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Strange times, old buddies, strange times.

It’s sort of nice to be at home with the children. We live on the edge of a village with tons of green space in every direction, so we don’t have any of that cooped-up / stir-crazy feeling that so many people must be having now. And the infection rate in our part of the world is low. Plus people round here are being very damn sensible with their precautions.

So in many ways we’re fine. And in other ways? Well, the news has become kind of odd, hasn’t it? And the impact of covid on the business side of Jericho Writers is like its own little whirlwind of destruction. Not nice. We’re doing emergency rescue work where we can. We’ll grab some loans if we need to. We’ll survive.

(And oh, if you fancy a manuscript assessment or the like, now would be a very good time to seek it! Do look in the PSes to see if anything there takes your fancy. We’d be much obliged.)

But in all of this, one thing that has struck me very forcefully is the metaphorical power of huge global forces.

Last week, I mentioned that King Lear was written (probably) while Shakespeare was in quarantine. Theatre-goers would have encountered the same kind of year that he’d had. And they’d be hearing the echoes loud and clear – a sense of end-times, things being split asunder:

… Love cools,
friendship falls off, brothers divide: in
cities, mutinies; in countries, discord; in
palaces, treason …
 We have seen the best of our time:

But you don’t have to be Shakespeare or be writing poetry to grab the same kind of effect from the world outside. Some of the most obvious examples of the technique from 20th century literature would include:

• The Great Gatsby. Prohibition is just central to that book. It’s the flipside of all the prosperity and flash of the Roaring Twenties, the vicious little secret behind it all. You couldn’t have Gatsby without Prohibition. The actual historical facts of the era effectively deliver the moral, metaphorical tapestry of the book itself.
• The Spy Who Came In From the Cold. Le Carre’s spy fiction is all about love, trust and betrayal. Those are his themes and how better to play those out on a massive canvas, than adopt the entire Cold War espionage struggle as his emblem? If he had taken the exact same story – who loved who; who betrayed who – and played that in a totally different setting (boy’s boarding school, Kansas dairy farms), the story would never have felt as urgent, as necessary, as colossal.
• The Plague (La Peste). Camus’s 1947 novel tells of an epidemic sweeping the French-Algerian town of Oran. There was some historical underpinning for the book – Oran did indeed have a history of plague – but no reader in 1947 could read that book without thinking of Nazism and the great darkness that had come over Europe. Without that instant and obvious metaphorical connection, the book would have been half what it was.

And what is all this to us?

Well, it’s just a way of suggesting we look up and out for metaphor, not just down and small. It’s not something you can force into a book. It’s just something that, if offered by your story and its setting, you should grab with both hands.

Sometimes, you’ll just walk straight into the centre of the Big Thing. So Hilary Mantel took a story of power and ambition and set it in the heart of the Tudor court. Everyone knows that Tudors are box office. Result: a trilogy of global bestsellers that far exceeded any of Mantel’s previous work in sales. It wasn’t that her writing had got better. It’s that her canvas had got bigger, the scale of everything was greater.

Equally, you could walk straight into the Cuban Missile Crisis or the American Civil War or the Battle of Britain. Any story set in the heart of those things would effectively matter right away, because you’re just grabbing history as your story.

If you’re writing SFF, the same thing, except you’re making up your Big Thing. One Ring To Rule Them All plus Mordor plus all that went along with those things – result: the seminal work of epic fantasy. It wasn’t the writing; it was the scale. It was the ambition. Same thing with His Dark Materials.

But you don’t have to walk into the heart of things to get the same effect. Suppose your story was a kind of Godfather-style mafia tale set in New Jersey or New York. If you got your story to play out, at the same time as the Cuban Missile Crisis was playing out, you’d get instant depth, instant authority, instant echo from doing just that. It’s like the ‘great times, great decisions’ feeling about the actual historical facts would bleed downwards into the pages of your novel. You wouldn’t need to do much more than dripfeed the historical drama into the pages of your fictional one. The reader’s own brain will do most of the rest.

And – well, we’re living in strange and overwhelming times at the moment. For what it’s worth, this covid epidemic doesn’t speak to the writer in me. I don’t get itchy fingers when I think about it. (Whereas – godfather-type story plus Cuban missile crisis? Yes, I could start writing that one tomorrow.)

And you? Maybe your Great Theme is covid. Or the Cold War. Or something completely else. And of course loads of great books are written without some great backdrop of that kind. But as a technique to use, when the circumstances are right? It’s a no-brainer. You get instant depth and gravity. You get sales.

That’s just about it from me. Do take a look in our PSes. But also do remember that we have a free membership offer for y’all too. We’ve had way over a thousand people take the offer up already and have had amazingly positive feedback too. We’ll be ending the offer soon, so grab it now:

Access My Free 14-day Membership Here

That’s it from me.

Stay safe. Stay happy. Stay writing.

And what do you think? Reckon that King Lear is overheated codswallop? Are you already at work on the Ultimate Covid Masterpiece? Are you safe and well? Or going stir crazy? Or, heck, do you have a great internet meme to share. Put your glad rags on, mosey down to the comments, and let's all have a Heated Debate.

Folks, we can avoid the subject no more. Pandemic is upon us. Around the world, we’re closing our doors to the outside, stocking up on handgel, and worrying about our elderly and vulnerable relatives.

We here at Jericho are all 100% OK.

Over the last year or two, as it happens, we’ve worked hard to build a team that mostly sits in the same small office in Jericho, Oxford because we reckon that physical proximity forms bonds and culture like nothing else. That said, we can all work remotely and that’s exactly what we’re now doing. Everyone is safe and well. Long may it remain that way.

I’m OK too. All the same, these are uncertain times. I have four kids under the age of 7 and my wife is immune-compromised and physically disabled. She is certainly in the vulnerable category and we have to hope that the waves of coronavirus don’t break too roughly on our little island here. I don’t think they will.

My wife and I both have elderly relatives, all of whom are being as safe and sensible as can be, and all of whom, aside from their age, are in pretty decent health.

I hope you and yours are spared any serious ill health in these next weeks and months. That, by far, is the most important thing. I’ll light a candle for you all.

And after that … a long way after that … we’re still all writers. And Shakespeare took advantage of the quarantine restrictions brought about by the bubonic plague to write King Lear. And Macbeth. And (damn the man) Anthony and Cleopatra.

If we’re safe, and our loved ones are safe, and we’ve watched enough funny Youtube videos about families surviving quarantine, our thoughts will start to turn to writing.

We’re here to help.

Same as before. Same as always.

If we can help, we will. If you have a dumb question, we can probably answer it. If you need help with your manuscript, we can certainly help with that. Our online courses will run just as before. We’ll still be available by phone and email.

What’s more, we’re giving serious thought as to how we can do still more to help people in an age when simply getting to the shops may be difficult.

Over the coming weeks, you’ll get a stream of announcements from us about things we’re doing to help out. First and foremost, we want you to be secure. After that, if you need our support, we’re aiming to do more than we’ve done before, not less.

In that context, I know a lot of you have wanted to try out JW membership. Perhaps you’re nervous of making a full-on commitment to an annual or rolling monthly subscription. Or perhaps you just want to nose into a few specific videos. (Want to get the detail on how to build a mailing list? Or need a refresher on how to produce great descriptive writing? Or get an insight into how big publishers work? Or use AgentMatch to build a list of agents. Or – well, anything really.)

Anyway. Whatever. We’ve created a free, no-strings, 14-day membership for you. You can access it whenever you want. (For example, if the next week or two looks frantic for you, the offer will still be there in 2 or 3 weeks’ time. We’ll give you plenty of notice before we withdraw it.)

And “no strings” means exactly that. The membership is free. We won’t ask you for a bank card. The membership won’t suddenly flip into a paying subscription. If at the end of the 14-day period, you choose to take out a full annual membership or our cancel-any-time monthly package, we’ll be delighted. If not, if the freebie was useful but sufficient for your needs, we’re also delighted. We’re here to help.

Access My Free 14-day Membership Here

That’s it from me. We’ve got some other ideas that I hope you’ll all love.

In particular, we haven’t forgotten our existing members. We want to do something lovely for you guys. Stay tuned. I don’t have anything to announce yet, but will do soon.

Stay safe, youse. Then go and write King Lear, you slackers.

You can add your draft ACT I below for scathing comment from the ghost of King James I. Or just chat about whatever the heck. We're all here.

My book of the moment is Amazon Ads Unleashed – a very useful guide to advertising your book on Amazon. Couple of warnings before you rush out and buy it. First, it’s written for more advanced users. If you just want a basic tour of Amazon ads, this isn’t the book for you. If a basic guide is what you’re after, you should head over to our Self-Pub course, which is free to JW members.

The second warning is that Amazon advertising in general works only for indie authors. If you’re traditionally published, your per-book royalties will be so small that it’ll be hard to make ads work for you. Not just that, but there are other problems with the way trad publishers price and market their books which mean conversion rates are likely to be poor.

So in a way, what I’m about to say won’t be of direct relevance to many of you … except that the heart of it is relevant to absolutely all of you.

Here’s what Robert Ryan, author of that Amazon Ads book, has to say about his own genre:

In my case, I might run an epic fantasy category ad. This targets all books listed in this category. That’s a lot. A whopping lot…

But I write traditional-style epic fantasy. The category, though, is a mixed bag of other things. First there’s grimdark versus noblebright – the more traditional flavour of epic fantasy. People tend to read one or the other. Much less often they read both. So, in a category ad, my noblebright books are being shown indiscriminately to grimdark readers. And those folks are numerous…

But things get worse. Extremely popular just at the moment is reverse-harem fantasy. It should have its own category, but it gets lumped in epic fantasy… And if reverse harem isn’t enough, litrpg fiction (literary role playing fiction) is thrown in with epic fantasy too.

My noblebright book ad could be shown on all these books in a category ad. It potentially gets a massive impression volume, but perhaps only twenty percent of the impressions are on similar noblebright books. And that’s where the readers I want to reach are mostly hanging out.

The point Ryan is making here is that seeking a wide audience for your books will always mean that you are chasing one that converts badly.

Those reverse harem readers just won’t buy your Tolkein-style fantasy. It’s just not what they want.

And, OK, that sounds like it’s just a lesson in how to use Amazon ads. But it’s not. It’s a lesson in book marketing, period.

You can’t make money by advertising your books widely on Amazon. Or via Facebook. Or via Bookbub.

If you seek to build your mailing list via large, indiscriminate giveaways, you will end up with a mailing list full of junk.

If you seek to boost your Facebook likes by posting funny cat videos (assuming you are not an author of funny cat books), you will end up with a Facebook profile that is absolutely useless for any marketing purpose.

If you go on a blog tour of 35 different blogs, where 34 of them are not perfectly attuned to the kind of book you write, you will be wasting your effort at least 97.1% of the time.

And so on.

Any kind of book marketing is about finding your most passionate audience and finding ways to make that audience adhere to you. (Of which, by far the most effective tool, is simply: write good books. If you can do that, the rest of your marketing challenge becomes a lot, lot simpler.)

In a funny way, what we think of as advertising – the Superbowl ad, or huge outdoor posters advertising beers or cars – is the exact reverse of what you should be thinking about. Those ads are aimed at everybody, and they work because Mercedes (let’s say) wants to target everyone. Either people are potential Mercedes buyers (so great; they get some effective advertising.) Or they are not potential Mercedes buyers, in which case they are being taught what the meaning of the brand is … which means that everyone knows … which means that Mercedes buyers know everyone around them will understand the brand meaning of the car they drive. That actively deepens the commitment of those Mercedes buyers, because there would be nothing stupider than paying top dollar for a car if people didn’t know it was a top dollar car.

Your book just isn’t like that. Your market is a niche in a niche in a niche and you just don’t need to establish some universal brand value. You need to find and talk to your readers. That’s it.

And it’s so easy to be tempted by the numbers. “If I wrote on this blog, I could get in front of X,000 readers.” “If I ran this ad, I could accumulate X,000 impressions.” And so on.

That way of thinking is always wrong.

Passion and specificity matters in book marketing perhaps almost more than in any other market you are able to think of. How come? Because books are utterly individual. Your market isn’t the market for fiction. Or the market for adult fiction. Or the market for fantasy. Or the market for epic fantasy. If you start to think of yourself as in the market for noblebright epic fantasy, you are getting closer. But is your book about warriors? Or a coming of age story? Or medieval tinted? Or what? Truth is, you are probably in a niche of a niche of a niche.

And that’s good – because that’s where passion, and readers, and success lies.

That’s it from me. We’ve got a brilliant self-pub day in London tomorrow. Hope to see loads of you there. If you haven’t yet bought tickets (shame on you!), you can turn up at the door and we’ll see if we like the cut of your jib. Details here.

Till soon.

What do you think? How do you market your work? What works, what doesn't? And are you more grimdark or noblebright?

The book I’m reading in the bath at the moment is the controversial American Dirt. The controversy is a bit silly, I think, but I’m not going to talk about that here. Rather, what I want to look at is two different ways of writing.

Here’s one way. The excerpt comes from the very start of the book – the mother (Mami) shoving her boy (Luca) towards safety during an attack on their home:

Her hands are not gentle; she propels him towards the shower. He trips on the raised tile step and falls forwards onto his hands. Mami lands on top of him and his teeth pierce his lip in the tumble. He tastes blood. One dark droplet makes a tiny circle of red against the bright green shower tile. Mami shoves Luca into the corner. There’s no door on this shower, no curtain. It’s only a corner of his abuela’s bathroom, with a third tiled wall built to suggest a stall. This wall is around five and a half feet high and three feet long – just large enough, with some luck, to shield Luca and his mother from sight. Luca’s back is wedged, his small shoulders touching both walls. His knees are drawn up to his chin, and Mami is clinched around him like a tortoise’s shell. The door of the bathroom is open, which worries Luca.

Now, it’s not just the content there which strongly suggests a thriller. The prose does too. In fact, this chunk has all the flavour of Modern American Thriller – clean, deft, unyielding. Writers in other genres and from other countries sometimes write this way, but there’s no question that American writers first constructed this way of writing and that they’re still the best at delivering it.

But before we discuss it in detail, let’s try to understand the beast. The writing involved in this MAT standard is typically:

• Present tense.
• Factual and declarative – not many qualifications or uncertainties.
• Sentences are typically short.
• Vocabulary is typically uncomplicated.
• Point of view is often objective rather than personal. There are only two phrases in this passage which identify Luca as the point-of-view character (“He tastes blood” and “which worries Luca”.) Mostly, the viewpoint feels neutral and external.
• Centred on factual / physical reportage, rather than emotional / intellectual reflection
• A collage of one-off snapshots, more than a broadly connected picture. So if you look at the passage above, you could remove almost any sentence or clause and leave the rest of it undamaged. So “He tastes blood” stands alone – a specific snapshot of a specific sensation. Yes, the sentence makes sense given what has immediately gone before, but you could remove this sentence and the passage would still make perfect sense. That’s true, give or take, of nearly all of it.

It’s pretty obvious why thrillers work well this way. There’s something uncompromising in this kind of language. Something warriorlike. In battle, there’s no room for complex reflection or sifting through of what-ifs and maybes. You just need facts. You need to remove emotion from those facts. You tell it like it is.

There is a kind of simplicity in this writing, but there’s a simplicity in the workings of a well-made handgun too. It’s the same kind of simplicity and has nothing to do with a lack of sophistication. George Pelecanos is a particular adept, but there are plenty of others. It’s like these authors have taken the lessons of Hemingway and Chandler and polished them up into a silver pebble, round and indivisible.

But that’s not the only way to write. Here’s how you could take the same material and deliver it in a way that largely breaks those MAT rules:

With ungentle hands, she propelled him towards the shower. Clumsy with shock, and her attention still pulled to the sounds of the intruders outside, she misjudged things, or Luca did. He tripped on the green tiled step and fell forwards, face-first, biting his lip in the tumble. Mami scooped him up and held him close, her body a shield for his. The blood from his lip looked astonishingly bright on the green tiles. Mami, automatically, wiped the blood away, but her thoughts were elsewhere. The shower had no door or curtain, only a low tiled wall that formed a kind of stall. It was pitifully little by way of hiding place. Nothing at all, by way of shelter.

In that passage, the series-of-snapshots quality has largely gone. The sequence of actions and consequences is all made clearer and more smoothly joined. Mami pushes Luca. He trips. He cuts his lip. Mami cuddles him and wipes away the blood. They take stock of where they are, and its limitations. And the reflections / qualifications / uncertainties are there too. Why did Luca fall? Well, Mami ‘misjudged things, or Luca did.’ Reality isn’t always quite clear, and this kind of writing picks up on those unclarities.

Is that rewritten passage, better or worse? Well, neither really. It's just different. Let’s call this kind of prose writing deep rather than flat; the equivalent of painting with oils rather than acrylics.

Very broadly speaking, the more character-centred your story, the more you will tend to paint with oils, the more you’ll want to write deep.

The more your interest is in action-reportage, and especially thriller-action reportage, the more you are likely to write flat.

But you can mix them up. As your story floats in and out of reflective moments and action moments, you can adapt your prose style accordingly. Indeed, although I’ve quoted Jeanine Cummins / American Dirt for this email, most of her book isn’t really written in MAT. It’s more character-led, more reflective.

And if your story is mostly ‘written deep’, then passages of ‘writing flat’ will be that much more powerful, that much more shocking. Your action scenes will gain a sense of edge and that exciting lack of compromise. The mild disconnectedness between the sentences can almost suggest a mild shock or altered emotional response on the part of your protagonist. Those are things you can emphasise a bit with your dialogue and your character’s other responses to the situation.

My own writing borrows a lot from MAT and I have a lot of fun with it – including actual fun, as in making jokes. So here, for example, is my character, Fiona, who has just had an altercation with a couple of thugs. She’s broken the jaw of one of them, then ran away. She’s safe now, but in shock. She arrives at a bus-shelter, where there’s a man also waiting:

‘Hi,’ I say.

‘Hi.’

After a bit, he says, ‘Are you all right?’

I say, ‘I don’t know.’

I want to ask him to punch me on the arm, to see if I can feel anything, but I don’t.

He smiles and shifts his weight.

We stand there together until I see a taxi. I try to flag it down, but walk straight into the glass wall of the shelter instead. My bus-stop buddy does the honours, flags the taxi and sees me into it. He handles me as you’d handle a figurine of antique china.

Nothing there says, ‘I am in shock’ yet Fiona’s shock reverberates all through the passage. There’s no obvious joke / punchline in the text, but Fiona’s ability to walk straight into a glass wall is sort of funny all the same. Fiona doesn’t directly reflect on how she must look or is behaving but, because the man asks ‘Are you all right?’, we understand that she must be giving off something quite odd.

And so on.

This kind of writing fun comes directly from the tools and resources of MAT – writing flat, not writing deep. (More prose writing tips here.)

Have fun with it. Tomorrow week, Saturday 14th, I’m going to be in London talking about self-publishing and author-led marketing generally. We still have a few tickets left for that, so do come along if you can.

But tell me: how do you write? Do you paint with oils or acrylics? Do you write flat or write deep? Or do you mix em up? Tell me what works for you, and let's all have a Heated Debate.