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Oh ye merry folk of writing, I have tidings to bring … but, in the best traditions of suspense, I’m not going to tell you just yet.

Instead, a question:

Suppose you were told that your book cover wasn’t allowed to centre on an image of any kind?

Fine, perhaps you might be allowed a doodle, or watermark, or something clearly secondary to the actual text – but mostly, you’d be allowed words, colours and nothing much else.

How would you feel?

I think most of us would feel disappointed. Text feels a good way to communicate data, but a lacklustre way of communicating emotion. And, since novels are mostly about an emotional journey, a text-only cover seems certain to disappoint.

And, OK, all my fiction covers use imagery of some sort. At times, that imagery has been very scanty indeed. The American cover of This Thing of Darkness features a cloud. That’s literally all. The US version of Love Story, with Murders features a tree in a snowy landscape and, again, nothing else. (The tree, by the way, plays no part in the story. It just looked nice.)

But what you have to remember about really good cover designers is that they’re really good designers. They’re creatives. You have to tell them the outcome you want – roughly, “This is the genre, here is the emotion I want to generate, and here are some visual ingredients that may or may not be useful.”

So when I talked to my cover designer about the Thing of Darkness cover, the basic mission statement could have been reduced to:

• Crime thriller
• Excitement / danger
• Trawler / storm / waves

I assumed we’d have some shot of a trawler deck, tipped at some terrifying angle, with black water sluicing across the deck. Throw a crimey-title in a crimey-font across the image and – badda-boom – there’s your cover.

And sure. I’ll bet you a dollar to a dime that my designer explored covers like that. Dug out pictures of trawlers (from massive image libraries that have got shots of absolutely everything.) But in the end, a designer has to be guided by what works.

Try trawler. Does it work? Dammit. Not quite. Explore lighthouse. Does that work? Dammit. Not quite. Try waves-smashing-on-rocks. Does that work? Dammit. Not quite.

A creatively-led and experimental design process ended up with a cover – the storm cloud – that we hadn’t anticipated, but worked just great. Here it is:

That cover, however, walked only halfway to pure abstraction; it didn’t go the whole hog. Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated, on the other hand, used text. And colour. And nothing else. Here it is:

Ask yourself honestly: would this cover have been better with imagery? And what would the images have been? The book tells a heart-rending story of the Jewish experience of Ukraine – and of the Second World War. You could have had some sepia-tinted photos of some long-ago shtetl. But those images would have been reductive. They’d have limited the book instead of hugely expanding it.

And ask yourself. What do you feel when you see the Everything is Illuminated cover? The black and white looks sober, but the billowing colour keeps telling you: yes, there is illumination, it is joyous, and it is magical, and this book will open those doors.

Or look at this version of Ian Fleming’s The Spy Who Loved Me:

It’s utterly simple. The title already sells the book. The font and colours hint at the book’s classic status. And the two singed bullet holes: they give you all the promise you need to pick the book up and starting reading. More would have given less.

I make these points because, oh merry folk of writing, I have news. And the news is:

I’ve written a book! And it’s just been published!

And not to beat about the bush too much:

You know what the book is – because you’ve already read it!

The book is called 52 LETTERS and it’s a compilation of these weekly emails from me to you – but squidged into book form, drained of any residual marketing nonsense, and tied with a ribbon woven from rainbow beams and unicorn kisses.

Now, I have to say, I love writing these weekly emails and I loved-loved-loved squidging them together into a book. An email, inevitably, a bit of a throwaway thing. Even if you read one and it really hits a spot, the likelihood is that you absorb some of the message, then move on. Forget it.

A book just has more status than that. In the world, yes, but also mentally. Anything tucked up in a book is asking to be stored in a different way – read differently, absorbed differently.

So though I remembered writing all those emails, the actual book feels like a different thing. Different and better. I love it already.

But – gulp – to remove my (sober, black felt) writing hat and put on my (jaunty, yellow) marketing one: how the hell do you sell a book like that?

I mean: it’s not a book about writing, or editing, or publishing, or marketing. It’s a little bit of all those things, plus a big fat helping of whatever nonsense is in my brain at the time.

And what kind of image do you put on the cover to say: “here’s quite a general, discursive yet practical and entertaining book for writers?”

A pen? A typewriter? A quill? An inkpot?

If you browse the Authorship category on Amazon, you’ll find books that make use of all of those icons … even though damn few of us actually use a pen, or typewriter or inkpot to write with. They’re icons used by non-creative visual folks as a kind of angry shorthand: “You know that inkpot symbolises things-for-writers, so here’s a book with yet another damn inkpot on it. Now buy it, OK?”

So. What did we do, me and my numberless colleagues at Jericho Writers Publishing?

Well, the title we came up with – in the form it appears on Amazon – is:

52 Letters:
 A year of advice on writing, editing, getting an agent, writing from the heart...

But the actual cover delivers a much longer title / subtitle combo:

52 Letters:
A year of advice on writing, editing, getting an agent, writing from the heart, the world’s oldest book, marketing your work, battling copyeditors, the secret of style, probable vs plausible, what’s up with Barnes & Noble, cannibalism, empathetic characters, writing phonetically and much more.

We liked that title because it told you what a rich, glorious, unembarrassed mish-mash the book contains. It feels like, at a textual level, a title that delivers the promise of the book.

But in a way, by choosing such a massively convoluted title, we were giving our designer an even bigger problem than he might have had to begin with. Not only was the book hard to pigeonhole, but we’ve given him a title so long that it wouldn’t even fit on Amazon’s title box.

But you know what? That wasn’t our problem. It was the designer’s. The sort of problem he loves to solve.

We just threw a book description and our enormous title at our designer, Kelly Finnegan, and said, “Hey Kelly, here’s a ridiculously long title for a hard-to-categorise book. The book is about writing and editing and all that, but it’s definitely not a textbook. We think it’s useful but entertaining, practical but discursive. And also – well, hell, we want it to be joyous and inspirational and anarchic and personal and fun. So please can we have a book cover that says all that – and looks incredible? Thanks.”

I had no idea what Kelly would come back with, but he came back to us with this:

And honestly? I think that may be the best book cover I’ve ever had. Any country, any title, any edition.

The fact is that, although Kelly’s used just three main colours, a watermark version of me, and the text, the result delivers exactly the message we wanted.

What’s striking is just how much creativity there is in the design.

We didn’t tell Kelly to make the actual book title (“52 Letters”) small; he just did it. We didn’t tell Kelly to put in the “Love from” before my author name; he just did it. And we certainly didn’t tell him to use that sprawling handwritten font for the subtitle, but his decision to do that immediately signified something personal, creative and fun.

We sent some advance review copies out to people and got lots of lovely comments back, including this doozy from John David Mann:

“Not since Stephen King’s “On Writing” have I so valued a writer’s writing on writing! These aren’t just 52 Letters—they’re 52 love letters, to and for writers of all stripes and stages of accomplishment.”

Now that’s a lovely quote, of course. (Thanks, John!) But that ‘love letter’ comment feels absolutely consistent with the cover Kelly created. And when you have that kind of merger between what the cover promises to a reader and what it ends up delivering, you have a kind of sweet perfection – and one not of my making.

Lovely.

And finally, my little pickled pumpkin, because you are one of the people to whom I have addressed all these letters, we have made the book available at a small fraction of its normal price. The paperback ($8.99 / £6.99) is just about as cheap as we’re permitted to price it: we literally earn almost nothing at that price. The ebook too ($2.99 / £1.99 / or free via KU) is priced to be more like a giveaway than an actual purchase.

So, please: I hope you pick up a copy, because it was written, quite literally, for you – and because you helped create it.

The fact is, that if you lot weren’t such a totally brilliant audience, I’d never have written as many emails as I have done, and they’d have been a lot more boring too. You guys are the best.

You can buy the book here.

And please, buy it fast, because when the clock strikes midnight on Saturday, we shall ratchet those prices up higher than a stilt-walking giraffe on a stepladder.

I think Kelly Finnegan is a wee bit of a genius. And best of all? No inkpots.

An interesting thought this week, arising from my Summer Festival conversation with Jenny Geras, the CEO of Bookouture, on Tuesday this week.

If you’re a SFOW ticket holder and missed the session, do try to catch up with the replay. If you’ve no idea what Bookouture is, then it’s a British digital-first publisher, that went from being a one-person startup to selling almost 10,000,000 books a year, half of them in the US. Its success was born from aggressive pricing, fierce focus on data and experimentation, excellent social media and a willingness to advertise.

In the course of our chat, Jenny said something that surprised me.

Bookouture runs an open submissions policy. If you have an agent, your agent may well wish to submit to the firm. But you don’t need one. You can just send in your work.

Now, that part I already knew. But – because I always like to know the stats – I went on to ask what proportion of those open submissions went on to get accepted. Jenny didn’t instantly know the percentage. (It’s a stat that matters a lot to writers, but is of little more than curiosity value to publishers.)

I prompted her. ‘One per cent?’ I asked. ‘Maybe a bit less?’

And she told me no, the acceptance rate wasn’t that low. From her response, I guess two or three per cent might be about right.

Now, OK, not everyone has heard of Bookouture, so I’m going to guess that their submissions are of slightly higher quality than those going to the average literary agent.

But still.

Two or three manuscripts in every hundred submitted are good enough for Bookouture to take on.

Wow! The equivalent stats for most literary agents would be about one in a thousand, with, admittedly, quite a broad range of variation in that proportion.

And even when you get taken on by a literary agent, your chance of having your work taken up by a major publisher is perhaps not much better than 50% (with, again, a ton of variation.)

Even allowing for fuzziness in the data, it seems clear that Bookouture is simply accepting work that the traditional gatekeepers never used to consider.

What’s more, Bookouture has no underclass. It pays no advances and every book gets the same level of budget, love, and attention upfront. In Big 5 firms, there are authors who get the huge advances and the marketing budgets – and ones who don’t and don’t. That’s just not the case at Bookouture. All books get the same input – and it’s readers, nobody else, who determine the final outcome.

In a way, that’s the most exciting, and most revolutionary, aspect of Bookouture’s model. Buy widely, invest equally, and let readers decide.

Perhaps all along, those trad publisher gates were built too narrow. The issue wasn’t that good quality manuscripts weren’t there. Perhaps the issue was simply that in a world of limited shelf space – and very limited in the case of supermarkets – gatekeepers were forced to reject far more than they should.

Interesting thought, no?

And the practical takeaway from this? Well, maybe it’s this. That the standard you need to achieve is easier to reach than you thought. The gates that matter aren’t those held by the traditional industry, they’re the ones held by readers – does your book please them?

That’s how it ought to be, right? And the goal is one you can achieve. That doesn’t mean you can discard all those disciplines around writing well and editing hard, but it means you can shift the entire project from “never gonna happen” to “yes, really quite plausible.”

And that’s good, isn’t it? A hopeful message in a worrying age.

That's it from me? What about you? Have you submitted work to Bookouture? What was your experience? And would you want to do it, or do you still prefer a bricks-and-mortar led strategy from a traditional publisher? Let me know, and we can all have a Heated Debate ...

I once saw a documentary about dog sledding in the Arctic. The show had (I think) three teams racing to the Pole using broadly the same kind of technology that the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen once used.

The Norwegian team won the race (obviously: they were Norwegian), but the TV show focused mostly on the exploits and struggles of the British team, all of whom were strong and committed - but who had no experience of the arctic. Or huskies. Or dog sleds. Or the arduous cross-country skiing involved. Or indeed, anything actually relevant to arctic travel. 

I’m thinking about that documentary because (drum roll, cymbals, and your choice of other percussive instruments) I AM ONCE AGAIN WRITING A FIONA GRIFFITHS NOVEL. 

I’ve been so busy with all things Jericho for the past year or two, I just haven’t written much. I’ve had a half-written novel on my laptop all this time and not had the time or clarity of thought to drive it forwards. But now I actually do. And I’m 50,000 words into a novel that’ll be about twice that length when cooked, which means … 

I am about halfway towards the North Pole ... 

Any map I once had has long ago been shredded by ice and wind … 

I’ve no damn idea how long this journey is likely to take … 

And I would quite like to go home, curl up in front of a log fire, and see how many crumpets I can eat. 

The simple fact is that there is something unnerving about being a long way into a book but also a long way from that blessed THE END. Most first drafts just are a bit shite. That’s not an original observation, I recognise, but it is one that intrudes quite forcefully at about the 50,000 word mark. 

As it happens, I’m free of a lot of standard author-angst. I know I put sentences together quite nicely. I know my characterisation works. If I write a scene that lacks colour, I know how to revive it swiftly and effectively. I know that I have the tools to identify and fix most problems. 

But still. 

In my head, I can’t help but compare this current draft to all the perfected drafts of previous novels that have now been published. And this book is, at the moment, just plain worse than all of them. Hurtling forwards into that arctic gloom seems like the only thing to do - but also a rather pointless one. It feels like a somewhat painful way of making a big dull thing instead of a small dull one. 

So this is where we have to separate brain and instinct. 

My instinct just says: “Go home. Eat crumpets.” 

My brain says, “No, look, don’t you remember that you felt roughly this way with ALL your books? Or perhaps not every single one of them, but certainly most, and every single time you went on to fix the issues.” 

And my brain’s right. I even know that my basic premise is fine. (Secure psychiatric hospital on the west coast of Wales. Stuffed full of veterans with Special Forces experience. Lots of shenanigans. Perfect for my character and my readership.) So really, I just need to bash out a draft, list the issues with that draft, then start fixing them. 

And that’s right. That’s the right advice. That’s what I’m going to do. 

But. 

Two plump little buts to offer you. 

But the first. 

The first but is simply that this midpoint anxiety often generates little flashes of insights. As I was worrying about my book, I realised that I hadn’t properly made characters of the key doctors at the hospital. But since the shenanigans needed to involve them, they had to feature properly in the early part of the book. And I need to do that in classic Agatha Christie style - where readers all suspect the irascible Italian, only to discover that the avuncular parrot-keeper is the baddie. 

If I fix that issue in the book now, my first draft will be that little bit closer to target and, overall, I’ll save myself work. 

If I had closed my mind to the worry, I wouldn’t have had that insight. My journey to the pole would have been longer and frozener that it needed to have been. So worry’s good. It’s creative. 

But the second. 

The second but is more vicious than the first. It’s a yawning crevasse camouflaged by the tiniest bridge of snow. And it’s this: 

Sometimes you really are writing a terrible book. Sometimes, it’s not simply that your execution of the idea is standard first-draft bad, it’s that the idea itself is beyond saving.

This is where I have a layer of shelter not available to most of you. I know that I have a readership for another Fiona Griffiths tale. I know this idea basically works for this genre and this detective. I know that I have publishers contracted to take the book I’ll give them (as well as a larger audience that comes to me via self-publishing.) 

But it’s not always like that. Not even for an author with a significant publishing history. 

The fact is that most writers, most of the time, have to ask, “Is this just a hideous mistake?” Sometimes the answer is yes, in which case the solution isn’t simply more labour, it’s the hard decision to abort proceedings. 

In that documentary I mentioned, the British team suffered with frostbite and wounds that needed antibiotics. But antibiotics hadn’t been available to Amundsen et al, so they weren’t available to the team. 

Continue or give up? 

It was a real question. As I remember it, one member of the team thought he could continue despite a nasty looking wound, and he was right. Another one - an international oarsman with a couple of Olympic golds - just took the view that his job was to continue marching, no matter what. Because his view was overly inflexible, he became detached from his team and would have been exceptionally vulnerable had he encountered a concealed crevasse, or picked up an ankle injury, or gone off route, or anything of that sort. He survived, but he might not have done. He made the wrong call. 

And you? 

I don’t know. I don’t know your book. 

But I will say that you must have an idea that works. That’s why I get so loud about the importance of a strong elevator pitch. That’s why it’s important to bake that elevator pitch right into the very essence of the novel. 

If you do that, if you have a powerful idea and your book truly delivers on that idea, you need to hurtle on to the Pole. Yes, you’ll have a draft with a whole frozen ocean of problems, but those things are fixable and you’ll get the job done. 

But if your idea is unworkable, then abort, abort, abort. Throw away your wooden skis. Discard that pemmican. Find yourself a helicopter ride back to somewhere civilised. Get home, light a fire, eat crumpets, start again. 

For me now, I’m confident in my idea. It really is just a word count challenge to complete the draft. 

Mush, mush, my lovable husky friends. That thing there, through the murk? That’s the Pole, that is. Onwards! 

But what about you, my fine parrot-keeping friends. How far are you towards your own Pole? What are your thoughts & feelings on the way And how do you get on with pemmican?

On Friday 26 June, we released a book: Getting Published, authored by me, and a major update on a book I first wrote ten years ago. (You can take a look at the book here, if you want to.)

You might think that releasing a book was an occasion for a little hoo-hah and hullaballoo, but in fact we released it in perfect silence. We didn’t tweet, didn’t blog, didn’t post on Facebook, didn’t send an email.

The one thing we did do was ask our Advance Review Copy team to submit their reviews for the book. Amazon, for obvious reasons, doesn’t permit reviews prior to the moment of publication, so you can only start to gather reviews in the day or two following launch.

Over that weekend therefore – the 26, 27, 28 June – we quietly nudged our ARC folk to submit reviews. Those reviews built gradually over the weekend, to a total of more than 50. We didn’t solicit only five-star reviews. We didn’t even do the “if you hated this book, tell me; if you loved it, tell others” thing. We just asked people to report their honest opinions via Amazon.

The result was that we got a mix of reviews. Mostly five-star. Some four-star. One three-star. Every author wants all five-star reviews of course, but the fact is that a mixture of opinions and comments lends absolute authenticity to the overall verdict. In the US and the UK, the reviews are knocking around the 4.7 to 4.8 level – highly positive, but just mixed enough to be real. Perfect.

We had some launch weekend issues, of course. Amazon started randomly and aggressively deleting reviews for absolutely no reason at all. It has form on this, of course, and there’s nothing much you can do except complain.

That wasn’t the only niggle.

The book cover didn’t show up properly for a while, because we’d inadvertently uploaded one that was marginally too large. It also took us a bit of time to get the paperback uploaded and available for sale.

But though we were working away behind the scenes, no one really noticed any problems – because the book, though published, was effectively invisible.

At this early stage, Amazon didn’t know who to market the book to. It made virtually no sales. Our beloved book was simply buried in a pile of 8 million other titles. By the end of the weekend, we had sold precisely four books: none on Friday, one on Saturday, three on Sunday. Four books across the entire English-speaking world.

But we didn’t care.

We wanted to make sure that when people did finally start landing on our book page, there would be plenty of reviews telling them what to expect – and basically validating the impulse to buy. (No one loves being the first idiot to buy an un-reviewed book.)

So over the weekend, we just sat tight and let our reviews build. Then, on Monday afternoon, we finally broke our weekend of silence. I started emailing you guys with a short email telling you about the book and inviting you to buy it. Some of you got the email on Monday, some on Tuesday, and so on through the week. As an extra little “buy it now” kicker, I told you that the price would double in a few days’ time.

The aim of this staggered email campaign was to build a gradually swelling mass of sales. If we’d judged it perfectly, sales would have run something like this:

Monday – 100
Tuesday – 110
Wednesday – 120
Thursday – 130
 Friday – 140

The aim in seeking to build that kind of profile is to send three messages to Amazon. Those messages are: (1) this book is selling, (2) there is steady demand for the book, not some temporary one-off spike, (3) that demand is, if anything, increasing.

And crucially, because you guys are all writer-types who love writer-stuff, we were in effect sending a critical fourth message too: (4) Look at the people who are buying this book; it’s that sort of person you need to market it too.

In effect, the purpose of our launch campaign was less about actually selling books and more about teaching Amazon how to sell our book – and making sure that it wanted to try. The sales campaign was all about prepping the machine.

How did we do? Well, I suppose we succeeded in achieving our aim, at least approximately. Our actual ebook sales profile looked like this:

Monday – 125
Tuesday – 141
Wednesday – 95
Thursday – 92
 Friday – 145

(Paperbacks, for some reason, started selling on the Wednesday, then increasing each day.)

That sales profile showed Amazon that the book was selling, that it was selling steadily, and taught Amazon’s bots about the kind of people who were its most likely buyers. It didn’t quite demonstrate a steadily increasing demand, but our strong Friday finale probably did enough on that front anyway.

On Sunday, we changed the ebook price from $2.99 in the US to $7.99. In Britain, we changed the price from £1.99 to £5.99.

Obviously enough, the reason for launching at a low price (but one that still delivers 70% royalties) was to maximise sales in that launch week and to give the book the best possible start in life.

The reason for switching to the $7.99 pricing was to give us a much better royalty on each sale - $5.59, in fact. At the same time, our book is still cheaper than its natural competitors (the ebook version of Writers Market retails at an exorbitant $19.99, for example.) So we’re both earning a good royalty on every sale – and making ourselves the easiest, cheapest entry-point in what is not a particularly cheap market.

Good. Some ebook pricing decisions are complicated. This one feels relatively straightforward.

We can’t play the same kind of games with paperbacks – printing costs just set a relatively high floor price – but we don’t really need to. Since ending the promo week and changing the price, we’re selling about 10-20 paperbacks a day and about half that number of ebooks daily.

In the UK, we’re still nestling at or near the top of the relevant category bestseller lists. That means the book will pick up sales passively, without any especial love from us.

In the US, we didn’t quite achieve the sales mass we wanted to in that first week, so the book’s visibility now is less than we wanted. For that reason, we’re about to start supporting the book with sponsored listings on Amazon. The purpose will be to drive sales to the point at which natural, organic sales can largely take over.

And that’s it. That’s pretty much you need to know about launch week and where it’s left us.

The key point from all of this? The absolute key? Simply this:

Selling on Amazon isn’t so much about how many books you can sell yourself, it’s about teaching Amazon how to sell your book – and making sure that it wants to.

That’s the trick. That’s the whole deal right there. If you really internalise that message, everything you do in terms of Amazon-selling will be easier and more fruitful than if you don’t.

Bish-bosh.

This email has yabbered on long enough. Me? I’m off to make a hashish and rose-petal jelly, which I will serve with mint tea and a dish of almond biscuits.

Reminder: If you want a free review e-copy of 52 LETTERS - a collection of these blog posts and emails from me - then email my colleague Rachael via publishing@jerichowriters.com. Put 52 LETTERS in the subject line, and please don't forget to tell us which Amazon store is the one you generally use. We have only a limited number of copies to give away, and it'll be first-come first-served.