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If ever I feel alone or friendless, or fear that these emails are falling into the Great Void of Unknowing, all I have to do is to write a grumpy email about agents and/or publishers. The torrent – the surge, the tsunami, the deluge – of responses tells me that you are out there, and listening, and care as much as I do.

That surge of responses deserves a direct reply.

Before I get to that, though, I do need to ask for your help, please. We’re trying to figure out what we’re doing right, what we’re doing wrong, and what you’d like from us. We ask you about courses, membership, events and more. The survey runs to just ten questions. Your responses will shape what we do next.

Please take the survey here.

Thank you. And now for some short-and-grumpy thoughts about all things Agent and Publisher.

First:-

A lot of you – and I mean a lot – wrote to me with stories broadly similar to those I mentioned last week. Probably the commonest tale was the one which, simplified, runs: “A literary agent took on my manuscript with a lot of gushing excitement, but then, as time passed, stopped communicating with me at all.”

And I repeat: that’s not OK. Yes, they’re busy. Yes, until you have formally signed with an agent, you aren’t technically their client. You don’t have an actual contractual claim on their time.

But –

I don’t accept that as an excuse. I once had a shouting row with an official of the Association of Authors Agents. He claimed that agents owed nothing to non-clients, because they weren’t clients. I argued – and still do – that no honourable agent can treat the community of writers with disdain.

I still think that’s obviously true.

And don’t get me wrong. I don’t have a problem with agents rejecting work. I don’t have a problem with them doing so with the blandest and least helpful of form-emails. But if an agent engages in a personal way with your work – perhaps they ask for a full manuscript, or they meet you at a Festival and tell you how great they think your work is, or they ask for editorial changes, or anything of that sort – then they owe you a timely, personal and considered response.

If that response is a “no, sorry, changed my mind” – well, OK. That’s not what you want, but if it’s honest, clear and timely, you can’t really complain. Just seize your manuscript and make it better.

Too many agents, too often, fail to give that personal, timely response, and it’s not OK. (Our advice on getting agents here.)

Second:-

One or two people who have had bad experiences wrote to tell me that they have basically given up. They’ll write for themselves, but will no longer seek publication.

People need to make their own decisions, of course, but I do think that’s a pity.

The fact is, that for all its problems, Planet Agent is genuinely open to new and unknown writers. If the story you write is blisteringly attractive, it will be picked up. It will secure an agent. It will secure a book deal. From the perspective of the individual writer, these things may feel like a matter of black chance and blind luck, but they’re really not.

At Jericho Writers, we see a lot of manuscripts and a lot of authors. When we see something that really dazzles, we basically know it will find an agent and a deal. Equally, some of the manuscripts we come across aren’t yet publication-ready. That doesn’t mean the author is an idiot. It just means they have more work to do. Those manuscripts, we know, are not yet ready to sell.

And then, yes, there is an intermediate category of good-but-not-yet-dazzling. Those books are sometimes picked up. Sometimes not. In those cases, it is more of a dice roll.

But the smart advice remains the same as it always has. Find a genius concept. Develop your craft. Tell your story well. Write better.

Most of what we do at Jericho Writers is to help you do those things. Do them well enough and the whole getting published bit is reasonably easy.

Third:-

Avoid, avoid, avoid the vanity presses.

Because it’s hard getting a literary agent, people are tempted into the vanity snake pit. As it happens, I think there’s a whole email’s worth of comments to make about those snakes, so I won’t say much now.

Simply this: if a publisher asks you for money – via ‘partnership contract’, ‘hybrid publishing’, or whatever other term they prefer – they aren’t a publisher at all.

Publishers make their money from selling books to readers.

Vanity publishers make their money from selling dreams to writers.

Please keep your money in your wallet and say no to the snakes. Vanity publishing, I do not love thee.

Fourth:-

Self-publishing is an utterly viable route to publication and readers. It’s not second best. It’s just different.

The only real caution here is that you have to commit. You can’t just toss a book out onto Amazon and hope that it flies. It won’t. You must view your writing as a business and your publishing as a career. Your first book won’t make money so don’t expect it to. If you do well, though, then by the time of your third or fourth book, you’ll be seeing results that make you think, Yes, this writing lark might actually pay me. I am finding readers. I have a community of fans. I’m an author, and proud of it.

Fifth:-

Protect yourself.

Even if you go trad, even if you have a wonderful agent, even if you have a terrific publisher, protect yourself.

The single best way you can do that is to write steadily and build a mailing list. That list will, if properly managed, guarantee your access to readers and income for years and years to come. Don’t neglect it, just because your publisher looks shiny and the excitement is palpable. That mailing list is your rock. You may one day need it.

Sixth – and last:-

Don’t forget why you write.

You never came into this game because you wanted this agent or that book deal. You came into this game because a story forced its way into your head and wouldn’t let you goi.

The joys and challenges of that story are real no matter what. So are the rewards. We writers are lucky. We carry joy in our heads.

That’s it from me. I promised you I’d be Mr Sunshine this week and – in a slightly undependable, British January way – I’ve delivered on that, at least approximately.

(Oh yes, and the granular, golden header image to this post is a photograph of the surface of the sun. Each one of those little granules is about the size of France. My six-year-old sun is currently planning to walk on the solar surface. I said, "Don't you think you might get too hot?" He looked at me with the joy of a six-year-old outsmarting his father and said, "Nooo. I'm going to wear a special suit." One-nil to him, I reckon.)

And again: over to you. What are your experiences? Your worries? Your hopes? Your beliefs? Are you bitter, hopeful, cautious, or just happily nuts? Tell me what you think below and let's have a Solar Heated Debate.

A short and irritable email this week, inspired by a trio of author-interactions I’ve had in the weeks since Christmas.

Three authors. Three stories. Here they are.

Author #1

Sells her debut book to a Big 5 publisher for a reasonably good advance. Lots of excitement, lots of mwahs, lots of happiness.

The excitement and happiness lasts for a while, but in the weeks before publication something in the atmosphere starts to fade. A cover reveal is mishandled on Twitter. A publicist is changed, a bit abruptly. Actual, tangible marketing activity seems hard to locate.

The author happens to grumble – a bit – to me about it. I ask the author what the level of supermarket orders is. She asks her editor (with whom she still has a decent relationship.) Editor says, roughly, “No, a bit disappointing unfortunately but, yay!, orders from Waterstones are yadda yadda, blah blah, change the subject.”

The marketing never materialised.

That’s author #1.

(Info on how to get published can be found here.)

Author #2

Has a reasonable track record over several books. Sales in one (smallish territory) have been good. Sales in the bigger, more influential markets have been weak, probably due to inattentive publishing. Reader reviews and critical reception has always been strong.

Anyway, after a hiatus, Author #2 writes another book and gets a (perfectly fine) offer direct from a publisher.

She goes to her agent with the offer. It is now that agent’s job to turn that offer into a contract, and to knit together a set of deals across the various English language territories, so that the author has a proper sales platform to work with.

But – after weeks of delay – the agent dumps the author. Nothing to do with the author; more a change of direction for the agent.

Now, it’s perfectly OK for agents to alter direction, of course, but that doesn’t, to my mind, mean that you can desert your existing clients at their moment of greatest need. On the contrary, you need to get the deal done, then move on. You take on those obligations when you take on clients. Like it or lump it.

That’s one thing, but there’s another. In this case, the agent was and is part of a large and well-resourced agency with plenty of other agents. So if Agent X wants to change direction, she should damn well speak to her colleagues and say, “We can’t, as an agency, let our client down, so please can someone step in here for me.”

That didn’t happen.

The author – the admirable Author #2 – has a publishing offer that urgently needs attention and she’s been abandoned by both her agency and her agent. Great.

(Info on how to get an agent in the first place can be found here.)

Author #3

This author email wasn’t even especially grumbly. It was just a “hi, how are you” from someone I last talked to years ago.

But one snippet from that conversation struck me. Author #3 got an agent. Agent launches the manuscript at the Big 5 publishers and their immediate competitors. Some nice words came back, but no offers.

The author then thought, “Well, that’s disappointing, but there’s a slew of smaller publishers who might be interested,” … only to discover that her agent had no intention of approaching them. Their relationship ended right there, over the corpse of an unsold book.

And I don’t like any of this. Not one bit of it.

Here’s what I think:

• Author #1: What happened here was that a big publisher killed its marketing efforts when it didn’t get sales from supermarkets. What should have happened was that the marketing effort pivoted to be Amazon-led, not supermarket led. But no such pivot happened. The publisher hasn’t yet come clean with the author, and likely never will, but when the supermarket orders failed, that author’s career was dead – even before the first book of a two-book deal was even published.
  
  
• Author #2. Agents can’t abandon authors when authors most need their help. It’s fine to part company, but you have to take the author’s needs in mind when it comes to timing. And big agencies should act like big agencies. If one agent is forced to step out, another should gladly step in. That shouldn’t be forced on the agency by a plaintive author. It should – obviously – be the way the agency wants to approach its business.
  
  
• Author #3. If an agent takes on an author, they should take that author on. Yes, a small publishing deal will earn peanuts for the agent, but it’ll quite likely be one of the most important things ever to happen to the author in question. An honourable agent should let the big deals pay for all the deals that never quite happened.

And many agents, agencies and publishers are deeply honourable about these things. I don’t want to suggest that malpractice is rife across the industry. But it is too common.

And I don’t like it.

These things are almost never the author’s fault. It’s just crappy behaviour by people who should know better. But because authors are (weirdly) relatively powerless in their own industry, there are no effective sanctions against bad behaviour. These things come down to a question of honour. Of honouring the broader contract between author and agent, or between author and publisher.

What can we do about it? Not a lot, except call it out when we see it.

What can you do about it? Not a lot, except know that you haven’t done anything wrong. It’s not you, it’s them. Oh yes, and if you start to feel like you are being badly treated by your agent or publisher, then you are quite likely right to think so. It’s time to start making plans to move on.

There.

Rant over.

As promised: it was grumpy.

Alas, however: it was not also short. My bad. I can’t really do short. Sorry.

I shall be sunnier next week. I shall be Mr Sunshine, with my tapshoes on. I have given you a sunny header image to brighten your soul.

And what about you? I think this week we should scrap the Heated Debate and go straight into your experience of Planet Agent and the World of Publishing. What's been good? What's been bad? Let's eat an ice cream and talk about it.

In my last email, I talked about scene building and I spoke a little as if the only two structural units in a story are the scene itself and the plot itself.

But that’s not really right. In the film industry, which gets a bit more technical about these things, they distinguish between the scene and the sequence. The scene could be very short indeed:

Actor gets out of car at lawn. Walks across a dark front lawn. Knocks at a door.

Something like that could easily come in at under ten seconds of screen time. 

But then you have the sequence, which is a chain of scenes that form a logical, coherent group of their own. So Jason Bourne style car chase in Paris is likely to have multiple, multiple short scenes. Something like this:

Jason Bourne jumps in car. Drives nervously away. Police sirens start to wail. He stamps on the gas. Car chase stuff. Bumping down a flight of steps in a Mini. People shooting. Cars crashing. Then, tra la, somehow Jason Bourne gets away. He ends up, safe but shocked, in an underground car park.

You can see that from a movie-maker’s point of view, there are a ton of scenes to deal with and film, but from the movie-goer’s perspective, the whole thing feels like one coherent unit – ‘the Paris car chase’.

Now, last week, we spoke about how the scene itself has a kind of rhythm of its own. A question gets launched. The tension around that question increases. The stakes and sense of pressure rises. Then the question is resolved or transformed one way or another. That scene ends and a new one begins.

All good stuff, right?

Well, it can be useful to apply the same kind of thinking to the sequence too. And here, the inner unity of the sequence often comes down to this: are the story-questions launched in each scene intimately linked or not?

So last week, we looked at a very short scene of 450 words. Fiona had just escaped from some baddies. She was looking for sanctuary. She came to her mysterious Russian friend, Lev, for help. He took her to his clean, but extremely basic, squat. She effectively rejected that as a place to stay. He agreed to take her somewhere else.

That was the gist of the scene. But the unity of the whole sequence flowed something like this:

1.    Fiona is just driving peacefully along a Welsh road, when – boom! – she gets abducted. That out-of-nowhere quality often signals the start of a major new sequence, a major new turn in the plot. The story question is now: why has she been abducted? What is going to happen?

2.    She’s taken to a barn and interrogated with violence. She believes that, even if she tells everything she knows, she will be killed at the end of the interrogation. The story question is now: will she spill the beans? Will she escape?

3.    She escapes, injuring one of the bad guys in the process. The story question is now something like: Will she make her getaway properly? Or will she be recaptured?

4.    It becomes clear that she’s avoided recapture, but she is very worried about whether her ever-fragile mental state will cope with what’s just happened. The story question is now: will she cope?

And so on.

The sequence doesn’t come to an end properly until she is back at work having, roughly speaking, survived not just the violence, but the mental consequence of it. If you look at your own work, you’ll find other similar sequences naturally jumping out at you.

And –

And what? What are the actual practical consequences of these thoughts?

Well, there might be a few, actually. For example, it’s very common to have a lovely time writing a sequence of scenes, such as I’ve just described. The story flows. The action moves. The whole thing is as fun and easy as writing ever gets. And then – you hit the end of the sequence. You have to find your footings again in the context of the wider story. And for a week or two, you thrash around, wondering why the work has suddenly become harder.

And the short answer there is: worry you not. That’s just part of storytelling. Give it time.

But also, it can be really worth thinking about your sequences in isolation. Are their highs or lows sufficiently high or low? Does there feel like a real structure there? (So think of the difference between a Jason Bourne car chase and a complex story-sequence like the Fiona abduction / escape one. The movie car chase is just plain fun and it doesn’t need much structure. Your work doesn’t have special effects and it doesn’t have Matt Damon, so you need the structure.)

If the sequence as a whole feels flat or lacking in intensity, it’s most likely because you haven’t quite evolved an internal sequence-structure that fits. If that’s the case, then the very simplest bit of analysis is just to take what you’ve written, scene by scene, and see how your story questions evolve. If there’s a natural, powerful movement from one scene to the next, you’re doing good. If the movement seems abrupt or too slow, you need to alter your pacing accordingly (which might mean adding or subtracting entire scenes, of course.)

But really, this email is a win if it makes you think about sequences as a story-unit in their own right. The problems and solutions in writing are often really, really obvious as long as you ask the right question. And sometimes those questions need to be asked about sequences.

That is all from me. I am neither ill. Nor locked in a vault.

That’s a win, right?

How about you? What sequences have you written that were most fun to write? Or most problematic. Tell me what you think, and let's all have a Heated Debate.

Thanks all for your supportive comments last week, when – cough, cough – I was very poorly. I’m pretty much back in the saddle this week, and I thought I’d bring you something sweet, simple and very actionable – a practical start to the New Year, in effect.

So: stories are made of scenes strung together in a plot. Let’s just assume for now that your plot is OK. In which case, the quality of your book is going to hang, to a very large extent, on the quality of your scenes. What makes a scene work? What are the tricks of the trade? What are the things you need to look out for?

Well, the curious little secret is that these things are (mostly) obvious and simple. They’re just hard to do. So here are some rules:

• Jump to the action as fast as you can
• If you want, you can jump right into the action, even at the cost of not quite making sense initially. You can then, 2-3 paragraphs in, go and back-fill the information the reader needs to make sense of things. So for example, you might start with dialogue, without the reader knowing where the characters are situated. Once you’ve got things going via dialogue, you can add the, “They were standing in the middle of a …, etc”. That often gives you a stronger more engaging start, than starting with a description could ever deliver.
• Leave the scene as fast as you can. You can always tie up any loose threads in the next scene … and you probably need to tie fewer things up than you might think.
• It’s often said that every scene needs to have a kind of conflict. I don’t think that’s quite right – or at least, it’s not the most helpful way of describing things. What IS true is that there needs to be something unsettled in the scene. Something mobile. A question that needs an answer.
• Your character’s emotions need to be engaged. If he/she doesn’t care, your reader won’t care.
• In general, but not always-always, you want a balance of scene description (so your scene is physically realised), dialogue (because that’s the most supple, alive element in any scene) and action (in the sense that we know what your characters are doing.)
• There should for preference be a useful reverberation between the action that’s taking place and the physical atmosphere in the scene. That can be obvious (a proposal in a rose garden) or contrasting (a proposal in a butcher’s shop), but you want some alive, interesting echo between action and place.
• And here’s a biggie: you structure your scenes much as you structure a story. You set up the question early on in the scene. You develop it. You reach a climax. You resolve quickly and move on.

Now all that seems pretty wholesome. A good, wholegrain style menu for writing a scene. But because that kind of advice seems pretty damn bland taken on its own, here’s a mini-scene of my own, with comments in italics added.

The situation here is that my character, Fiona, has just escaped from a damaging and traumatising situation. She has fled to a buddy of hers: a guy called Lev, who is ex-Russian Special Forces and not exactly a run-of-the-mill character. She trusts Lev to look after her, but Lev needs to find his range first. Here’s how things go:

 +++++++++

I park where Lev tells me to, outside a cream-painted house, with a sheet of graffitied chipboard for a door.

Very swift intro to the physical location. So brief, it hardly interrupts things

‘Is here,’ says Lev.

The door is held by a crude wooden catch. No lock.

Fiona’s observation this. By noticing the crudity of the accommodation, she is letting you know, in effect, what she’s thinking.

Lev opens the door for me – there are no hinges, so he has to lift it – and I step inside.

I knew that Lev didn’t have a permanent home in Britain or, I think, anywhere. Mostly he sleeps in his car or on the floors of friends’ houses. But when he isn’t doing those things, and isn’t abroad, he uses squats.

But knowing that and being here: two different things.

Again: Fiona isn’t saying, “I feel X about this place.” But she’s letting us know all the same. Indirect access to character emotions is just fine.

The downstairs room is lightless. The doors and windows have been boarded up front and rear. There’s a poor quality kitchen in place – white formica doors loose on their hinges, chipboard surfaces bubbling and splitting with damp – but I already know there’s no water in the tap, no power in the sockets.

More physical description. But this isn’t done for its own sake. By now, it’s clear that the question raised by this scene is roughly: “Is this horrible squat going to satisfy Fiona’s needs for sanctuary? And how will her discomfort shift her relationship with Lev?” Those aren’t huge questions in the context of the story. But they don’t have to be. They just have to feel alive and important for the duration of a (shortish) scene.

Lev says nothing. Just points me upstairs.

Upstairs: two bedrooms, one bathroom, nothing else. Bare boards. No furniture. No heating. No bathroom fittings, even. Lev has taken over the larger of the two bedrooms. A military looking roll of bedding, neatly furled. A ten-litre jerry can of water. A wash bowl. A primus stove and basic cooking equipment, all clean, all tidy. A black bag, of clothes I presume. A small box of food. The front window was boarded, but Lev has removed the boards and they stand leaning against the wall.

This is the first revelation of the accommodation proper. In that sense, what’s gone before has been just preamble. This is where the scene-question gets sharpened up further.

Light enters the room in silence. Leaves again the same way.

I don’t say anything.

Don’t even step into the room, not really. Just stand there in the doorway.

So everything’s hanging. At the moment, we’re reaching a moment of crisis in our mini-story. Will this squat work for Fiona? It’s not looking good. Her hanging back in the doorway (rather than stepping forward into the room) is as close as she gets to actual conflict with Lev. And that’s not much conflict. That’s why I don’t think focusing on conflict is especially helpful.

I am not what you would call a girly girl. I don’t have a particular relationship with pink. Don’t revere handbags or hoard shoes. I don’t love to dress up, or bake, or follow faddy diets, or learn new ways to decorate my home. On the other hand, I have just spent the weekend being tortured in a barn near Rhayader and I was, I admit it, wanting something a bit homelier than this.

Fiona humour! And for the first time really direct access to her thoughts / feelings. Again, this is pushing us closer to the point of crisis/decision/resolution.

Lev stands behind me seeing the room through my eyes. Perhaps he was secretly expecting me to be thrilled. Perhaps he is thinking dark thoughts about decadent Western girls, our need for luxury.

More humour. But here we have Lev’s position and Fiona’s. At the moment, these are two opposed, unresolved forces. We don’t yet know how this is going to resolve.

He says nothing. Not straight away. We just stand there in the pale light. Even the tiniest sounds echo among these hard surfaces, so a single creak of a floorboard rolls around the room, like a pea in a shoebox.

Tension ratchets up for a couple of lines. Then …

Then Lev says, ‘Is not suitable.’

That was halfway between a question and a statement, but I let it be a statement.

Lev says, ‘We go somewhere else.’

Boom! Done. We know that Fiona’s opposition has won the day. As far as we can tell at this stage, the Fiona / Lev relationship hasn’t been injured by that micro-conflict. And of course a new story question is immediately launched: Lev still seems willing to find sanctuary for Fiona, but what is he going to offer? Will Fiona find her sanctuary? And will that be enough to allow for her recovery? Those questions are immediately tackled by the scenes that follow.

 +++++++++++

That’s it. As you can see, not a lot of heavy-duty story-freight hangs on that scene. In a way, you could cut it completely and the book would lose nothing much in terms of plot. But from the reader’s perspective, the scene is funny. It’s tense. And they learn something about Lev (the way he lives) that they may have been curious about for the space of about 400,000 words (ie: since the moment they first met him in book #1 of the series.)

And one other thing: the scene is short. That whole thing notches up just 450 words, or about a page and a half of a paperback. But that’s still long enough to launch a question, develop it, build some tension round it, have plenty of personality / emotion / humour in the situation, then resolve it and move on. Do that enough times in the course of a properly plotted story, and you have a book, my friend.

How about you? DO you have a way you like to write scenes? Recipes you follow? Rules you adopt? Let me know and we'll all have a Heated Debate.