like will have many more. But fiction is much more supple than that general rule suggests. So yes, my character is tough. Yes, she uses lots of sentences fragments in approved noir style. But she also reflects on philosophy, quotes poetry, introspects extensive, and so on. In the end, you build from the character to the voice to the punctuation. It makes no sense to try building the other way. The Exclamation Mark (!) An exclamation mark (or point) marks an exclamation, denotes shouting, or otherwise gives emphasis to a sentence. It’s like a shouty form of a period. But watch out! You think you know how to use the exclamation mark, but … The Most Common Error The most common error is to use the exclamation mark! It’s fine in emails. It’s OK-ish in blog posts. But in novels? Avoid it. As Scott Fitzgerald remarked, “An exclamation mark is like laughing at your own jokes.” It’s like you’re trying to make your punctuation compensate for a failure of your actual writing. If you want a rough rule of thumb, you can use one or maximum two exclamation marks per 100,000 words of prose. If you have zero, that’s just fine. And never, ever have a double or treble exclamation mark in your text. What’s fine on Twitter, looks just awful on the printed page. More Advanced Ways to (Not) Use the Tool So if I (like most pro authors) hate the exclamation mark, what do you do instead? After all, there may be occasions where you feel your work actually needs the emphasis. But consider these alternatives: #1 “Go get it.”#2 “Go get it!”#3 “Go get it,” he ordered her, sharply. Those options are ranked in approximate order of shoutiness. The first option doesn’t feel especially emphatic. The addition of the exclamation mark adds a little force. The third option adds even more, via a highly coloured verb and adverb combo. But neither of the last two options is great. And the issue here is simply this: the actual bit of underlying dialogue is fairly colourless, and that’s not going to change, no matter how many toppings you put on. In other words, if you started out with option #1 and found yourself thinking, “Hmm, this feels a little bland, so let’s get out the heavy-duty punctuation,” that should be a signal that you need to rewrite things. So a better option than either #1, #2 or #3 above would be: #4 “Go get it. Get it now. Give it to me. Never take it again.” You’re not using anything more than a common old period there, and you’re not resorting to ordering sharply, yelling loudly, yodelling wildly or exclaiming defiantly. But because your dialogue is now unmistakeably emphatic, it’s fine on its own. If the burger tastes great, you don’t need the relish. The Ellipsis (…) An ellipsis is a bit of a slippery brute. What it does is mark the fact that some words are missing. So, in dialogue, for example, people will often trail off, rather than actually complete a sentence. That much is easy – but how do you actually write it? Three dots is pretty much universal, but do you have spaces between them? Do you have a space before and after the ellipsis? And if you have the ellipsis at the start of a sentence, do you have a period (to denote the end of the previous sentence), then a space, then the ellipsis? That option sounds technically correct, but also rather fussy. The good news for you is that none of this really matters. Different style authorities advise different things, with some variation between British and American usage. And in the end, who really cares? Your editor won’t. Your agent won’t. Your reader won’t. It’s just not a big deal. I’d suggest, in general, that you use three dots without spacing in between, but with a space before and after. Like so: “Oh, Jen, if you really think that, then we should … I mean, maybe this was never meant to be.” The Most Common Error As with exclamation marks, the primary error is to overuse these little beasts. What works fine in an email, quickly looks annoying on the printed page. But whereas I’d advise you to hunt the exclamation mark almost to extinction, you can let the ellipsis breathe, just a little. One ellipsis per chapter is probably too many, but you’d have to be quite a fussy ready to object to half a dozen, or even a dozen, over the course of a full length novel. More Advanced Ways to Use the Tool As with the exclamation mark, the best way to use the ellipsis is to let it nudge you into querying your own writing. If you feel yourself wanting to use the ellipsis, just check that it’s not your writing that needs to change. In nine out of ten cases, adjusting your text will be a better option than using the ellipsis. The Semi-Colon ( ; ) The semi-colon is a divider, the way commas and periods are dividers. The comma is the lightest of these in weight: it inserts the shortest of pauses. The period inserts the maximum pause. The semi-colon lives somewhere in between. Here’s an example of all three in action: It never normally rained, but the weather that day was awful.(comma = minimal pause)It never normally rained; my mother didn’t even own an umbrella(semi-colon = mid-weight pause)It never normally rained. That day, though, there was a deluge.(period = strongest pause) And look: you can live without the semi-colon completely. Personally, I quite like semi-colons, but my narrator, Fiona Griffiths, never uses them, so in about 750,000 words of published Fiona Griffiths’ novels, there’s only one semi-colon – and that enters the text via a direct quote from Wikipedia. Short message: if the semi-colon scares you, it’s fine to leave it well alone. The Most Common Error There are no common errors with semi-colons, except maybe overuse by people thinking they’re fancy. More Advanced Ways to Use the Tool Thinking of semi-colons as a middle-weight pause is technically correct, but it misses something, nevertheless. A better way to conceive of the mark is this: You need a semi-colon when you have two sentences, and the second one corrects or modifies the meaning of the first. So take those examples above. We used a semi-colon in this context: It never normally rained; my mother didn’t even own an umbrella. The first sentence is, in effect, adjusted by the second. The semi-colon tells us to read the second sentence as a kind of comment on the first one: “look, here’s just how much it never rained.” Or, if you want a slightly more grown-up example, here’s William Faulkner in The Sound and the Fury: Clocks slay time… time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life. But you can get too hung up on these things. Arguably, sentences that speak about each other shouldn’t need any punctuation to get their point across. The text itself should handle the communication just fine. So there’ll be plenty of writers (including my narrator) who’d agree with Kurt Vonnegut’s lesson in creative writing: First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college. And who cares if you’ve been to college, right? Parenthesis Brackets () | Dashes – – | Commas ,, There are three types of parenthesis you can use. They are: Commas: The comma, always a useful creature, can be used to separate one clause from the rest.Dashes: The dash – a more forceful beast – can be used in much the same way.Brackets: The bracket (perfectly fine in non-fiction) is relatively rare in fiction. But these three are not equivalent, and not equally common. I just opened up my Word document that contains the entire Fiona Griffiths series, and checked to see how many of each punctuation mark I used. In about 650,000 words of text, I used: 39,000 commas, of which, admittedly, many thousand wouldn’t be parenthetical.5,000 dashes, though most of these were actually hyphens, as in “short-tempered”. So I’m going to guess maybe only 1,000 actual dashes.100 brackets, of which many were things like “in Paragraph 22(c)”, where the use of the bracket isn’t really a parenthesis in the normal way. The Most Common Error There are two common errors when it comes to parenthesis. The first error is not to use anything to mark off a clause from the rest of a sentence resulting in (often, but not always) a sentence that is just plain hard to read. For example: The comma always a useful creature can be used to separate one clause from the rest. Tucking commas in around the useful-creature clause makes the meaning pop right out. The second error is kind of the opposite. It’s as though writers get worried that commas aren’t emphatic enough, so they start clamping their text inside brackets, like this: She couldn’t get enough of him (understandable, given her past), so she tried to find reasons why he couldn’t leave. And that feels heavy-handed. A simple rewrite releases the sentence and lets it breathe: Understandably, given her tangled past, she couldn’t get enough of him and she tried to find reasons why he couldn’t leave. There’s more flow there. Less sense of an author forcing information at you. The no-brackets alternative seems much more natural to fiction. The with-brackets version is better suited to the information-delivery task of non-fiction. More Advanced Ways to Use Parenthesis The real trick with parenthesis – and with commas particularly – is to learn to feel the weight of a sentence. In most cases, commas will cover your parenthetical needs. If you need to rewrite something to make it work, then rewrite it. If you need the greater weight of dashes, then go for it, but recognise that you are, in a small way, pulling on the handbrake mid-sentence. If that’s what you want, fine. In many cases, there’ll be better options. Oh, and though I personally never read my text out loud, lots of authors swear by it – and any hiccups or awkwardness as you read is a huge clue that your punctuation or your text (or both) are at fault. Hyphens and Dashes The hyphen, the en dash, and the em dash We can’t quite leave a post about punctuation without talking about the various dashes available to you. Specifics in one second, but first, a public annoucement: The specifics don’t really matter. Yes, a lot of writers (especially those college-educated brutes that got Vonnegut all riled up) care a lot about their en dashes and their em dashes. But if you’ve never spent a moment caring about them in the past, you don’t have to worry that you’ve been doing something very wrong. You haven’t. Any “errors” on this scale will bother almost nobody – neither readers, nor agents. So, here’s what hyphens and dashes are and how to use them. The Hyphen The hyphen is on your keyboard as a minus sign. You use it to connect words, as for example: The hot-headed wood-cutter tip-toed past the one-eyed she-wolf. Apart from a slight anxiety about whether a hyphen is needed in a particular context (is it woodcutter or wood-cutter?), it’s hard to get these little fellows wrong. Oh, and although everyone will have a house-style defining when to use hyphens, everyone’s style guide will be a bit different, so there’s often not a clear right and wrong here anyway. The En Dash The en dash is so called because it is a dash approximately the same width as the letter N. And it doesn’t live on your keyboard anywhere: you have to give it life and breath all by yourself. You do this by hitting Ctrl and the minus sign at the same time, to give yourself something that looks like this: Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) As that example suggests, it’s used mostly for dates, or for things that feel much the same, for example: Washington–New York (in the context of a flight timetable, for example.) The Em Dash The em dash is so called because … well, you’re going to have to guess which letter-width it’s named after. You create this little critter in Word by hitting Ctrl-Alt-minus. And the em dash performs the following functions: It marks an interruption in dialogue.“The buried treasure,” he said, as he lay dying, “the treasure can be found just to the right of the old—”It marks a parenthesis in the middle of a sentence.The em dash—more forceful than commas—marks out a parenthesis in the middle of a sentence.But it can also mark out a parenthesis at the end of a sentence.He was allergic to fruit, sunshine, exercise and soap—or so he always insisted.(The “so he always insisted” part is the parenthesis here. If you were using brackets, that whole end chunk would be enclosed in brackets.)It can be used as a slightly informal colon.The result of that informal colon—often a little hint of comedy, or something of a “ta-daa” quality.It marks deleted or redacted words.The accuser, Ms — —, struck a defiant tone in court. Best practice is generally to use the em dash without a space before or after, but that’s one of those things that doesn’t actually matter. Newspapers tend to use spaces and British usage is much more tolerant of spacing and lots of people just don’t know the rules anyway. That’s it from me. Beautiful punctuation is often a sign of careful writing and a beautifully readable book.

Sample Query Letter & Template Included You want to know what a great query letter to literary agents should look like? We’re going to show you a perfect sample letter in a moment. But we’re also going to figure out what your query letter needs to do – and how you’re going to write it. This blog post will give you everything you need – and I promise that if you are talented enough to write a book, you are EASILY capable of writing a strong, confident query letter. OK. We’ll get stuck in in one second. But I should probably tell you that I am a real author describing a real book. The query letter below pretends that this book is a first novel and I have no track record in the industry. Tiny digression: this isn’t a complete guide to getting your book published. You can get that here. Nor is it a full guide to getting an agent – more info here, and here.) Write A Query Letter In 3 Easy Steps: Introductory sentence – include your purpose for writing (you’re seeking representation!) book title, wordcount, genre. 1-2 paragraphs about your book – what your book’s about and why a reader will love it. A brief note about You – who you are and why you wrote the book. Here’s What A Query Letter Should Look Like Remember that your query letter needs to accomplish the following goals: Introduce the purpose of your letter (ie: to secure representation). To define in a very concise way the manuscript that you’ve written (ie: title, genre, word count). To introduce your work at slightly more length – so you say what it is (setting / setup / premise / main character). To give a sense of the emotional mood of your work – what is the emotional payoff for the reader? To give a hint of your book’s USP or angle. To help the agent understand where your book would fit in the market by including comparable titles and agent personalisation. To say something – not much – about you. We’ll say more about all that shortly. But first up, here’s a query letter of a sort that would make any sane agent want to start reading the manuscript in question: Dear Agent Name I’m writing to seek representation for my first novel, TALKING TO THE DEAD, a police procedural of 115,000 words. The book opens with news of a murder: a young woman and her daughter have been found dead in a rough area of Cardiff. The house where they’re found is in poor condition, but in the corner of the room is a platinum bank card belonging to a local millionaire. A millionaire who died in a plane crash some nine months previously. New recruit, Detective Constable Fiona Grifffiths is assigned to the investigation. Puzzling as this crime looks, it’s not the heart of the book’s mystery. It becomes rapidly clear that Fiona Griffiths herself is a very peculiar woman, who is withholding crucial secrets from the reader. Who exactly is her father? What was her childhood illness? And what is it with her and corpses? I currently run my own small consultancy business, and this is my first novel. I look forward to writing further novels in the series. I enclose the first three chapters and a synopsis. I hope you like what you see and look forward to hearing from you. Yours, Harry Bingham Simple right? And you can do it, no? Here’s that query letter again with my comments highlighted in bold: I’m writing to seek representation [the purpose of you getting in touch] for my first novel, TALKING TO THE DEAD, a police procedural of 115,000 words. [title, genre, word count – all defined fast and clearly.] The book opens with news of a murder: a young woman and her daughter have been found dead in a rough area of Cardiff. The house where they’re found is in poor condition, but in the corner of the room is a platinum bank card belonging to a local millionaire. A millionaire who died in a plane crash some nine months previously. [This sets up the basic premise of the crime story. Already, the agent has the basic co-ordinates she needs to navigate.] New recruit, Detective Constable Fiona Grifffiths is assigned to the investigation. [Introduce main character – clearly and succinctly.] Puzzling as this crime looks, it’s not the heart of the book’s mystery. It becomes rapidly clear that Fiona Griffiths herself is a very peculiar woman, who is withholding crucial secrets from the reader. Who exactly is her father? What was her childhood illness? And what is it with her and corpses? [This hints nicely at the book’s mood and USP. It starts to suggest the emotional payoff – a mystery to do with the book’s central character.] I currently run my own small consultancy business, and this is my first novel. I look forward to writing further novels in the series. [A line or two about me. Confirmation that I understand I’m writing a series – an important touch for this kind of fiction.] I enclose the first three chapters and a synopsis. I hope you like what you see and look forward to hearing from you. [Wrap it up. The whole letter easily fits onto one page. And yes, I know you’ll be sending an email, but you know what I mean.] Now you know what you’re doing, we’ll get into a slightly more specific analysis. What To Include In Your Query Letter All the letter must do is: Give a very brief 1-sentence summary of the book and your purpose in writing it A somewhat longer, 1-2 paragraph, introduction to the book. (Not a full-scale plot summary, that’s for the synopsis). A brief introduction to you. Not be badly written. That’s it. If you can write a novel, you can write that letter. And each of those elements is simple enough. The 1 Sentence Summary You need to say why you’re writing. (You’re seeking representation, right? So say so.) You need to give the title of your book, either underlined or (better) in italics, please. You need to give the word count of your book, rounded to the nearest 5,000 words. (And one word of advice: just be sure your word count is approximately right for the market. Advice here.) You need to give the approximate genre or territory of your book. If you do those things, the agent can instantly understand what you want and what you’re offering. You will also, by the way, prove yourself to be a swift, professional writer. The 1-2 Paragraph Introduction To The Book First, it’s important to say what this is not. You are not writing a back-of-book blurb. But nor are you writing a detailed outline of your story. (That’ll come in the form of your synopsis – more synopsis help right here.) What you are doing is explaining what your book is and why a reader will feel compelled to read it. That ‘what’ element will typically be a matter of presenting some facts. You need to give some more information about your settings, your premise, your characters and so on. You don’t need to be as salesy as a cover blurb, and you don’t need to be as dry as a synopsis. It’s almost as though you were chatting to your best friend and telling her about the book you’ve just been reading. The ‘why’ element is equally crucial. Here, you are conveying something about emotions. What is a reader going to feel as they read the book? What kind of atmosphere will they inhabit? What kind of emotional payoff or challenge is likely? Comparable Titles Including comparable titles is a clear and simple way to help authors understand where your book fits in the market. It\'s important to query agents who specialise in your genre, and comparable titles help them get a sense of where your book would fit in with their list. Some people choose to include this in the introduction of their query letter, while others add it in later on; you can place it anywhere that suits you. Try to include two or three comparable titles. You could reference them by saying \'readers of x, y, and z would love (your book)\' or \'x meets y in (your book)\'. Make sure that you also describe why your book is unique and detail the extra elements it adds to the books you reference. It\'s important that the comparable titles you use are genuinely similar to your book. Though it can be tempting to reference books you admire, it\'s helpful to show an understanding of the market you\'re writing in and give the agent a sense of the overall tone/style of your book. The titles should be commerically successful and contemporary (ideally from the last two years or so) to show your agent why you think your book will sell in the current market. Agent Personalisation Agent personalisation is a very brief part of your query letter, but it\'s an important one. Lots of writers eagerly send query letters to lots of different agents, and agents want to know that you put some thought into deciding to contact them specifically. As with comparable titles, this is a section which can go anywhere in your query letter. Providing an agent with a specific reason why you chose to query them will help make your query letter stand out, and it also shows that you\'ve done your research. Maybe they represent an author in your genre who you\'re a big fan of, and that\'s how you found out about them. Or perhaps you discovered them on Twitter, or went to an event they took part it where something they said really resonated with you. Let them know! Including this element of personalisation will make your letter more memorable. A Brief Introduction To You, The Author About you Luckily, agents don’t care too much about you. Nor should they. They should care about the book, and only the book. That’s a fine, honest, meritocratic approach. May the best book win! That said, agents are obviously curious about the person behind the manuscript. So tell them something about yourself. It’s fine to be human here, rather than resume-style formal. It’s also OK to be quite brief. For example: “I am a 41-year-old mother, with three children, two dogs, one husband, and the finest vegetable garden in the southwest.” Why you wrote the book If there is a real connection between who you are (a shrimp fisher, let’s say) and the book you’ve written (something to do with the sea and fishing) then it’s worth another sentence or two to tease that out a bit. But don’t feel compelled to do that. In my case, I wrote a crime novel, just because I wanted to write one. I’m not a cop or ex-cop. I have no forensics expertise. I have no legal expertise. Or anything else relevant. And that doesn’t matter, of course – what matters is the quality of the book. So if you have something good to say, say it. If you have nothing to say, then say nothing and don’t worry about it. Your previous writing history If you have some real background as a writer, then do say so. For example, you might have written a textbook or similar on a topic relevant to your own professional area. Or you might have won or been shortlisted for a major short story prize. Or perhaps you work as a journalist or copywriter. Or something similar. If anything like that is the case, then do say so. But if it’s not – don’t worry! We’ve seen a lot of agent query letters that say things like “I haven’t had much writing experience, but my English teacher always used to say that I would be a writer one day . . .” And, you know what? It just sounds feeble. So don’t say it. Agents know that most slushpile submissions will be by complete newbie authors. And that’s fine. JK Rowling was a newbie once . . . Writing a series? If you are writing a series, then you should say so, much as I did in that sample letter above. Agents will like the fact that you recognise the series potential of your work and that you are committed to taking the steps needed to develop it. What you don’t want to do, is sound overly rigid or arrogant. (“I have completed the first four novels in my Lords of the Silver Sword series, and have got complete chapter outlines for the next 11 titles. I am looking for a publisher who will commit fully to the series.” — if you write something like that, agents are likely to reject you out of hand.) How Long Should Your Query Letter Be? Your overall letter should not run to more than one page. (Except that non-fiction and literary authors can give themselves maybe a page and a half). And that’s it. If you\'ve written your query letter, and would like some feedback before querying agents, why not purchase an agent submission pack review from us. We can help YOU get published.Did you know, we have a complete course on getting published? The course covers absolutely everything you need to know: how to prepare your manuscript, how to find agents, how to compile your shortlist, how to write your query letter and synopsis – and much, much more besides. That course is quite expensive to buy . . . so don’t buy it. The course is available completely free to premium members of Jericho Writers. Not just that course. You get our Agent Match tool for finding literary agents. You get our awesome How To Write course. Plus our members get regular opportunities to pitch their work live online to a panel of literary agents. Sounds good, doesn’t it? So hop over here and find out more about joining us. Query Letters: The Exceptions OK, there are a few exceptions to the above rules. Of those, the two most important ones you need to know about are: You Are Writing Literary Fiction If you are writing genuinely high end literary fiction, agents will want you to strut a little, even in your query letter. So if you were writing about (Oh, I dunno) a fictional nun in 14th century Florence, you might talk a bit about the themes of your work and what inspired you to pick up this story. This kind of thing: “I got the idea for this story, while working as a game warden one winter on the Hebridean island of Macvity. I was all alone and with a deeply unreliable internet connection. It occurred to me that my solitary life had its religious aspect and I became very interested in female monasticism. Blah, yadda, yadda, blah.” (Sorry for the blahs, but personally I like books that have corpses in them.) The idea of this kind of approach is that you are selling the book (its themes, its resonances), but also you’re selling yourself – you’re showing that you can walk the talk as a literary writer. You Are Writing Non-fiction And You Have A Remarkable Platform Let’s say you are writing a cookbook and you have a couple of million people who subscribe to your YouTube channel. Or you are writing a book about motorcycle repair and you have a motorbike-themed blog with 250,000 monthly readers. In those cases, you have to delineate your platform in enough detail to convince an agent (and ultimately a publisher) that you are the right person to write this manuscript. In those cases, then your query letter does need to outline your platform in sufficient detail. You may even want to kick that outline over into a separate document. However you handle it, the “one page query letter” rule can safely be binned. Your prospective agent wants to know what kind of platform you can supply – so tell her. Oh yes: and having a website is not a platform. Having 10,000 followers on Twitter is impressive, but means nothing in the context of national or international marketing. In short: if you are going to make a big deal of your platform, your platform itself needs to be a big deal. That means having six- or seven-figure numbers to boast about. Nothing else will really cut it. You Are Writing Non-fiction And You Have Extraordinary Authority Much the same goes if you are (let’s say) writing a book of popular psychology and (like Daniel Kahnemann) just happen to have a Nobel Prize to wave around. If you bring amazing authority to a topic, then you need to cover that, either in your query letter or a separate bio. Again, the one page rule just doesn’t apply. What To Do If You Don’t Hear Back From Literary Agents So. Let’s say you’ve got a shortlist of agents. You’ve checked those agents’ websites for their specific submission requirements – probably opening chapters + query letter + synopsis. You use our query letter sample and write your own perfect query letter. You avoid any weak language, misspellings or grammatical howlers, of course. You use our advice to put together your synopsis (advice right here). You don’t spend too long on writing the synopsis either, because if you use our techniques, that process is simplicity itself. You read the opening chunk of your manuscript one last time – and follow our simple rules on manuscript formatting. And then – well, you send your stuff off. You light some candles, pray to your favourite saints, tie a black cat into a knot and throw a mirror over a ladder. (Or under it? Or something to do with a wishing well? I’m not sure. Superstition isn’t my strong suit.) Anyway. You get your stuff out to at least 6 agents and preferably more like 10-12. You wait an unfeasibly long amount of time – but let’s say 6-8 weeks as a rough guide. What happens next? Well. Rejections do happen, and are likely to happen even if you’ve written a great book. (Because agents have their hands full. Or just like a different sort of thing. Or have an author who is too directly competitive. Or anything else. It’s not always about you or your book.) But if you send your material out to 10-12 agents, and find yourself being rejected, then you have to ask yourself: Am I being rejected because I’ve chosen the wrong agents? Am I being rejected because my query letter / synopsis are poor? Am I being rejected because my book isn’t up to scratch? Truthfully? The third of these issues is by far the most common. If you’ve written a great book, and a rubbish query letter, you can still find an agent. The other way around? Never. If you are confident that you’ve gone to the right agents, and have been rejected by 10+ people (or heard nothing after 8 weeks, which amonts to the exact same thing), then the probable truth is that your book is not yet strong enough for commercial publication. And, you know what? That’s not a big deal. All books start out bad. Then they get better. So getting rejected is really just a signal that you still have further to travel down that road. (Find out about the type of rejection letters to look out for here.) Remember that getting third party editorial advice is the standard way of improving your work. We offer outstanding editorial help and you can read all about it here. Alternatively, join the Jericho Writers family, and you can get a ton of help absolutely free within your membership. Free courses on How To Write. Free courses on Getting Published. Free access to AgentMatch. And so much more. Find out more here. Happy writing, and good luck!

We get loads of enquiries from writers wanting to write their own life story. Sometimes it’s just a personal project. Sometimes it’s for friends and family. Sometimes it’s intended for commercial publication. But the question we’re asked is always the same. Where do I start? That’s an easy one. Follow the rules below. 1: Tend Your Expectations Writing your life story down is massively worth doing, but please don’t think that it’s easy to get published. It’s not, if you’re after commercial publication. Only the best stories will get taken on by literary agents and publishers, and only then if they are really well written and well told. Of course, you can always self-publish, too. 2: Keep It Simple Many memoirs fail because they try to over-complicate. Keep it very simple, but be sure to do the simple things well. That means: Start at the beginning and move forwards chronologically from there. (If you’re not doing this, have a good reason, and be talented at it.) Keep the reader in your shoes. Talk about what you saw, what you did, what you felt. Stay in the present moment of your story. Don’t digress. Don’t tell your story in diary form, unless you keep a journal as compelling as Sylvia Plath’s. A diary is a very stop-start type of experience. You need to write a flowing narrative that keeps the reader engrossed. Don’t lecture. Remember to stay descriptive. You may remember what Heathrow looked like in the 1950s, but most of us don’t, so tell us. That’s why we’re reading your book. 3: Research Research the market. Find out how professional, published memoirs are written. See how those writers handle the things you need to deal with. One book we recommend you look at is Please Don’t Make me Go by John Fenton. We recommend this for two reasons. One: we worked on it with John, so we’re fond of it. Two: it’s a masterclass in memoir writing. Very simple, but very, very good. Other memoirs of note might be Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt, Call the Midwife by Jennifer Worth, Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen, Reading Lolita in Tehran by Nafisi Azar, or Where am I now by Mara Wilson. Look at these and other memoirs you like and ask yourself what all these have in common. It could be a poignant insight into off-piste topics (Mara Wilson’s musings as a former child star turned writer), or a knack for colouring the ordinary to make it unusual, compelling (Jennifer Worth’s years as a midwife in London’s East End). There may be other great, well-written memoirs from celebrities you like. What Happened by Hilary Rodham Clinton might be a compelling memoir, but a readership was already in place for her. Publishers would have considered this (before looking at a manuscript) when offering her a book deal, so try to pick out books from relatively unknown writers (or unknown before publication) wherever you can when researching the market. Also, do get a proper idea of length. For commercial publication, and to have a chance with a literary agent, you’ll probably want to produce a manuscript of between 70,000 and 100,000 words. If you are much longer or much shorter than that, you can pretty much forget about publication almost irrespective of content. Finally, although you are writing about your own life, you may well find that some research really does wonders for what you are talking about. Let’s say you were working in Iranian oil fields in the 1950s. You’ll remember a lot, but you’ll have forgotten things, too. The more you can research that time, the more you may spark your memory. 4: Take Care With Your Style If you want to grip a reader, to make sure that your words and your story hold the attention, then you must take a lot of care with your style. That means you can’t just write as you speak. It means you need to get in the habit of challenging yourself to write clearly, forcefully, visually, so the reader can see exactly what you are telling them. For more tips on good writing, please check tips on prose style. 5: Seek Feedback Once you’re properly stuck into your project, why not come to us with the first 10,000 words or so? That’s far enough into it that we can give you detailed advice on what is and isn’t working in your writing, and how to improve where needed. The advice will cost, but for a project as important as this, it can be worth the investment. Alternatively, if you prefer to plough through and come to us with a complete manuscript, we’d be delighted to work with that, too. We’ll tell you whether your writing is the sort that a literary agent or publisher might be interested in. If it is, then we can advise on next steps regarding agents. 6: Enjoy Don’t let writing your life story become anything but a pleasure and a joy. This is your story. Enjoy telling it and be proud of it. You deserve it. Your Life Story If you’ve come through to this page, you’ve perhaps been through challenging times and have a story to tell. As far as publishing that story goes, there’s good news and bad news. The good news is that the market for inspirational true life stories (also called inspirational memoirs) is still fairly hot. The bad news – you guessed it – is that competition is intense and only the best manuscripts are taken on by literary agents. If you have a story to tell, please ask yourself these questions first: How will you feel if your story never gets published, or even accepted by a literary agent? How will you feel about commercializing your story? Can you tell your story in an emotive and unique way to connect with readers? How will you feel about doing PR and other publicity work? If your responses to these questions are negative, then ponder before going any further. If your answer is that you still want to go ahead, then read on. Cathy Glass Shares Her Tips Cathy Glass is bestselling author of seventeen books. True life stories, or inspirational memoirs as they are also known, have enjoyed so much success in the last ten years that they have become a genre in their own right, often separate from biography. My own first book Damaged, in which I told the story of a child I fostered, spent three months at the top of the bestseller charts. Since then Please Don’t Take My Baby, and Will You Love Me? have also been at number one, with all my other fostering stories going into the Top 10 for weeks. To date, I have sold millions copies of my books around the world, and they have been translated into ten languages. Is there a formula for writing memoirs like there is for Mills and Boon romance? One that I can pass on? Not a formula as such, but having spent some time pondering how I write these books, I have come up with a few suggestions which may be of use if you are about to embark on memoir writing (more covered in my book). If you are writing your own memoir, as opposed to ghost-writing for someone else, you will know your story better than anyone, and here lies your strength. Write straight from your heart. Think back and remember. When, and where did it all begin? Where were you? What could you smell and hear? What could you see through the window? What was going through your mind? Be there and relive it, although this may be very upsetting if you have suffered; but writing is cathartic and writing it out is a therapy in itself. Have an aim for your book (a remit) – a message you want to impart to your readers. It may be one of courage, faith, hope, or sheer bloody-mindedness. And remember when writing a true life story you have an emotional contract with your reader. You owe your reader honesty, and in return you will have your readers’ unfailing empathy and support. I have been completely overwhelmed by the thousands of emails I have received from readers who felt they knew me personally and were part of my family from reading my books. Their words of encouragement have been truly wonderful and are much appreciated. Some of these emails are on the blog on my website. Write scenes, not a monologue. Although the memoir is true it doesn’t have to be a diatribe of abuse and suffering. Write it as you would a gripping novel, building scenes, creating tension, and using cliff-hangers at the end of chapters to keep the readers’ interest. There will be highs and lows in your story, so keep the reader on a roller coaster of emotion. There will be some very sad scenes, some horrendous incidents, and some funny incidents. If there is constant and unrelenting degradation and abuse the reader will soon become desensitized and lose empathy, and therefore interest. Make your book episodic, describing in detail events that are of interest or highly poignant to your story. Leave out the mundane unless it is an intrinsic part of building the scene. You can kaleidoscope years into a couple of lines, or spread half an hour into two chapters as necessary. Your memoir should be approximately 85,000 words in length, with double line spacing, using a word processing package. If it is your first memoir, the agent and publisher may also want a detailed proposal, even if your book is already written. For writing a proposal, there are guidelines to follow, as there are for getting a literary agent. Read other books in the same genre, and consider how and why these books work. Good luck with your writing, and most importantly, enjoy it!

A checklist for your novel or manuscript rewriting process So you’ve written the first draft of your novel (or other manuscript). That’s great. Congratulations! It’s a big moment. But now you need to make sure that your novel draft works on other readers as you want it to. Maybe you’ve just about managed to tame your novel, but now you’re facing A Big Revision or Rewriting of your first draft – so where on earth do you start? Before you edit, revise or rewrite anything, here are some pointers. Step 1: Read Through Your Book First, I suggest, you need to do your own appraisal, trying to read your first draft novel straight through, and as much like a reader as you can. I call this “problem-finding”, and by far the best way to do this it on paper, with a pen in your hand. Using track-changes and comment balloons on screen is a poor second, but possible; either way, you’re trying to record your reactions, as a reader, to the story, not start problem-solving: that comes later. Also note any wider thoughts that this reading throws up, but don’t then just dive into the most urgent or least frightening job. Because so many decisions and changes will affect all sorts of other things, it’s terribly easy to lose track, get diverted, lapse into fiddling and tinkering, and generally get into a worse muddle than you started in. Step Two: Organise Your Thoughts So, first bring all the different feedback you’ve had together, make an enormous pot of coffee or your working-drink of choice, and start sorting it out into rough categories. Problems that run all through the story: the order you’re telling the story in doesn’t work; a character is cardboard, or vanishes, a lost-letter plot’s in a muddle; the narrative voice is dull.Problems with particular sections: a saggy middle; that scene where the dialogue is flat as a pancake; the too-confusing opening; the crucial but oh-so-difficult sex, or battle, scene.Problems of continuity and consistency, such as paragraphing, how dialogue is punctuated, or how you represent dialect.What I call “bits”: individual corrections and tweaks, from typos, to one-off clunky paragraphs, to missing research. Once you have the overall picture, you can sort it out into a to-do list, and decide on the order to tackle your rewrite. The temptation here is to plunge straight into the revision process . . . but you need to resist that. Before you start to edit, revise and rewrite like crazy, you have a little more organising to do. Step 3: Work From Big To Small One possibility is to look at your first page, do everything it needs, then move on to page two, but that’s probably not the best way to tackle it. As with totally renovating a house (only this is one you don’t have to live in at the same time), it’s not wise to do the whole of one room, from damp-course to top-coat, before you start the next. You need to make sure the structure is solid and the roof waterproof, then get the electrician in to move lights and install heating, and only when all that’s done, do you paint the walls and lay carpets. Whichever order you do things in, any major change probably has ramifications elsewhere. Get into the habit of not galloping off to follow up now, but make a note on your To Do list to tackle it at a logical point. And although every writer is different, this, I suggest, would be a good order in which to tackle things: Big structural changes. Don’t worry about the close-detail of stitching the sections into their new places, just do the rough carpentry.Any all-through-the-story things which need shrinking, changing or enhancing.Individual work on scenes and sections, now that they’re all in the (probably) right place.Consistency and continuity things which are most easily done when you put on the right glasses and deal with that issue all together: a character’s taste in clothes, say, or the punctuation and paragraphing of dialogue.Just work through from the beginning of your manuscript, and adjust anything that will adversely affect the reader\'s experience. You could even recruit some beta readers to help you out with this stage. Step Four: Work In Layers As much as you possibly can, tackle any particular problem working forwards in the story, so that you stay in touch with how the reader reads. It’s super-important for plots which depend on many other elements of the book (sub-plots, foreshadowing, pacing etc). But it also matters for things like characterisation and setting, because the reader is encountering this person or place in stages, through time: make sure you’re in control of how that knowledge develops. If it helps you, work through the novel focusing on just one layer: focus on editing Aunt Anita’s character arc, let’s say, or the way you build a picture of 1940s Manhattan. Ignore anything else (good or bad) if it doesn’t pertain to those exact issues. I know it feels inefficient to “go through the book” so many times, but believe me, you save far more trouble than you spend, because you don’t get in a muddle, duplicate work or cause muddles elsewhere without realising. Step 5: Re-Read The Entire Text If you follow the advice above, you’ll have far less work to do once you get to the last stage: Do another straight read-through-like-a-reader, in print or on screen. Use this to pick up any darning-in of the big structural changes that’s still needed, and anything else you might have missed. This also is a very good moment to read it aloud, pen in hand, if you haven’t already: it’s brilliant for picking up typos, and more generally getting outside the novel to read it as if you didn’t write it. Just have a big jug of water to hand. Step 6: Stay Positive If all this sounds as if it’s more work than writing the first draft was – you’d be right. All authors know that writing is rewriting. Revising the first draft of a novel isn’t easy. True, some rewrite each page or even line, until it’s perfect, then move on, while others hurl a whole first draft down on the page, spelling-mistakes and all, and only then go back and start to hammer it into shape. Still, most would say that they spend perhaps three or four times as long on that rewriting of a page or novel as they did on putting the first version of those words on paper. But, like most things, rewriting gets easier with time. I hope these steps have given you the support you need to get started. Happy rewriting!

What’s great & effective? What’s downright bad?Real Examples From Real Writers. Recently, we ran a competition soliciting opening lines or sentences from real writers, with a small prize available for the winner. We’re going to look at some examples drawn from that competition... along with my own (hyper-picky) comments about what’s really good, and really effective. And what’s just a bit... not so good. Before we plunge into our sentence surgery, three quick comments. First, the examples that follow are drawn from writers writing real novels (or short stories). They are, like you, serious aspiring writers, but not yet published. For the most part, we were looking at works-in-progress, so these examples were all subject to change anyway. Second, opening sentences don’t matter all that much. The opening paragraph of the novel I’ve just handed to my publisher ran, in its entirety, as follows: \'Rain.\' Was that a good opening line for a novel? Well, no one asked me to change it, but does that sentence hook a reader in? And hook them into a story set in Wales, where the presence of rain hardly merits much discussion? I don’t think so. The fact is that the process of hooking a reader usually takes longer than a sentence and writers shouldn’t obsess unduly about the stuff above and to the left of the manuscript’s first full stop. There’ll be plenty more full stops to come. And last: I’m horrible. I mean, yes, I’m nice to widows, orphans and stray dogs, but I’m horrible to slightly iffy sentences. I’m very picky and my standards are high. So if some of my could-do-better commentary below depresses you – well, forget it. It’s not you. It’s me. But if you want to learn how to write opening sentences, then you probably want to look at what follows... How To Write A Good Opening Line: Full stops are your friends. Short, clear sentences will grab your readers’ attention. Use language that will add weight to your sentences. Use your verbs correctly, and your adjectives sparingly. Opening lines don’t have to be loud, subtlety is just as effective. Opening Lines To Novels / Short Stories: Examples So much for the preamble. Now for the sentences. (No authors are named because very few of the sentences I had had named authors on the page.) Example #1 \'There were just three things that Samine was certain of in her life; first she was dangerous; second, she was never allowed to leave her room and, third, the spirit of a dragon lived inside her.\' Not bad, though it’s a little too close to Stephenie Meyer’s now famed three-part quote from Bella Swan in Twilight. Still, you can see what the author is wanting to do and the idea itself is fine. Here’s one way of tweaking things without altering anything too much (though it brings it still closer to Stephenie Meyer’s phrasing): There were just three things that Samine knew for certain. First she was dangerous. Second, she was never allowed to leave her room. Third, a dragon lived inside her. That’s shorter, clearer. It’s also better weighted. The key word in the first part of the writer’s sentence is “certain”. The addition of “in her life” doesn’t add much meaning but it does de-emphasise “certain”. My formulation is that bit clearer about where the interest of the sentence lies. One other thing, I’m not sure if this is the place to reveal that Samine can’t leave her room. The middle of one of the three certainties doesn’t tie obviously to the other two and feels a bit different. (#1 and #3 feel like existential statements; #2 feels like a simple, known fact.) But if the middle of those three statements goes, then the whole opening needs reconsideration. Example #2\'The most ironic thing about your first impression of me – I looked like butter wouldn’t melt.\' Interesting. I almost like this. My only real worry is that “the most ironic thing” bit. It feels a bit like a teenage use of ironic, which is perhaps not correct given the context, but in any case, I do wonder if there aren’t simpler, less laboured ways of doing the same thing. Suppose, for example, we just said this: Your first impression of me: I looked like butter wouldn’t melt. That is surely strongly suggesting that that first impression might be way off base, yet it conveys that impression by making the reader do most of the work. As a rough guide, the more the reader feels they’ve made a deduction, the more powerful that conclusion will feel. Example #3\'He’s stalking behind the disused factory, waiting for the flapping of wings to alert him to where you are.\' You remember when I said I’m pedantic? To stalk is a transitive verb, that is, it requires an object. I stalk you, etc., I don’t just stalk in the abstract. So that first clause feels a bit uncomfortable. And “alert him to where you are” also feels a little bit strained. Wouldn’t “alert him to your position” read better? And the double participle (waiting for the flapping) seems a bit needless here. But you only need a little tweaking and this is a strong, engaging opening: He’s searching you out behind the disused factory, waiting for a sudden flap of wings to reveal your position. That’s better. (Oh, you want to delete the word “sudden” from that? Yes, that’s probably better.”) Example #4\'The house had something American Gothic about it, though nothing it was minded to share.\' Excellent! Nothing to pick at, except that me personally I’d probably sooner say “had something of the American Gothic …”. But it’s a great, subtle opening. I like it a lot. Example #5\'What do you pack when you have four minutes to leave your husband?\' Again, that’s great opening line. Oh, and you want to know why that sentence works as well as it does? It’s because it makes you do a double-take. The first part of the sentence makes you think, “oh, this is a question about packing...” The second part makes you go, “whaaaaaat?!” It’s that mid-sentence pivot that gives it wellie. It’s also nice, because it instantly launches the reader into two important story-questions. Not just “why is this woman leaving her husband?”, but “why does she only have four minutes?” Of those two questions, it’s the second one that has the greater bite. Marriages collapsing are (unfortunately) a rather everyday occurrence. Marriages that collapse and give the wife just one minute to get away – well! We want to know more. Example #6\'My mother’s shroud was a grubby net curtain and her coffin was a gun case.\' You like that, don’t you? Yes, and it’s almost terrific. But I don’t like that word “grubby”, at all. It pulls attention away from “net curtain” and the use of a net curtain for a shroud is quite striking enough irrespective of whether it’s grubby. Just delete the adjective. The sentence gets instantly stronger Also, I hope this writers is about to tell us how come the gun case was big enough to fit a mother. I mean, that’s a very large case, or a remarkably small mother. So long as the author explains that niggle sometime soon, that’s fine, and (once you’ve deleted that “grubby”) it’s a good opening line. Example #7\'It was not a good day to bury a child, let alone ‘The Chosen One’, and the more Thomas Cowper tried to console his mother the more she sobbed, ‘Fear not, Mary... Blessed art thou amongst women.’ Hmm. I’m afraid I don’t rate this as an opening line. It’s almost good, but gets itself into a tangle, then trips over itself. And the thing is, the best bit of this sentence is the very opening and the longer it goes on the more the writer overwrites that clean and striking opening. Some full stops would help: It was not a good day to bury a child, let alone ‘The Chosen One’. The more Thomas Cowper tried to console his mother the more she sobbed. ‘Fear not, Mary … Blessed art thou amongst women.’ That’s already a lot better. Even so, I’m not completely happy. That opening line now has real merit and launches plenty of story questions (why is this a bad day? Why is a child being buried? Why is this child The Chosen One?) So if it were me, I’d leave the reader dangling a bit more, before starting to answer the questions they really cared about. So I’d run with the first question (why is this a bad day?), and just answer it with a description of winds and rain. Mourners getting soaked. Rain on the preacher’s Bible. That kind of thing. And this approach would work because I’m pretending to answer the questions I opened up with my first sentence ... but not the ones the reader really cares about. It’s like the reader is yelling at me, WHY ARE YOU BURYING THIS CHILD? and all I’m doing is explaining why the day is a bad one. I’ve basically created suspense already, and my description of the weather is just keeeeping that suspense going for longer. Example #8\'Deano’s hair was still wet from the pool and he swept his palm over his scalp trying to chase off the cold. ‘Come on, cock-snot. Pick up. Please.’\' Okay, I very much like the dialogue. I like the contrast with the more formal opening line. The writing itself is fine. Just... I don’t quite believe the gesture you’re telling us about. When people get out of the pool their hair is normally already very flat and smoothed from the water. You definitely can’t chase cold away by palming your already flat hair and it’s not even a gesture most of us feel tempted to make. If he’s cold, he grabs a towel, or moves into the sun, or does something other than what you tell us he’s done. Picky? Yes. But getting those kinds of details utterly convincing from the off is part of what gets a reader into the story. Here, you do get the reader in, but you’ve done so with a tiny – and needless – stutter upfront. Example #9\'The hands on the clock didn’t seem to move, unlike mine as I drummed and fidgeted on the table.\' Hmm, this is okay, but it’s not quite good. The hands-not-moving-on-the-clock isn’t a cliche exactly, but it is a very familiar idea. Likewise fidgeting hands: also a very standard way of conveying impatience. Further into a novel, those kind of issues dissolve a little bit. Sometimes it’s just quicker and cleaner to reach for the familiar, so the novel can hurry onto wherever it’s heading. But in an opening sentence, I think any whiff of cliche threatens a reader’s trust, and you need to extirpate it completely. As I say, there isn’t an out-and-out cliche here, but I do think you’re cycling a little too close to the edge. My verdict? Rethink this sentence from scratch. Example #10\'The cat barked.\' Everyone will want to read on to see what follows. Purrfect. That’s a terrific opening line. Example #11\'The fucking train is cancelled. Again.\' Yep, good – cancelled trains as a sign of commuter distress is well-used, however, so I hope the writer has an interesting way to develop the incident. I would be disappointed in an opening page that just rehearsed the various woes of the commuter – but we’re on sentences here, not pages, and the sentence itself is fine. And finally: Example #12\'I had not been awake long, when I heard the knock on the door, I opened it and saw Sheriff Dennis Munroe on the porch, he stood a little over five foot six, but gave the appearance of being almost cubic he weighed over two hundred and fifty pounds and had arms like a bear, thick, powerful and covered in coarse black hair.\' Here’s one of those ‘sentences’ which is begging to be carved up. A few full stops instantly make this a mile better: I had not been awake long, when I heard the knock on the door. I opened it and saw Sheriff Dennis Munroe on the porch. He stood a little over five foot six, but gave the appearance of being almost cubic. He weighed over two hundred and fifty pounds and had arms like a bear, thick, powerful and covered in coarse black hair. That’s a relief already, only a few remaining niggles really. Using Munroe’s full name doesn’t seem right, since the narrator clearly knows the guy, and we don’t think of people as know as Title Firstname Lastname. Yes, you may want to give us Munroe’s full name in due course, but you don’t have to do it here. Secondly, that last sentence has four ands in it. That feels awkward, especially so early in the book. Third, how does the narrator know what Munroe weighs? I mean, the sheriff is clearly a fellow who likes his meat and potatoes, but that’s different from knowing someone’s measured weight. I’m not convinced. And finally, a minor thing, I have a hesitation about ‘I opened it’: it’s just that you’re narrating every tiny incident, even those we take for granted. Better to take a slightly less blow-by-blow approach. Something like this, maybe: It was early, when Sheriff Munroe came calling. He stood at my door, five feet six and almost cubic. He must weigh close to two hundred and fifty pounds, and he has the arms of a bear: thick, powerful and profusely hairy. I know that last sentence still has three ands, but the restructuring helps the rhythm, at least to my ear. And it’s so much shorter! It has the exact same content as the first sentence, but compresses it into a much shorter space. Result: much more energy per pound – and a much more compelling story. Best Opening Lines: The Winner There, we’re all done. If I must pick a winner, I’ll go for: \'What do you pack when you have four minutes to leave your husband?\' Or: \'The house had something [of the] American Gothic about it, though nothing it was minded to share.\' I like both of those. The second is a bit more literary; the first is a terrific opening line for a psychological thriller, or something of that sort. They’re both excellent. And One Last Comment On Story Openings The thing to remember? That your opening line it doesn’t really matter. The opening sentences for my five Fiona Griffiths novels are: #1: Beyond the window, I can see three kites hanging in the air over Bute Park. #2: It’s a Friday afternoon. #3: I like the police force. #4: Rain. #5: ‘Well?’ None of those are good opening sentences (though none of them are terrible). And, in most cases, it doesn’t take long to get something that puts a scrap of meat on the reader’s dish. The opening paragraph to my second Fi Griffiths novel, for example, goes like this: Example: Love Story, with MurdersIt’s a Friday afternoon. October, but you wouldn’t think so. High clouds scudding in from the west and plenty of sunshine. The last shreds of summer and never mind the falling leaves. That last sentence already advertises a certain strength and confidence. The reader feels immediately placed in the mood of the story. Because the writing has that confident tone, the reader trusts me. It’s as though they’re thinking, “OK, this is supposed to be a crime story. Nothing much seems to be happening yet, but I can tell this author knows what he’s doing, so I’ll stick with him and see what develops.” An opening paragraph can do more if it wants to, but it really doesn’t have to. Notice that this opening para sets up nothing interesting about the character, the situation, or, indeed, even the weather. It just sets a scene and does so with confidence. If your manuscript does that then, no matter how unshowy that opening sentence, you’re doing just fine. Oh, and if you need a little more inspiration for your opening lines, check these out. More than ready to get the ball rolling with agents, but just need a little push? Or perhaps you’ve had a few rejections but aren’t sure why? Our Agent Submission Pack Review gives you detailed professional advice on how to perfect your submission and increase your chances of securing an agent. Happy writing – and happy editing!

Guest author and blogger Lauren Sapala is a writing coach, the author of The INFJ Writer, and writes about writing, creativity, and personality theory on her blog. She currently lives in San Francisco. It’s often empowering to understand what helps you as a writer, but types only take us so far. First and foremost, you’re you. What builds your own creativity and what holds you back? If you’re struggling to make headway on a writing project, think how you best work, how maybe a “weakness” could be a strength, and what’ll most help you finish – will it be a deadline? Or a designated day of the week to write? For more on the MBTI system, the Myers & Briggs Foundation website is a great place to start. However, I’d urge every writer to experiment with many different methods of writing to find what works best for them. There can be great variation, even among the same type. Every artist is an individual. All artists should give themselves the permission to do whatever works best for them. Are You An Intuitive Writer? I struggled for years as a writer. I wanted desperately to write a novel, but I couldn’t even write the first page. Then, when I finally worked up the courage to take a creative writing course in college, I failed miserably. I stopped writing altogether for seven years. Oddly enough, it wasn’t until I discovered my Myers-Briggs personality type that I began to shine as a writer. Finding out that I was an intuitive personality was just the information I needed to finally move forward. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is a system of 16 personality types that divides people along a spectrum of traits that determine how an individual interprets and reacts to the world. The MBTI system focuses on such tendencies as introversion versus extroversion, and intuition versus sensing (i.e. relying primarily on concrete information gleaned from one’s five physical senses). The complexity of the MBTI system is too vast to be addressed fully in this article, so if you don’t already know your type or you’re interested in learning more about this fascinating area of psychology, I recommend you make use of the wealth of helpful resources that can be found online. If you do already know your type, and you want to know a bit more about how this affects your strengths and weaknesses as a writer, look at my selection of “writers by type” below, to discover how you can start using your type as a creative advantage. These below are intuitive personalities on the MBTI system – ones I seem to work oftenest with, encouraging their ideas and intuitive talent. Tips For INFJ Writers I’m an INFJ writer myself, and so I’m intimately acquainted with many of the most common obstacles INFJ writers face. The number one challenge I see INFJ writers struggle with is perfectionism. INFJs have a rich, all-consuming inner life, and they excel brilliantly at seeing the big picture and imagining the ideal version of how something could take shape in the future. Because INFJs are such amazing abstract thinkers, it’s easy for us to bring together different elements in our mind to form a perfect whole. It’s when we try to make this “perfect whole” a physical reality that we’re confronted with the real world and all the messiness, pitfalls, snags, and less-than-perfect elements it contains. INFJ writers who are unconscious of their own perfectionistic tendencies will get stuck at this stage, always dreaming and never making any of their dreams a reality. It’s only when INFJ writers realize that the real world is never perfect, and anything they create will necessarily be bound to this real-world truth, that they can begin to accept their writing for what it is, flaws and all. Tips For INFP Writers INFP writers suffer the most from too many ideas, and a feeling of being overwhelmed by all the choices and different creative paths they could take. I’ve written on my site on the non-linear way I’ve often seen INFP writers work. This can be a strength, though – a means to connect patterns between scenes, images, characters, and ideas. It’s also not uncommon to see an INFP writer working on several writing projects at once, but the problem is not that INFPs work on too many things at the same time. Instead, the problem is that they tend to judge themselves harshly and resist their natural tendency at every turn. INFPs need a lot of variety. They also need a sense of flexibility and the freedom to be spontaneous and fluid in their artistic pursuits. Out of all the types, INFPs are most likely to work in circles. This means that the INFP writer usually works on one story, then moves onto painting for a few days, then moves onto writing a poem, and finally circles back to the story. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this approach and, in fact, it can work quite well for INFPs who have accepted their nature and embrace this circular way of working. INFP writers run into trouble though, when they compare their creative processes to others and try to force themselves to work in a linear manner. Tips For ENJF Writers Out of the four intuitive feeling types (INFJ, INFP, ENFJ and ENFP) the ENFJ is the type that is most likely to fall prey to an extremely harsh inner critic. ENFJs are almost preternaturally aware of the relationship dynamics surrounding them, and that includes a thorough assessment of how others view them and how they measure up in the larger order of any community of which they happen to be a part. This leads many of them to easily play the comparison game, and many times feel like they’re coming out on the losing end. ENFJs also have a strong need for connection and community. If they feel isolated in their writing pursuits, or like no one understands them or “gets” what they’re attempting to do with their writing, they can quickly shut down and then begin isolating themselves even further. ENFJs must feel emotionally supported by a group of peers they love and respect. This is when they will do their best work. Tips For ENFP Writers ENFPs are similar to INFPs in that they suffer from the feeling of being overwhelmed by too many ideas, but with ENFPs this includes an outer world component that can contribute to even more overwhelm. Simply put, ENFPs are unabashed extroverts. They love people and they love getting out and having adventures with people. A healthy ENFP might work two jobs, have a family, and still take up demanding hobbies such as snowboarding or Spanish classes in their spare time. This kind of schedule usually leaves little time for writing. The number one problem most ENFPs struggle with is finishing things. They begin novels, plays, and short stories full of enthusiasm for the project, but then a sparkly, too-interesting-to-resist person or cause comes along and immediately distracts them. The best method for ENFPs is to devote one day a week to a certain piece of work (maybe the novel they’ve always dreamed of writing) and keep firm boundaries in place around that day so that the project gets a guaranteed slice of their creative energy on a regular basis. Never feel boxed in, though. Find your best writing habits. Always do what works for you. Learn about Lauren’s journey and read more at her site. Learn more about all different MBTI types and writing styles – and check out more free writing advice on us.

The ultimate guide on how to use verbs in your writing, including vivid verb examples and a handy list of over 333 strong verbs! Sometimes you write something and it just feels… dead. So you go to work on it, juicing it up with adjectives and adverbs. Trying to put a sparkle into your writing. Only then do you take a step back and look again. And what you have is actually worse. It’s still flat, but somehow trying too hard at the same time. Like playing canned laughter at your own bad party. So let’s pare back and go back to basics. Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs. The adjective hasn’t been built that can pull a weak or inaccurate noun out of a tight place. From The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops. To put it another way, they’re like dandelions. If you have one on your lawn, it looks pretty and unique. If you fail to root it out, however, you find five the next day… fifty the day after that… and then, my brothers and sisters, your lawn is totally, completely, and profligately covered with dandelions. Stephen King Others, such as Elmore Leonard and Mark Twain, seem to agree. So what’s the problem that all these authors are getting riled up about? The fix sounds simple enough, and yet we may still find ourselves asking: exactly what are vivid verbs? Weak Verb + Adverb Versus Strong Verb Take a look at these sentences: “No, Thomas,” she said very quietly. He ran as quickly as he possibly could to the station. She jumped as high as she knew how off the diving platform. The words in italics are either adverbs or (same basic idea) adverbial phrases. And don’t you feel how cluttered they are? Don’t you feel like there are a lot of words being used there to communicate very little? Here’s how we could have done it: “No, Thomas,” she whispered. He raced to the station. She leapt off the diving platform. Fewer words. No adverbs. Simple, effective communication. Doing more with less. And that’s the basic idea about vivid verbs. If you use the right verb, you will communicate more swiftly and effectively than if you choose the wrong one to start with – then try to patch the damage with yet more verbiage. OK. So that’s a win. But there’s more to explore here – because, yes, there’s another way to go wrong with creative writing verbs, and it’s this. State of Being Verbs Take a look at these sentences: Jerry was a great believer in the virtues of cold water. Jemima was never out of bed before midday. Notice that both those sentences use a state-of-being verb (in this case, “was”) to link a person to something about that person. And, OK, there are plenty of times when that’s a perfectly fine approach. None of the issues raised in this blog post are rules; they’re more like guidelines, or at least useful things to think about. But in this case, both sentences could be made better by using a more active verb – a vivid verb – in place of that state of being one. Here’s how those sentences could have gone: Jerry believed passionately in the virtues of cold water. Jemima lay in bed well beyond midday. Better right? Jerry is now doing something, not just being something. And in Jemima’s case, we’ve removed that negative / state of being approach, and made a positive statement about her indolence. Both sentences seem somehow more active, more emphatic. Oh yes: and you probably noticed that, in the sentence about Jerry, I slipped the word passionately in there. That’s optional, but if you want to strengthen the verb, you can. There’s no neat one-word way to say “believed passionately”, so using an adverb there is certainly a legitimate choice. There Is / There Are Another perfectly valid construction in English is to start a sentence with “there is” or “there are”. For example: There were countless trees in that forest and only one of them… There are many opportunities at this company… Those sentences are not grammatically wrong. You won’t get shot if you use them. But… Well, we could do better right? For example: Countless trees peopled that forest and only one of them… This company offers many opportunities… Boom! In the first case, we’ve got rid of a horrible empty construction (“there were”), we’ve used a good strong verb (“peopled”), and the whole sentence has got better. It feels like that forest is more alive, more exciting. That’s a perfect demonstration of how a good vivid verb can help fix an underpowered sentence. Same thing with the next sentence too. In the first version, the “company” features only as an afterthought. In the second version, it is actively offering something – it’s the subject of its own sentence and its generosity seems now like a positive act. And note the role of the verb here. The act of generosity is encapsulated in that verb, “offers”. We’ve killed a weak verb, added a vivid one – and our sentence has improved. Better right? And so damn easy. Passive Verbs vs Active Verbs Let’s take a look at two more sentences. The cake was made by my grandma. The fender was bent out of shape by a fallen branch. And yes: you spotted the issue there. In both cases, the sentences use the passive voice, not the active voice. So the person who actually made the cake was grandma. The thing that actually bent that fender was the branch. (Need more help remembering the difference between active versus passive? Check out this easy guide.) So in effect, both sentences pushed the real subject to the back of the sentence, almost as though shoving them out of sight. Here’s how to rewrite those sentences and make them better: My grandma made the cake. A fallen branch bent the fender. (Yes, you could say “out of shape” but doesn’t the word bent already convey exactly that? I think it does.) But again, I want to remind you that we’re dealing with guidelines not rules here. Which of these is better: Detective Jonas arrested and charged the suspect. The suspect was arrested and charged. The first sentence is all about the admirable Detective Jonas. But what if we don’t care about him? What if this story is all about the suspect, and what happens to him? In that case, the second sentence is better. In fact, the use of the passive voice here almost emphasises the suspect’s powerlessness. As always in writing, you need to use your judgement. And if in doubt, you can find extra help here and here! Sometimes Weak Verbs Are OK And while we’re on the issue of judgement, let’s just remember that sometimes weak verbs are really OK. For example, you can’t get a much blander verb than say / said. So you might think that your dialogue should be littered with words like trumpeted, shouted, asserted, called, whispered, muttered, declaimed, hollered, and so on. But can you imagine how ridiculous that would get how quickly? And what do you want people to pay attention to? The dialogue itself, or your comments about it? There’s no contest. In other words: weak / dull / lifeless verbs are fine when you don’t especially want to call attention to that part of your writing. Let the dialogue shine. The rest of it can just go quietly about its job. The Ultimate List Of 333+ Strong Verbs OK. That’s a lot of preamble. But you want some vivid verbs? You got em. Here goes, grouped by the kind of word they might replace: Instead of say: Ask, enquire, reply, answer, state, hiss, whisper, mumble, mutter, comment, bark, assert, shout, yell, holler, roar, rage, argue, implore, plead, exclaim, gasp, drawl, giggle, whimper, snort, growl, scream, sing, stammer Instead of run: Sprint, dart, bolt, canter, gallop, trot, zoom, hurry, speed, jog, saunter, scamper, hurtle, rush, scramble, spring, swing, swoop, dive, careen Instead of walk: Stroll, hike, promenade, saunter, march, amble, stride, tread, pace, toddle, totter, stagger, perambulate Instead of look: Observe, glance, stare, examine, peek, study, notice, see, glare Instead of go: Leave, depart, shift, take off, move on, quit, exit, take a hike, travel, drive, proceed, progress, run, walk away Instead of eat: Pick at, nibble, munch, chew, gobble, devour, consume, demolish, gulp, swallow, scarf, wolf Instead of hold: Grip, clench, grasp, seize, reach, embrace, clamp, clench, clasp, grab Instead of give: Provide, offer, present, hand over, deliver, contribute, furnish, donate, bequeath, pass over, pass to, extend, assign, allow, lend, bestow, grant, award, confer Instead of let: Allow, permit, authorise, agree to, consent to, accede to, give permission for Instead of put: Place, set, lay, position, settle, leave, situate, locate, plant, deposit, plonk, plunk Instead of pull: Yank, heave, haul, draw, cart, lug, hump, drag, tow, jerk, attract, pluck, wrench Instead of move: Progress, transfer, shift, topple, change, redeploy, refocus, relocate, prod, nudge, induce, cause, budge, stir, lead, encourage, propose, induce, slink, scamper, careen, zip, ram, drift, droop, heave, edge, stalk, tiptoe, creep, crawl, plod, waddle, drag, stagger Sensory verbs / quiet: Sigh, murmur, rustle, hum, patter, clink, tinkle, chime, whir, swish, snap, twitter, hiss, crackle, peep, bleat, buzz Sensory verbs / noisy: Crash, thunder, clap, stomp, beat, squawk, shout, yell, explode, smash, detonate, boom, echo, bark, bawl, clash, smash, jangle, thump, grate, screech, bang, thud, blare Instead of tell: Order, command, instruct, dictate, require, insist, warn, caution, decree, mandate, charge, direct, dominate, lead, rule Instead of like: Love, adore, yearn, treasure, worship, prefer, idolise, cherish, admire, enjoy, be fond of, be keen on, be partial to, fancy, care for, appreciate, hold dear Instead of want: Desire, crave, covet, yearn for, aspire to, envy, fancy, require, wish for, hanker after, need, lack, miss, aim for, choose Instead of cover: Bury, wrap, conceal, mask, veil, hide, cloak, shroud envelope, obscure, blanket, curtain Instead of throw: Toss, lob, chuck, heave, fling, pitch, shy, hurl, propel, bowl, cast, drop, project Instead of surprise: Confuse, puzzle, bewilder, baffle, bamboozle, disconcert, flummox, perplex Have fun, my friends, and happy writing!

Ever wondered what goes in to writing a nasty villain? Or what makes a good villain? Guest author C M Taylor has put together his top tips for writing the best villains, plus everything else you need to build a well-rounded bad guy. How To Create A Good Villain The term ‘villain’ defines an evil character who personifies the forces which thwart the progress of the main character. Now, while it is feasible that the villain is the main character – and we will come on to that less usual and more nuanced situation later on – in the vast majority of cases, the villain is villainous in relation to opposing the needs and desires of the main character. This structural role of antagonising the main character is the reason the villain is often described as the antagonist. They are a character who stands in negative relation to the spiritual, emotional, moral or financial progress of the main character, a character who is often described as the protagonist. 1. Thematically Develop Your Villain A writer can usefully begin their creation of a villain using villain characteristics via an understanding of theme. Are you writing about loyalty, for example? In which case, your protagonist has issues with loyalty which they must overcome, via the obstacles of the plot, to achieve a healthy, positive attitude to loyalty. Hence the role of the villain is to embody and prosecute a version of loyalty which is negative but tempting, which is corrupt but seductive, which might derail the heroic character’s attempt to achieve a healthy version of the theme. It is the villain’s job to oppose the progress of the hero, and so, knowing the specific thematic nature of the progress which the hero must make, that necessarily takes you some way to defining the nature of your villain. Your villain must be suitable and specifically adept at preventing the thematic success of your hero, hence must embody a negative version of that theme. 2. Create A Compelling Backstory So, once you have understood your theme and decided which negative version of the theme is embodied by your villain, you next ask yourself why they are like this. For an example, let’s stick with the theme of loyalty. Your villain might espouse a version of loyalty which states you must have only loyalty to yourself, or loyalty to chaos, or loyalty to crime, or loyalty to the dead. Any unhealthy version of the theme will do. Let’s pick they have loyalty to chaos and want to bring disorder and anarchy to the whole world. Why are they like this? Their parents were unbelievably controlling and up-tight and rational and crushed the villain with their excessive punctiliousness maybe. Or the villain and their brother were in some youth cadet force which was all about order and discipline and the brother died in an accident born of excessive following of the rules. You see, one you have your thematic relation, you move to explain it via the backstory. 3. Build Emotional Logic Our thematically-driven excavation and development of the villain’s backstory allows us to take an emotionally logical approach and explain why the villain is like they are. Continuing with our theme of loyalty, our rule-following cadet was eager and good to start with, tragic events having turned them on to a negative chaotic version of loyalty. Or our young child started off good but was hounded by neurotically rule-bound parents to crave the release of chaos. If you show the reader that it is emotionally logical for the villain to have passed from a state of health to their current corrupted self as a consequence of events, you humanise the villain. You make the reader think that they themselves might plausibly have reacted the same way in the same circumstances. You give the villain an emotional plausibility and a gravitas. And a decent villain needs gravitas, needs the emotional plausibility and heft to pull the villain into their version of the theme, into their version of reality. A good villain is like a moral centrifuge. What they pull towards them and put in peril is the hero’s self, their morality, the hero’s version of the theme. Showing it was entirely reasonable for the villain to arrive at the moral place they are in shows that the hero might arrive their too, and so puts a huge amount of jeopardy in play for the hero. 4. Show Physical And Mental Scars The clichéd villain is often physically disfigured, right? There being a suggestion of a relationship between moral and physical disfigurement. I would however caution against this simple equation, quite apart from it perpetuating discrimination against people who are unfortunate enough to be physically disfigured, it has been done to death. Why not mix it up? The hero is trying to overcome prejudice against their physical disfigurement while the gorgeous villain is prone to the ravages of narcissism. 5. Add In Super Human Gifts Your protagonist has to be special. In some genres like fantasy or science fiction they can be ‘the one’ level of special. In genres such as crime or thriller they can ‘exceptional human being’ levels of special. In genres such as romance or realism, they can ‘normal person pushed to the edge behaves heroically’ levels of special. And if your protagonist is special well, given that it is the job of the villain to oppose the protagonist, then in order to seem anything like able to compete with the hero, the villain needs to be special too. 6. Make Your Villain Unbeatable Every villain needs to seem unbeatable to start with. The obstacles they place in the way of the protagonist must seem insurmountable. If the hero can beat the villain at the beginning, then there are no struggles needed. It is the insurmountable villain that causes the hero to develop and grow. It may be that your story is a tragic and the hero fails to beat the villain in the end. However it ends, in the beginning there must be no way that the hero – in their current state – can compete. 7. Writing Well-Rounded Bad Guys And Villains Why do villains matter to fiction?  Answering this involves taking this question right back to ask ourselves: what is a story? The crux of a story is concerned with how the main character changes, or fails to change, over time, in contact with internal, external and relationship pressures. A story is a map of this change over time, or this failure to change over time. The change is both an internal, emotional journey and an external, physical journey. Now if the journey comes easily, then there will be no drama, because drama requires struggle. The journey which the protagonist goes on needs to be ripe with struggle – with obstacles, tests, high stakes. The most common and identifiable way to manifest struggle is to have it between people. Between the antagonist (or villain) and the protagonist (or heroic character). It is the antagonist who provides the obstacles standing in the way of the protagonist’s need to consummate their change. It is the test of wills between the antagonist and the protagonist that generates the struggle. On a very simple level, in terms of the mechanics of plot, it is the villain who sets the test and the heroic character who sits the test. It is the villain whose actions provoke the need for the hero to act. Batman without The Joker would have no need to act. The villain is a dark twin to the hero. The villain embodies the shadow qualities of the hero. The villain is what the hero might have been, what the hero might be, should they make the wrong choices, which is what gives rise to the clichéd piece of film dialogue, ‘We are not so different you and I, Mr Bond.’ If the heroic character struggles to embody the positive possibilities in a work of fiction, the villain convincingly embodies the negative aspects. The villain personifies the specific forces of antagonism which aim to prevent the protagonist from completing their internal and external journey. 8. Does Every Story Need A Villain? The short answer to this question is no – in terms of the villain being a physical personification of antagonism, not every story has or needs this. A story needs antagonism, yes, and most usually this antagonism takes the form of a human being standing in opposition to the progress of the heroic character, but it is not necessary to do this. Antagonism can be generated in other variations than the single, embodied villain. The antagonism might be within the heroic character themselves. It might be a mistaken belief about life which leads them astray or into repeated unhealthy actions; or it might be an addiction. Note that choosing to centre the antagonistic force internal to the main character influences what type of story you are telling. It would be hard to make this choice and write an action story, for example. The choice to situate the main antagonistic force internally, as an aspect of the heroic character, is more associated with character-led stories – literary or dramatic works, or sometimes the psychological thriller. Whereas the more traditional human villain personification of antagonistic force is more usual within crime or fantasy or action stories. There are other forms of antagonism too. It might be centred around a group of people. It might be the family that a young person needs to escape to ‘become’ whole. Or it might be the pain still felt when a parent abandoned a child. Or it might be a best friend who continually leads the main character into activities which are against their best interests. Basically, antagonistic forces can be anything as long as they are the main obstacle in the way of the protagonist achieving what they most need. Traditionally this force has been embodied via the personification of a villain, but the villainous function can be performed within a story by other forces. 9. How To Create A Likeable Villain As I write above, the villain stands or falls on the plausibility of their world view – the villain is the hero in their own eyes. If you can show why the villain has ventured from the path of moral health to become the creature they are today then you have created the route by which the reader can empathise with the villain. And if they can empathise then – in the current parlance – they can possess relatability. All the best characters are layered, multidimensional and above all, unique. So, if your bad guy can have some redeeming qualities, or a journey that the reader can connect with, then that could definitely make for an interesting read. 10. What If Your Protagonist Is A Villain? Your protagonist can be both hero and villain – look at Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Or your protagonist can be a criminal – look at The Godfather, at Breaking Bad, at The Sopranos, at Crime and Punishment. Or your protagonist can be an anti-hero – look at Mr Robot.  They can be any of those things. As long as they are subject to thematically congruent antagonistic forces, the rules are the same. As long as we know why they are like they are – In The Godfather, Michael Corleone gets pulled back into the family business of murder and extortion through love of his threatened father. Walter White sells meth – initially at least – to protect his ill family in Breaking Bad. Elliot from Mr Robot illegally hacks computers to out greater criminals. This is a common strategy – outflanking your villains with even greater villains to make your villain comparatively empathetic. Look at Dexter. Yes, he is a serial killer, but he only kills people who are themselves worse than him. He performs bad acts for a comprehensible and relatable reason. 11 Examples Of Evil Villains And Bad Guys Tricking Othello into murdering his own wife makes Iago a pretty good start to our collection. Another trickster, in Treasure Island, Long John Silver tricks Jim Hawkins, disguising his own role as leader of the mutiny. Why do we care for and want the sociopathic murder Tom Ripley to escape throughout Patricia Highsmith’s Mr Ripley novels? Because he feels love and we feel his vulnerability and inadequacy. And why do we admire Hannibal Lecter in Thomas Harris’ novels? Because he is brilliant and stylish and logical. Only somebody as prodigiously gifted as Moriarty could aspire to being a villain worthy of Sherlock Holmes special powers. Anne Wilkes in Stephen King’s Misery turns out to the fan no writer wants. Xan may seem like the villain in P D James’ The Children of Men but isn’t the broader antagonistic force that of infertility itself. No mistaking that it’s a shark who is the villain of Peter Benchley’s novel, Jaws. Isn’t narcissism the antagonistic force in play in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Grey? Are dinosaurs the antagonistic force of Jurassic Park? Rather I would say it was the human vanity and over-reaching that lead to the recreation of dinosaurs in the first place. Same with Dr Frankenstein – it’s the Dr not the monster who sets the test. Isn’t the entire Republic of Gilead the antagonist force in The Handmaid’s Tale?

Points of View in Fiction Writing (with Plenty of Examples) What is first person writing in fiction? What’s third person narrative? What’s all this about limited vs omniscient…? How you narrate a story – or what points of view you choose when writing fiction – can make all the difference to its appeal. What’s more, the choices you make now will affect every page (indeed, pretty much every sentence) of your novel. So you’d better get things right, huh? No worries. This post will tell you everything you need to know. We’ll start with some definitions and some examples, then assess the pros and cons of each possibility. Oh, and buckle up. This stuff can sound quite technical and scary, but (a) it’s simpler than it sounds, and (b) the choice you want to make instinctively is probably the right one. It’s really possible to overthink these things! First up: some definitions. All You Need To Know About Points Of View Point of view (POV) is the narrator’s position in relation to the story: First person – the narrator and protagonist are the same Second person point of view– very rare and hard to pull off Third person – an ‘off-page’ narrator relates a story about your characters Mixed – combines first-and third-person passages Point of View: Definitions The Point of View (or “POV”) is the narrator’s position in relation to the story. There are a few basic possibilities here, one of which is exceptionally rare. They are: First person narrationIn this instance the narrator speaks in the first person, (“I did this, I said that, I thought the other.”) The narrator and the novel’s protagonist are essentially one and the same. Second person narrationHere the narrator speaks in the third person (“You did this”, and so on.) It’s exceptionally rare as a technique and is definitely not advisable for beginners. Third person narrationIn this instance, the narrator speaks in the third person, (“She did this, he did that, they did the other.”) The narrator is basically an invisible storyteller, telling the reader what happens to the novel’s protagonists. Third person narration comes in two basic flavours: limited third person and the extremely grand-sounding omniscient third person. We’ll get more into the detail of those two in a moment, but the basic difference is that a limited 3rd person narrator stays very close to the character whose viewpoint is being used. An omniscient one is more inclined to wander free from the character and give a broader view of things. (Not sure you’ve got the distinction? No worries. We’ll get to more details in a moment.) Mixed narrationIf a novel combines passages told from the first person point of view with passages told from the third person point of view, it has mixed narration – or mixed first and third person point of view, if you really want to spell it out. Point of View: Examples Examples of first person narration are legion. For example: The Sherlock Holmes stories (narrated by Dr Watson, in the first person) Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe stories (narrated by Philip Marlowe, of course) Bridget Jones’s Diary, narrated by … well, you’ve already guessed, right? Moby Dick, narrated by … well, put it this way, the famous first line is “Call me Ishmael.” Hunger Games, narrated by Katniss Everdeen Twilight, narrated by Bella Swan The Kay Scarpetta novels of Patricia Cornwell Some of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher books (but not all) Here’s an example of first person point of view in practice: “Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation.”—Moby Dick, by Herman Melville Examples of second person perspective are extremely rare. Famous recent examples include: Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City opens with the line, “You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time in the morning” and then it continues from there, with the protagonist always described as “you”. Italo Calvino did much the same thing in If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller. There are a few other examples too, but you’ve got to be a really smart and skilled writer to do this. In short, for 99.99% of writers out there, just fuhgeddabahtit. This technique isn’t one for you. Examples of third person narration are also commonplace. For example: Girl with a Dragon Tattoo, which is about Lisbeth Salander, but not narrated by her The Da Vinci Code, about Robert Langton, but not narrated by him Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice John Grisham’s The Firm Stephen King’s Misery Some of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher novels, but not all And here’s an example of third person narration in practice: It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters. “My dear Mr. Bennet,” said his lady to him one day, “have you heard that Netherfield Park is let at last?”—Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen Got that? OK. We’ll skip on to the limited / omniscient distinction, then start figuring out how to apply point of view to your novel. Third Person POV: Limited vs Omniscient OK, the thing that probably most confuses newer writers is the distinction between third person limited and third person omniscient. Quite honestly, though, this isn’t something to trouble with too much. If you want to write in third person, just do what’s right for your characters and your story, and you should do just fine. If you want to know more, however, what you need to know is this: Third Person Limited: Definition & Example When you use a limited form of third person narration, you stay very close to your character. So the narrator isn’t telling the reader anything that the character in question wouldn’t themselves know / see / hear / sense. Here’s a beautiful example from Anne Tyler (in Breathing Lessons): “They planned to wake up at seven, but Maggie [the point of view character in this passage] must have set the alarm wrong and so they overslept. They had to dress in a hurry and rush through breakfast, making do with faucet coffee and cold cereal. Then Ira headed off for the store on foot to leave a note for his customers, and Maggie walked to the body shop. She was wearing her best dress – blue-and-white sprigged with cape sleeves – and crisp black pumps, on account of the funeral. The pumps were only medium-heeled, but slowed her down some anyway.” You’ll notice that nothing at all in that passage is something that Maggie doesn’t know about. So even when the passage talks about Ira heading off to the store, that’s done from Maggie’s perspective. We know that he goes and what his purpose is there, but we know nothing at all about his walk itself – whereas we know exactly what Maggie’s wearing, and why, and why her shoes slowed her down. This is third person limited (because it’s so closely limited to Maggie’s perspective) and as you can see it delivers a kind of intimacy – even a homeliness. Third Person Omniscient: Definition And Example The omniscient version of third person is, as you’d expect, able to tell the reader things that aren’t directly knowable by any of the characters in the tale. The most famous example of this narrative voice in literature is surely this passage from Charles Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope,it was the winter of despair, …” As you can see, this isn’t told from any character’s viewpoint. It’s almost as though a lordly, all-seeing Charles Dickens is hovering over London (or England? or the world?) and giving his kingly overview of the situation. This type of writing has become rather less common in fiction, so you’ll tend to stick with broadly limited narration, interspersed (perhaps) by something a little more omniscient in flavour. Point of View: Which One Should You Write In? First Person Point of View First-person narration shares action as seen through the eyes of your narrator. A narrator can therefore only narrate scenes in which he or she is present. Coming-of-age novels – Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle, Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower – work exceptionally well in first-person narration. A lot of YA books are written in first person, because their intimate, emotional narration chimes with their teenaged readership. Romances (with their emotional focus) are also often first person. So are ghost stories with a sense of claustrophobia like Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black. In particular, however, it’s worth thinking about Jonathan Franzen’s dictum that, “Write in third person unless a really distinctive first-person voice offers itself irresistibly.” In other words: (A) do you feel you have to write in that first person voice, and (B) does that first person voice really sound and feel distinctive, personal and indvidual. I’ve mostly written third person, but my recent detective novels are first person – essentially for the reasons Franzen hints at. Here’s an example from my book, The Deepest Grave. (I’ve made some short edits for length, but mostly this is as it appears in the finished book.) The narrator is Fiona Griffiths, my detective protagonist. I’m a little earlier than I said, but it’s not long before I hear the sound of approaching feet. Katie appears. Sees me up here on my bank. I raise a hand and smile welcome. She approaches. Impressively torn black jeans. Black cowboy boots, well-used. Dark vest-top worn under an almost military kahki shirt. A chunky necklace. One of those broad-brimmed Aussie-style hats with a leather band. […] The look has attitude and personality and toughness, without quite dipping into angry hippy counterculture. Also: she walks with a ski-stick, a mobility aid not a fashion statement. She comes up the bank towards me. Sits beside me. I say, ‘You hurt your ankle?’ You’ll notice that it’s not just that the observations are made by Fiona. (eg: “not long before I hear the sound of approaching feet”). It’s also that the character of those observations is shaped 100% by Fiona herself. So yes, the list of clothes that Katie is wearing is a fairly neutral list (though the very short sentences and lack of any verbs – that’s all Fiona). But that summary comment about the overall effect (“the look has attitude  . . .without quite dipping into angry hippy counterculture”) is what Fiona thinks about Katie’s look. I can’t comment myself, because this is Fiona’s narration. She’s in charge. For the same reason, if there were, let’s say, a lion in the undergrowth about to spring out on Fiona, the book couldn’t say anything about the lion, until Fiona herself had seen / heard / smelled / witnessed it in some way. Does that sound claustrophobic? Needlessly restrictive? Well, maybe. But I’m now halfway into writing novel #7 in that series, and when that book’s complete I’ll be close to 1,000,000 words published in the series. And every single one of those words, without exception, comes from Fiona’s voice. There is no other perspective anywhere in the series. In other words, the restriction of first person is real, but you can still write at length, and successfully in that style. First Person Point of View, Pros And Cons This is quite easy, really! The pro is the opposite of the con and vice versa. Pro: First person narration gives you intense, personal familiarity with the narrator. The reader can’t – short of putting the book down – separate from the narrator’s voice, their thoughts, their commentary, their feelings etc. Con: You lose flexibility. If there’s a lion in the undergrowth, you can’t say so, until your narrator has seen the damn thing. If a key thing happens in your plot without your narrator in the room, then tough. He or she can only talk about it when they encounter the consequences down the road. My comment:I’ve written books both ways. There’s no right or wrong here. I love both. One good tip is to use first person narration mostly when you have a distinctive narrator with a strong voice. Most thrillers are written third person (so they can flip between different points of view (eg: investigator / victim / perpetrator), but there’s no absolute rule. I write mine first person. Likewise, a lot of romance stories are written first person . . . but you can go either way there too. Third Person Point of View Third person narration uses “he” or “she”, where a first person narrator would say, “I”. Here’s an example taken from (and this is a blast from the past for me!) my first novel, The Money Makers: They spoke of other things until it was late. They damped down the fire, cleared away the dishes, and walked upstairs. Fiona went right on into the one usable bedroom. Matthew stopped at the door, where his bag lay. ‘Fiona,’ he said. ‘You remember you said you would never ever lie for me again?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Any chance of your lying for me right now?’ He looked at the inviting double bed, heaped high with clean linen and feather quilts. She smiled. Once again, ambiguity flickered in frightened eyes, but her answer was clear. She walked right up to Matthew and stopped a few inches from him. Her long dark hair fell around her shoulders, and her face was only inches from his. This scene (and the whole chapter) is written from Matthew’s perspective. So, yes, much of the factual data here (“they spoke of other things until it was late”) was available to both Fiona and Matthew in this scene. At the same time, when they step up close and get intimate, it’s Matthew we’re with, not Fiona. (How do we know this? Because when we get to “ambiguity flickered in frightened eyes”, it’s Matthew that sees this, not Fiona. If that little bit had been written from Fiona’s perspective, it would have had to say, “she felt ambivalent and frightened”, or something like that. Limited vs Omniscient My advice to newer writers is mostly to forget about this distinction. As a rule, you should stick close to your character – and that means adopting a generally limited point of view. How come? Well, quite simply, readers want to experience story through the eyes and ears of its characters, and that means time away from the limited perspective is time spent away from that precious character-experience. That said, if now and again, you want to dive into something a little more godlike (or omniscient), you absolutely can. Just: Make sure that your godlike voice offers something grand, the way Charles Dickens’s does in Tale of Two Cities. (The opening passage of White Teeth by Zadie Smith offers a rather more contemporary example.) Use that omniscient voice only in small doses. You want to zoom, pretty damn fast, from the omniscient view to the up-close-and-personal one. The golden rule to remember here is that readers want character – and they only get that experience from the limited perspective. Third Person Point of View: Pros And Cons The main limitation we found with the first person narrative approach was its restrictiveness. My and my Fiona Griffiths books, with every one of those 1,000,000 words locked into one voice, one point of view. So most writers adopting the third person approach will use multiple perspectives. George Eliot’s Middlemarch is one famous example. The same goes for much of nineteenth century fiction, especially of the more epic variety: Dickens, War and Peace, Vanity Fair, Henry James, you name it. What you get from those many perspectives is the ability to see into many hearts, many minds, many souls. That multi-viewpoint narration gives your novel: Richness – all those multiple perspectives Flexibility – you can set your movie camera up wherever the action is happening. You avoid the restrictions of narrow first person narration. Potentially something epic in scale – because all those characters and voices lend a depth and scale to your story. Also notice this: There are types of suspense you just can’t deliver in a first person novel. So Hitchcock famously distinguished between surprise and suspense. If two people are sitting in a cafe, when a bomb detonates – that’s a surprise. But let’s restructure that same episode with multiple viewpoints, and you get something completely different. So we might see (Point of View #1) a terrorist planting a bomb in the cafe, then switch perspectives to (Point of View #2) the innocent couple drinking coffee right by the ticking bomb. In that case, the simple scene of two people drinking coffee becomes laden with suspense. The reader knows the bomb is there. The couple don’t. What’s going to happen . . .? That’s a type of suspense that we first-personeers (or single perspective third personeers) just can’t deliver. Consequently, third person / multiple viewpoint novels are particularly common with: thrillers and suspense novels anything epic in scale. We’ve mentioned some nineteenth century fiction already, but George RR Martin and his Game of Thrones series is a perfect example of modern and big. Ditto any door-stopper by Tom Clancy. Third Person Point of View: Summary Most third person novels are written with multiple perspectives, even if (as in Harry Potter) the point of view stays mostly with a single central character. Advantages and disadvantages? Well, essentially you get the opposite of the first person pros and cons. So third person / multi-viewpoint narration: Is flexible. You can pop the camera anywhere you want. You can deliver suspense as well as surprise. Enlarges your book. It can move you from a narrow-focus/small book to a wide-focus/epic one. Loses intimacy. In particular, if your camera gets too promiscuous – if you just use too many viewpoints – you risk breaking the reader’s bond with your central character(s). If that happens, your book dies! Third Person Narration: The Golden Rules We said above that the main risk of multiple viewpoints is that you break the reader’s bond with your main character and as a result you end up losing the reader completely. Bad outcome, right? A book killer. Multiple Points of View: Three Golden Rules Fiction is about inner worlds and inner journeys, and you need to respect that. So here are the rules: GOLDEN RULE #1Limit your number of primary characters I’d suggest that, for almost any new novelist, you should not go above three. My first book was a story about three sons, although the sister too had a significant secondary viewpoint. I’d say that count of three-and-a-half viewpoints represents the upper limit for any first novel by all but the most gifted novelists. You can go higher than that. I think of books that run to dozens of viewpoints. But as a place to start? Nope, that kind of thing is too dangerous for 99.9% of you. (And the 0.1% are talented enough, that I don’t really know why they’re reading this!) Your next rule follows from the first: GOLDEN RULE #2Never go more than 3-4 pages before returning to your primary characters. We’ve all watched movies where the leading couple is so incredibly strong that the movie starts to die as soon as one of them is off-screen. Or take that great first series of Homeland, where Carrie (Claire Danes) and Nicholas Brody (Damian Green) had a mesmeric quality together. You could have scenes with both of them in (great!). Or scenes with just one of them in (very good!). But scenes with neither? They flagged very quickly. And sure: you need some filler scenes just to make sense of the story. But if you stay away from your main characters for too long, the book dies. And just because I said “3-4 pages” in the rule above doesn’t mean that you have that much space every time you take a break. You don’t. You need to keep those non-protagonist scenes as short and tight as possible. Three pages is better than four. Two pages is better than three. And our next rule follows from the first two – and from absolutely everything we know about why stories work as they do. GOLDEN RULE #3Every main character (every protagonist) needs their own fully developed story arc. If you use any Point of view repeatedly, the character needs a fully developed inner life, a fully developed arc, a full set of challenges, encounters and personal change – and relevance, too. Is this person relevant to your collective story material? So take my first book, The Money Makers, with its three (and a bit) protagonists. Every single one of those three needed: A motivation A challenge A set of external obstacles (ie: things in the world) A set of internal obstacles (ie: things in their character that blocked them from accomplishing their goals) A crisis, linked to all the things in the list so far A resolution In effect, to write a three-handed story, you have to write three stories, each perfectly structured in their own right. Phew! That sounds like a scary undertaking, and yes, I guess it is. But because a book can be only so long, if you write from three points of view, each one of the stories you are telling can afford to be quite simple – the kind of thing that would seem a bit flat if told on its own. (If you’re a bit worried about fitting it all in then you’ll probably find this blog on chapter lengths and this one on wordcount really useful.) As it happens, I love third person / multiple viewpoint narration almost as much as I love first person. There isn’t a right or a wrong in the choice; it’s only a question of how you want to write and how your story wants to be written.

How to write great characters in your novel.How to make them lifelike.How to make them dazzle. What makes a reader glued to a book? What makes that person come back to it again and again? As a rough guide, people turn the pages because of plot, but they remember a book because of character. Don’t believe us? Then answer this. Can you recall, in detail, the plots of: To Kill a Mockingbird? The Hound of the Baskervilles? The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo? We’re going to bet not. But do you remember Scout and Atticus? Holmes and Watson? And the badass Lisbeth Salander? Of course you do. And that’s the aim of this post: helping you achieve the same level of vibrating life that these characters achieved. In effect, we’re going to tell you how to develop a character that can be used for both the protagonist (hero) and the antagonist (bad guy). How to write the kind of characters that will elevate your novel to a whole different plane. And it’s not magic. It’s just the logical application of tried-and-trusted writing techniques. But let’s start by figuring out what character development is, and how it works for you. Don’t want to wait for the blah?Just download our 200+ question Character Bio Template. It’s freeGet the Ultimate Character Profile Template What Is Character Development? Character development is two things: Character development is the the process by which an author develops a detailed character profile. This activity is usually done in conjunction with plot development and takes place as part of the planning process, before the writer actually starts to write. Character development also refers to the way a character changes through the course of the novel, generally in response to the experiences and events gathered through the course of the story itself. This is known as the Character Arc. (Need more? Get plot structure advice here.) Those twin definitions are immediately helpful. Yes: you have to develop a character profile before starting to write, but you also have to knit your character so closely to the story you’re going to tell that the two things seemed joined at the hip. Ideally, the reader won’t be able to imagine any other character occupying your story – just like you couldn’t imagine Girl with a Dragon Tattoo without the inflammatory, exciting presence of Lisbeth Salander. So: the first question is, how do we choose the right character for the story we’re about to tell? That’s up next. Plan Your Character Arcs The two basic character types in fiction – and how to choose the one who’s right for your novel. There are two basic types of main character (or protagonist) in fiction: The first type is an ordinary character plunged into the extraordinary. And, by this process, they become a little more extraordinary themselves. The second character type start out extraordinary – they could make things happen in an empty room. You need to be careful about identifying which character is which. You might think that Harry Potter can’t be ordinary, because he’s a wizard. But think about it. He seemed like quite an ordinary boy. And when he gets to wizard school he seems quite ordinary there too (daunted by the school, a bit scared of Hermione, and so on.) He’s an ordinary wizard who finds his inner extraordinary self over the course of seven books. Lisbeth Salander, however, never strikes the reader as ordinary. She’s a rule-breaking, computer genius with anti-social traits and a scary capacity for violence. You just know she’s going to cause waves, no matter where she goes. Here’s a quick way to figure out what kind of character yours is: Ordinary Characters Will typically refuse adventure, or accept it only reluctantly Will typically have something of the boy next door / girl next door quality to them. That doesn’t mean they have to be boring (we’re all different after all), but it does mean that they can act as a kind of placeholder for the reader. “That person could be me. That adventure could have been mine.“ Will typically find something heroic or extraordinary in themselves as a result of the adventure. Something that was buried becomes visible. The adventure has to echo or vibrate with whatever is distinctive about the character. So at the very start of the Harry Potter series, Harry seems like an ordinary boy, except that he’s an orphan. No wonder then that the entire series revolves around Harry completing the battles of his lost parents. Extraordinary Characters Will often leap into adventure. May even create it. Will typically seem nothing whatsoever like the nice kid next door Will have something astonishing in them all the time. Something that probably makes them look awkwardly ill-at-ease in the ordinary world. But, as with ordinary characters, the adventure will resonate with who they are. Sherlock Holmes is a detective – so let him solve crimes! Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan is a CIA guy, so drop him into a thriller, not a schmalzy love story! What A Character Arc Looks Like You can already see how these three things need to intertwine: Your character’s profile at the start of the book The story your character plunges into The way your character develops through the course of that story So for one hyper-simple example, you might have: Harry Potter starts out as an ordinary boy, albeit one with natural wizarding ability He is plunged into a life or death battle against Voldemort He discovers previously unseen reserves of courage and resourcefulness – he finds his inner extraordinary. Here’s another example of the same thing, this time from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice: Lizzy Bennet is an ordinary young woman, but somewhat prone to impulsive and immature judgements She is plunged into a tumultuous love story, and … Discovers new wisdom and maturity. These things are beautifully simple when you see them – but needless to say, designing something beautifully simple ain’t so easy. (Just ask Steve Jobs!) Build Your Character Development Arc Your first task? Simple. Just do the same thing as we’ve just done for Harry Potter and Lizzy Bennet. Take a sheet of paper and write out – in a few words only – the following: Your character’s broad start position The nature of the story The way your character develops as a result of the story you are telling. Do that exercise. Make sure you’re happy with it. And when you are – congratulations. You’ve just taken your first big step in developing your character. Try Our Ultimate Character Profile Template Also called a “Character Bio Template” Figuring out who you want to lead your story is the first essential of success. But the next part – the fun one – is every bit as important. And the rule here is simple: You have to know your main character better than you know your best friend. That’s it. The simple fact is that strong characterisation is based on knowledge. The only way to write a really convincing, lifelike, vibrant protagonist is to know them inside out. If you have this knowledge, you will find yourself using it. If you don’t have it, you can’t. So the problem of writing character comes down to this: you have to know protagonist. And we’ve got a brilliant technique to help with just that. If you haven’t yet started your book, then work on the character creator exercise below before you start. It makes developing a character so much easier. Or cheat! It’s fasterWhy not download our 200+ question Character Bio Template? It’s freeGet the Ultimate Character Profile Template If you have started, but think that maybe you started prematurely, then back up. Do the exercise and then read back through your work, looking for places where your characters seem a little blank. So. Let’s start. Use A Character Profile / Bio To Develop Stunning Characters Begin with a blank sheet (or screen). And begin to write down everything you know about your central character. Don’t be too concerned to edit yourself at this stage. Just let rip: this will be your character profile. It helps to group your comments a bit under certain themes, but if that inhibits your flow then just write. Group your notes up later. You should cover all kinds of topics, including: Backstory Where did your protagonist come from? What was their childhood like? Happy or sad? What were relations like with their parents? Or brothers or sisters? If their father was (say) extravagant, what impact did this have? If their mother was (say) easily tearful, how did this affect them? And what about now, where relations with others are concerned? Were there key incidents in childhood that shaped this person in a way relevant to your book’s story? What about more recent backstory? Their move to Arkansas, joining the army, their first girl/boyfriend? Sketch those things out too. Write how your protagonist’s backstory has shaped their drives, their character arc, and will shape your plot. It helps if examples are concrete, showing your protagonist via actions and choices in specific situations. (And yes: showing matters. If you need a show vs tell refresher, we’ve got it for you.) Looks And Physical Attributes Get to know how your character looks, how they inhabit their body and how they interact with the world: Is your character tall or short? What hair colour, face & body shape, what eye colour? Are they physically graceful? Or clumsy? Or what? What animal do they most remind you of? If you had to choose one image to represent this person, what would it be? [Hint: the best answers to that question often float between the physical and something a bit more spiritual. There’s often something mobile in the image, not just static. examples: “She was like a deer grazing in snow.” or “He was like an iron sword of the old type. Unbending. Strong. Prone to a sudden, flashing anger.”] How does your character sleep? How do they fiddle? Are they impatient? How do they eat? What foods do they love and hate? What do they look like from a distance? Or close up, when seen by a stranger? What is their voice like? Or their laugh? Think of an actor or actress who could play your character. If you need a visual image to work from, then look through magazines until you’ve got something you can use. Pin it up close to where you work, and work from that. Or create an inspiration board, either a real one or using a site like Pinterest, to pin images of your characters, of story aesthetic, etc Your Character’s Personality Is your character sunny and carefree, like Lizzy Bennet in Pride and Prejudice? Or hardened, unforgiving, like Lisbeth Salander in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo? What impression would they make on a casual observer? Are they screwed up in any way? Are they conflict-avoiders or conflict-seekers? Are they sensitive or selfish lovers? How emotionally involved would they get? How does all of this feed into their character arc (ie: the way they develop through the story)? If you answered a Myers-Briggs personality test in character, what would your character’s results be? Relationships Why has your character chosen this partner? Is he or she like the partners your character normally goes for? Do they go in for cutesy baby-talk? Or hard-edged flippancy? Or reflectiveness? What are their pet names for each other? Do they encourage maturity in the other or bring out the less mature side? What are their disagreements about? Do they row, and if so, how? How do they mend rows? What does one love most about the other? What do they most dislike? What is your predicted future for the relationship beyond the end of the novel? Goals, Fears, Ambitions Be sure, most essentially, you know your characters’ deeper goals and motivations. What’s their deepest wish? What are they most afraid of? What would failure mean for them? What voices would they have in their head commenting on that failure? (eg: a critical parent, or a disappointed friend.) What’s the goal, the thing they most desire? Does it change? And why? What’s their motivation for wanting it. What does it say about their nature? The Ultimate Character Profile Template The very best way to get to know your characters is to do this: Write a list of 200+ questions about your character Then answer them Do that, and before too long, you’ll know your character with utter intimacy. You’ll move beyond some mechanical character development exercise into deep, fluent, easy knowledge. Do note that you have to write the questions before you start answering them, otherwise you end up just asking questions that you already know answers to. Oh, and it’s incredibly hard to come up with a really long list of questions that really probe everything about your character – so we’ve done it for you. We’ve created the Ultimate Character Builder, and it’s yours for free. Get the Ultimate Character Bio Template. Give yourself an hour or two on that exercise and, quite honestly, your development of character journey is mostly complete. Nice to know, right? Build Empathy With Your Characters When you are writing a character, their motivation matters so much. You know that thing that literary agents do? “While we liked your book a lot, we didn’t quite love it. We didn’t quite feel empathy with your main character, but wish you the best of luck in finding representation elsewhere.” Makes you want to scream, doesn’t it? And the issue is NOT that your character isn’t nice enough. It’s not that she needs to do more home-baking, or go to more church meetings, or smile more sweetly. The equation is simply this: Empathy = Character’s motivations + reader understanding. That’s it. The whole deal. If a character really wants something, and the reader really gets why that thing matters so much to that character, then the reader is committed. They’ll feel intensely involved. They will, if they’re a literary agent, want to represent your novel. In terms of your character development challenge, that means you need to: Understand your character’s motivations deeply Make sure your character really cares (because if they don’t, the reader won’t.) Make sure your character’s motivations come through in your writing. And that’s it. Simple, right? Dialogue: Characters In Relationship While we’re on the topic of building empathy, it’s also worth remembering that your character doesn’t exist in isolation – they’re at the centre of a particular web of relationships that will be tugging at them with complex and often contradictory forces. That’s quite likely tough for the character – but great for the reader. And dialogue is where you’ll feel those emotional pulls and pushes most forcefully and in their most alive possible way. Making sure that your dialogue is sinuous and mobile will give a real kick to your character – and add whole new layers to the process of acquiring and retaining the reader’s empathy. More dialogue help right here. That’s It: Character Development – Done! If you’ve done the work on developing your character arc, and you’ve explored your character in detail via our Ultimate Character Development Sheet, then you know what? You’ve completed your character development work. Yay! Truthfully, you’ll be ahead of at least 95% of the other writers out there. Well done you. If your plot is roughly in shape, then you’re good to start writing, and your first draft (though it won’t be perfect) should be a pretty damn good platform for your final, finished book. That said, once you have written (say) 10,000 words of your first draft – STOP. Just stop writing and review what you’ve written so far. Does your character feel like a fully rounded human? Or a cliche? Do you make plenty of reference (where appropriate) to your character’s thoughts, memories, feelings and physical sensations? Does the character feel fresh or stale? Individual, or just a standard character type? If your answers are yes, this character feels fresh and individual, then your work has paid off. You’ve created a great character – and your novel is well on its way to being a damn good one. Congratulations on finishing your book! Keen to improve the first draft and polish your manuscript, but not sure where to start? Get help from an experienced professional editor with our Manuscript Assessment Service. Premium Members get 10% off!

It’s easy to copyright your work. We explain exactly how to do it and what you can hope to achieve in this article. What Is Copyright? You’re probably reading this because you’ve created something – a book, a novel, a story, a play. Whatever. Good. You now own the copyright in your work, which means that you have the absolute right to control its use and distribution. If someone tries to copy your work without your permission, you have the legal right to stop them. If you wish to license or sell your work to a third party on defined terms – such as a book deal with a publisher – then you have the right to do that too. That all sounds simple, right? And in essence, it is. Unsurprisingly, though, there are some twists and turns, so it’s worth reading all the way to the end of this post before deciding what to do. How To Copyright A Book? Is Copyright Automatic? The first surprise, for some readers, is that copyright protection is automatic. In other words, you acquire copyright protection for your work simply by writing it down. As soon as the words have left your fingertips – as soon as they’re marks on a page or screen – they belong to you and no one can copy them. The trouble is that there are two ways in which it is, in theory, possible to copy someone’s work. Direct copying of text. If someone just takes all or part of your text and copies it out word for word, that’s a breach of your copyright. In the most egregious cases – like e-book pirates simply stealing your book and selling it online – the offence is utterly obvious and beyond dispute. But that’s not the only way that illicit copying can occur …Copying of ideas, characters, sequences, concepts. But it’s also possible for a breach of copyright to take place even without direct copying of text. For example, suppose I decided to take Delia Owens’ smash hit Where the Crawdads Sing and rewrite it in my own words. I might decide to use my own words and a new set of character names, but to leave every single plot incident, emotional moment, and so on exactly as in the original. In that case, I would be breaching Owens’ copyright as surely as if I’d just written the whole thing out word for word. If Owens chose to sue me in a court of law, I’d most certainly lose. You can read more on that, here. Now, all that seems pretty damn obvious, but there’s an ugly little legal loophole that remains open. If I’d copied Crawdads out word for word, everyone would know that I’d copied and where I’d copied it from. There’s just no possibility that my copying was a remarkable coincidence. But what if the themes / characters / plot twists seemed very similar, but had some differences? You might say my version of the book looked eerily familiar … but there are supposedly only seven plots in the world anyway. Themes of death, parenting, coming of age, self-expression and so on (all themes to be found in Crawdads) are common enough. Maybe two different authors just happened across the same basic set of ideas. Now if you were Delia Owens and wanted to prove that my version of the Crawdads story was a deliberate knock-off of your own, you’d have to prove, in court, that I had read your book before composing my own version. If you could achieve that level of proof, you’d probably win the trial. Fail, and you’d probably lose. That feels like a really tricky problem to solve... but it’s the problem that copyright registration was born to solve. Why Register Copyright In Your Work? Registering copyright can solve two problems for you. They are: How can you easily and simply prove that you are the author of a given work? And how can you easily and simply prove the date on which your manuscript was complete?How can you get around the issue of having to prove that a given plagiarist had accessed your story before their copying began? Fortunately, there are solutions to both of these conundrums. There’s a cheap, easy version that does a bit less for you. And there’s an annoyingly bureaucratic and pointlessly expensive version that does more. Here are the options: How to register authorship and date of production If all you want to do is prove that you are the author of a given work and that your work was completed by such-and-such a date, then you can just use an online ‘copyright vault’ service, such as Protectmywork.com. Using such a service will solve the “whose work, what date?” issue. It will not solve the second issue highlighted above. If someone copies your ideas and plot, but doesn’t snatch your exact wording, you would still have to prove that the plagiarist had read and used your work. That’s going to be tough. For that reason, anyone really serious about copyright, will take the more complicated – and official – action below. The advantage of this cheap and cheerful version of protection, however, is simply that it’s cheap and cheerful. So for $50 / £30, you can copyright-protect not just one document, but many. If you’re prolific and want the assurance of proper legal documentation of your authorship, this is a very low-cost way to achieve what you need. But let’s say you want to do things properly, in that case you’ll want to register copyright with the US Copyright Office, part of the Library of Congress. How to register your work with the US Copyright Office If you register your work with the US Copyright Office, you will prove that you are the author of a given work. And the date of production will also be proved. But better still, if you register your work with the Copyright Office, anyone copying your work will be automatically deemed to have read it. So Delia Owens no longer has to prove that I’ve read her Crawdads book. If she (or more likely her publisher) has registered her work, then any court will simply assume that I have read it. Then the legal argument will simply revolve around whether my version is or is not too close to her version to constitute copying. That’s a win, right? The trouble is, the cost is a lot higher ($100 per document registered) and the process is annoyingly bureaucratic. The form you need to fill in is here. You need to print out that form, fill it out, and send it off with cheque for $100 and a paper copy of your work to: Library of Congress Copyright Office-TX 101 Independence Avenue SE Washington DC 20559-6000 And yes, I know. A printed form! And a paper copy of your work! And this is in the 2020s, not the 1920s or 1820s. But there you go. Bureaucrats just wanna bureaucratise. If you’re really serious about protecting your work, that’s the route you have to take. But before you start printing forms and scribbling out cheques to the government, just pause a moment to think what you will achieve and whether it’s worth it. Will Copyright Protection Defeat Plagiarists? Arguably, the big question is simply whether copyright protection serves any practical purpose at all. And that means considering the world as it is. (You might want to peruse this list of plagiarism scandals as a reminder of how these things actually operate.) And here’s what we learn: Are publishers or literary agents likely to steal your work? No. Because their business would come to an abrupt, juddering, nasty halt as soon as they were caught, which would be pretty damn soon. I’ve read around a little bit and can’t find any bonafide case of an agent trying to steal and profit from an unpublished author’s work. OK, maybe there’s a case somewhere that I’ve missed, but the literary agent community receives hundreds of thousands of manuscripts a year. Stealing just basically doesn’t happen. You should worry about lightning strike or asteroid falls before you start to worry about those things. Are professional book pirates likely to steal your work? Yes. Or rather: no, if your book never really achieves any sales. But yes, definitely, if your book sells enough copies to seem worth thieving. I’m not going to dignify any of those plagiarism websites with a link, but they exist. And they are there to steal books. So if your book is selling well on Amazon at $7.99, there’ll be a plagiarist selling the exact same text at $0.99 or less. They don’t have to actually copy out your text to do that. They just have to break the DRM lock on your ebook (easily done; it takes two minutes), then they copy the file. I don’t know any properly bestselling author (including me) whose work has not been pirated. Will copyright protection defeat the pirates? No. Of course, it won’t. They’re thieves. They steal stuff. Those websites are commercial enterprises which exist to profit from theft. So what about you send those guys a cease and desist notice? What about you actually hire a hotshot, $600-an-hour lawyer to go after them? Well, here’s a guess: they laugh at you. Wherever they are, you can be damn sure they’ll base their horrible website in a jurisdiction which really, really doesn’t care about your copyright issues. Is there practically speaking any way to defeat plagiarism? No – and I can prove it. Here’s my argument: I am willing to bet that your resources are less than those deployed by, say, Penguin Random House.PRH’s authors are routinely plagiarised.Yes, PRH chases the thieves around the internet and uses hotshot lawyers wherever it’s plausible those guys will make a difference, but …PRH’s authors are still routinely plagiarised. That’s probably true of pretty much all their top-selling authors.You can afford $100 to register your work with the Library of Congress. That’s true.But you probably can’t afford a lot of hours that are charged at $600 an hour, and you certainly can’t afford them if the likelihood of that spending making a difference is close to nilNo government agency or law enforcement body anywhere in the world is going to care that a plagiarist is stealing your work.So there is nothing you can do. Conclusion Honestly? My advice? Look register your copyright if it’ll make you feel better. But you aren’t ever going to go to court to enforce your copyright and you’ll probably bankrupt yourself if you do. So write a great book. Sell it. Then write another. If you do well – if you do really, really well – book piracy sites will steal a tiny bit from your sales. (Or maybe not: because maybe the people who take books from those sources would never put an honest dollar in your pocket anyway.) But there’s nothing you can do about it, so just write another book, and sell it, and be happy because you are doing a hard thing well. And you feel good about doing it. Oh, and if you meet a book pirate? Well, as far as I’m concerned, you’re welcome to thump them.

To the uninitiated, the process of getting a book published can feel like an unfathomable mystery. It’s entirely forgivable to feel daunted by how to get your book published as a writer and how to get a book deal. Finally holding your book in your hands can feel like a very distant dream for any new writer - let alone getting that all-important book contract! So what do you do when you’ve finished your story? Should you even finish a full manuscript before you send it to literary agent, or is it better to send a partial manuscript with your query letter? Who do you send it to? Who will best be able to look after your work? How do you find a publisher? What are most agents looking for? Do you even need a literary agent? What about publishing it yourself? And these questions are just the tip of the iceberg. But don\'t panic, because in this article I will be outlining everything an emerging writer needs to know before they get anywhere close to a publishing deal. How To Get Published- The Three Main Paths Even to the initiated, the publishing process can feel mysterious and confusing. I’ve been in the industry for over twenty years but that doesn\'t mean I find it in any way straightforward. Although that’s also what makes it interesting and exciting. There are many possible routes from manuscript to published book. The following guide will provide you both with the map you need to start finding your way through those woods - and some good reasons to start putting one foot in front of another. The first thing to know about getting a book published is that there are three main paths: traditional publishing, self-publishing and hybrid publishing. I’ll describe each of these in detail as this article goes on, but briefly, for now: Traditional publishing is the route where you sign a contract with a commercial publisher who will be responsible for getting your book made and then out in the world, in the shops and into readers’ hands. This should also include editing, marketing and distribution. More on that later. Self-publishing is, as the name suggests, the route where you take on the responsibility of producing, marketing and selling your own work. Hybrid publishing is, as the name also suggests, a kind of blend of the two, where an author might pay for some of the services that traditional publishers supply and do the rest themselves. There are also numerous other options including crowdsourcing, putting work on fan forums, online platforms like Wattpad, and approaching various specialist forms of micropress. But I’ll get to all that as we get deeper into things. For now, let’s focus on traditional publishing because I know it’s the aspect of getting published most authors at the early stage of writing are curious to hear about, and what most have in mind as their desired end point. Traditional Publishing  Traditional publishing is what a lot of people think of when they consider writing a book and getting it published. It’s so traditional that you can trace its lineage at least back to Guttenberg. The business of printing and selling books is still recognisable from the 15th century. ‘Traditional’ is a useful label to use to conceptually separate this kind of publishing from self-publishing and hybrid publishing. Not that any readers consider it when browning through books in a store. Traditional publishing is what the majority of people think of when they think about publishing at all. It\'s the business of seeing an author’s manuscript through from completion to the moment it is sold in the shops - and of trying to make a profit from it. The UK and US publishing market is dominated by the ‘Big Four’ (Penguin Random House, Hachette Livre, Harper Collins and Pan Macmillan) who are responsible for numerous imprints publishing all manner of literary fiction, genre fiction, and non-fiction and have multi-million pound annual turnovers. There are also dozens more medium sized publishers like Bloomsbury, Oxford University Press, WW Norton, Faber & Faber and Canongate who also have annual turnovers in the millions. And then there are hundreds of smaller independent presses and micro-presses catering to all kinds of tastes and interests. How To Get Your Book Published Traditionally Finding the right publisher for you can be tricky, so here are some key things to consider. Importantly, this form of publishing does not cost the writer anything. Instead, the publishing house pays the author. Generally a traditional publisher will give writers an advance against royalties (anything from £100 to £100,000 and more) and then a percentage of the sales (generally something in the region of 10-25%) once that advance has earned out (ie the book has sold enough copies to make back that publisher\'s initial investment). It\'s important to note that the advance is rarely a reflection of the quality of the book that has been acquired, but can be determined by how much interest it has had (ie if more than one publisher wants it then it may go to auction), or it may reflect the writer\'s past successes or ability to sell books (ie a celebrity). This is why a literary agent is important, as they will do their best to negotiate the very best deal for you. The publishing house also foots the bill for all the other vital parts of the book production process such as cover design, editing, print, distribution, marketing, and promotion. Already you can see the benefits of having a literary agent and not having to pay for all the important and expensive parts required to get your book published - but there are also more advantages for writers: Having A Literary Agent Agents are like brokers for the publishing industry. You\'re a lot more likely to get a great book deal (and have your announcement appear in trade press, such as the much-coveted Publishers Weekly) if you have an experienced and supportive agent. More on how to get one further down the article... Agents are experts at getting books in front of publishers, at knowing what publishers will want to see, and they often already have a great relationship with editors - knowing which publisher and editor is most likely to sign your novel. Most agents will also work with you on your manuscript to help get it into shape before submission, looking at sample chapters and suggesting edits. There are many different agencies with a vast range of specialities, so not only is it vital you approach the right ones but that you form a strong working relationship with them. Successful authors can work alongside these agents for years and years, and together they build great careers for one another. But remember you only need an agent for a traditional publication, not when you go out and do it yourself! Editing Good publishing houses have skilled and experienced editors who are experts at helping writers make their books as clear and complete as they can be, this applies to both fiction and nonfiction books. Editors should help with line edits, structural edits and everything in between. For instance, a great editor will help fiction writers bring their characters to life, avoid plot holes, keep a grip on pacing, and keep to the ideal word count. They will also help non-fiction writers martial and order their arguments, check their facts, and avoid mistakes. Editors will have a good understanding of the readers you want to reach out to, as well as the nuts and bolts of the writing process. They will often be the best in the world at what they do and their help can be invaluable. Very few great books have become a success without the help of an equally great editor! Professional Production And Printing As well as working on editorial, publishers are responsible for copy-editing and proofreading manuscripts and also for getting them properly typeset. (Typesetting is the art of getting arranging words on the page so they look good, without strange gaps and more. It is a crucial, if generally invisible part of the process. Read more about it here.) Traditional publishers design covers and write blurbs, as well as help find great quotes from top authors to help promote your work. They also oversee the printing of the books (normally via an offset printer, not digital print on demand) and the preparation of ebooks. All these things are complicated technical processes involving considerable skill and knowledge. Without a traditional publisher, doing these jobs properly can cost a lot of money (and those who self publish soon learn the hard way that doing these things yourself can damage sales and careers). Publishers also have the capacity to print very large numbers of books, if need be, leading us on to storage and distribution. Effective Distribution Once books are made, the next challenge is to store them and get them out into the shops when they are needed. Publishers have established networks to get this done and a dedicated sales team - not to mention the budget to promote them in the trade press. They also have the necessary relationships with bookshops and other retail outlets to persuade them to stock the books. Remember, not all books that are published by a traditional publisher is guaranteed to end up in a bookshop - many factors are at play to ensure a book becomes a bestseller (even a book published by big names). Publicity And Marketing Talking of networks, the traditional publishing route also offers the best chance of getting your book seen by reviewers and journalists. They have the media contacts and the ability to achieve the necessary column inches. If your book starts doing well they should also have the marketing muscle to make sure even more people hear about it via social media, digital advertising, PR, and trade press. Kudos Thankfully, some of the stigma has gone out of self publishing, especially as we are seeing more and more established and traditionally published authors become hybrid authors and releasing books both ways. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t still some prestige to getting a book published with established and well-regarded publishing houses. If you spend a lot of time on places like Twitter, you may see a lot of criticism of publishers being gatekeepers and arbiters of taste. But take that with a pinch of salt. Partly because some of that social media bile comes from resentment, but also because being a gatekeeper is a publisher’s job and part of their strength. For better or worse, publishers can bestow a seal of quality and approval (let\'s be honest here, we all know a book published by Penguin and stocked in Waterstones is going to probably be better edited than a self-published book, with few reviews or press coverage, that you can only buy on Amazon). The simple fact that a traditional publisher is prepared to put their time and money into a book is a demonstration to the world that someone other than the author believes in it - and not just in the ability of the writer, but the fact that book is more likely to appeal to a wider audience. After all, publishers aren\'t signing books to be nice. It\'s a business! The fact that these big publishers are reputable professionals who know the industry and the market (or, at least, they ought to be!) and that they believe in your work should be a demonstration that the book has potential. So it stands to reason that most authors start out wanting their book to be signed by one of the top four big publishing houses. But that doesn\'t mean that route will find you money and fame. In fact, a lot more money can be made (and a lot quicker) publishing your book yourself! It just involves a lot more skill, time, money and know how... Self-Publishing With this option of the publishing industry, authors take responsibility for the production and marketing of their books and all other parts of the process. Generally, this means they will publish ebooks of their works on platforms like Amazon and Smashwords. But they can also produce audiobooks of their work, print on demand paper copies, and even pay for their own print runs and book storage. All this means that authors take responsibility not only for the words on the page, but how they are presented. It might be that they do all the work themselves, or they employ professional editors, copy-editors and proof-readers, cover designers and typesetters to help them present their intellectual property in the best possible condition. There are also agencies who can help you convert your finished manuscript to ebook form - or you can use the in-house explanations and templates provided by platforms like Smashwords. Once you\'ve produced the necessary computer files, there aren\'t normally too many more upfront costs when it comes to how to producing your own ebook. The platform you choose is generally supportive and easy to use, and they will help you get it out to readers while taking a percentage of each sale. Print on demand suppliers like Lulu.com provide a similar system. They will offer you a cost per book based on your production specifications. The print on demand supplier will then take a percentage from the sale of each copy sold on their store, and pay some royalties to the author. If you choose other print methods and print in bulk, you will generally be expected to pay those production costs yourself and will need to find a place to store all these books and sell them at either events or through distributors. People choose to publish their books themselves for three main reasons: They\'ve tried the traditional method, had no luck securing a literary agent or publisher, so decide to go out there on their own. They understand that their choice of genre or fiction is niche, and better suited to readers who look online for these kinds of books (because they aren\'t commercial enough for book stores and big publishers to stock). The author is already established in their own right (ie big social media presence, or an expert in their field) so they know they will be able to make more money using their already-established captive audience and communication channels, and can sell books that way.This normally works best for a nonfiction book (ie you\'re a famous gardener with a number of garden centres around the world where you can sell your book) or you\'re a huge TikTok star and can promote your novel that way.  However you choose to produce your own book, or why, here is a list of reasons why it may be the right choice for you: Ease Of Access  Perhaps the clearest advantage of self-publishing is that just about anyone can do it, and there are very few barriers to entry. If you want to write about cowboy mermaids in space, you can, there is absolutely no one stopping you! Speed You can also get your book out quickly. When considering how to get your book published, ask yourself how important the timing is. A traditional publication may take three years from final draft to bookstore shelves (you need to find an agent, go on submission, secure a deal, then wait 12-18 months for your book to be released). Most platforms offer a step by step process that helps you through production. This means that with just a small amount of know-how you can convert your manuscript into an ebook within hours. And it doesn’t take much longer for that book to pass the quality control checks on whichever platform you choose. After that you can start selling. You Generally Get A Higher Percentage Of The Profits  Because there are far fewer people involved in the publication process and because there are fewer costs involved in getting your book out as an ebook, you can also generally expect to receive a higher percentage of the profits from each sale of your book than you would in the traditional publishing industry. (There are caveats to bear in mind here though. Self-published ebooks generally also have to have a lower cover price to attract buyers - so you’re only going to get a larger percentage of far less money. The books also tend to sell fewer copies.) Control Since you are in charge of the publishing process you also get to make all the decisions about when the book comes out, cover design and pricing. Plus you have full access to sales stats and get paid royalties monthly, not quarterly or yearly. You Get To Unleash Your Creativity Okay, this isn’t for everyone. Often book covers and their related artwork are best left to the professionals. But if you do have design skills, creating a self published novel gives you a great opportunity to make the most of your design, illustration and photography skills. Hybrid Publishing Also sometimes known as co-publishing, author-assisted publishing, or partnership publishing (and, more misleadingly, indie publishing) hybrid publishing is an umbrella term for a mix of traditional publishing and doing it yourself. Generally, the publishing company offers professional publishing services when it comes to things like cover design and typesetting - and sometimes they will even take on distribution. But the author pays some of the upfront costs of getting the book made and into the world. Although don\'t get these mixed up with vanity publishers, who we strongly recommend you stay clear of! Many people opt for Hybrid as a \'self-publishing but with help\' alternative. Here are a few advantages: Ease Of Access Because they are not taking a risk on your writing, hybrid publishers are often more likely to take your work on. The flip-side of this is that they will not always care about it as much - but if you have realistic goals and enter into the partnership with open eyes it can be a good way to get a decent quality version of your book out into the world. More Control Since you will be footing the bill that should also mean you get more say over the look and feel of the book, book cover design, when it\'s released and how many copies are produced. High Royalty Rates Many hybrid publishers offer attractive royalty rates. But a word of caution here - because you are paying them upfront, they have less of an incentive to help promote your book as they have already earned from it. Other Publishing Models You can publish a book with a publisher in more than just three ways, as there are a huge variety of publishing companies out there. Other options include: Micropresses There are dozens of high quality small independent publishers in the UK and USA who represent books by all sorts of writers, releasing both top quality fiction and non-fiction. There are different definitions for what constitutes a small independent publisher or micropress, so let\'s take a closer look. Some say it’s a company that makes less than $50million a year (which is still pretty big!). One useful guide in the UK is the entry criteria for the excellent Republic Of Consciousness Prize for small presses which is an annual competition for publishers with fewer than 5 full-time employees. In the USA (where everything tends to be bigger) the equivalent prize instead defines small presses as those which publish an average of 18 or fewer published titles per year. They generally operate more like a bigger publishing house and are likely to offer you a traditional publishing deal. But all small presses accepting submissions are different. They all have their own personality and impact on the market, with different passions and beliefs. They cover everything from: Science fiction Children\'s books Young adult books Hardcore literary fiction Short stories Non-fiction books Specialist books LGBTQ+ books Travel books And much much more! Smaller presses (including university presses) are often specialists, with distribution options to reflect that, and in most cases you don\'t need to submit your work via an agent. But, the flip-side of that, is that your book may not reach as many people. Crowdsourcing This is an interesting alternative way to get your book published. As in hybrid publishing, the crowdsourcing publisher offsets some of the risk of publication by asking the creator to raise the funds necessary to produce and print a book. But in this case, they are asking their target readers to help out! In the UK the publishing company Unbound has published several successful and well-regarded books using its crowdfunding platform. And Kickstarter.com is now one of the biggest publishers of comics and graphic novels in the world because creators have had so much success on their platform. Crowdfunding can work for creators because it connects them directly with their audience, the process of raising money for a work can also help to raise its profile and generate excitement. Plus, because many platforms have reward tiers that allow creators to offer extra incentives to their funders, it means creators and their fans get to work on a project together. Digital First Publishing Some big companies like Harper Collins have digital first imprints, a division that only produces ebooks and distributes them on relevant platforms. Many even accept un-agented authors. Some genres (ie crime and thrillers) do incredibly well as ebooks, and if a book become an instant bestseller the publisher may choose to then print the book too. Most digital contracts do not offer an advance and the publisher has a much lower investment in each book than under their traditional models. But this can also mean they sign on a multi-book deal, they can get it out sooner, and often pay higher royalty rates. Amazon Publishing Amazon offer a digital and print service that helps you quickly build your book and get it to market on the Amazon website. It\'s one of the quickest ways to get your book ideas published and out into the world, and as they also offer a publishing service they have a ginormous captive audience to publicise it to. Fan Fiction Forums This is niche but it can often be a great way to build a dedicated readership. If you’re a fan of something and love writing about it, there may well be people who love reading about it. There are numerous forums for the Star Wars universe, Harry Potter, the Twilight saga - and much more. Famously, the multi-million selling 50 Shades Of Grey started life as Twilight fan fiction and there have been other self published authors who have found mainstream success in this way by being snapped up by a traditional publisher. And even if such breakthrough stories are rare, publishing on these forums can be a really good way to reach readers and practicing your craft. Wattpad Wattpad calls itself “The world\'s most-loved social storytelling platform” and is so big it deserves a heading of its own. With a community of millions of readers, writers publish their work directly via the site across a huge range of categories from adventure, LGBTQ+, romance, nonfiction books, books for young adults, historical and fan fiction. There are also - inevitably! - a whole range of erotic categories. A number of Wattpad stories (mainly YA and romance) have even become successful TV series and films (ie Through My Window, The Kissing Booth, the After trilogy). How Do You Get A Book Published?- General Tips We’ve seen the main publishing options that are available, but many writers at the early stages of penning their novel will still have questions about how to write and publish a book.  So here are a few of the things that will help you on your journey: Get Editing The first step (no matter what publishing route you decide to take) is to get your manuscript in the best shape it can be. Finish it. Read it. Re-read it. Carefully check for elementary spelling and grammar mistakes as well as all the important matters of structure, plot holes, characterisation, flow, argumentation (we have a blog post on everything a writer needs on our site). It often helps to set your manuscript aside for a while after you have finished writing. And also to print it out so that you can read it away from the screen in a new context. If you have trusted beta readers, bring them in too. Consider Getting Professional Help If you are uncertain about the quality of your work and how to develop it further, it can help to get a professional assessment. Yes, friends may offer to help, but you really need an expert who is objective and honest. Professional writing mentors can answer all kinds of questions that may be nagging you. Is my query letter OK? How do I choose a book title? How long should my book be? Will anyone want my non fiction? Is my writing strong enough? A mentor or professional editor will not only read your book proposal and manuscript, they will have had some of the same battles with finding the best publishing routes that you have and will guide and support you. Most writers find these services invaluable.  Take a look at the mentoring, editing and agent match services we offer at Jericho Writers. Attend Writing Conferences A good writers’ conference will give you the opportunity to meet industry professionals, to ask questions about what they are looking for and why, and listen to talks from established traditionally published writers, self-published writers, agents and publishers. Being part of a writing community is important when it comes to meeting fellow writers who are also learning how to publish a book with a publisher. They are a great place to swap stories, give each other encouragement and to learn that you aren’t alone. Why not take part in Jericho Writer\'s York festival of writing, our Summer Writing Festival, or join our FREE writing community! Scope Out The Market Determine your genre, have a look at the kind of books that are being published in that genre and who is publishing them, and try and gauge what the public enjoy reading. This will help you decide the best route to market and how to get your book published the right way. Approach Literary Agents We\'ve already discussed how it\'s not possible to get a publishing deal with the big top four publishers without an agent. So how do you get one?  Most literary agents have what we call an MS Wish List - this is a clear outline of the kinds of books they are looking for and the kind of writing they enjoy reading. Do your research and draw up a list of those who are more likely to want to read your work. It can be a bit of a mine field, but luckily you can find plenty of free resources on the Jericho Writers website: A list of US literary agents along with tips on how to write your query letter A list of UK agents along with tips on how to write your query letter Discover our agent match service to help find your dream agent Some more useful tips on how to approach agents Put Together A Submission Pack  If you wish to become a published author of fiction, a submission pack is what literary agents ask to see once you have a finished manuscript and are seeking representation. In most cases, a submission pack consists of a query letter, a brief synopsis (and maybe a chapter by chapter summary) and a sample of your work. If you are writing non fiction it may be simply be a concept and some examples of writing plus credentials along with your query letter. The most important tip about the submission pack is that you should carefully check on the website of each agent and publisher to see what they are asking for. Follow their submission guidelines carefully (some even request a certain font type and size). Some may want to see a full manuscript. Some may want sample chapters. Some may want a chapter-by-chapter summary. Or some will have different requirements for different kinds of books. Make sure you tailor your submission accordingly. It’s not only good manners, it demonstrates that you know who you are applying to and care about what they want. Here are more articles on the subject: You can read a sample query letter here - along with some useful hints and tips Here\'s a guide to writing a novel synopsis Here\'s more information on how to present your manuscript Build Your Author Platform  If you can raise your author profile through writing a blog post, being in the press, attracting social media followers and winning writing competitions, it can help to stand out to literary agents and publishers. Most writers like to start with at least a Twitter or Instagram account to appeal to their target audience. Although building up your author profile before sending out a query letter isn\'t vital to your success and won\'t automatically lead to a book proposal (most literary agents, acquiring editors and readers simply want to read a great story), it can help grow a bigger audience for your writing, regardless of the path you wish to take to publication.  Now You Know How To Get Your Book Published! Phew. You made it to the end - well done! I hope the information shared has helped you understand the best route to publication. I also imagine that most of you reading this will be at the early stage of your writing career, whether fiction or non fiction. And the vast majority of you debut authors will now be wondering what the heck you\'ve gotten yourselves into. Well don\'t worry, the writing community is a fun and supportive one, so at this stage just take your time and focus on writing a great story. Maybe bookmark this article and refer back to it at each stage of your journey. Time To Get Going The key things to consider, when choosing how to publish your book, is what you want out of it. Do you want to set your sights high and aim for the top dream of traditional publishing, see you books in Barnes and Noble and Waterstones, and even make the New York Times bestseller list? Do you want to write a book every two months, be in full control, and make lots of money? Or do you simply want to hold your book in your hands and have it read by your nearest and dearest? Whatever you choose, this article demonstrates that there are many routes to publication, all of which have the potential to make you happy and proud. And at the end of the day, all that matters is that you finish your wonderful story, and that you share it with others. So go on, get out there, and make it happen. Because we are right there beside you, cheering you on every word of the way!

Creating an agent submission pack for fiction is reasonably simple, with clear guidelines. But nonfiction book proposals can be a little trickier. In this article, I\'ll show you how to write your own nonfiction book proposal that will work for a literary agent and a publisher. I’ll provide a sample proposal and give you examples of what to do (and what not to do) as you put your proposal together. We’ll start off by considering what nonfiction publishers actually want from you. Their wants drive what you need to give them. In effect, we can just build a template book proposal where all you have to do is fill in the blanks. Easy, right? Write A Nonfiction Book Proposal In 4 Steps: Prepare a query letter – include a book overview, target audience, USP, writing CV, and motivation for writing. Add a bio – including a professional resume and platform, i.e. social media, blog, mailing list etc. And a market overview. You’ll also need to send sample chapters, book outline, and introduction. What Is A Book Proposal? And what do publishers want from it? A book proposal is a pitch to a publisher. Quite likely, you reach that publisher via a literary agent, so the first pair of eyes on your work will be those of an agent, but either way, your final target is a publisher. So, when you’re writing a nonfiction book proposal you need to think about what makes your book stand out. Your pitch offers the traditional publisher the opportunity to acquire a nonfiction book, authored by you, on the subject set out in your proposal. In exchange, the publisher will (assuming they’re keen to proceed): agree to publish your work pay you an advance pay you royalties if and when your advance is ‘earned out’ by book sales. You will receive a slice of that advance payment once a contract is agreed. The remainder of the advance will be paid out, typically, (a) on acceptance of a complete manuscript, (b) on hardback publication, and (c) on paperback publication, if you have one. If your nonfiction book only comes out in one edition, the last two chunks will come as one. Clearly, publishers make their money by acquiring books with commercial potential, so it makes sense to pitch them with interesting book ideas. Here are some things you should cover in your proposal: Subject What do you want to write about? Audience Why do you think anyone would be interested? Competition What other titles are there in your area? Or, to be rather more accurate: what titles in your area have made money? That’s important, because those comparable books will form an important part of any acquiring editor’s in-house pitch at the time of acquisition. Angle How does your book differ from everything else that’s out there? Why does the particular angle you bring feel urgent, necessary and compelling? Authority What qualifies you to write on this topic? Why should anyone listen to you? Platform What platform do you have to generate publicity or visibility for your book? Answers might include large followings on social media, a regular broadcast presence, or a position as a columnist in a major national newspaper or magazine. Title It’s almost possible to overlook the title, just because it’s so damn obvious. But a great title counts for a huge amount. A good title should do two things. It should communicate what the book is about, but it should also do that in a sexy, edgy, novel, exciting way. A book called A Journey of Self-Discovery would be unpublishably bad. A book called Eat, Pray, Love could just be an international hit. Or just think how many extra sales Yuvral Noah Harari achieved by calling his first book simply Sapiens. That’s a huge subject with an utterly enticing one-word hook. Perfect! Do likewise. Intended Word Count Honestly? You won’t know this until you’ve written your book. But say something. 70-90,000 words would be about right for most memoirs. A 100,000-word book would be about 350 pages in print, so think roughly how long you want your finished book to feel. Anything over 120,000 words will have a slightly epic quality for the reader (and be more expensive for the publisher to produce), so only aim for high word counts if the subject matter is really worth it. (The American Civil War: yes. One somewhat interesting murder in Minnesota: no.) All that is to look at your proposal from a publisher’s point of view, but they have to think about things from a readers’ perspective as well. So they will also want to know: The Pitch To The Reader How would you go about pitching the book to a reader, rather than to a publisher? Does that pitch feel compelling, or a bit flat? Writing Skills Can you write decently? What is the actual experience of reading your book going to be like? Detailed Subject Matter What is your book actually about? It’s all very well to say (for example), that your book will be a history of Rome. And good – that’s clearly the kind of subject matter for which there is a perennial market. But what will the actual, detailed, chapter by chapter content be? You need to be able to outline your content and do so in a way that will make sense to someone who has little prior knowledge of your topic. These questions have to be answered by the proposal you offer to the publisher/literary agent. In effect, your proposal will simply go through these questions one at a time and answer them in a way that will give the strongest possible reassurance to the people holding the chequebook. What Should Be In Your Book Proposal:A Template A nonfiction book proposal template might run roughly as follows. (Why only “roughly”? Well, several reasons, really. First, non-fiction is a very varied field, and the basic template will need to bend a bit depending on what’s on offer. Secondly, there’s no required industry-standard format, the way there is with screenplays. That gives you some wiggle room. And third, you may be stronger in some areas and weaker in others. There’s nothing wrong with constructing your proposal so as to make the most of your assets!) Right. So things may vary, but a good place to start is as follows: 1. A Covering Letter (Or Query Letter) Your covering letter will deal with the following elements: Purpose: Explain why you’re writing in the first place.Example: “Dear Annie Agent, I am writing to seek representation for the attached book proposal, A Puzzle in String” Subject matter: Explain what the book is about.Example: “My book is a popular science book that explains string theory in terms that laypeople can understand [etc].” Audience: Explain who you think will be interested.Example: “The book will appeal to anyone interested in understanding the most fundamental aspects of the universe we live in. It will appeal to broadly the same people who bought Steven Hawking’s Brief History of Time . . . etc.” Angle: The world mostly doesn’t need more books. So why is yours the one that readers will want to pick up, given the vast range of options they already have?Example: “My book differs from the other books on the market in that it …” Personal background: Explain (in brief) who you are.Example: “I am a Professor of Physics at XYZ University . . .” (Optionally) Motivation: In some cases, it can help to explain why you felt driven to write this book.Example: If you were writing a book on silence, you might want to mention (say) that you had spent six months living, in silence, as a hermit. Documents: Explain what documents you are presenting.Example: “I attach the following documents . . .” A good letter will run to no more than two pages. (If you were a novelist, we’d suggest your letter run to no more than a single page, but the rules are a bit different for nonfiction authors. You have a little more room.) 2. A Professional Author Bio Your self-description needs to cover (usually) two elements: Here’s where you set out something like a professional resume. Even here, bear in mind your audience. So let’s say you are a professor of physics. Since you\'re addressing laypeople, instead of listing your papers in detail, you can just say, “I have authored more than 70 scientific papers . . .” You should also set out your platform, if you have one. That platform will include any way you have of reaching your target audience: social media, broadcasting, journalism, a blog post, a mailing list – anything. Do note that publishers have pretty high standards here. You’d need several hundred thousand Twitter followers, for instance, to move a publisher’s stony heart. Typically, you will either bring significant authority (“I’m a physics prof”) or a significant platform (“I have over 2,000,000 followers on Instagram”). It’s pretty rare that an author brings both, but if you have both – brag. And what happens if you have neither platform nor authority? Well, authority and platform are great, but if anyone tells you they’re essential – well, they’re wrong. Great writing plus a great idea will work fine every time as they\'re the most important things. If you have neither platform nor authority, your bio doesn\'t need to go into any great depth. 3. A Market Overview A marketing plan is also crucial. You’ll need to provide: A swift definition of your market as you see it. Be as precise as possible here. Don’t tell agents/publishers that your book will appeal to “all intelligent book buyers”. Define your audience as precisely as you can.Example: “This is a book of popular physics, part of the broader popular science market. Because the book lies at the harder end of the science market, it’s likely to appeal to readers with past enjoyment of quantum physics, astronomy…” Measures of engaged audience size: You want to give publishers some kind of metrics for the possible target audience – but be sober here, not expansive. If you are writing a book about Ireland, for example, don\'t say, “The worldwide population of Irish, Irish-American, and other Irish descended people is estimated at…” Yes, you may arrive at a large number that way, but it will be a meaningless number. Much better to say something like, “Nuala FitzShamrock’s history of the Irish Famine spent Y weeks on the NYT bestseller list.” It’s quite hard to get useful measures of engaged audience size, but you\'re better off giving a few hard stats rather than a larger number of fluffier ones. Offer an overview of major recent titles plus, if you want, some older classics – but publishers will certainly be focusing primarily on titles of the last 2-3 years. Don’t just list out the titles themselves, but include details of author, publisher, publication date, ISBN, page count, formats (eg: hardback, paperback, e-book, audio), and price points for each. These things matter a lot to a nonfiction publisher because they’ll instantly be able to tell what kind of market currently exists for these books. (They can also check, which you can’t, what the sales history for these titles are.) So if the only current publishers for your subject are academic publishers with books priced at $100+, it’s unlikely that a trade publisher will think that a mainstream market exists for your book. You\'ll want to provide data on at least 5 comparable titles, but 10 would be a better number to aim for. Provide any data you have on sales / prizes won / publicity achieved for your comparative titles. This can be hard, by the way, because this is an area where publishers will have paid-for sources of data that you don’t have. All the same, it’s worth making some effort here, as you can show yourself to be a professional, market-aware author – something publishers love to see! The easiest way to guesstimate approximate sales is by looking at Amazon sales ranking . . . just be aware that those rankings are volatile, so they can be an unreliable guide.Example: “String Theory for Idiots, by Prof Quentin Quark (Pub: Penguin Random House, 2018) is currently ranked at #1,800 in Amazon.com’s overall bestseller list. Format, pricing and ISBN details are: …)” Angle: Provide a brief summary of how your book differs from the competition. What makes yours special? Why does the market need your book? This last point is the crucial one. Sometimes, you might come across an idea that hasn’t been done before. In that case, say so. You have to bring something new to the market you are writing for. It is the newness and urgency of that idea which will go a long way to determine whether your nonfiction book proposal succeeds in generating offers or not. 4. Sample Material So far, the material we’re offering to the publisher includes stuff about the book (your query letter, that market overview) and about you (the bio.) But we do also need to give publishers a good taste of the work itself, which means you will also need to supply: A. Sample Chapters You\'ll need to include sample chapters from the book itself, to give the agent and publisher an idea of whether you can actually write. Can you write engagingly for a broad audience? This is your chance to prove it. If your book is narrative nonfiction, you will need to include the first three chapters from the book, because the narrative won’t make sense any other way. For subject-led non-fiction, the chapters can be non-contiguous. B. A Synopsis You need to give a detailed synopsis of the complete book. If you\'re writing narrative nonfiction, that can take the form of a regular synopsis, but probably longer than what you’d offer for fiction. Aim for about 2,000 words, if you’re not sure – though again, these things are variable. In some cases, you’ll find that narrative nonfiction – such as memoirs or travel books – simply demand to be treated like the novels they resemble. And that will probably mean that you need to write the whole damn book and that a proposal will simply not be enough. Sorry! (Though you can always get a proposal over to an agent. At the very least, a good proposal will start a useful conversation with an interested agent.) So what about the more subject-led non-fiction? The good news here is that you may be able to get away with relatively little. If you’re writing, let’s say, Paleo Science: What’s fact, what’s myth, and what matters to you, a detailed skeleton outline of a few pages should be fine. Don’t go wild. C. An Introduction As well as a sample chapter or two and a detailed outline, I strongly favour including the introduction that you intend to appear in the final finished book. That intro should act as a kind of manifesto for the book. It needs to proclaim, in effect, “Here’s why this topic is so important and so urgent that you have to fish $20 from your pocket right now and buy this book.” The manifesto is partly a communication of facts. (For example: “If sea levels continue to rise at their current rates, 47% of lower Manhattan will be underwater by 2029.”) But it’s also partly a process of seduction. You are seeking to entice the reader into seeing the world your way. That’s where strong writing comes into its own – and indeed, this will probably be the most important chapter you’ll write, as it’ll be the most influential in that buy/don’t-buy decision. Quite likely, you’ll find that actually writing that intro will bring your own project into greater focus, even for you. You’ll realise exactly what it is about your project that drives you so much. Communicate that passion to the reader, and you are onto a winner. What Not To Do In Your Nonfiction Book Proposal When you\'re including anecdotes in your nonfiction proposal, it\'s important that you add some human colour to it, rather than just offering a piece of information in an uninteresting manner. In particular, if your book is narrative non-fiction, you want the reader’s response to be rather as it would be at the start of a novel. Why are we here? What’s going to happen next? It’s those questions that compel attention. It’s that human anecdote which seduces the reader into the author’s project, and the author’s passion. If you can get your actual writing to strike the right seductive tone, you will succeed. Readers will read your book for pleasure and interest above all else. Want More Help With Your Book Proposal? Why not try an agent submission pack review, or our video course on how to get published. Or, take a look at our range of editorial services here. Frequently Asked Questions How Long Is A Nonfiction Book Proposal? The average length of a nonfiction book proposal is roughly around 10-25 pages. This varies greatly, depending on the topic, how thorough your proposal is, and how many sample pages of your writing you include. Specific literary agents and publishers may also have their own requirements for the lengths of the book proposals they receive. What Is The Format For A Book Proposal? The format of a book proposal may vary slightly, though most of them include: a query letter, a professional author bio, a market overview, and sample material (which includes a synopsis, sample chapters, and the introduction to your book). How Do You Write A Pitch For A Nonfiction Book? A pitch for a nonfiction book tends to be one or two sentences in length, and will reference the setting, subject, story, and unique selling point. Pitches summarise the key points of a book in a way which is clear and engaging. How Do You Write A Synopsis For A Nonfiction Book Proposal? The synopsis for a nonfiction book proposal should have a clear beginning, middle, and end; reflect the tone of your writing and the genre of your book; be engaging; reveal the key sections of your book (including any unexpected twists or spoilers); and be objective. They tend to be around 2,000 words long, though if you\'re writing subject-led nonfiction it can be briefer and around a few pages long.

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

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

Your first job as a storyteller is a simple one, and a crucial one. You have to get your passengers into your train – your readers into your story. Only then can you hope to transport them. And that crucial first step doesn’t have much to do with characters or story or anything else. What matters first is this: your fictional world has to seem real. It has to grip the reader as intensely as real life – more intensely, even. Writing descriptions that seem vivid, with the use of evocative language, is therefore essential. The buildings, cities, places, rooms, trees, weather of your fictional world have to be convincing there. They have to have an emphatic, solid, believable presence. A big ask, right? But it gets harder than that. Because at the same time, people don’t want huge wodges of descriptive writing. They want to engage with characters and story, because that’s the reason they picked up your book in the first place. So your challenge becomes convincing readers that your world is real . . . but using only the lightest of touches to achieve that goal. Not so easy, huh? Start Early Set the scene early on – then nudge. It may sound obvious but plenty of writers launch out into a scene without giving us any descriptive material to place and anchor the action. Sure, a page or so into the scene, they may start to add details to it – but by that point it’s too late. They’ve already lost the reader. If the scene feels placeless at the start – like actors speaking in some blank, white room – you won’t be able to wrestle that sense of place back later. So start early. That means telling the reader where they are in a paragraph (or so), close to the start of any new scene. That early paragraph needs to have enough detail that if you are creating a coffee shop, for example, it doesn’t just feel like A Generic Coffee Shop. It should feel like its own thing. One you could actually walk into. Something with its own mood and colour. One vivid descriptive detail will do more work for you than three worthy but colourless sentences. And once, early in your scene, you’ve created your location, don’t forget about it. Just nudge a little as you proceed. So you could have your characters talking – then they’re interrupted by a waitress. Then they talk (or argue, or fight, or kiss) some more, and then you drop in some other detail which reminds the reader, “Yep, here we still are, in this coffee shop.” That’s a simple technique, bit it works every time. One paragraph early on, then nudge, nudge, nudge. As the roughest of rough guides, those nudges need to happen at least once a page – so about every 300 words. If it’s natural to do so more often, that’s totally fine. Be Specific Details matter! They build a sense of place like nothing else. Gabriel García Márquez, opening One Hundred Years of Solitude, introduces his village like this: Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. Boom! We’re there. In his world. In his village. Already excited to see what lies ahead. And yes, he’s started early (Chapter 1, Page 1, Line 1). But it’s more than that, isn’t it? He could have written something like this: Macondo was a village of about twenty houses, built on a riverbank. I hope it’s obvious that that sentence hardly transports us anywhere. It’s too bland. Too unfocused. Too generic. There are literally thousands of villages in the world which would fit that description. In short, what makes Marquez’s description so vivid is its use of telling detail. They’re not just houses, they’re adobe houses. The river doesn’t just flow over stones, its flows over polished stones that are white and enormous, like (wow!) prehistoric eggs. The sentence works so well because Marquez has: Created something totally non-generic Via the use of highly specific detail, and Uses surprising / exotic language to make those details blaze in our imagination. That basic template is one you can use again and again. It never stales. It lies at the heart of all good descriptive writing. So here, for example, is a more ‘boring’ space . . . but still one redolent with vividness and atmosphere thanks to the powerful use of atmospheric specificity. In Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Offred introduces her room with details that not only grab us but hint at something dark: A chair, a table, a lamp. Above, on the white ceiling, a relief ornament in the shape of a wreath and in the centre of it a blank space, plastered over, like the place in a face where the eye has been taken out. There must have been a chandelier once. They’ve removed anything you could tie a rope to. Those clipped words transport us straight to Offred’s enclosed, and terrifying, space. We’re also told just enough to give us an image of that place, enough to heighten tension, enough to tease curiosity. This is just a description of a room – but we already feel powerfully impelled to read on. Be Selective With Your Descriptive Details Be selective – don’t overwhelm. It might be tempting to share every detail with us on surroundings. Don’t. Even with a setting like Hogwarts – a place readers really do want to know all the hidden details of – J.K. Rowling doesn’t share how many revolving staircases it has, how many treasures in the Room of Requirement, how many trees in the Forbidden Forest. That’s not the point. (And it would write off a little of Hogwarts’ magic and mystery.) If you’re describing a bar, don’t write: The bar was approximately twenty-eight feet long, by perhaps half of that wide. A long mahogany bar took up about one quarter of the floor space, while eight tables each with 4 wooden chairs occupied the remaining area. There were a number of tall bar stools arranged to accommodate any drinker who didn’t want to be seated at one of the tables. The ceiling height was pleasantly commodious. That’s accurate, yes. It’s informative, yes. But it’s bland as heck. The reader doesn’t want information. They want atmosphere. They want vivid language. They want mood. Here’s an alternative way to describe a bar – the Korova Milk Bar in A Clockwork Orange. This description delivers a sense of intimacy and darkness in a few words: The mesto [place] was near empty … it looked strange, too, having been painted with all red mooing cows … I took the large moloko plus to one of the little cubies that were all round … there being like curtains to shut them off from the main mesto, and there I sat down in the plushy chair and sipped and sipped We’re told what we need to know, thrown into that murky Korova atmosphere and Burgess moves the action on. All we really have in terms of detail are those mooing red cows, some cubies (curtain booths?), and a plushy chair. There’s lots more author Anthony Burgess could tell us about that place. But he doesn’t. He gives us the right details, not all the details. And if that’s not enough for you, then try reading this. Write For All The Senses You have a nose? So use it. Visuals are important, but don’t neglect the other senses. Offering a full range of sensory information will enhance your descriptive writing. Herman Melville, say, describes to us the chowder for the ship’s crew in Moby Dick: ‘small juicy clams, scarcely bigger than hazel nuts, mixed with pounded ship biscuits and salted pork cut up into little flakes.’ Such descriptions are deft, specific, and brilliantly atmospheric. Where else but on board a nineteenth century American whaler would you get such a meal? By picking out those details, Melville makes his setting feel vibrantly alive. Here’s another example. Joanne Harris’ opening of Chocolat plays to readers’ senses, as we’re immersed straightaway in the world of her book through scent, sound and sight: We came on the wind of the carnival. A warm wind for February, laden with the hot greasy scents of frying pancakes and sausage and powdery-sweet waffles cooked on the hotplate right there by the roadside, with the confetti sleeting down collars and cuffs and rolling in the gutters. These non-visual references matter so much because sight alone can feel a little distant, a little empty. By forcing the reader’s taste buds to image Melville’s clams or Harris’s pancakes – or making the reader feel that warm February wind, the confetti ‘sleeting’ down collars – it’s almost as though the writers are hauling the readers’ entire body into their scenes. That’s good stuff: do likewise. (And one easy test: take one of your scenes and highlight anything that references a non-visual sense. If you find some good references, then great: you’re doing fine. If not, your highlighter pen remains unused, you probably want to edit that scene!) Get Place And Action Working Together That’s where the magic happens! Use the atmospheric properties of a place to add to other properties of the scene. That doesn’t mean you should always play things the obvious way: no need for cliché;. You can have declarations of love happen in idyllic meadows, as in Twilight by Stephenie Meyer, but why not at a bus stop in the rain? Shouted over the barriers at a train station? Your character also brings one kind of mood to the scene, and the action that unfolds will bring other sensations. Lynda La Plante’s crime novel Above Suspicion makes a home setting frightening after it becomes obvious a stranger has been in protagonist DS Anna Travis’ flat, and she’s just been assigned to help solve her first murder case. So the place is influenced by action, once Anna notices: Reaching for the bedside lamp, she stopped and withdrew her hand. The photograph of her father had been turned out to face the room. She touched it every night before she went to sleep. It was always facing towards her, towards the bed, not away from it. … In the darkness, what had felt safe before now felt frightening: the way the dressing-table mirror reflected the street-light through the curtains and the sight of the wardrobe door left slightly ajar. Here a comfy, nondescript flat becomes a frightening place, just because of what else is going on. Go for unfamiliar angles that add drama and excitement to your work. Descriptions As Active Characters You know the way that a place can turn on you? So (for example) a place that seems safe can suddenly reveal some other side, seem menacing, then almost try to harm the character. That’s an incredibly powerful way to build descriptive writing into your text – because it feels mobile, alive and with a flicker of risk. You can use plotting techniques to help structure the way a reader interacts with a place: starting with a sense of the status quo, then some inciting incident that shifts that early stability, and so on. The inciting incident can be tiny – discovering that a photo frame has been moved, for example. Having your characters voice their perceptions of a place in dialogue also adds to its dramatic impact, because now the reader sees place both through the eyes of a narrator and through the eyes of the characters themselves. Good, huh? Do you need more help?Did you know we have an entire video course on How To Write? That course has had awesome client reviews, but it’s kinda expensive to buy . . . so don’t buy it! We’ve made that course available, in full, to members of Jericho Writers. Our members don’t just get that course, they also get: An incredible course on Getting Published A brilliant course on Self-Publishing A ton of filmed masterclasses Access to AgentMatch, the world’s best literary agent search tool A brilliant and supportive writers community Chances to pitch your work in front of literary agents, live online every month And more We’ve made the offer as rich as we know how to – and made it incredibly affordable too. You can find out more about our club here. Remember: we were founded by writers for writers – and we created this club for you. Do find out more . . . and we’d absolutely love it if you chose to join us. Use Unfamiliar Locations And smart research ALWAYS helps. Using unfamiliar settings adds real mood and atmosphere. Stephenie Meyer, when writing Twilight, decided she needed a rainy place near a forest to fit key plot elements. Like protagonist Bella, she was raised in Arizona, but explained the process of setting Twilight in an unfamiliar setting on her blog: For my setting, I knew I needed someplace ridiculously rainy. I turned to Google, as I do for all my research needs, and looked for the place with the most rainfall in the U.S. This turned out to be the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State. I pulled up maps of the area and studied them, looking for something small, out of the way, surrounded by forest. … In researching Forks, I discovered the La Push Reservation, home to the Quileute Tribe. The Quileute story is fascinating, and a few fictional members of the tribe quickly became intrinsic to my story. As her success has shown, it’s possible to write successfully about a place you don’t know, but you must make it your business to know as much as you can about it. (Or if you’re writing a fantasy or sci-fi novel, plan your world down to its most intricate details.) And to be clear: you’re doing the research, not because you want that research to limit you. (Oh, I can’t write that, because Wikipedia tells me that the river isn’t as long / the forest isn’t as thick / or whatever else.) On the contrary: You are doing the research, because that research may inspire and stimulate a set of ideas you might not have ecountered otherwise. The key thing is to do your research to nail specifics, especially if they are unfamiliar, foreign, exotic. Just read how Tokyo is described in Ryu Murakami’s thriller In the Miso Soup: It was still early in the evening when we emerged onto a street in Tsukiji, near the fish market. … Wooden bait-and-tackle shops with disintegrating roofs and broken signs stood next to shiny new convenience stores, and futuristic highrise apartment complexes rose skyward on either side of narrow, retro streets lined with wholesalers of dried fish. There’s authenticity, grit to this description of Tokyo, as opposed to using ‘stock’ descriptions that could apply to many modern cities. Note this same thing with foods: in Japan, your protagonist could well be eating miso soup, as per Ryu Murakami. Or say if your story was set in Hong Kong, you might write in a dai pai dong (a sort of Chinese street kitchen), something very specific to that city if you’re describing a street there. Alternatively, if you are setting something in the past, get your sense of place right by doing your research right, too. In historical novel Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier, set in Holland in 1664, maid Griet narrates how artist Johannes Vermeer prepares her for her secret portrait, musing, to her horror, that ‘virtuous women did not open their mouths in paintings’. That last is just a tiny detail, but Griet’s tears show us how mortified she is. Modern readers won’t (necessarily) think about seventeenth-century connotations like this, so if you’re writing a scene set in a very different era or culture to what you know, research so you’re creating a true sense of place. Use Place To Create Foreshadowing A brilliant technique – we love it! Descriptions of place are never neutral. Good writers will, in overt or gently subtle ways, introduce a place-as-character. If that character is dangerous, for example, then simply describing a place adds a layer of foreboding, foreshadowing, to the entire book. Just read how J.R.R. Tolkien describes the Morannon in The Two Towers: ‘high mounds of crushed and powdered rock, great cones of earth fire-blasted and poison-stained … like an obscene graveyard.’ It’s obvious from this description trouble lies ahead for Frodo Baggins and Sam Gamgee. But even if you’re not writing this sort of fantasy, character psychology and plot (as we saw above) can also render seemingly harmless places suspect, too. A boring apartment in Above Suspicion becomes scary when it seems someone’s been inside. In the same sense, we thrill to the sense of a place with excitement and promise, too, like when Harry makes his first trip to Diagon Alley (in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone) to shop for Hogwarts equipment with Hagrid. There were shops selling robes, shops selling telescopes and strange silver instruments Harry had never seen before, windows stacked with barrels of bat spleens and eels’ eyes, tottering piles of spell books, quills, and rolls of parchment, potion bottles, globes of the moon. … They bought Harry’s school books in a shop called Flourish and Blotts where the shelves were stacked to the ceiling with books as large as paving stones bound in leather; books the size of postage stamps in covers of silk. Just weave place and action together like this to create atmosphere, excitement, tension, foreboding. Think About Your Words – Nouns And Adjectives Specific is good. Unexpected is great! One final thought. When you’ve written a piece, go back and check nouns. A bad description will typically use boring nouns (or things) in settings, i.e. a table, chair, window, floor, bar, stool, etc. If you try to fluff up that by throwing in adjectives (i.e. a grimy table, gleaming window, wooden floor), the chances are you’ll either have (i) made the description even more boring, or (ii) made it odd. Of course, this works for that first passage we looked over from Margaret Atwood. We sense Offred counting the few things she has in the little room she calls hers, the window and chair, etc., in terse phrasing. We sense her tension, her dissociation, and we feel trapped with her. All the same, play with nouns, with taking your readers to new surroundings. Give them a Moloko. Play with surroundings, how you can make them different, how you can render the ordinary extraordinary. With the right nouns in place, you’ll need fewer adjectives to jazz things up – and when you do use them, they’ll feel right, not over the top. And if you want more on writing techniques, then check out this article on verbs – it’s a must read. Happy writing!

So, you’re well on your way to completing your book on travel, and have a cracking book proposal that you can’t wait to share with agents. Well, we’re here to help!  WANT TO JUMP STRAIGHT TO THE AGENT LIST? CLICK HERE  Travel Non-Fiction Travel writing is not as simple as it sounds, and far more varied than you may think. You can have travel memoirs, travel guides, and everything in between. Whether your book is narrative and personal, or fact-driven, it’s important that it appeals to readers and is an interesting read.  What makes your personal memoir interesting to the average reader? What makes you qualified to write a food-driven travel guide? Do you want your books to inspire people to travel, or just be a light Sunday read? These are the questions you should ask yourself and be ready to answer in your book proposal when querying agents.   Some well-known travel books include Eat, Pray, Love (which was even adapted to film), A Cook’s Tour: In Search of the Perfect Meal, Into the Wild, Under the Tuscan Sun. Look at what makes each of these books successful, and find where your own book fits in the market.   AgentMatch And How To Use It There are plenty of travel book-loving agents, but you won\'t want to approach them all. The best way to develop and refine your own shortlist of UK agents for travel non-fiction is to visit AgentMatch, our literary agent database, and use the search tools on the left to make your selection.  With AgentMatch you can select by genre (e.g. travel non-fiction), country, the agent’s level of experience, their appetite for new clients, and much more. You can even save your search results and come back to them, allowing you to work through them one by one, at your own pace. Each profile has been researched thoroughly including what agents like to read in their spare time, information on their most recent deals, manuscript wishlists, submission requirements, and exclusive interviews.  You can sign-up for a 7-day free trial which will give you a good feel for the data and functionality. Or join us as a premium member and get unlimited access to AgentMatch.  UK Agents For Travel Non-Fiction To get you started we’ve selected a list of 20 UK agents looking for travel non-fiction:  [am_show_agents id=14] More Resources   We’re here to help you at every step in your writing and querying process. Check out our favourite blogs that can assist you in putting together your query letter and synopsis, and if you want valuable, personal feedback on your writing you can book a fifteen-minute One-to-One with an agent of your choice. Premium members can also get a free query letter review from our lovely Writers Support team!     Happy searching, and good luck on your querying journey!   

Have you just finished your novel and are ready to begin your search for an agent? Well, we’re here to help!  WANT TO JUMP STRAIGHT TO THE AGENT LIST? CLICK HERE  Romance Fiction Romantic fiction is one of the most popular of all genres, usually following the romantic relationship between two or more people, and often having a happy or satisfying ending.   There are many different types of romance fiction that just happen to share this umbrella term but can be very different in how they are presented. While you can get contemporary romance novels where the entire focus of the novel is on the relationships presented within, there are often crossovers with other genres. These can include historical romance, and paranormal or fantasy romance. This means that each genre is equally important in the novel, creating a unique story.  Finding the right agent is a long process but at the heart of it you need an agent who is not only qualified to work with your book, but also loves the genre/s you’re writing in.  So if you have written a historical romance with fantasy elements, for example, you should look for an agent that expresses an interest in both genres, not just an agent looking for romance novels. This may seem like a daunting task but that’s where AgentMatch can help.   AgentMatch And How To Use It There are plenty of romance-loving agents, but you won\'t want to approach them all. The best way to develop and refine your own shortlist of US agents for romance novels is to visit AgentMatch, our literary agent database, and use the search tools on the left to make your selection.  With AgentMatch you can select by genre (e.g. romance), country, the agent’s level of experience, their appetite for new clients, and much more. You can even save your search results and come back to them, allowing you to work through them one by one, at your own pace. Each profile has been researched thoroughly including what agents like to read in their spare time, information on their most recent deals, manuscript wishlists, submission requirements, and exclusive interviews.  You can sign-up for a 7-day free trial which will give you a good feel for the data and functionality. Or join us as a premium member and get unlimited access to AgentMatch.  US Agents For Romance To get you started we’ve selected a list of 20 US agents looking for romance novels:  [am_show_agents id=7] More Resources   We’re here to help you at every step in your writing and querying process. Check out our favourite blogs that can assist you in putting together your query letter and synopsis, and if you want valuable, personal feedback on your writing you can book a fifteen-minute One-to-One with an agent of your choice. Premium members can also get a free query letter review from our lovely Writers Support team!     Happy searching, and good luck on your querying journey!   

Guest author and blogger Mandy Berriman shares with us how she hooked her literary agent and the importance of never giving up. I went to a family wedding earlier this year. At our places at dinner, we each had a name card with a quote on the back. Mine read: I have one talent; I never give up. We laughed at the aptness, but it was also a well-timed personal reminder to me. Keep going, you’re almost there, don’t give up. And on I went with the current rewrite, kicking the doubt demons into the dust along the way. I think it is possible that in the history of Jericho Writers (The Writers’ Workshop), I hold the longest record for not giving up: eleven years, two months and 26 days, to be precise. I was one of their earliest clients with my nine chapters of an unfinished ghost novel for children. It was the first piece of fiction I’d written since leaving school and although I had experienced a huge buzz writing it, I’d taken a year and a half to get to Chapter 9 and then stalled. Was it any good? Did I even know what I was doing? Could I actually write a whole novel? After uttering once too often, ‘but how do I know if I can actually do this?’, my husband found The Writers’ Workshop and told me to go and find out. A few weeks later, I had a report back from Harry. The gist: yes, you can do this, and here are all the things you need to learn about writing. That was June 2005, and I haven’t stopped learning since – Arvon, reciprocal critiquing arrangements, constructive feedback from agents, self-editing, six Festivals of Writing, mentoring from outstanding Debi Alper, and always the ongoing support and encouragement from the team here. I spent many years on that original novel (writing, finishing, rewriting, editing, finishing again, rewriting, editing, finishing again), and I came very close with a number of agents, including one who read, offered feedback, and re-read several times over a period of three or four years, and my opening chapter was shortlisted at 2012’s Festival of Writing, but I never quite jumped the agent hurdle. I decided to put the novel in the drawer and move on. I’d been writing and rewriting it for nine years and was desperate for a change. I started a second children’s novel and rediscovered that buzz of fresh, no-idea-where-it’s-going writing. But fitting it in around two children and an increasingly demanding job meant progress was slow and I struggled with motivation. I dabbled in other bits and pieces, never settling on anything, but I started to write short stories and flash fiction in different styles and voices, and quite a step away from the children’s fiction where I felt comfortable. In 2013, several things happened to dramatically change my direction and fire my motivation. Firstly, I moved jobs to one that was far more creative, allowing me to focus on my passion for music and step back from time-consuming paperwork. Secondly, my youngest son started preschool freeing up a precious few daytime hours in which to write. Thirdly, and probably most importantly, Stories for Homes happened. Debi and her friend, Sally Swingewood, decided they wanted to create an anthology of short stories and poems on a theme of ‘home’ to raise money for Shelter. Debi asked for submissions of stories, techy help, proofreading and so on. I was determined to make progress on my children’s novel and I had no story ideas, so I replied to say that I would help where I could but doubted it would be in story form. However, just before the story deadline, I read Claire King’s The Night Rainbow, a wonderful, inspiring novel written from the POV of a five-year-old girl. (Read it!) Its themes are not about homelessness, but it sparked a thought – what does homelessness look like, feel like, smell like to a young child? And there was Jesika with her hands on her hips and that look she gets on her face when an adult is being really silly, wondering out loud why it took me for ages to notice her. I wrote and edited Jesika’s story in a week and sent it to Debi and Sally just in time for the deadline. They loved it. They made it the first story in the book. The book was filled with sixty or so other fantastic stories and poems and the book went on sale and raised over £2,000 for Shelter. (It’s still on sale, still raising money for Shelter.) I was very proud to be a small part of the overall project and when the excitement died down, I returned to the children’s novel. Except Jesika had other ideas. She wouldn’t leave me alone. I realised that one short story was not going to satisfy her. I’ve spent the last three years writing, rewriting and editing Jesika’s novel. In that time, Debi has continued to mentor me and I’ve been to four Festivals, each time taking a little bit of Jesika’s story with me for my one-to-ones. In 2013, all three agents told me they loved the voice, and they’d love to see more. (I wasn’t finished, so made a note of their names). In 2014, I saw two more agents who loved the voice, but weren’t convinced I could sustain it (and I still hadn’t finished it, so I couldn’t prove them wrong). However, that year I also went to a workshop run by Shelley Harris and because of a piece of writing I scribbled for one of her tasks, she introduced me to her agent, Jo Unwin, and we talked about the novel and she gave me encouragement to continue. In early 2015, I finished the first draft and started rewriting. In 2015, I submitted to Jo as one of my one-to-ones. She loved it and wanted to see more, and then after the festival, one of the agents I saw in 2013 asked to see the first chapter. She also loved it and wanted to see more, but the rewrite wasn’t finished. It took me a year to finish – during an emotionally challenging year and with enormous help from Debi’s editorial genius – and just before the 2016 festival, I was ready to submit again. I had two agent one-to-ones arranged and I emailed Jo Unwin and the other agent to ask if they wanted to see it, too. I assumed that nothing much would happen for a few months, and then I’d look at any feedback I got from the agents and talk to Debi about further rewrites. What did happen was I ended up with four agents reading the full manuscript, two making me an offer of representation, one taking me out for lunch and me having a choice to make – all in the space of three and a half weeks! I’m delighted to say (and still pinching myself when I say it) that I chose Jo Unwin. I know that this is one more hurdle in a series of hurdles and who knows what comes next, but I’m very excited to have arrived at a place I’ve been working towards for so long and so grateful for the day my husband handed me The Writers’ Workshop info and told me to get on with it. I stepped through a door that day that led me to so many fantastic opportunities, wonderful people and great friends – and I am the writer I am today because of them. Back in 2007, Harry posted about me on a now-dead blog to congratulate me on that initial success of finding an agent who believed enough in my first novel to offer feedback and ask to read it again. He acknowledged there were no guarantees that it would lead to representation but he said, ‘I bet Mandy makes it though. And I bet she sells well when she does. Certainly hope so.’ I printed that blog off and pinned it up to remind me to keep going, and I did keep going. Thank you, Harry. And thank you to everyone else along the way who believed I could do this. Lastly, incredibly, one of the many agents who rejected my children’s novel five years ago is the agent I’m now signed with as my book heads to publication with Doubleday. My advice: be rejected, crawl away and weep in a corner, look at feedback, eat chocolate, learn, re-read feedback, swear, try new things, get involved with other writers, allow your writing to be critiqued, learn more, delete, rewrite, edit, throw the whole lot in the bin for a day – but never give up!

Have you just finished your novel and are ready to begin your search for an agent? Well, we’re here to help!  WANT TO JUMP STRAIGHT TO THE AGENT LIST? CLICK HERE  Crime, Thriller, And Action Crime and thriller is one of the most enduringly popular genres of all time, from Agatha Christie and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, to Gillian Flynn, Stephen King, and our very own Harry Bingham. Readers have always loved reading about crime and mystery, whether it’s more psychological and full of suspense, a police procedural drama, or full of gore and death.   These stories have always captivated us as readers and remain one of the most popular genres. Because of this, it’s important to make sure your book is unique and stands out. Crossover novels can be incredibly successful, whether you’re adding historical or speculative elements to your story, and this can help in creating that USP (Unique Selling Point) when approaching agents.   All you need to do is make sure you have a polished manuscript and a standout submission pack. After that, you’re ready to start doing your agent research and creating a shortlist. And that’s where we come in.  AgentMatch And How To Use It There are plenty of crime novel-loving agents, but you won\'t want to approach them all. The best way to develop and refine your own shortlist of US agents for crime and thrillers is to visit AgentMatch, our literary agent database, and use the search tools on the left to make your selection.  With AgentMatch you can select by genre (e.g. crime, thriller, and action), country, the agent’s level of experience, their appetite for new clients, and much more. You can even save your search results and come back to them, allowing you to work through them one by one, at your own pace. Each profile has been researched thoroughly including what agents like to read in their spare time, information on their most recent deals, manuscript wishlists, submission requirements, and exclusive interviews.  You can sign-up for a 7-day free trial which will give you a good feel for the data and functionality. Or join us as a premium member and get unlimited access to AgentMatch.  US Agents For Crime, Thriller, and Action  To get you started we’ve selected a list of 20 US agents looking for crime and thrillers:  [am_show_agents id=19] More Resources   We’re here to help you at every step in your writing and querying process. Check out our favourite blogs that can assist you in putting together your query letter and synopsis, and if you want valuable, personal feedback on your writing you can book a fifteen-minute One-to-One with an agent of your choice. Premium members can also get a free query letter review from our lovely Writers Support team!    Happy searching, and good luck on your querying journey!   

The ultimate guide for serious self-publishers, with everything you need to know about kindle publishing and how to sell e-books on Amazon. This is a jumbo post, because it tells you everything you need to do and how to do it. If you only need to research a specific topic, then use the index on the right hand side. Otherwise, jump right in – and let’s get you self-publishing successfully via KDP, Amazon\'s self-publishing platform. Self-Publishing – How To Make a Living An Overview Of Effective Self-Publishing Step 1: Write A Good Book Step 2: Create A Strong Cover Step 3: Prepare Your ‘Look Inside’ Material Step 4: Prepare Your End Material Step 5: Format Your E-book Step 6: Build Your Print Book (If You Want To) Step 7: Build Your Website Step 8: Create Your Readers’ Magnet Step 9: Mailing Lists And Other Technicalities Step 10: Social Media: Why You Can (Mostly) Ignore This Step 11: How to Choose Categories (BISAC Codes) On Amazon Step 12: How To Choose Keywords On Amazon Step 13: How To Price Your E-Book On Amazon Step 14: How To Launch Your Free Book Step 15: How To Launch Your Paid Book Step 16: The Long Term: Where Do You Go From Here? Self-publishing: How To Make A Living Via Amazon’s Kindle KDP The good news: self-publishing is easy these days. If you have a book and a cover, then uploading it is: Free. You pay nothing to Amazon, though there will be some costs involved in preparing properly. Fast. Allow 12-24 hours for the book to go live worldwide. Awesome. KDP can make your work made available to a worldwide audience. That’s something that even the largest traditional publishers can’t offer, unless they have acquired worldwide rights. That’s the great side of self-publishing, but there are challenges, too, of which the biggest is simply this: Invisibility. Amazon has 3.4 million titles in ‘literature and fiction’. 3.6 million history titles. Half a million comics and graphic novels. And of course, the flood grows ever bigger. Half a million new titles became available on the Kindle store in the last 90 days alone. Your title might be great, but bury it amongst 499,999 competing titles and it’s still likely to vanish. In short, self-publishing on Amazon is awesome and scary in about equal measure. This post will tell you how to publish your work on Amazon in a way that is low-cost (not zero cost), professional, and effective. Just how effective it is will depend on you, your books, your genre, and how much work you put in. But it is, these days, perfectly realistic to aim at earning a decent living wage from Amazon KDP publishing (possibly supplemented by publishing on Apple, Google, Kobo, etc). And just to be clear, although a good chunk of my author earnings come from traditional publishing, the money I earn from self-publishing my work in North America alone is excellent. In 2017, I earned $100,000 from just six e-books. And as you build your range of titles, your readership, your email list and your marketing skills, your income should follow suit. Yes, it’s hard work. Yes, it involves a little upfront cost. Yes, it depends on some clever tricks of marketing and presentation, but it works. It worked for me. It can work for you. The same basic principles underlie the success of thousands of other indie authors. And I’m going to share everything. This post is basically the ultimate guide to self-publishing your book on the Amazon Kindle store and I’ll update if things need to be tweaked or changed. Since the post is super long, I recommend that you bookmark it and use the Table of Contents up top to navigate. Tweet it, share it, link to it from your website, if it’s all helpful. To business. An Overview Of The Self-Publishing Process Effective self-publishing on Amazon requires: Strong underlying material. In other words, your book needs to be good. If it’s not, no amount of clever marketing will save it. A properly presented e-book. What I mean by this is that the cover needs to be strong. The material at the front of your e-book (the ‘Look Inside’ portion) needs to tempt the reader to complete their purchase. The material at the back of the e-book needs to clinch the deal. It needs to turn a one-off reader into a permanent, committed fan. (Not sure which ebook format to use? Then check out this article). A properly constructed author platform. That means a website, a reader’s magnet and a properly set-up mailing list. If that sounds scary or technical, don’t worry. There’s nothing hard here and I explain it all, anyway. Sensible pricing. No one will buy your book if it’s too expensive. You won’t make any money if it’s too cheap. Well-chosen metadata. Another scary term for something that’s basically simple. Because a lot of purchases on Amazon come via different types of search, you need to make sure that your book will pop up in the right places, not the wrong ones. And it’s all easy. Proper book promotion. So far, everything in this process is about getting ready for publication. Actually launching your book comes right at the end of the process. And, once you’ve built any kind of track record, you do that launch via your mailing list. You basically tell these guys (your committed fans) that you have a new book for sale. They rush out and buy it. Amazon notices that there’s a huge sales surge in this cool new book, so their search engine starts showing it to more and more people. So now you have totally new readers buying your book and as they enter your world, they start signing up for your mailing list, so your fan base grows and your next book goes even better. All that works well once you’ve got started, but how do you get started in the first place? Well, there are tricks there too and we’ll cover them. In short, the basic marketing process on Amazon is (A) prepare properly, (B) build a mailing list, (C) sell your work to that mailing list, (D) acquire additional sales from brand new readers who arrive at your work thanks to the visibility acquired via those mailing list sales, then (E) rinse and repeat, ad infinitum. Once you’ve mastered the basic essence of this underlying technique, you’ll want to add in the following methods too. (I’ve put the easiest techniques first, the harder ones later. Don’t work this list in the wrong order!) Book promotion sites Cross promotions with other authors Amazon Advertising Bookbub advertising Facebook advertising Of these methods, Facebook is probably the most powerful and scalable … but it’s also the most complicated and the easiest place to lose money. Most indie authors want to add Facebook advertising right away. That’s a mistake you pay for – with dollar bills magicked out of your pocket and into Mark Zuckerberg’s Fund For More Digital Wickedness. And though this post is long, don’t panic. Yes, there is set-up time and cost involved in getting started, but the basics of marketing are really quite easy thereafter. In July 2015 I launched a book in the US where my complete marketing plan consisted of: One email to my mailing list. Nothing else. (My wife had her second set of twins that year and we were … busy.) I didn’t tweet, post on Facebook, blog or send out review copies or anything else. You want to know how much money I made? I earned $30,000 from that one email and, since then, things have only got better. I’m going to show you how to do all of that, so buckle up as we hit the detail. Step 1. Write A Good Book People always laugh when I say that, “Write a good book,” but it’s the only absolute essential of the whole marketing process. It’s also the area where writers most tend to rush things. (Simple starter guide on writing a book here.) Again and again, we see writers struggling to achieve sales on Amazon. They talk with intensity about their metadata, their Facebook campaigns, their experiments with permafree and a million other things but when I look at their books, they’re too often just not good enough. And if your product isn’t a hundred percent, your sales will only ever be mediocre. Remember that if you’re writing thrillers, you are selling head-to-head against Lee Child and John Grisham. If you’re writing YA fiction, you are selling head-to-head against Stephenie Meyer and Veronica Roth. Getting nice comments from your beta-readers is not enough, because – scary truth – everyone gets nice comments from their beta-readers, so do things properly. Hone your craft, say with a writing course. Get detailed feedback from professional, third-party editors like ours. Put your work in the way of people who are skilled at finding flaws, not too quickly generous with praise. There are a lot of different editorial services out there; from manuscript assessments to developmental editing. We obviously think ours are pretty good, but do check out what different types of editing have to offer. Some of them are damn expensive and best avoided. There’s one school of thought, which is that you may as well get your work out there. Make some sales, acquire some readers, and learn on the job. Well, maybe, but I think that’s the wrong attitude. I think the writers who succeed are the ones who want to put the best possible product out there always, every time. And indeed, in self-publishing, there’s a strong argument which says that book #1 in your series should be the best one you write. That’s the portal into your series. That’s the one which hooks fans and compels them to read on. If you write a dud Book #4, your core readers will forgive you and buy Book #5 anyway. If you write a dud Book #1, you won’t have any readers for anything else you write. Another way to look at the same thing: Great marketing + a lousy product = a lifetime of struggleSo-so marketing + a brilliant product = easy sales A great book is the foundation for everything else. So get it right. Build those foundations strong. They’re going to support your entire career. Step 2. Create A Strong Cover The cover is second in importance only to the book itself. If the cover doesn’t immediately appeal to your core reader, then that reader won’t even arrive on your first page to read a single word. You must get the cover right. Nothing less than perfect is enough. That means your cover needs to: Look good in thumbnail. The book must work at small scale. Designers always like showing you the hi-res version of their image, which is fine, it needs to look nice at scale, too. Still, your very first task is to shrink that right down and see if it works when tiny. Look good when compared with competing titles. I always copy that thumbnail sized image onto a screengrab of an Amazon search page, full of books written by my own direct competition. Then I ask: does my image look competitive on that page? If not, try again. Inform the reader instantly what kind of book it is. A YA dystopian cover should announce its YA dystopia instantly. A rom-com cover should be instantly interpretable as such. Yes, that means that those covers tend towards clichés, but in this case, that’s good. The first task of a cover is to say, “I am a book of this genre”, where said genre is a rom-com, or thriller, or romance, or whatever else you’re selling. Convey a mood or feeling. Readers typically buy books because of a hook and a feeling, e.g.: ‘It’s this book about an ordinary girl and vampire who fall for each other.’ That’s a hook plus a feeling, giving a reason to buy. A book cover can’t really convey the hook (that’s the job of your blurb), but it can and must convey the feeling. Those Twilight covers conveyed a general sense of dark, forbidden sexiness. That was all they needed to do, and they did it superbly. Generate questions, don’t close them off. Covers that answer questions don’t tempt readers in. Covers that prompt questions invite further exploration. Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight cover is a good example. Why that girl? That apple? That black background? You instantly want to know more. If the cover had been pretty-girl-plus-hunky-vampire gazing adoringly into each other’s eyes, it would have sold some copies, but never have been the global hit it became. Similarly, your approach to your subject matters needs to be oblique and suggestive, not right on the nose. Use good quality images. That’s sort of obvious, but it’s common to see self-published books where the images look like (and almost certainly are) stock images from some free or low-cost image library. And they don’t look bad, exactly, they just look like stock images. They have a seen-it-before quality, death to your project of attracting a reader’s eye. If you need to pay money for a top-dollar image, then pay that money. Use good quality typography. Again obvious, but getting the typography (font styles, etc.) on a book is harder than it sounds. If a draft cover feels a tiny bit ‘off’ when you see it, then it is wrong. That feeling never lies. So once you know what you want to achieve, how do you achieve it? It’s strangely hard. You’d think getting a strong book cover was a reasonably mechanical process. You write a design brief. You hand it to a competent person. Boof, you get back a design that’s going to be anywhere from good to excellent. And, in my experience, it’s not really like that. I’ve had poor to mediocre covers from best-of-breed traditional publishers. I’ve had mediocre book covers from talented, award-winning freelancers. I’ve used competition type websites with results that were okay, but not utterly satisfactory. And, yes, I’ve also got some book covers that I’m totally happy with. So my recipe for success is as follows: Fire your Uncle Bob. Unless your friend, relative, etc., is a professional designer, that person is not right for you. And yes, you may save some money. But NASA would probably save some money by patching their rockets together from stuff found in a junkyard. There’s a reason they don’t do it. Use pros. You can go to competition type websites, of which 99Designs is the most prominent example. (Personally, I think you have to pay a lot of $$$ to get a good outcome from this, however.) You can go to outsourcing type sites like Fiverr or Upwork. You can search libraries of premade book covers for sale (for example, The Book Cover Designer. You can just Google around (search “book cover designers”) and look at different offerings. Or, simply design your own ebook cover. There are pros and cons to every avenue and in the end, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. You may blunder around a bit until you find the right solution for you, but that’s fine. This is a creative process and you may need to experiment before you get it right. Spend money. Just to be clear: the phrase “blunder around a bit” can mean “spend some money getting projects started with designers who looked really great (and are great, actually), just you didn’t like their initial designs and twigged things weren’t going to work out.” Don’t end up settling for almost-good, because you couldn’t bear to write off the $150 that you had to spend. Either invest again with the same designer to get something you’re happy with or close off that avenue and start again. Remember that your first cover will almost certainly be by far your most expensive. Once you’ve settled the look (the kind of image, the mood, the typography, etc.), the next batch of covers will be easy-peasy. Only work with people where you’re happy saying ‘no, not yet’. This is a crucial one. You must be happy with your cover. That means continuing to look at images, to work away at typographical niggles, until you’re genuinely delighted. If your designer charges you $90 an hour beyond a certain level of changes, or if your (talented, but not infinitely patient) Uncle Bob is just going to start rolling his eyes, then those people may not be right. You must feel okay with demanding perfection. And yes, that may mean being pushier than you normally like to be, but it also means working with someone where you can feel safe to be pushier. If you’re unsure, look up more tips on how to commission ebook cover designs here. Now we turn to the book itself. Step 3. Create Your Ebook: ‘Look Inside’ What is the front material there to do? For ebooks, there is only one answer: the front material is there to convert ‘Look Inside’ browsers to people who buy your book. It’s effectively a front door that has to look welcoming if you want to tempt readers inside. If your front-end material does not directly contribute to that goal, then it needs to go elsewhere. Yes, you may want to find room for your thanks, your copyright notices and all the rest. Those things don’t make people buy your book, though, so bury them at the back. The front of your e-book probably only needs: The cover – because you need it, and readers expect and want it. A title page – ditto. Formal proofs – that means any plugs from fellow authors, from newspaper reviews, or anything which tells readers, ‘Yes, serious, professional readers have read this book and rated it highly’. At the start of your career, you may struggle with those formal proofs, but that’s fine. All new authors are in the same position. Do what you can, but don’t fret too much. Social proofs – in other words, any comments from readers that tell people, ‘Yep, people like you have read and enjoyed this book.’ Social proof is quite possibly just as important, maybe more important, than any number of great notices in the New York Times Review of Books, and even as a newbie, you can accumulate social proofs. So go do it. And put those proofs up front where casual browsers can find them. Constant reminders about what your book is and what it offers. Remember that people who click on the ‘Look Inside’ feature may well only be browsing in quite a casual way. They’ll have sort of took in your cover design, sort of read your book description. Just as bookstore browsers flip books over to look at them in quite a casual way, though, so it is with people browsing on Amazon. You need to assume that these browsers haven’t intently studied anything. They are only two or three clicks away from buying something quite else. Hammer home your message, by carefully choosing formal and social proofs and other related text. My own ‘Look Inside’ text will try to remind readers that, “This is an exciting crime thriller featuring a really interesting female detective.” That proposition won’t appeal to all readers, but it should appeal to the kind of readers my book is aimed it. So make it clear. Keep it uppermost in the browser’s mind. Offer a freebie. I’m going to talk more about readers’ magnets and email lists in a later section of this post, so for now, just notice that I recommend you offer a freebie, a story available for readers to download for free, up at the front of your e-book. We’ll talk more about what and why soon. And plenty of text! The shorter your other front material, the more room you have to give readers what they really want, which is a taste of your book itself. Make sure that your first chapter is strong, and let readers get there fast! Step 4. Create Your Ebook: End Material If the front material in your e-book is there to persuade the browser to buy, the end material has a rather more complex set of functions. It should: Get your readers to buy another book from you. Get your readers to give you their email address. Build a real human bond between you and your reader. Encourage readers to write reviews. Make the extent and structure of your book series and other works really clear. The thinking here is simple. A reader has just finished your book. We have to assume they enjoyed it (if they didn’t, no marketing genius in the world will entice further sales.) So what next? Now is the moment to reach out and build a lasting bond between you and the reader. E-books that just finish without doing that are kind of like the door in the image: they kick you out onto the street, leaving a slightly disappointed feeling behind. E-books that look after the reader are far likelier to create a pool of keen buyers, who’ll come back to your work again and again and again. So how to achieve those happy results? Answer: Write an author’s note that feels personal. Make sure it’s full of your voice and personality, and directly thanks (perhaps even compliments) your readers. Invite participation Notably by encouraging readers to give you their email address in exchange for a free story from you. More on this shortly (and it’s key, you can’t miss this step). Be smart about offering those buy links. Remember that Apple won’t accept books with Amazon links in, so you can either (A) work exclusively with Amazon (probably the best bet for newcomers to indie-dom), (B) have a mobi (Kindle) file that is different from your epub (Apple, Google, Kobo, and everyone else) file, or (C) create a landing page like this to let readers choose their own store. Remember that e-readers are probably reading in an online environment where they can take instant action, meaning print books are a terrible model for how to put together your end-material. Web design is a better model. You want easy-to-access links in places where your readers may want to take actions enabled by those links. In other words, don’t just talk about other books in your series, make it simple for readers to buy those books on Amazon, Google, Kobo, wherever. Making it easy will make a huge difference to your conversions and that means making a difference to your pocket. Step 5. Format Your Ebook Don’t feel too fussed by this. Writing a great book, preparing inviting front material, developing material at the back of the book that seals the deal with the reader, those things matter. The rest is a technical exercise that you can either do yourself or outsource. It’s not expensive and easily done. So first, make sure that your Word file is in good shape to be converted. We’ve lots more advice if you need on how to format your ebook. (This section assumes that your MS is basically textual. If you are creating a design-led book that involves a lot of images, then Visme offers a great, simple, e-book creator. Did I mention that it’s free? Well, yes, it’s free.) Then, iff you’re working exclusively with Amazon (which, as I say, I recommend when starting out), then you can just upload your Word document to Amazon. It’ll make the conversion for you. And boom, that’s it. If you are distributing to all the e-stores, you’ll need an epub file, not just a mobi one. You can create that file yourself via simple online tools, Scrivener being one option (you pay for this, but it has loads of other features and loads of writers swear by it). Calibre is another. Apple users love Vellum. Some e-book distributors, for example Draft2Digital, offer free online tools that are very simple to use and come with no strings attached. Whatever route you take, just make sure that you preview the ebook before going live with it. All the those conversion tools offer previews, and just go through, checking every page. This is your product we’re talking about. Checking matters! Step 6. Want A Print Book? Then Sort That, Too. Most self-publishers will sell work in e-form, not book-form. My own e-sales are probably about fifteen times greater than hard-copy sales. (With my traditionally published work, the balance is much more even, or even leans more to print.) What’s more, print books are harder, more expensive to put together. You have much less control over the selling price. A lot of the promotional techniques that work brilliantly for ebooks don’t work as well for print. And so on. I say that to be honest, not to put you off. I sell several thousand self-published print books each year. I make a little over $3 per sale, so I end up with a satisfying amount in my pocket because of those sales. And I do nothing at all to promote those books. Nothing. All I do is promote my e-books actively and intelligently via the Kindle Store and elsewhere, and that visibility brings my work to the attention of some readers who think. ‘Hey, this looks good, but I’d rather have it in hard copy.’ And it’s easy enough to add a print element on to your offering. KDP offers a print option too. You’ll need a back jacket and spine design, as well as your front cover (but those things are easy, once you have the front sorted). The additional cost involved is minimal. You’ll also need interior formatting, to be sure your book looks lovely when laid out on the page. Don’t try to do that yourself – it’s harder than you think. Your best bet is an outfit, BB eBooks, which is based in Thailand and combines excellent experience and quality with Thai pricing. Once you have your cover and your text, you just upload them via KDP. Bingo. Worried about an ISBN? Don’t be. Ebooks don’t need one and most top-performing indies don’t bother with them at all. In terms of your print books, your print partner will sort out an ISBN for you. So, for example, if you create print books via Amazon KDP (your best starting option), Amazon will simply take care of it for you. Easy! Just remember, e-sales are likely to predominate by a large margin, and your print sales will only start to take off if your e-sales do. National or international distribution via bookshops is basically a fantasy, unless you have a traditional publisher to take care of that for you. Step 7. Build Your Website You know you need a website, but why? What do you want it to do for you? There are lots of flaky, fuzzy answers floating around the internet, and they’re almost all wrong. Some people will tell you: ‘Oh, it’s a key part of your brand. You need to build a platform.’ Really? Why? Most readers will surely just be happy with (a) the book, and (b) Amazon. Why do they need anything else? Or: ‘You need to make yourself discoverable by search engines.’ This is rubbish. Or it is if you’re writing fiction. Google-search and similar just doesn’t matter to most novelists. How could it? Here’s the one thing you need to know about your author website. Your website is there to collect reader’s email addresses. That is its purpose. That is why you have it. If it does that and almost nothing else, you’re doing fine. (Or, full disclosure, that’s true if you’re a novelist. If you’re writing non-fiction, then the truth may be a bit more complicated.) Yes, you will probably want a page for each one of your books. Yes, you probably want some kind of bio. Yes, you probably want a contact page. If you like writing blogs, you probably want a ‘news’ or ‘blog’ type page as well. Still, I can’t even remember the last time I posted on my author blog. I don’t make sales from my book-specific pages (I make them on Amazon.) The contact function is nice because it means readers can get in touch with me, but if I disabled the page, the world wouldn’t collapse and my sales would remain untouched. Your website is there to collect reader’s email addresses – and how does it do that? Well, the primary chain is simple. It’s this: You have a link in your e-book that says, “I’ve got a free story for you, please come and get it”. That links passes the reader to a page on your website that handles that story-for-email exchange. The reader gets your free story. You get a way to contact them in the future. That’s a fair exchange: you are, in a way, giving the reader something of more value than the thing they’re giving you. And it’s an honest one. You will make it clear that yes, you will retain that reader’s email address and sometimes make use of it, though only for matters directly related to your books. The way you structure that basic exchange is critical. Tiny differences in set-up will make a few percentage point impacts on your conversion rates, and, when cumulated, those little impacts can make a huge difference to the success of your campaign. Your ebooks need to take people to a page on your website that maxes the number of people downloading your story. Here is an example of a good page from my own website (and see what happens when you click the buttons – functionality matters). Key design points to consider are: Eliminate all in-site navigation. This page exists on my website and has completely normal navigation tools up at the top, excepting this page. On this page, I want people to click those buttons. I don’t want them to be distracted by any other good stuff I have on the site. This page has to say, “Either download the story, or close this page: there is nothing else to do, read, see here.” Have incredibly obvious calls to action. Giant orange buttons on a monochrome background works for me. Don’t ask for an email address straight away. It’s better to make it a two-stage process: (A) let the reader give you an order: “give me my freebie”, then (B) obey the command. And it just so happens that obeying that command involves collecting an email address. Around two thirds of visitors to my website end up leaving me their email address. They’re readers who have liked my work enough to buy it in the past, and to collect the free story I’ve offered. Those are the people who are likeliest to buy my work again in the future, and now I have a way to get in touch with them direct. Since you’re building a website, too, you may as well do the obvious bits right. Its branding should be synced with your books’ branding. The site should communicate what you are all about as an author as swiftly as your book covers do. Your site should be mobile responsive, so that it looks as good on a phone as it does on a PC or tablet. And so on. There are other bits and pieces to get right, but any half-way competent designer should do them fine. A few rules to follow are these: Pay that little bit extra for your own domain name. So pay for JaneSmith.com or JaneSmithAuthor.com. Yes, janesmith.wordpress.com is cheaper, but you’ll regret it in the long rum. Use WordPress. Wix and Squarespace and their like are cheaper in the short run, but they have vastly less power than WordPress. So again: think long term, not short term. WordPress needs a theme – a stylistic chassis, in effect – to hold your site together. I strongly recommend Parallax for Writers, because it’s great, it’s designed for you, and it’s crazy cheap. Learn a little bit of basic tech. You don’t have to be a tech wizard – I’m not – but if you know nothing, you’ll always have to go through someone else to make minor site tweaks which means that, after a bit, you won’t even bother. Your website doesn’t make you money directly, but it’s the launch pad – the blast station – for everything that follows. So build it good, and get ready for launch . . . Step 8. Create Your Readers’ Magnet OK, now listen up, because this stuff matters. We’re talking reader magnets. A reader’s magnet is a free story you give to your readers in exchange for their email address. You advertise the freebie in the front and back of your ebook to maximise the number of people who take you up on that incentive. You will then use the email list you build to bond with readers, launch books, boost promotions and, in general, to send you off, giggling, to the bank driving your own gold-plated Cadillac with a trunk stuffed with high denomination bills. To secure these outcomes, your reader magnet needs to be good. So be sure your story lives (broadly speaking) in the same fictional world as your for-sale novels. You can’t use a horror-fiction magnet as a lure for your fluffy romance readers, or vice versa. Be sure that your magnet is well-presented and has a lovely book cover. Obviously, you’re going to scatter plenty of links in your ebook (the front and back of it, not the actual text), so readers can’t miss the fact you have something free to offer. I also recommend you make at least some of those links visual (i.e. you use a book cover or similar) to invite the eye. Text links are great, and you should use those, but visual plus text beats text alone. That story you offer does not need to be a full-length novel. Anything from 5 to 15,000 words is fine. Just make sure it’s a satisfying piece of quality writing. Don’t cheat your reader. And that’s it. One story (a magnet) to attract readers and collect email addresses. That already sounds good, but in fact, as we’ll see, it’s going to form the absolute heart of your promotion strategy. Step 9. Mailing Lists And Other Technicalities Now we’ve got links in our e-books to take readers to your website, where the story-for-email exchange is made, but how does the actual plumbing of all that work? The answer is that you will need two tools. The first is Mailchimp (or any other mailing list provider.) They will store your email list, send mass emails, eliminate duplicates, handle the unsubscribe process, and plenty more. Some people find Mailchimp hard to use and prefer Mailerlite. If you are ambitious and tech-confident, you might want to use the more powerful Convertkit. The second is Bookfunnel, an outfit that makes the delivery of your free ebook (your reader’s magnet) unbelievably simple – both for you and for your reader. Both services are paid, but the money isn’t crazy. You’ll pay $100 a year for Bookfunnel, and Mailchimp is free until you hit 2,000 mailing list subscribers, and $20-30 monthly thereafter. Bookfunnel is so simple to use, you won’t need any help setting it up. In fact, I would be insulting you if I told you how to use Bookfunnel, so I won’t. (Phew. We’re still friends.) Integrating Mailchimp with your website could require help, depending how much you hate fooling around with that kind of thing, but don’t cut corners. Creating a smooth path for your readers is key. They need to: See a link in your ebook. Click over to a (navigation-free) landing page on your website. Hand over an email (to your Mailchimp mailing list). Be delivered a book via Bookfunnel. That’s all easy. If you need help with web bits, then get this. Again: all this set-up stuff can seem boring, but so is climbing up a long flight of steps. You’ve got to put the effort in, if you want the reward at the end. Rushing to publish too soon is the absolutely class, #1, gold-plated mistake that most indies make. Put in the effort, then enjoy the rewards. There’s a lot to take in, right? There is, yes. Self-publishing is more complicated than regular publishing, especially at the start. (Later on, it can actually seem simpler in many ways, especially if you hate giving up control.) But still: a lot to take in. A lot to do. And there’s this horrible (but accurate) sense that getting the detail right really matters. That’s kind of yikes!, right? Well, yes and no. Because the thing is we created an entire step-by-step video course that’s intended to be everything you need to know about getting set up as a self-publisher. That course is super-premium, which is a fancy way of saying (a) really high quality, and (b) scarily expensive. So don’t buy the course! That’s right: don’t buy it. It’s a great course, but it’s expensive, and you’re on budget, so – don’t buy it. After all, why buy, when you could rent? For a crazy-cheap (and cancel-any-time) monthly fee, you can become a member of Jericho Writers – a club designed for writers just like you. Quite simply, we aim to give members as much as we possibly can. An insane amount of value for as little as we can possibly charge. Think of us as a kind of Netflix for writers. So members get unlimited access to our self-publishing course. And unlimited access to a whole heap of filmed masterclasses, including some brilliant ones on self-publishing. And filmed interviews with authors and agents and publishers. And an incredibly supportive community. And live webinars from top experts on all the topics that matter most to you. Why so much? And why so much for so little? Well, that’s easy. We’re writers too, and we built our club for writers like you, writers like us. You can find out more about joining us here. We really hope you do. Step 10. Social Media: Why You Can (Mostly) Ignore This A lot of writers worry that self-publishing is going to be all about bigging yourself up on social media. Endless tweets, endless bragging Facebook posts. And it’s not. It’s not. Those things don’t work. They’re a waste of time. They’re horrible to do. I do have a Twitter account and an author page on Facebook, but I don’t get book sales via either route. (I have a Twitter account mostly because that makes it easy for Twitterholics to contact me if they want. Some of those contacts have proved of real value. I also have an author page on Facebook because a traditionally publisher once told me I had to have one. I got one, and neither they nor I ever used it.) Nor do you need to blog. Although I do blog here, I hardly ever blog about author things on my own website. And if I do, that’s because I feel like doing it. Actual book sales deriving from those blogs are trivial. There will be categories of author where social media does really matter. If you’re a fashion blogger wanting to sell books, you’ll need an Instagram following, and so on. It’s also true that social media can be a great way to network with fellow authors and influential bloggers in your niche. Those relationships are worth fostering but they’re not, directly, to do with selling books at all. For most of us, the big news is this: If you hate social media and want nothing to do with it, you can still sell books very effectively on Amazon. If you don’t want to blog routinely or do the work involved in building a large following, that’s fine, too. It doesn’t matter. To be clear, there are exceptions. In particular, if you build a strong audience on Facebook, you will make your FB advertising life a lot, lot easier.  If you’re interested in doing that, the rules are: Stay narrowly focused on your audience and their interests. Don’t ever stray from that core. Quality posts and interactions beat quantity. Post good stuff when you have something good to say. Be recognisable. When people scroll down their feeds you want them to know it’s your content straight away. Instasize is a great app for editing your images and keeping them on brand. If/when you have a decent FB following, you should pay to boost your launch post / promo posts. You can also think about advertising to your FB audience to support your email and boosted post campaigns. These are later stage tactics, though, and you can safely ignore these for now. If you’re nervous of getting involved in all that stuff, though, don’t be. Just forget about. You don’t need it. (For now.) Step 11. How To Choose Categories (Bisac Codes) On Amazon When a bookshop shelves your book, they need to choose where to shelve it. With romance? With crime? With general fiction? With health and beauty? Or what? It’s the same with Amazon, except that Amazon has far more categories. When you upload your book to Amazon (which is easy, and has become easier) you will see a little box prompting, and you need to choose categories highly relevant to your book. It’s important to understand the reason for this. You’re not choosing categories because you want to help Amazon with its filing. You are choosing categories in order to sell more books. Amazon has an overall bestseller list, of course, but it also has a massive range of sub-bestseller lists – for things like “Fiction > Crime” or “Fiction > Mystery & Detective > International Mystery & Crime”. Readers like perusing those lists, and Amazon likes to direct them there. If you can get on your chosen lists, your book will get more eyeballs, and all the clever stuff we’ve already put in place will convert those browsers into buyers. You need to choose categories by thinking of bestseller lists you’d most like to be on, and which you have a realistic chance of appearing on. That’s the whole deal right there. That’s (almost) all you need to know about choosing categories. For newer authors, it’s better to target rather more niche lists – in my case, “International Mystery & Crime” is more niche than “Fiction & Crime”. It won’t get as many viewers, but my chances of sitting close to the top of the list and staying there for a time outweighs that issue. Also – pro tip here – if you are picking a sub-category (eg: international mystery & crime), you are automatically entered in the relevant parent category (in this case, mystery & detective). So don’t waste your second category choice by entering the parent category as well as the child. Until you have a little experience of your book, your genre, your sales, you are largely guessing as to which lists to target. But at least you know what you’re doing here. If you are already published, then check out your Also Boughts to understand what kind of readers you have – what other books they like. You can use Goodreads or other online book recommendation tools to achieve the same kind of thing. Two last things on this topic: Amazon now uses the term ‘categories’ for this selection process. It used to talk about BISAC codes, a hoary old library classification system. You may come across both terms being used, but don’t worry about it. They’re the same thing. You need to read this section, on categories, in conjunction with the one that follows, on keywords. It’s when you put those two things together that the magic happens. Step 12. How To Choose Keywords On Amazon When you come to upload your book, Amazon will ask you to give it seven keywords that describe your book. (As you’ll see, some of those keywords can be two or three word phrases. That’s fine, but the term keyword is still used.) So far, so easy. Whilst categories have only one role (they let you choose what bestseller lists to target), Amazon keywords have two roles to play, and they both matter. Those keywords let you: Choose what sub-bestseller lists to target. Choose what thematic searches to target. Take the first of those things. When you look at the overall Amazon bestseller list, you’ll see that there are 330,000 or so mystery and detective books available for sale. If you’ve targeted that list, you might be a little nervous. You think your book is good, but do you really want to fight off 329,999 other bad-asses? What you need to do is break that group of 330,000 titles down into manageable sub-units, and if you click on the relevant broad category, you’ll see Amazon has given you a host of more manageable sub-units or mini-bestseller lists. Under ‘Moods & Themes’, for instance, I’m given various boxes to check under words like ‘Action-packed’, ‘Horror’, ‘Racy’, ‘Noir’, and more words to define the feel of my book. Under ‘Characters’, I’m given ‘Female Protagonists’, ‘British Detectives’, and so on. And something magical happens. Counting the number of books allocated to Amazon categories I want, the book count – i.e. your competition – goes down. More than half your competition disappears, just because authors and publishers haven’t chosen keywords that pin down good books into relevant sub-categories. (Recent changes have removed those numbers from the Amazon site, so you can’t now check what I’m saying. It’s still true, however!) Now you’re not going to get caught in that disappearing act, because you’re going to do this: Pick your broad category, Go to the relevant Amazon bestseller list Finding out which sub-categories might be relevant to your work. (You are looking at the left hand sidebar for this.) Pick out all the sub-categories which might apply to your work Use those sub-category titles as your keywords Obviously, it’s important that you don’t cheat at this, or your readers will feel cheated, too. So if your book isn’t racy, don’t use that keyword just because you feel you could clamber onto that list. If you see a sub-category where your readers are likely to gather, then jump on it. That’s it. Oh and the best way to find bestseller lists is just to enter ‘Books’ or ‘Kindle Store’ in the dropdown box on the Amazon search bar, and then, leaving the search bar blank, hit enter. Since the search bar is blank, Amazon knows you want to look for books but doesn’t know which books you want, so it just takes you to its default book navigation page. You want to explore the left-hand sidebar. That little baby is your friend. A useful pro tip here is that you can use multi-word phrases as your keywords, and every word counts. So for example, my sub-categories include options like Dark, Disturbing, Noir. My books tick all those boxes, so I could use three keywords to scoop up those terms … or, much better, I could have “Dark Disturbing Noir” as one keyword, and keep my powder dry. Keywords are best used in this sub-category extension way, but remember that people use Amazon’s search engine in multiple different ways. So people can find books in at least four ways: Author name (“Harry Bingham) Book title (“Talking to the Dead”) Series name (“Fiona Griffiths series”) General search (eg: “Murder mystery novels”) Now although it seems obvious you want to scoop up general search enquiries, it’s very doubtful that you’ll actually get a ton of sales from that route. Yes, “Gripping thriller” might seem like a great keyword, but if there’s any traffic on that term, it’s most unlikely that you’ll appear anywhere near the top of an Amazon search page. And if there’s no great traffic on the term, you won’t get any sales anyway. So don’t spend too much time on your general search terms, but for what it’s worth, here are the guidelines: Make a list of possible keywords – at least 12-15 if you want to do this properly. Start to type the first few characters into Amazon’s search bar Take a look at the autocomplete suggestions, and adjust your terms if Amazon is nudging you towards a slightly different version of your search term. Then actually look at the page of results that comes up. Check out the bestseller rank of the lowest ranked book. If that book is #5000 on the overall bestseller lists, it’s a pretty safe bet that your work will never meaningfully appear for that search term. If the lowest ranked book is #50,000, then you have a decent chance of appearing on that list, at least during launch/promo periods. If the lowest ranked book is #500,000 or below, then you can pretty much bet that there’s not enough traffic on this search term for you to care much about it anyway. To sum up this section: Choose categories according to what overall bestseller list you want to appear on. (Important) Choose keywords first according to what sub-bestseller lists you want to appear on. (Important) Choose keywords next according to what you think your readers will be searching for. (Not important) The whole exercise might take an hour or two, but can generate steady sales for years to come. Step 13. How To Price Your E-book On Amazon Pricing is scary, but also easy. The data you need: Free e-books get more downloads than paid ones. 77% of readers who download free work also buy paid work. Amazon offers two royalty bands of 70% and 35%. You get the 70% royalty if you price inside $2.99 – $9.99. Anywhere else, you get 35% royalty. Indie authors tend to price work (excluding free and promotional material) in the $2.99 – $4.99 range. It’s the same broadly for Amazon Publishing. That fact is relevant, because no one is going to be smarter than Amazon at interpreting data from pricing experiments. If $5.99 is their ceiling (and it is), then it should be yours. And that, really is all you need to know. Your price envelope is basically $0.00 to $4.99. (Some niches may vary, though, so always check against your own genre.) Now, pretty obviously, we don’t love $0.00 sales as much as we love $4.99 sales, but we’re going to use the cheap or free pricing, in a kind of Amazon ju-jitsu, to maximise our $4.99 sales. Free books get you readers. They build your fanbase. They make no money. $0.99 books get you lots of readers (but fewer than free). They make a bit of money, but not much. Sell a $0.99 e-book and you make $0.35. Sell a $2.99 e-book (at that higher 70% royalty rate) and you make $2.09, so you have to sell 6 times as many of the cheaper books to make as much. $1.99 books are kind of pointless. They’re too expensive to attract freebie readers, and they’re too cheap to get the 70% royalty. Just don’t price at that price point. You make money by pricing between $2.99 and $4.99. That’s where the money is. Where exactly you pitch your wares depends on all kinds of things. Do you want to aggressively grow your business in the longer term (while sacrificing some short-term revenues)? Then price at $2.99. Do you want to harvest your existing success? Then price at $4.99. Are your readers generally younger, or poorer? Then price low. Are your book buyers generally more affluent? Then price a little higher. Can’t decide? Then price at $3.99 which is an excellent compromise. Now we need to do two things. We need to get readers into our sales funnel – into our series – at the kind of price that won’t put anyone off (ie: $0.00 or $0.99), then use the love and commitment we’ve generated with our amazing writing to sell lots more books at $4.99. In short: You need to offer a free or highly discounted ($0.99) book to get readers into your universe. Without an existing fanbase, you have few other routes to this happy outcome. You need to have full price ($2.99 to $4.99) work that puts some money in your pocket. Those of you competent at mathematics will notice that I’m telling you to write two books to sell one. And yes, I am saying that. Except that, as you write more over time, that one free book will start leading readers into a larger pool of paid work. So you’ll be using one free book to sell two, then three, then four, then ten full-price ones. Also, those of you supremely gifted at mathematics will also have noticed that I’ve told you that: You have to give away a reader’s magnet, a roughly 10,000-word short story, for example, in order to collect emails. You need to write two books and one lengthy short story or novella to sell one book. Really? Well, yes, really. You are selling a series, not selling a book. If you understand that fully, your selling efforts will be vastly more successful over the long run. Step 14. How To Launch Your Free E-book I hope I’ve persuaded you that it’s worth giving away a book for free. Your purpose is to attract the greater downloads, to acquire fans. And it’s to get the email addresses of those fans so that you can contact them when you have a new book to share. There are four broad methods for doing this. Old articles never leave the internet, so you’ll see old advice that appears authoritative, but things change and change fast. Some of those older methods just look limp or expensive or awkward compared with more recent ones, so do read all of this section before you make your pick. So. Method 1: Just Give Your Book Away For Free Everywhere What you’re going to do here is upload your book on Amazon (at $2.99, or whatever), then upload it to Google, and Apple, and Kobo, and everywhere else, too. It’s too annoying to do that second part yourself, so you get an outfit like Smashwords or Draft2Digital to do it for you. They’ll charge a kind of agency fee on any revenues you make, but pay it. It’s money well-spent. Then, via your distributor, you simply make the Apple-Google-Kobo price $0.00. That’s easy-peasy. You just do it. Amazon doesn’t like free. (It’s a shop and it likes selling things.) Look at your book page, though, and scroll down to the Product Details section. You should see at the bottom there a little rubric (with contact links) that looks like this: “Would you like to tell us about a lower price? If you are a seller for this product, would you like to suggest updates to the product page?” Well, yes, you would like to tell Amazon about a lower price, so tell them. Report that lower price using the automated tool. I also recommend contacting Amazon more directly via the contact page on the KDP site. Say something like this: “I’m a serious and long-term author, looking to build fans for my work or series. I’ve made this book available for free through other stores, including Apple, Kobo, Google etc. I would really like it if you would consider making the book free on your store as well. And, to be clear, my long-term aim is to sell a lot of work, at full price, through your store. I very much appreciate your help.” They won’t guarantee to help. It’s not automatic. Their response is variable in terms of outcomes and timings, but you’re probably fine. Fingers crossed. The results can be very good. I did a freebie in January 2016 using roughly this method. I notched up about 10,000 downloads in the first week, through Amazon alone. Other e-stores were additional. Some further downloads followed (though at a much lower rate). And of course, my mailing list took a terrific jump upwards and I got plenty of emails and reviews from readers telling me that they loved that first book so much, they wanted to jump right into the rest of the (paid) series. Method 2: Give Your Book Away On Amazon Only (For A Limited Period) If you agree to work exclusively with Amazon – by enrolling in KDP Select – you will enjoy the ability to schedule Kindle Countdown promotions, which give you the opportunity to price your book cheaply, or for free, for 7 days in every 90 day period. Amazon will promote those deals itself and, if you go for the $0.99 option, you’ll still be on a 70% royalty (rather than the normal 35%). If you are exclusive to Amazon, and I think the default choice for new authors is probably to go exclusive as you learn the ropes, then you should use these opportunities fully. (I wouldn’t ever discount for seven continuous days, however. You’ll find that any sales surge quickly tamps down. You’re better off doing one three day and one four day promotion spaced about 1.5 months apart.) To be clear, though, these short one-off promotions are not really the same as the ‘perma-free’ option we’re mostly talking about. If you want a ‘perma-free’ book, you are probably making that one not Amazon-exclusive, pricing it free elsewhere, then coming back to Amazon as per Method 1 above. Method 3: Give Your Stuff Away Via Facebook Ads This approach had a real surge in popularity recently, but it’s a strange one, I think. With other approaches in this section, you pay nothing (or little) to give your work away for free. With the Facebook approach, you pay real money to acquire each new reader. You literally place ads on Facebook that say (in effect) “Hey, come and get your free book (but you’ll need to give me your email address to get it.)” And as a method of getting readers, it works, but that new reader of yours might be a flake. They might or might not read your free giveaway. They might or might not go on to buy other books in your paid series. The arithmetic looks like this: Unit revenue from your free giveaway: $0.00 Unit cost of acquiring those readers: $0.50 (or something like that) Your profit per reader: -$0.50 That arithmetic does not look attractive to me, but it is possible to make things work, if: You’re very good at managing your Facebook ads, so you target the right readers and keep your costs per click down very low. You’re very good at coaxing giveaway-readers into your paid-readership. That normally involves further little free gifts and a strong series of automated emails aimed at shifting kinda-interested readers into committed ones. You’ve a long tail of paid work to sell because, of course, the more you have to sell, the higher the expected long-term revenue that will be generated by each new reader. The people who succeed with Facebook ads do tend to have a lot of work to sell and they work hard and intelligently at managing their ad campaigns – which is all fine. All the same, do you want to be an ad manager or a writer? If (like me) you think the business of managing a Facebook ad portfolio could quickly become wearisome, there are probably better ways to do this. The one real exception I can think of applies to new writers who do have some cash to spare who just want to get on and do it. Instead of following my (very organic) sales method, where each new book just expands the mailing list and readership ready for the next one, you could just invest (say) $3,000 in basically buying 6,000 reader emails. Just be aware that paid-for emails will have a lower conversion rate than freebie ones. I assume about 1/3. Method 4: Use Book Promo Sites To Shift Your Work The best method, however, is to use book promotion sites to get your work out into new hands. There are two big ways to do this. One is via book discount sites. These sites have built large reader databases and they email their readers, saying, in effect, “Hey, these great books are on promotion.” You can build surges of attention to your work – and these tools can work very well indeed. The info you need about these sites can be found via Nicholas Erik here. Use those tools! Especially for newer indies, they are an indispensible way to get the word out. An excellent additional support is Prolific Works (formerly Instafreebie.) Those guys have good email lists themselves, but they also have great tools for collaborating with other author and cross-promoting work there. And I’m not going to tell you how to use that site here, because I’ve already told you in detail in this blog post right here. One indie author, J.N. Chaney, who has used both Facebook ads and Prolific/Instafreebie reports these results: “I just scaled back my Facebook Lead Ads. I still use them, but I’m now seeing better results with a lower price tag using Instafreebie. … My Facebook budget for that ad was $23 per day yielding an average of 49 subscribers per day at an average CPL [Cost Per Lead] of $.51. … Instafreebie is $20 per month yielding an average of … 84 subscribers per day at a CPL of $.0076. Not even joking. (It could have been 129 per day had I figured out that I need to require an email address to download.)” I also moved on from Facebook. I use Instafreebie myself, and it’s worked very well for me. Yeah, there’s a lot to think about isn’t there? So think about joining Jericho Writers and getting a TON of really classy learning materials that take you step by step through the whole process. I’m not going to give you a heavy sell. I’m just going to say that we built our Jericho Writers club for people like you, and you should think about joining us. You can find out all the details here, and we’d absolutely love it if you went ahead and joined us. Step 15. How To Launch Your Paid Book On Amazon KDP We’re there. We’ve done all our prep work. We have written a great book. Commissioned a great cover. Got great front and end material. We’ve written our reader’s magnet. We’ve got our website and other bits of plumbing in place. We’ve sorted out our metadata (our BISAC categories and keywords). We’ve figured out our pricing. We’ve got some initial names on our mailing list, probably because we’ve made use of Instafreebie or other tools to distribute free samplers of our work. And now we want to launch our first proper paid-for book on Amazon. We don’t just want readers. We want money. Good. (We need to live.) Now here’s a simple launch strategy for you to follow: Upload your book to Amazon, Apple, Google, and everywhere else. Send an email to your mailing list to tell them your book is now available for sale. That’s it. Have a drink, go for a long walk, take a nap. You’re probably thinking, you have got to be kidding, there must be more to it than that. Must there? On the one hand, yes, there are advanced strategies out there – and they make sense – but mostly, no. Follow this and you’ll do just fine, so long as your books are good. You can’t sell bad books. And the ultimate reason for the success of this strategy has to do with Amazon’s sales rank algorithm. That algorithm is crucial, but it involves just a tiny bit of arithmetic, so bear with me. Every book (indeed, every product) on Amazon’s system has a score which is made up of how many units you sold today, plus half the units you sold yesterday, plus a quarter of the units you sold the day before that, plus an eighth of the units you sold before that, and so on. A score is calculated for every book on the system. Those scores are placed in order. And, bingo, what you’ve got is Amazon’s sales rank. That piece of information is astoundingly important. Why? It tells you that short term movements in sales are intensely influential in determining overall rank. Let’s say you want to hit #100 in the Amazon.com Kindle bestseller lists. Good target, right? Well, you have broadly two ways to get there: You can sell (roughly) 500 e-books every day for a month, or you can sell (roughly) 1000 e-books in a single day. The first of those things is very hard to achieve. How, after all, would you even do it? Maybe a massive (and expensive) Facebook ads campaign could do it, but you’d end up spending a lot more than you were earning back. The second of those things, the big, one-off pulse in sales, is easy to achieve. And you already know how to do it. You just contact your mailing list and tell them, ‘Hey guys, I’ve got a new book out!’ They like your stuff now, so phrase it well, and they’ll look to buy your book. (On my last launch, 30% of my mailing list bought my book within eight hours of me sending the email.) And bingo! That’s your sales surge right there. The sales surge powers you right up the Amazon sales charts. All the good stuff you did with categories and keywords means your book will get to be visible right where it needs to be: in the exact places that your potential readers are browsing. All the good stuff you did with covers and your Look Inside section means those browsers will convert into readers. And those guys are new readers. They aren’t buying your book because they were on your mailing list. They’re buying your book because they were casually browsing, but you managed to ensure that your book was under their noses when they were doing so. You’ve just expanded your readership. And that’s good. But it gets better. Because all the lovely stuff you did with the end material of your book means that your new one-time readers will soon turn into your committed fans. They’ll join your mailing list and expand your reach for the next time you play this game. And that is the whole secret of successful self-publishing on Amazon. You turn that wheel and keep it turning, with book launch after book launch. If your work is strong enough to keep your readers reading, your sales will only increase from cycle to cycle. Step 16. The Long Term: Where DO You Go From Here? This (uber-massive) post has revealed the basic art of self-publishing success – but, believe it or not, it’s still something of a starter guide, a basic template. As you get your self-publishing career properly started, you’ll soon start to think about some broader questions, for example: How often am I going to publish a new book? Me, personally, I’m very old school. I write one book a year and can’t see myself going much faster than that. Loads of indie-publishers will aim to write and publish a book every three months. If anything, the trend is for writers to try and bring that down to one every two months. The more you write then (probably) the more money you’ll make, but you’re not just in this game for the money. You want a nice life, and you want to be artistically proud of your books, so where do those things settle for you? Are your current writing rhythms capable of change or are you happy where you are? What do I do between launches? The mailing list-driven, sales-spike approach works well to promote your book on launch and you’ll enjoy a lovely month or two of elevated sales as that book floats gently down the rankings. That still leaves plenty of months where your book sales spitter-spatter along at the rate of a few books per title per day. How do you gee things up there? Well, as I say, there are five basic add-on techniques that you will start to use as you build out your series. They are: Price promotions, combined with Kindle Countdown deals (if you’re Amazon exclusive) and juiced up with the support of one or more book promotion sites. (Info here.) You should look to build this technique into your selling process as soon as you feel ready. Amazon Advertising. A cranky system has become less cranky and more powerful. You can place Amazon ads on Amazon itself, so you are buying the attention of book browsers direct in-store. That’s great, but (a) Amazon ads are now quite expensive if you don’t have plenty of books in your series, and (b) they are desperately hard to scale. You should find it relatively easy to make some money each month via Amazon Ads, but a lot of money? I don’t think anyone anywhere manages that. Cross-promos with other authors. Find those authors via Prolific Works or Bokfunnel. Team up with them. Cross promote each other’s work. Make money. This is also easy and a strong way to make sales and build your email list. (Pro tip: don’t team up with anyone who’s not in your genre. You want to keep your email list full of core readers, otherwise you’ll confuse Amazon’s marketing robots.) Bookbub ads. A very powerful tool once you get it working for you. Read Dave Gaughran’s book. Subscribe to his newsletter. Do as he says. Facebook ads. Extremely powerful, especially if you have strong website traffic or a busy Facebook page. FB’s ad system is complex however, and it’s easy to lose money. Use this as the final element in your marketing system, not the first. Are you going to be Amazon-only? Or sell your work everywhere? You can go either way on this or, indeed, vary your approach. The Amazon-only approach has some advantages in that: (A) it’s easy to manage, (B) you enjoy sales via KDP Select that would otherwise be closed to you, and (C) Amazon is so dominant that you’re accessing most of the market anyway. And against that? Well, there are other retailers and they’re keen to make sure that they don’t totally lose out on the indie-publishing boom. Some prominent indie authors get a full 50% of their writing income from the non-Amazon stores, which they’ll achieve using techniques additional to the ones described in this post. With those other retailers, you don’t win via an approach of fire-and-forget, and where you stand on this decision is up to you. There are prominent voices on both sides of the fence. I strongly urge newer indies to go Amazon exclusive at the start. Once you’ve got a few books out and are hitting, say, $10,000 in annual revenues, you have a decision to make. Till then, stick with Uncle Jeff Bezos. And don’t worry. Copyright remains with you no matter what. If you ever want to remove your books from Amazon, you’ll still own the copyright to do with as you please. How do you strike a balance between writing and managing your business? Personally, I don’t do much business management at all. Most of my mailing list growth is organic: people like my books and sign up. I make enough money with my current approach and I just don’t particularly want to spend my time fiddling around with Facebook ads and the like. You may feel differently. You’ll have to figure out the balance that’s right for you. You might want to outsource some tasks to third parties. You might want to do it all yourself. A classic small businessperson’s dilemma. Do I need a literary agent? Once upon a time, that would have seemed like a strange question. You’re an indie author, right? You’ve turned your back on that whole traditional superstructure – except things do change. If you do well in English language markets, literary agents have a role to play in selling those additional rights. Foreign language sales. Film and TV. Audio. Or maybe you want to go for the full traditional publication with some portion of your portfolio? Or in one specific national market, such as the UK? If you’re not thinking about these things yet, you will probably want to do so in time. And that’s it – the ultimate (starter) guide to self-publishing on Amazon. It’s not comprehensive. There’s more to tell – but, this being a starter guide, you have what you need right here on how to self-publish with Amazon. (And if you found it all helpful, do click to tweet: The Ultimate Guide to Self Publishing on Amazon. (We hope!) https://ctt.ec/T8x6a+). If there are techniques working for you we haven’t covered, which you think others should really be adopting, drop us a line. We’d love to hear. As ever, best of luck, and happy writing!

Are you writing a book? Maybe you’re starting out for the first time? Twenty years ago, I was in your exact position. My wife was seriously unwell. I’d quit work to look after her. And yes, a lot of my time was spent caring for her… but that still left a whole lot of hours in the day. I didn’t want to just do nothing with that time. And I’d always wanted to write a book. (I’ve still got a little home-movie film clip of me, age 9, being asked what I wanted to be when I was grown up. I answered, “I want to be an author.”) So, sitting at home, and often quite literally at my wife’s bedside, I opened my laptop and started to write. That book grew into a 190,000-word monster. I was engrossed by the damn thing too. Worked really hard. Was a perfectionist about every detail. I got an agent and I got a six-figure book deal with HarperCollins, one of the world’s largest publishers. And the book went on to become a bestseller that sold in a load of foreign territories too. And best of all? I got a career I loved. I’ve been in print continuously ever since, bringing out about a book a year in that time, and I’ve basically loved every second of it. (Oh, and my wife? Yeah, she’s got a long term condition that will never leave her, but she’s about a million times better than she was back in those days. It’s been an up-down ride, but we’ve been a lot more lucky than not.) A Super-Simple Step-By-Step Guide For New Writers But you’re not reading this because you want to know about me. You want to know how to start writing a book. You’ve got a big empty screen to deal with. A headful of ideas, a desire to write… but no structure for putting those ideas into practice. You want to know: what next? Well, that’s a good question. (One I didn’t think about too hard about when I started out, but then again I did end up deleting a 60,000-word chunk of my first draft because it was just no damn good.) So what do you need to do next? The book writing process can be incredibly daunting, so we\'ve made it simpler for you. If you want to start writing a book, take the following steps, in the following order… Write A Book In 10 Steps Take one fabulous idea Build a blistering plot Add unforgettable characters Give your characters inner life Add drama by showing it unfolding on the page Write with clarity, economy and precision Writing for children? Same rules apply! Be disciplined Revise your draft Get feedback 1. Take One Fabulous Idea If you want to know how to write a novel, there is only one sensible place to start, and that’s not with the first line as you might think, but with the very idea of your book – the thing you want to write about. This is one part of the writing process which you can\'t avoid. Which is great, as for lots of people it\'s the most fun part. Concept matters massively. It’s almost impossible to overstate its importance. Stephenie Meyer writes competent prose, but it’s her concept that turned Twilight into a cultural phenomenon. Dan Brown, Stieg Larsson, and Stephen King are similar. They’re decent writers blessed with stunning ideas. Agents know this, and – no matter what your genre – a strong premise is essential to selling a book. Given any two broadly similar manuscripts, agents will almost always pick the one with the strongest central concept. How, then, do you get your amazing book ideas? The answer is that you probably already have them. Your killer idea may be germinating in your head right now. It may arise from a passion of yours; it may come out of a book you love. It’s not about the seed of the idea. It’s how you develop it that counts. The key here is: (A) picking material that excites you, (B) picking enough material (so you want several ideas for possible settings, several ideas for possible heroes, several ideas for basic challenge/premise, etc. You want to be able to make choices from a place of abundance.) (C) – and this is the genius bit – you need to start combining those ingredients in a way that ensures you have at least one rogue ingredient, one unexpected flavour in your concoction. So let’s say that you just wanted to write a 1940s, film-noir style, private-eye detective story – an homage to Raymond Chandler and that great generation of writers. If you just replicated all those ingredients, you’d have an unsaleable book. Why? Because they’re too familiar. If people want those things, they’d just buy Chandler’s own work or others of that era. So throw in – a ghost. A German secret agent. Or set the story in a black community in Alabama. Or… whatever. Just make sure there’s one discordant ingredient to make readers sit up and take notice. Need more help? Then go watch this 10-minute video I put together that walks you through this exact part of the writing process. Expert tip: It also helps to know really early on what kind of word count you should be looking at. The gold-standard way to figure this out is to get hold of five or six recently published novels in your exact area. Then count the words on a typical page and multiply up to get an approximate total. If that sounds like too much work, then just use our handy guide. The gold-standard approach is better though! 2. Build A Blistering Plot The next essential for any novelist is a story that simply forces the reader to keep turning pages. Fortunately, there are definite rules about how to achieve this. Here are the rules you need to know: Work With A Very Small Number Of Protagonists  These are the main characters in your story. The ones who propel the action and whose stories the readers invest in. You probably only have one protagonist, and that’s fine. If you have two or three, that’s fine too. More than that? Not for a first book, please! They’ll make your job too hard. Unsettle The Status Quo Very Early On You could possibly do this from the first page, but certainly within the first chapter. The incident that gets the story rolling is called the Inciting Incident, and it’s the catalyst for everything that follows. Read more about how to make your Inciting Incident work really well here. Give Your Protagonist A Major Life Challenge  Do this very early on in the book and don’t resolve things till the very end. The reader basically read the book to see whether your protagonist gets the thing they’re seeking. Does the gal get the guy? Does James Bond save the world? Increase Jeopardy Though it\'s important to do this over the course of the book, it doesn’t have to be an even progression, by any means. But by the final quarter or third of your novel, your protagonist needs to feel that everything hinges on the outcome of what follows. End Your Book With A Crisis And Resolution So the crisis part is when everything seems lost. But then your hero or heroine summons up one last effort and saves the day in the end. In general, in most novels, the crisis wants to seem really bad, and the resolution wants to seem really triumphant. It’s achieving the swing from maximum light to maximum dark that will really give the reader a sense of a satisfying book. (More on plot structure here.) Delete Unessential Chapters And finally, one more crucial tip: if a chapter doesn’t advance the story in a specific way, you must delete that chapter. How come? Because all the reader really wants is to know whether your protagonist achieves the thing they’re seeking. If that basic balance between protagonist and goal doesn’t alter in the course of a chapter, you’ve given your reader no reason to read it. So axe unnecessary backstory. Ignore minor characters. Care about your protagonist with a passion. Sounds simple? Well, the principles aren’t that hard to understand, although executing the advice can be a wee bit trickier. Expert tip: Use the “snowflake method” to build your structure. The heart of this concept is the idea that you should start with an incredibly bare-bones summary of your narrative – one sentence is fine. Then you add something about character. Then you build that sentence out into a paragraph. And so on. It’s a great way of allowing your plot to emerge somewhat naturally. More help on that technique here – but don’t ask my why it’s called the snowflake method. It’s nothing like a snowflake. 3. Add Unforgettable Characters Long after a reader has forgotten details of a plot, the chances are they’ll remember the character who impelled it. The two things you absolutely must bear in mind when constructing your characters are: Make sure that the character and the story bounce off one another in interesting ways. If, to take a stupid example, your character has a fear of spiders, the chances are that your story needs to force your character to confront those fears. You must bring your character into their zone of greatest discomfort. Make sure you really, really know your character. It’s so often little things, and subtleties that make characters seem human (e.g. Amy has a passion for Manhattan in winter; she collects a shell from every beach she’s ever visited.) If you want to check if you know your character well enough, we suggest you use our ultimate character builder. Oh yes, and one great tip (albeit one that won’t work for every novel) is this: if in doubt, add juice to your character. Here’s an example of what I mean: Stieg Larsson could have just written a book about a genius computer hacker. But he didn’t. He could have written a book about a genius computer hacker with Aspergers. But he didn’t. He could have written a book about a genius computer hacker with Aspergers and a hostile attitude towards society. But he didn’t. He could have written a book about a genius computer hacker with Aspergers, a hostile attitude towards society, and who was also a rape victim. But he didn’t. He also tossed in a complex parental background, bisexuality, a motorbike, years spent in the Swedish care system, and an aptitude for violence. It was the intoxicating brew of all those elements combined that created one of the world’s most successful recent fictional creations. Short moral: if in doubt, do more. Expert tip: Our character development page has got a free downloadable character profile questionnaire that asks you 200+ questions about your character. Those questions basically challenge you to know your character better than you know your best friend. It’ll only take you an hour or two to complete the worksheet – and your character knowledge will be propelled to a whole new dimension of awesome. Honestly? It might be the single most useful hour you can spend right now. Uh, unless you are on a burning ship in a storm. In which case, reading this paragraph is not a good use of your time. 4. Give Your Characters Inner Life One of the commonest problems we see is when a character does and says all the right stuff, but the reader never really knows what they think or feel. If you don’t create that insight into the character’s inner world, the book will fail to engage your reader, because that insight is the reason why people read. After all, if you just want to watch explosions, you’ll go to a Bond or Bourne movie. If you want to feel what it’s like to be James Bond or Jason Bourne, you have no alternative but to read Ian Fleming’s or Robert Ludlum’s original novels. This character insight is one of the simplest things for a novelist to do. You just need to remember that your protagonist has a rich inner world, and then you need to tell us about it. So we want to know about: What the character thinks What their emotions are What they remember What their physical sensations are And so on It’s OK to use fairly bland language at times (“she was hungry”, “she felt tired”), but you’ll only start to get real depth into your characters if you get individual and specific too. See for example how much richer this passage feels, and how full of its character it seems to be: Seeing the meat, she felt a sudden revulsion. The last time she’d seen mutton roasting like this on an open fire, it had been when [blah, blah – something to do with the character’s past]. As the memories came back, her throat tightened and her stomach was clenched as though ready to vomit. Because the character has thoughts, feeling, memories and physical sensations all combining here, the moment is richly endowed with personality. A simple “She felt revolted” wouldn’t have had anything like the same impact. Expert tip: Once you’ve written 20-30,000 words or so, it’s worth pausing to check that your characters seem alive on the page. So just print off four or five random pages from your manuscript and circle any statements that indicate your character’s inner life (physical sensations, memories, thoughts, feelings, and so on.) If you find nothing at all, you have written a book about a robot and you may need to rethink. If you do find indicators of inner life, but they’re all bland and unengaging (“I was hungry”, “I remembered a barn like that when I was a kid.”), you may want to juice up your character. If you find a rich inner life, then you’re doing great. Just keep at it. 5. Add Drama Your job as a novelist is to show action unfolding on the page. Readers don’t just want a third-hand report of what has just happened. That means you need to tell things moment-by-moment, as if you were witnessing the event. Consider the difference between this: Ulfor saw the descending sword in a blur of silver. He twisted to escape, but the swordsman above, a swarthy troll with yellow teeth, was too fast, and swung hard. (This form of narration is “showing”.) And this: Ulfor was badly injured in a swordfight. (This form of narration is known as “telling”.) The first snippet sounds like an actual story. The second sounds like a news report. Obviously, you will need to use the second mode of storytelling from time to time. Telling can be a simple way to convey facts and speed things up, but for the most part, your tale needs to consist of scenes of dramatic action, glued together with bits of sparse narration. If in doubt, look up our free tips on the ‘show, don’t tell’ rule. Expert tip: One of the real drivers of drama on the page – and one of the real pleasures of fiction – is intense, alive, surprising dialogue. Writing dialogue competently is pretty easy – you can probably do it already. But writing really great dialogue (think Elmore Leonard, for example) is not so simple. That said there are rules you can follow which just make your writing better. For more advice on all this, just check out our page on dialogue. 6. Write Well It sounds obvious, but it’s no good having a glowing idea and a fabulous plot if you can’t write. Your book is made up of sentences, after all, and if those sentences don’t convey your meaning succinctly and clearly, your book just won’t work. Almost everyone has the capacity to write well. You just need to focus on the challenge. So think about the three building blocks of good writing: A. Clarity You need to express your meaning clearly. Of course, YOU know what you’re meaning to say, but would a reader understand as clearly? One good way to check yourself here is to read your own work aloud. If you stumble when reading, that’s a big clue that readers will stumble too. B. Economy Never use ten words when eight would do. That means checking every sentence to see if a word or two could be lost. It means checking every paragraph for sentences that you don’t need. Every page for surplus paragraphs. If that sounds pedantic, just think about this. If you tried to sell a 100,000 book that had 20,000 surplus words in it, you shouldn’t be surprised if agents rejected it, because it was just too boring and too baggy. But that’s the exact same difference as a 10-word sentence and an 8-word one. In a word: pedantry matters. It’s your friend! C. Precision Be as precise as possible. This normally means you need to see the scene in your head before you can describe it clearly to a reader. So it’s easy to write “a bird flew around the tree”, but that’s dull and imprecise. Just think how much better this is: “A pair of swallows flew, chirrupping, around the old apple tree.” The difference in the two sentences is basically one of precise seeing, and precise description. Need more help? Then you’ll find this article really useful! If you can manage those three things – and you can; it’s just a question of making the effort – then you can write well enough to write a novel. That’s nice to know, huh? Expert tip: Descriptive writing sounds like it ought to be boring, right? Everyone knows what a coffee shop looks like, so isn’t it just wasting words to tell the reader? Except that’s not how it works. The reason why writing descriptions matters so much is that the reader has to feel utterly present in your fictional world. It has to feel more real than the world of boring old reality. That’s where great descriptive writing comes into its own. If you can – economically, vividly – set a scene, then all your character interactions and plot twists will come into their own. They’ll feel more dramatic, more alive. And again: there are simple repeatable techniques for strong descriptive writing. Read more about them right here. 7. What If I’m Writing For Children? Same rules apply, no matter the age or genre you’re writing for, but we’ve put together a collection of our best tips for children’s authors, including help on how to get a literary agent who’s right for you and your work. Whatever else, write clearly and economically. If your style isn’t immediate and precise, children won’t have the patience to keep up with you. If a chapter doesn’t drive the story forwards, you’ll lose them. If in doubt, keep it simple. Write vivid characters to an inventive plot. Write with humour and a bit of mischief. But really: if you’re writing for kids, then follow ALL the rules in this blog post, but do the whole thing on a smaller scale. The only really crucial issue that distinguishes children’s fiction from adult work is word count. You just have to know the right kind of length for the specific market you are writing for. That means: Figure out what age range you are aiming at Figure out what kind of books you are writing (books about unicorns for 6-7 year olds? Adventure stories for young teens? Contemporary issue-driven books for mid-teens?) Get hold of some books in the right niche Take a typical page in those books Count the words Multiply the number of words by the number of pages. Done! Oh, and don’t rely on internet searches to give you the right answer. Because there is so much age-dependent variability in kids fiction, crisscrossed by a good bit of format and genre variability, the only safe route to follow is the one we’ve just given. Expert tip: The most common mistake made by aspiring children’s authors has to do with writing down to children. And that’s wrong. Children don’t want to be lectured or patronised. They want their world to be taken as seriously by you as they take it themselves. One of the reasons Roald Dahl was so successful was that he wrote about stuff that adults (in the real world, outside fiction) would have disapproved of. A giant who spoke funny? Adult twits who behaved badly? A lethally dangerous chocolate factory? Dahl’s willingness to be subversive put him clearly on the side of kids, not adults. Authors such as Suzanne Collins, Veronica Roth, JK Rowling, and Stephenie Meyer all use the same basic trick. Copy them! 8. Set Up Some Good Writing Disciplines The first rule of writing is this: Good writers write. They don’t want to write. They don’t think about writing. They don’t write a blog post about writing. They write. Sure you can do those other things too, but they’re not what counts. What counts is bum-on-seat hours and that document word count ticking ever upwards. Now the truth is that different writers approach their work differently. There’s no one set of rules that works for everyone. But here are some rules that may work for you. If they do, great. If they don’t, adapt them as you need. Either way, if the rules help you write, great. If they don’t, discard them. So. The rules: Set Up Your Writing Space So It Appeals Lose the distractions. Make sure you have a computer, pens, and notebooks that you like using. Get a comfortable chair. You\'re going to be in your dedicated writing space a lot, so it\'s important to find somewhere you can relax. (Just don\'t get so relaxed that you end up spending hours of the time that you allocated to your writing sessions surfing the internet or cuddling your cat.) Eliminate Distractions Got a TV in your writing room? Then lose the TV. Or change rooms. Get rid of the distractions that most bother you. Determine When And How Often You Will Write If you have a busy life, it’s OK if that’s a bit ramshackle (“Tuesday morning, alternate Wednesdays, and Saturday if I get a chance.”) But the minimum here is that you set a weekly allowance of hours for your writing sessions, and stick to it come hell or high water. Pair your writing schedule with: Set A Weekly Target Word Count Hit your word count target every week, no excuses. In terms of specifics, it doesn\'t matter how many words you write. Whether you reach a word count of 2,000 each day or 300, what\'s key is being consistent. Once you\'ve started writing and have tangible evidence of your hard work, it\'s likely that carving out some writing time and reaching your target will get easier. Make Some Kind Of Outcome Commitment For example: When I have finished this book, I will get an external professional editor to give me comments. Or: I will share this with my book group. You just need to have in mind that this book will be read. That knowledge keeps you honest! Commit To A Deadline Don’t make that too tough on yourself, but do make it real. Almost anyone should be able to manage 2,000 words a week, even with a busy life. And most adult novels are 70-100,000 words long, so in less than a year, you have yourself a book, my friend. With practice, you’ll get faster. Work To An Outline I said you needed to sketch your plot, right? (You can get that plotting worksheet by navigating to the top of the sidebar on this page.) Use that outline as your story-compass. If you need to tweak it as you go, that’s fine – but no radical changes, please! Always Prioritise The Reader’s Perspective Don’t write to please yourself. Write to please the reader. If you need to imagine an actual Ideal Reader, then do so. Write for them. Don’t Worry If Your First Draft Is Lousy It’s meant to be! That’s what first drafts are for. Jane Smiley said, “All first drafts are perfect, because all they have to do is exist.” Same goes for you, buddy. Take Breaks If you’re a fidgety writer (as I am), you’ll want to take a lot of breaks. If you concentrate fiercely for twenty minutes and take a break for five or ten, that’s fine. Just keep going that way. This is your writing time, and it\'s important that you set it out in a way which works for you. Warm Up Each Day I always edit my work of the day before as a way to warm myself up for the chapter I’m about to begin. If you like to warm up differently, then go for it. Just remember you may not be able to just start writing fresh text at 9.01 am precisely. Most of us need to warm the engine a little first. Even if all you do for the first ten minutes is get settled into your dedicated writing space and re-read yesterday\'s work, that\'s a great start. And that’s it. Do those things, and you should be fine. 9. Revise Your First Draft Nearly all first drafts will have problems, some of them profound. That’s okay. A first draft is just your opportunity to get stuck in on the real business: which is refining and perfecting the story you’ve just told yourself. That means checking your story, checking your characters, checking your writing style. Then, doing all those things again. You’ll find new issues, new niggles every time you go back to your work (at least to start with), and every time you fix those things, your book will get better. It’s a repetitive process, but one you should come to enjoy. Don’t get alarmed by the repetitions: think of this rewriting task as climbing a spiral staircase. Yes, you are going round in circles, but you are rising higher all the time. We’ve seen hundreds of new manuscripts every year, and we’re pretty good at recognising common problems. We’ve even got a checklist of recurring issues we find. Most are fixable, so you don’t need to worry too much if some of those apply to you. The thing is simply to figure out what the issue is, then sit down to address it. Remember that all successful novelists started the same way as you did: with a lousy manuscript. Expert tip: Editing your own work can be a challenging and somewhat mysterious process. So we’ve removed the mystery. We’ve put some actual edits to an actual book (by me, as it happens) up on the blog, so you can see how the self-editing process works for an experienced pro author. You can find more about all that over here. While you’re at it, you may want to take a look at the various different types of editing that are available. But don’t jump into paid editing until a very late stage. For now, self-editing will improve your manuscript and build your skills. 10. Make Friends, Get Feedback Writing a book is hard work. It’s lonely. Those around you are seldom equipped to offer expert feedback and advice – and, of course, this is a difficult road. Most first novels do not get published. So please don’t try to go it alone. Here are some things you can and probably should do: Join A Writing Group Or Online Writing Community It\'s really helpful to be able to interact with people who are on a similar path to you, and understand what writing is like. There are many communities to choose from. Like ours! See our expert tip below. Go Public With Some Of Your Writing Goals/Achievements That could just mean updating your Facebook page or talking with your friends at the office. The main thing is to avoid your book feeling like a dark secret you’re not able to share. Get Friendly Peer Feedback When your book is finished and roughly edited, it can be useful to seek supportive feedback, of the “Wow, you can really do this!” variety. You’ll need to get tougher in due course, but that early support can work wonders. Build Your Skills That could mean doing an online creative writing class, or taking a course, or working with a mentor, or attending an event. Whatever you choose to do, you will improve as a writer and writing & editing your next book will come easier than it did this first time round. Get Professional Feedback  Once you’ve done as much self-editing as you can manage, getting some professional feedback is the ideal next step. There is absolutely no better way to improve a manuscript than to get a rigorous set of comments from an experienced third-party editor. Watch this video for tips on how to process and make best use of that feedback. Remember, you don’t have to do all of this at once. This is a marathon, not a sprint. So go easy with yourself when setting out your goals. Under-commit and over-deliver, right? Expert tip: Meet friends in a free and knowledgeable community of writers. I blog there every week and thousands of writers like you meet to share peer-to-peer critiques, gossip, advice and support. And also – friendship. Passion makes friends like nothing else and our community is all about passion. Sign up is totally free. And fast. And easy. Just go here and do what you gotta do. Bonus Tip: Get A Literary Agent Literary agents only take about one book in a thousand, so before you take this final step, we do suggest that you’ve completed numbers 1 to 9 properly. You should also take a look at our advice on manuscript presentation to make sure you’re really prepared for the next stage. That said, if your novel is good enough, you will find it easy enough to secure representation. Just follow these steps. A) Select Your Target Agents We have a complete list of literary agents and you can filter all data by genre, agent experience and more. It’s the most complete source of its kind. B) Choose About 8-12 Names You’re looking for agents keen to take on new writers. If they happen to represent authors you love, so much the better. (More advice on how to start your agent search.) C) Write A Fabulous Covering Letter This can be a little daunting. But once you\'re familiar with the process, it will feel less overwhelming. Try using this advice and sample letter. D) Write A Good, Clear Synopsis Synopsis writing is a process that terrifies most writers, but this is easier than you might think. Just follow these tips. E) Get Your Stuff Out There And there you have it: 10 steps to help you start writing that novel. This may seem like a long, daunting process, but you want to write a book, and now you know where to start. So let\'s celebrate that for now! Happy writing, good luck. And keep going!

So, you’re well on your way to completing your book on a popular science topic, and have a cracking book proposal that you can’t wait to share with agents. Well, we’re here to help!  WANT TO JUMP STRAIGHT TO THE AGENT LIST? CLICK HERE  Popular Science Popular science as a genre is the exploration of scientific topics in an accessible way for the average reader. The work should be interesting and understandable to a non-expert, and focus on topics that will be of interest to the general public.  Popular science topics can include space, nature, biology and the human body, climate change, mental health (which can here have the crossover with psychology), time, data, and many more. These are topics that grasp the interest of the average reader, discussing the history of the universe, or genetics, or the history of the human race, in a way that is accessible to anyone who picks up the book. They remain a popular genre, particularly those books that follow on with current scientific discoveries and trends.  Authors of popular science and psychology are more popular than ever. Stephen Hawking, Oliver Sacks and Michio Kaku, to name a few.  AgentMatch And How To Use It There are plenty of science-loving agents, but you won\'t want to approach them all. The best way to develop and refine your own shortlist of US agents for popular science is to visit AgentMatch, our literary agent database, and use the search tools on the left to make your selection.  With AgentMatch you can select by genre (e.g. science), country, the agent’s level of experience, their appetite for new clients, and much more. You can even save your search results and come back to them, allowing you to work through them one by one, at your own pace. Each profile has been researched thoroughly including what agents like to read in their spare time, information on their most recent deals, manuscript wishlists, submission requirements, and exclusive interviews.  You can sign-up for a 7-day free trial which will give you a good feel for the data and functionality. Or join us as a premium member and get unlimited access to AgentMatch.  US Agents For Popular Science  To get you started we’ve selected a list of 20 US agents looking for popular science:  [am_show_agents id=11] More Resources   We’re here to help you at every step in your writing and querying process. Check out our favourite blogs that can assist you in putting together your query letter and synopsis, and if you want valuable, personal feedback on your writing you can book a fifteen-minute One-to-One with an agent of your choice. Premium members can also get a free query letter review from our lovely Writers Support team!    Happy searching, and good luck on your querying journey!   

So, you’re well on your way to completing your book on food and cookery, and have a cracking book proposal that you can’t wait to share with agents. Well, we’re here to help!  WANT TO JUMP STRAIGHT TO THE AGENT LIST?CLICK HERE Food And Cookery This is a market dominated by full-colour, hard-copy books. The eBook revolution has done little to change the basic market. Which is good news.   The bad news is that this means the market dynamics are challenging for debut authors in this area. A sure-fire way to get a cookbook published is to have a TV show first. Or a column in a national newspaper. Or, you’re a celebrity. But for ordinary cookery writers it is hard to get published. It can be hard to get publishers interested enough to invest in a book because the high production quality means that a book needs to shift a lot of copies to break into profit.   There are still opportunities for new debut writers. Especially if you are an expert in an under-explored area of food and drink. Having a strong platform with demonstrable interest in the area of food and drink that you’re writing about will only make your submission pack look even stronger.  AgentMatch And How To Use It There are plenty of cookbook-loving agents, but you won\'t want to approach them all. The best way to develop and refine your own shortlist of US agents for food and cookery books is to visit AgentMatch, our literary agent database, and use the search tools on the left to make your selection. With AgentMatch you can select by genre (e.g. food and cookery), country, the agent’s level of experience, their appetite for new clients, and much more. You can even save your search results and come back to them, allowing you to work through them one by one, at your own pace. Each profile has been researched thoroughly including what agents like to read in their spare time, information on their most recent deals, manuscript wishlists, submission requirements, and exclusive interviews. You can sign-up for a 7-day free trial which will give you a good feel for the data and functionality. Or join us as a premium member and get unlimited access to AgentMatch. US Agents For Food And Cookery Books To get you started we’ve selected a list of 20 US agents looking for food and cookery books: [am_show_agents id=37] More Resources  We’re here to help you at every step in your writing and querying process. Check out our favourite blogs that can assist you in putting together your query letter and synopsis, and if you want valuable, personal feedback on your writing you can book a fifteen-minute One-to-One with an agent of your choice. Premium members can also get a free query letter review from our lovely Writers Support team!   Happy searching, and good luck on your querying journey!  

Congratulations! You\'ve finally finished your manuscript and now you\'re looking for a literary agent who represents authors just like you. So where do you start? Perhaps, like most writers looking to submit their book proposal, you\'ve heard of a few well-known agencies. Perhaps you\'ve been on Twitter or read the trade press and seen references to Curtis Brown, Darley Anderson Literary, Caroline Sheldon Literary Agency, Peter Straus, Juliet Mushens, Soho Agency, the Bent agency, Marsh Agency, or Eve White. These are all big names in the book world, literary agents and agencies who have achieved some great deals over the last few years for many award winning authors. It makes sense you would start there. But then, perhaps you\'ve looked at their websites, been overwhelmed by the established writers they represent and the bestselling authors they\'ve achieved huge advances for, and started to lose confidence. Or, as is often the case, seen that your favourite agent is no longer accepting submissions and you\'ve given up. Never give up! There are hundreds of literary agents in the UK, and this article lists the top (and best) agents. So if you\'re in the UK and looking for a UK-based agent you\'re in luck, because this is the only article where you\'ll find up to date links of every single one of the UK\'s best literary agents. For FREE! WANT TO JUMP STRAIGHT TO THE COMPLETE AGENT LIST?CLICK HERE Find your perfect UK agent Literary Agents: All You Need To Know In this article we\'re going to guide you through everything you need to know about finding a UK literary agent - from agent submission guidelines to fiction submissions, how to write a covering letter to understanding genre when it comes to choosing your agent. Here are the 8 simple steps you need to take when searching for a UK literary agent: Understand what an agent does Know your genre Decide who to approach Create a shortlist Write a synopsis Write a query letter Look at our Frequently Asked QuestionsAnd finally... Check out our links to the UK\'s top agents and start making notes! And if you actually want a list of US literary agents, then you need to be here instead. What Does An Agent Do? Literary agents are the gatekeepers of the book world. This can be a bitter sweet reality because, although they weed out books that aren\'t a good fit for traditional publishing, they are also the people standing between you, a top publishing house, and your dream of becoming a bestseller. When it comes to traditional publishing - especially the Big Four (Penguin Random House, Harper Collins, Simon & Schuster, and the Hachette Book Group) - no editor will look at an author\'s book proposal unless it comes from one of many reputable literary agencies. So if you have fantasies of your novel making it to Waterstones shop window, or for sale in supermarkets and airports, or if you want to be a Sunday Times Bestseller with your story turned into a movie via a film agency, then you will need to be with a big publisher. And if that\'s the case, then you need an agent. Literary agents are salespeople - they take you on (not just for this book but YOU as an author) and they cheerlead you all the way to the editors who they feel will suit you and your work best. The idea is that they will help shape your career, you will work together for many books to come, so this relationship needs to work! But before you decide who to approach, you need to understand why book genres matter, and why you need to know how to sell your work - whether it\'s literary fiction, science fiction, or narrative non fiction. Why Are Genres Important When Choosing Literary Agents? Genres are the themes and categories in which a book is placed. All debut authors will tell you that you can\'t sell a book to an agency without knowing where your work fits in terms of positioning (ie where would a bookseller will place it on their shelves). What you write matters when it comes to finding the right agent, because each one represents authors and books from specific genres. The quickest way to get a rejection is to approach an agent who isn\'t looking for a book like yours. Let me break this down some more... If you write YA fiction (ie young adult fiction) you may find an agent who could also represent your graphic novel, middle grade book or picture books, as they may specialise in a diverse range of children\'s books. Many authors write books for children of all ages. Same goes with commercial fiction, such as psychological suspense, crime fiction, and thrillers. This genre (along with romance) is one of the best selling genres, so you will find agents who only specialise in those kinds of books. Likewise, if you write historical fiction, that agent may also represent a broad range of books generally enjoyed by a female demographic across many genres, such as reading group fiction and women\'s fiction. There\'s plenty of cross-over there, which gives an author flexibility when it comes to writing more than one type of book during their writing career - lessening the chance of having to look for another agent in the future. So make sure you know what type of book you have written (and intend to write in the future), what books and authors it could be classified alongside (these are called \'comps\'), and who the audience is. If you don\'t know that from the onset, not only will you struggle to find the right agent but you will also struggle writing your submissions to them. How Do I Know Which Literary Agents To Approach? The fact that there are over 400 literary agents in the UK can be overwhelming. Where do you begin? You can jump straight to our list of agents or keep reading. The simplest place to start is dismissing the ones that are not right for you. But don\'t get too worried about finding ones near to where you live. Most UK agencies have a London office - because that\'s where most publishers are - but with Zoom and the like, you will still maintain a great relationship with them from wherever you are in the country. Get Filtering By using our AgentMatch service (or a good old fashioned pen and paper), filter out the agents who represent your genre of book, who have an MS Wish List that sound like your book, and who are open to submissions (many get so inundated they only accept applications in short bursts). Once you know who you want, then let\'s take a look at the ones who may want you... Find UK Literary Agents Who Want You You need to approach literary agents who are keen to hear from people like you. It’s pointless wasting your energy on the rest. That means you want UK literary agents who: Are open to submissions in your genre Welcome submissions from new writers via their slushpile (this sounds scarier than it is, it just means adding your submission to their large pile of other unsolicited applications) That’s a good start, but most agents are interested in reading a diverse range of books, so now your longlist is, like, 100+ names long. Yikes! So let\'s whittle it away further... Find UK Literary Agents YOU Want Take your longlist and pick out any UK literary agents that you especially like the sound of: Maybe they represent some of your favourite authors in your genres. Or they represent a favourite author in a different genre. Or they don’t represent a particular favourite writer of yours, but they have commented admiringly on that author. You have particular reason to like or admire the agent’s literary agency. They share a passion of yours. They made a comment in a blog / on YouTube / at our Festival of Writing / or anywhere else . . . and for whatever reason that comment struck a chord in you. And it’s OK if your reason is dumb. Maybe you like an agent’s face (never underestimate a gut instinct)! Really, you’re just looking for points of contact that make sense given your (relatively scant) information resources. You are looking for about 12 names in total. Get Matched With Your Perfect Agent At Jericho Writers, we\'re the only membership group where members get access to the very best literary agents around the world. All are vetted, all information is up to date, and you can even book to speak to them one on one and ask them your questions. This article is just a little taster of how easy to can be to find the best literary agents for you with a Jericho Writers membership by filtering via genre, experience, size, location and name. Get matched with your perfect UK agent Draw Up A Shortlist Of Your Chosen Agents The best number of agents to focus on, at the beginning, is 12-15. Why? Fewer than that you\'re not giving yourself a chance (some agents may LOVE your book, but it may be too similar to something they already have or they simply don\'t have the time). But if you keep submitting after more than 15 rejections, with no concrete feedback and no full requests, it\'s much better to re-evaluate where you went wrong and keep those other agents up your sleeve than send something that isn\'t working to your top 50 candidates. Create A Spreadsheet Keeping track of your progress is important. In your spreadsheet add the date, their name, literary agency, email address, info about them and what they are looking for, space to add any feedback or notes, and colour code it. I used to use the following: Purple: Closed for submissionsRed: RejectionYellow: Full requestGreen: Offer That way you can see, at a glance, how you\'re getting on and whether you need to make edits, amends, or start again. The Importance Of Submission Guidelines Whether you write diverse fiction or popular science, commercial or non fiction, the best way to be rejected by any literary agent is to not follow their guidelines. READ THE GENERAL SUBMISSIONS GUIDELINES CAREFULLY! Most agents or associate agent ask for a Word document or pdf, many opt for Times New Roman font at 12pt. This may sound pedantic - but when you get over 3,000 manuscripts sent to you a year, you don\'t want to be reading a Powerpoint presentation in purple Comic Sans! Some will ask for sample chapters, others just the first few pages. Some are still accepting submissions via post, most are by email or their own online forms. Make sure you tick all the boxes! Write A Synopsis I\'ll keep this brief (we have many blogs on how to write a synopsis) but this is an important part of the submission process. A synopsis is a summary of your entire book, preferably on one page or 600-1,000 words. Most agents will generally ask for the first three chapters of your book / first ten thousand words / first thirty pages - along with a covering letter and a synopsis. From that they will know what you writing style is like, what the entire book is about, and who you are. If that whet\'s their appetite then they will ask for a full request - the entire manuscript. The simplest way to write a synopsis is to do so BEFORE you write your book (believe me, it\'s easier to write an 85,000 word novel based off a 600 word outline than the other way around). If not, then ensure your synopsis focusses on just the main characters, the keys beats of the plot, that it includes all twists and spoilers. It doesn\'t matter whether you write science fiction or narrative nonfiction, your outline needs to highlight the main point of your book and the order in which everything happens. Don\'t worry about it sounding boring (it\'s just an outline, it\'s not meant to be exciting) and don\'t be tempted to get carried away explaining your favourite amusing sub plot as you need to stick to the main outline. How To Write A Query Letter In short, a query letter (or \'covering letter\') is a simple introduction to what you\'re looking for, a brief summary of your book, and some info on you. Explain that you are looking for representation and why this agent is the right fit for you and your book. Add your one line book pitch and an intriguing premise. Including why you were inspoired to write it. Outline some relevant info about yourself (this is where you highlight any relevant writing experience, awards, education, background that adds strength to your writing career). For a more comprehensive guide on writing the perfect query letter, take a look here, or read our sample query letter. You can also get help on your query letter here, and your synopsis here. You can even get an overview of all your options on how to get published right here if you need it. Phew! Keep track of your agent search And if you STILL have questions... Frequently Asked Questions: UK Literary Agents How do I find a literary agent in the UK? The top UK literary agents are listed below. Keep scrolling! Or better yet, joing our AgentMatch service. How much do literary agents cost UK? Glad you asked that, because the answer is NOTHING. Never ever pay an agent out of your own pocket. They work purely on commissions (generally 15% for UK sales, 20% for film and abroad). they don\'t earn a penny from you until you earn. Who is the best literary agent for new authors? It\'s very hard to get on the books of a top agent who already represents established authors. So instead of aiming for the managing director of an agency, or literary agents who are already very busy, look at associate agents and newer names. Most have probably been trained by the big names, working at the same great agencies, but have more energy and time to focus on debut authors. How do I find a good literary agent? The answer to that is simple. Scroll down and take a look at our top UK agents.And if you STILL have questions, here is a super detailed, all you need to know about agents, article! Time to find your UK agent match Literary Agents: The Complete UK List The list below is a complete list of the top UK literary agents. Simply click on the links and discover the profile summaries for each agent. To get complete access to all data, click here and sign up for your FREE account. [am_show_agents id=2] Jericho Writers is a global membership group for writers, providing everything you need to get published. Keep up with our news, membership offers, and updates by signing up to our newsletter. For more writing articles take a look at our blog page or join our free writer’s community. 

All stories share a simple common structure - so the simplest way to outline your novel is to use that universal template by way of scaffolding. Figuring out that template and how best to use it to create the best story possible for your readers is exactly what I\'m going to do in this post. (Or – full disclosure – it’s what you’re going to do. I’ll just help a little on the way…) In this step by step guide to plotting a novel I will be teaching you everything you need to know about novel plotting - from my favourite mind mapping method, to understanding character arcs and how to tie up loose ends. Are you ready to learn the most important part of the writing process? Here we go... The Best Way To Plot A Novel Very few writers can have a load of story ideas and start writing without any clear direction as to where they are heading and what is going to happen. The novel plotting template I will be demonstrating in this article is more of an outlining process. A simple but detailed plot outline for your book that will serve as a skeleton from which to hang the meat of your story (sorry for that rather macabre visual representation). As you go further into your writing journey you can make this into a pretty bullet journal or a colour coded Excel spreadsheet if you want, but for now you just need a pen and a piece of paper. Ready? Good. Let\'s outline your novel together. What A Story Template Looks Like A story template is just a simple method for getting all those brilliant pictures out of your head and on to the page in a way that will help your story ideas make sense to your readers. To begin with we need to look at the key components of any story. Write down the following headings: Main character (who leads the story) Status Quo (situation at the start) Motivation (what your character wants) Initiating incident (what disturbs the status quo – conflict) Developments (what happens next) Crisis (how things come to a head) Resolution (how things resolve) And now sketch in your answers in as few words as possible - aim for 1-3 sentences. It\'s important to keep it simple at this stage as complex is our enemy. Fixating on intricate plot detail at drafting stage will only get in the way of finding the actual bones of your novel. And it\'s those bones that will hook an agent/editor/reader. The Novel Template: An Example You probably want an example of what your outline should look like, right? OK. Let’s say your name was Jane Austen and you had a great idea for a story about a prideful guy and a charming but somewhat prejudiced girl. If your were plotting Pride And Prejudice, the outline might look something like this: CharacterElizabeth (Lizzy) Bennet, one of five daughters in Regency England. Status QuoLizzy and her sisters will be plunged into poverty if her father dies, so they need to marry (and marry well). MotivationLizzy wants to marry for love. Initiating IncidentTwo wealthy gentlemen, Mr Bingley and Mr Darcy, arrive. DevelopmentsLizzy meets proud Mr Darcy and dashing stranger Mr Wickham. She despises Mr Darcy and likes Mr Wickham. She discovers Darcy loves her and that Wickham isn’t all he seems. CrisisLizzy’s sister elopes, threatening the social ruin of her family. It now looks like Lizzy can’t marry anyone. ResolutionMr Darcy helps Lizzy’s sister. Lizzy agrees to marry him, deciding now that she loves him, after all. Now that’s easy, right? That’s the whole of Pride and Prejudice in a nutshell, and it was easy. You just need to do the same with your book or your idea, and keep it really simple. In fact, if you struggle to know everything that goes in the ‘developments’ section, you can even drop in some placeholder type comments. If you were Jane Austen you might, for example, start out by saying something like “Lizzy breaks with Wickham, because it turns out he’s a bad guy. He killed someone? Stole money? Something else? Something to think about.” And that’s fine. Don’t worry about any blanks. It’s like you’re building a tower and you’re missing one of the girders. But by getting everything else in place and putting a “girder needs to go here” sign up, the structure is still brilliantly clear. That’s all you need (for now.) Oh, and don’t bother separating those down into chapters just yet, you can worry about that later – but when you do, read this, it’s really useful! Developing Your Story Outline You might feel that our template so far is just a little too basic. Which it is. So let’s develop the structure another notch. What we’re going to do now is add anything we know about subplots – or basically any story action that you DO know about, which doesn’t fit neatly into the above plot structure. So if you were Jane Austen, and had a good handle on your story, you might put together something like this. Subplot 1Jane Bennet (Lizzy’s caring sister) and Mr Bingley fall in love, but Bingley moves away, then comes back. Jane and Bingley marry. Subplot 2Lydia Bennet (Lizzy’s reckless sister) elopes with Wickham. She is later found and helped by Darcy. Subplot 3Odious Mr Collins proposes marriage to Lizzy. She says no. Her more pragmatic friend, Charlotte Lucas, says yes. Notice that we’re not yet trying to mesh those things together. In fact, the way we’ve done it here, Subplot 3 (which happens in the middle of the book) comes after Subplot 2 (which comes at the end). But again: don’t worry. Sketch your additional story material down as swiftly as neatly as Miss Austen has just done it. The meshing together – the whole business of getting things in the right order, getting the character motivations perfectly aligned and filling in any plot holes – that’ll do your brain in. Yes, you have to get to it at some stage. But not now. Keep it simple, and build up. How To Use Subplots If you’re a fan of Pride and Prejudice, you’ll know perfectly well that our outline so far still misses out masses of stuff. There’s nothing on where the novel is set. Or why or how events unfurl. It doesn’t say a thing about character relations, why each feels as they do. There’s nothing to say on character development, conflict, subtleties, supporting cast, and so on. And that’s fine to start with. It’s actually good. What does matter, however is your character’s motivation. Taking one subplot above as example, Charlotte wants security through marriage to Mr Collins. Lizzy, however, rejects her friend’s rationale. Charlotte’s marriage reaffirms Lizzy’s romantic values and, crucially, also throws her in Mr Darcy’s way again later in the book. Now that’s interesting stuff, but if a subplot doesn’t bear on a protagonist’s ability to achieve their goal or goals, that subplot must be deleted or revised. Luckily, though, our story structure template helps you avoid that pitfall in the first place. In fact, here are two rules that you should obey religiously: If you’re outlining a plot for the first time. Pin down your basics, then build up subplots, conflicts, and so on. If you have already started your manuscript and you think you’re uncertain of your plot structure, stop – and follow the exercises in this post, exactly as you would if you hadn’t yet written a word. And do actually do this. As in pen-and-paper do it, not just “think about it for a minute or two then go on Twitter.” The act of writing things out will be helpful just in itself. How To Plot A Novel: The Template Remember that every subplot has its own little journey. Maybe a very simple one, but it will have its own beginning, middle and end, its own structure of Initiating Incident / Developments / Crisis / Resolution. Go ahead and drop everything you have into the grid below for every subplot as well as the main plot. MAIN PLOTSUBPLOT 1SUBPLOT 2SUBPLOT 3INITIATING INCIDENTMAIN PLOTCRISISRESOLUTION If you’ve got more complexity to accommodate than this allows, take care. No matter how sprawling an epic you’re writing, you need to be able to identify the essence or heart of the story you’re writing, so try paring your novel down – you can always add more details and columns after. How To Further Develop Your Plot Outline What happens if your plot doesn’t fit into that grid? If you give that exercise your very best go and just draw a blank? You may have a great story idea, but that\'s all it is - a basic idea. So how do you go from there to the plot points? This is particularly hard when drafting your first novel. You may love the vibe of your story, have developed some cool characters, you may even know your rising action or character arcs, but that doesn\'t mean you know how to plot a novel. The basic problems here are twofold: You don’t yet understand your plot well enough, or You just don’t have enough plot to sustain a full-length novel. Two different problems. Two different solutions. Let\'s look at building a story from an initial idea... The Snowflake Method The snowflake method allows you to expand on an idea and flesh it out bit by bit. This doesn’t mean tack on needless bits and pieces, like unnecessary drama just for the sake of it. It means adding depth and subplots, and developing the complexity of your protagonist’s story. Here are four ways to grow your story idea into a full plot. Method 1: Mirroring Imagine your name is Harper Lee and your story is the tale of a girl named Scout. Let’s say Scout’s spooked by an odd but harmless man living on her street. It’s fine, though there’s not yet enough complexity yet to carry a novel, so complicate it. One thought is giving her a father figure, say a lawyer, named Atticus. He’s fighting to defend a man accused of something he obviously didn’t do. Targeted for who he is, rather than anything he’s done. A black guy accused for looking different? An odd-but-harmless guy who spooks Scout? It’s straightforward, tragic mirroring. Atticus’ fight is lost, the stories interweave, and Scout learns compassion in To Kill A Mockingbird. Introducing that second, reverberating plot strand meant that Harper Lee’s novel had the heft to become a classic of world literature. Method 2: Ram Your Genre Into Something Different Another way to complicate your plot is to throw action into a different genre – such as sci-fi, fantasy or crime. So take The Time Traveler’s Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger. Without the time travel element it would be a standard issue romantic story, but by adding a fantasy element you have something shimmeringly new and exciting. Or take Tipping the Velvet, by Sarah Waters. Evocative Victorian historical novels are nothing new, but by adding a lesbian coming-of-age story in that context the result is a literary sensation. Method 3: Take Your Character And Max Them Out Why was it that The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo went on to get such gigantic sales across the globe? Stieg Larsson took a basic story and made its complex character, Lisbeth Salander, the star. Lisbeth is an autistic bisexual computer hacker and rape survivor - this made the story unique and intriguing. Method 4: Add Edge – A Glint Of Steel A few years back, I was struggling with one of my books, This Thing of Darkness. The basic plot, main characters and final climax were strong, it wasn\'t working. My solution? A glint of steel. I took an incident from the middle of the book – a break-in, and a theft, but no violence, no real time action – and I turned that into a long sequence involving the abduction of my protagonist. The need to rescue the main character made the book! Steel. Edge. Sex or violence. Those things work in crime novels, but they work in totally literary works too. Can you imagine Ian McEwan’s Atonement without that glint of sex? Would The Great Gatsby have worked if no one had died? How To Plot A Novel: The Next Step Now you have your plot, the next stage is to work on character development. I won\'t delve any deeper on that as info on character building is an entire collection of articles, which you can find here. But it\'s important to remember that plotting is merely the first stage of your writing process, because even with a strong plot a book without memorable main characters is nothing. Here\'s a quick summary of what we\'ve learned... Frequently Asked Questions What Are The 5 Parts To A Plot In A Story? Introduce characters and setting Inciting incident Main story premise Crisis/Realisation Resolution How Do You Plot A Novel In One Day? If you know roughly what your story is about, you can plot your novel in a matter of hours (in the most simplest of ways). Ask yourself what your character wants most in the world, and think about the incident that has turned their life upside down. Decide whether they achieve what they want by the end (or get what they NEED) and then show their journey. Start with this simple list: Main character (who leads the story) Status Quo (situation at the start) Motivation (what your character wants) Initiating incident (what disturbs the status quo – conflict) Developments (what happens next) Crisis (how things come to a head) Resolution (how things resolve) From here you can add all the details that will make your story shine. What Makes A Good Novel Plot? As a writer all you should care about is keeping your readers hooked. So make sure you understand your characters and their motivation, add lots of obstacles in their path to success, make them (and your readers) think all is lost, then show your character arc as they grow at the end (and if they don\'t succeed, at least offer some hope). Having completed this exercise you should have lots of notes on your plot and a very strong foundation from which to build your story. Which means now you can have the real fun and add all the details. Enjoy!

Including a template for you to follow and a working example When you approach literary agents, you will need to present them with a submission package that includes a query letter, a sample of your manuscript and, of course, a synopsis. If you’re asking yourself how to write the synopsis, you should know it will need to look professional – that is, it wants to follow a proper synopsis format – and it needs to do its job, of convincing a literary agent that your story sounds exciting. That’s not actually hard to achieve, and this post will tell you exactly how to write a novel synopsis. We’ll reveal the two huge tricks that make your life easy as a synopsis writer…and give you an example of a novel synopsis too, so you can understand exactly how to put the rules into practice. Sounds good? Let’s jump right in. How To Write A Novel Synopsis What is the synopsis? A synopsis is a 500-800 word summary of your book that forms part of your agent submission pack. It should outline your plot in neutral non-salesy language and demonstrate a clear narrative arc. Every character, any big turning point or climactic scene, and all plot twists should get a mention. But lets go into the definition in more detail. Definition: What Is A Synopsis? A synopsis is: A short summary of your story, in its entirety, from beginning to end, soup to nuts, nose to tail. Written in fairly neutral, non-salesy language. Follows the same broad structure as your novel. So if, for example, you have a novel with two intertwining time-strands, your synopsis would follow the order of events as presented in the novel. Your novel’s structure trumps any chronological issues. Probably about 500-800 words in length, but agents’ requirements differ, so do check against each agent’s submission requirements. What Is The Difference Between A Synopsis And A Blurb? A good synopsis is not like the text on the back jacket of a book. Those book blurbs are much shorter and normally offer only a teaser, rather than a full rundown of the book’s story. For the same reason, a novel synopsis is not the same as an Amazon-style book description. In fact, a book synopsis is what you think it is. A 500-word long spoiler for your entire novel. Every major plot twist. Every major character. Any big turning point. Your big climactic scenes. They’re all there, briefly, succinctly and (yes) a little drily narrated. Oh yes: and some good news – If you can write a novel, then you can definitely write a synopsis. Writing a synopsis is a lot, lot easier than writing a whole damn novel, so don’t stress. You should be able to put together your synopsis in a morning – and still have time for a stroll before lunch. Purpose: What Is A Synopsis for? I just said that a book synopsis is kinda dry – and it is. In fact, I doubt if anyone has ever enjoyed reading one. It’s just not that entertaining. So if it’s not for fun – why have it? What is the synopsis of a book for, and why do almost all literary agents ask for one? OK, so this is how it works: Most literary agents will look at your covering letter first, then turn to the manuscript. If they like the first three chapters, they’ll be thinking, “This looks great, but is it going to hold interest? Is it worth making that investment of time to read it all?” That’s where the synopsis comes in. Your book synopsis is there to outline your plot and to demonstrate a clear story arc, a satisfying ending. It’s your tool to make someone read on. That’s why your synopsis needs to: Tell an agent directly and clearly what your plot is – it needs to give a clear picture of the narrative arc; Clearly identify your main characters – and at least hint at any major character development arcs; Make clear what your hook, premise or elevator pitch is; Demonstrate implicitly its appeal and how plot momentum increases; Share an ending that feels satisfying. If your synopsis achieves all that – and your query letter and manuscript sample is up to scratch – the agent will ask you for the full manuscript. They can’t not. You’ve got them hooked. Synopsis: Length, Tone, Format The format of a wonderful synopsis has the following ingredients: Length Your synopsis should be about 500 words (but check agency requirements – they can be quite variable). There’s a lot of advice around suggesting that your synopsis should run to no more than one page. We think that’s on the low side. Most good synopses we see run to two nicely formatted pages (ie: reasonable line spacing, normal margins and a sensible font.) Language Be business-like; clear, to the point, neutral. In particular, it’s fine to tell not show: this is a business document, not the novel itself. Presentation Be well-presented with no typos or spelling mistakes. Use normal fonts, normal margins, and line spacing no narrower than 1.5. It’s fine if your synopsis runs to two pages, but (unless an agent specifically asks for more), don’t run to more than that. Character Names Put the names of main characters in bold or CAPS when you first introduce them. That makes the synopsis easier to navigate. Character Thumbnails As well as highlighting your characters names, you should give a swift resume of who they are, on first introduction. So for example: “James Bond, (38), a British agent – handsome, cruel, seductive, and high-living – …”. Note that you can insert age in brackets without having to say your protagonist “is thirty-eight years old.” Save that word count! Extra Points If you have a compelling way to ‘sell’ your story in 2-3 lines maximum, you could insert that little snippet up at the top of your synopsis. Third Person Presentation Even if your novel is narrated in the first person, your synopsis should be written in the third person. So (to pick one of my own first person detective novels for example), I wouldn’t write “I am a police constable in South Wales …”, but rather, “Fiona Griffiths is a police constable, based in South Wales…” You can instantly see how much more professional the third person sounds to the reader, right? Tense Your novel synopsis should be written in the present tense, so that the agent feels connected to the story and like they\'re experiencing its events in real time. File Name Please don’t call your file synopsis.doc. That works fine for you on your computer – but the agent probably has 100 files from writers with that exact filename. So help the agent out. Your file should be in the format title-synopsis. So: farewell-to-arms-synopsis.doc, for example. And once again: tell the story. Your job is not to sell the book, write the blurb, or anything else, just say what happens in the story. How To Write A Synopsis For Your Novel There are two big tricks in getting your synopsis right. They are: First, Build Your Synopsis Structure Don’t take your massive 100,000 word manuscript and try to figure out how to cram all its rich complexity into a 500 word precis. It can’t be done. You’ll go crazy. Your synopsis will be terrible. Instead of going from your manuscript and boiling it down, you need to go from your structure and build up. That’s the trick. It works every time and it’s awesome. What’s your structure? It’s this: Status quo Inciting incident Rising action/Developments Crisis Resolution Without looking at your manuscript, sketch out your plot using those headings in about 300 words. The ‘developments’ section obviously represents the largest portion of your novel, but it may not amount to more than 40-50% of your total word count here. That’s fine. Missing out excessive detail is exactly the point. It’s precisely what you’re trying to do. So do it, and don’t fret. Equally: don’t get into too much detail about character or settings or anything like that. Just focus on the exact mechanics of each plot point for now. Second only to your novel, these are the most important documents you’ll ever write – so get them sorted fast, easily, and with excellence. You’ll be glad you did. Second, Layer In Character Details The second trick is equally simple and equally effective. It’s this: Layer in information about who your characters are and how the events of the story impact them. Synopses can feel like rather cold and baffling documents. When they do (and assuming they’re decently written), it’s always because the writer has focused entirely on plot machinery and hasn’t said enough about why it matters to the characters. But we read books for the characters, so your synopsis has to engage with those emotional aspects too. Remember I gave you only 300 words for the actual plot machinery? The remaining 200 words are where you can express yourself with protagonists, emotions and character arcs. Example (Without Character/Emotion Language): “As BELLA walks into the class, a fan blows her scent towards a boy, named EDWARD CULLEN. Bella sits next to Edward in biology class on her first day of school. He disappears for a few days, but sees more of Bella upon his return. Bella is then nearly struck by a van in the school parking lot. Edward saves Bella, stopping the van with only his hand.”(Adapted from the Wikipedia synopsis of Twilight) Example (With Character/Emotion Language) “As BELLA walks into the class, a fan blows her scent towards a mysterious boy named EDWARD CULLEN. Bella sits next to Edward in biology class on her first day of school, but he seems repulsed by her, affecting her feelings in the process. He disappears for a few days, but warms up to Bella upon his return; their newfound relationship is interrupted after Bella is nearly struck by a van in the school parking lot. Edward saves Bella, stopping the van with only his hand.”(Source: as above) Do you see how much more engaging the second version is to the reader? Although the text remains quite dry, by including emotional/character-type language in its summary, we have some sense of the real, developing relationship. Short message: don’t focus so hard on plot mechanics that you forget to layer in emotion. Writing A Synopsis: Common Mistakes Here’s what not to do. Miss the agent’s word count by a mile. If an agent’s website gives you a particular word count to aim for, then deliver that, at least approximately. You may find you need a couple of different versions of the same documents, just because those blooming agents can’t cohere around one set word count. Jeepers. Those guys. Go into detail about setting: If you were writing a synopsis for a Jane Austen novel, for example, you might simply say: “This novel is set in a small village in Regency England.” You don’t need more. Go into vast detail about character: A few quick strokes are all that you need. (For example: “Ella, an experienced but overconfident assassin (36)…”) Be scrupulous about plot detail: It’s fine to skip subplots or ignore some finer details. The truth is, you won’t have time to include those things in a 500-word summary. Agents know that the synopsis is at best an approximation of the story. Hide the plot twist: A synopsis is the ultimate plot spoiler, opposite to a blurb, and your job is to reveal all major plot points, whether you like it or not. Start telling us about the novel. So, for example, don’t say, “Then the novel picks up the story of Kate and Jacob…”. Say: “Meanwhile, Kate and Jacob…” Cram in too many character names. Four or five is the maximum an agent wants to deal with. If you need to refer to other characters, just say, “the CIA agent” or “the beautiful doctor”. Forget to put your character names in CAPS or bold. Make it easy for the literary agent! Omit the title. Yes, we’ve seen synopses entitled “Synopsis”. Make sure you have both the title of your book and your name up at the top of your document. So your title line might read: A Farewell to Arms: Synopsis”, and beneath that in smaller text you’d have your name – maybe Ernest somebody-or-other. Use an unhelpful filename. Your document needs to be yourbooktitle-synopsis.doc. Write badly. Yes, a synopsis is a brisk, functional document, and you don’t need to write wonderfully. But you are still a writer trying to sell your work, so don’t allow yourself clumsy or badly expressed sentences. Fail to use our incredible Agent Submission Builder. These tools help you structure and write your synopsis and your query letter in a trice. Or even less than that – a dice. You can get them for free here. Watcha waitin’ for? If you’re not making those errors, you should be good to go. If you need help on getting your plot structure right in the first place, then check out these links: how to plot, more on using plot outlines, and how to apply the snowflake method to your story construction process. Synopsis: An Example This is a synopsis example penned by one of our own clients, Tracy Gilpin. The synopsis (and the book) went on to wow a literary agent and secure a book deal. Synopsis Of Double Cross By Tracy Gilpin Dunai Marks discovers the strangled corpse of Siobhan Craig, an activist who is not only her employer but also a mother figure; Dunai had been abandoned at an orphanage as a baby. Siobhan was about to present to government the results of a controversial population control model for possible implementation at national level. Dunai believes this is the reason she was murdered. The investigating officer on the case is instructed by an agent of the National Intelligence Agency to treat the murder as a botched burglary. Although some evidence points in this direction, Dunai believes Siobhan’s murder was work-related, which means she and Bryan, an American statistician, could be in danger. She strikes a deal with Carl, a private investigator. If she is able to find a motive for the murder he will show her how to go about catching the killer. Dunai discovers Siobhan was blackmailing five people who stood in the way of her pilot project, and was involved with a subversive group of radical feminists called Cerchio Del Gaia whose insignia is a double cross. Dunai and Carl investigate the individuals blackmailed by Siobhan. They include: an anti-abortion activist, the head of an all-male religious fundamentalist group, an Anglican bishop, a member of local government, and a USAID official. One of these suspects was the last person to see Siobhan alive, another is known to have approached a contract killer a month before her murder. Cerchio Del Gaia becomes increasingly entangled in both Dunai’s life and the investigation, and she is told that if she joins the group she will have access to information about her birth. The National Intelligence Agency is on a similar tack; if Dunai infiltrates Cerchio Del Gaia, which they believe is an international terrorist organisation, they will provide her with information about her origins. Dunai turns down both offers and the mystery of her birth and abandonment is eventually revealed by a woman claiming to be Siobhan’s sister, Dunai’s birth mother and the head of the South African chapter of Cerchio Del Gaia. Throughout the investigation Dunai has searched for Mr Bojangles, a schizophrenic vagrant who may have seen the murderer. When she eventually finds him he seems to be of little help, yet it is his ramblings along with another clue that leads to her close friend and colleague, Bryan, who has been wanted by the FBI for twenty years for terrorist activities in the US. Bryan murdered Siobhan after discovering she intended betraying him to the National Intelligence Agency to deflect attention from Cerchio Del Gaia and as proof that she abided by the law even when it meant personal sacrifice. Carl, who is now romantically involved with Dunai, offers to continue her training as an investigator and she agrees to divide her time between this and Siobhan’s NGO. What Next? We suggest using Tracy’s synopsis as a great example for your own synopsis format. If you need more help writing your synopsis and query letter, we offer an agent submission pack review, which is one of the many manuscript editing services we provide. Happy writing – and have fun. Frequently Asked Questions How Do You Write A Good Novel Synopsis? To write a good synopsis, you need to write in the third person; use correct grammar; examine the structure of your novel and include all the main plot points; write in neutral language; include your hook; ensure you stick to the word count; layer in information about your characters; include all spoilers and plot twists; and include your novel\'s title. What Should Be Included In A Novel Synopsis? A novel synopsis should include: your premise/hook, the overall plot (all of the major plot points), an introduction to your main characters, plot twists and spoilers, and character development arcs. How Many Words Should A Novel Synopsis Be? Synopsis lengths can vary- check to see the length the literary agent you\'re querying has suggested- but they tend to be around 500 words long.

So, you’ve written a travel memoir and you’re ready to find an agent to represent it? Or maybe you’ve written a travel guide and can’t wait to get it out there.   WANT TO JUMP STRAIGHT TO THE AGENT LIST? CLICK HERE  Travel Non-Fiction There are many different forms of travel writing, and it’s important to figure out where your book places in the market before you start querying authors. A travel memoir is very different from a travel guide, and something narrative will have a far different appeal than something more fact-driven.  If you’re writing a travel book, it also needs to set itself apart from others like it in the market. Take a look at Into the Wild, Eat Pray Love, or Under the Tuscan Sun, what sets them apart and makes them so appealing to readers? Bear this in mind when querying agents, and show them what makes your book unique.  AgentMatch And How To Use It There are plenty of travel book-loving agents, but you won\'t want to approach them all. The best way to develop and refine your own shortlist of US agents for travel non-fiction is to visit AgentMatch, our literary agent database, and use the search tools on the left to make your selection.  With AgentMatch you can select by genre (e.g. travel non-fiction), country, the agent’s level of experience, their appetite for new clients, and much more. You can even save your search results and come back to them, allowing you to work through them one by one, at your own pace. Each profile has been researched thoroughly including what agents like to read in their spare time, information on their most recent deals, manuscript wishlists, submission requirements, and exclusive interviews.  You can sign-up for a 7-day free trial which will give you a good feel for the data and functionality. Or join us as a premium member and get unlimited access to AgentMatch.  US Agents For Travel Non-Fiction  To get you started we’ve selected a list of 20 US agents looking for travel non-fiction:  [am_show_agents id=15] More Resources   We’re here to help you at every step in your writing and querying process. Check out our favourite blogs that can assist you in putting together your query letter and synopsis, and if you want valuable, personal feedback on your writing you can book a fifteen-minute One-to-One with an agent of your choice. Premium members can also get a free query letter review from our lovely Writer Support team!    Happy searching, and good luck on your querying journey!   

When I wrote my first novel, I had no idea the project was hard. I didn’t write a plot outline. I didn’t sit down to plan my story. I didn’t actually do anything by means of any preparation at all. I just sat down, and wrote a book. As it happened, that book worked out well. It sold for plenty of money and went on to become a bestseller. I thought, “Yep, I can do this. I’m a great writer. Of course I don’t need to plan my next novel. I’ll just figure it out as I go along.” Big mistake. My second book was so bad that my editor basically called me in and told me that it was completely unpublishable in its current form. My editor was right. I knew he was. So I went home, opened up the file on my computer. Hit Ctrl-A for “select all”. And hit delete. My second novel – gone. I rewrote that novel and this time it did fine. It got entered into one of the UK’s biggest summer book promotions. It aroused some film interest. (We got an offer actually, and accepted it, but the company went down in flames before I got any cash.) And I date my writing career – my real writing career – from there. Not from my first novel, which did fine, but which just landed in my head and on the page thanks to some benevolent higher power. But from my second novel, which I had to wrestle into existence. Which I had to figure out and plan from scratch. You’re reading this post because you’re smarter than I was back then. You’ve figured out not just that you want to start writing a novel, but that you want to plan it too. You’ve realised that: If you have an outline of your novel – a structure in fact –you’re much less likely to go wrong as you write it. Yes, I know that’s obvious. I was just dumb. So this post is going to tell you how NOT to write a novel the way I tried to do it that second time. We’re going to plan out an entire structure for a novel – a complete story outline, in fact – and we’re going to do it easily. And well. We don’t want an easy way to write a bad story. We want an easy way to write a good one. Are you with me? You are? Then let’s go. How To Plot A Novel Using The Snowflake Method: Write your story in one sentence Decide on your protagonist Write a paragraph on settings Add a beginning, middle and end to your story description Write short character summaries Expand your story description to 2 pages Keep adding details until you’re ready to write What’s The Snowflake Method, And Why Use It? So this post is going to tell you how to build up a novel outline, piece by piece. (For a reminder of plot basics, go here.) The idea of the “Snowflake” method is that it’s circular and incremental. So you don’t build your outline like this: Chapter 1: X happens, then Y happens Chapter 2: Something else happens Chapter 3: and then something else etc That way is really hard to pull off. I’ve written a lot of books and I’ve never once succeeded by attempting this technique. What you’re likely to find is a mess of a first draft. Yes, you can fix it, but it’s much easier to do things right in the first place. The way the Snowflake Method works is much cleverer. It’s a much simpler way to structure your story... and will give you a much better story as well. (The idea, by the way, was first developed by Randy Ingermanson – so, thanks, Randy.) Here’s the basic idea. You build your outline like this: What’s the idea of your novel? Write it down in one sentence. Who’s the protagonist (hero or heroine) of your story. Write that down in one sentence. What’s the setting of your story? One sentence there, please Then you go back to the idea of your story. This time you tease it out into five segments with 1 sentence (or so) for each one. And  so on The reason this method works is that it works the way the human brain works. It doesn’t ask for a ton of detail upfront before it’s settled in your mind. It uses the actual process of working to generate more thoughts and more detail...so you only ever need to make incremental changes to what you did before. How To Plan Out Your Novel: Approach And Mindset We’re writing creatively, right? That means two things: It’s going to be slow and jumpy.It’s not like writing a report at work, where you just need to put in enough hours and the job will get done. Sure, you need to put some hours in front of a keyboard . . . but maybe you also need to go walk the dogs, listen to some music, have a swim. It’s often enough when you’re musing but not actually working that you get the breakthroughs you need. So sure, sit at a keyboard: that part is essential. But give yourself the space to do other things too. Make space for those breakthroughs. You’ll make mistakes.And that’s good! Mistakes are good! The imagination has to be able to try stuff out. When you go clothes shopping, you see something you like,then try it on. When you look at yourself in the mirror, more often than not, you’ll think, “Nope, not  quite right.” But if you don’t try stuff on, you won’t find what is right. So let yourself try out ideas. That’s what a first draft novel outline is for. Give those ideas space and time to show you what they’re made of. And don’t get upset if you throw things away. You’ll only get to the great stuff by sifting plenty of just-not-good-enough ideas first Use The Snowflake Method: Getting Started Before you start writing your novel, make sure you have something worth writing about! The idea of the Snowflake Method is that you pen first the heart or core of your novel, so the rest can expand from here. From here, you flesh out, building out to key milestones in plot, profiling how each main character views the story, and so on, and so on – until you’re ready to start. Take a piece of paper or fire up a new document. This is how it’s done. 1 Write A One-sentence Description For Your Novel An easy starting point. This is the sum of your story, your protagonist’s journey. Where will they go, what will they achieve, how will they grow? See if you can condense all that succinctly in a single sentence or two. That sentence is the whole point of the Snowflake Method. So let’s say, you want to write a private eye type story set in 1940s Los Angeles. You love writers like Raymond Chandler, but you want to offer something new as well. So maybe you throw in one unexpected ingredient – you want to do something that Chandler himself would never have done. So, in this example, you’ve chosen to add a ghost story element to your novel. Sure, that’s just an example, but we’ll work with that idea as we develop the way the Snowflake Method actually works. Example: 1 sentence story description A private eye (Bernie Brandon) is trying to track down the killer of beautiful murder victim Amy Adderley... but Amy’s ghost is stalking Bernie. Does that work for you? It works for me, I think. I’d like to know more about that story. 2 Who’s The Protagonist (Hero Or Heroine) Of Your Novel? Now write down something – a sentence or two – about your protagonist. Don’t push yourself to write more here than you want, and remember that anything you do write can be scrubbed out and changed later. Changing your mind isn’t bad, remember. It shows that you’re approaching this task in a flexible and imaginative way. But, OK, for now, let’s try something like this: Example: Protagonist description in 1 sentence Bernie Brandon is an ex-cop. Lives alone. Is a problem drinker. Has a soft spot for any beautiful woman, but can’t manage long term relationships. Somewhat lonely. Is an excellent cello player, and plays the cello when he’s feeling blue. Did I say one sentence? I did. Was that one sentence? It was not. But if it comes, it comes. Don’t hold yourself back. The purpose of the Snowflake Method is to build incrementally from a simple starting point. It’s meant to remove the mental block of being asked to build too much scaffolding before you’re ready. But if you’re ready, then let yourself rip. We need to build up your main characters at some point anyway. Oh, and I originally thought that my protagonist was just going to be Bernie Brandon, only I realise I have an impulse to bring the victim / ghost more into the story as well. Maybe this story is going to be a two-hander, where Bernie and Amy both take turns to narrate? I don’t yet know the answer to that, but if you want to write something additional down about your characters here, then do. Example: 1 sentence about another major character Amy Adderley is a rich girl, dead before the start of the story. She is (or was) a singer. I didn’t find myself having more to say about Amy, so we’ll leave her there for now. 3 Write A Paragraph Or So About Your Major Setting Or Settings OK, we know what we’re doing here, right? We’re working with a 1940s Los Angeles noir. We want to evoke all that Bogart / Bacall smart-talking, hard-drinking era. So: Example: Paragraph about settings Los Angeles in the 1940s. The place is seedy, post-Prohibition, and most of the big money is dirty money. We’re thinking about big oceanfront homes, with  glossy sedan cars outside. We’re thinking about squalid little diners up in the hills where lonely souls, like Brandon, can get meals after midnight and avoid going home. This is an LA where the girls are pretty, but fallen, and the cops can be bought. And you know what? As I wrote that paragraph Click! Something clicked for me about Amy Adderley. I wasn’t looking for that to happen, but that’s how this outlining method works. You go round the various different elements of your novel (Story, Protagonists, Settings), step by step, adding detail as you go. And pop! Working one one thing, you get an insight into another thing. Those insights are what this outline process is all about. They’re why we use this method in the first place. So I’m going to jump back to my description of Amy Adderley and add this: Example: 1 sentence about another main character Amy Adderley is a rich girl, dead before the start of the story. She is (or was) a singer – but classical. She loves Schubert lieder and opera. her father, however, is a brute. A nightclub guy who made his money dirtily during Prohibition. The father’s type of singing is strictly nightclub fare – and a lot of his girls will do more than just sing for the customers . . . if the customers pay enough. Boom! You like it? We have to have a reason for why Amy is killed, and her father’s background already provides more than half an answer. And also, we gave Bernie the cello to play, just because he’s a lonely but talented guy and we had to give him something to do in his hours at home. But now Amy is a singer, a classical one. So there’s this lovely link between them. Almost like they could be lovers, right? Except that she’s dead already . . . but that feels just right for the mood of this novel. Notice that we haven’t yet said anything much about our actual story yet, but now that we have an outline of our major ingredients, we’re going to hurtle back with interest to the story itself. So, round we go again. We’re hitting the same basic targets – story, character, settings – but this time we already know more about our ingredients, so we can add layers of detail that weren’t available to us before. Using The Snowflake To Build Your Story Outline We’ve got the ingredients for our novel now. So now we need to add layers of detail. OK, so here we go again. And we’ll start by jumping back to the story that we started to create before. 4 Flesh Out Your Story Description, So It Contains A Beginning, Middle And End Our first draft story idea didn’t say a whole lot more than, “Let’s write a Raymond Chandler style novel . . . but include a ghost.” As we started to build the other elements of our novel outline, though, the story itself jumped into view a little more. (We got data on Amy’s father, and possible reasons why his daughter might have got herself killed.) So now we’re going to try to write a version of the story – still maybe only a single paragraph – but this time we’re going to give that story its basic structure: a beginning, middle and end. Already you can feel that first draft idea starting to wriggle into life. Exciting, right? So we might go with something like this. Example: Very short story outline, with beginning, middle and end Beginning: Amy’s father (Dorcan Adderley) sends a henchman to hire Bernie Brandon to investigate the death of his daughter. Bernie rejects the henchman, but meets one to one with Dorcan, and agrees to take the job. Middle: Bernie investigates. Keeps encountering / being pursued by Amy’s ghost. Bernie discovers that Amy had a fling with the son of some big wheel in the LA underworld. [Let’s call the son, Patrick Prettyboy – probably not a name that will end up in the final novel!] Bernie realises he’s meant to think Prettyboy killed Amy. He almost goes to the police with the news. End. Amy’s actual killer was her father. The whole private investigation thing was just a way to throw the blame elsewhere (and win a turf war at the same time.) Bernie doesn’t have enough evidence to take Dorcan before a court, but he confronts him and there is a struggle, which results in Dorcan’s death. Amy & Bernie, by now ‘lovers’ across the ghostly divide, play music into the small hours. How’s that? It’s not a finished story outline, by any means – but doesn’t this already feel like something that could have legs? And I’ll tell you the truth: when I began this blog post, I had no idea what story example I was going to choose. I just made it up as I went along. And presto: we already have the bones of a decent story here! That’s how easy the Snowflake Method can be. So now we cycle back to our characters again. 5 Write A Short Summary Sheet For Your Main Characters OK, I think we now have three or four characters to play with: Bernie Brandon, our PI Amy Adderley, our ghost Dorcan Adderley, our bad guy Maybe Paul Prettyboy, though he’s certainly lesser than these other three. So now we’d give them each a whole sheet of paper. We’d start to ask questions about them, and start to sketch out our answers. This is a trial and error process. So maybe we start off by giving Paul Prettyboy his own nightclub to run, a gift from daddy. Except maybe that makes the whole story a little bit too nightclubby in tone. So how about we jump to the other end of things? Maybe Paul Prettyboy runs an upmarket art gallery, somewhere nice in Pasadena. He looks sauve, and sounds suave, but under it all, he’s still just a thug. A mini-me of his father. If you want to get an idea of what questions to ask about your character, you can get a great starting list here. Because we’re beginning to get more detailed – and because this is only a blog post! – I’m not going to give examples of everything from here on. *** A Word Of Warning *** We’ll go on to develop the Snowflake Method as a tool for templating out your story or novel, but first let me make one thing clear. I’m just writing a blog post, and I don’t want that post to splurge to some ridiculous length. But you are writing a book, not a blog post, so you can’t mess around. In fact, for the avoidance of doubt: You have to do this exercise in full. So, you’re going to write one page on each of your major characters, plus notes on whatever other ones pop into your brain. And here’s one more guideline that you just have to follow as you go through this novel outline process. This rule is not optional and it takes precedence over all the others: If you get an idea, write it down. Until you have actually written it (handwritten or on screen, whichever),you haven’t captured it. And you have to capture it:that’s what releases your brain to go on to the next stage. That, in a nutshell, is why most of the people who want to write a novel, don’t write a novel. They think that dreaming around with characters and stories and scenes will produce a novel. It won’t. It doesn’t. What produces a novel is: work. You write stuff down. You start thinking of the next thing. You write that down. You move on. Yes, sure, at times you’ll go back and undo some of the stuff you did before. (So first we had Paul Prettyboy as a nightclub owner. Then we realised we weren’t satisfied with that and changed it to art dealer. But we had to specify ‘nightclub owner’ in order to get to the insight that produced ‘art gallery owner’. Even mistakes are rich in insight.) Right. Lecture over. Back to the Story Outline process. 6 Expand Your Story To About Two Pages Stick with those Beginning / Middle / End sections. They’re a helpful tool for organising your novel structure. But now you want to get more detailed. So in our early attempt at sketching the story, we wrote: Beginning: Amy’s father (Dorcan Adderley) sends a henchman to hire Bernie Brandon to investigate the death of his daughter. Bernie rejects the henchman, but meets one to one with Dorcan, and agrees to take the job. And that was fine, for back then, but now we want to know more. So that little beginning description might expand to something like this. Example: Story beginning in more detail Beginning: Bernie Brandon is in his office. No work, nothing to do. There is whisky in his desk drawer and he is trying not to drink it. A big scary guy – suit, colourful – comes to hire him. Plonks down a roll of dollar bills. Too much money  for the job. There’s some wise-cracking interchange. Brandon refuses the job. Big scary guy leaves. Brandon gets the guys registration plate, phones it through to the cops – his former colleagues – and gets an ID. Brandon finds the henchman’s car that evening, tails it to a nightclub. Realises henchman guy is working for Dorcan Adderley – with whom he, Brandon, has some history. Brandon barges his way into Adderley’s office and says, in effect, “I don’t work for the staff. If I work for anyone, I work for the boss.” Adderley laughs and gets him a drink. [and so on.] Oh, and you know I said that thing about writing stuff down? That just thinking about it isn’t good enough? Well, I’m right, and here’s the proof. As I was writing that little section above, I thought, “Hey, where’s Amy ghost in this? She needs to make an early entry.” So I almost edited the example above to make room for her, but then realised that this post is meant to give you an example of the  Snowflake Method in action, and that means that I need to show you the bits I missed, the new insertions, the second thoughts . . . all the changes of direction that the Snowflake Method is there to permit. So for that reason, here’s my second shot at that beginning section: Beginning: Bernie Brandon is in his office – blah, blah, blah – all the same as before, right down to Brandon getting an ID for the henchperson. Brandon finds the henchman’s car that evening, and waits outside. As he’s waiting, he hears music – classical singing. Schubert Lieder. Strangely, the (female) singer is singing the exact song that Brandon had been playing on the piano shortly before coming out. He tries to find the source of the music, but it proves elusive. He has a constant sense of being watched. When Henchperson leaves the for the evening, Brandon tails him to a nightclub. [Then all as previously, except I think that ghostly presence has to vanish, almost petulantly, as she/Brandon get close to Dorcan Adderley.] Yeah. That’s better, right? We’ve got a lovely double note coming into the start of that book. A contemporary reader would think, “Yep, this feels a little like Raymond Chandler, but with a subtle , strange different element that I can’t yet place. I like it.” 7 Keep Going Until You’re Ready To Stop Planning, And Starting Writing Your Novel The guy who popularised the Snowflake Method, Randy Ingermanson, has a pretty fixed bunch of guidelines on how you’re meant to do this. So you’re meant to go from a one paragraph description of the story, to a one page / four paragraph description of the story / then onto a full four page description of the story. Something similar applies to the other elements of your novel. If that works for you, then go for it! But really there are no fixed rules here, and no set end-goal. Or rather the only two fixed rules are: You have to write stuff down You have to circle round between story / characters / themes / settings,adding detail on every go round. And the only end-goal that matters is this: When you feel super-ready to start writing your novel –and not just ready, but actually impatient –then you can start writing your book. Personally, I’m not much of a planner, so I tend to jump into my books sooner rather than later (and, I’ll admit, sometimes regret my decision.) The mere fact that you’re reading this post suggests to me that you’ve got a good bit of planner in you (or you’re just procrastinating quite badly), in which case I think a reasonable stopping point would be as follows. You will have: Several pages of notes / ideas about your major characters At least a page on your most important secondary characters Several pages talking about settings, locations, themes, time of year, etc. All the background stuff that will make your novel live and breathe. 3-4 pages of notes on your story, and those pages will include . . . A full page (or more) on the beginning / set-up phase of your book. That’ll include the Initiating Incident (in our example, that’s the henchman/Brandon meeting but, even more so, the Brandon/Dorcan Adderley one), but you’ll probably also find yourself describing the immediate consequences of that incident. The Set-Up Phase will probably account for about 25% of your actual final finished novel. You will probably also have a page or so on the Climax and Resolution of your novel. In our example, it would involve the the denouement of the mystery (“Who killed Amy Adderley?”), the physical showdown between Dorcan Adderley and Brandon, and the romantic climax too (the ghost and the PI playing sad classical music into the small hours.) This Climax & Resolution Material will cover the final 25% of the novel Then you’ll also have something on that awkward middle section – the middle 50% – that we just label ‘Developments’. You want to know the truth here? Most authors – including pro authors with multiple books, and even perhaps multiple bestsellers under their belts – will tend to struggle with that ‘Developments’ section. When writers complain about their work (and we mostly love it), the mos tly love it), the most frequent reason is that they’re encountering the rocks and white water that mark the transition from Set-up to Developments. So, my own personal guidance (which you should tailor to suit your own personality and your own experience with your particular story) would be to make a decent shot at guessing what your developments section would look like. So I certainly wouldn’t advise that you just ignore it completely. But when you start writing your novel, be aware that you may need to pause once the book is about 25% written, so you can come back to a version of this exercise and redo it. Why redo it? Because you’ll be returning to your story outline process with much greater feel for your characters, your settings, all the richness of that set-up material, and so on. That richness will give you a ton of insight into how to navigate the rocks that lie ahead. If you’re a planner, then you may want to synopsise the entire novel at that point. You might even find that you can do it chapter by chapter. I can’t do it that way – never have, never will – but I do still take a moment at the 25% mark to rethink where I’m going. (Oh, and when I say “take a moment”, what I actually mean is “Spend two weeks grumbling around the house and looking for excuses to do anything else other than sit in front of my laptop and work.” I LOVE writing, and I love being a writer. But that part of the planning process? I do not love.) Ready To Start Writing Your Novel? Get help. It may make the difference between success or failure. When I wrote my first novel, I didn’t write much of an outline. I didn’t plan anything very much. I just sat and wrote. And yes, that novel got published and did well. But yes, I also ended up doing a ton more work than I would have done if I’d planned properly from the start. And my second novel? Well, it was just a total car crash, because I thought I knew how to write novels, when I really, really didn’t. We’ve talked through a lot of the technique you’re going to bring to bear in your own writing journey, and – believe me – that technique is going to reward you a million times over. But wouldn’t you like more help than that? Of course you would! Writing is a pretty lonely business, and wouldn’t it be great if you could: Get comments and feedback on your work from like-minded writers? Get the benefit of a massive super-premium video course on How To Write? Watch filmed masterclasses from top tutors teaching specific examples of writing technique? Meet literary agents and editors online, so you can get a feel for the industry you want to be a part of? Get an entire video course on Getting Published from a bunch of people who have helped hundreds of people like you get published? Watch films & videos especially created for writers like you and focusing on the questions and issues that writers like you are interested in? Have a kind of “Agony Aunt” for writers service, where you could just bring your questions and have them answered with tact and expertise? That sounds good, doesn’t it . . . but surely not for real? Surely nothing like that actually exists? Well, yes, it does. And you’re right here on the site that can make all that happen. Jericho Writers is a club for writers like you and we welcome new members. Once you take out a membership, everything that we can provide digitally comes to you for free. Every course, every video, the entire community, everything. Membership is cheap and you can cancel any time. There are no restrictions at all on how much of our content you can access during the course of your membership. The Snowflake Method is a truly great way to develop and plan your novel outline. But Jericho Writers can help with absolutely everything: writing, publishing, self-publishing, everything.

So, you’re well on your way to completing your book on politics and current affairs, and have a cracking book proposal that you can’t wait to share with agents. Well, we’re here to help!  WANT TO JUMP STRAIGHT TO THE AGENT LIST? CLICK HERE  Politics And Current Affairs Political non-fiction includes topics such as governments, current affairs, and political figures or situations. They cover a range of topics that will be accessible and of interest to the mass readership, and often intend to educate readers on things they may not otherwise know. It is important to remain current and up-to-date on what is going on in the world when writing political non-fiction, particularly if it relates to your own book. The political and social worlds change at such a pace that something that was of relevance 6 months ago may not pick up the same level of readers today. An understanding of the political world would therefore be required in order to predict and be aware of trends. For example, a book about the American voting system (or a presidential election) would likely be most successful in the year leading up to the election (as candidates take on the lengthy campaign process), and then immediately afterwards.   Very niche topics will be difficult to find an agent for, as they simply won’t sell as well as something very commercial or broader topics that will appeal to a wider range of readers. If your book is very niche you may be best going directly to publishers who specialise in that topic.  Literary agents may have a more broad interest in political non-fiction and be happy to receive anything within the genre, others may have more specific tastes or interests. You should look closely at their wish-lists in order to find the best agent for your book. There may even be an agent who is especially interested in receiving the exact book you are writing, which would be perfect.  AgentMatch And How To Use It There are plenty of agents who love political works, but you won\'t want to approach them all. The best way to develop and refine your own shortlist of US agents for politics and current affairs is to visit AgentMatch, our literary agent database, and use the search tools on the left to make your selection.  With AgentMatch you can select by genre (e.g. politics and current affairs), country, the agent’s level of experience, their appetite for new clients, and much more. You can even save your search results and come back to them, allowing you to work through them one by one, at your own pace. Each profile has been researched thoroughly including what agents like to read in their spare time, information on their most recent deals, manuscript wishlists, submission requirements, and exclusive interviews.  You can sign-up for a 7-day free trial which will give you a good feel for the data and functionality. Or join us as a premium member and get unlimited access to AgentMatch.  US Agents For Politics And Current Affairs  To get you started we’ve selected a list of 20 US agents looking for politics and current affairs:  [am_show_agents id=21] More Resources   We’re here to help you at every step in your writing and querying process. Check out our favourite blogs that can assist you in putting together your query letter and synopsis, and if you want valuable, personal feedback on your writing you can book a fifteen-minute One-to-One with an agent of your choice. Premium members can also get a free query letter review from our lovely Writers Support team!    Happy searching, and good luck on your querying journey!   

Sophie Beal came to the Festival of Writing 2018. She did not get an agent, but did get inspired. Dear Myself-of-the-Weeks-Before-the-Festival, This letter is for you, poring over the Jericho resources, searching for wisdom on those ultimate questions: how can I know the Festival won’t be a waste of time and money? And what if, instead of an agent, I get conclusive proof I’m delusional? These are the things you’ll want to know up front. You don’t make any of the competition shortlists. You have a very depressing 1-2-1. That dream, where agents and publishers stalk you? It doesn’t happen. You’re now wondering if you should cut your losses, stay in Bournemouth and save the petrol. Keep reading. Sometimes, people meet their agent in the coffee queue. This is unlikely in your case. Either, you’ll be too scared to strike up conversation, or not be scared enough and say something really stupid. So there you are. Four hundred and sixty pounds down, no chance of representation and surrounded by three hundred odd people all after roughly the same thing. It’s going to be murder, right? That’s what you’re thinking. That first 1-2-1 is not the agent’s fault. She’s lovely, but doesn’t think you’re the next Tolstoy. “I’m getting caught up in the medical red tape,” she says. She has no idea of the time you’ve spent trying to make sure that didn’t happen. You sit there and listen. You write notes. You return to your session. Then you go back to your room and grieve. After all, unless something magic happens, this is probably the end of the line for your novel. After eleven years. If you could fit this into the hour and a half before dinner, it would be an ideal time and place. It’s quiet. There are no children asking you for snacks or arbitration. But you’ve a soul to vomit and mealtime comes all too soon. You’re not pretty when you cry. People will assume you’re dying of something they don’t want to catch. Or they’ll know the truth – that you’re not as good as you hoped. You drag Rachel, your trusty writing partner, to your room. She gives you a good hug, and supervises you while you rinse your eyes in warm water and make your way towards food. And there you meet someone else who hasn’t yet had either of their 1-2-1s, but is thoroughly fed up with the submission process. You share your own tale of woe. And the lady on the other side shares hers. And you say things to each other you would usually reserve for the mirror (or Rachel). Like, “I think I’m good.” Someone buys three gins and tonic and instead of slipping out before Friday Night Live, you surprise yourself by staying up to whinge until eleven thirty (that’s three am in young person time). You’re still feeling a little fragile the next morning, but all that panic-surfing has paid off. You remember Emma Darwin’s blog. You have your first coherent thoughts: You really didn’t think your world through before you wrote your novel. Your main characters are academic anaesthetists. How many non-medics know those exist? And there’s so much more you need to set up alongside the love story, including the ambition and rivalry. World-building in these circumstances is difficult, but it doesn’t necessarily mean the novel is doomed. The agent didn’t criticise your prose, your first page, or your characterisation. A lot of your work has paid off. Mandy Berriman had a difficult journey to publication. People have told you she’s lovely. You will try to speak to her. Together with a cooked breakfast, you’ve reason enough to get out of bed. Penny Holroyde and Allie Spencer sit at your table in the canteen. This is the moment you should try and impress Penny who is after all an agent. But when they ask you about your festival, you end up telling them the truth. It’s the best thing you can do. They are both lovely. “So many published authors I know, have a novel they love but can’t sell,” says Allie. “It doesn’t mean it’s not any good.” You talk about easy reading for thinkers.  She wrote her first romantic comedy about a young barrister, so understands your world-building issues and gives you some pointers. You come away thoroughly inspired. That is your “all is lost moment” done and dusted. Having planned plenty of alone time, you don’t miss a thing after that: Sarah Pinborough may apologise for waffling in her keynote lecture, but has everyone in stitches as she describes life as a published author. And everyone’s crying by the end of Julie Cohen’s session about Pixar story-telling. At the book club and literary industry panel you’re told genre boundaries are blurring. Pinning your book down as literary or commercial doesn’t matter as much as it did. Finally, someone produces a useful definition of book club fiction. It’s obvious really: “something people want to talk about with their friends.” You contemplate skiving the Futurecast session. It’s on Sunday morning; you’re tired and already know vampires are out, uplit and psychological thrillers in. But there’s loads more to learn. Afterwards, everyone you speak to is considering self-publishing. And somewhere in the middle of all that, you have a second 1-2-1. It’s far more relaxed than your first, possibly because you now know the problem. You bring up the world-building issue yourself. She suggests emphasising the love story over the setting from the start. But she says, “You’re clearly a very good writer.” You have time left. You could show her your elevator pitch for novel number two, but you forget and use the minutes up blithering about how much her opinion means to you. There you are: three competitions, two 1-2-1s and no agent. But you now understand more about how you could fit into the industry. And you’ve found the rest of the people like you in the world. The money isn’t wasted. On Sunday morning, you listen to Mandy Berriman’s keynote session and her full story of knockbacks, perseverance and eventual success with her second novel. Over lunch, you tell your fellow writers about your novel number two. “That one will be so much easier to sell. I can condense the idea down into a few sentences.” You tell them it’s about a couple about to abandon fertility treatment when the woman is raped. She then discovers she is pregnant. She thinks the baby is her husband’s. He thinks she’s delusional and wants an abortion. Someone says, “I’m wondering what I’d do.” And someone else, “You need to write that.” Then you remember you’re actually on your second draft. This sets off those pesky dreams again. You see yourself up on the main stage, about to publish your first novel as your second. The editor next to you is saying, “I couldn’t believe she had something so marvellous in her bottom drawer.” With very best wishes Sophie Beal

This post has (at the bottom) a complete and regularly updated list of the literary agents active in the United States. By clicking through to each agent, you will also find which literary agencies they belong to. WANT TO JUMP STRAIGHT TO THE COMPLETE AGENT LIST?CLICK HERE If you want a list of agents active in the United Kingdom, you’re on the wrong page. Hum God Save The Queen, throw a Union Jack round your shoulders, and teleport over here instead. Want A Quick Reminder Of How To Get An Agent? Finding a literary agent to take on, edit, sell and champion your work is a career-defining moment for any traditionally oriented writer. But it’s career-defining partly because it’s hard to achieve. So let’s try to keep this simple. Here’s what you need to do to attract a literary agent: Step 1: Write a wonderful book. That’s hard, admittedly, but you’re on this page because you’re serious. Step 2: Compile a longlist of qualified literary agents. A qualified literary agent is one who is (A) in the right country, (B) open to your genre, and (C) reasonably open to taking on new work and new clients. Once you have that longlist – which could easily run to 100+ names – you can start to filter it. Our AgentMatch tool, which is a literary agent database, allows you to select agents by genre at the click of a button. You can search by literary fiction, women’s fiction, crime thriller, romance, fantasy, science fiction, non-fiction, young adult, and pretty much every other genre you can think of – including all major non-fiction genres. It\'s a great tool for helping you decide which agents to query. Learn more about AgentMatch. Step 3: Narrow down to a shortlist of 10-12 names. Once you have your longlist, you need to work to find the ones who jump out at you – normally because you find a point of contact. You’re looking for something that seems to connect the kind of reader that agent is with the kind of writer you are. A shared favourite author. A passion for steampunk. Book set in your agent’s childhood state. Shared passion for the ocean. The point of contact doesn’t matter. Just find agents who sing to you. Step 4: Write a brilliant query letter. Sounds hard, but it’s really easy. All you need to do is read our amazing query letter advice – and follow it. Step 5: Write a sizzling synopsis. Sounds very hard, but it’s also very easy. There are two big tricks to writing a successful synopsis fast and easily. We tell you what they are (and with some bonus tips included) on our synopsis page. Step 6: Give your manuscript and opening chapters a last check. Look: I’m not about to tell you how to write a book. But you probably want to check your opening chapters meet the basic requirements for professional manuscript format. You will probably also be interested to learn what we think are the most common mistakes made in the kind of manuscripts that go out to literary agents. If you want a properly complete guide to getting an agent, you can get that here. Phew! Literary Agents: All You Need To Know Agents sell manuscripts to publishers All the agents in the US are listed on this page You need to shortlist 10-12 agents Write a synopsis Write a query letter Submit your work to your shortlisted agent Keep your fingers crossed How To Use Agentmatch To Find Your Literary Agent AgentMatch gives you a complete, easily searchable list of all literary agents in the US – and all those in the United Kingdom too. Our English-speaking, graduate researchers have put together profiles of all literary agents out there, making use of ALL publicly available information (not just that on the agent’s website.) Then we make it incredibly easy to search: By country By genre By experience By level of interest in acquiring new writers Size of literary agency And much else Each agent has a detailed profile, including photo wherever possible – so you can complete an entire search process in a swift and completely non-haphazard way. Sounds good right? Except presumably we’re going to ask you for a ton of money. Except – no. We’re writers too, so we offer a free trial of Agent Match . That gives you access to ALL the data, not just profile summaries. You can also get access to our search tools, which allow you to compile your agent longlist in about 20 seconds . . . and compile a really effective shortlist in the time it takes to drink a couple cups of coffee and maybe eat a croissant too. And “free trial” means just that. We don’t ask you for any payment details. We don’t restrict your usage of the site. Any data you collect, you are welcome to retain and use for your own purposes. (We’re nice like that!) You can get your free trial here. We hope you love it! Meantime, we promised you a complete list of every literary agent currently active in the United States so that you can embark on the next step of your publishing journey. So scroll on down and knock yourself out. Or actually – don’t. Knocking yourself out? Ouch. Just scroll. US Literary Agents: The List [am_show_agents id=3]

Have you just finished your novel and are ready to begin your search for an agent? Well, we’re here to help!  WANT TO JUMP STRAIGHT TO THE AGENT LIST? CLICK HERE  Women’s Fiction As genres go, women’s fiction is one of the hardest labels to describe. It tends to be a rich and broad market, covering a variety of sub-genres, such as domestic noir, romance, and literary fiction. The publishing world tries to class women’s fiction as writing predominantly for women, about women. But women’s fiction is much more complex than that.  So, it’s important to be careful how you choose your book genre. Is it really a book club type of novel (i.e. accessible and literary)? Is it romance? Erotica?   Just because your book may be about a woman and her relationships (not necessarily romantic ones), it doesn’t mean that you should be describing your novel as women’s fiction. Instead think more about what kind of book it is and what type of agent you’d like.  Once you’ve clearly defined your genre and where your book sits in the market, it’s time to put together your agent shortlist.  AgentMatch And How To Use It There are plenty of women\'s fiction-loving agents, but you won\'t want to approach them all. The best way to develop and refine your own shortlist of UK agents for women\'s fiction is to visit AgentMatch, our literary agent database, and use the search tools on the left to make your selection.  With AgentMatch you can select by genre (e.g. women\'s fiction), country, the agent’s level of experience, their appetite for new clients, and much more. You can even save your search results and come back to them, allowing you to work through them one by one, at your own pace. Each profile has been researched thoroughly including what agents like to read in their spare time, information on their most recent deals, manuscript wishlists, submission requirements, and exclusive interviews.  You can sign-up for a 7-day free trial which will give you a good feel for the data and functionality. Or join us as a premium member and get unlimited access to AgentMatch.  UK Agents For Women\'s Fiction  To get you started we’ve selected a list of 20 UK agents looking for women\'s fiction:  [am_show_agents id=30] More Resources   We’re here to help you at every step in your writing and querying process. Check out our favourite blogs that can assist you in putting together your query letter and synopsis, and if you want valuable, personal feedback on your writing you can book a fifteen-minute One-to-One with an agent of your choice. Premium members can also get a free query letter review from our lovely Writers Support team!    Happy searching, and good luck on your querying journey!   

Have you got a new and exciting work of non-fiction on the go and are ready to begin your search for an agent? Well, we’re here to help!  WANT TO JUMP STRAIGHT TO THE AGENT LIST? CLICK HERE  Non-Fiction Non-fiction is any literary work with the goal of providing information for the reader. It is fact-based and requires a level of knowledge and expertise of the author, in order for them to be an authority to educate on the chosen topic.  When literary agents are looking for non-fiction, they are often looking for the topics that will sell. If something is too niche, you may be better off going directly to an appropriate publisher. The most popular non-fiction genres include:  Historical non-fiction  Memoir, biographies, and autobiography  Popular science  Politics and current affairs  Celebrity-led projects, anything written or endorsed by a celebrity   Interesting travel stories  Motivational and self-help works  One of the most important things to remember as a non-fiction author is that your work should always be entirely rooted in truth and fact, and that you should be qualified to write on your chosen topic. These are things that not only readers are looking for, but literary agents too. You need to be able to demonstrate why your book is special and why you are the person to write it.  Few agents focus solely on non-fiction projects. Most agents will build a fiction and non-fiction list, just as they would cultivate a literary and commercial list. The important thing to remember is that it’s the quality of the agent that really matters, not whether they specialise in a particular genre.   How Do You Know What Literary Agents Want?  This can be split into three categories: Firstly, know what you need to query agents with.   For fiction submissions, you need to have written the whole book before querying agents. With non-fiction submissions, you can often get away with sending a book proposal, which is basically an outline of the book you intend to write, first.   If your book is story-led (think memoirs), then it would be worth writing the whole book before you submit to agents.   But if your non-fiction is subject based, then it‘s fine to start with the book proposal.   Secondly, deliver a saleable manuscript.   As I mentioned above, the only thing agents are really looking for is a manuscript that will sell well and make money. This means you need:   Strong, popular, entertaining writing – even if your subject is interesting, if the writing is poor no one’s going to want to read it!   To write for the market. Obvious, yes, but a surprisingly high number of non–fiction authors don’t know who their intended market is. So, if you don’t know yours, then go to a bookstore or local library and find out.   And finally, get professional help. If you keep getting agent rejections or just want to perfect your manuscript first, then it’s time to ask for help. There’s lots of information out there. We’ve helped non-fiction authors in their writing journeys, and we can help you too. So, get in touch.  Non-Fiction Genres Let’s look at the most popular non-fiction genres a little closer: History  Historical non-fiction is any piece of literary work that looks at a specific time or event from the past. This could be delivered in a very fact-based way, or in a narrative way (such as The Five by Hallie Rubenhold), and can explore very wide and general topics (such as the Romans, or the Elizabethan era) or a very specific person, event, or niche topic (even something as obscure as salt – no really, it exists. Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky).  Food And Cookery  Non-fiction that focuses on food and cookery is a staple of many households. Recipe books would be the most common form of this genre, but it can also include crossover books that explore the history of food (such as Scoff by Pen Vogler), or food-based memoirs (such as Stanley Tucci’s Taste, or Grace Dent’s Hungry). This is a varied and diverse genre, full of useful tips and interesting facts.  Memoir  Memoirs can encompass a wide range of books, from the food-based memoirs I mentioned above of celebrities Stanley Tucci and Grace Dent, to a memoir of a postman (Please, Mister Postman by Alan Johnson). If you have an interesting story to tell, then there is space for you on the memoir bookshelf. That’s not to say it isn’t difficult to get there. If you’re not a celebrity, then you need an incredibly interesting story and a true way with words in order to reassure a literary agent that your book will sell.   Mind, Body, Spirit  This genre is an interesting one. It spans topics of mindfulness, meditation, astrology, the paranormal, and much more, and can be quite divisive (depending on an individual’s beliefs). Whether you are a doctor writing professional advice (Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before? By Dr Julie Smith), or you’re writing based on your own experiences (The Wim Hof Method by Wim Hof), it’s important to demonstrate the value you bring, not only to the genre as a whole but to the readers picking up your book. It is likely that readers of Mind, Body, Spirit want to learn something new about themselves, or how to approach the world we live in and our daily lives.  Politics, Society, & Current Affairs  Politics and current affair books can cover many things, from political history to a focus on an individual, or a deep-dive into a specific political event. Bestsellers like Owen Jones’ The Establishment (exploring British politics), or Watergate: A New History by Garrett M Graff, explore popular topics at the time of their publication. One of the most important things to remember when writing political non-fiction is to remain current and relevant, unbiased (unless your work is biased, in which case it’s important to make that clear), and to ensure your book is fact-based (as far as facts are available at the time of publication).    Popular Science  Popular science is a genre that makes current scientific discoveries and theses accessible to the average reader. Anyone should be able to pick up your book and come away with a greater understanding of the topic than they did coming into it. Popular science can cover any topic (especially ones that are of particular interest or relevance at the time of publication), from space, psychology and medicine, to astrophysics and our understanding of death. Anything that is current and of interest to the general population. Once again, one of the most important things when writing in this genre is to have demonstratable expertise, and to be able to explain why YOU are the person to write this book.   Travel  Travel writing can encompass everything from a travel guide to a travel memoir (Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert). Books in this genre can do a deep dive into a specific city, or they can give general advice for camping or backpacking. They can be food based (One More Croissant for the Road by Felicity Cloake) or based in history (Madhouse at the End of the Earth by Julian Sancton). Whatever your expertise or experience, it’s important that the writing of your book lines up with it’s aim. If you are writing a guide it should be informative, whereas if you’re going for a more narrative interpretation it should be able to strike the balance between fact-based and interesting.    Popular Culture  Popular culture is those topics, beliefs, themes or objects that are dominant and widely known in society. This can encompass books, film, music, art, fashion, and much more. Chuck Klosterman’s The Nineties: A Book does an excellent job of capturing the popular culture of an entire decade, while Matt Alt’s Pure Invention: How Japan Made the Modern World focuses on an entire nations historical influence. The importance when writing works of pop culture is to remain current and relevant, alongside the emphasis on being fact based. You can deliver a serious discussion on a topic, or a more tongue-in-cheek satirical view, but whatever you do it’s important once again to demonstrate your expertise and why it will be of interest to the mass readership.   Narrative Non-Fiction  Narrative non-fiction describes a piece of literary work that is fact-based at its foundation but presented in the style of a fiction novel. Take Hallie Rubenhold’s The Five. This is a book that explores the history of the victims of Jack the Ripper, providing facts and citing her sources. Hallie takes creative liberties in her presentation of this story, using the facts to create a fleshed-out narrative of the lives of these women; in this way the narrative element suits her book as she seeks to humanise them. When writing narrative non-fiction, it is important to strike this balance between fact and fiction. Your book should read like a story, but remain entirely fact-based. This form makes the writing accessible and interesting to the mass readership, and they can go away having learnt something new (sometimes without even realising it).   Business And Finance  This genre can provide business advice, explore historical aspects of business and economics, look at finance analysis, marketing and management, or encompass cross-genre books such as politics (Butler to the World by Oliver Bullough), or memoirs (We Can All Make It by Sara Davies). Where you are an expert in your field or have personal experience to draw on when writing your book, you should demonstrate not only that you are the best person to write it, but that there is a space and interest for it.   Health & Lifestyle  This genre focuses on all aspects of health and lifestyle, from dieting and working out, to mental health, relationships, and careers. Whatever your focus is, it’s important to make sure your book is relevant, well-researched, and that there is space for it in the current market.   Self-Help  Self-help falls into similar categories to Mind, Body, Spirit, and Health and Lifestyle. These books all focus on the individual and encouraging personal development, but self-help sits apart as more of a guide. Marie Kondo’s Spark Joy and James Clear’s Atomic Habits provide information and advice for how the reader can go about making the relevant changes in their own life. They are there to evoke a positive response in the reader and to provide them with something that will remain even when they put the book down. Once again, relevance and expertise are required when writing in the self-help genre.   Sports  Sports non-fiction covers everything from guides to biographies. They cover any and all sports you can think of, and can either be an interesting read or a tool for the reader to develop their own skills. Whether you’re considering the social influence of sports, specific individuals, or the history of sport, it is important that you can demonstrate your knowledge and whether there is interest for your book.   Arts  This genre covers a wide range of topics, including art, photography, fashion, music, film, crafts. They can work incredibly well as coffee table books, or as an exploration into an individual (A Life of Picasso by John Richardson) or a movement. They can provide a collection of creative work, a historical exploration (The Secret Lives of Colour by Kassia St Clair), or offer advice for beginners (Read This is You Want to Take Great Photographs by Henry Carroll).   Women\'s Issues  Also categorised as Gender Studies, this genre explores a variety of topics, from feminism to medicine, history to race. Books that focus on women’s issues attempt to evoke change, and often look at social discrimination and inequality. Books like Caroline Criado-Perez’s Invisible Women and The Authority Gap by Mary Ann Sieghart use data and facts to inform the reader, and offer up ways we can make change for the future.   LGBTQ+  This is a very broad genre that encompasses a variety of topics and crossovers. From memoirs (What if Feels Like for a Girl by Paris Lees), to essay collections (Gender Euphoria by Laura Kate Dale), and from histories (The Pink Line by Mark Gevisser), to guides (Queer Up by Alexis Caught). The aim of this genre is to inform and to evoke change, both for those readers who are queer, and for those who aren’t. From appeals for change to uplifting real stories, this genre is as diverse as its authors and topics. It is important when writing in this genre to remain relevant (is there a market for your book), fact-based, and to have personal experience of your chosen topic and be able to demonstrate why you should be writing it.   AgentMatch And How To Use It There are plenty of agents who love non-fiction, but you won\'t want to approach them all. The best way to develop and refine your own shortlist of US agents for non-fiction is to visit AgentMatch, our literary agent database, and use the search tools on the left to make your selection.  With AgentMatch you can select by genre (e.g. your non-fiction genre), country, the agent’s level of experience, their appetite for new clients, and much more. You can even save your search results and come back to them, allowing you to work through them one by one, at your own pace. Each profile has been researched thoroughly including what agents like to read in their spare time, information on their most recent deals, manuscript wishlists, submission requirements, and exclusive interviews.  You can sign-up for a 7-day free trial which will give you a good feel for the data and functionality. Or join us as a premium member and get unlimited access to AgentMatch.  US Agents For Non-Fiction  To get you started we’ve selected a list of 20 US agents generally looking for non-fiction:  [am_show_agents id=5] More Resources   We’re here to help you at every step in your writing and querying process. Check out our favourite blogs that can assist you in putting together your query letter and synopsis, and if you want valuable, personal feedback on your writing you can book a fifteen-minute One-to-One with an agent of your choice. Premium members can also get a free query letter review from our lovely Writers Support team!    Happy searching, and good luck on your querying journey!   

I got a call from my agent.  “I have news.” I sat on my kitchen table, my feet on a chair, my elbows on my knees, one finger jammed in the other ear, the better to hear. For the first time in days I hadn’t been obsessively checking my inbox; I’d let it go, I’d given up, I’d said to myself, oh well, I’ll just have to write something better.  I’d gone off to town with my children, I hadn’t looked at my phone all day till I was home and saw three missed calls and an email saying, do call when you have a minute.  I was holding the phone in my hands, staring at the screen, when it rang again. It’s a bit like when you’re pregnant for the first time, all you think about is the birth.  Not the aftermath, the what comes next, the slow reveal of fears you never thought you’d have.  I’d spent a decade driving at representation, a manuscript finished and loved and taken up by an agent.  When I signed with Jenny Savill following FoW16, I thought that was it.  It was a height I had dreamt of and not once had I thought beyond it.  It had never crossed my mind that anything would be as fraught. A friend once commented that being taken up by an agent was child’s play compared to selling to a publisher. A writer can submit to the same agent year on year if they want. But once a publisher turns your book down, that’s it. It’s a one shot game. At the beginning, with Frankfurt Book Fair looming and all the excitement of total ignorance, I was convinced I’d hear within days, hours, of easy success. Instead the weekly updates from Jenny were crammed with kind, encouraging notices of failure. It was three weeks into that torment of declines that Jenny gave me the best advice I’d ever had.  Lower your expectations she said to my whining misery that I hadn’t been bought overnight, that the industry moves at its own quiet pace, that clearly I knew nothing.  And when it seemed like pessimism was getting the better of me, she said It’s not over yet.  But Christmas came and went and my infant novel looked for all the world as if it would never make it to adulthood.  I practised saying it happens and searched for examples of Booker Prize winners who’d struggled to find air.  I got on with writing something else. A trip to town on a freezing afternoon at the end of January, my children needing boots, or the dentist, or maybe I just needed to get out of the kitchen and away from what felt like humiliation – I don’t remember anything of that day except coming home, and checking my phone for the first time since breakfast, and seeing three missed calls and an email.  When it rang in my hand my heart jumped and my breathing went funny. “We’ve had an offer.”  And then she told me who it was, and I sat on my kitchen table with my feet on a chair, and my elbows on my knees and one finger jammed in the other ear, and I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. My debut, ‘A Perfect Explanation’, came out in March 2019, published by Salt Books, one of the finest independent publishers of literary fiction.  It happened; the thing that I gave no thought to, that I presumed would be easy, and wasn’t and felt crushed by.  Those four months seem like nothing now, but looking back at the struggle, I have learnt this: that every step is a test of what you know and reveal of what you don’t, and when a brilliant and hard working agent and you decide to work together, remember it is just the beginning.