Our Articles

OK, so my new favourite thing for today? It’s when you’ve been writing professionally for 20 years and still get really excited when a writer shows you some techniques that look sexy, fun, creative – and productive.

More of that in one short second, but first, if you missed my webinar on self-publishing (or, really, on author-led marketing), then you can catch the replay here:

https://jerichowriters.com/bf-self-pub-webinar-replay/

We’ve had massively positive feedback on that webinar. People said things like:

I just wanted to say that I really enjoyed watching your self-publishing webinar the other day … I was genuinely inspired.

This is hands down the best live webinar I've been on. Pure value and an inoffensive pitch ;-) Thank you so much Harry.

I watched the replay last night and it was packed with really great information. You guys are definitely the best and most motivating writing resource I have found on my journey so far

Loved your webinar and your follow-up below really helped me buck up … One personal question: Did you ever figure out why your kids were wearing helmets in your kitchen? 

No, I never did figure out why my kids were wearing helmets in the kitchen, but then again they found a fake fur pompom in the garden yesterday and built a hedgehog house for it, complete with bed of leaves and dish of milk. So helmets in the kitchen? That passes for normal, I’m afraid.

As for the webinars, a lot of people avoid them because they assume the content is going to be all tease and no value. We don’t do that. We just cram as much serious value into the hour as we can. We do mention a product at the very end of the webinar, but we also tell you not to buy it, so that seems fair. Oh yes, and remember that you can get all the slides from the webinar from a download link here, so no need to take notes.

Right. Bish, bosh. Next thing.

So last night, the Mighty James Law delivered a webinar yesterday on Ideas, Plotting and Planning – that whole process of coaxing a novel into shape. Some of the material was familiar to me, but much of it wasn’t and was genuinely inspirational.

In particular, I loved-loved-loved James’s willingness to state something that isn’t often enough said.

Lots of published novels are bad. They annoy the reader. In James’s candid summary:

Things that annoy me about novels

When I just don’t give a &%$£

When I have no idea why they’re doing what they’re doing

When they do something completely unexpected
(usually to bail the author out of a plot hole)

And we all know the feeling, right? You’re 100 pages into a perfectly competent novel, written by a pro author and published by some big, fancy publishing house. And you just don’t care. Or the action taken by the main character seems desperately contrived or stupid. (“No. Don’t enter the dark house where an armed gunman might be lurking. That sounds idiotic. How about you call your colleagues in the POLICE and call for ARMED BACKUP. That’s the whole point of being in the police, isn’t it?”)

Issues like that kill a novel. I don’t finish those books. I don’t buy another one by the same author. I don’t think they should have been published, or not with that much laziness in storytelling and editing.

So I am (I hope) as alert as James is to the risks. And of course if you write in a genre like ours, you are always bumping up against what the story wants (character enters dark house alone) and what reality demands (phone for backup.) So realistically, you will always be bicycling close to the edge of that precipice. You just want to avoid spilling over the edge.

My solution is rudimentary. It involves lots of writing, even more rewriting, gallons of tea, and a trust that my own editorial smarts will end up washing any plot stupidities out of the fabric. That probably works well enough in the end, but I have always worried that my process isn’t especially efficient.

James’s solution to these issues is the Why Diagram.

It’s a kind of structured attempt to drive out plot-stupidity from your novel before you write it. Why is the reader going to care about your Initiating Incident? Why should they care about your main character? Boom, boom, boom. James’s technique forces you to look at and answer the big questions before you put pen to paper. It’s basically a tool for de-stupidising your story before you even start writing. There’s lots else in his presentation too, but that’s the part that made me sit up and bark.

Plus … James has got three beautifully published books out, more on the way, and a TV deal in the oven. So you know what, I think he’s onto something. I’ll hand over to James himself for the detail.

View James’s webinar replay here

Unless you are wiser than Methusalah or as sour as a dish of crab-apples, I think you’ll learn something and I think you’ll chuckle. I’m a grizzled old SOB, and I did both.

One more webinar to go this season. It’s the Thrice-Blessed Sarah Juckes talking about How To Get Published. If you want to sign up for that (for free, of course), the sign up page is right here. Do note that the webinar is on a Wednesday; the others have been on a Thursday, so don’t get tripped up.

That’s it from me. Go and spin some sunbeams into a wreath of happiness. I’m off to find some tea in the Townhouse - like our guest in the header image.

But what about you? Do you find a lot of commercially published novels a bit disappointing? And what are your planning / idea generation techniques. Pull up an ebony chair or a duck-feather chaise longue and let's all have a Heated Debate.

So, yesterday was the first of our super-brilliant autumn webinars. Last night’s discussion was about how to self-publish your work: the mindset, the basic model, and some extra tips for adding thrust to those efforts.

One thought I had afterwards is one I often have:

It’s a kind of regret that these conversations are restricted to writers-interested-in-self-pub. Because actually, the heart of what I spoke about yesterday is Author-Led Marketing – the kind of marketing that you can do very effectively, for very low cost, and totally irrespective of who your publisher is.

In other words, let’s say you are dead-set on trad publishing. Nothing wrong with that. Maybe you even have an agent or are progressing nicely down that happy road. Very good.

Let’s say you get your book deal. (Yay!) Your book starts heading for market. (Double yay!) And then it occurs to you that the fate of your book is wholly in someone else’s hands. Those other hands will be trying very hard to get your book bought by all the major supermarkets and other physical retailers, but what if they don’t succeed? And, given that all big publishers are hurling a lot of titles at a limited number of retail slots, they are quite likely not to succeed. So what then? What happens to your book then?

The scary truth is that the marketing budget for your book will rapidly shrink down to a little bit of nonsense on Twitter and the like, and the chances of your book selling well start shrinking down to a small, round zero. Those odds aren’t much affected by how good your book is. If your book doesn’t have a substantial retail platform, its chances of rescue by word of mouth are basically nil.

That’s where author-led marketing comes in – and it’s my personal view that every serious author these days needs to invest in their own marketing system. (Invest time, I mean. The actual costs are pretty small.)

That marketing system will elevate your sales no matter what your outcomes in the world of bricks-and-mortar print.  That marketing system will guard and protect you. It will insure your career. It will increase your income and give you more flexibility over what you can profitably write.

It’s a modern author-essential.

These discussions tend to be wrapped up in a self-publishing wrapper, simply because every single author-led marketing technique of the last decade has emerged from the world of indie authors. Some of those techniques work well only for self-publishers, but the big red engine at the heart of all indie success works for everyone. Trad, indie, hybrid, anyone. It can work for you.

In other words, if you have never thought about how to market your books, it’s high time you started. You can spend an hour learning the ropes on our Webinar Replay page right here:

https://jerichowriters.com/bf-self-publishing-webinar-replay/
[The formatting on that page is a bit weird at the moment, but the video plays normally if you click it, and we'll sort out the formatting as soon as we can.]

Right. Bish, bosh. That’s done.

There was something else I wanted to pick up from yesterday, and it was sparked by questions like these:

BENEDICT: Is it possible to make money publishing Middle grade e-books, if you're not already a popular writer?

CAROLINE: Hi Harry, one thing that concerns me is that it sounds like to make it work, you have to be churning out books very quickly! I am not a fast writer... Is self-publishing still going to work for me?

SARAH: Hi Harry, my series is planned out at 27 books (not all written yet!), but is also planned to be split into three sets of nine books with past, present and future time periods… Do you have any tips for setting out with something this ambitious?

DIANA: I have written my first novel. Edited and rewritten after Jericho editor report. It's literary fiction. My next novels will be significantly different. Your model seems to suggest that a series is the most important aspect of self-publishing … Lit fiction is probably not the most lucrative market?

GAIL: I've written a memoir - a WW2 pilot. No series. How do I build an email list?

And, look, there are specific answers to all these questions. (Roughly: yes, middle grade can work. Yes, less prolific authors can succeed with self-pub. Yes, there is probably a good way to sequence some massive 27-book endeavour. Yes, lit fic is a hard sell in self-pub terms, but that doesn’t mean it can’t work at all. And yes: marketing a one-off memoir is hard, but there may be ways to cheat the system a little.)

But the big answer is broader and bigger. So is the underlying question. Because the underlying question is often something like this:

What does success look like? What would it be to be a successful author?

There’s just no one single right answer to that question. Or rather: the single right answer depends on you and no one else.

Yet I think there’s often a tendency to think that there’s only one model of successful author. Or maybe two: Lee Child (if you’re thinking of commercial fiction) and, I don’t know, Jonathan Franzen if you’re thinking of literary fiction.

Millions of copies sold. Or prizes won. Or both.

And if you don’t check one of those boxes, you haven’t succeeded, or not really.

But that’s horse dung, my friend. Fresh, bright, and steaming.

Here are some other ways to succeed:

• You write a memoir that people cherished by you read and love.
• You write a memoir that is read and valued by those in your professional community (Air Force pilots, for example.)
• You get published by a small publisher. You have a book on your shelves. It never sells very much, but you never wrote it for huge sales in the first place. That was never the expectation or the purpose.
• You write a literary novel that perfectly satisfies you, artistically.
• You write a commercial novel that satisfies you artistically and gathers a core of passionate, supportive readers
• You earn enough money from your writing that you can chip into the family coffers and allows you to describe yourself, truthfully, as a professional author
• You don’t ever get published, not the way you once wanted at any rate, but you have a skill and a passion and a community of friends who share your passion
• You read your draft manuscript and feel real, unfolding pleasure at the story you are telling.

These things are all successes. Every one. Especially the last, because it was to generate that sense of pleasure that we all came into this ridiculous game.

Of all the Jericho Writers clients who have gone on to commercial success (and several have hit a million copies in sales and counting), the two I take most pleasure in came from a couple of writers, both well into their retirement, who wrote memoirs. Their work sold well, as it happened, but their pleasure and pride came long before their work had even hit the shelves. It wasn’t the sales that mattered: it was the accomplishment. The perfectly told story.

And, full disclosure, my own authorial career flies on the same winds, swims on the same tides, walks the same well-grassed paths.

I could, I know, make more money from my writing. I could market harder, write more, push those boundaries.

But I don’t. And won’t. I like the books I write. I enjoy the act of writing and editing. I enjoy marketing up to a certain point, but when that marketing stops being fun, I stop doing it.

There’s a model of self-pub author which doesn’t look anything like me. It’s the four-books-a-year author, who still has time to run five email lists, and dozens (hundreds?) of ads on Facebook, Bookbub, and Amazon.

Those guys definitely make more money. Some of them also write good books. But they’re not me. I admire them, but I don’t want to be them. I’ve been approached – headhunted – by publishers wanting me to enter a partnership model that would turn me into something like those authors, and I’ve said no. Definitely, definitely not. It’s just not what I want.

So define your own success. Don’t be pushed around by the success of others. Choose what constitute success for you and know that that’s the only true success there is.

Go watch that webinar replay here. We’ll make slides available as well.

Next week: James Law on plotting, and everyone loves James Law.

Please walk in an autumn wood, while there are leaves still on the tree. Take a hat, though, because the winds are chill.

But what about you? What defines your success as a writer? Tell me what matters to you and let's all have a Heated Debate.

My favourite thing?

Well, I have a lot of favourite things, but my favourite for today is when you guys ask super-brilliant questions that make me think … and generate the meat for a cracking email.

And this week, honours are taken by Nigel S, who wrote to say:

Hello Harry,

Can I ask you about warmth in writing?

I have probably read on average two books per week for the last sixty years. (That probably tells you everything you need to know about me.)

Warmth in a story has always fascinated me, and I strive for it in all my jottings. For instance, Stuart MacBride and Harry Bingham have it in spades (Lord, I hate a smoke-blower, don’t you?) while M______ and L______ don’t.

Anyway, try as I might to apply my mighty intellect to it, I can’t identify what it is that does the trick.

So I’d be very grateful if you could give me and the writing world in general your take on why I can read a book about Laz and Roberta in a day, whereas it might take a week’s stay in Three Pines to get the juice.

And that’s an interesting question, right? I’m certain, for example, that JK Rowling’s massive success relies in very large part on her wit and warmth. So yes, you come to her books for the boy wizard and Voldemort and all that. But you stay because of that sense of human generosity at the heart. The warm blanket and the just-right mug of cocoa.

Same thing with Stieg Larsson in a way. If you describe the Lisbeth Salander character – Aspergers, violent, spiky, tattoos, motorbike, abuse survivor, computer geek – you expect someone who is impressive, maybe, but not someone you want to spend a ton of time with. Yet the books themselves do have a sense of warmth at their heart – warmth, not bleakness – and the result is that readers committed to a series, despite its multiple flaws.

So, if warmth is a Good Thing, how do you build it? How do you make it happen on the page?

The honest answer would be: I’m not sure. This email doesn’t offer a properly developed explanation. It offers some first thoughts in response to an interesting question.

But I’ll start by saying that this question particularly chimes with me, because a few years back I was developing my Fiona Griffiths crime series. On the drawing board I had a character and book who seemed deeply unlikable, with a theme that seemed dark to the point of a cemetery midnight:

• Fiona used to think she was dead
• She deals in homicide
• The crime at the heart of book #1 was ugly (human/sex trafficking)
• Fiona’s dad is a crook
• She has no romantic attachments and no historically successful relationship
• At one point in the book, Fiona sleeps in a mortuary. She’s not accidentally locked in. She’s not looking for clues. She just wants to sleep next to dead people.

A book like that might or might not be impressive. But is it something you’d want to read? Is that a character you’d want to return to? Based on that chilly outline, I’d have to say no. (And some publishers did say no, by the way, for that exact reason. The tone of the rejections was roughly: "Wow! We love what you've done, but we don't think readers could resonate with this theme." In other words: we're clever, insightful readers and we love your book, but we think that the unwashed rabble out there wouldn't have our excellent good sense. I don't need to tell you what I think of that attitude.)

But for the future of my career, the answer absolutely had to be yes. Yes, readers had to love the book and bond to the character. Everything depended on that.

I didn’t want to change my basic outline, but I will say that the aspect of that first FG novel I thought about hardest as I was writing it had to do with the basic question: “How can I make this book feel warm?”

One answer was humour (a tool that JK Rowling used a lot, and Stieg Larsson not at all.) But it’s an easy win. If a book makes the reader laugh, that little splash of sunshine will do a lot.

Another answer, and a really important one for me, is close family relationships. For all Fiona’s mental chaos, and for all the darkness in her head, she loves her family. And they love her. Not in some American, happy-clappy, Thanksgiving TV kind of way. Just in an ordinary family way. Ordinary like this, for example:

We [ie: Fiona, her mother and sister] eat ham, carrots and boiled potatoes, and watch a TV chef telling us how to bake sea bream in the Spanish fashion.

Ant has homework that she wants help with, so I go upstairs with her. The homework in question takes about fifteen minutes. Ant waits for me to give her the answers, then writes what I tell her to.

That snippet shows functional, happy, ordinary relationships. And when Fiona’s life is placed under stress by the events of the story, she ends up calling on her family for emotional and practical help, and the family gives it, generously, without fuss.

That fictional act – placing someone at the heart of a web of loving relationships – somehow snakes outwards from the book and envelops the reader too. The family route works mostly strongly and easily, but your story may not accommodate it. (Harry Potter and Lisbeth Salander, are both in effect orphans, after all.) In such cases, you can build a kind of surrogate family. Ron and Hermione in one instance. Mikael Blomkvist and the Millennium team in the other. It’s the loving warmth thrown out by those relationships that steps in where a family would most naturally be.

But I think my third answer probably runs deepest. It’s this:

Chilliness in a book starts in the heart of your main character.

And what matters here isn’t your character’s situation, or her achievement of love, or the existence of close ties. It’s what she wants. It’s what she strives to attain.

So, yes, my Fiona had difficulty recognising her own emotions. She had never had a proper boyfriend/girlfriend relationship. She kept on making a mess of the relationship that is burgeoning under her nose. Here’s an example:

The restaurant he’s [David Brydon, the prospective boyfriend] chosen is only a few minutes away … but he walks half a step ahead of me, moving a bit faster than I can manage, and he has his chest thrown out and his shoulders pulled back as though he’s a soldier bracing himself for combat. I realise that this is his way of preparing for an all-out assault on Fortress Fi, and I’m touched, though I would slightly prefer it if potential suitors didn’t regard a date with me as akin to entering combat.

It’s possible that I was prickly with him in the wine bar. I sometimes am without knowing it, my habitual default position. Not good when it comes to flaunting those feminine charms.

I determine to do better.

And she does indeed try her very hardest to do better. It’s a clunky, awkward attempt to do better, but it’s genuine. Not just genuine, in fact. It’s heartfelt. This is someone urgently wanting human connection. Here’s an example:

I smile at him when we’re sitting and tell him again that this is lovely. I even go as far as being coaxed into ordering a glass of white wine. I realise that I’m operating as though following instructions from some kind of dating manual, but I’ve found out that that’s usually OK with people. It’s only me who feels weird.

From that point on, things go much better.

And, as it happens, it works. She gets her man. She creates and sustains her first proper romantic relationship.

But it didn’t have to. What mattered wasn’t the achievement of romantic completion, but the desire to find it. And indeed, as the series progresses, readers discovered that the path of true love never did run smooth (and certainly not when you have a series to write and an authorial income to generate.)

And there it is. Great question from Nigel. Three answers: humour, family, and the desire for human connection. Because, as I say, these are opening thoughts, I’ll be interested in your reflections.

So what do you think? What works for you, either as reader or writer? Let's all cuddle close, and have a Heated But Amicable Debate.

A couple of weeks back, I talked about how important it was to gear your book for the market. I don’t mean – and never mean – that you shouldn’t write from a place of passion and love. You should! You should! But you need to write from a place of passion, love … and market wisdom.

Now, a few of you wrote back to say, essentially, “Hey great, Harry. In that little story of yours, you told me how you sat with your agent and drank tea and ate ginger biscuits and had the market explained to you by a pro agent with thirty years’ experience of selling. What about those of us who don’t have an agent, YOU DIAMOND-ENCRUSTED NINCOMPOOP?”

And, OK, that’s a fair question. I was going to answer it last week, in fact, except that I suddenly decided I needed to tell you all about the oldest texts in existence. (My reasoning for that change of tack? Absolutely none. Sorry.)

Anyway, here goes:

How to understand the market for your book if you don’t have an agent

If you don’t have an agent, you are mostly cut off from the chatter that accompanies the sale of manuscripts to editors. Not entirely, of course, you can pick up snippets from Twitter, or from Publishers Weekly or the Bookseller. But the fact is that even publishing editors understand the market less well than agents, simply because they understand the appetites of their own firm, but don’t know what other firms are buying. Agents have those ‘What’s hot, and what’s not?’ conversations every week, with every firm, so their feel is second to none.

And when I say you need to write from love and passion, I do mean it. So let’s say you have quite a dark comedy about (I dunno) a blind woman looking for love. Then you read that the big new thing in publisher land is Up Lit, and everyone wants books that are sunny, not dark.

What do you do? Simply turn your book on its head and write something wholly different from what you first intended? No.

Similarly, indie authors have a lot of data-tools available to them, that purport to guide them on what books they should write. Those tools say things like, Regency Romance is saturated, but YA dystopia looks hot. And the data is probably right. But again: if writing regency romance is what you want to do, why would you jump into YA dystopia just because a stupid data tool tells you to do it?

So you go with your passion, but intelligently.

That means, with your blind-woman / dark comedy novel, you’re going to search out similar books. You’d think about things like:

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine. (Yes: woman is in search for love. No: she’s not blind. Yes: she has some significant emotional challenges. Yes: the comedy engages with some quite dark subjects.) 

Nathan Filer / Shock of the Fall. (Central character is a guy not a woman. But yes, plenty of comic moments. Yes, examines life from inside a disability.)

Anthony Doerr / All the Light We Cannot See. (No, not a comedy. Yes, directly about blindness.)

And so on.

As you can see from my comments, none of those novels perfectly reflect the one you want to write – which is good, not bad – but you can also see that your novel lives inside that company. You can feel the family relationships.

And then?

Nothing. You don’t copy. You don’t draw stupid conclusions. (‘Hmm. Anthony Doerr’s novel brought Nazis into the story about blindness, and we all know that Nazis are storytelling gold, so maybe I need to reset my story from contemporary London to, um, 1942 Munich.’)

Rather, you just read the novels that are in your zone.

Yes, you read some classics. You read some non-fiction. (So, for example, if your book deals with blindness, you read autobiographical work by Borges, and Lusseyran, and others.) But mostly, and most importantly, you read novels that:

1.    Have come out in the last 3-5 years

2.    Are, broadly speaking, in your zone

3.    Have done well commercially and (ideally) also critically.

That’s it. Then you write the book you want to write, but you do so with your mind and imagination formed by the current state of literature.

So, for example, Anthony Doerr’s heroine trains her senses by mastering complex puzzles, built for her by her locksmith father. If you used that trope, or something similar, it would feel a little flat. Over familiar. Stale. If on the other hand, you’ve imbibed that book, and loved it, your mind will likely spring to some other way of tackling that same issue. Some natural progression from Doerr’s own approach.

That’s all you need. Simply supplying your mind with the right feedstock will work.

So yes: a couple of weeks back, I told you how I got one of my books market-ready through a conversation with my agent. But I didn’t tell you how the Fiona Griffiths series came to be born. Then, I decided I wanted to turn to crime, but had lost touch with the modern crime market. So I went out and bought – everything. Two dozen novels, two dozen authors. All contemporary writers. Most of them big-selling. British, Irish Scandinavian, American. A wild medley of approaches. Literary and commercial. Series and one-off. First person and third person. Dark and gentle. Funny and grim. Police procedurals and everything else. And so on.

Then, I didn’t use that knowledge in any mechanical way. I just absorbed it and wrote what I wanted to write. But the knowledge changed what I wanted to write.

And lo and behold, I wrote the most timely book I’ve probably ever written. So I was putting the finishing touches to my first Fiona novel, when Girl with the Dragon Tattoo became huge. It was when Claire Danes (as Carrie) was storming a small screen near you with Homeland. And so on. My book wasn’t a copy of any of those things. Indeed, it had been written before I had any knowledge of them. But I was pushed by the exact same zeitgeist and ended up in (my version of) the exact same place.

Result: a novel that hit the spot with readers and was sold, quickly and easily, to publishers all over the world and which was also adapted, fast and easily, for TV too.

You can do the same. And quite likely, if you look at your bookshelves, you’ll find you’ve already done it.

That’s all from me. I am off to remove a pumpkin from my son’s head.

But what about you? Have you tried the approach I've recommended here? Did it work? Do you have other suggestions? Let's all have a Heated Debate ...