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A common question for all new writers and the answer (almost always) is yes. Let’s start by reviewing what agents are there to do, though. What Literary Agents Do They have several main roles: Selecting saleable manuscripts from all those submitted. Under 1% of manuscripts are strong enough to sell.Working with the author to get the manuscript in perfect condition to sell. That can mean extensive editorial work, likely lasting a period of months.Identifying the right editors at the right publishing houses for your book. An agent needs excellent contacts and to keep those contacts up to date. It also means understanding the current market for fiction and non-fiction, making sure that your book is in tune with that market.Conducting an auction. There’s no single way to sell a book. Your agent needs to choose the right way, then sell it professionally, with drive and conviction.Negotiating a contract. Publishing contracts are long and technical. Additionally, with the advent of ebooks, those contracts are changing fast and key terms are constantly moving. So you do need an expert on your side.Making foreign sales, and handling film and TV rights. Again, that’s a complex business involving expertise and strong contacts.Guiding your career. In the long term, a good agent should be nudging your career in the right direction and keeping you away from wrong turns. Writing is an insecure business, so a good agent can make a difference. All that might may make you think that you need an agent under any circumstances – but agents make their fees on sales they make. Typically speaking, they take a 15% commission. Agents need to live, too, so won’t have an interest in representing you if there is no realistic prospect of them making money. You Do Need A Literary Agent If: You are writing a novel.You are writing commercial non-fiction (the sort of thing that might be sold at the front of a shop, or feature on a bestseller list).You are writing fiction for children.You are writing a ‘how to’ type book in a major category (such as health and well-being). You Do Not Need A Literary Agent If: You are intending to self-publish.You are writing poetry.You are writing one-off short stories.You are writing journalism.You are writing specialist or academic non-fiction. In all those cases, there won’t be enough money to interest an agent and you should approach the appropriate publishers directly. You May Need A Literary Agent If: You are writing children’s picture books. I’d probably recommend having an agent to start with, but you could go either way.You are writing a themed collection of short stories. Such collections are hard to sell, but not impossible. A truly good collection may attract an agent. Anything less than wonderful won’t. And, as ever, don’t forget that if you need feedback, advice, or help with literary agents, we’re here to supply that. Sign up for emails for more on how to get a literary agent, or have a look at more free advice. Very best of luck. More than ready to get the ball rolling with agents, but just need a little push? Or perhaps you’ve had a few rejections but aren’t sure why? Our Agent Submission Pack Review gives you detailed professional advice on how to perfect your submission and increase your chances of securing an agent. For more advice on finding an agent, see here.

Developmental editing. Structural editing. Line editing. Copy editing. Proofreading. Yes, we know: you’ve written a manuscript. You know it needs some kind of professional help. But what kind of help? Copy editing or line editing? Structural editing or developmental support? There seem to be so many options to choose from. But never fear. We’ll tell you exactly what each of the different types of editing are – and offer some suggestions on what editing you do/don’t need right now. The good news is that, quite often, you need less editorial input than you might think. (The bad news is that you have to put in a lot of hard graft instead…) What Are The Different Types Of Editing? Developmental editing: checks concept, plot coherence, and character development/arc.Structural editing: identifies issues with plot, pacing, characters, settings, themes, writing style.Line editing: looks at details line by line.Copy-editing: is much as above, except with less attention to line-by-line correction of clumsy writing.Proof reading: looks for simple typos or errors in the text. How Editing Works Before we go any further, it’s worth explaining the editorial heirarchy. Essentially you go from large to little, from structural to detailed. So it’s like building a house: you start with foundations, walls and roof. Then you start thinking about doors and windows. Then you start thinking about paints and wallpapers. Last, you go around sweeping up and sorting out any last little snags. The same thing with editing, where the hierarchy runs roughly like this, from big to small: Developmental editing. Is this concept sound? Does my plot cohere? Are these the right characters for this book?Structural editing. Identifying and addressing any number of issues covering (for example) plot, pacing, characters, character development, settings, emotional turning points, themes, writing style and much else.Line editing: this starts to look at the detail. Is each sentence clear? Are there typos? Unwanted repetitions? Minor factual errors?Copy editing: much as above, except there’s less attention to line-by-line correction of clumsy writing.Proof reading: At the proof stage, you generally expect that all the essential work has already been done, so this is really just rushing around the manuscript looking for last bits of lint to pick off and typos to clear away. That’s the overview. Not all manuscripts will go through all of these stages – indeed, if you’re doing a decent job as an author then two or three of these stages are probably redundant. All that said, let’s jump straight into the meat… Developmental Editing We’ll start with the biggest, broadest, most sweeping kind of editing you can get: developmental editing. That’s a type of editing that used to have one meaning, but it’s kind of morphed into two distinct beasts for reasons, I’ll explain in a second. Definition: What Is Developmental Editing? In the good old days, developmental editing used to have one precise meaning. It now has certainly two, and maybe three. A. Developmental Editing – Traditional Definition But we start with the first, core, and most precise definition. To quote the ever-reliable Wikipedia: “A developmental editor may guide an author (or group of authors) in conceiving the topic, planning the overall structure, and developing an outline—and may coach authors in their writing, chapter by chapter.” In other words, any true “editing” took place before the writing. It was a planning and design function, in essence. Because competent authors can probably take care of planning and design perfectly well by themselves, such editing was always relatively rare and, in fiction, very rare. (I’ve authored getting on for twenty books now and have never once had a development edit. I’m damn sure I never will.) B. Developmental Editing As Industry Euphemism But of course not all authors are perfect and, now and again, publishers have to deal with a manuscript they’ve commissioned, but which turns out to be absolutely dire. Think celebrity memoir of the worst sort. Or a multi-million-selling author who’s long since stopped caring about how he or she writes, because they know the money will roll in anyway. So what to do? Well, the standard solution in trade publishing is to do what is euphemistically called a ‘development edit’. What that actually means is that an editor takes on the role of something akin to a ghostwriter. They rip out everything that’s hopeless and rebuild. I’ve known a Big 5 editor who had done this a couple of times, and he said it was soul-destroying. He didn’t get any bonus for doing the work. He didn’t get a share of fame or royalties. He didn’t go on the chat shows or the book tours. And he was always dancing on eggshells with the Famous Author, because the author in question was very prickly about having his work slighted in any way. Even though the work in question sucked. Great. So that’s the second meaning of a development edit: basically a euphemism designed to disguise what is basically a ghostwriting job. When Is Classic Developmental Editing Right For You? It isn’t. You don’t need it. What you probably need (either now or in due course) is a professional manuscript assessment and possibly some of the add-ons normally associated with developmental editing. But in the classic sense of the term, you just don’t need it. We’ll talk about what you do need right away. Structural Editing, Substantive Editing, Editorial Assessment Right. So I’m not a big fan of developmental editing, but I LOVE the type of editing we’re about to talk about. But first up: definitions. Definitions Structural editing is, strictly speaking, a set of comments on the structure of your work. That will certainly involve plot and pacing. But it may also include comments on character, mood, emotional transitions, dialogue, character arcs, writing style and much more. If you’re being strict about it, structural editing should focus only on structure, but in practice editors tend to comment on anything that, in their view, needs attention. (Which is good. Which is what you want.) Basically, a good structural edit will tell you: What’s working (though they won’t spend too long on this)What’s not working (this is where the report will concentrate all its firepower)How to fix the stuff that isn’t yet right A good report will quite simply cover everything that you most need to know. It’ll do that from the perspective of the market for books as it is now. So the kind of crime novels (say) that could have sold 25 years ago may not be right for the market now. A good editor will know that, and set you on the right lines. Substantive editing is basically the same as structural editing, except that technically it doesn’t have to limit itself to structure alone. But since structural editors don’t in practice confine themselves to structural comments, it’s pretty safe to say that, in practice, the two things are exactly the same. Editorial assessment, or Manuscript assessment. These two things are exactly the same as structural editing. The difference is that an editorial assessment gives you an editorial report, but doesn’t usually also give you a marked-up manuscript as well. Again, in practice, these things blur into each other. Our own core editorial product is, indeed, the manuscript assessment. The main deliverable there is a long, detailed editorial report on your book. That said, a lot of editors will, if it’s useful, also mark-up all or part of your manuscript. Or if they don’t, they may quote so extensively from your work, that it’s kinda the same as if they did. In short, and give or take a few blurry bits on the edges: structural editing = substantive editing = editorial assessment = manuscript assessment Easy, right? Is Structural Editing / Editorial Assessment Right For You? Yes. Almost certainly: yes. Now, to be clear, I own Jericho Writers and if you trot along to buy one of our wonderful manuscript assessments, you’ll make me a teeny-tiny bit richer. So in that sense I’m biased. On the other hand, I just told you not to buy developmental edits, and I’d make myself a LOT richer if I got you to buy one of those things, so I hope I have a little credit in the bank. I’m speaking truth, not salesman yadda. And the reason I like structural editing so much is that: It is and remains the gold-standard way to improve a manuscript. Nothing else has ever come close. I’m not that far away from publishing my twentieth book. (I’m both trad & indie, and I love both channels, in case you’re wondering.) I’m a pretty damn good author. I’ve had very positive reviews in newspapers across the world. My books have sold in a kazillion countries and been adapted for TV. And every single one of my books have had detailed editorial input. And they’ve always, always got better as a result. Always.It makes you better as a writer. You always emerge from these exercises with new skills and new insights. You will apply those to your current manuscript, for sure, but you’ll apply them to the next one too. The more you work with skilled external editors, the more you’ll grow as a writer. (And, I think, as a human too.) So that’s why I think structural editing works so well, and for such a huge variety of manuscripts, genres and authors. When Should You Get Structural Input On Your Work? Well, OK. The businessman in me wants to say, “Get that input right now. Hand over your lovely hard-earned dollars / pounds / shekels / yen, and your soul and career will flourish, my friend.” But that’s not the right answer. The fact is that the right time for editorial input is generally: as late as possible. If you know you have a plot niggle in Part IV, then fix the damn niggle. Fix it as well as you can. Don’t go and pay someone to tell you that you have an issue. That’s dumb. Same thing if your characters feel a bit flat, or your atmosphere is a bit lacking, or whatever else. If you know your book has issues, then do the best you can to fix those issues. You’ll learn a lot and your book will get better. That means, the right time for editorial input comes when: You’ve worked hard, but you keep going round in circles. You’re confusing yourself. You need external eyes and buckets of wisdom.You’ve worked hard, but you know the book isn’t right. You don’t know what’s awry exactly, but you know you need help.You’ve worked hard, you’ve got the book out to agents, but you’re not getting offers of representation. You know you need to do something, but you don’t know what.The self-pub version of 2: you have a draft you’re reasonably happy with, but you’re about to publish this damn thing, and your whole future career depends on the excellence of the story you’re going to serve the reader. So you do the right thing and invest in the product. You’re going to get the best kickass structural edit you can, then use that advice as intensively as you can. (Editing, in fact, is one of the only two things that should cost you real money at this early stage: the other one is cover design. And, no surprise, they both relate to developing the best product it is in your power to produce.) In short: work as hard as you can on the book. When you’re no longer making discernible forward progress, come to an editor. And – blatant plug alert! – Jericho Writers is very, very good at editorial stuff. We’ve got a bazillion people published, trad and indie, and the success stories just keep coming. Developmental Editing – As Premium Manuscript Assessment I love manuscript assessments – I think they’re the single most helpful thing you can do to improve your work. At their best, with author and editor working well together, they’re like a magic formula for improving your work. But a lot of people still find them insufficient. In particular, a manuscript assessment might say something like, “Your character Claudia isn’t yet cohering. Here’s what I mean in general terms [blah, blah, blah]. And here are some specific page references which illustrate my general point [page 23, page 58, etc].” Now that’s helpful, but it still leaves you to do an awful lot. If Claudia is a major character, the specific changes you need to make are likely to go well beyond the handful of examples the editor uses to make their broader point. So what do you do? Well, hopefully, you understand exactly where your editor is coming from, and you make the necessary changes, and your manuscript becomes perfect. Only maybe not. Some people just are helped by having their manuscript marked up page by page. That’s not instead of the more general report. It’s in addition. That way you get to see the broad thrust of the comments, as well as the more specific issues as well. So you get an overview of (for example) why Claudia isn’t quite working as well as a detailed laundry list of all the specific places where her character grates a bit. And it’s not just characterisation. It’s plot issues. It’s matters of writing style. It’s sense of place. It’s everything that goes into a novel. So – and this is because our clients have specifically asked us to create the product – we now offer a version of developmental editing that combines these services in a single package: Manuscript assessment – overview reportDetailed mark-up of your manuscript – literally page, by pageOne hour discussion with the editor, so you can resolve any outstanding questions or niggles you may have. Pretty obviously, this is a deluxe package and, pretty obviously, it’s expensive. It’s also, honestly, not what most of you need. Will I Benefit From Developmental Editing, Jericho-style? As a rough guide, very new writers are probably best off building their skills by taking a writing course or, of course, just hammering away at their manuscript. (That’s still the best learning exercise of all.) After that, once you have a first, or third, or fifth draft manuscript, it makes sense to get a regular manuscript assessment. That way, you can grasp the main issues with your work and you have a plan of attack for dealing with them. Because developmental editing is as much concerned both with the broader issues AND with the narrower ones, it doesn’t really make sense to purchase the service until your manuscript is in pretty good shape. After all, the outcome of a manuscript assessment might be “That whole sequence set on Venus just doesn’t work and needs to be rethought from scratch.” If that’s the case, then having detailed page-by-page comments on the way you write isn’t really going to help you much. So as a rough guide, you will benefit from developmental editing, if: Your manuscript is in pretty good shape (ie: this should be the last major round of work before submitting to publishers or self-publishing the manuscript)You want both broad and narrow commentsYou want the opportunity to talk at length with your editorYou are OK paying for a premium service. You will not benefit from developmental editing, if: Your manuscript is still at a somewhat earlier stage in its journeyYou feel able to handle the narrower issues yourself, so long as you have reasonable guidance from your manuscript assessment report. Because we don’t want to take your money if developmental editing is not right for you, we have made the service by application only. That’s not because we’re going to stop you doing what you want to do. Just, if we’re not sure whether it makes sense for you to splash the cash, we at least want to be able to check in with you before we go ahead. Line Editing, Copy Editing, Proof Reading OK. We’ve dealt with the broader, more structural types of editing. We’re now going to home in on the ever finer-grained types of editing. We’ll start as before with some definitions. Definitions Of the detailed, line-by-line type edits, line-editing is the one that has the broadest remit. I’ll start with proof-reading (the most narrowly defined of these editorial stages) and build upwards from there. Proof-reading comes at the final stage prior to printing/publication. It basically assumes that the manuscript has already been checked over thoroughly, so this is really only a final check for errors that have managed to slip through the net. (And, in fact historically, the process of type-setting for print often introduced errors, so proof-reading was partly necessary to reverse those. These days, unsurprisingly, you can format a document for print without messing it up.) The kind of errors a proof-reader will catch include: typos, misspellings, punctuation errors, missing spaces, and the like. It’s a micro-level, final-error catching task, and nothing much else. Copy-editing includes everything included in proofreading, but it’ll have a somewhat broader scope. So a copy editor will also be on the look out for factual errors, timetable and other inconsistencies in the novel, occasional instances of unclear or weak phrasing, awkward repetitions, deviations from house style (if there is a house style), and so on. In the traditional publishing sequence, copy editing will take place after all structural editing has been done, but before the book has been set for print. Line-editing will cover everything that’s detailed above, plus a general check for sentence structure, clarity and sense. In other words, it is part of a line editor’s job to fix clumsily phrased, repetitious or otherwise awkward sentences. Yes, you the author should not be writing clumsily in the first place, but if by chance you do, the line editor is there to put things right. Why does anyone ever want or need line-editing? Well, some authors are brilliant at generating character and story, but their actual sentence-by-sentence expression of that story just isn’t so great. In these cases, a publisher will commission a line-edit to put those things right. The Editing Process: What You Need & When You Need It Right. What kind of editing you need and should pay for depends on what kind of publication you are looking at. So: The Traditional Publishing Sequence The normal publishing sequence (for traditionally published books) would be: Structural editing (ie: a detailed manuscript assessment)Copy-editing (or line editing if the author really needs it, but never both things)Proof-reading That’s it. If you are aiming at traditional publication, then you may well need to invest in a manuscript assessment, in order to write something of the quality needed for a literary agent / publisher. You certainly won’t need copy editing, or anything along those lines. That’ll be carried out, for free, by the publisher down the line. (They’ll also do some more structural editing work too, but don’t worry about that – you can’t get too much, and your book always gets better.) The Indie Publishing Sequence Indie publishers, inevitably, focus more on cost-cutting than the Big 5 houses do, so a typical indie process might look simply like this: Some kind of structural support – probably an editorial assessment or something similarSome kind of copy-editing support If you don’t have the budget for both, I’d urge you to get the structural help: that’s what will really make the difference to the sheer readability of your book. That’s where to spend your funds. Indeed, though we at Jericho Writers offer a full range of copyediting and proofreading services, I don’t usually advise writers to invest in them at all. If you are an indie on a lowish launch budget (which is the right kind of budget to have when you’re just starting out), then I’d recommend an editing plan along roughly the following lines: Full editorial assessment, ideally from Jericho Writers (because we’re really good at it.)You then rework your book in the light of what you’ve been toldYou then give it a good hard proofread yourself for any errors and typosYou then enlist the help of any eagle-eyed friends to do the same That plan won’t give you a manuscript as clean as if you give it the full cost-no-object Big 5 treatment … but it’ll be just fine. Don’t overspend at this stage. The Indie Publishing Sequence OK. You know the basic layout of what editing is and when it’s used. Here’s what I think the big questions are. Developmental Editing Vs Structural Editing You know my view on this. I think for 99% of you reading this, you are best off (a) working and self-editing as hard as you can yourself, then (b) getting professional input on your work from a structural editor. That’s going to be miles cheaper and the end result will be better too. Yes, you’ll need to do a lot of work, but you’re a writer. You like work. (If you don’t, you’re in the wrong job.) If you are a newer author, you may well need two or three rounds of structural input. That’s fine. That’s not a failure on your part. That’s you learning a new trade. It’s money well spent – and you can prove it to yourself too. Just ask yourself: are you a better, more knowledgeable, more capable writer at the end of the process? If the answer isn’t yes, I’ll eat my boots, jingly spurs and all. (*) * – disclosure: I don’t actually wear spurs. Structural Editing Vs Copy Editing OK, these are two very different things, but of the two, the structural editing definitely matters more. The purpose of structural / substantive editing is simply: make your book the best book it can be. The purpose of copy editing is simply: make the text as clean as it can be. Both things matter, but if your budget only permits one of those things, then go for structural editing, every day of the week. A wonderful story is much more important than tidy text. And again, though we sell copyediting services, you shouldn’t need them at all if you are heading for trad publication, and you should probably be able to find an acceptable but much cheaper substitute if you are self-publishing. Line Editing Vs Copy Editing Vs Proof-reading If you are going to get line-by-line corrections to your MS, then the default answer is to go for copy editing. Proof-reading is really too narrow, and only really makes sense if your book has already been copy edited. (Which is fine if you have a Big 5 budget, but makes no sense for you.) Line editing is really only required if your sentence construction isn’t yet all it could be, in which case I’d urge you to invest in upskilling. Quite simply: as a pro author, you should be in command of your language. If you’re not, and have to pay a line editor, and if you intend to write 10, 15, 20 or more books over the course of your career, you’ll end up paying a fortune. Much, much better to nurture those exact skills in yourself, and you’ll never need to spend a penny on a line edit. Also: writing well is good for your soul and writing beautiful sentences is a source of beauty and joy forever. So don’t give anyone else the pleasure. And Finally… That’s it from me. Thanks for reading. If you’ve read this far, you may also like: Help on how to present your manuscript Help on how to self-edit your novel If you need help figuring out what kind of editorial process (or, indeed, other support) might be right for you, then get in touch. Jericho Writers does not have a sales team or employ salespeople or pay anyone on commission. Our customer service people are only allowed to recommend a particular service if they genuinely think it would be helpful to the writer concerned. We’re run by writers for writers, and we’re on your side. Thanks for reading – and happy editing! Jericho Writers is a global membership group for writers, providing everything you need to get published. Keep up with our news, membership offers, and updates by signing up to our newsletter. For more writing articles take a look at our blog page or join our free writer\'s community. If you think you need copyediting for your manuscript, take a look at our copyediting services. Jericho Writers\' experienced editors specialise in editing both novels and non-fiction and would love to help you with your work. Click here for more.

Understanding Dialogue Dialogue functions to reveal character, impart information and move the story forward but it’s the way you make it function that’s important. How you create dialogue will determine how original it is at conveying meaning, developing the story, and drawing the audience into the emotions of your characters. Always be aware of how you can incorporate subtext into your dialogue. Subtext is the underlying meaning of a character’s words and actions. It’s when someone says one thing but means something else – usually the emotional significance behind the surface words. That’s why it connects to the audience at the deepest level. As you write see how much your dialogue can suggest the inner emotions of characters. (Oh, and if you’re after help with the same issues in the context of the novel, then you probably want to pop over to this blog post instead. Or, better still, as well.) Give Dialogue Energy Listen to your dialogue out loud as you write. If you leave them on the page you won’t know whether they’re going to come alive or not.  Use a tape recorder or the voice facility on your computer. Ask yourself how the dialogue’s going. Does it have energy, pace and rhythm? Is it original? Believable? Unique to each character? Emotional connection with the audience? Have I used subtext well? Creating tension? Breathing space? Creating conflict? How sharp is it? Each word necessary? Suggesting psychological state? Does it have energy, pace and rhythm? Is it original? Believable? Unique to each character? Emotional connection with the audience? Have I used subtext well? Creating tension? Breathing space? Creating conflict? How sharp is it? Each word necessary? Suggesting psychological state? Looking Over The First Draft Again, move around and say the words out loud or get friends to read through it and you listen and make notes. This time you’re assessing the dialogue’s role in the trajectory of the story. Ask yourself: Is this developing my characters’ inner life? What distinctive details are shaping my characters’ ways of speaking? Are they all sufficiently individualised by not only what they say but how they say it? Is it forwarding the action? What do I lose/gain if I get rid of this? Are there moments where I’m giving the audience some space to absorb what’s happening? Why is my character compelled to say this? And why at this moment? What does the audience need to know here? Better to keep them waiting? Would silence be more dramatic here? How are the words speaking to the theme of the story? How much is subtext expressing meaning? More Screenwriting Exercises Get into the habit of watching a few scenes of films and focus solely on how the dialogue and subtext are working. Choose a few movies you haven’t seen. Try watching dialogue scenes with the sound turned off. Then write the dialogue. Turn the sound up. Compare your words to those in the film. Try writing short exchanges for your characters using subtext alone Get two lovers talking. A scene of tenderness. A violent row. Making up. Get a supporting character and main character together. Make it a power struggle. How is the subtext conveying hostility? Notice how you’re creating emotion which lies behind the words (the subtext).

You’ve written a book. You’ve got it all the way through production, either with the help of a traditional publisher or on your own, via self-publishing. And all that seemed like plenty of effort, did it not? You’d think that you could now lie back in the warm sun of adulation as readers flocked to your books and asked you intense questions about just how you found your inspiration. And then, you know. Reality. If you have a traditional publisher and you’re lucky with them and the book, then things really can be like they were in your dreams. Huge retail distribution. Big sales. All that adulation. But even for traditionally published authors, those things are rare. The situation for most of us (and I’m a hybrid author, both traditionally and self-published) is that we see our books – our beautiful, published books – languishing a long way from the happy sunlight at the top of the bestseller charts. So, what to do? There’s a lot you can do, in fact, and some of the tools are very potent indeed. So here’s the top 10 things to try when marketing a book. Some are more complex than others. Some cost money. Some are as free and easy as winter rain. So let’s explore. We’ll start with stuff that’s easy, cheap and relatively low in effectiveness … and move up the ladder to stuff that’s harder, but more potent. 1. Post Something On Your Blog You have a blog, right? Preferably integrated into your own website that has a domain name of the form yourname.com. If you’re not yet there, well – you need to get there. A decent looking website is necessary these days. These things can be put together for almost nothing these days, though if you’re serious about your career, I think you’ll do what you need to do to create something of quality. In any case, use your site to tell a story. Don’t sell at the reader. No one loves to have stuff shoved at them. Your best bet is to tell a story that engages in some way … and then make it unbelievably easy for readers to buy your book if they want to. That means creating easy, obvious links to your Amazon page, at the top, front and middle of your piece. Need to set up a website? Here’s how. Want to create a vlog (video blog) as well as a written one? This video editor might help. 2. Create Author Profiles On Amazon And Goodreads Readers hang out both on Amazon and Goodreads. Both sites want authors to claim their profiles. Use a photo that feels personal. Write a short bio that feels human and engaged. If you want to reference your favourite authors (ones writing in a similar field to you, of course), then do so. These things won’t create readers overnight, but they are part of any modern author’s armoury. Basically, you must do them. Having said that – don’t misdirect your attention either. I have yet to meet a professional author who thinks that being active on Goodreads is a good way to spend time. It isn’t. You need to create an attractive profile there, then leave it. Spending hours engaging with the community will not create sales. Advertising on Goodreads is a simple way to lose money. Create a good-looking author page following Amazon’s own recipe. 3. Create An Author Page On Facebook (And Connect It To Your Blog) You don’t want to mix your personal page with your professional one, so set up a yournameauthor page on Facebook. Maintaining that page as well as your blog will drive you crazy, so make sure that when you post on your blog, that post pops up both on your Facebook author page and on your Goodreads one. The truth is that probably no one may read your blog much in the first instance – these things take time to grow and even major authors don’t necessarily have huge volumes of site traffic. But readers do congregate on Goodreads and Facebook and they do like to see some personal, engaging material on authors they may happen to stumble across. So create the material on your blog. Pipe it over – automatically – to those other sites. If you can’t do that by yourself, then pay someone to do it. You’re an author not a tech-expert, so it’s OK to pay others when you need to … and there are cheap or free ways to automate these things, so paying someone to make the connections shouldn’t cost you much. Read up on more tips for your author page. 4. Open Yourself Up To Twitter Yeah, I know. If you like Twitter, you’re already on it. If you’re not, that’s because you hate it and can’t see the point. And I hate Twitter. I don’t like the zero-attention-span, weirdly formatted, near-impenetrable texts that the damn site is full of. Also: you cannot sell stuff via Twitter. Yes, this is a post about marketing your work. Yes, I am recommending that you join Twitter. And yes, I have just told you that you cannot sell on Twitter. It’s not just me that thinks that last thing. The digital marketing manager at a major publishing house told me the exact same thing. I’ve also seen data that calls into question the degree to which even a really ‘successful’ Twitter campaign can influence sales. The only real exception is where you are already established enough that you don’t have to sell your book, but you can notify people that it’s there. All that said, you still need to be on Twitter because numerous people that you may want to connect with (bloggers, other authors, marketing types, industry folk) may not publish an email address, but are publicly and easily available on Twitter. For that reason, Twitter remains absolutely central as a way to connect with these industry types (a technique known as PRM in marketing, where PRM = Partner Relationship Managament.) And if you want to reach those people, you don’t just need to be signed up to the service, you do need to follow some people, and get followed back, just so that you don’t look like the only naked one in the room. It’s a faff, yes, but you’re marketing your books and you can’t ignore Twitter just because you #hateit. And – once you’ve signed up, and got properly started – then start to contact the people that matter. And remember that conversations on Twitter are like conversations anywhere. You don’t just barge in and shout and try to sell stuff. Be courteous, interested, and – when you have a relationship – you politely enquire if Person X might be interested in your very fine Y. Out of those relationships, come invitations to appear on blogs, to get book reviews, to do Q&As and all the rest of it. There are other ways to reach those people – email works, and there are some great groups on Facebook – but Twitter is still the easiest way to make that first knock on the door. Need more on getting started? Find out more from these people. 5. Use Your Ebooks As A Platform To Sell Your Ebooks If you have more than one ebook, then make sure that your ebooks are properly set up to sell each other. That means that in the back of each e-book you have a proper listing of your titles – updated, please, as new books come out. That listing shouldn’t just list the actual titles, you should also include some enticing sales copy and think about including a book cover too. The point is to catch readers when they’ve just finished your book – when they’re still half in love with your character, still giddy with the excitement of your ending – and get them to buy more stuff. So put that stuff under their noses, and make it very attractive, very engaging and very buyable. And that’s only step one! You also, crucially, need to make it unbelievably easy for people to buy the books they’re looking at. That means (for most indies) a simple link to Amazon in your mobi files – or rather three, as you’ll need different links for the .com, .ca, and .co.uk sites. Traditionally published authors can’t – for complicated reasons to do with their publishers’ contractual situation – place the same easy links to Amazon. So what you need to do is create a kind of “choose your e-store” page. That page will basically just bounce people from your ebook to the reader’s choice of e-store. You can see a fine example of such a page right here. Notice that although that page exists on my own website – harrybingham.com – it’s shorn of all in-site navigation. That is, once you arrive on the ‘choose your estore’ page, there’s absolutely nothing to do except choose your estore and move on. Also – obviously – the links are to your page on the various estores, not just the home page. Getting your ebook to sell effectively at the end of the book is essential and it’s a free and easy way to make additional sales. The best way to understand what the back end of an ebook should like is to look at an ebook that has been carefully designed to sell an entire series. My own ebooks do just that, like the back of The Dead House. Notice the author’s note, the series listing, those “choose your estore” links, and the multiple email sign-up opportunities. 6. Get Clever With Your Bisac Codes Your BISAC codes or ‘browse categories’ tell Amazon where to shelve your book. (Find out more here.) And mostly, you’ll want to shelve it in places that actually collect some traffic – so “Romance/Historical” say, rather than “Family and Friendship”. But it’s hard to climb far enough up those major categories to really find eyeballs … and one brilliant, if sneaky, little trick is to choose one BISAC code that’s so minor you just don’t need to make many sales to hit that #1 position. And once you have that #1 position, Amazon tags your book with a sweet little #1 bestseller icon … which is a wonderful lure to anyone stumbling across your book. And, in any case, remember that your BISAC codes are infinitely malleable. If your original choices aren’t working for you, then change them. Mess around and see what works. That’s free and it’s easy. If you’re traditionally published, then you won’t have direct access to these codes, but do ask your publisher what they’re doing, and test their answer. Make sure they have a strategy and are revising it if need be. 7. Get Clever With Your Keywords And Subtitles Try typing something into Amazon now. Just type the first two or three letters of whatever you’re searching for and Amazon will quickly offer you a dropdown list of things it guesses you might be seeking. Sometimes, it’ll offer you the name of an author (‘Harry Bingham’). But often enough it offers you thematic-type searches – things like ‘psychological thriller’ or ‘historical novels’. Those thematic search terms are great to use as keywords for your book – just make sure they pop up on those Amazon dropdowns, because if they don’t, then no one is searching for them. And once you’ve chosen your keywords, do shove them into your series titles or subtitles, because use of a keyword with subtitle/series title support always beats an equivalent book which lacks that support. If you’re self-published, you already know about this and are probably already doing it. If you’re traditionally published, you may well think that this is all complicated stuff and your publishers presumably know their onions. Except they may not do. A huge proportion of traditional publishers have been trained and brought up in a world of bricks and mortar print. Editors who came into the industry because they wanted to edit books may simply not want to deal with the minutiae of keywords and series titles. Results: some huge and supposedly sophisticated firms can be blithering morons when it comes to online visibility. So ask. Understand the answers. And ask again. Do not let this one get away. Learn more about keywords. 8. Pricing So easy, this, but I’ve relegated the matter of price to a long way down this list because unless you have other ingredients of your marketing platform well-set in advance, the impact of a pricing tweak will dissipate far too fast into the cloudless blue. But once you are happy with your author platform, once you have optimised your ebooks, once you do have your keywords and your BISAC codes and all the rest of your metadata straight, then press the pricing button. Dropping your price from $4.99 or $2.99 down to $0.99 will give you an immediate strong but relatively short-term boost to pricing. All the same, that boost gets more readers into your series and gives you the chance to make full-price sales of later books. I do also recommend the use of Amazon’s useful pricing tool, KDP Pricing Support (available via Kindle Direct), locked it would seem in permanent beta. The tool shows you the impact of pricing on both readers and revenues. You want revenues, of course. That’s your aim. On the other hand, nearly all authors want to grow their readership in the hope of earning even larger revenues down the road, in which case you’ll want to price somewhat to the left of that ‘revenue maximising point’. Dipping down to $0.99 or $2.99 to raise visibility, then jumping back to a higher price point makes great sense. If you live at the lower price levels all the time, you’ll find that you don’t secure any extra kick staying there. You’re better off with a kind of yo-yo strategy. 9. Email Lists If you don’t keep an email list, you need to create one. If you do have one, then you probably know how to use it. But for a whistle-stop tour of why you need one and how to make one, then here you go. A. You need your readers’ email addresses so you can contact your customers directly when you have a new product. It’s like when you buy a new dress from an online retailer: they’ll be in touch later to say, ‘Hey, you like dresses. We’ve got some more dresses. How about it?’ That tactic was and is the best marketing tactic ever invented. You’re basically talking to customers who like your stuff and have been ready to buy it in the past. They’re the very first people to go back to when you have more products available to sell. B. You collect readers email addresses by setting up a ‘Readers’ Club’. People want to be part of a readers’ club attaching to a series or author that they love. C. You can’t just take stuff (an email address), you must give, too, and what you give has got to be a lot better than one email address. But you’re a writer, yes? And readers are committed to writers. Write a long short story or a short novella and give it away for free to anyone who signs up to your club. The story should be exclusive, for subscribers only. If you sell the thing on Amazon, you’re demeaning the gift, so don’t do it. D. In terms of techie stuff, you need an email provider – most likely Mailchimp – and a sign-up page. If that sentence frightens you, then pay someone to do the necessary. Your aim is to have a landing page that functions like this one. There’s no in-site navigation, big obvious sign-up buttons, plenty of use of the word ‘free’. Oh, and don’t ask for an email straight away because that seems grabby. Only ask for an email address in direct response to a customer’s request. Only when a user on my website clicks the “Get my download now” button do I ask for an email address. In other words, let them give the orders. You only ask for the address to fulfil that command. E. Where do you get your email sign-ups from? Well, yes, from the website, except that realistically the only people who come to your website with the intent to join your Readers’ Club are people who have just read and enjoyed one of your books. The real source of sign-ups is from within the ebooks themselves. I have graphic calls-to-action in the front and back of my ebooks and text-only links underneath and a call to action in my author’s note and a further one in my series listing. That sounds horribly overdone, except that it seems perfectly natural when you have the book in your hand. And get this: I get about one email sign-up for every five ebooks I sell. That’s a very good ratio, which means I can reach at least 20% of my readers by email whenever I want. F. How do you use the email list once you’ve got it? Answer: as little as possible. People will just unsubscribe if you blast them with unwanted crap, so keep it very light. I reckon that two emails a year is (in most cases) plenty. One to announce when a book goes up for pre-order. Another to nudge people when that book is published or enjoying a special and temporary price promotion. G. And, to be clear, the real beauty of the email list is not the fact that you can collect however many hundred sales. It’s that because those sales are densely focused around the time you send the email, you can instantly jump into the bestseller charts, at which point Amazon’s own algorithms will start giving you a ton of visibility – then, consequently, a whole heap of additional sales. The email list isn’t there to sell to the people on the list only, it’s there to multiply your visibility whenever you choose to do it. Lovely! 10. The Joy Of Facebook And finally, the simplest way to promote a book and get sales is the most traditional way of all. Advertising. Placing ads is not particularly hard or technical or difficult. You simply go into Facebook and click the little down arrow on the right-hand side of the top navigation bar. You’ll get a drop down with ‘Your pages’ at the top. You want to click on ‘Create Ads’ a little further down that list and you’re off. The things you really, really need to know about Facebook advertising are as follows. First, Facebook-world distinguishes between Campaigns, Ad-sets, and Ads. The Campaign might include all the ads you use to promote a book. The Ad-sets are defined by budget and audience. The ads themselves are defined by the text and images that you use. The five great keys of Facebook advertising are: 1. Start with small budgets£10 a day is fine. When you get a sense of what works, add money cautiously to the ad variant(s) that is/are working. And don’t woosh the budget up from £10 to £100, as that can throw sand in Facebook’s ad gears. Go up in 50% increments, even if you’re impatient. Watch what works – and the key metric here is cost per click. How much does it cost you to send a qualified, interested reader through to your Amazon page? 2. Test, test and test againTry varying audiences, headlines and either image or ad text. Once you evolve your best audience, your best headline and so on, you can pile your resources in there. And don’t vary everything all at once. You need to be able to compare ads that are basically identical except for one thing changed. 3. Always include an emotional reason to buyWhat will your book make the reader feel? What mood do you want to convey? You need to make sure that your image, your text and your headlines are all in sync with that mood. 4. Always include ‘social proof’People are – rightly – suspicious of ads, because those ads want to take money off the reader. So include ‘proofs of excellence’ from whatever source you can. I have nice reviews from well-known newspapers and bloggers, so I tend to use those. Others will use things like ‘Over fifty-five-star reviews’ or ‘Readers are saying that …’ Whatever you do, make sure that your ad is conveying the idea that other people like this book. That way, no one is dumb for forking out a few dollars for it. 5. Always include a rational reason to buyPeople know that they can go to Amazon any time they want to pick up books at full price, so an ad that says, in effect, ‘Here’s just one more full-price book on Amazon’ will struggle to achieve real traction. So discount your book. Slap something on the ad that says, ‘Now only £1.99’ (or similar). Your ad has got to make people feel (i) Oooh, I like the sound of that, and (ii) better get in there now, before the price goes back up. And – of course – start modestly. Track results. Stick to budgets. And be quick to pull out or pull back if things don’t go the way you want. It’s easy to spend a ton of money on Facebook – and that’s fine only if you’re making two tons of money via Amazon. So that’s our top 10 marketing tips for authors, self-published or traditionally published. The last two of these tools are extremely potent but do work best if you’ve done all or most of the other things first. Good luck, and happy marketing!

‘Creative non-fiction’ is one of the trickiest terms in writing. Non-fiction means being factual. Creative means using imagination. Isn’t that a conflict? At one end, you have textbooks, how-to books, academic and professional work of every sort. In areas like this, factual expertise and clarity matters hugely. Imaginative writing and creative insight may actually get in the way. At the other end of the non-fiction writing game, you have some genuinely creative areas. Travel writing is one. Memoir and biography can be another. Factual reconstruction of particular historical episodes another. If you want to read a non-fiction book that reads exactly like a novel, then try Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. It’s completely true. But it reads like a novel. Capote, in fact, called it a non-fiction novel. It’s famous partly because of its genre-bending format. You can also find historians writing quite creatively (try Simon Schama’s Rough Crossings). And some of our own clients have used our help to achieve bestselling success in the memoir category, if you look for John Fenton’s Please Don’t Make Me Go, or Barbara Tate’s amazing West End Girls. Both these books had the freshness and creativity of novels. If you’re keen to write creative non-fiction, then you need to acquire a novelist’s skills but deploy them to your own factual ends. You can get a real quick survey of the core novelist’s tools on this blog. You can get a more in-depth guide to those skills by browsing our full set of writing resources. Either way, the core of creative writing in non-fiction is to create immediacy, to get close to the character and to the drama of the unfolding moment. Using web-based resources is a good first step on the path to writing successful non-fiction, but it’s only a first step. Other bits of advice would be: Read a lot. You won’t succeed in non-fiction unless you know the market you’re trying to write for. Take a course. It’s one thing learning from books. It’s quite another getting personal feedback from a top tutor as you start to develop your skills. Courses these days can be quite cheap and can be done from home, so it’s not the hassle that it once used to be. We offer some brilliant courses, so check them out here. Depending on exactly what you’re writing, you may even find that a ‘how to write a novel’ course will be the right one for your particular project – but if in doubt, just ask. Start writing and get help. Finally – crucially – the only way you’ll learn how to write better is to start writing. Just get stuck in. You’ll learn masses simply by plunging in. Then, once you’ve got a good chunk of the manuscript written, you can get expert feedback on what you’ve done – what works, what doesn’t work, what you need to do to fix it. Using that support wisely can make all the difference between a book that publishers love, and one that just accumulates rejection letters. And whatever your project, good luck!

It’s probably the most-asked writers’ question: How do I get an agent? And it’s probably one of the best answered, too. There’s no lack of advice on this subject, from Jericho Writers’ own Agent Match to any number of websites and chat forums, with agents themselves, publishers, and well-known writers, all offering tips and stratagems to hook that must-have gatekeeper to publishing heaven. But what happens once you have secured an agent? How you conduct that relationship, one of the most important you’ll ever have in your writing and publishing career, is crucial. If it goes well, then that’s great. But if it goes wrong, what can you do? Where oh where is the advice you need then? Because these relationships do go wrong – a lot. It’s hard to realise that from the lack of information out there because the publishing industry doesn’t like talking about the downside. It’s an industry that thrives on the positive, not the negative – it needs writers as much as writers need it, and it doesn’t want to put them off. Which is understandable. And a bad agent-author relationship is not what the industry wants to have to deal with. But writers do have to deal with it, and deal with it more often than they might expect. Why It Goes Wrong Is your agent not returning your emails or calls? Is your agent not sending your book out to all the publishers that they promised they would? Is it a personality clash? Are you just not the right ‘fit’ for one another? First of all, you want to establish if you’re making your agent any money or not. If not, then they may want rid of you, they just won’t say it. I’ve been with three agents so far. We tend to think a multiplicity of agents in our career is a bad thing, because we all know the stories of successful writers who have had the same agent since forever, who’s their best friend, their right-hand man/woman, godparent to their first born, etc. It’s the agent-author relationship we all aspire to: success on both sides, as the agent nabs the best deals with the biggest publishers, and the writer cements said agent’s income and status by selling big and winning awards. Fabulous. Unfortunately, a lot of the time it doesn’t work like that. And while we shouldn’t blame our agents if they can’t sell our work to a publisher, or if said publisher can’t sell enough of our work to the public or get it onto prestigious shortlists, we can and should hold our agents to account if they’re ignoring us as a result of our book or manuscript failing. My three agents were all very different. One was with a huge agency, two were with smaller ones, and in different locations. Two were strangers before I signed with them, one was a friend. I left all three of them, although in one case I definitely jumped before I was pushed. Why did I move on each time? Well, the first time was because I didn’t feel my agent was very engaged with my work or pushing it with publishers. Her response to my novel manuscript was generic and I worried I was going to miss out. My second book had just come out and was getting a lot of coverage. I thought I might be in a strong position to get someone else so I moved on. Some people have likened the author-agent relationship to dating, and when you want out, the excuses tend to be the same (‘It’s not you, it’s me’ – I did actually use that one; ‘I think the timing/chemistry/feeling’s just not right/there’; ‘You just don’t understand me’ etc). And because having to end it is always excruciating, we use these excuses, when the truth almost certainly lies elsewhere and goes unspoken. My second move wasn’t so much of an ending because we had a kind of understanding in the beginning that if he got me a deal, I’d stay with him, and if he didn’t, I wouldn’t (already it sounds so personal). In the end, I got my third deal myself, but I still paid him an agent fee because he’d done a good job sending round a non-fiction proposal for another book (which didn’t make it). My fourth book, a historical novel, wasn’t really his area, so I went shopping for another agent, and, after a lot of leg work, I ‘hooked’ one. What To Do When It Does Go Wrong My third agent experience was the one that really pushed the scariest questions. When you find yourself in a no-win situation and you know you want to leave, these are the ones you lie awake at night asking yourself: ‘Is it too late to back out of my contract?’ ‘Will it harm my chances of signing with anyone else if I do this again?’ ‘Is moving from agent to agent just making me look bad?’ I was never given a reason for my third agent ignoring me, but it soon seemed clear why. After signing me up, she had worked with me over a few months to get my manuscript right, then sent it out with much excitement. After three months, I’d heard nothing so I emailed her but got no reply. Then just three days before Christmas, she emailed me the news that the first round of publishers had all rejected it. I burst into tears, but she had promised to send it round a second lot of publishers in the New Year, so I clung to that small ray of hope. She didn’t email me again until the end of February, and that was only because I’d eventually rung her to ask what was happening (she was ‘in a meeting’ and couldn’t come to the phone). By May, I’d had two emails from her in 8 months, no list of the publishers she’d sent my manuscript to in the first instance, despite my repeated requests to see their responses, no idea who she’d sent it to in a second round (there was no ‘second round’, as it transpired), and my requests to meet face-to-face were ignored. I couldn’t ignore it any longer – I was being ‘ghosted’, and probably because of my book’s failure to get picked up in the first round. I was being dropped, without it being spoken out loud. What on earth should I do? Hang on in there? Hope that someone out of the blue took my book and my agent started talking to me again? I looked for advice online, but there was little to help me. I asked agented friends, but they weren’t sure either. I came to the only conclusion I could. My confidence was being eroded – I hadn’t written anything in the eight months since my agent had sent out my novel, and all my ideas for other books seemed pointless. I had to stop feeling worthless because I was being ignored, and that was when I knew I had to end it. So I did. I emailed to say I wasn’t happy with her lack of response and felt that the relationship wasn’t working for me. No reply. I emailed again, this time to say quite firmly, that it was over. No reply. I posted a written letter, as my contract stated that it could be terminated only in writing. No reply. I wrote another letter. Finally, a response, thanking me for my ‘brave, wonderful novel’. It was a relief. It took another six months after I ended the contract for me to start writing again, but at least the writing did return. I don’t yet have another agent, but my confidence is still growing and I am looking for one. I’m also trying smaller publishers who don’t require submissions from an agent. 10 Top Tips For Surviving The Wrong Agent I’ve learned several things from this experience, and here is my advice to anyone in a similar situation. Do not let anybody, be it agent or publisher, damage your confidence. That’s different from feeling sore after a rejection, or refusing to take advice on rewrites. It’s about protecting yourself from damaging treatment by someone who appears to be holding all the cards (because they don’t). If your agent is ignoring your emails about a new manuscript you’ve submitted, and this continues for over six months, cut them loose. They’re not working for you. If your agent promises to send your work out but they don’t, and all you get is prevarications and excuses, cut them loose, too. Agents need writers as much as writers need agents. There may be far more writers out there than there are agents, but the right one for you still exists, you just haven’t found them yet. Keep looking. Get used to the notion that in your career you may go through many agents. Just as we now move from publisher to publisher more than we did in the past, so too with agents are we more mobile. Scriptwriters in tv and film got used to this years ago; now print writers have to as well. Don’t believe an agent who promises you the moon, but do hold them to account if they’re falling below deliverable promises. Give an agent a chance to correct what they’ve done before you fire them. Don’t be afraid to talk about your bad experience. The less silence there is on this subject, the better for everyone. Trust your instincts: if your instincts say this isn’t working, then they’re probably right. Remember that, as a writer, you’re more than just a brand. Recently, my blog about this experience was viewed over 1000 times and I was inundated with writers, some very well-known, on their own bad experiences. So it does happen to most of us at some time, and it is survivable. The important thing I learned from it is to develop a sense of flexibility, appreciate your own mobility, and keep positive. This is the game, but some know how to play it better than others. You have to make sure you are one of the better informed. More On Finding An Agent How to Find a Literary Agent (the Simple 8 Step Guide)

Writing fantasy is not an easy option or a quick way to make money, but if you have the imagination to see wonders and the skill to describe them, if you have things to say that can only be said with dragons, then fantasy may be your genre. The best preparation for writing fantasy is to read myths and legends from lots of different cultures. Many fantasy classics are longer than the average novel, but you don’t have to write a multi-volume epic to break into the fantasy market. Anything from 90,000 to 200,000 words is an acceptable length. Ideally, your novel should be satisfying as a standalone work, but perhaps have the potential to be the first of a series. Literary agents see hundreds of manuscripts set in vaguely medieval worlds, in which magic works. There will need to be something distinctive and compelling about your manuscript to make it truly stand out. Don’t base your book on a role-playing game. Don’t feel that you must use the standard cast list of warriors, wizards, dragons, elves, etc. Only write about elves if you are passionately inspired by elves, if you have something new to say about them. Creating new worlds is one of the most enjoyable challenges in fiction. Readers (and that includes literary agents!) should feel that you know everything about your invented world and its history. Getting to that stage may take years of thought, planning and research. Then, be ruthlessly selective. Most of your beloved background material should stay in your notes. Genre novels are expected to be fast-moving, so don’t start with pages of scene-setting and explanation. Plunge into the story as quickly as possible and only tell your readers what they need to know when they need to know it. Your basic plot doesn’t have to be completely original. You might choose to tell an old story with a new twist or from an unusual viewpoint. There will always be a market for classic quest stories and battles between good and evil, but if you don’t genuinely care about how and why the ‘good guys’ win, neither will your readers. If you give your heroes unlimited magical powers, it will be hard to get enough tension and conflict into your plot. Try to restrict the number of ‘voices’ you use to tell your story. If your main viewpoint character is an outsider of some kind, this will make it easier for your readers to identify with her or him. Your characters don’t have to speak in pseudo-archaic language, but they shouldn’t all sound like American teenagers, either. Finally, remember that what works in a fantasy film or comic won’t necessarily work in a novel. Blow-by-blow accounts of sword fights can be boring to read and huge battle scenes just confusing. In a novel, action scenes need to be personalised. Show what an individual warrior is thinking and feeling as he fights, and take your readers right inside the world of your imagination. Then get your manuscript to a literary agent… and best of luck!

We’re storytellers, so I’ll start out with a story. (It\'s Harry Bingham writing, by the way.) The story is true, and has been life-changing for me. Follow some of the advice in this post, and your life might change, too - in a very, very good way. How Self-publishing E-books Makes Me An Easy Six Figures A few years back, the first novel in my Fiona Griffiths crime series was bought by Kate Miciak of Delacorte/Bantam Dell in New York. If those names don’t mean anything to you, suffice to say that Kate also edits the work of Lee Child. Back then, she also edited the work of Karin Slaughter. She edits, or has edited, the work of countless other megastar authors. Delacorte is an imprint of Penguin Random House, and a leading crime imprint in the US. My literary agents in the US and UK were (and are) both outstanding, so it looked to me like I had pretty much a full house, aces over kings. The perfect editor, at the perfect imprint, at the perfect publisher, and with superb agents by way of support. That’s dream-come-true territory. Only, of course, if the book was lousy, no amount of good publishing would save it, so there was that to consider. There was a possible pitfall right there. Except – the book did okay. It got a starred review in Publishers Weekly. A starred review in Kirkus. A full four stars in the USA Today. It got rave reviews in the Boston Globe, the Seattle Times, and a host of others places too. Second book in the series, the same thing. Brilliant reviews. Great publishing team. The best names in the business. And the books flopped. Curled up and died. They did so badly, that the second book never even went into paperback. How come? Response from readers had been good. Things seemingly lay more in the difficulty that my publishers had in finding the right look – the hardback of that first book had a nice but weird cover on it. Retailers were unconvinced, and didn’t stock it. Readers, the same. When they saw the book in store, they didn’t really know what kind of book it was. The failure of that cast a pall over a radically rejacketed paperback. Since that also didn’t sell, the second book was pretty much dead in the water, despite yet another desperate attempt at rejacketing and rebranding with the hardback of the second book. And that was that. My US career pretty much over. Nice reviews, no sales. Too bad – but I believed in those books. And if what I’ve described was correct, that seemed to me an extremely solvable problem. So I wasn’t quitting the North American market. My Self-Publishing Experiment I chose to self-publish book #3 in that series (more about how to do that in a minute). That experiment went well, so I bought back the rights to books #1 and #2 from the (very generous) people at Penguin Random House. That repurchase cost me $10,000, but it was probably the best investment I’ve ever made. In June 2017, I published #6 in that series. I’ve earned about $100,000 from my Fiona Griffiths books over the last twelve months. I do almost no marketing. I release just one book a year. I have an incredible relationship with my US readers – the best I’ve had in twenty years of being a professional author, and readers like my books. I hope you’ll agree that’s a great outcome. How do you achieve it? What’s the secret? Well, two things. Number one: my books are good. If your books are poor, or even mediocre, they won’t get that level of success and, frankly, don’t deserve it. And number two: I self-published an e-book. (Or, rather, a series of e-books.) Yes, I also sell in print, but ebooks account for 95% of my sales, or more. And the print sales I do get arise, almost entirely, as a result of my ebooks’ visibility. An e-book \'boxed\' set of the first three Fiona Griffiths novels Why Ebooks Haven’t Peaked – And Are Here To Stay Is this all a bubble, though? A flash in the pan? Well, you might well think so, given the number of daft stories like this one, which claim the ebook revolution is on the wane. And the short answer is that, yes, the number of ebooks sold by traditional publishers have flattened off and even dipped, but that’s largely the result of an acute decline in the market share of traditional publishers. The Association of American Publishers reports double figure declines in ebooks. The British Publishers Association notes that sales of trade fiction (i.e. novels for adults and kids) have declined by a quarter. In five years. Ouch! That’s a horrendous loss of revenue, but it’s not that people have stopped reading books. It’s that they’re not reading traditionally published work in anything like the same quantity. What AuthorEarnings.com tells you is that, between 2014 and 2016, Amazon’s own publishing imprints doubled their market share. Indie authors have relentlessly accumulated share. And traditional publishers as a group, and the large publishers most of all, have lost share seriously. In short, the ebook market is thriving, and the market for books of any format sold online is now utterly, utterly dominant. AuthorEarnings reckon that sales of adult fiction are now more than 75% online, and that’s just unbelievably excellent news for writers like you. Why? Because you can’t compete in bricks and mortar retail. Except in exceptional circumstances, or in minuscule volumes, your books just won’t get sold through those channels. You have fully three quarters of the entire market for books to aim at, and: Not only can you compete here – no one is blocking your way But also it’s free to compete here – there’s no entry charge The dominant player wants you to compete here – it positively welcomes self-pub authors And best of all: You actually have a competitive advantage over big traditional firms, because readers positively want a direct connection with the author. No one in the world positively wants a direct connection with some giant multinational. You have a marketing edge they cannot match. So it’s perfectly possible to make good money with e-books. As Amazon continues to flourish, the indie tide is rising all the time. The simple fact is: More and more indies are making more and more money than ever before. Next year will be better than last year. Good to know, right? But money doesn’t just drop into your lap. You gotta to go make it. So – after a pretty picture of that rising tide – let’s go figure out our next steps. Step 1: Set Up An Account With KDP KDP stands for Kindle Direct Publishing and you will grow to love those intials very much indeed. You just go here – https://kdp.amazon.com/ – and sign in with your regular Amazon account. If you have everything else ready, you are about ten minutes away from publishing your first ebook. Step 2: Prepare Your Ebook (In Word) It’s absolutely fine to prepare your book as a regular Word document. Just be aware that you need to think about an ebook in three sections: The front matter: this is the “Look Inside” section and you need to prepare this part thinking about readers who are curious about your book, interested in buying it, but who haven’t yet made the purchasing decision. This is the place for any lovely reviews you may have, any good selling text – and of course plenty of the actual book itself. What you don’t want is any tedious copyright notices and that kind of thing. Yes, sure, you have to get those in somewhere, but you can bundle them right out of the way, at the end of the book. The book itself: Obviously you want to make this as strong as possible. Your only thought here should be to deliver the very best reading experience possible. The end matter: This is where you want to solicit reviews for the book and, crucially, where you want to collect your readers’ email addresses. I’ll tell you how to do that in a moment, but it’s probably the single most important element in the whole selling chain, so don’t neglect it. Make sure as well that you have done the basic formatting bits and pieces right. So, for example, you need to: Use the tab key or the paragraph format menu to indent paragraphs. (Do not just hit the spacebar five times: that’s a real formatting no-no.) Ensure total consistency in your chapter numbering and formatting. So if you use simple digits to mark out each new chapter, make sure those things are formatted the same way every time. Ensure consistency in other headings, such as Author’s Note, About this Series, etc And of course, the entire book should be in a single document – don’t even think about trying to format something chapter by chapter If you want KDP’s own formatting guide, you can get it here. Step 3: Create Your Cover Top-end cover design is hard. It can be fairly expensive. And, even if you splash the cash, results can be curiously disappointing. Nor is that even surprising, really, given that everyone knows that covers really matter, and everyone is trying to out-compete everyone else. Just don’t get too worried. It’s not hard – it’s actually easy – to get a good, professional cover on your book. And it doesn’t have to be expensive, either. For a really detailed overview on how to commission a cover, check out our advice, but mostly I’d suggest that you: Search “pre-made book cover.” What you’ll find here is huge libraries of covers that have been put together by pro designers and then discarded. If that sounds crazy, then bear in mind that a large publisher or picky author may well commission multiple designs, in order to pick one. Rather than bin the unwanted designs, designers simply remove the specifics of author name and title and make the design available to anyone with $50-100 to spare. Sure, the cover may not be super-specific to your book, but that really, really doesn’t matter. Readers buy on mood and genre-indication. The specifics just aren’t relevant. Fly solo, using Canva. Canva announces itself as ‘amazingly simple graphic design software’ and it really is easy. It offers a variety of book cover templates. You just pick a photo. Add your text. And off you go. Depending on whether you use a free image or not (I’d suggest probably not), that route will cost you between nothing at all and a few bucks. Step 4: Format Your Ebook These days, you have multiple options for formatting an e-book. You can: Pay someone. These people, for example – but look at various quotes, as you shouldn’t really be paying more than $100 for this service. Do it yourself via Scrivener, if you like Scrivener. Do it yourself via Vellum, if you like Apple. Do it yourself via Draft2Digital. (The service I mostly use – it’s free.) Do it yourself via KDP’s own conversion platform – though this will leave you with a mobi file only and all other e-tailers use epub files. (These are basically the same, but also irritatingly different.) The DIY version of things is fast and simple. Once you’ve got the hang of a particular system, it’s a ten minute chore, if that. Remember that the cover is part of the e-book, so you can’t progress to the formatting step until you’ve got your cover sorted. And of course once you’ve ticked off this step – congratulations! You’ve created your product. Now your only job is to get it on the shelves and starting to sell. Step 5: Set Your Ebook Details So the new model is to ignore the keyword bundling, and instead use subtitles that present the book in the most attractive possible light, e.g., “The Seventh Corpse: A tense thriller that you won’t be able to put down”. I think that’s a better strategy, and it’s the one I recommend. Do note that Amazon requires you to have the text of the subtitle present somewhere on the cover. (You can read more about their requirements here.) But Amazon doesn’t effectively enforce that rule and the truth is that, at the moment, you can ignore it if you want to. So one perfectly practical strategy woul be: experiment with different subtitles, see what works best, then change the cover when you’re ready. But also: don’t spend too long on all this. It’s not a game-changer. SeriesIs your book part of a series? If so, say so. Anyone searching for my books, for example, might use my name to look for them, or they might look for the name of my detective protagonist, Fiona Griffiths. To make sure that anyone searching for “Fiona Griffiths” finds my books, I call my series “Fiona Griffiths”, and Amazon will add “Book X” to each book in the series. So, for example, my sixth book in the series is entitled (with title, subtitle, and series data) as follows: “The Deepest Grave: An ancient battle, a dead researcher, and a very modern crime (Fiona Grifiths Book 6)”. That’s not a bad template to follow. EditionYou probably won’t need to use this. You can just ignore it. AuthorThat’s you. Check for typos! Don’t misspell your name. ContributorsDo you have co-authors? Illustrators? Other collaborators? If so, this is the spot to include them. DescriptionThe book description matters. It’s how you pitch to the reader. How you convert that opening interest into the hook of purchase-intent. I like descriptions that follow a little story arc all of their own. So: An opening sentence or two, that acts as a hook, or teaser. The purpose of this sentence is to make the reader curious and choose to read on. The blurb proper. Usually this will describe the set up only, and will include those elements most likely to intrigue the reader. A cliff-hanger type ending. The sort of thing that runs, “But that’s when he started to realise how serious the danger really was – and when he wondered if he’s escape with his life.” You can definitely choose your own strategy, but that basic Teaser – Content – Cliffhanger template is hard to beat. Note that if you want to make use of bold, italics, and that kind of thing, then you can. If you know basic html, then feel free to use it. If you don’t, then use a simple formatting tool like this one, to generate beautiful looking text. Don’t overuse those tools though – too much bold just looks childish. Keep it nice! RightsYou need to declare that you own the copyright and hold the necessary publishing rights. If you are the author of the work, then you’re fine. KeywordsThese are the keywords that help Amazon determine what kind of book yours is and will guide what searches it appears under. Amazon’s own guidelines – here – are quite helpful, and you should use them. Do remember that it might seem clever to shove a keyword like “thriller” into your keyword choices – because lots of people like thrillers, right? – but your book is unlikely to feature on highly competitive searches, unless you have reason to be very confident of hitting a good salesrank early. Again, it’s worth doing a reasonable bit of research into possible keyword selections, but don’t go crazy. 2-3 hours work on this is easily enough, or more than enough. Keyword choices won’t make the difference to your sales. CategoriesJust choose the library-style classification for your book where your readers are most likely to congregate. For me, for example, I choose these categories: Fiction > Mystery & Detective > International Mystery & CrimeFiction > Mystery & Detective > Police Procedural The ‘International Mystery & Crime’ category is relatively niche, but works very well for me, because I want US readers with an interest in non-US set crime. And ‘police procedural’ precisely describes what I write, so I’m going to find my natural readers in that category. Age rangeSelf-explanatory. If you’re not writing for kids, this isn’t relevant. Pre-orderUnless you are an experienced author with a strong sales plan, I’d recommend against using a pre-order. And even if you are experienced, they may not work for you. I don’t pre-orders myself any more and my sales have benefitted. And, to be clear, if you don’t set a pre-order date, then your book will publish within about 24 hours of you hitting the publish button at the end of this form. You are that close to getting out there! Yowch! This is a lot to take in, right? Yep. One big reason why a lot of self-publishers mess up is that they’re so keen to get published that they don’t invest enough time in learning how to do it right. (And yes, I’m guilty of that myself. I threw away plenty of easy money as a result.) So we created a really comprehensive, easy to follow, step-by-step video course that teaches the whole self-publishing game – and it’s designed for people just like you. And yes, yes, I know. As soon as someone says “video course” to me, I think here comes the hard sell for a product which might really be great, but which is going to have some eye-watering price. And yes, the course does have an eye-watering price (details here), but you can get it free. That’s right. You can get an entire, super-premium video course FREE, just by taking out membership of Jericho Writers. We’re a club, founded by writers for writers, and our aim is just to deliver a spectacularly huge amount of value within that membership. So it’s not just that one course. We’ve also got an incredible how to write course. Loads of stuff on trad publishing. Filmed masterclasses. Live online webinars with agents, writing tutors and more. If you’re even one tiny bit interested (and, if you’re reading this blog post, then you darn well should be), then hop over here to learn a whole heap more. We look forward to welcoming you soon. Step 6: Set Your Ebook Content We’ve already dealt with the two biggest ingredients of your content: your book itself and your cover. With those two items, just upload the relevant files and wait for Amazon to digest them. I do recommend that you use the eBook previewer tool: it’s just a comforting way to make sure that everything looks as it should do before you hit publish. In this section, however, there are three other things you need to think about. DRM choiceYou can choose whether or not to protect your book from potential piracy with ‘Digital Rights Management’. And while protecting your book sounds like a no brainer – of course you want to protect it! It’s your baby! – the simple fact is that DRM doesn’t work. Easily available software can strip the DRM out of your book in a couple of minutes, and once some idiot has done that, the pirated version of your book can spread everywhere anyway. Meantime, DRM can be a real pain for perfectly legitimate readers who may want to lend your book, read on a new device, or whatever. So my choice – and this would be the advice of a majority of experienced indie authors – is not to enable DRM protection. Realistically, there just isn’t much you can do about piracy. Treat any manifestations of piracy as a compliment to your book and your writing, and focus your efforts on all the millions of legitimate readers who want to buy, not steal, your book. ISBNTo get your book into a bricks and mortar bookstore, you would need an ISBN – effectively an international identifier for your book. But e-books don’t need ISBNs. And even if you’re publishing in print with Amazon as well, you can let Amazon just allocate a free ISBN to you when you publish. So basically, just ignore the ISBN box. It doesn’t matter to you. PublisherHuh? You’re the publisher, right? So why is KDP asking you for this information? Well, no reason, really. Lots of self-publishers just leave this box blank, and there’s no reason not to do that. But personally, I just like the idea of having a publisher’s name on my books, so I call my publishing imprint ‘Sheep Street Books’ and give that phrase to Amazon when it asks me for my publisher. Note, there’s absolutely no requirement for any legal substance here. There isn’t a legal entity called Sheep Street Books. My accountant doesn’t have to handle anything different. It’s literally just a name. Nothing more. But it’s nice, no? Step 7: Choose If You’re Going To Go Exclusive To Amazon At this stage, you need to determine if you’re going to make your work exclusive to Amazon or not. That sounds like a bad idea – why wouldn’t you want your book to be sold in every store possible? – but there’s a catch. The thing is, Amazon doesn’t just control the world’s largest bookstore (Amazon.com), it controls the second biggest one too – Kindle Unlimited, which makes e-books available for free to participating members. The word ‘free’ in this context might cause you some alarm but, be not afeard, Amazon pays about $0.0045 for every page of your book that a KU subscriber reads. Your KU income, therefore, comes in the form of payments for pages read, rather than a traditional type of sale. And KU is huge. KU is disproportionately important to indie authors and, indeed, indie authors in 2017 made a total of about $180 million from Kindle Unlimited, compared with just $50 million a year from Apple and all other non-Amazon sources. To me personally, that logic is overwhelming. I offer the first book in my series wide (i.e. with every store) in order to capture as many readers as possible. After that, though, all my books are Amazon exclusive. I make about a third of my income from KU reads and I know some very successful authors who make a full 50% of their income from KU. If you are just starting out, then I urge you to follow that exact template. When and if you start to generate decent sales for your series, you should reconsider the matter. Some pro indies urge the wide route; others advocate the narrow one. For these experienced authors, there’s a real choice. But starting out? Go narrow. Make it work. Then think again. Step 8: Set Ebook Pricing Finally, you need to determine royalties and pricing. Amazon likes people to sell e-books in the $2.99 to $9.99 range. It wants to avoid excessively high pricing (because that would damage the extent of the e-book market), but it doesn’t like super-low pricing all that much either (because it doesn’t make enough money.) The result is that is offers an (amazing, brilliant, wonderful) royalty of 70% to indies publishing their books within that range and a (still good) royalty of 35% outside that band. In terms of where you should sell your books, you need to think about (A) where you want to end up, and (B) the best way to start out. A typical end-point for you will be something like mine: Book #1 – $0.99 (make it attractive for readers to get into the series)Book #2 – $4.99 (make some money)Book #3 – $4.99 (make some money)Book #4 – $4.99 (make some money)etc But you can only sell books in volume at $4.99 or more if you already have a bunch of committed readers. If you’re not yet at that stage, then remember: FREE IS A MARKETING STRATEGY What’s more, and by the same fine logic: CHEAP IS A MARKETING STRATEGY Sure, you don’t actually make any money from free, and you don’t make much from cheap . . . but your job now is to tempt readers into your series (and your book’s job is then to blow them away.) For newer authors, then, I think you want to fool around at the $0.00, $0.99 and $2.99 price points to find readers and build your base. Remember, you can change your decisions at any time, so just try out one option, see what happens, then change it if you need. Step 9: Hit That Button, ‘Publish My Kindle Ebook’ You’ll get a message telling you that the book may take up to 72 hours to be published, but it’s generally a lot less than that. You’re on your way, my friend. You’re a published author now. But don’t walk alone. We created our Jericho Writers club to be here for you on your journey. We’ve helped all types of writer get published, including some of the biggest selling indie authors of recent years. I’m not going to start yelling about how much we make available for free in our club (clue: it’s masses). Instead, I’m just going to tell you to hop over here and take a look. Honestly? I think it’ll be the best investment you ever make. Step 10: Market Like Crazy And Build Your List I told you earlier that that the back matter for your book needed to include an inducement for readers to leave you their email address. The way you do that is by deploying the power of free. You create a reader magnet – a nicely written, properly formatted short story with a decent cover – and say, “Get my wonderful story, for free.” Readers, blown away by the power of your storytelling, sign up for this new free story. You send it to them by email. You now have their email address . . . and their permission for you to market to them direct. That, in essence, is the strategy that lies at the heart of every self-publishers success. Your core readers buy each new book when you ask them to. That sales surge blasts you up the Amazon sales rankings. That delivers a ton of visibility you couldn’t get in any other way. And a whole host of new readers enters the series and falls in love with your writing. Now needless to say, that strategy is important enough that you need to get it right. This post – already too long – isn’t going to talk in detail about how to build your list, but it matters intensely,and fortunately for you, this post goes into detail about how to set up the various elements. Get published, my friend. Sell some books. Have some fun. And good luck.

I recently came across a useful article by Rachelle Gardner, an American agent, about how to get literary agents to represent you. She advertised 13 sure fire ways to get representation … but I have to say that not all of them struck me as realistic. Here’s my edited version of her list, with some comments. The good news is there are perhaps only nine things to worry about, not the thirteen Rachelle mentions. And if nine is still too many for you, the crucial point’s right at the end of this piece. Good luck and here’s how to get that agent. 1. A Fresh Idea This matters a lot, no matter what genre or market you are writing for. I was at a crime festival at the weekend where panellists complained about the glut of serial killers, weird murders and by-the-book procedurals that came out a few years ago. For sure, there are still top ten bestsellers writing exactly those kind of books. But they rose to the top, when that kind of writing still felt fresh and new. If you were a debut novelist, writing the exact same material, you would struggle to sell it today. Is that unfair? No! They wrote fresh work for the market as it was at the time. You need to do the same today. 2. Get Your Submission Right This matters, too. Look at what an agent asks for on their website and submit that exact material in the exact way specified. Even if that doesn’t seem to suit your plan or your book, you need to comply anyway. For now, you must realise there is absolutely nothing special about your manuscript and you must get in line with everyone else. Oh, and don’t muck up the covering letter or your synopsis. These things are easy to get right. We’ve got a simple guide to writing your query letter (that includes an example of a query letter), and a guide to writing your novel synopsis. Simple. 3. Know Your Audience If you are writing fantasy fiction, you have to be a student of the genre. You have to know the classics. You have to know the modern twists on the classics. You have to know the market the way readers do – by reading masses and masses. The same goes for any other genre, including non-fiction. If you are writing a book about quantum theory, let’s say, you just have to know what other people have done, what approaches they took – and ensure that yours is different, new and compelling. All that starts with knowing your area. 4. Have Some Social Media Presence Here’s all you need to know about social media presence: If you have blog traffic in the 100,000s and Twitter followers in the 10,000s, and if your book is directly related to that traffic/following. (e.g.: if you’re a motorsport guru and your book is on motorsport), then your social media presence will help sell your book. If your traffic is not on that scale, then publishers won’t really care about it. Nor will they expect you to have traffic on that scale. Most authors just don’t. And if you’re writing a novel, who cares? I just don’t know how that myth gets propounded. Your agent submission, your story, is what’ll get you published. 5. Have An Impressive Platform This is true for some non-fiction authors, but that’s it. I wrote a history book without having any platform at all. No blog, no followers, no mailing list, no academic credentials in the field, not even a history A-level. That shows that, even with a serious subject, a good idea allied to good writing is all you need. That said, if you do have a strong platform (blog/mailing list/etc), it will help. Even so, this point only applies to non-fictioneers, and usually then only if the topic is of relatively focused interest, rather than broad popular appeal. 6. Include Links To Videos Where Agents Can See You Speaking Sorry, but no, this just doesn’t matter. No agent or publisher has ever asked me for this. I’ve done a few festival gigs myself, but the total book sales from those events probably numbers in the mere dozens of copies. Of course, publishers and agents would prefer a confident public performer to a stuttering, sweating wreck, but it’s just not a significant factor in anyone’s acquisition decision. 7. Show Some Familiarity With Today’s Marketing Requirements For Authors Nope, again, just not a real issue. I’ve recently published crime novels in the UK and the US. Neither publisher has asked me to tweet about the books, to do anything to support the books on Facebook, to promote them via blogs or mailing lists. I have, in fact, done a few things on those fronts, but they don’t make a big heap of difference and publishers just don’t care. It’s not what sells books. And how could it? Let’s say you have a Twitter following of 100,000 people. Let’s say you tweet about your new novel several times to those 100,000. You can’t do it more often than that because you’d look like a pushy moron. Most of your followers won’t even see your tweets, because following someone means dipping in now and again; it doesn’t mean reading every single tweet. I doubt if you would get more than 1-5,000 eyeballs maximum looking at your please-read-my-book tweet, but let’s say 10,000 to be generous. Of those 10,000, you would do very well to convert even 1% into an actual buy decision. (And that 1% is a lot higher than the average ad-conversion rate online. It’s higher by about 1-2 orders of magnitude.) So 1% of 10,000 views is 100 book sales. Great. No one says no to selling 100 books. But from a publisher’s perspective, that’s a mere dop in the ocean of what they need to achieve. So they don’t care about your Twitter following. They. Just. Don’t. Care. 8. Show A Cursory Acquaintance With The Agent You’re Pitching To Yes, kind of. It certainly helps if there’s a little personal something in your covering letter, but only a bit. And if you’re struggling to say anything, then don’t worry about it. My literary agent, Bill Hamilton, represents Hilary Mantel, and I’ll bet that a large fraction of letters addressed to him say, ‘Dear Mr Hamilton, As you’re a fan of historical fiction, such as that written by Hilary Mantel, I’m hoping that you’ll be interested in my book …’ And what does that mean, really? It means that you’ve picked one starry name from a much longer client list and that you’ve done so because someone told you that you had to find some way to personalise your letter. If there’s an angle which feels natural and authentic, then mention it. Otherwise don’t. It’s that simple. It\'s also important to visit the agent\'s blog. Very few agents in the UK have a blog, so good luck with that. Obviously, if they do, then visit it. But see my comment above: natural and authentic is good. Anything else is not. 9. Take The Craft Of Writing Seriously And lastly (but most importantly) you must be serious about the craft. That means copyediting and presentation have to be very good (but not, at this stage, perfect). It also means that you need to have structurally edited your manuscript so it is in good shape. Yes. Gimmickry or forced humour in your opening approach to agents won’t feel great in the cold light of a Monday morning. Keep it professional. The ONLY Thing That Will REALLY Get You An Agent Write the best book you possibly can! If you have a truly dazzling book you could have no social media profile at all, be all but mute in the presence of other people, know nothing about your agent, and still get taken on and do very well indeed. In the crazy world of publishing, authors have very little control or say as to what the public want to read, or editors and agents are taking on. So focus on the one thing you CAN control - and that\'s writing the best book you possibly can. Good luck and happy writing! More On Finding An Agent How to Find a Literary Agent (the Simple 8 Step Guide)

How to finish writing a book and schedule your writing time. One of the hardest things about finishing a novel – before you think about ideas, characters, or plotting – is finding time and confidence with all those words to write. Maybe writing a novel seems like a mammoth task, a distant dream. Read on for tips in writing productivity, how to get organised with your writing, and how to finish your book draft. A massive spoiler: you can do it. How To Schedule Your Writing Time (By The Hour) How can you be sure to finish a novel you start? Lots of writers prefer spontaneity to planning out writing times. If vagueness hasn’t been helping, though, setting goals could help make a novel seem less imposing. Goals may adapt as you go on, too (perhaps by the day, if you’ve written something one day that negates what you were planning to do the next day, and so on). This shouldn’t be an inflexible process. Just decide on your writing days per week, how much time you know you’ll roughly have to dedicate to writing on each day. Some days, you may have an hour or two. On others, you know you may just have twenty minutes. Twenty minutes can still count. If you want your novel written, you’ll need determination – and Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope even paid someone to get him up and bring coffee, so he could write in the few hours before he went to work. Even if your designated writing times aren’t every day, they should still be fixed (as much as you can make them). Show up for your writing, keep it habitual. If you’ve been struggling to make time for writing on a more fluid basis, see if actively planning your writing like this makes a difference. How To Set Your Writing Goals (And Achieve Them) Let’s explore this idea of hours more, how you’ll make the time productive, once you’ve scheduled it into your day. Perhaps you’ll allot in your diary (or mobile calendar) an hour of each weekday to writing your novel. List its ideal outcome. Does Chapter 1 need starting? If you’re further on than that, does a scene need revising? Does a ‘filler’ or ‘bridge’ section need getting down on paper, before you go back and figure out how to make it better later? Maybe there’s a weeknight you know you’ll have limited time, so take out just twenty minutes for research, making an outline, editing, or mind-mapping ideas for a scene. Maybe there’s a weekend you know you’ll have lots more time, so set yourself a bigger task. Try giving one ideal outcome to each time you write, to help turn your novel into a manageable project (so if you do more than that, wonderful). Few people can find long stints of time to write as they’d like. The only agreed solution (between the ‘planners’ and the ‘pantsters’) is to carve writing hours into a schedule, then stick to them, making them useful. You can always break up your writing time with something called the Pomodoro technique, too – 25 minutes of work, then 5 minutes to break – rewarding yourself as you go. Or think of a time of day when you feel most creative- such as early afternoon- and schedule some time then. Bring your close family and friends along, too. Your desire to write is a part of you, so having support and understanding from others will help. How To Protect Your Writing Space (And Headspace) Whilst it’s possible to write anywhere, your headspace and surrounding environment can help you keep up a writing discipline. Surround yourself with writerly comforts. Some need black coffee, others need green tea. Some need quiet, others need jazzy playlists. Some need cushions, others need a wrist support. Some need scattered notes, others need filing systems. Make your writing spot a place you’ll literally love coming to. If it’s just not possible to create a makeshift writing space at home, settle yourself where you’ll feel comfortable, even if it’s just in bed with a laptop. (And why not?) Respecting your physical space, the bustle of a café could be less taxing than the bustle of home in terms of productivity. If you need to remove yourself from home distractions for a bit, why not take yourself to a coffee or lunch? Treat yourself to whatever feeds your writer’s brain. Perhaps during a lunch break at work, you’ll be able to take yourself and your laptop to a café somewhere. Also, any space (and anyone’s headspace) nowadays is easy to infiltrate with wi-fi. Protect focus by turning off the wi-fi. (You can always ‘reward’ yourself with the Internet later.) Keep things fun, just keep yourself to task, too. How To Keep Going And Finish Your Novel First, Start Now. There’s never going to be a time when you’re readier to write than the present. Start writing, then keep it habitual, even between projects. Carry a notebook and pen with you. Try jotting ideas on the go. If you’re a first time writer, try checking out this page for extra advice and inspiration! Second, Release Some Pressure. Allow yourself to be carried along, to enjoy and let loose. Allow your first draft to be imperfect because otherwise it can’t get written. You’ll have time to edit once it’s out on a page, but you can’t edit from nothing (editing, by the by, we can help with once you’re ready). Third, You Can Do It. If you’ve set yourself a word count of 10,000 words every month (as an example, aiming for between 2,000-3,000 words per weekend), you could have a first working draft in less than a year before all your structural editing and revisions go in. Fourth, Remind Yourself How Much You Want This. If you want to be published, you’ll need to be resilient, as well as kind to yourself. Getting a first draft out is hard, and a first draft is allowed to be flawed before you go back and edit. Oh, And Fifth? Get some damn help! Our editorial services are there for your assistance, as well as an incredible self-editing course that will help you on your way to finishing your novel. Most importantly, hang around in a supportive writing community, crammed with expert resources, that will help you achieve what you want to achieve.

If you make it as a writer, it is highly likely that your relationship with a literary agent will be the most enduring and important of your entire career – so the decisions you make at this stage really matter! The tips below won’t guarantee you that you find the right agent for you, but if you follow them carefully, they will help your chances of doing so. Keep reading – and good luck! How To Choose Your Agent Shortlist 1. Know your genre In finding agents, you need to have a reasonable understanding of your own genre. In some cases, that’s clear. (Got a detective? You’re writing crime.) In other cases, it’s not – in which case, you’re probably writing general, contemporary fiction. Which is fine. Not all work has a very specific genre. But if you’re in this broad, general category, it helps to know if your work is more commercial or more literary. If it’s in between (thoughtful, but accessible) you can describe your work as ‘suitable for book groups’. That’s a hot area for literary agents, so do use the phrase if it applies to you. (Whenever you search for agents through us, be sure to select your genre before making use of other filters.) 2. Don’t box yourself in Plenty of work falls on boundaries between different territories. For example, if you are writing a near-future thriller, you could equally well describe your work as sci-fi, or as a techno-thriller. An agent who did like thrillers but didn’t normally handle space-opera type SF might well be interested. It’s fine to approach agents who work on either side of your boundary. Other common areas of overlap might be “chick-lit noir”, so look at all the genre options. Be willing to think about agents who work in areas adjacent to your own. 3. Don’t search for specialists Most agents don’t specialise. My own literary agent handles high end literary fiction, and serious non-fiction, and popular non-fiction, and chick-lit, and crime. What’s more, he handles bestselling writers in most of those categories. The lesson for you is simple: you need an agent who is open to your genre. You do not need one who specialises in it. 4. Don’t look for an agent who is local to you Most agents work in London. Most writers live elsewhere. But agents only congregate in London because that’s where the publishers are. Since you want your agent to really, really know the publishing industry, you shouldn’t select one on the basis of how close they live to you. Truth is, you won’t see your agent face to face all that much – and when you do, it’ll mostly be because you’re seeing your publisher. The only real exception to this rule has to do with Scottish writers, who may prefer an Edinburgh-based agent, simply because travel to London is so expensive and time-consuming. Even then... all the big publishers are based in London. Personally, I’d want my agent to know those guys intimately. 5. You want an agent who wants you Every world has its superstars, and there exists a handful of superstar agents with high name recognition. But those guys have starry names because their client lists bulge with bestsellers. Realistically, those guys are much less likely to offer you representation and they will have much less time to offer you if they do. 99% of new writers (and maybe 99.9% of them) will be better off with an agent who is genuinely eager for their business. You’ll get more time and more attention. Look for agents keen to build client lists, they are more eager to find and take on new writers. View all agents here. 6. Remember that it’s publishers who create bestsellers, not agents A lot of writers will read the advice above and think, “I want my career to stand the best possible chance of success. Why wouldn’t I get the top literary agent out there?” But you don’t want the ‘top agent’. You want the best literary agent for you. That means one who has the time to take you through editorial changes, who won’t ditch you as a client if things don’t immediately go to plan, and who will argue patiently and sincerely for your merits. In short, you want one who won’t be distracted because J.K. Rowling, Ian McEwan, et al., is on the other line. And the core of any agent’s job is simple. It’s to think of 8-10 editors who might well like your work, then email it to them. That’s it. And any competent agent should be able to do that. You don’t need to be a superstar. 7. Look for points of contact When you’re reviewing an agent’s profile, look for any points of contact. “Loves rock-climbing” might not mean much in terms of literary tastes, but if you’re a keen climber, you shouldn’t scorn that potential point of contact: you’re looking for anything. And if you’re not a climber, but your book has a superb climax set in the high Alps, then thats a definite reason to reach out. 8. Look for agents who represent your favourite authors Perhaps there’s an author in your exact genre whom you love, in which case it would certainly be interesting to find out who represents that person. But you don’t really have to find authors in your genre. For example, if you are writing “chick-lit”, but there’s an agent who represents a couple more serious authors whom you adore, then that’s a meaningful point of contact – an indicator of shared taste. Just search the name of an author (surname only is fine) and their agent will appear, assuming that the agent-author relationship is public information. 9. Avoid the obvious! You’re a crime writer? Yes, you admire Ian Rankin, of course you do. But Ian Rankin’s agent will get a lot of letters says, ‘Dear X, You represent Ian Rankin who is one of my favourite crime authors...’ Do you really think that the good Mr X is going to sit up and take notice? 10. Compile a shortlist of 8-12 names, and then double-check everything We recommend a shortlist of about a dozen names, no more. Most books won’t even go out to as many as a dozen publishers and editors are even pickier than agents, which means if you can’t impress one in 12 agents, you don’t stand much hope with publishers. But don’t go to too few agents either. Approach six or fewer and you risk being rejected for essentially random reasons (too busy right now, lost your manuscript, don’t really like this kind of story, got a client who’s doing the exact same thing right now...) Once you’ve got a shortlist of agents that you’re happy with, you should double-check their websites. Our own database is as up to date as we can make it – but there are limits to our reach and you are hoping to sign up with someone for the duration of your career. Now’s a good time to double-check your facts!). So, in sum, find a literary agent in your genre, one looking for new clients (or at least open to them). Ignore location. Seek points of contact, including favourite authors. Then check and double check your shortlist. How To Write A Query Letter For Literary Agents 11. Get their name right Is it John or Jon? Is it Mr Sam Spade or Ms. Sam Spade? Don’t offend an agent with your very first words. You also need to make sure that you have their current address and other details correct. If you don’t know whether it’s Miss Jo Johnson, Ms Jo Johnson or Mrs Jo Johnson, it’s just fine to write “Dear Jo Johnson,” In fact, Dear Firstname Lastname is probably standard these days, publishing is not a particularly formal industry. 12. Re-check the basics If you’re writing children’s fiction, don’t send your work to an agent who handles only adult material. And while most agents wanta a fairly standard submission package (letter and synopsis and first three chapters), do check what this specific agency wants and follow their rules. 13. Keep it simple A covering letter doesn’t need more than a page. Perhaps if your work is quite literary and you want to expand a little on theme and your impulse to write it, you can go into a second page – but that qualification applies to maybe one writer in twenty. In other words, it probably doesn’t apply to you. 14. The first paragraph should cover the basics, briefly Your first paragraph should be just a sentence or two that sets out: (a) the title of your book, (b) the approximate genre, (c) a brief characterisation of the book and (d) a word count. Thus, for example, if I had been a new novelist seeking an agent for my Talking to the Dead, I might have said: “I am writing to seek representation for my first novel, Talking to the Dead. The book is a Welsh-set police procedural of about 115,000 words and features a young female detective, who is in recovery from Cotard’s Syndrome.” See? That’s a perfect first para because it instantly gives an agent their need-to-know info (crime novel, Wales, police procedural, word count), plus a little teaser – a reason to read-on: “Cotard’s? What’s that? Sounds interesting …” That opening paragraph is not hard to write. If you can’t write a perfectly good one, then your book is no good anyway. 15. The next paragraph can expand The next paragraph should open out a little more. So my second paragraph might have said something like this: “The detective, Fiona Griffiths, is a twenty-something junior officer, based in Cardiff. She’s highly intelligent, driven … and odd. As a teenager, she suffered from a genuine but rare disorder, known as Cotard’s Syndrome – a psychological condition in which the sufferer believes themselves to be dead. Fiona is no longer directly afflicted, but the illness continues to dominate her life and her sense of self. Then, as her Major Crimes team starts to investigate the violent deaths of a part-time prostitute and her, Fiona realises that the past feels dangerously alive again.” That’s all you need. The paragraph expands our opening teaser into something with more meat on it – something that should tempt a reader to read on. But that’s all – about a hundred words should be fine. If you’re going over the 150 word mark, you probably need to rein back. 16. That paragraph should convey your elevator pitch or USP That second paragraph has one crucial job: it’s to force the agent to turn to page 1 of your manuscript with a smidge of excitement and interest. That means you need to convey the Unique Selling Point of your book with brevity and force. Note that you should not say, “The Unique Selling Point for my book is...” That just feels heavy handed and clunky. (Want to know more about Elevator Pitches? Find out here.) 17. You do not need to summarise your plot That’s the job of your synopsis. Notice that my sample paragraph above (point #15) said nothing at all about plot. Yes, it mentioned the initiating murders, but that’s it. It doesn’t say anything about what happens thereafter. It doesn’t need to. 18. You are not writing a book blurb The blurb on the back of a book belongs on the back of the book. You are addressing a potential agent, not a potential bookshop browser. Thus the paragraph above about Talking to the Dead mentioned Cotard’s Syndrome, which no book blurb would ever do. (Because that would ruin one of the big reveals at the end of the book.) Focus on the agent and your USP or elevator pitch. The blurb will come much, much later in the process. 19. You don’t need to explain everything If you are writing about a fantasy world where – I don’t know – gravity is upside down, or England has a good footie team, or Amazon pays some tax, you can pick out anything that is key to your brief overview of the book. But you don’t need to explain every little thing. The covering letter needs to offer a glimpse of stocking, no more. The book itself will do the rest. 20. Finally: a few words about yourself And that means a few words. “I am a thirty-something mother of two. I currently work part-time as an accountant, but am retraining as an exotic dancer.” Or whatever. Unless there is a direct and important relationship between who you are and the topic of your manuscript, you don’t need more than the very briefest sketch of who you are. No one cares and no one ought to care: it’s your book that matters here; you are merely its transmission device. 21. Your website, your Twitter account, or your online footprint are much less important than you might think You will see suggestions online, including from some people who should know better, that these days agents really care about your social media profile. And that is simply not true. Yes, admittedly, if you have 100,000+ blog visitors monthly and your book is a non-fiction work directly connected to the subject of that blog, then agents will be impressed, and so will publishers. But that’s it. Blogs or sites with smaller followings don’t mean much in sales terms, and they certainly don’t mean much when it comes to promoting fiction. So you just don’t need to say anything about your current online footprint. If publishers want to discuss it with you down the line, then they will, but it’s not something to worry about for now. (And by the way, my Fiona Griffiths crime series has been published all over the world, is critically acclaimed, and has been televised. In all that time, I’ve only had one conversation in publishing about my e-footprint, and that was early on, and was never followed up. That’s how little publishers care.) 22. If you’re impressive, say so (for fiction writers) A covering letter is not the place to mention your school prizes or your work on the parish magazine, but if you have accomplished something genuinely noteworthy say so. “The maritime scenes in my novel draw heavily from my own experiences at sea: I have sailed single-handed round the world and have competed in a number of international yacht races. The shipwreck scene towards the climax of my novel is largely based on a similar accident that befell me a few years back.” A paragraph like that would do very nicely – but, if you’re writing fiction, it’s not all that likely you have a similar connection to make. In which case, don’t worry. Most people don’t. 23. If you’re authoritative, say so (for non-fiction writers) While it’s relatively rare for fictioneers to include much biography in their covering letter, the reverse can be true of non-fictioneers. For example, if you are writing a book on artificial intelligence, then you will certainly be expected to demonstrate authority. So: “I am current head of Google’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory …” Or, “I am Professor of Cybernetics at the University of Wherever …” Or, “I have worked extensively as a smart systems consultant to blue-chip companies including …” “I am the Science and Technology editor on the XYZ newspaper …” Any of those things would do just fine. “I’m a keen amateur student of these things and think the subject is really, really important” – that kind of thing would not fare so well. As a non-fiction author, you are expected to demonstrate compelling knowledge. 24. If you’ve self-published, that’s fine, but be realistic These days, agents will receive plenty of self-published manuscripts, and it’s fine if yours has already seen the light of day. But agents will only be impressed if your manuscript has seen a lot of downloads. That means 30-50,000 downloads, if the manuscript was being offered for free. And it means at least 10,000 downloads if the manuscript was being sold at a meaningful price. ($0.99 or £0.99 as an absolute minimum.) 25. Be careful about mentioning competing similar works If you are writing fiction, it’s fine to place your novel by triangulating from other authors. For example, you might say, “This is, roughly speaking, Philippa Gregory territory, but transposed to Dark Ages Mercia.” That helps an agent understand the kind of book you’ve written. (Though even in that example, it would probably be better to convey the same message without the PG reference.) On the other hand, it is not clever to say, “My book combines the philosophical grandeur of a Saul Bellow, the prose of John Banville and the compelling narrative of a James Patterson.” You’re welcome to think all those things – but don’t say them out loud. If you are writing non-fiction, a couple of references are very often useful. For example, “The book is a lively, popular account of quantum physics, in the footsteps of such texts as Quantumly Wonderful by Mr A and Oh What a Wonderful Atom by Ms B.” If you do use that kind of tactic, be very clear about how your book differs from those fine texts. 26. Don’t misspell anything Humans make typos and most writers are human. And that’s fine: a well-presented manuscript doesn’t have to mean a flawless one, but an agent submission pack is the first thing the agent reads. So no misspellings. None. No excuses. That also means you need to avoid all other hideosities. No it’s when you mean its. No references to my “fiction book”. (It’s called a novel.) No bad punctuation. You want to be a professional writer. So be professional. 27. No horrible sentences And mere tidiness is not enough. You also can’t express yourself badly. You need to eliminate any clunky, ugly, or badly phrased sentences. So don’t write sentences like this: “Emily (who is the hero in this bit) then finds herself in a dungeon which is really like the one in Game of Thrones (second series) except that my one has this big arched window really high up, which Emily tries to climb out of for an escape attempt but can’t because she slips and really hurts her ankle.” Don’t write sentences even a bit like that. Please. They make our gums hurt. In sum, keep your letter short. All you need is a couple of overview-type sentences, then a paragraph or so on your book, then a short paragraph of background about you. That’s it. Make sure that you get the basics right (spellings, punctuation, who you’re addressing) and make sure you write with economy and professionalism. How To Write A Wonderful Synopsis 28. Don’t stress Most writers stress over their synopses. They shouldn’t: the things just aren’t that important. Some agents ask for them but hardly read them. Get your synopsis right, yes, but don’t fret about it. Half a day should be easily enough for the task. 29. Keep it short, but not crazy-short Anything from 500 to 1,000 words is fine. Less than 500 words seems a little on the thin side (unless perhaps your book has a notably clean narrative line, in which case OK.) More than 1,000? No need. That’s just more words. Keep it tight. 30. Tell the story A synopsis tells the story of your novel. That’s all it does. You’re not pitching the novel. You’re not writing a cover blurb. You’re just telling the story. Which you know intimately, right? This is not a hard assignment. 31. Keep your text neutral A synopsis isn’t usually a good place for atmosphere, humour, detailed characterisation, or anything else. Those things are for your book. A simple factual narrative is fine. 32. Don’t worry about spoilers Of course there are spoilers in the synopsis, just like there’s alcohol in beer. That’s kind of the point. If you really, really don’t want to give away the very ending, you can say something along these lines: “Jones is all set to raid the warehouse, when Karen arrives with news that will devastate them both – and lead to a final, bloody and unexpected finale.” But, if you can steel yourself to do it, just tell the whole darn story including the ending. That’s what agents want. 33. Put key names in bold When you first mention the name of a key character, you should set it in bold, or even bold caps. Like this: “KAREN, a thirty-something police sergeant, is appointed to ….” That makes it easy for an agent to see who’s who and to check back if they get confused. (And synopses are confusing; that’s just the way they are.) 34. Presentation matters. So does your prose As with the covering letter, you should make sure that your synopsis is well-presented and free of horrible sentences. 35. You can briefly restate your book’s USP before the synopsis proper If you want, you can have an italicised line or two before the synopsis proper that sets out the book’s premise or broad narrative arc – anything that reminds the agent why they like the idea. So, for example, this would be nice: “Jacob is a diamond dealer in Rotterdam. When his warehouse is burgled, he wonders how the thieves got past his security system … and why his wife was driving the getaway car.” That sets up an enticing premise in slightly more than 30 words. Or you can sketch the whole story in the same kind of space: “Two brothers quarrel in the trenches of the First World War. They separate and each found a mighty oil business – one striking rich in the sands of Persia, the other sprouting up in the oil fields of East Texas. Then another war comes and the two men are obliged to confront their pasts – and each other.” That’s fifty-something words and sketches a book that is 600 pages long (my third novel, as it happens.) These introductory snippets don’t excuse you from writing a full synopsis, they just enrich the one you’ve written. So recap your story in about 500-1000 words. Put key character names in bold. Keep your prose clean and reasonably neutral. Avoid howlers. You get bonus points for a short, tempting intro. How To Prepare Your Manuscript For Literary Agents 36. Check: Are you really ready? Most writers send out their manuscript before it’s ready. That can mean anything from poor prose and a lousy concept through to a text that is really pretty good but in need of a good, hard, final edit. A lack of polish can kill your chances, so be professional. Give your manuscript another close read. Be picky: agents will be. (Not sure if you’re ready? You can get paid-for editorial advice for your manuscript. It’s very rare that writers are not helped by professional editorial feedback.) 37. Your first three chapters: getting that right Most agents ask for a covering letter, a synopsis and the first three chapters. But what do the first three chapters really mean? What if your chapters are strangely long? Or short? And should you count your prologue? The answer is that agents don’t really care about these things. Just send about 10,000 words, ending at a natural break in your text. That’ll do fine. 38. Check for common errors This post isn’t long enough to list them all, but here are the top fifteen. 39. Check spellings, punctuation, typos, prose No horrible sentences, okay? A few typos don’t matter, but good presentation is still essential. 40. Make sure that your text is properly formatted There are no strict rules here (unlike in the screenplay business), but do check that: – Your margins are normal (your program’s default settings are fine).– Your text is 1.5 or double-spaced.– Your dialogue is correctly presented.– You begin each chapter on a fresh page.– You avoid weird fonts.– You lay your book out like a book, not a business letter. That means no blank line between paragraphs, but each paragraph should be indented (anywhere from 0.2″ to 0.5″). You should set the indents with the Paragraph Format menu or with the Tab key. You should not rely on the space bar.– Either left hand justified or both-sides justified text is fine.– It’s still better to print on one side of the page only. If that offends your eco-sensibilities, plant a tree – or look for agents who take work by email: most now do. 41. Remember to insert page numbers This gets its own bullet point, because a lot of people forget, and then have to print their stuff off again. And while you’re at it, pop your name and manuscript title in the header or footer of each page. (So when an agent drops your stuff, they can put it all back together again.) 42. Nice clean title page, please Your title page should ideally contain: – Your title (in a font as large as you like)– Your name– Your contact info– A word count, rounded to the nearest 1,000 or 5,000 words– And nothing else You do not need a dedication, or an acknowledgements, or anything along those lines. This isn’t a book yet, it’s a pile of paper. Also, it’s a bit fancy-pants putting an epigram on a manuscript, but some manuscripts are a bit fancy-pants. In which case, put it on the title page, or on the page immediately following. 43. No copyright notice You don’t need a copyright notice – it’s legally meaningless and, in any case, no agent steals copyright. 44. No cover art! A publisher is not going to use your cover art. So don’t show it to agents. 45. The Golden Rule There is only one golden rule of the agent submission process and that is the hardest. You must write a wonderful book. Good is not enough. Competent is not nearly enough. Agents take about 1 in 1,000 submissions. Your work has to dazzle. Happy writing, and best of luck! More than ready to get the ball rolling with agents, but just need a little push? Or perhaps you’ve had a few rejections but aren’t sure why? Our Agent Submission Pack Review gives you detailed professional advice on how to perfect your submission and increase your chances of securing an agent.

The battle of the ebook formats. You’ve written a book. What you have is a massive Word document and you can’t wait for the world to read it. Only now it seems that ebooks are a totally different kind of beast from Word. You have to start converting your Word document to some other file format, and you don’t know which one to pick. And you don’t know how to do it. Well, relax. It’s all easy. What Is Epub? When you think about it, an ebook is a bit like a special sort of webpage: a way to get text and images to appear on screen. The most universal and flexible ebook file format is the EPUB. Those kind of files can: Fit the text to whatever device you are using Handle text-to-speech Offer a pagination-type experience Changes in font size and type Handle embedded images Permit highlighting and bookmarking And plenty more What Is Mobi? And what is a Mobi file? It is the same thing, in almost every respect. The only differences between a mobi file and an epub file is that the MOBI file: Is an Amazon proprietary standard Allows Amazon to control your ebook from afar – and in particular, Mobi files have embedded “digital rights management” (DRM) that allow Amazon to restrict your mobi files only to devices that are associated with your Amazon account. In short, epub and mobi files are basically indistinguishable to users – with the exception that mobi files are kept within Amazon’s walled garden. What File Format Should You Choose For Your Ebook? When you are choosing your file format, you basically need to answer the question of where you want to sell your ebooks. Here are your choices: Only Amazon Apple and Kobo and everyone else except Amazon All e-stores – Amazon, and Apple, and everyone else Now, there are basically two smart choices there, and one dumb one. The dumb choice is to sell your book with Apple and Kobo and all the rest, but not with Amazon. How come? Because Amazon (depending on what stats you look at) accounts for about 75-85% of all ebooks sold in the United States. Their dominance of the UK market is somewhat similar. Only in Canada and some other minor markets does Amazon have anything less than an absolute lock on the market. So, OK, you’re definitely going to sell your ebook on Amazon. And Amazon only works with mobi files. So you’re going to have to create a mobi file. Fine. But are you going to be exclusive to Amazon? Or sell via Apple and everyone else as well? Now that sounds like a dumb question, right? You might assume that you just want to be selling books in as many places as possible. Except if you agree to sell your work exclusively through Amazon, you get to participate in Kindle Unlimited (KU). If KU subscribers borrow a book and read it, you will be entitled to a payment based on the total number of pages read. Loads of indie authors report that KU income is as large as regular sales royalties, or even more. Other indies (who prefer to be ‘wide’ rather than exclusive) prefer to sell through as many stores as possible. Without getting into the weeds on that argument here, you’ll end up deciding between two options: Amazon Exclusive: You are only selling through Amazon. You need a Mobi file and nothing else. Selling Everywhere: You’re selling everywhere, so you need both a mobi file and an epub. Just to be clear, you can easily create both a mobi file and an epub file from the same Word document. Before You Create Your Mobi / Epub File Before you create your ebook file, you just need to make sure that your Word document is in good shape to convert. That means three things: Your text needs to be (very largely) free of typos and other errors Your document needs to be consistently formatted You need to put together front- and end-material that will support your ebook marketing I’ll talk just a bit more about those things. Text Should Be Free Of Typos If you are preparing to self-publish, it’s not enough just to tell a good story. Your text needs to be free of spelling and punctuation mistakes, accidental typos, messy formatting and other issues. Even if you’re naturally very attentive to these things (and most authors aren’t), you will need a second pair of eyes finding those typos and correcting the errors. If you know someone who can do this for you (an English teacher friend, a librarian, or whatever), then you should definitely take that route. But if in doubt, pay for a professional copyeditor – such as our own copy editing services. These days, a badly proofed book stands next to no chance of selling. Consistent Formatting When you convert your document from Word to Epub / mobi, the converter will scan your document and look for major headings and sub-headings. So if all your chapter headings (whether numbers or titles) are formatted the same way, the converter is almost certain to find them and render them correctly. If your chapter headings are a mish-mash of different font sizes, caps and lowercase, bold and not bold, then the converter will almost certainly have no idea how to structure your document, and your mobi or epub books will be unreadable. You can read up on how to format your manuscript, here. So the message is simply – be consistent. Use a consistent font size and format for your major headings, and the converter should be able to do the rest. Simple. Support Your Ebook Marketing Remember that your Word document will form the basis of your ebook. And remember that your ebook can basically be divided into three slices: The front “Look Inside” part of the ebook Your text itself The bit after the actual end of your story It’s pretty obvious what your text has to do: it has to dazzle readers and blow their brains. But you need to remember that the front part of your book should be all about converting a possible reader. So if someone comes to your Amazon page and hits the “Look Inside” button, you want to present them with material that makes them most likely to convert. So don’t fill it with long author’s notes and thanks to friends. You want to include a few positive messages about your book and then leave plenty of room for text. All the boring stuff can live at the back of the book. And that leaves end matter. When a reader finishes your book, you want them to complete three actions. You want them to review the book they’ve just read. You want them to buy the next one. And you want them to give you their email address in exchange for a reader magnet of some kind. I’m not going to get into detail here – this post on self-publishing does that – but just remember: an ebook is not a print book. Your document needs to look forward to the ebook it wants to become. How To Create A Mobi File The easiest way to create a mobi file is … just upload your Word document to Amazon, via your KDP dashboard. Amazon will handle the conversion for you. Once Amazon has completed the conversion, it’ll ask you if you want to preview your ebook. And you do! Every page. If there is a formatting error, a slipped heading, a page break in the wrong place, now is your time to catch it. If you do find an error, you need to rework your Word document, then re-upload it. Continue that process until all your errors are fixed. And one other thing: when you preview your ebook, you need to do so using a variety of different device / font settings. Because pagination varies from device to device, a faulty page break may not show up on one view. You may only find it when you switch from one font setting to another. In essence, though, creating a mobi file is simplicity itself. Step one: write a book. Step two: ask one of the world’s largest tech companies to do the fiddly stuff for you. Step three: become a kindle bestseller. Easy. How To Create An Epub File You can’t ask Amazon to create an Epub file for you, because Amazon doesn’t work with them. You have a couple of alternatives here. One, if you are an Apple user, you use Vellum – a very easy to use and beautiful formatting tool. Everyone who uses it, loves it. It comes very highly recommended. For people in PC-world, I generally recommend that you use Draft2Digital, which has a very easy to use – and free – conversion tool. The principle here is exactly the same as with the Amazon / mobi conversion process above, so just repeat that same basic exercise. And that’s it. It takes maybe three minutes to convert your files, assuming that your Word document was in shape to start with. Easy right? Epub Vs Mobi Vs PDF Older posts used to include the PDF file format in a discussion of ebooks. But you know what? PDFs aren’t ebooks. They’re fine for corporate brochures and that kind of thing, but for a responsive reading experience, you need the flexibility of an epub or mobi file. So, please, just forget the PDF. It has no place in this discussion. Conclusion And that’s it! The question isn’t really mobi vs epub, because you’ll quite likely need both. They’re simple to create, and the creation process comes free. The main thing to think about, in fact, is getting the raw material – your Word document – in shape first. Good luck with the process. Happy editing. Happy converting. And, most of all, happy publishing.

So, you’re well on your way to completing your book on food and cookery, and have a cracking book proposal that you can’t wait to share with agents. Well, we’re here to help!  WANT TO JUMP STRAIGHT TO THE AGENT LIST? CLICK HERE  Food And Cookery The cookery market remains a solidly dependable corner of the book market with many literary agents representing the non-fiction genre. It tends to be an area where full-colour hardback books dominate the bookshelves.   The bad news is that this is what makes the market so challenging for new writers. Given the high production costs now expected in this area, food, cookery, and drinks books are under pressure from the beginning to sell a lot of copies in order to make a profit.  The one sure fire way to get a cookbook published is to make sure that you have a TV show first. Or a column in a major newspaper. Or you’re a celebrity with some lifestyle angle to promote. If that’s not you, then there are still opportunities for new debut writers. Especially if you are an expert in an under-explored area of food and drink. A strong platform, demonstrable interest in the area of food and drink you’re writing about, and a bespoke list of targeted agents to approach will mean that you’ll be in a strong place to begin submitting to agents.  AgentMatch And How To Use It There are plenty of cookbook-loving agents, but you won\'t want to approach them all. The best way to develop and refine your own shortlist of UK agents for food and cookery books is to visit AgentMatch, our literary agent database, and use the search tools on the left to make your selection.  With AgentMatch you can select by genre (e.g. food and cookery), country, the agent’s level of experience, their appetite for new clients, and much more. You can even save your search results and come back to them, allowing you to work through them one by one, at your own pace. Each profile has been researched thoroughly including what agents like to read in their spare time, information on their most recent deals, manuscript wishlists, submission requirements, and exclusive interviews.  You can sign-up for a 7-day free trial which will give you a good feel for the data and functionality. Or join us as a premium member and get unlimited access to AgentMatch.  UK Agents For Food And Cookery Books To get you started we’ve selected a list of 20 UK agents looking for food and cookery books: [am_show_agents id=36] More Resources   We’re here to help you at every step in your writing and querying process. Check out our favourite blogs that can assist you in putting together your query letter and synopsis, and if you want valuable, personal feedback on your writing you can book a fifteen-minute One-to-One with an agent of your choice. Premium members can also get a free query letter review from our lovely Writers Support team!    Happy searching, and good luck on your querying journey!   

In this article we will break down all you need to know about the unreliable narrator. Contains spoilers! We’re going to figure out who the unreliable narrator is and how using one will impact your story. We’ll discuss the different types of unreliable narrators at your disposal, and how to choose which one is right for you. We’ll also dissect some real-life examples – what type of unreliable narrator was used and how did they impact the storyline? Above all: this is intended as a practical guide for writers wanting to explore one of the richest and most enjoyable writing approaches of them all. But first, the basics. A definition. Unreliable Narrator Definition What does unreliable narrator mean? An unreliable narrator can be defined as any narrator who misleads readers, either deliberately or unwittingly. Many are unreliable through circumstances, character flaws or psychological difficulties. In some cases, a narrator withholds key information from readers, or they may deliberately lie or misdirect.  While the term is fairly new – it was first used by literary critic Wayne C Booth in 1961 – unreliable narrator examples date back hundreds of years. Medieval poet and chronicler Geoffrey Chaucer used various unreliable narrators in The Canterbury Tales, for example the bragging and exaggerating Wife of Bath.  Some Shakespearean characters could also be described as unreliable. Could we trust Hamlet, in his grief and paranoia, to tell us the whole truth and nothing but the truth?  In modern writing, unreliable narrators feature frequently in crime and thriller books, but the technique can be used to withhold information and surprise readers of any genre, as the many thousands of readers who enjoyed romantic suspense The Man Who Didn’t Call by Rosie Walsh can testify.  An unreliable narrator usually tells the story in first person, but there are notable exceptions to this such as Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None which uses limited third person. The world’s bestselling mystery novel uses an unknown narrator who shows us the numerous points of view of the potential killers (and victims) trapped on an island.  Is An Unreliable Narrator Right For Your Story? What Is The Effect Of An Unreliable Narrator?  The unreliable narrator in literature, if written well, will cause the reader to experience the delight of a shocking twist or a dawning realisation that they have been misled.  When readers have been told a story from a specific point of view, we cannot help but side with the storyteller, even when they are doing dubious things or making bad decisions. This can make for complex and conflicted feelings when readers realise they have been double-crossed by someone they trusted.  If readers feel that they have been outright lied to with no possible way to sniff out the truth though, the effect can be negative. For this reason, it’s essential to balance the mistruths with some careful foreshadowing and stitching in of ‘clues’ so that when readers look back and think about the story after the reveal, they feel satisfied and impressed rather than frustrated.  What Is A Reliable And Unreliable Narrator?  A reliable narrator is the antithesis of an unreliable narrator. The reliable narrator tells readers all the pertinent information they need to know, albeit from their own point of view, and they do so as accurately as possible and in good faith.  An unreliable narrator also tells a story from their own point of view but the information they share is designed to mislead readers or obscure the truth.    In locked room mysteries, where any one in a group of people could be responsible for a crime or misdemeanour, authors can tell the story from all their points of view so a reader has to try to work out which of the narrators is unreliable and which is reliable. Sometimes, of course, there can be more than one unreliable fly in the ointment. Agatha Christie was a master of such a technique.  Why Is The Unreliable Narrator Right For Your Story?  An unreliable narrator can perform ‘sleight of hand’ by hiding clues and prompting readers to look in the wrong direction. For example, they may build up a picture of another character’s behaviour that makes you believe they are guilty of something. This is especially useful in crime and thriller writing but it can work well in any story that requires suspense and surprise.  An unreliable narrator, when he or she is one of several points of view telling the story or alone, can – to put it bluntly – mess with a reader’s mind. They can make a reader mistrust other narrators or characters or second guess their own understanding of events.  As with any literary device, it is important to think about how your use of the technique will improve your story. Would using an unreliable narrator allow you to fit an intricate plot together more effectively? Would it help to showcase a complex character? Would it drive the story along in a way that a truthful narrator telling the story would not achieve? Will it add that ‘cherry on the cake’ that is currently missing from your work in progress?  Unreliable narrators can be incredibly fun to write, but it’s important that you know why you’re writing them.  Types Of Unreliable Narrators There is an argument that any first–person narrator who does not have an omniscient view of all events, is unreliable. They can only share their personal experiences and those that they have been told, they have filtered everything through their own experiences and beliefs, and even if they are not ‘baddies’ they will have their own motivations and desires which can’t help but effect their reading of events. All of which is true.  Where I believe a narrator becomes unreliable, is where their take on the situation and the way they tell their story to readers, creates in the reader’s mind a significant gap between what they’re led to believe happened, and the truth.  The Deliberately Unreliable Narrator  Those who lie, obscure and otherwise deliberately mislead. A deliberately unreliable narrator is often – but not always – a ‘baddie’. But even if someone has been deceitful for wicked reasons, their actions should still be believable. No-one is just plain evil for no reason, so make sure that even the most cruel and manipulative liars have a motive for their behaviour – even if it’s a screwed–up motive!  Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn contains one of the most famous unreliable narrators of the last decade: Amy Dunne. We first get to know Amy through her diary entries which lead up to her kidnap. At the midpoint twist, we find out that Amy is not only alive but has been meticulously writing a retrospective diary to frame her husband for her murder. The plot is complex, with multiple twists and reveals, but the basic idea of a narrator creating his or her own cover story through a diary is actually a very neat and rather simple one.  The other main character, Amy’s husband Nick, is also a deliberately unreliable narrator which makes for a very twisty book. In his case, Nick tries to paint the best picture of himself by keeping his infidelity from the reader, which is a very tame form of manipulation compared with his wife’s character.  You can find out more on how to create your own bad guy, here. The Impaired Narrator  Alcohol is an oft-used tool for enabling narrators to have holes in their story and misremembrances. Alcoholic Rachel from Girl On The Train by Paula Hawkins is a prime example of this. Rachel is woven deeply into the other characters’ lives, but has memory blanks over key events. In some ways, she is openly unreliable – she doesn’t hide her drinking or her struggle to remember events from the reader – and the reader is invited to join her as she tries to uncover the crucial moments that she has forgotten.  Drug use in a narrator would also fit this role, but drinking alcohol is a more universally understood experience so it’s arguably easier for readers to both empathise and imagine themselves in the narrator’s role.  The Psychologically Unreliable Narrator  What is sometimes, rather unkindly, called the ‘madman narrator’. Patrick Bateman from Brett Easton Ellis’s American Psycho is one such ‘mad man’ who tells a shocking tale of murder and mayhem… until it’s revealed that one of his supposed victims is still alive.   In modern books, psychological unreliability often takes the form of a narrator whose psychological issues or traumas have jumbled up their memories or made it hard for them to understand the circumstances and events in which they have found themselves.  If you would like to use a psychologically unreliable narrator, it’s essential to give them nuance and characteristics outside of their ‘issues’ or readers may balk at the use of trauma or illness to simply drive plot or mislead. Every character deserves to be well-rounded.  The Unaware Narrator  Those who are passing on information that they have been told by another unreliable character. Sometimes this is due to blindly trusting those around them, sometimes it can be due to memory or other issues which make them rely on someone else’s events.  The main character in the brilliant Before I Go To Sleep by SJ Watson has a rare condition that makes her forget everything that has happened that day, waking up each morning with no recollection of who she is or where she is. She only knows what those around her tell her, and what information she finds that she has left for herself on previous days.  The Naïve Narrator  The naïve narrator is a little like the unaware narrator but does not have the maturity of thought to understand the events they are describing. Child characters can be used to simplify an adult situation or express a naïve take on events. For example, Pi, the eponymous character in The Life of Pi by Yann Martel, who tells a tale of survival that is both entirely unbelievable and extremely moving.  Teenager Holden Caulfield in J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye is unreliable through his youthful inexperience, which lead him to misunderstand the situations in which he finds himself. Although he is naïve, he is also an angry and rebellious teenager and it is through this lens that Caulfield views the world and interprets it.  The wonderful Notes on a Scandalby Zoe Heller contains an adult character – Barbara – whose own moral code, inexperience and loneliness make for a naïve and skewed reading of events. As readers, we begin to understand what is really happening even when she doesn’t, which is both thrilling and devastating to watch.  Tricks To Creating Unreliable Narrators As with writing twists, my approach to unreliable narrators is to write them as if they’re entirely honest, as if I – the writer – completely believe the story they are telling. I try to forget that some of what they’re saying is untrue and write it as if it’s gospel. Writing my second book, Don’t Close Your Eyes, which includes an unreliable narrator, I wrote the story as if all characters were telling the truth. Then, when I had completed the first draft, I went through carefully and changed some of those details to lies.  An unreliable narrator has maximum impact if the reader has truly bought into their story and believed them, right up until the moment where it is revealed that they are untrustworthy. To help foster your readers’ trust, keep as many details accurate as possible. If the narrator is a frequent, outright liar from the start of the novel, readers will not put any stock in their story. Whereas if we see them telling the truth, possibly even going out of their way to be honest to a fault, it will be all the more shocking when we realise that we’ve been well and truly had.  So, there we have it, the unreliable narrator. What did you think? Have we missed anything? Anything else you’d like to add? Head on over to the Jericho Townhouse and let us know your thoughts. 

A short, honest answer... So you’ve written your book. Congratulations! Now you want to self-publish your work and you’re excited about what might lie ahead. But, getting the damn thing published? How exactly does all that work? And (yikes!) just how much does it cost? In this blog post, we will honestly answer exactly how much does it cost to self-publish a book. OK. We’re not going to tell you HOW to self-publish your work in this post. If you want a complete guide to what to do and how to do it, then hop over here for everything you need. That guide deals step by step with what you need to do to self-publish successfully, but for now, lets talk about costs. Oh, and before we talk about costs: you probably want to know who I am and whether I know what the heck I’m talking about. Well, I’m Harry Bingham. I’ve written and self-published a fair few books. (You can see some of them here.) In the last 12 months, I’ve earned $100,000 from my self-published work, and I look to do even better in the future. If you can write well, and if you have the diligence and commitment to put together a series of books, not just the one, then there is no reason why you should not go all the way to a rich and satisfying career. Here’s what you need to know. How Much Does It Cost To Self-Publish A Book? For a typical manuscript, allow: Editing – $800 (optional, but probably sensible) Copyediting – $1200 (optional, best avoided) Cover design – $70-400 Formatting – $0 (do it yourself) Typesetting – $300 (optional) Uploading to Amazon – $0 Email list builder – $0 (at first) Bookfunnel – $100 Website – from $12/month, but spend more to get it right How Much Does Self-Publishing Cost? OK, I’m going to start with the headlines, and a giant BUT. The ‘but’, quite simply, is that there is no one-size-fits-all answer here. Every single book and indie author will do things a bit differently here and that’s just fine. Different writers have different skills, different access to resources, and different audiences. What follows then is just a broad set of guidelines for you to adapt as you please. I’ll assume you have written a novel of about 80,000 words, and that you are serious about actually making money from this project. That is: you are happy to invest a little in the expectation of a proper future return. Do read the comments that follow these headlines, because the juice is in the comments, not the headlines. Okie-doke. Your costs very roughly are: Book Production Structural editing – $800 / £550You can skip this, but we’d advise against doing so Copyediting – $1200 / £850You need to do something here, but this is an area where you can and should, save money Proofreading – $0 / £0Don’t do this as well as copyediting. The big publishers do both, but for you it’s a waste of money Cover design – $70-$400 / (£50-£250)You have to get the cover right, but there are some great low cost options available. Formatting (for ebook) – $0 / £0You can do this yourself perfectly easily for free Typesetting (for print) – $450 / £300 (if you want)This is more a vanity-type cost. You can just upload a Word file and it’ll look OK. But if you want a fancy-shmancy book to give to your mother, then you’ll want to pay a bit more. Skills Building OK, that’s not a normal entry on a list like this, but if you jump into a complex area like indie-publishing – an area where you’ll be competing head-on against some very skilful and well-resourced authors and publishers – you’ll just waste a ton of time and money if you don’t learn the ropes in a disciplined way. You have to make room in your budget for intelligently directed learning. Books – $20Just buy everything by David Gaughran, Joanna Penn and Nicholas Erik. This is small potatoes in terms of money, but the wisdom is yuuuuge. Podcasts, blogs, video – $0It’s all free. This blog post is free. Reading that stuff makes you a better, more effective entrepreneur.. You’re doing the right thing. Courses – $50I’ve done most of the big expensive courses out there, and I’ve learned a lot. But some of those things are $699 and upwards – and that’s crazy money. We have a big expensive self-publishing course of our own and it’s very damn good indeed. (Check it out here.) But why buy it? As a member of Jericho Writers you can get access to it for free. Signing up with us for a month costs just $39. You can just grab the entire super-premium course in that time, download all the notes, and walk away a massively better equipped writer. Basically a good course gives you a step-by-step template for success and you’re just crazy if you don’t do something along these lines. You can take out a simple, cancel-any-time Jericho Writers membership here. Uploading To Retailers Uploading to Amazon – $0 / £0I know everyone knows that, but it’s still amazing, isn’t it? You get unlimited access to all the readers in the world. And it costs nothing! How good is that? Uploading to everyone else – $0 / £0Same thing, except everyone else combined isn’t worth half of one Amazon. Creating Your Platform Building & hosting your website – $12/monthIf you use an all-in-one service like Squarespace or Weebly, you can get web-hosting plus drag-and-drop type editing tools that make it unbelievably simple to create your site. It’s crazy-cheap for what you get. Email list builder – $0Did I just say free? Yep I did – at least for anything up to 2,000 email addresses with Mailchimp. And within this starter package, you get automation tools which are essential for pinging readers thank you emails whenever and wherever they sign up to your list. Another amazing thing that the modern world just gives you. Book delivery (Bookfunnel) – $20/yearNot strictly essential, but any serious indie author will use Bookfunnel or something like it. And at this price? You gotta have it. Prolific Works – $20/monthYou don’t need to be permanently signed up to Prolific Works, but you can use it as a superb mailing-list accelerant. You probably want to budget at least a few months’ membership here as you start out. Other design costs – $100?You can use your cover design plus Squarespace’s design tools, plus freely available photos, to give you a pretty damn good website along with any other design bits and bobs you might want. But some amazing photos need paying for. Sometimes a designer offers you something too good to turn down. So chuck another $100 into your budget, and consider that as your way to treat yourself to stuff you like. Paid Advertising AMS – Budget $200/month AMS is Amazon’s own in-store advertising system. (You’ve seen those “sponsored result” messages – that’s AMS doing its stuff. AMS is a pretty ropy system, in truth, but it’s pretty easy to get results. So assume you’ll spend some cash here. You should get it all back, and then some. Bookbub – $500 (if you can get it) If you enter your book for a featured offer type promotion, and Bookbub accepts you, then kiss BB’s sainted feet and hand over your wallet. You will certainly make money. That said, it’s hard to get accepted by BB these days, so that money is likely to stay in your wallet. Good Kindles- prices start at just $25 This is another great option if you\'re looking for a book promotion service that\'s both affordable and will help you reach an audience tailored to your genre. Bookbub ads, Facebook ads – ???? You could spend $10,000 here, or nothing. This post is hardly long enough to go into the ins and outs of the two biggest ad platforms for authors, so I’ll just observe that (A) some indie authors essentially make their livings by playing the ad-game with great care and extreme skill, and (b) other indie authors – including me! – make a fat living while making almost zero use of ads on either of these platforms. I am in a minority, but it is possible. So much for the headlines. But do read on, because there’s real debate about whether some of these costs are necessary – and real opportunities to shave money off these figures if you’re agile enough. What Costs Are Involved In Self-Publishing A Book? OK. We’ve talked about headlines, and some of those headlines are uncontroversial. It just doesn’t cost any money to upload your book to Amazon. And yes, you can pay $2000 for a professionally created website . . . but you’ll end up with less control over it than you would if you build it yourself, and you won’t actually get any additional sales. But let’s home in on a few areas where it might or might not make sense to save money – and where there might or might not be opportunities to cut corners. We start with the heart of the entire publishing industry – the editorial process itself. Structural Editing (Also known as developmental editing, or manuscript assessment, or just plain editorial advice.) What’s involved?An experienced, professional editor reads your text in detail and tells you what’s working, what’s not working and (crucially) how to fix the stuff that isn’t yet right. An editor isn’t there to inflict changes on your work directly – this is your book and you need to be the final judge of what changes are needed – but you should get a very good idea of how to develop and improve your text. Likely costDepends on the length of your book and the quality of the editorial service. An 80,000 word book will generally be charged at around $850 / £550, assuming that you are going to a really good editor with a load of experience and insight. You will find offers online for a good bit less, but I’d question whether they’re worth it. Good editorial advice can be THE thing that turns it from good-but-not-dazzling to the kind of thing that readers are recommending to their friends. Bad editorial advice on the other hand can actually kill a book. So if it were me, I’d rather pay a proper wage to a proper editor – or skip editing altogether. And me personally (but see the disclosure below), I’d never send a book out, unedited. DisclosureI’ve had a dozen novels traditionally published, and have worked with each of the world’s three largest publishers. I’ve had a ton of critical acclaim and have a big fat load of experience. But even so I use third party editorial advice. I have never published a book without it. I never will. Now, I truly believe that and have always lived by it. But just to be clear: Jericho Writers is (among other things) an editorial agency. We offer editorial help on books such as yours, so you could argue that I’m totally biased. And, OK, I do have a financial interest here, but the single reason why such huge numbers of Jericho clients have gone on to get published and (in some cases) sell millions of copies / win film deals / etc is because we take editorial advice incredibly seriously. You can read more about the editorial help we offer here. I really hope you take a look! Right. Enough of that. Just two more comments before we move on Remember that editorial advice may not be a one-shot thing. Especially if you are on your first book and don’t have a ton of previous experience, then your first draft may be horrible. Your second draft will be better. It may take multiple rounds of editorial advice to get your book to where it needs to be. Don’t worry about that. Just put in the time and the investment. The other thing is this. A bad product can’t sell – but you’re not just investing in the product. You’re investing in yourself. Every time you work with an editor, you will become a better writer. Your next book will come faster, slicker and more confident than it would otherwise. I promise. Copy-Editing And Proofreading What’s involved?A big traditional publisher will typically engage in one or two rounds of editorial work per book. Then the manuscript will be copyedited (or line-edited.) Then it’ll be typeset. Then there’ll be one last set of checks prior to printing, and those final checks are referred to as proofreading. The two activities – copyediting and proofreading – are much the same, except that copyediting is broader. So where proofreading will only be looking for clear errors (misprints, typos, spelling errors, and the like), a copy-editor should also be looking for: factual errors clumsy phrasing awkward repetitions inconsistencies (grey eyes that turn blue, for example) plotting inconsistencies erroneous or awkward punctuation Do I need copyediting and proofreading?No. Save yourself the money. Do it properly once, and a few remaining typos won’t kill anyone. How can I save money?To get a formally trained copyeditor doing a Big Publisher quality job on your book is eyewateringly expensive. In the figures above, I suggested $1200 might be a reasonable guide for an 80,000 word book. Well, maybe. But only if you got a hungry copyeditor and your manuscript needed only the lightest of edits. The truth is, because this work is painstaking and done page by page and line by line, it’s slow. Because standards in the Kindle store have risen over the years, readers have (rightly) become a bit tetchy about sloppy spellings / puncutation / presentation etc. That means you’re in a bind: On the one hand, you want to do a decent job. On the other hand, you don”t want to pay $2000 and more to fix some commas. So what do you do? Well, as it happens Jericho Writers does offer pro-quality copy-editing services (more about that here), but 99% of people reading this will NOT want to use them – and probably shouldn’t: they’re just too expensive for what you get. So the best advice, really, is as follows: Train yourself to write a really clean manuscript. Grammarly is a great tool, but better still, you start to build a Grammarly-style app in your own head. Find your own errors. Be your own copy-editor. You still won’t eliminate all errors – you just need a second pair of eyes for that – but you’ll vastly reduce the work (and the cost) involved in copyediting. And then, once you have your – fairly clean – manuscript, just use whatever resources you can find to work with you cheaply or for free. Are you friends with your local librarian? Have a keen reader who used to be a school teacher? Have a college friend who’d do some work for cash? If you snuffle through your contacts (and reader emails) you’re quite likely to find someone who will work for nothing. I’ve had offers from readers along those lines and have ended up choosing to pay $300 – partly as a thank you, but also as a way to say, “Look, this is a professional relationship and I’d really appreciate it if you did the best job you possible could.” Will you get a perfect result from this approach? No. Will you get a perfectly OK one? Yes, if you do it right. And will you lose any sales as a result of low-balling it? Well, no, not really.

You may be asking yourself \'what does character motivation mean, and why do I need it?\' Well, this article will answer all your burning questions, and help you in developing your own well-rounded and interesting characters. What Is Character Motivation? Character motivation and plot are very tightly linked. They are the Little and Large of writing fiction. A strong character will have a clear motivation, which will generate the plot. In J R R Tolkien’s fantasy novel Lord of the Rings, the hobbit Frodo needs to destroy the Ring of Power to save Middle Earth. In Daphne du Maurier’s psychological thriller Don’t Look Now, a husband needs to protect his family from what he considers are sinister forces. Ideally speaking, the character’s development will be linked very closely to the points in the plot: each stage will have an effect on the character; but motivation will always push the character towards achieving a goal.    So, what is character motivation in literature and how does it affect the reader\'s experience? Motivation is the force which pulls the reader through the story, as it creates a sense of empathy with the character. If a character’s motives are unclear or repellent, then it can cause the reader confusion or unease. And we don’t want that. Writing fiction is in part about trying to make sense of the world around us, which means trying to understand ourselves. Is A Character’s Motivation The Same As A Goal? A character’s goal is ultimately the end result of the motivation. Think of a footballer: his goal is to win a match; his motivation is more complex, linked to ambition and to the pride in his team and to his financial success. So, what are character motivations and how to they link to their goal? Frodo’s final goal is the destruction of the ring; his motivation is to save Middle Earth. In Don’t Look Now, the goals change: initially, the protagonist, John, wants to protect his wife from what the narrator believes are sinister forces, which means that his specific goal is to remove her from their influence. Then it’s to find his wife; then it’s to reach home. But his motivation is always to make sure that his family are safe. How Does A Character’s Motivation Affect A Story’s Plot? A character’s motivation will be the major plot driver. In Homer’s Iliad, the motivation of Achilles is his anger at being dishonoured by King Agamemnon. This means that he withdraws from fighting the Trojans, which means that the Greek forces are routed. When his best friend, Patroclus, is killed, Achilles is then motivated to take revenge on the Trojans, and thus fights and kills Hector.  Motivation is important. Without it characters are limp and lifeless. Too often I see characters that are wetter than the wettest blanket. They are flat, and events happen to them, and they let things carry them along without questioning or thinking. A character must have life, and motivation is partly what brings it. It’s the electricity pouring into the assembled body parts of your creation. You are Victor Frankenstein: your character needs to be galvanised into life! Should Readers Relate? This is an eternal question: and the answer is, not necessarily. The general consensus is that a character must create empathy: that doesn’t necessarily mean sympathy. Our protagonists do not have to be saints: too much of that, and your reader will fling the book aside in disbelief. But on the other hand, if they are too cruel or unhinged, then the reader can be disgusted.  An excellent example of an artful, successful and complex character is Humbert Humbert, the hero of Nabokov’s Lolita: he’s a murderous child molester. His voice is exceptionally compelling: but we do not need to like him. The key is to create characters that aren’t cliches. So we are instead fascinated by his language and his style, seduced by him as much as we are revolted by his desires.  (If you want to know more about writing villains, then read this.) How Do You Determine A Character’s Motivation? A character’s determination is determined by what he or she wants. When you’re writing, you will develop your own process, but it’s a good idea to begin with your setting. A setting will produce a character: a general on a spaceship hurtling towards unknown planets will want very different things from a housewife on a farm in Wyoming.  It’s a good idea to test your characters. Put them into normal situations and see what they do; then introduce an element of surprise. How does your character react? That will help you to understand what motivates them. Need and necessity are two very powerful things that produce the friction and the energy for a good story. Powerful motivations include a desire to survive; to save or to protect, or to change things for the good.  You then need to decide what your character’s goal is in relation to the plot. This is very much determined by genre: the rational motivation of a detective is to find the murderer, so his goals will be step by step movements to uncover evidence against him; the motivation of Humbert Humbert is to avoid detection and to seduce Lolita, so his goals change as he travels across America. The former is a rational motivation; the latter is more conflicting and complicated.  How Do You Write A Powerful Character? There are many techniques to develop a powerful character, and as you continue to write, you will find that you will hone your own. Different things work for different people. Some writers like to create little biographies or dossiers for each character, detailing every aspect of their life from cheese preference to first sexual encounter to number of moles on their cheek. Others prefer to go with the flow and allow the story to shape the characters.  Whichever way you choose, a character must have fully formed motivation. Ged, in Ursula Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea, is motivated to find a dark shadow that he himself has released; as it’s also a part of himself, the novel becomes an exploration of psychology and a movement towards a mending of a fractured psyche.  In a T C Boyle short story, The Lie, two middle class American teenagers fall in love; the girl becomes pregnant. The lovers don’t want the baby to disrupt their young lives; and so, they fall into a pattern of deception that has a tragic, terrifying consequence. Their motivation is to get through college and become successful adults; but their goal is to do so by hiding a pregnancy. And thus the complexities of character are born: we empathise with them, but we are horrified by their actions.  When all else fails, put your character in a pub, and see what he or she does. Do they go to the bar and ask for a drink? Or do they sit by the side, nervously scanning the room for a friend? You can then draw out the more general motivation. And maybe treat yourself to a glass of wine as well. Your motivation: relaxation; your goal: finish the wine. So, there we have it, a full breakdown of character motivations. Have we missed anything? Anything else you’d like to add? Head on over to the Jericho Townhouse and let us know what you think. 

Have you just finished your horror novel and are ready to begin your search for an agent? Well, we’re here to help!  WANT TO JUMP STRAIGHT TO THE AGENT LIST? CLICK HERE  Horror Since Stephen King revived and expanded the genre, horror has been a reliably steady element in the book market. The emergence of teen paranormal sagas has brought new readers to the genre, as well as changing the genre’s boundaries even further. While the ebook revolution has also introduced new readers to the genre, namely young men (traditionally more reluctant book-buyers), who have been more willing to purchase fiction via their tablets and smart phones.   Whether you’re writing paranormal horror, gory horror, or a suspenseful edge-of-your-seat horror (which you can only read during daylight hours), it’s important to remember that the genre shouldn’t be seen in too restrictive terms. Contemporary authors, such as the award-winning Lesley Glaister, have added quality to the genre. While well-respected authors like Susan Hill have actually been writing horror fiction for years, albeit not for the typical audience associated with the genre. You might also find that some crime and thriller authors also plough through the classic horror territory.  Whatever your story, there’s sure to be an agent out there who can’t wait to read it. So, where to begin?  AgentMatch And How To Use It There are plenty of horror-loving agents, but you won\'t want to approach them all. The best way to develop and refine your own shortlist of UK agents for horror is to visit AgentMatch, our literary agent database, and use the search tools on the left to make your selection.  With AgentMatch you can select by genre (e.g. horror), country, the agent’s level of experience, their appetite for new clients, and much more. You can even save your search results and come back to them, allowing you to work through them one by one, at your own pace. Each profile has been researched thoroughly including what agents like to read in their spare time, information on their most recent deals, manuscript wishlists, submission requirements, and exclusive interviews.  You can sign-up for a 7-day free trial which will give you a good feel for the data and functionality. Or join us as a premium member and get unlimited access to AgentMatch.  UK Agents For Horror  To get you started we’ve selected a list of 20 UK agents looking for horror novels:  [am_show_agents id=22] More Resources   We’re here to help you at every step in your writing and querying process. Check out our favourite blogs that can assist you in putting together your query letter and synopsis, and if you want valuable, personal feedback on your writing you can book a fifteen-minute One-to-One with an agent of your choice. Premium members can also get a free query letter review from our lovely Writers Support team!    Happy searching, and good luck on your querying journey!   

I know what you’re thinking. Why do I need to read a blog post about Second Novel Syndrome, when I haven’t even finished the first? Well, publishing is a funny thing. In January 2017, I wondered if I’d ever get a novel published. By March that same year, I had an agent and my book was in the London Book Fair catalogue. When it happens, it can happen fast. [Ed’s Note: It kinda helps if you come to one of Jericho Writers’ events. That’s where the magic happened for our Sarah.] What Is Second Novel Syndrome? Second novel syndrome (SNS) isn’t talked about a lot. I spent twelve years writing books and trying to get an agent, and I didn’t think much about what would happen after that. Getting an agent felt like an impossible end goal. It wasn’t. Second books are actually notoriously difficult to write. I know – I didn’t think they would be, either. I wrote three ‘practice’ books before I made it with my debut. What’s the big deal about writing one more? SNS Symptom #1 – You Have Way Less Time I started my debut novel in July 2014. In 2015, I completely trashed the draft and started again. In 2016, I wrote my next draft as part of a writing course, and then completely changed it again in the summer of that year, thanks to some feedback from an agent. All in all, the novel took me two and a half years to write – and then another year editing it with my agent and editors after that. When I casually asked my agent when publishers expect an author’s second book, she said ‘usually a year after delivery of the first’. Yep – a year. Somewhere in that year, I had to come up with an astounding concept that was as good as the first. I had to research, plan and write a terrible first draft (that I could bin and re-write entirely, before no doubt re-writing again). All of this whilst trying to hold down a full-time job and all those other things that go with being a human being. The cure: make more time Certainly not an easy feat. For me, I’ve had to cut my working week to four days, so I have at least one day to donate entirely to writing. I work from home as much as I can, so I have more energy to write in the evenings. This won’t be doable for everyone. Find the pockets of time you can squeeze out of your day, no matter how big or small, knuckle down and make that happen. SNS Symptom #2 – You Now Have Multiple Projects On Your Hands I’m a bit of a loyal writer. When I have my head in a book, it consumes me. Over the last year, I’ve learnt that it’s not really possible to write a second book and have it consume you. I’ve had to split my time between writing my new book and editing my old one – occasionally dropping the new project completely to make a deadline. Some writers are already brilliant at project juggling. For me – it’s been a big learning curve. The cure: learn how to juggle projects As your writing career progresses, you’re going to have more and more projects to juggle. When you’re writing your fifth book, you might still be doing events on your debut. No one talks about it, but it is one of those skills you have to learn if you want to be a professional writer. I’m still in the process of learning it, but so far, I’ve found that sectioning my working week can help differentiate between projects. In the morning, I could be working on debut edits from home. Then in the afternoon, I take my laptop to a café and I throw some words down for book two. SNS Symptom #3 – You Can’t Shake Off Your Last Book My debut was written in first person present, from the point of view of a girl with a distinctive voice and a weird way of seeing the world. I’ve spent three and a half years with her, and I’m still with her now. She’s difficult to shake off. I’ve written over a hundred first pages of my new novel, and they’re still not quite right. I need a new, equally distinctive, but completely different voice – but everything I write still seems to be about her. The cure: get out of your comfort zone If, like me, you’re struggling to find a new voice, try writing your story in a completely different way to your first. For example, I’ve found writing in verse to be a helpful way in. Writing poetry means I can get to know my new character in a place my previous protagonist doesn’t belong. Yes – I’ll probably scrap every word. But with first drafts, everything and anything you can write will help you reach the finish line. SNS Symptom #4 – Your Next Book Needs To Be As Good As Your First As a writer, I feel the need to impress. My agent is amazing – she fights in my corner and believes wholeheartedly in my writing. I want to hand her a new novel that is even more amazing than she thought my first one was. Unfortunately, what I’m actually writing is terrible. I mean – of course it is. She saw my debut after two rewrites and a year of edits. All she’s going to see now is that first draft I’m going to throw away. Knowing this doesn’t make it any easier. And, of course, when we’re writing something we don’t think is as good as it could be, it can be difficult to keep going. It becomes easier to stop for a bit, maybe have a tidy up, or obsessively scour Pinterest for home décor ideas... (Not that I do that.) The cure: forget about other people This one I definitely find the hardest, as I have a (somewhat ridiculous) need to please people. The truth is though – other people don’t matter when it comes to first drafts. Anyone who writes, or who knows writing, will know that first drafts are for the writer to work out what it is they want to write. First drafts of book two do not need to be as good as your finished debut. And – all because you have an agent now, doesn’t mean you are suddenly a know-it-all, master writer. All writers need to keep learning and – importantly – keep making mistakes. The important thing is that we keep writing. That’s the only way horrible first drafts get turned into published novels. Second Novel Syndrome: A Cure There is no complete cure for Second Novel Syndrome other than just doing it. But do remember this: Jericho Writers is a club for writers like you. Like us, in fact.

So, you’re well on your way to completing your book on politics and current affairs, and have a cracking book proposal that you can’t wait to share with agents. Well, we’re here to help!  WANT TO JUMP STRAIGHT TO THE AGENT LIST? CLICK HERE  Politics And Current Affairs Political non-fiction includes books about political structures, governments, and laws. These books cover different viewpoints, countries, the effects on society, and current affairs. When writing political non-fiction, it is important to stay up to date on the most recent political developments (that are relevant to your specific topic). The mass readership (for whom – if wanting to have commercial success - these books are intended) will be interested in the most current topics, and it’s important to make sure that your book is accessible and clear in what you are hoping to achieve (are you looking at a specific viewpoint, aiming to be more satirical, aiming to educate?)  Literary agents who are interested in political non-fiction may be seeking more general topics or they may have something specific that they’d love to receive, so make sure to take a close look at their wish-lists in order to determine the best agent for your book.   AgentMatch And How To Use It There are plenty of agents who love political works, but you won\'t want to approach them all. The best way to develop and refine your own shortlist of UK agents for politics and current affairs is to visit AgentMatch, our literary agent database, and use the search tools on the left to make your selection.  With AgentMatch you can select by genre (e.g. politics and current affairs), country, the agent’s level of experience, their appetite for new clients, and much more. You can even save your search results and come back to them, allowing you to work through them one by one, at your own pace. Each profile has been researched thoroughly including what agents like to read in their spare time, information on their most recent deals, manuscript wishlists, submission requirements, and exclusive interviews.  You can sign-up for a 7-day free trial which will give you a good feel for the data and functionality. Or join us as a premium member and get unlimited access to AgentMatch.  UK Agents For Politics And Current Affairs  To get you started we’ve selected a list of 20 UK agents looking for politics and current affairs:  [am_show_agents id=20] More Resources   We’re here to help you at every step in your writing and querying process. Check out our favourite blogs that can assist you in putting together your query letter and synopsis, and if you want valuable, personal feedback on your writing you can book a fifteen-minute One-to-One with an agent of your choice. Premium members can also get a free query letter review from our lovely Writers Support team!    Happy searching, and good luck on your querying journey!   

What are the pros and cons? What does a publisher do? Which route generates more money? Are self-published books successful? And which approach is right for you? When I wrote my first book, things were easy. You wanted to sell books? You needed to get hold of a book publishers. Simple. The rise of Amazon and the e-book obliterated all those old certainties – and made a whole array of exciting new options of how to publish a book available to authors. But this leaves one important question for writers; do you follow traditional publishing routes or explore self publishing possibilities? In the twenty years since my first book deal, I’ve published books both traditionally, and self published them as an indie author. I’ve made money and hit bestseller lists via both routes. But even now, if you asked me “which is better?”, I couldn’t tell you. Either option has advantages and disadvantages, and some types of author will find one specific route obviously appropriate to them. Other authors will just find it a hard call, because both routes look attractive. The purpose of this blog post is, therefore, to lay out the pluses and minuses of traditional publishing, and of self-publishing. I’m not going to tell you what you ought to do. I will tell you what to expect in terms of pros and cons. So sit tight. Let’s start with some basic definitions. What’s The Difference Between Traditional And Self Publishing? Traditional publishing (or just “trad publishing”): Means that the intellectual property rights in your manuscript are purchased outright by a publishing company (often a large multinational). The best known publishers include Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Macmillan, and others. The sale normally takes place via a literary agent (and novelists, especially, will benefit from having an agent), The publisher will use its corporate contacts to make your book available for sale as widely as possible. That means you can expect your book to be sold via every e-tailer (notably Amazon), but also chain bookstores (Barnes & Noble or Waterstones, for example), supermarkets, indie bookstores, and so on. Your book will almost certainly appear in print – and quite likely in four separate editions (hardback, paperback, e-book, audio.) You stand a chance of being reviewed by formal outlets, such as newspapers. You would normally expect to receive an advance. If your sales are such that your advance ‘earns out’, you will also receive royalties – though many authors don’t see royalties at all. Your book now belongs to the publisher. If you want it back – that’s just tough. If you don’t like their marketing – that’s just tough. If you change your mind and want to go indie – well, you’ll either need to buy the rights back or just write a new book. In essence, you are selling your work to a corporation, and that corporation will go about exploiting those rights. Sure, you can expect your editor to be nice to you, and to listen to your viewpoint and all the rest of it. But you’ve sold the book, and you’ve lost control. That’s not a bad thing necessarily, but you need to understand the basic nature of the transaction. Self publishing (or “indie publishing”, or “e-publishing on Amazon”) is a totally different proposition. Self Publishing: Means you never sell rights to the book. It’s yours. That also means there’s no advance in self-publishing. Rather the opposite: you’ll need to make some investments upfront, even if they’re not very large. Most indie sales take the form of e-books. (My own e-book sales volume is about 25 times greater than my print sales volume, and I’m not exceptional.) Means you are highly unlikely to see your book sold in physical bookstores on any kind of national or international basis. (Local store owners might be happy to stock a handful of books on sales or return, but that’s just being nice. You won’t make many sales from that route.) Equally, you won’t get reviewed in newspapers. And you’re responsible for everything: creating your product, marketing it, choosing an ebook format, everything. We’ve adorned this blog post with pictures of old-fashioned rotary phones in a (slightly feeble) attempt to suggest that the trad vs indie issue marks a dichotomy as profound as the analogue phone / smartphone one. But the trad / indie division isn’t about a simple technical evolution. After all, modern publishers use plenty of technology too. They sell on Amazon too. Really, what we’re looking at is a totally new ability for indie authors to reach a worldwide audience without the support of a corporate publisher. Amazon created that ability, and it’s astonishing, and it’s wonderful. But Big 5 publishers can also get you in front of a very broad audience. So which route do you choose? Which option do you take? Who Makes More Money? Traditional Publishing vs Self Publishing There are a lot of questions with unclear, blurry answers. This question has a clear and emphatic one. Indie authors are, today, generating more money from their work than traditionally published ones. That situation is likely to become progressively more true over time. It remains true, no matter which income level you want to look at. Here, for example, is one graphic from the excellent AuthorEarnings.com: To see that, look first at the left hand side of the graph: “Authors who debuted in the past century”. Clearly, that includes a host of huge-selling and long-established traditionally published names -that’s the category where you find your Lee Childs, your John Grishams, your Stephen Kings. But those guys were all established before indie publishing was a thing. More relevant to your situation is the cluster of bars on the right of the graph: “authors who debuted in the past three years.” You’ll see that the number of indie-published authors (in blue) vastly exceeds the number of Big 5 authors (in mauve). That is, there are way, way more authors earning $50,000 or more on Amazon than there are trad authors. Now yes, trad authors may have better access to income sources beyond Amazon. (eg: Barnes & Noble, other physical retail outlets, non-Amazon e-stores, foreign translation deals, film & TV money, etc), but: (A) you can exaggerate the size of that disparity.I self-publish my Fiona Griffiths books and I’ve sold audio rights, foreign rights, and am in detailed discussions on a possible major TV deal. Many more experienced indies would be in the same approximate position. (B) the picture doesn’t change, even if you allow for greater non-Amazon income on the part of trad authors.This post isn’t quite the right place to go into all that. The numbers are now a little out of date, but if anything today’s numbers are even more favourable to indies. How Come Self Publishers Make More Money? Well, it’s not rocket science. If a trad author sells $100 of ebooks on Amazon, Amazon will keep $30 as its (very fair) retailer share. The rest passes to the publisher, who will keep 75% of the amount, passing the rest (25% * $70 = $17.50) to that author’s agent. That author’s agent will help themselves to their contractual 15% and pass the balance (85% *$17.50 = $14.88) to the author. So trad authors makes $14.88 from $100 of e-sales. Not a lot, right? The indie author sells $100 on Amazon. They get $70. No deductions, just cash in the pocket, paid monthly, and with exceptionally clear and detailed reporting. Indie authors make $70.00 from $100 of e-sales. That huge – almost fivefold – difference in what a trad author gets from an e-book sale and what an indie author gets from the same sale accounts for the basic difference in income levels. The fact is: an indie author can price their books more cheaply than a trad author’s, and sell fewer copies, and still make more money. That is the golden engine behind the entire self-publishing revolution. But even if you’re quite focused on money, the “who earns more?” question doesn’t settle all debate. You need to remember, for example, that: Traditionally published authors will (mostly) get an advance. Self published authors will be putting time and money into the publication and marketing process. Focusing on top-line revenues ignores all that. The “top of the world” type outcomes are still way more common with trad than with indie publishing. (I’m talking about explosive international successes like Gone Girl, or Girl on a Train. It’s not that hits like these are ever frequent, nor that huge hits are impossible via indie routes, but that level of global attention does mostly fall to trad published authors. It’s just the way it is.) Lots of self published authors sell effectively nothing. They may make a loss from self publishing. In fact, it’s probably true that a majority of indie authors lose money (because their books are bad, or their marketing is bad, or both. Equally, lots of traditionally-oriented authors knock at the gates of the traditional industry and are never admitted. Those guys don’t make money either.) And forget about the boosters from either camp. Making money from either trad or indie publishing is hard. Most writers don’t earn a living from what they do. There are a zillion other reasons to write of course (because it’s brilliant!), but Earning Fame and Fortune isn’t one of them. Want to know how I earn $100,000 a year from self publishing, with minimal effort?Well, I’ve put together an entire video course on the subject, that runs you through the entire self-pub process and will ensure you avoid all the mistakes I made along the way. The course is expensive to buy – so don’t buy it! It’s free to members of Jericho Writers – and we’d just love it if you chose to join our club. All the info you need is here. I really hope you hop on board. Traditional Vs Self Publishing: Different Genres/Authors What’s right for you? One of the problems with the traditional vs self publishing question is that the advantages and disadvantages of the two routes vary depending on who the author is. So here is a quick tour of the major issues. Do Traditional Publishers Even Want You? As a very rough guide, literary agents receive about 2,000 submissions a year, and they are likely to take on 2-3 authors from that torrent. Put another way, you have a roughly 1 in 1,000 chance of being taken on by a given agent. And suppose an agent does take you on. Even then, the agent may sell hawk your book around, only to find that no one wants it. Or someone does want it, but only a micro-publisher who has no money to spend either on author advances or (more serious yet) on marketing. Or you end up with a digital-only imprint that won’t get your book into bookshops, which is the thing you always had your heart set on. The truth is, I’m not sure that those Stats of Doom should alter your decision one way or the other. Here’s the simple truth: You can’t sell a bad book. I mean, yes, sure, you can make some sales with almost anything. But if you want to make a career at this game, you need to write well enough to persuade a large audience that you have what it take. And that’s why the top indies move in and out of traditional publishing with ease. Mark Dawson was published by Macmillan, then switched to indiedom. Hugh Howey was and is an indie, but he’s done some huge traditional deals too. The levels of quality needed aren’t set by your choice of publishing route. They’re set by readers. So the bar is set high, no matter what. And that’s good. We’re writers. We want to write well. So please: raise that bar. What Genre Is Your Book? Indie authors do well in genre fiction – and the more genre the better. So if you take a niche like military sci-fi or out-and-out romance, you’ll find that indies account for 80% or more of the market. Indies also do very well in crime, thrillers, westerns, SF, fantasy, young adult, women’s fiction, and so on. At the same time, there is essential no indie market for serious literary fiction. If you want to write the kind of books that could sit alongside work by Jonathan Franzen or Elizabeth Strout etc, then you can forget about self-publishing completely. The route just won’t work for you. WIth non-fiction, if your work is the sort of thing that might be found by its title (“How to Make Your Own Sausages”), then self publishing is very viable indeed. If it’s a one-off (eg: Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow), then indie publishing will not work. Short message:Genre fiction and subject-led non-fiction work very well on the indie model. With anything else – take care. Are You Writing In A Series? That sounds like a funny question, right, but here’s the thing: For indie authors, series fiction sells way, way better than non-series fiction. Here, for example, is data collected by Smashwords which shows that around three quarters of bestselling fiction (in Smashwords’ own sample) is series-driven. At the bottom end, around two-thirds of the books are standalones. And sure, Smashwords’s userbase isn’t quite representative of the broader indie market – but the fact is that series books sell much, much better than standalones: probably in large part, because an indie author’s selling tools work better for such work. If you are currently writing standalone work, but are intending to explore the indie route, I’d urge you to consider how you could series-ify your work. For example, if you write standalone private investigator novels, maybe your PIs could all work for the same agency, or run up against the same cops, or drink in the same bars or, really, anything to say to the reader, “Yes, this is the world you know and love.” Short message:If your work is not currently written in a series, then either think of ways to series-ify it . . . or consider traditional publishing as a better option. Are You Prolific? Most successful indie authors will have lists of a dozen or more books for sale. Indeed, plenty of indies will really only hit six-digit earnings when they have 15-20 titles available. if you just can’t see yourself writing that many books or if you don’t want to be under pressure to write 2-4 books a year (or even more), then the traditional route may be better for you. But think about it. You may be able to write faster than you think. A writer’s first book is often a learning experience and often a wrestling match to get into shape. Books do come more easily with time, so you may be a faster writer than you quite realise at this stage. Do You Want Traditional Acclaim? What do you think will fulfil you as a writer? Is it book sales and money and being able to give up work? If that’s the case, then the indie-publishing route may be better for you. Or are you OK for money already? Do you want, instead, to see your work in ‘real’ bookshops? Do you want book reviews in proper newspapers? Do you want to be invited to literary festivals and invited to talk on radio, and all the rest of it? If you want all those signs of acclaim, then traditional publishing is probably your only route to fulfilment. Please note that traditional publishing does not guarantee those things, not by any means. You can be traditionally published, and find that your publisher just hasn’t managed to get your book into many stores, and no newspaper reviews are forthcoming, and no literary festival is interested in hearing you speak. That experience is, indeed, more common than not. All the same, those good things almost always flow only to traditionally published authors, so if that’s what floats your boat, you know what to do. Are You Entrepreneurial? Will You Relish The Challenge Of Self Publishing? Let’s face it. Self publishing isn’t easy. You will either have to take on the following roles, or commission third parties to handle them for you Authoring (that’s your job!) Structural editing Copy-editing (try our copy-editing service here) Book formatting (e-book and print) Copy writing (book description) Cover designing Website construction Email list: building blocks Email list: copy Finance Advertising strategy Advertising creative Advertising monitoring and adjustment Aside from the authoring, most of those things will either be done by your traditional publishers, or they’ll ignore them completely (effective digital marketing? from a Big 5 publisher? Hmm). That still leaves some things down to you (notably, your website and email list) but no one will fret too much if you don’t do them at all. In other words: if you want to be left alone to write and do not much else of anything, that is more possible with traditional publishing than it is with self publishing. It’s not advisable either way. But is it possible? Yes. How Much Work Is Really Involved? There are a lot of misconceptions about the amount of work involved in self-publishing and the type of work required. The result is that writers can make poor decisions because their information is faulty. It’s really easy to think, “Jeepers, I don’t want to do all that, so I’ll just have some highly paid, very experienced professionals to do it all for me.” And yes, OK, there’s some truth in that – but only some. So here are some countervailing thoughts: It’s still the case that traditional publishing tends to handle Amazon sales quite badlyI can’t even count the number of trad authors I know who tear their hair out with low energy & unintelligent e-marketing from their publishers. Indie authors who watch that hair-tearing just feel mildly puzzled that the whole thing should seem so arduous. Selling on Amazon is (in many ways) easy! There is quite a lot of author-input needed in traditional publishingAs soon as you engage on the traditional publishing process, you will notice that (a) you care a lot more about your book than anyone else does, and (b) you don’t have any control over anything – you signed control away when you sold your book. The consequence is that, to make a difference to things, you have to work quite hard and from a place where your tools are cajoling / asking / yelling, rather than simply an ability to give orders. (“No, sorry, I don’t like that. Can you redo it? Thanks.”) Much of the work in self publishing is around setting up your sales channelThere IS quite a lot of work and some expense in getting your website and email list set up as you need it to be. But that work takes place upfront. It’s basically a one-off. It’ll save you time and make you money for ever after. Short message:There is work involved in both routes and, believe me, you’ll care enough about your book that you’re happy to do any amount of work if that gets it sold. Final Thoughts What’s right for you? You should probably go indie if: You are entrepreneurial You aren’t totally scared of a few numbers and a bit of tech. (You don’t need great expertise here; you just can’t have a powerful irrational aversion!) You are able to be fairly prolific You write genre fiction or subject led non-fiction You are happy to write in a series You favour income/readers over traditional bookstore sales / traditional channels of acclaim. The more you check those boxes, the more definitely you are an indie author. If those boxes really, really don’t apply to you, you should go for the trad route. And if you check some, but not all, boxes – well, it’s up to you. There’s no right or wrong answer here, and you don’t have to make a once-and-f0r-all choice. You can start out indie and go trad (or hybrid) later if you choose to. You can start out trad and migrate the other way if you prefer. Truth is, this is a great time to be an author. You have more choice and more possibility than ever before. Enjoy the freedom – and happy writing!

Typesetting a book: it’s the stuff of writers’ dreams. Your double-spaced, A4 sized, agent-ready manuscript turns into a beautiful paperback book; that first line that you agonised over for days, leaping out at the reader; your paragraphs neatly aligned and looking as they should – actual real-life pages in a beautiful looking book. Ahhh, we can almost smell the paper. Every day, writers turn manuscripts into quality paperback books, either for self-publishing or to give to family and friends as a handy editing tool. Readily-accessible tools such as Microsoft Word and Adobe InDesign mean that writers can now typeset their manuscripts themselves. Once you learn the tricks of DIY typesetting, it’s straightforward and immensely satisfying to learn how to typeset your own book and see it take shape. Here are some top tricks for DIY typesetting that every writer should know. 1. Paragraph Styles The key to any book interior layout is consistency. This includes making sure your chapter headings, typeface, quotations and asides are all in the same style and format. You won’t see many books that start in 11pt Times New Roman and then suddenly change to 12pt Helvetica (unless it’s intentional, of course!). You can find paragraph styles on most Word processors – in Word, they’re placed in a bar at the top with different fonts and headings. Once you’ve perfected the font and placement of your first chapter heading, highlight it and then right click on ‘Heading 1’ to save it as a style. Then, when it comes to writing Chapter Two, you can easily replicate the same style. You can also do the same for your main body text and any other headings and styles, perhaps a character’s handwriting, a quote, or other graphic elements if you’re writing non-fiction. 2. Page Breaks No more shall we press the return key multiple times to get to a new page. If you do this, you’ll find yourself having to go back and forth adding and deleting paragraphs every time you make a change to the text. Instead, just insert a page break. This will take you onto the next page, right where you want to be. You’ll be surprised how many times you’ll use this when you know it’s there! 3. Justification Authors who typeset their own work often don’t justify their text. This is where you make sure each line meets both margins, so that it looks like a perfect rectangle on the page. This just makes things a bit neater and is a key part in giving your manuscript that extra finesse that will make it look as beautiful after printing as it reads. 4. Prelims and Title Pages Title pages are where you get to be creative as your own typesetter. They are the first few pages that the reader sees when they open your book. This might include a page that states title and author name, a copyright page (if you’re self-publishing) and then maybe a half-title page which also lists the publisher. Many publishers use the title pages to bring some of the aspects of the cover into the book itself – perhaps by using the same font as the title on the cover or similar black and white illustrations or shapes. There are some really great examples of title pages around – just look at the books on your shelf for inspiration! 5. Indents As standard, a first paragraph after a new chapter or heading shouldn’t be indented, but every new paragraph afterwards should be. Although using the ‘tab’ key to indent your text on your A4 manuscript is fine, this space suddenly looks huge once you size the page down to your standard paperback size. I’d recommend an indent of 0.5-1cm to match the other books on your shelf. To alter the indent, just drag the small, top arrow on the ruler at the top of your screen. Remember to update your paragraph style with the change to save you the time of decreasing every indent! And Finally... Whether you end up typesetting your own book or not, you’ll be surprised how often some of these typesetting skills will crop up in your writing career.

What is it that makes a truly exceptional genre novel? What can an author of a horror, science-fiction, fantasy or any kind of genre novel bring to their work that elevates it in some way, so that when reviewers write it up they describe it as ‘transcending its genre’? That’s a phrase that used to annoy the hell out of me until I realised the essential distinction between ‘literary’ and ‘commercial’ fiction. All fiction deals in conflict of one kind or another. It can be a moral conflict, perhaps the threat of war or the consequences of unreasoning prejudice. It might equally be the need to survive an invasion, or a plague, or the unintended consequences of an earth-shattering new technology. My concern in this article has to do with the source of that conflict. Broadly speaking, the distinction between literary and commercial fiction is this: literary fiction deals in internalised conflict. That could be fear, jealousy, greed, desire for power or revenge, thwarted love and so on. It’s these internal conflicts, after all, that are the cause of so many of the great tragedies that characterise humanity. Wars of religion, of power, of survival. In Greek myth, the entire Trojan War took place because Paris fell in love with Helen of Troy and stole her away from her husband. A ten-year-long conflict is thereby triggered entirely by one person’s desire for another, regardless of the consequences. Commercial fiction, on the other hand – and remember, we’re speaking broadly here – deals in externalised conflicts. It creates dramatic stories out of direct conflict with something ‘other’, other races, other religions, other cultures, classes or political orders, and so on. Fantasy at its most basic, generic level deals with the threat of a ‘dark power’ of some kind – with magic turned to evil purposes. A good deal of science fiction deals with the consequences, intended or otherwise, of sudden technological change or scientific discovery. Those consequences are external – created in a lab, or built in a workshop, rather than formed in a human mind. Once I realised this distinction between internalised and externalised conflict, the defining quality of the very best sci-fi and fantasy became clear to me. It synthesises both approaches – and most often it does so by externalising what is otherwise an internal conflict. Some of the best examples are in film as much as in literature. In Star Wars, our internal conflict between what we know is right, and our own, darker capacity for evil, is externalised in ‘the Force’. The Force can be channelled for good, but it has a seductive side – one that can ultimately lead one to commit terrible acts of genocide or injustice, should one fall prey to darker emotions. The Force, then, is our own internal dialogue between what is morally right and wrong, objectified as a physical part of the universe into which we tap. So why does this work? Because where that internal dialogue between good and bad is in the real world entirely subjective, Lucas, in his screenplay, makes it into a distinct, objective thing that can be tapped into and that can influence us. Externalising what is otherwise an entirely internal dialogue allows the reader – or in this case, the viewer – to see that internal conflict in an entirely different light. Similarly, the plot of The Lord of the Rings revolves around a journey to carry a ring of enormous power back to the mountain where it was forged, in order to destroy it. The ring is our desire for power, objectified and made external, rather than internal. It’s this externalised internal conflict that in part makes this such a strong and overwhelmingly popular story. It’s very often the case that budding fantasy writers will make the mistake of entirely externalising the conflict in their novels; the source of evil in this case is always a Rising Dark Power of some kind. The hero is always pure and true. And it’s boring. The best way to write such fiction is instead to introduce internalised conflict, to balance the external. Frodo in The Lord of the Rings struggles with his own internal desires, and the seductive power of the ring – all he must do is slip it onto his finger, to achieve power he can only dream of – and he struggles with this internal conflict (made flesh by the ring) all the way to Mount Doom. Gollum is a stand-in for the terrible price that the ring can exact on those too weak for its seductive power, and he also represents what can happen to us if we allow the worst parts of ourselves to override our conscience. This internal conflict on Frodo’s part, then, balances the external conflict with Mordor’s armies, on the march to retrieve that very ring. It also elevates the story above one of simple good and evil by reminding us these conflicts exist within us, as well as outside us. In Frank Herbert’s Dune, we at first appear to have a simple tale of a messianic figure, born to lead the Fremen to victory against an imperial occupying force. But Herbert quickly elevates the story by focusing the narrative around Paul of Atreides’ struggle with the path his life appears to be predestined to follow. By imbibing the spice of the worm, he can see the future, and his role in it; but as in the best Greek tragedies, it’s a path he rejects utterly, even while his attempts to resist fate cause the very events he foresees to take place with grim inevitability. The external conflict – between the dastardly Harkonnens and the Fremen led by Paul – is balanced by Paul’s own, equally gripping internal conflict. In Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly, a policeman is working undercover, living with people whose lives revolve around a drug called Substance D. He’s so deep cover, even his bosses don’t actually know his identity; he wears a futuristic ‘scramble suit’ when he meets with his superiors, so they cannot find out who he is, thereby assuring him absolute anonymity as he searches for the source of the drug. One day, he is given a new assignment; to investigate one of the people living in the same house as him. He has, in fact, been asked to investigate himself. This creates a wonderful internal conflict that balances the external – the search for the source of the drug. Increasingly schizophrenic from his own use of Substance D, Dick’s character finds himself struggling with his own identity, as to whether he is a policeman, or the addict he is investigating. If your book isn’t coming together – if your characters feel lifeless, or lack motivation, or feel wooden and two-dimensional – provide them with an internal conflict to balance the external. It’s that conflict that, when handled properly, keeps readers glued to the pages. To sum up: the best sci-fi and fantasy fiction takes internal conflicts, and re-represents them as external conflicts in a way that creates a kind of ‘useful distance’, allowing readers a degree of objectivity on their own fears and desires they might not otherwise have. But even then, that conflict must be mirrored through your protagonists’ own thoughts and actions, and their own internalised moral dialogue.

What Is An Author Platform? What it is, why it matters, & how to build your own. The author platform 101 step-by-step. I remember when I first learned about author platform building– and its extraordinary power to deliver readers, sales and publicity. I was writing non-fiction for HarperCollins at the time (I’m quite proud of this book), and I shared an editor with the mighty Ben Goldacre. If you haven’t come across Goldacre’s work, he’s the guy behind Bad Science and Bad Pharma – essentially a scientist’s quest to expose poor quality science across the globe. He’s a campaigner for truth and loves nothing better than exposing fraudulent ‘scientific’ claims for what they are. He was early into the blogging arena, and quickly built up a substantial worldwide following. That following was big rather than huge, but it was passionate. These were people who cared about the same things as Goldacre, and loved the fact that he was making a noise about them. (The blog is here, by the way. The design now looks rather elderly.) The result? Goldacre didn’t use HarperCollins as a marketing operation. He used it as a fulfilment one. To paraphrase my (somewhat stunned) editor, Goldacre effectively walked in and said, “Here’s the manuscript. I’ve arranged these online promotional activities. I’ve got this many science editors from the major international newspapers agreeing to review it. I’ve got endorsements from all these famous people. Now can you please get this thing printed up and into bookshops.” Now, OK, I’m sure it wasn’t quite as simple as that, but you get the point. HarperCollins provided the sales network, but it was Ben Goldacre who actually brought the readers. The result? Half a million books sold . A further best-selling book to follow. A hyper-successful career as public speaker and campaigner. And more than any of that? He changed the world. The British government recognised the truth in much of what Goldacre was saying, and used him to reshape the way they fund and support science. You want to know what an author platform is? It’s that. It’s what Goldacre did. It’s owning your audience. Or, if you want a more formal definition, then author platform can be defined as the ability to deliver readers, through having direct and effective channels of communication with them. And please note, the issue here – the thing that this definition makes central – is your ability to deliver readers. It’s not how many Twitter followers you have, or how many likes you’ve acquired on Facebook. The fact is, the scale of your platform is measured in terms of the number of people who, when you say “Buy!” will go right ahead and buy your book. Platform Vs Authority While we’re still on definitions, it’s also worth distinguishing between your author platform and your authority. Authority is about how much kudos and respect you have acquired in your niche. It’s a measure of your knowledge. Platform is about your communication potency. It’s about your ability to reach – and influence – readers in your niche. So, in the popular science space, a Harvard Professor of Physics might have super-high authority, but zero platform. Equally, the host of a TV science show might have great platform but relatively low authority. Both routes can generate sales. Ben Goldacre had a huge platform . . . and he sold a lot of books. Daniel Kahneman had no platform to speak of, but he did have a Nobel Prize – so, when he wrote his Thinking, Fast and Slow, people wanted to read it, and it too became a global bestseller. Authority and platform at the same time? Not many people can bring that. Jordan Peterson – psychology professor and YouTube sensation – can. This guy outscores him in both dimensions, though.) Why Author Platform Matters If author platform equals your ability to deliver readers, then it’s sort of obvious why it matters. But depending on what type of author you are, the specific issues vary a little. Tradtionally Published Non-fiction If you are a non-fiction author seeking traditional publication, then most literary agents will demand to see evidence of either: Platform, or Authority Indeed, it can sometimes seem that if you can’t provide evidence of excellence on one of those two issues, then you simply won’t be able to sell your book. Luckily (for most of us), that’s just not true. When I sold my This Little Britain – a book of popular history about Britain’s role in the world – I had no platform at all. Nor did I have any authority: I didn’t even study the subject at college.. But what the heck? I had a great concept. I loved my subject. I could write well. I could make people laugh. My agent and I laid three sample chapters in front of a bunch of publishers, and we had a blow-out book auction that netted a two book £175,000 ($250,000) book deal. That wasn’t thanks to my platform, or my authority, just plain good writing. The fact is, quality sells. Traditionally Published Fiction When it comes to fiction, there will, of course, be some authors who bring a platform with them: oftentimes, celebs wanting to cash in by writing a book that relates in some way to their celebrity. For example, a political reporter writing a political thriller, or a reality star ‘writing’ romance. (The inverted commas are needed there because those books are often ghostwritten. If you’re a reality TV star, why would you actually need to write anything? You can get staff for that.) But the vast majority of times, debut authors will bring exactly nothing by way of platform. Yes, maybe a couple of thousand Twitter followers. Yes, maybe a blog – ‘My Writing Journey’, that kind of thing. But those things won’t impress publishers. (What would be impressive? Well, I think you’d need to look at monthly blog traffic in excess of 100,000 visitors. Twitter followers in the several hundred thousand.) So for ordinary writers, the short message is: just don’t worry. If you have a huge following – great; publishers will like that. If you have no great following – doesn’t matter; publishers weren’t expecting one anyway. If you just don’t like and don’t get on with social media – don’t worry; publishers will just find other ways to promote your work. That said, there is a caveat here and it’s a very important one. It actually has the potential to alter and enlarge your entire career. How come? Well, just consider the following question for a moment: How do self-published authors sell their work? After all, indie authors don’t have the ability of Big 5 houses to get your book into bookstores across the land. They can’t get newspaper reviews. In fact, most of the options open to Big 5 publishers are closed to indies. Yet these guys now sell more adult fiction than all the Big 5 houses combined. So something’s going on there . . . and that secret sauce is something that absolutely any author should be interested in concocting for themselves. More on that subject coming right up. How To Build Your Author Platform How indies do it – and how you can do it too. When self-publishing first became serious business, back in about 2010 or thereabouts, the new breed of indie authors had to figure out how they were going to crack this exciting new market. Pretty quickly, it became clear how not to market your book. Failed approaches include: Yelling about your book on Twitter Yelling about your book on Facebook Blogging a lot Guest blogging a lot Taking out full page ads in the New York Times Hiring a trad publicist for $5-10,000+ to do all the things that a trad publicist does Arranging book signings Arranging book tours & multiple signings Hand-selling your book, bookstore by bookstore, across the country Hiring a zeppelin to criss-cross Manhattan, while a troupe of performing monkeys scamper along below handing flyers to passers-by Now, in truth, I’m not absolutely certain that the last of these methods doesn’t sell books, because I’m not sure it’s been tried. (The zeppelin gambit has probably already been used a few times by now. But zeppelin and monkeys? That’s cutting edge.) Instead, the indie community has come to cluster around a few author platform examples and techniques which do, absolutely, 100% guaranteed, sell books. (If done right, and if the books are good enough, and so on.) Those techniques are: Distributing free or very low cost books Emails, sent direct from author to reader Featured deals on Bookbub and similar. (more here, if you’re interested.) Advertising on various online platforms (notably Facebook, AMS and Bookbub). These techniques only partially work for trad-published authors. On the free/deeply discounted book idea: just try running that past your editor. Her laughter may be loud and demented enough to crack glassware. On the featured deals on Bookbub : well, yes, trad publishers do make more use of those than they have in the past. But they don’t always use them well, and, in any event, you’ll only enjoy those once a year or so, and the benefits won’t flow mostly to you. On the advertising: yeah, right. Publishers do extremely little online advertising, and it won’t be worth your while to do any at all, because you can’t make ads work if someone else is collecting most of the revenue generated. Which leaves emails. Which sounds sad. And boring. And kinda hopeless. Except that email marketing is one of the most potent tools ever invented and you have it in your power to do it exceptionally well. A well-built, carefully curated email list is, in fact, one of the most potent author platforms it is possible to build. And you can build it. And I’ll show you how. Just add monkeys How Email Marketing Works Here, in a nutshell, is how email marketing works: You sell an ebook. In the back of the ebook, you say to your readers, “Hey, I’ve written a great story. Would you like a copy of it for free?” They say yes, because they love your writing, so they click through to a page which collects an email address (with all appropriate consents, of course) You email them the story (a process which can be easily automated), so they’re happy But you have their email address and that reader’s permission to email them When you have your next book out, you email that reader, saying, “Here’s my book, and here’s where you can buy it.” That reader is happier than a Trump with a Cheeseburger, because – remember? – that reader loves your work, is thrilled to hear from you, and would love nothing better than buy your latest release. This is permission marketing at its purest. You’re not marketing to people who resent being marketed to. You’re marketing to people who love your stuff! Who get genuinely excited when an email from you plops into their inbox! Who actually contact you asking you to write faster, because they’re impatient to read your next release. And email marketing is a lot, lot better than you think How come? Because, let’s say you work hard to create a mailing list of 10,000 names. And let’s say 3,000 of those buy a book when you ask them to. (The other 7,000 were maybe busy. Or never got your email. Or thought, “yep, I must buy that at some point in the future.” Or lost all their powers of taste and judgement and decided against reading your books.) But still. You want to amplify your sales, not just sell to a smallish subset of the people you sold to last time. Luckily, there is a very fine solution to that conundrum, and that solution has a name: Amazon. Amazon’s bestseller rankings are highly susceptible to short-term movements in sales. Which means those 3,000 sales can blast your title right up the search rankings, so it starts popping up in the search results of readers who have never heard of you or your book before. Sure, most of those casual browsers won’t buy your book, but enough will. And before too long, you are making a heap of sales to brand new readers, who’ll read your book, and love it, and see that invitation in the back of your book (the one about getting a free story), and they’ll think, yeah, sounds good, and they’ll go get that ebook, and add their names to your mailing list, and the next time you launch a book, you’ll have even more firepower than you did before. Get it right, and this type of author platform can be: Easy to build (but you have to get the details right; this game is all about detail) Cheap to build (there are few significant costs involved) Versatile (it works for almost any type of author) Durable (those readers will stick with you) Self-sustaining (each new launch will bring new readers to your email list) And best of all, this kind of marketing can be: very lucrative. I self-publish my Fiona Griffiths books in the US and Canada only. (I’ve been trad published elsewhere.) I built my email list using the techniques described here. I do minimal amounts of paid advertising. I do very little of anything else either. (No book signings, no zeppelins, no monkeys.) But last year I earned $100,000 from sales of my work in the US and Canada. If I wrote faster (or spent less time moonlighting for Jericho Writers), I’d earn a fair bit more. That’s the power of email marketing. That’s a writer platform that delivers readers, time after time after time. Indeed, if I could only one bit of advice to about-to-be debut novelists, then it’s this: Build your email list! It’s the single most effective thing you can do to sell books. It’s the single thing that is most likely to future-proof your career. You will be called upon to do countless other things in your career – those book signings, those festival appearances, and all the rest of it – but only two things matter. Writing books, and building your list. Your sales rep. How Email Marketing Works For Authors OK. This post has gone on way too long – but at the same time, if you are serious about building your platform, then constructing a really good email list should be your first duty outside actually writing the damn book. In fact, your priorities are, in order: Write the damn book, Collect email addresses, Eat, drink and be merry. Truly, nothing else matters as much as this. How do you accomplish step #2 above? And accomplish it as fast as possible, as cheaply as possible, and without making yourself scream in frustration at any tech stuff? Well, I said it’s about getting the detail right, and it is. We’ve put a really detailed post together on how to self-publish. You can find that post here. If you are heading for trad publishing, then the material on actually preparing your manuscript for publication is irrelevant to you. But the material on email lists and websites and best-practice e-book construction does matter to you. Ignore the fact that the post references self-pub, and just home in on anything that relates to the collection and use of email lists. Honestly? That information is just about the most helpful material we have anywhere on this website. But it’s hard doing things from a blog post alone. Which is why we developed a complete set of video courses on  – well, everything. You want to know how to set up your email marketing platform?We have a course on that. (And a filmed two hour tutorial with a heap of slides. And a ton of other supporting material.) You want to know how to get published?We have a course on that. (Tons of tutorials, loads of PDF downloads, every topic expertly covered.) You want to know how to improve your writing?Yep, we’ve got a course on that. (A very good one, with a bazillion stunned testimonials from writers just like you.) You want a brilliant database of literary agents with super-easy search tools?Yep, we built one, just for Jericho members. It’s the slickest, most comprehensive tool of its kind in the world. You want to pitch your work live online to literary agents?Yep, we got you covered. Each month, we stick a camera in front of some agents, we give them some work submitted by Jericho members and see what they say. Then fire questions at them. And you get to watch... if you decide to become a member. You want tons of other stuff too? For free, within one low cost, cancel-any-time membership plan?OK, sure. We’ll do that too. We look forward to welcoming you soon!

Have you just finished your novel and are ready to begin your search for an agent? Well, we’re here to help!  WANT TO JUMP STRAIGHT TO THE AGENT LIST? CLICK HERE  Romance Fiction Romance fiction, from Jane Austen onward, is one of the most enduringly popular of all genres. It is most often defined by its primary focus on the romantic relationship between two or more characters, and the frequent occurrences of satisfying or happy endings (though this is not always the case).  In mainstream publishing the term \'romance fiction\' can sometimes fall under the broader genre of women’s fiction (fairly literary, upmarket, and serious) or commercial (think mass-market commercial novels published by Mills & Boon). While in some cases, it will cross over the genre divide and claim a combination of genres, such as historical romance. Obviously there\'s a lot of grey area in the world of romance fiction which is why it\'s so fun to write and why readers love it. This flexibility also means that when you\'re ready to start the querying process it\'s important for you to do your research (and lots of wider reading!) so that when you submit to agents you know exactly where your book falls in the market.  Finding the right agent is a long process but at the heart of it you need an agent who is not only qualified to work with your book, but also loves the genre/s you’re writing in.  So if you have written a historical romance with fantasy elements, for example, you should look for an agent that expresses an interest in both genres, not just an agent looking for romance novels. This may seem like a daunting task but that’s where AgentMatch can help.   AgentMatch And How To Use It There are plenty of romance-loving agents, but you won\'t want to approach them all. The best way to develop and refine your own shortlist of UK agents for romance novels is to visit AgentMatch, our literary agent database, and use the search tools on the left to make your selection.  With AgentMatch you can select by genre (e.g. romance), country, the agent’s level of experience, their appetite for new clients, and much more. You can even save your search results and come back to them, allowing you to work through them one by one, at your own pace. Each profile has been researched thoroughly including what agents like to read in their spare time, information on their most recent deals, manuscript wishlists, submission requirements, and exclusive interviews.  You can sign-up for a 7-day free trial which will give you a good feel for the data and functionality. Or join us as a premium member and get unlimited access to AgentMatch.   UK Agents For Romance  To get you started we’ve selected a list of 20 UK agents looking for romance novels:  [am_show_agents id=6] More Resources   We’re here to help you at every step in your writing and querying process. Check out our favourite blogs that can assist you in putting together your query letter and synopsis, and if you want valuable, personal feedback on your writing you can book a fifteen-minute One-to-One with an agent of your choice. Premium members can also get a free query letter review from our lovely Writers Support team!     Happy searching, and good luck on your querying journey!   

Writing historical fiction gives writers a fantastically rich background against which to write. But the old verities of fiction – character, story and prose – remain as important as ever. Here a few practitioners offer their words of wisdom on how to write historical fiction which will feel brilliantly alive – and wonderfully saleable. Tips From Emma Darwin Emma Darwin is author of acclaimed literary historical novel The Mathematics of Love. It goes without saying that you’ve researched your historical facts. That includes manners and morals as well as stage-coaches and corsetry: how people behave in matters of sex or smoking must be as accurate and convincing as how they cook or bet or fight. You’ve kept a sharp eye out for things you didn’t know you had to check: don’t make your medieval peasants eat potatoes, or your Regency heroine tell her fiancé to ‘step on the gas’, and don’t forget that everyone always wears a hat outdoors. You’ve read writing of the period and found a voice for your novel that’s neither incomprehensible, nor twee pastiche, nor crashingly modern. And then you must leave it all behind, because you’re not writing history, you’re writing fiction, and fiction is all about what you can make the reader believe you know: not what you’ve learnt in a library, but what you know as naturally as you know your own house. The worst writing you’ll ever do is what you write when you’ve got a history book in the other hand. The best is when your characters and their points of view are so alive to you that of course you write what they see and how they see it, their voices filling that panelled room or smoky alehouse. And all of that must happen without you once letting the reins drop. Your readers want to live and breathe history, but they won’t keep reading if the narrative grinds to a halt on a hill of historical detail. Find it all out, get it right, and then, in a sense, forget what you’ve found and write. You’re telling stories, not histories. Tips From Susan Opie Susan has been senior editor at HarperCollins and publisher of Philippa Gregory’s The Other Boleyn Girl, among many other works of historical fiction. Before you embark upon your historical novel, ask yourself: who are you writing for? Not only must you have a clear idea of your potential readership (male, female, crossover, and how literary), but also you should bear in mind the state of the market in this area as well. The publishing industry changes, and it has certainly done so in this field within recent memory. The market demands good fiction, but also looks for a strong sense of authenticity. That’s as applicable to commercial historical novels as it is to the more literary kind. Remember, readers want to come away from the novel feeling that they have been entertained and that they’ve learnt something, as well. They might then go away and discuss the book in reading groups, so it’ll have to stand up to such scrutiny (and the scrutiny of literary agents, of course!) The biggest successes in the area have tended to evoke a period we think we know something about, and have then gone on to shine a new light on it, bringing it to life in a fresh way. It might be told through the eyes of a character not directly in the line of historical action, allowing the narrator much more freedom to move and to comment. Generally, readers are drawn in by familiar elements (if not the period, then a famous character or setting), but not so familiar that they’ve heard it all before. Keep an eye on what’s come out over the past year or two, also on what’s about to come out. If a particular character, setting or period has featured several times already, why would a literary agent or publisher take on another book of the same kind? If you receive an offer of publication, the harsh reality of the industry will mean that your publisher will ask you to produce books in quick succession. That can be hard in this genre; research takes time, and the novels themselves tend not to be short, so you’d better love the period you’ve picked. It’s much easier to write regularly in a period you know well rather than try to change eras with every new book. If all that hasn’t put you off – good luck! Tips From Harry Bingham Harry is the founder Jericho Writers and author of historical novels Glory Boys and The Lieutenant’s Lover. First, authors of historical fiction need to write good fiction, meaning a strong plot driven by strong characters and prose, but the historical genre does make a difference to the writer, all the same. In my experience, settings drawn from history give a rich backdrop for novels. Make sure you relish the opportunities you get to use an evocative vocabulary. Pay attention to nouns. Get specific and reach for details that illuminate the period. Keep dialogue modern, with the occasional dip into the vocabulary or grammatical structures of the past. Use of the occasional, now obsolete, slang or idiom can help. One other point, for commercial novelists especially, is that you do need to be careful about the attitudes of your characters. An English gentleman born in the nineteenth century would (almost certainly) have been racist, homophobic by modern standards. You’ll still need the empathy of contemporary readers, so you will need to finesse these issues. On the whole, unless you are portraying villains, you should have old-fashioned attitudes tempered by more liberal concerns, even if these never quite wind up winning. Finally, enjoy writing. It ought to be pure joy. It certainly has been for me. Good luck!

Have you just finished your novel and are ready to begin your search for an agent? Well, we’re here to help!  WANT TO JUMP STRAIGHT TO THE AGENT LIST? CLICK HERE  Women’s Fiction Women’s fiction is a rich and broad market. It covers many sub-genres: romance, domestic noir, and literary fiction, for example. A literary fiction novel need not cancel out that the novel may also be classed as a romance. Nor does a sub-genre like domestic noir mean that this is a genre read only by women, even though the publishing world tends to market the genre as such.   So, it’s important to be careful how you choose your book genre. Is it really a book club type of novel (i.e. accessible and literary)? Is it romance? Erotica?   Just because your book may be about a woman and her relationships (not necessarily a romantic one), it doesn’t mean that you should be describing your novel as women’s fiction. Instead think more about what kind of book it is and what type of agent you’d like.  AgentMatch And How To Use It There are plenty of women\'s fiction-loving agents, but you won\'t want to approach them all. The best way to develop and refine your own shortlist of US agents for women\'s fiction is to visit AgentMatch, our literary agent database, and use the search tools on the left to make your selection.  With AgentMatch you can select by genre (e.g. women\'s fiction), country, the agent’s level of experience, their appetite for new clients, and much more. You can even save your search results and come back to them, allowing you to work through them one by one, at your own pace. Each profile has been researched thoroughly including what agents like to read in their spare time, information on their most recent deals, manuscript wishlists, submission requirements, and exclusive interviews.  You can sign-up for a 7-day free trial which will give you a good feel for the data and functionality. Or join us as a premium member and get unlimited access to AgentMatch.  US Agents For Women\'s Fiction  To get you started we’ve selected a list of 20 US agents looking for women\'s fiction: [am_show_agents id=31] More Resources   We’re here to help you at every step in your writing and querying process. Check out our favourite blogs that can assist you in putting together your query letter and synopsis, and if you want valuable, personal feedback on your writing you can book a fifteen-minute One-to-One with an agent of your choice. Premium members can also get a free query letter review from our lovely Writers Support team!    Happy searching, and good luck on your querying journey!   

Guest author and blogger William Kowalski shares his insights into creating sympathetic characters that resonate on the page. Sympathetic Character Development Language is a living, organic thing, and words have a habit of shifting meaning over time. This is precisely what has happened with the word sympathy. Like ouzo and democracy, sympathy comes to us from the Greeks. It’s derived from pathos, meaning “feeling”, and together with its prefix, which in English becomes “sym”, it once meant to feel along with someone, or to join a community of feeling. We have not completely lost this sense of it, but our understanding of sympathy has narrowed until it’s come to mean feeling sorry for someone, or commiserating with them. As we writers develop our characters, we would do well to spend some time pondering the original, deeper meaning of the word. Sympathetic Vs Unsympathetic Characters Why are sympathetic characters so important? Because unless your readers have some kind of emotional investment in their outcome, they won’t care what happens to them. They will become antipathetic. As a writing mentor, I must often explain that a sympathetic character isn’t just one we feel sorry for. It’s someone in whose struggle readers have become wrapped up, the more completely the better. We feel the same range of emotion he feels. We have joined her community of feeling. We do this because we believe this character is a real, flesh-and-blood person, if the author has done his job properly. What happens to her happens to us. It’s a skilled illusion, so how do we pull it off? The answer lies in the all-important practice of strong character development. Importance Of Making Characters Believable In Poetics, Aristotle tells us that characters must be “good” (she must possess some redeeming quality); “appropriate” (her qualities must make sense, based on her identity); “believable” (we have to believe that such a person could exist); and “consistent” (her character, while mutable, should also follow a pattern throughout the course of a story). I go into more detail on Aristotle’s contributions to our storytelling culture in an article available for free on my website, called “Writing Secrets of the Ancient Greeks.” But these are not the only considerations. If a character is to be sympathetic, he must be in pursuit of something. In his rules for writing, Kurt Vonnegut said, “Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.” In fact, the simpler your character’s goal, at least at the outset of the story, the better. As we watch him go off in pursuit of that thing, we will naturally sympathise with his struggle. All these rules can confound us if we try to follow them to the letter as we write. The best practice for me has been to revisit them periodically, in order to remember the basics. In this way, they become implanted, and eventually become second nature. Remember that we don’t have to like everything about a character. A flawed and imperfect nature makes him even more sympathetic, because we’re not perfect, either. We have a much easier time relating to an empathetic character who screws up from time to time than to someone who always gets it right on the first try.

Have you ever wondered what advice your favourite author would give to a debut writer? Here are 99 quotes from some of the World’s most successful writers! Enjoy. The quotes and aphorisms gathered together below range across more than 2,000 years of the practice of the craft. Within these quotes you will find agreement on what constitutes good writerly practice, but you will also find a decent slice of disagreement. One writer plots it all out, right down to the finest details before embarking, while another writer could not begin to work if they knew beyond the next scene. One writer works out meticulous biographical histories of their characters, for another writer it is enough to close their eyes and picture their subject. Some of these quotes below contradict or dispute each other. That’s deliberate. That’s fine. Many ‘story gurus’ or ‘formula writers’ might wish you to believe that their approach to story is the one, that they have cracked the secret and if you follow their approach – and buy their book – your work will be bestselling. But writing is not like that. There are many ways to arrive at the same destination. If there were one single successful approach then literature would be all the poorer for it. The application of formula to practice tends to make results more formulaic. The resulting work would be samey and bland. What are offered below are tools not rules. If a quote strikes a chord with you then think about it, use it. If the quote intuitively offends how you wish to proceed with your work then you are entitled and right to discard it. It is not right for you – someone has offered you a hammer when you need a spade. Only you will know when you read something and think, ‘That’s it! That’s what I’ve been looking for.’ Each writer must collect the twigs to build their own nest and no nest is the same. Don’t feel anxiety because you disagree with Anton Chekov’s approach, or Colette’s approach. What made them Chekov and Colette will not make you into you. Rejoice in the venerable writers and quotes below, enjoy, relax and I hope you find some twigs for your nest. Good Writing Here’s a diverse collection of musings and advice on what makes good writing from many of the best practitioners who have trod the path before you. See if any ring your bell. “The road to hell is paved with adverbs.” ― Stephen King (about) “Write quickly and you will never write well; write well, and you will soon write quickly.” ― Marcus Fabius Quintilianus (about) “Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.” ― Anton Chekhov (about) “Sooner or later every writer evolves his own definition of a story. Mine is: A reflection of life plus beginning and end (life seems not to have either) and a meaning.” ― Mary O’Hara (about) “Comparisons deplete the actuality of the things compared…” ― William S. Wilson (about) “A good story is a dream shared by the author and the reader. Anything that wakes the reader from the dream is a mortal sin.” ― Victor J. Banis (about) “Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very;’ your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.” ― Mark Twain (about) “Read, read, read. Read everything — trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it’s good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out of the window.”― William Faulkner (about) “In writing. Don’t use adjectives which merely tell us how you want us to feel about the thing you are describing. I mean, instead of telling us a thing was “terrible,” describe it so that we’ll be terrified. Don’t say it was “delightful”; make us say “delightful” when we’ve read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers, “Please will you do my job for me.” ― C.S. Lewis (about) “Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader – not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.” ― E. L. Doctorow (about) “Story is metaphor for life and life is lived in time.” ― Robert McKee (about) “Good writing is like a windowpane.” ― George Orwell (about) “In good writing, words become one with things.” ― Ralph Waldo Emerson (about) “All good writing leaves something unexpressed.” ― Christian Nestell Bovee (about) “I believe that writing is derivative. I think good writing comes from good reading.” ― Charles Kuralt (about) “It may be observed of good writing, as of good blood, that it is much easier to say what it is composed of than to compose it.” ― Charles Caleb Colton (about) “The problems of the human heart in conflict with itself… alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.” ― William Faulkner (about) “Good writing can be defined as having something to say and saying it well. When one has nothing to say, one should remain silent. Silence is always beautiful at such times.” ― Edward Abbey (about) “You do an awful lot of bad writing in order to do any good writing. Incredibly bad. I think it would be very interesting to make a collection of some of the worst writing by good writers.” ―William S. Burroughs (about) “By the time I am nearing the end of a story, the first part will have been reread and altered and corrected at least one hundred and fifty times. I am suspicious of both facility and speed. Good writing is essentially rewriting. I am positive of this.” ― Roald Dahl (about) “You don’t write about the horrors of war. No. You write about a kid’s burnt socks lying in the road.”― Richard Price (about) “A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.”― G.K. Chesterton (about) “The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.”― Thomas Jefferson (about) “Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way.” ― Ray Bradbury (about) “Easy reading is damn hard writing.” ― Nathaniel Hawthorne (about)  “The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.” ― Voltaire (about) “It’s not wise to violate the rules until you know how to observe them.” ― T.S. Eliot (about) “If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.” ― Stephen King (about) “Write what will stop your breath if you don’t write.” ― Grace Paley (about) “What is the essence of the art of writing? Part One: Have something to say. Part Two: Say it well.” ― Edward Abbey (about) Character How can collections of words on a page approximate to the living, breathing complex ambiguities that people present in real life? Every writer knows it’s a tough job to even try, but try we must… “Let’s face it, characters are the bedrock of your fiction. Plot is just a series of actions that happen in a sequence, and without someone to either perpetrate or suffer the consequences of those actions, you have no one for your reader to root for, or wish bad things on.” — Icy Sedgwick (about) “The one common thread in all of the books that are falling apart on my shelf? Characters—flawed ones with desires and needs who spend most of the story tripping over their weaknesses in an effort to get what they want.” — Becca Puglisi (about) “You take people, you put them on a journey, you give them peril, you find out who they really are.”― Joss Whedon (about) “Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations.” ― Ray Bradbury (about) “The characters in my novels are my own unrealised possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented.”― Milan Kundera (about) “In displaying the psychology of your characters, minute particulars are essential. God save us from vague generalizations!” ― Anton Chekhov (about) “Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them — in order that the reader may see what they are made of.” ― Kurt Vonnegut (about) “Fictional characters are made of words, not flesh; they do not have free will, they do not exercise volition. They are easily born, and as easily killed off.” ― John Banville (about) “Everyone here seems to have some weird secret or other.” ― Iris Murdoch (about) “When I am writing, I’m very much on the ground, on the same ground my characters are treading.” ―Graham Swift (about) “When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away. ” ― Kurt Vonnegut (about) “Action, reaction, motivation, emotion, all have to come from the characters. Writing a love scene requires the same elements from the writer as any other. ” ― Nora Roberts (about) “The real story is not the plot, but how the characters unfold by it. ” ― Vanna Bonta (about) “My only conclusion about structure is that nothing works if you don’t have interesting characters and a good story to tell. ” ― Harold Ramis (about) “Almost all great writers have as their motif, more or less disguised, the passage from childhood to maturity, the clash between the thrill of expectation and the disillusioning knowledge of truth. ‘Lost Illusion’ is the undisclosed title of every novel.” ― Andre Maurois (about) Plotting A plot is just a string of events, sure, but if it reads like just a string of events then your book is dead in the water. Here, a range of writers offer advice about how make your events meaningful to keep readers turning the page. “A lack of narrative structure, as you know, will cause anxiety.” ― John Dufresne (about) “What I’ve learned about writing is that sometimes less is more, while often more is grander. And both are true.” ― Richelle E. Goodrich (about) “The novel cannot submit to authority.” ― Julian Gough (about) “Of course, the writer can impose control; It’s just a really shitty idea. Writing controlled fiction is called “plotting.” Buckling your seatbelt and letting the story take over, however… that is called “storytelling.” Storytelling is as natural as breathing; plotting is the literary version of artificial respiration.”― Stephen King (about) “I once tried to write a novel about revenge. It’s the only book I didn’t finish. I couldn’t get into the mind of the person who was plotting vengeance.” ― Maeve Binchy (about) “Character is plot, plot is character.” ― F. Scott Fitzgerald (about) “… plot, the absolute line between two points which I’ve always despised. Not for literary reasons, but because it takes all hope away. Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.” ― Grace Paley (about) “Modernist manuals of writing often conflate story with conflict. This reductionism reflects a culture that inflates aggression and competition while cultivating ignorance of other behavioral options. No narrative of any complexity can be built on or reduced to a single element. Conflict is one kind of behavior. There are others, equally important in any human life, such as relating, finding, losing, bearing, discovering, parting, changing. Change is the universal aspect of all these sources of story. Story is something moving, something happening, something or somebody changing.” ― Ursula K. Le Guin (about) “What monster sleeps in the deep of your story? You need a monster. Without a monster there is no story.” ― Billy Marshall (about) “Don’t resist the urge to burn down the stronghold, kill off the main love interest or otherwise foul up the lives of your characters.” ― Patricia Hamill (about) “An author must learn the principles of good storytelling only in order to write better from the heart. ” ― Uri Shulevitz (about) “The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.”― Blaise Pascal (about) “[T]he success of every novel — if it’s a novel of action — depends on the high spots. The thing to do is to say to yourself, “What are my big scenes?” and then get every drop of juice out of them. ”― P.G. Wodehouse (about) Editing You spend the whole first draft being delighted at getting more words down on paper, then as soon as you’ve finished you spend the next few months trying to take word out. As all writers know, editing is a tough game… “If it can be cut out, then CUT IT OUT. Everything non-essential that you can eliminate strengthens what’s left.” ― Alexander Mackendrick (about) “The part you must jettison is not only the best-written part; it also, oddly, that part which was to have been the very point. It is the original key passage, the passage on which the rest was to hang.” ― Annie Dillard (about) “Editing should be, especially in the case of old writers, a counselling rather than a collaborating task. The tendency of the writer-editor to collaborate is natural, but he should say to himself, ‘How can I help this writer to say it better in his own style?’ and avoid ‘How can I show him how I would write it, if it were my piece?” ― James Thurber (about) “No author dislikes to be edited as much as he dislikes not to be published.” ― J. Russell Lynes (about) “The best advice on writing was given to me by my first editor, Michael Korda, of Simon and Schuster, while writing my first book. ‘Finish your first draft and then we’ll talk,’ he said. It took me a long time to realize how good the advice was. Even if you write it wrong, write and finish your first draft. Only then, when you have a flawed whole, do you know what you have to fix.” – ― Dominick Dunne (about) “No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else’s draft.” ― H.G. Wells (about) “I’m writing a first draft and reminding myself that I’m simply shovelling sand into a box so that later I can build castles.” ― Shannon Hale (about) “I’ve found the best way to revise your own work is to pretend that somebody else wrote it and then to rip the living shit out of it.” ― Don Roff (about) “Put down everything that comes into your head and then you’re a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff’s worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.” ― Colette (about) “Whatever in a work of art is not used, is doing harm.” ― C.S. Lewis (about) “I write, “Jane came into the room and sat down on the blue couch,” read that, wince, cross out “came into the room” and “down” and “blue” (Why does she have to come into the room? Can someone sit UP on a couch? Why do we care if it’s blue?) and the sentence becomes “Jane sat on the couch – ” and suddenly, it’s better (Hemingwayesque, even!), although … why is it meaningful for Jane to sit on a couch? Do we really need that? And soon we have arrived, simply, at “Jane”, which at least doesn’t suck, and has the virtue of brevity.” ― George Saunders (about) “Let the reader find that he cannot afford to omit any line of your writing because you have omitted every word that he can spare.” ― Ralph Waldo Emerson (about) “It was like removing layers of crumpled brown paper from an awkwardly shaped parcel, and revealing the attractive present which it contained.” ― Diana Athill (about) “I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter.” ― Blaise Pascal (about) “Put down everything that comes into your head and then you’re a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff’s worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.” ― Colette (about) “No iron can pierce the human heart as chillingly as a full stop placed at the right time.” ― Isaac Babel (about) Inspiration Whoever you are, no matter how motivated or disciplined, sometimes the well is dry. Here’s a collection of quotes from other writers that might inspire you and help to get the wheels turning again. “Imagination is like a muscle. I found out that the more I wrote, the bigger it got.” ― Philip José Farmer (about) “You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.” ― Jack London (about) “Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.” ― John Steinbeck (about) “Write what should not be forgotten.” ― Isabel Allende (about) “Advice? I don’t have advice. Stop aspiring and start writing. If you’re writing, you’re a writer. Write like you’re a goddamn death row inmate and the governor is out of the country and there’s no chance for a pardon. Write like you’re clinging to the edge of a cliff, white knuckles, on your last breath, and you’ve got just one last thing to say, like you’re a bird flying over us and you can see everything, and please, for God’s sake, tell us something that will save us from ourselves. Take a deep breath and tell us your deepest, darkest secret, so we can wipe our brow and know that we’re not alone. Write like you have a message from the king. Or don’t. Who knows, maybe you’re one of the lucky ones who doesn’t have to.” ― Alan Wilson Watts (about) “One should use common words to say uncommon things” ― Arthur Schopenhauer (about) “He asked, “What makes a man a writer?” “Well,” I said, “it’s simple. You either get it down on paper, or jump off a bridge.” ― Charles Bukowski (about) “First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you’re inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won’t. Habit is persistence in practice.” ― Octavia Butler (about) “A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”― Thomas Mann (about) “Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before you begin talking. Aim for the stars. Keep grinning. Be bloody-minded. Argue with the world. And never forget that writing is as close as we get to keeping a hold on the thousand and one things–childhood, certainties, cities, doubts, dreams, instants, phrases, parents, loves–that go on slipping, like sand, through our fingers.” ― Salman Rushdie (about) “The difference between real life and a story is that life has significance, while a story must have meaning. The former is not always apparent, while the latter always has to be, before the end.”  ― Vera Nazarian (about) “A good writer refuses to be socialized. He insists on his own version of things, his own consciousness. And by doing so he draws the reader’s eye from its usual groove into a new way of seeing things.” ― Bill Barich (about) “Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.”  ― George Orwell (about) “How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.” ― Henry David Thoreau (about) Motivation Writing relies hugely on internal resources and personal fortitude and whoever you are you’ll have days when those things are in short supply. Here’s some wisdom to help motivate you and keep the fires burning… “The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize.” ― Robert Hughes (about) “Writing is about resilience and faith. Writing is hard for every last one of us – straight white men included. Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine coal? They do not. They simply dig.” ― Cheryl Strayed (about) “Art is only the means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself.” ― Henry Miller (about) “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”― Robert Frost (about) “There is nothing harder to estimate than a writer’s time, nothing harder to keep track of. There are moments—moments of sustained creation—when his time is fairly valuable; and there are hours and hours when a writer’s time isn’t worth the paper he is not writing anything on.” ― E.B. White (about) “A writer who is a pro can take on almost any assignment, but if he or she doesn’t much care about the subject, I try to dissuade the writer, as in that case the book can be just plain hard labor.” ― Sterling Lord (about) “A novel takes the courage of a marathon runner, and as long as you have to run, you might as well be a winning marathon runner. Serendipity and blind faith faith in yourself won’t hurt a thing. All the bastards in the world will snicker and sneer because they haven’t the talent to zip up their flies by themselves. To hell with them, particularly the critics. Stand in there, son, no matter how badly you are battered and hurt.” ― Leon Uris (about) “Writing is a manual labor of the mind: a job, like laying pipe.” ― John Gregory Dunne (about) “Never ever forget that you enlisted in the ranks – you weren’t press ganged or drafted. Nobody owes you anything – least of all respect for your work – until you’ve earned it with what you put on the page.” ― T.F. Rigelhof (about) “Before I start a project, I always ask myself the following question. Why is this book worth a year of my life? There needs to be something about the theme, the technique, or the research that makes the time spent on it worthwhile.” ― David Morrell (about) “Work like hell! I had 122 rejection slips before I sold a story.”  ― F. Scott Fitzgerald (about) “Since I became a novelist I have discovered that I am biased. Either I think a new novel is worse than mine and I don’t like it, or I suspect it is better than my novels and I don’t like it.” ― Umberto Eco (about) “I can’t blame modern technology for my predilection for distraction, not after all the hours I’ve spent watching lost balloons disappear into the clouds. I did it before the Internet, and I’ll do it after the apocalypse, assuming we still have helium and weak-gripped children.” ― Colson Whitehead (about) There we have it, 99 quotes from some of the World’s most successful authors. What did you think? Have you got any memorable quotes of your own? Head over to the Jericho Townhouse and let us know! Or find more inspiration via a writing podcast.

From Allan Ahlberg to Dr Seuss, picture books matter because they create the foundations of a child’s reading life – and you never know what a difference your own book could make. Once upon a bicycle, so they say, a jolly postman came one day, from over the hills and far away. Or: I do not like green eggs and ham. I do not like them, Sam-I-am! Or:  Silly old Fox, doesn’t he know, there’s no such thing as a Gruffalo. These are just a few of the all-time classics, quotes that stick in your head long after you\'ve stopped reading the books yourself only to come back around when you hear them read to children later in life or even read them yourself to your kids. As such, there’s a timelessness to children’s picture books, which makes them great to write – and a picture book draft is a draft like no other. Read on for valuable tips on how to create a picture book that children will love for generations to come. Tip #1: Write Memorable Characters A sure-fire way to delight children of all ages is to populate your book with joyful characters like the Enormous Crocodile, Winnie the Witch, the Highway Rat, Sam-I-Am, Sir Charlie Stinky Socks, or Spot the Dog. Start by asking yourself if there\'s an animal or idea you feel an affinity for. Then, start to create connections from there! Let’s say you’ll write about a puppy. Maybe from there you’ll think up a chewed-up toy he’s attached to. Or a child (maybe his owner) he wants to follow to school. There’s all sorts of links to be mind-mapping from this. Sometimes, a simpler story is what works best, too. An enormous crocodile who wants a child for dinner (The Enormous Crocodile). A postman delivering letters to the Big Bad Wolf, to the Witch, to Baby Bear, Goldilocks and Cinderella (The Jolly Postman). Aliens who come to earth to wear underpants (Aliens Love Underpants). Also, who will meet who? The jolly Postman meets fairy tale characters. Max meets the Wild Things (Where the Wild Things are). Jemima Puddle-Duck meets a fox (The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck). Mouse meets Gruffalo (The Gruffalo). The very hungry Caterpillar meets chocolate cake, ice-cream cones, pickles and cheese (The Very Hungry Caterpillar). Most children remember iconic characters like the Cat in the Hat as they grow up, long after all the rhythmic intricacies have faded from mind (vital as these are; much as the rhymes of Dr Seuss or Julia Donaldson linger with us, too). Try to give your characters a quirk – a Cat with a hat, Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit with his blue jacket, Aliens who love (and wear) Underpants, or the more unusual fairy tale characters from Roald Dahl’s Revolting Rhymes. Create vivid characters to linger in children’s minds, whom they’ll want to return to. Tip #2: Repetition Speaking of returning, repetition might be discouraged in fiction writing -- but not in picture books. Repetition is a source of huge fun and suspense for children, reeling in attention and building anticipation. In Funny Bones, for example, Allan Ahlberg opens the story with relish: In a dark, dark town there was a dark, dark street, and in the dark, dark street there was a dark, dark house, and in the dark, dark house there were some dark, dark stairs, and down the dark, dark stairs there was a dark, dark cellar, and in the dark, dark cellar … three skeletons lived! By the time we get to those skeletons, we’re very ready to meet them and spend time with them! In The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle, a caterpillar gets hungrier and hungrier. Each day, ‘he was still hungry’. We’re told (and want to know) about his increasing amount of foods and what’s eaten each day, until the caterpillar gets stomach ache. There’s a rhythmic quality to repetition, too, e.g. descriptions in The Gruffalo by Julia Donaldson, where the Gruffalo, in Mouse’s descriptions, has ‘terrible tusks and terrible claws, and terrible teeth in his terrible jaws’. Later he has ‘knobbly knees, and turned-out toes, and a poisonous wart at the end of his nose’. After the build-up, it’s an exciting moment when we and Mouse get face-to-face with the Gruffalo in the woods. Tip #3: Strong Beginnings And Fun Endings It\'s true for any kind of writing, but with children it\'s even more-so: if you don\'t grab the reader right away, they\'re gone. So be sure that your beginning comes out of the gate strong and exciting, giving a sense of the story and the character and the world all in a few lines. And then, when you get to the ending, keep in mind that kids are smarter than they get credit for. Don\'t be afraid of a surprise ending, something that might make them (or their parents) laugh -- because that positive last experience will be the thing that keeps bringing them back to your book over and over again. Tip #4: Rhyme And Rhythm Rhyming in picture books means additional care and work – and you can still create wonderful rhythm in prose without rhyme – yet rhyme is still worth exploring if you’re confident or just passionate about doing this. If poetry is something you\'re familiar with, crack on! If it\'s new to you, let\'s take a moment to explore: The most common rhyme style, the one Shakespeare often used, is called \'iambic pentameter\' -- a line of ten syllables, alternating stressed and unstressed. Think about the sound of a human heart and you\'ve got it: Da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM. That’s all it takes! Ten syllables or five iambic \'feet\' to create your framework. There are other forms of poetic styles you could also try writing, and Stephen Fry’s The Ode Less Travelled is a good book to invest in if you’re keen to be exploring this. You may also like to invest in a copy of The Poet’s Manual and Rhyming Dictionary to help you. Children’s publisher Nosy Crow has written a great blog post on rhyming in children’s books, well worth a read, too. Tip #5: Writing A Good Baddie Not every story needs a villain, but if you\'re thinking about a story that includes one, the best way to write ‘baddies’ and darker elements in picture books is to make these elements comic. Take the scariness out so that children laugh instead. For example, Roald Dahl’s comic gift lies in the mischief of books like The Enormous Crocodile, about a thwarted crocodile looking for a yummy child to eat (before he’s smacked into the sun). Dahl’s crocodile is only funny because he\'s painted as an object of fun. The rest of the jungle hates him, and after the crocodile finds the children, jungle animals appear in turn to warn them to look out. Finally, the elephant hurls the crocodile by his tail up into the sky – where he’s ‘sizzled up like a sausage’. A similar thing happens when the Mouse makes the scary Gruffalo convinced he’s the monster, and ‘now my tummy’s beginning to rumble – my favourite food is – Gruffalo Crumble!\' -- and off the Gruffalo runs. Don’t Eat the Teacher by Nick Ward is also hilarious, even if it wouldn’t very funny in real life. Sammy the Shark happily eats everything on his first day of school because he’s so excited, which translates into hilarity. Skeletons (Funny Bones), witches (Winnie the Witch), monsters (Where the Wild Things are), or vampires and werewolves (Well, I Never!) are absolutely ‘writable’ in picture books. Just remember to translate that darkness into something funny and silly. You need to make your readers laugh. Tip #6: Thinking About Illustration Are you wondering if you need to illustrate your own picture book? A picture book is often a collaborative book between writer and illustrator. Sometimes writers are also illustrators, like Maurice Sendak -- but often, we think of the great duos like Roald Dahl and Quentin Blake, or Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler. If you can\'t draw a lick, don\'t worry! You don\'t always need an illustrator to write your picture book, and a good publisher can match you to the right artist for bringing your story to life. Keep in mind that you should keep the in-text descriptions sparse where you know pictures will be conveying details, too. A reasonable word limit for your picture book should be about 700 words – but that should be enough to give illustrators an idea of what they need to depict. Tip #7: Read It Aloud Whether you\'re writing in rhyme or not, you should read your work aloud as you\'re working on it! After all, most children\'s books are read aloud at one point or another -- by parents, by teachers, by librarians, even by precocious children themselves -- and you\'ll know when you read it what\'s working and what\'s not. If you have them available, it\'s worth it to read other picture books as well. Consider it market research: you\'ll get a sense of what works to you, what excites your ear -- and if your inner child is into your work just like it was into Dr. Seuss or Maurice Sendak (or whomever else!), then you\'re on the right path for sure. Happy writing!! If you\'re looking for a bit more support, consider our guide to writing children\'s books. If you’re further along than that, and in need of editorial feedback for your picture book, you’ve come to the right place, too. We can\'t wait to read your tale (aloud)!

Overall, writers are paid poorly and there is a vast over-production of supply. So professional novelists, for example, earn an average £11,000 for their year’s work, yet even so agents reject 999 in every 1,000 manuscripts that come their way. Screenwriting, to no surprise, is much better paid. The average professional screenwriter in the UK earns perhaps 5 times that meagre sum. (Check data on minimum rates of pay, average payments are well ahead of those minimums.) And we here see plenty of would-be screenwriters bringing us screenplays that range from the visibly-new-at-this-game to the excellent. So, good, right? A bunch of writers choosing to write for a market that might pay enough to give those people a half-decent living? Only not. I’d say that well over 90% of the screenwriters we see come to us with feature scripts: 100 to 120 minutes long, and clearly designed for the big screen. And that market doesn’t exist. I mean, yes, of course new British films come to the screen all the time, and those things have paid something to their screenwriter. All the same: Those British films will often be adaptations, in which case the task will always be given to writers with a track record of some sort;When the films are original, there will nearly always be a writer, director, producer team who collectively act as ‘auteur’: the creative brains behind the film. Those things are nearly always born within a production company, and when they’re not the scriptwriter is almost certainly known – personally and professionally – to the project’s movers and shakers before any contract is ever written;There are bewilderingly few UK production companies that produce a regular slate of features and endure beyond a summer or two. Most production companies are born to service a project, then vanish once that project is either delivered or killed. The only major British exception to that rule is Working Title – but again, you’d struggle to find Working Title films where the scriptwriter was a genuine newbie. And so what, you may ask. Hollywood exists, doesn’t it? It needs scripts, doesn’t it? And yes, of course – but Hollywood teems with writers, good ones, all of whom are there, are networking, and on the spot. As a newbie writer, without a track record, and based in Hull or Roehampton or Donegal or whichever spot you call home, you have an approximately 0.0001% chance of getting your speculative script made into a Hollywood movie. Quite frankly, if you want your work screened, you should simply forget about writing for Hollywood at an early stage in your career. But this post isn’t suggesting that you should stop writing scripts – the opposite, if anything – it’s a plea for you to write for the massive, lucrative, and hungry market that exists right under your nose. Just count the number of hours of TV drama that unfolds on your screens each week. By all means, deduct American imports, but do remember to count every half hour of every soap, every hour of every cop series, every minute of every drama-special. Those things need writers and the British TV industry is actually short of good ones, in a way that Hollywood emphatically is not. I’m writing this post because I recently had a lovely dinner with a former head of ITV drama and she told me that there is a shortage of good writing talent in the UK. The big networks and big production companies are actually eager to find, recruit and pay new talent. The head of a big and successful UK TV and film agency told me the exact same thing: that almost every successful screenwriter in the UK has their roots firmly in TV. Another film agent told me that, so hard-pressed are they to find good scriptwriting talent, that they often raid the stage industry to find it. In other words, if you are a committed, talented and professional screenwriter, there is a real appetite for your work. That appetite will exist today, tomorrow and in ten years’ time. What’s more, if you build any kind of track record in TV – even if it’s churning out scripts for Holby City – you will start to build the kind of profile and contacts that means those feature projects, that you still really want, will come your way: because you will now be the sort of insider for whom good things happen. Even hearing these arguments, some screenwriters remain persistent. I think that resistance normally tracks back to one of two issues, namely: The film industry is more glamorous. And it is, yes. But it’s more glamorous because it’s less industrial. And you need a proper industry, with cash, expertise and commitment, to support your craft. You can get the glamour down the road, once you have a record that enables you to make the transition. (And, by then, you won’t think the film industry is all that much more glamorous anyway.)Feature films allow a writer more creative scope to be intelligent. But actually, the opposite is true. Those dramas you adore – Westworld, Game of Thrones, The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, The Wire and all the rest – are hyper-intelligent, challenging and wonderful dramas because they’re on TV and because they have the space and the time to expand into something wonderful. I know I’ve just named US dramas, but that’s sort of the point. British TV is short of top writing talent and when it finds it in programs like Sherlock, or Doctor Who, the results are fantastic. So. Screenwriters of Britain, write for TV. Think up a TV series or drama that will compel an audience. Your career will start with that script.

We like agents. Like and respect them. Their job is exceptionally demanding: nearly all reading work is done outside of office hours and since agents read a lot, that means they’re working late pretty much every night. And they take risks. When an agent takes on a new writer, they’re committing upfront to a lot of work which will only be repaid if the agent is correct that the writer’s manuscript is or becomes saleable, with the agent’s help. Given how fierce the competition is, it’s impressive that agents have the confidence and commitment to keep fishing from the slushpile – yet fish they do. What’s more, an agent’s skills are very varied. Literary excellence lies at the heart of things, of course, but they need to be as pushy as car salesmen when it comes to auctioning a manuscript, as tough as lawyers when it comes to negotiating a contract, as silky smooth as a diplomat when it comes to smoothing ructions between authors and publishers and, of course, a good agent always has a firm strategic overview of their client’s career development. So – we repeat – we like and respect agents in general, but there are always exceptions. Agents who are no good, or decent agents who mess up now and again. We’re not going to name names in this post but there are patterns that do recur and which really, really shouldn’t. When Agents Mess Up – The Top 7 Horror Stories #1: The Three-Year-Old Goodbye Sometimes, things don’t work out. That’s fine. An agent takes on an author. Tries to sell the manuscript. Can’t. Hates the second MS that the author produces. Decides that enough is enough. That story – or variants on it – are common enough. And that’s okay. Picking manuscripts from the slushpile IS a chancy business and agents can’t get it right all the time. But it matters how an agent breaks the news. A professional client phones the author and says, ‘Look, I loved your first MS and made an honest effort to sell it. I didn’t succeed. In all honesty, I don’t like this second MS and I’m not sure that I’m still the right agent for you. I wish you the very best of luck in your future career, but I think we need to part company.’ Obviously no author loves that. On the contrary, any normal author will obviously feel upset and alarmed. But at least the conversation is direct, truthful and non-accusatory. It is, in fact, a professional way to break bad news. What we hate – and what is far, far too common – is that agents break the bad news in incredibly bad and stupid ways. The classic version of this is that the author emails the agent. No answer. Politely reminds the agent that they had a question, and asks for a response. No answer. Repeats the reminder, pointing out (still politely) that the question is (a) important and (b) still unanswered. At which point the agent tantrums back, ‘Well, if you keep hounding me like that, I think it’s pretty clear you no longer trust me as an agent, and without trust, what are we? GOODBYE!’ [And slams phone down, forever.] That’s not okay. It’s just not how any professional behaves ever. Yet we do hear stories along those lines at least once a month, and involving numerous agents, some of whom work at very well known and prestigious agencies. For sure, sometimes the author in question has been too pushy, or even crass, in demanding excessive amounts of the agent’s time. But not always. Sometimes the agent has simply failed to deliver bad news in a professional way. That’s not fine. How often does this happen? Often. It’s the complaint we hear most frequently.How bad is it? 3/5 bad, where 5 is worst. #2: Agents Don’t Communicate Key Info Agents are agents. You – the writer – are the principal. That means that while your agent may execute business on your behalf, they are only ever a proxy for you. And obviously, you’re nicely brought up and you won’t ask stupid, excessive or intrusive questions. But you do, for example, have a perfect right to know things like this: – how many publishers have seen my work?– which editors at those publishers did you send it to?– why – briefly – did you choose those editors/publishers?– what (roughly, and maintaining any necessary confidences) did those editors say in response? It’s YOUR work and you have every right to know those answers. Indeed, you shouldn’t really need to ask those questions: it should be completely routine for agents to discuss those things with you. You may, of course, choose to say, ‘Look, you know this area vastly better than I do. I trust your judgement, just go out there and do what you can.’ But if you ask the questions mentioned – or others of equal significance – then you should damn well get answers. Yet some agents are feeble about giving answers. Again, not okay. How common? Fairly common – much more so than it should be.How bad? 4/5 #3: Agents Don’t Guide You Through The Publication Process You’re an industry newbie. Your agent isn’t. So a non-negotiable part of their job is to hold your hand in your journey to publication. That doesn’t mean you get to talk over every tiny detail with them: agents have limited time and you need to be sober about how much time and attention you (and your particular project) can demand. That said, we recently heard about an author who had never been to a meeting with their publisher, and hadn’t even seen their book cover prior to publication. That’s appalling behaviour by the publisher, of course, but an agent should not have allowed that to happen. It’s not okay. Ever. Under any circumstances. How common? Very rare, fortunately.How bad? 5/5 #4: Not Properly Considering An Author’s Priorities At Auction What does an author want from a book deal? Well, publication certainly. Money, yes. But what else? Might you want a prestigious publisher? Or an editor with whom you have excellent personal chemistry. Or one who has a more holistic and flexible view of your likely career path than another. In short, you may have numerous motivations, only one of which is cash. And your agent has to respect that. He or she needs to get the best available offers, then lay them in front of you and ask: which is it to be? Obviously you’ll rely on your agent’s intelligence and advice in making that choice. You’ll want to meet, or at least speak to, your putative editor. Then you’ll make your decision taking everything into account, not just the money. Most agents we know will totally respect this. Indeed, if you probed them about it, they’d suggest – rightly, in our view – that if Publisher A offers 10% less cash than Publisher B, but is a better fit in all other respects, that ‘lower’ offer would prove more lucrative in the long run, as your career prospects will be better. So most agents will respect your non-financial motivations and will work hard to find the right fit as well as the right cash. But not all agents. Again, we heard about one agent recently who boasted to a senior publisher that she never allowed her clients take anything but the highest advance. She made that seem like a feat of machismo, of negotiating prowess. But that’s absurd. It’s terrible agenting and it betrays the client. It shouldn’t happen. How often? Hard to know. We think rare, but we could be wrong.How bad? 2/5 #5: Talking Crap In Public Most agents we know are open, approachable and warmly encouraging of new talent. That extends even to those senior agents who, realistically, aren’t going to get most of their new clients from the slushpile. But even those guys know that some of the biggest stars on their roster started out as total unknowns, and they respect the huge community of unknown writers toiling away out there. But. There are also agents who – in public, and to audiences containing wannabe authors – speak incredibly disdainfully of unpublished authors. When agents do that, it’s incredibly corrosive. The stories instantly spread on the internet and a false, but highly destructive, meme gets spread that agents hate writers. That the industry is snobby and exclusive. That agents are always secretly laughing behind the backs of the as-yet-unpublished. Our Festival of Writing is a place for agents to meet writers, offer feedback on work, mix and mingle, answer questions. That helpfulness, that warmth is the real truth about agenting, but one snobby and stupid comment can destroy those good impressions in a moment. We don’t like those attitudes and we wish they would vanish. How often? Rare, it just gets highly reported.How bad? 1/5 [It’s normally only a moment of stupidity.] #6: Consorting With Muggers Some agents have ties with vanity publishers – the old-fashioned sort who demand stupid money upfront for a product that they know damn well will never sell in any meaningful quantity. We have no problem with self-pub per se, but for almost all purposes these days the natural entry route is e-publishing. That’s cheap (or even free) and reaches a massive audience. The idea that agents, of all people, should be inviting writers to hook up with vanity publishers is simply disgraceful, yet we know at least one agent who has a habit of doing just that. How common? Not too common, thankfully.How bad? 5/5 This behaviour is utterly unethical in our view. #7: Charging Reading Fees No literary agency should ever charge you to read your book, to send it out to publishers, or levy any other compulsory upfront fee. This matters because agents are kept honest by having to work on commission. If they think your book isn’t going to make it with publishers, they won’t make money from it, so they will politely reject your work. If they could make a few bucks just by stringing you along, then unscrupulous ‘agents’ would no doubt do just that. Luckily, the practice of charging reading fees is exceptionally uncommon these days. We can think of one US-based scammer and two UK-based ‘agencies’ operating like this in the last ten years. And fortunately, the agent-as-scam business model doesn’t work: the scammers always go broke. How often? Very rare.How bad? 4/5 Oh, and we know we promised you seven ways that agents can fail, but here’s one last one: a bonus to you for reading so far. (Bonus) #8: Agents Demand Exclusivity And Then Never Do Anything Sometimes agents demand your manuscript in a burst of excitement, ask exclusivity as they read it, and then, nothing. Nothing at all. An echoing void. There’s probably not much more to that behaviour than poor time management, but it can really mess up your life. The good news here is that you don’t have to let it. First, you should never offer exclusivity for more than a week. Secondly, we’d gently suggest that you don’t offer exclusivity at all. If an agent wants your work, there’s no reason why they shouldn’t compete for it. (It’s different if an agent is working on a set of suggested editorial notes: then it IS reasonable for them to ask for something in exchange, like exclusivity.) And if you feel you’re being ignored, then don’t do nothing. After a couple of weeks has gone by, just drop a simple note that says you want to go on seeking representation and, while you’d warmly welcome that agent’s involvement, you will be going out to other parties as from Monday, or whenever. Don’t pick a fight. Just make it clear that this pause is not forever. Any half-decent agent will totally respect your right to do that, so don’t be afraid to do so. How common? Yep, pretty common, we’re sorry to say.How bad? 1/5 – you can always just walk away. The AAA (or Association of Authors’ Agents) One final point. Some writers look at membership of the Association of Authors’ Agents as being a stamp of approval. A sign that your interests will be protected. And that’s not really so. The AAA is a perfectly fine organisation, but it is an industry body whose task is to protect the interests of agents and amplify their voice. It is NOT primarily there to protect you; on the contrary, it’s primarily there to look after agents. Yes, it does have a rule against agencies which charge reading fees, but the way that rule operates disqualifies excellent agents like John Jarrold (his site) because John also works as an editorial consultant. In other words, we’re not quite sure that the one clear and useful writer-protecting rule actually functions as it ought to. When we’ve raised matters such as agents who recommend authors to vanity publishers to the AAA, their approach has been a polite shrug. It is not their policy to intervene on agent/author ethical matters except in extreme cases, and those cases apparently do not include suggesting that authors waste their money with charlatans. Again: we don’t have a beef with the AAA, and its membership includes virtually every reputable agency in London, but be aware of its limits. As a writer, you need to choose an agent you get on well with, and who likes your work. You need to work professionally with that agent and be prepared to move on if it becomes clear that the agent is not dealing with you as they should. Most literary agents are great and you are not likely to have a problem, but we hope this list gives you some idea of what to look out for and how to cope. What problems have you had? What would you want to warn people about?

In this guest post, Anastasia defines the difference between erotica and pornography, justifying what she writes and why. If you’re an aspiring writer of erotica, this is the post for you. Is Porn Good For You? There was a debate by an organisation called Intelligence Squared at the Royal Institution last Tuesday 23rd April where the motion was ‘pornography is good for us: without it we would be a far more repressed society.’ I didn’t attend the debate itself, but apparently at the outset 60% of the audience supported this motion, and by the end this had only reduced to 50%. Germaine Greer opposed it, arguing that pornography doesn’t rescue us from repression, it feeds off it, because without some form of repression there would be no pornography. Either way, it looks as if we – or at least the intelligentsia sitting in a debating chamber – are still equally divided in our opinions. I wonder how such a debate would go if it was enacted by parents, teachers, therapists, criminologists and so on. We live in a society where we are lucky to have access to whatever literature or images we choose, but as an adult I choose to avoid going anywhere near the troubling modern day, dead-eyed porn in all its blatant, fleshy, garishly-lit, visual crudity. It’s starting to make Emmanuelle look like Mary Poppins and it terrifies the life out of most parents. So had I been debating this issue I would have gone further and suggested that even the word ‘repression’ is surely outmoded in this day and age in which case so should porn be, that is, why do we apparently still ‘need’ it? Far from liberating us or taking us away into fantasies, it merely takes sex, something that is beautiful, if basic, and turns it something ugly, brutish or even violent at best, and at worst is starting to damage and frighten the young, evolving minds that watch it. Differences Between Erotica and Porn Some might say this is rich coming from a writer of erotica, but the two prime words I have just used are ‘watch’ and ‘writer’. One of the many tags that irritated me about the Fifty Shades of Grey phenomenon was its description as ‘mummy porn’, which, without getting too heavy, seemed to link two opposing words in an extremely unpleasant way. The writer of it happened to be a mother, and the readers were often mothers, but the only mother in the narrative is an abusive, drug-taking prostitute in the hero’s back story. Similarly, the ‘porn’ involved in the story relates to the use of domination, punishment and sex toys (albeit in a consensual relationship), but then the book is also described as erotica, alongside commercial pornography. So, which is it? Erotica, or porn? In my view, it can’t be both. Stimulation Over Sexual Gratification I am not a natural debater – I tend to get heated, emotional and as you can see from this piece, opinionated – but if I am challenged on the basis that I’ve written some pretty experimental sexual practices in some of my earlier work, I prefer to simplify matters for myself and for my audience by making a stark distinction. To me, porn is immediate, unimaginative, visual, and predominantly male-orientated. Erotica seeks to arouse through the written word and imagination, and is primarily by women, for women. It’s the difference between brutality and sensuality. Insult and compliment. Relationship and encounter. Consent and imposition. It\'s something that has literary and artistic value. Porn seeks to lower, erotica to elevate. Porn is imposed, violent, debasing. Erotica celebrates sex within an adult, and with the genre of ‘erotica romance’ catching on, increasingly intense, romantic relationships. An unlikely champion of this viewpoint was D.H. Lawrence. Recently, preparing for my erotica workshop, I re-read parts of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and realised that the ‘obscenity’ in it relates more to the context, the language used, and the times in which it was written, rather than the explicit yet tender descriptions of the sex itself. In Conclusion... I suppose in conclusion that if I was going to put my money where my mouth was, I’d have to imagine my teenage son’s reaction if he read one of my books. Mostly he’d snap the book shut as soon as he realised what was going on, but if he did read it more closely he would see that everything happening was part of an intense, loving journey between consenting adults. The worst that could happen is that he’d be deeply embarrassed, not deeply damaged.

A while back, I completed my fourth Fiona Griffiths novel. The publisher – those nice folks at Orion – liked the book and it was published. So far, so good. Still, both my editor and I felt the book just felt a bit long. There was nothing redundant or superfluous in it, just the whole book needed to be a little shorter. It was a ship dragging a sea-anchor. Nothing needed to be rebuilt. We just had to reduce the drag. This post is about how to edit a first draft novel, but based on an actual example of an author (me) going through that process, using my manuscript by way of example. The book was 136,500 words when I delivered it, but I have just finished a process of cutting and re-editing that has taken it down to 131,000 words. Since my changes included about 750 words of additional text, that means I’ve trimmed a total of somewhat more than 6,000 words, or about 5% of the novel. (Are you thinking that’s quite long for a thriller? Well, yes, it is. You can get a guide to average novel word counts here, but suffice to say, my work does tend to live at the long end of average. I’d save a lot of work if I learned how to write shorter books!) This post will share how I did that. What kind of cuts I made, the other adjustments that ensued, the thought processes involved. Before we get into the detail (and these things are all about detail), three things. This was my ninth published novel, and my thirteenth or fourteenth book. A first draft by a new writer is often able to lose 10% quite easily. It’s not uncommon for 20-30% to be a more accurate target. New Writers Rule #1 Be ambitious when it comes to cutting material.You’re not aiming to lose content, necessarily – just verbiage.A 12 word sentence could become just a 9 word sentence?That’s the same as cutting 30,000 words from a 120K word novel! Second, the draft I first delivered to my publisher had already been edited hard. Not just for length, but for flow, atmosphere, plot logic, characterisation, dialogue, beauty, everything. Although the emphasis in this post is on how to cut a novel, this post is just about one small slice of the whole process. New Writers Rule #2 When it comes to the self-editing process, everything is up for grabs.Everything.Plot, characters, pacing, twists, settings. Everything.There’s nothing sacred. Every little element has to contribute – or get changed. Third, it’s worth bearing in mind the narrator in what follows is my little Welsh detective, Fiona Griffiths, who has, according to one reviewer, ‘some of the most memorably staccato narration in the genre’. In other words, she likes short sentences, clipping verbs or pronouns where it would be more normal to retain them. That’s her voice. You do not have to follow suit. In other words, the decisions I make need to be taken in that Griffithsian context. Your decisions will be made in the context of your voice, your characters, your market, your story. New Writers Rule #3 Don’t follow my rules.Make your own! Enough preamble. Let’s look at some cuts. Again, the examples are taken from my actual edits of my actual manuscript . . . Example Edit: Description of Scramble to Base of Cliff Here big chunks are dropping out. Some of it is simply about removing surplus. (We didn’t need the names of six different colours of rock or lichen, for example. We didn’t need to know exactly how far Fiona had soaked herself.) But notice how the scene becomes better as a result. All the pieces were there before, but the assembly was a bit slipshod. This tighter format makes the atmospherics work better, even though there’s actually less atmospheric language. But some of the cuts also had to do with a willingness to trust the reader. So, in the first version, my narrator has said, in effect, “Look, I’ve seen the crime scene photos and I know I’m in the right spot.” The second version just drops all that. Most readers won’t even wonder how Fiona knows where to stand. Those that do can probably be trusted to think, “Oh, I guess there’d be file photos, something like that.” And notice the tiny changes. “Just about practical” becomes “manageable”. That’s a saving of just two words, but I’d say that a full third of my cuts were probably made up of such tiny things. Here are a couple more examples of tiny cuts. There were hundreds, even thousands of such things through the new draft: Here, the sense of ‘can’t see anything’ is adequately reflected in Fiona’s question, so the sentence can go. Three words saved. Yummy. And, before we move on, just one more example of tiny: One word saved. Hooray. Overall, it was rare that I came across passages (like the first passage above) that I could really hack into. Much more common was a host of small or tiny changes that cumulated to something bigger. In total, Microsoft Word reckons I made 3400 changes between the first draft and the second. Now, you can maybe quibble about the way it counts, but the point is still good. You can cut a lot of words by making a lot of small changes. It’s hard work, but you’re a writer. And work is fun. Example Edit: Description of Crime Photo Now peek at this: The very first passage was taken, not from an action scene exactly, but one with real vibrancy all the same: a quest to see if an accidental death might really be a suicide. The chunk above, however, comes from one of those scenes that all novels have aplenty. Ones that are necessary to the story, but which don’t have real dramatic frisson. So the cuts above were aimed at simply reducing word count. Not too far, of course: we still need to ‘meet’ Emmett and to feel the atmosphere of that meeting. If I’d cut too far, the text could have felt economical but bland. But still. We didn’t need that sentence starting, ‘I’d have preferred …’. And yes, that sentence does do something to characterise Fiona Griffiths, but her character is all over this novel, anyway. So keeping a sentence like that in a scene that wants to be shorter made no sense. Out it went. Example Edit: Prison Description The same kind of logic applied here: The deleted material is perfectly fine, but it characterises a location that isn’t used in the scene. Fiona encounters her ex-convict friend in the car park, not the waiting room, so I left in the bit that talks about the car park, cutting the rest. Truth is, I think I was writing myself into the prison scene with that stuff about the waiting area. You’re welcome to write yourself into the scene – just remember to delete fluff. And even that bit in the car park is a wee bit tightened. Example Edit: Getting the Rhythms Right You also need to realise that you’re seldom just cutting, even if cutting word count is your only mission. Here’s a small example of what I mean. (But again: this is all about detail.) Now all I’ve done there is delete the six words about sailing boats. (Not worth doing? But six words is 0.1% of my total reduction target! That’s massively worth it.) But you’ll notice that the bit about the Bay now jumps to the previous paragraph. No actual words have changed but, even for the staccato Ms Griffiths, that “Views …” sentence didn’t have the muscle to comprise a paragraph all on its own, so I cut the para break and the text flows better. You have to be alert to those rhythmical things all the time. Here’s another example: That first deletion (‘all’) is simply a tidying up thing. It makes the sentence shorter, yes, but it also makes it better. I’d have made the change, even if I weren’t on a hunt for word count. But notice the next bit. I deleted the sentence ‘Like the efficient …’ because I wanted to compress this (not-very-high-octane) scene, but then having done so, the repetition of the word ‘finish’ would have been too much. So the first instance goes. And the rhythm now works again: the staccato four word sentence (‘neat, swift, etc.’), followed by one that sets up the reaction shot – and a teeny bit of tension as to how Jackson will respond. Example Edit: Increasing Sentence Force And as you cut text, you’ll find you get sensitised to other little points of detail. Ones like this, for example: You’ll notice that that’s three words cut, but three words added. There’s no alteration in meaning, nor have I even fiddled about with the sentence’s key flavour-giving words (ie: best-known, king, obscure). So why make the change? The answer is that the starts and ends of sentences have more power than the middles. A sentence that ends ‘ … not the most obscure either’ is just a little less forceful than one that says ‘… nor is he the most obscure.’ I changed the sentence so that the weight could lie in the final word, not the penultimate one. Example Edit: Getting your Scene / Chapter Endings Right A similar kind of point lies behind this cut: This is the end of a chapter. The first version still leaves Fiona’s question nicely mysterious – but the last four, very short, paragraphs don’t really add any more spice than simply ending the chapter at ‘And look, there’s something else.’ Ending early and arriving late is a very good rule to remember when checking your chapter constructions. Are you getting in as close as possible to the dramatic action? Are you leaving as soon as possible thereafter? And do note that ‘dramatic action’ means anything at all which increases the story pressure in the mind of the reader. Fiona’s final question blips that pressure up a notch (what is she asking, what does she want?), so the best place to finish the scene is right there, with the reader mid-blip. What Next? Since this is a long post already, that’s probably the place to leave it. But don’t feel you have to struggle alone with your novel. We have excellent editors ready to help you identify and fix the issues in your novel. If you want help understanding the various types of editorial service available, you can find a complete (and opinionated) guide here. A useful editing resource page (via Kindlepreneur) can be found here. And as you get close to the moment of actually Getting Your Manuscript Out There, you probably want to read our guide on how to get a literary agent and our complete literary agent FAQs page here. Or, if you\'re ready to get the ball rolling with agents, but just need a little push, try our Agent Submission Pack Review for some detailed professional advice. If it\'s your manuscript that you want a little help with, try our copyediting services or a manuscript assessment.

You’ve been there. I’ve been there. We’ve all been there: the one-third slump, when a manuscript runs out of steam maybe thirty-thousand words in. Something about the story simply isn’t working. So what’s gone wrong? When I first started out as a writer, I read up on the different approaches used by novelists I admired. I found that many of them, particularly Stephen King, didn’t like to plan things out. They were seat-of-the-pants writers, who liked to come up with a situation, then watch where their characters took them. For such writers, part of the pleasure of writing was the sheer unpredictability involved. All well and good, but it took me a long time to work out that this wasn’t the right approach for me. Over the next several years, I started and failed to finish a ridiculous number of stories and novels. I knew the characters, the basic story, and the conflicts. What I didn’t have was a clear enough idea where the story went after a certain point. This continued to be a concern even when I got my first book contract. Although my first two novels, Angel Stations and Against Gravity, were well-received, I was never quite satisfied with the plot in either. I became highly stressed while trying to find the direction of the story in each. And so, when it came to writing my third novel, I took a radically different approach. Whenever I pitch a book to my publishers, I’m required to provide a rough outline of the story. This time, I determined to write a much more detailed synopsis than before, but for my benefit rather than that of my publishers. I wanted to be absolutely sure not only how the book started, but exactly how it would end. I broke the story down on a chapter-by-chapter basis until I had approximately six thousand words of text. Then I started writing what later became my third novel, Stealing Light. I hit a one-third slump anyway, despite all my planning. I found what had sounded good in the synopsis wasn’t necessarily panning out in the actual manuscript. I suspect this happens even for those of you who do plan your novels. So I stopped writing and, for the next four or five weeks, did nothing but revise that synopsis. I made a point of not worrying about my deadline. By the time I finished those revisions, the synopsis had ballooned to a little over twenty-four thousand words — one quarter the length of an average novel. I had every little detail absolutely nailed down, as well as having made major revisions to some of the principal characters. It occurred to me during this that all those seats-of-the-pants writers were being a touch disingenuous about their writing process. Either they did plan out their stories, but kept it all in their head, or their offices were filled with a vast number of unfinished stories and manuscripts. Both, I think, are true. When I write editorial reports on writers’ manuscripts, time and again I find that a novel hasn’t been planned in sufficient depth, and I sometimes wonder if it’s because the author read the same interviews I did when I was young — interviews with writers like Stephen King, who can produce hundreds of thousands of words of text every year, without fail, even if much of that effort winds up in the bin. Writers like King are the exception, I believe, rather than the rule. The rest of us, in order to write a saleable story, must instead plan everything out in as much detail as possible before we start writing a novel. Think of it as building a roadmap; without the map, you become lost in the woods, but with the map, you can see not only where you came from, but where you’re going. Without the map, you might be able to find your way out of the woods eventually, but it might take you far, far longer, and the journey might be considerably more frustrating and much less fun. And what about if, like me, you find even with that map — that outline — your story still isn’t coming together in those early stages? Do what I did: stop writing the book, and rework the synopsis instead. Treat those first thirty-thousand words as a kind of testbed for your ideas. Use it to figure out what does work, and what doesn’t. Give yourself permission to play around, to develop alternate paths for the story to develop. Treat the synopsis as an end in itself, and take satisfaction in developing its twists and turns. Allow yourself as much time as necessary to do this, and don’t even think about starting work on a book unless you know how it ends. Don’t believe writers who tell you doing this can ‘kill’ the story for you: just because it’s true for them doesn’t mean it is for you, and you could save yourself weeks or months of frustration. That third novel of mine, Stealing Light, was an enormous success, and my ‘breakout’ novel. It was also my first book to be issued in hardback, and was soon followed by two sequels. I attribute this almost entirely to the care and attention I took in plotting every twist and turn. Ever since then I still stop at roughly the one-third mark in a manuscript to revise and alter the synopsis, based on what is and isn’t working. Instead of an object of frustration, let that one-third slump become an opportunity for inspiration.

Short and sweet, here are my top ten tips for writing crime fiction and thrillers that will please the reader and make publishers reach for their chequebooks. 1. Know The Market Read very widely. As many authors as possible, not as many books. If you’ve read one book by Patricia Cornwell or Linwood Barclay, then move on. You know their prose, their style. Find what else is out there. That means also reading the classics, knowing genre history, and reading plenty of fiction in translation, too. It also means reading relevant non-fiction. If you’re writing political espionage thrillers, for example, you need to know the political, military and security background. If you don’t, your readers will, and you’ll be caught out. 2. Understand Where The Leading Edge Lies The biggest names (think Coben, Rankin, Reichs) are not the most current. They built their reputations years back. Try to locate the sexiest (i.e. bestselling, most praised, most innovative, prize-winning) debut novels. That’s what editors are buying today. That’s the market you’re competing in. 3. Don’t Just Trot Out Old Clichés You’ve got a serial killer, have you? A terrorist bomb plot? Be tough with yourself. These tropes are tired. They can work if you handle them in a new or dazzling way, but the old ways are no longer enough. 4. Be Complex Your plot needs intricacy and a surprising number of well-planned, well-executed twists. Modern crime authors have become great at developing complex but plausible plots, and because modern thriller writers have become so adept at delivering endless chains of impossible-to-see-it-coming twists, you can’t afford to be less than devilishly clever yourself. With rare exceptions, simple no longer sells. 5. Stay With The Darkness Your book must be dark and tough. That’s your entry ticket to the genre. What you do there can be very varied, but cute, cosy crime is a very limited market now. 6. Don’t Forget Jeopardy Crime novels now are also thrillers. It’s not fine for the detective to solve the mystery and explain it all to a hushed and respectful audience. On the contrary, he or she must live in fear of his or her life. It’s got to be thrilling, as well as intellectually satisfying. 7. Concentrate On Character Crime and thriller plots are easily forgettable, and often feel very samey anyway. Characters like Elvis Cole, Hannibal Lecter, on the other hand, never leave us. If you find a strong character, and do everything else reasonably competently, then you quite likely have fiction that’ll sell. 8. Write Well Bad writing will almost certainly kill your chances. You don’t have to be flowery. You do have to be competent. 9. Be Economical Thrillers need to be taut. Check your book for needless chapters, your chapters for needless paragraphs, your paragraphs for needless sentences, and your sentences for needless words. Then do it all over again. Twice. 10. Be Perfectionist Very good isn’t good enough. Dazzling is the target. Being tough with yourself is the essential first ingredient. Getting someone else to be tough with you is quite possibly the second. I said ten tips, didn’t I? Here’s an eleventh: 11. Don’t Give Up Be persistent. You learn by doing, and the more you write, the better you’ll be. Think about building your skills, engaging with the industry, or getting editorial advice. All those things will enhance your writing, too. As ever, best of luck!

17 Tips (And Every One Of Them Awesome) If you are planning to e-publish your book on Amazon and elsewhere – as an ebook and/or in print – you’re going to need a cover. And needless to say, getting that cover right can make a huge difference to sales. The right cover can make the difference between a book that works, and one that falls flat. But commissioning a cover design from an online book cover maker is not easy, and can easily become very expensive. I’m Harry Bingham, and I make six-figures annually self-publishing my work. And truthfully? I think commissioning your first book cover is hard. And it’s especially hard when you’re starting out and don’t have a lot of moolah to spend at a book cover design agency. So what follows are the tips I’ve derived from my own personal experience – and from hanging out in the industry a long time, and seeing a lot, a lot of successes and failures. Hold on to your hats, and let’s go design that cover. Where Do You Find a Book Cover Designer? First up, where do you source your designer? There are basically five possible answers to that question. 1. You Google “Book cover designer” (or similar) Nothing wrong with that. Do some proper research though: it may well be that the right person for you is on page #5 of a set of Google search results. Remember that Google ranks websites, not book cover design quality! Remember too that designers tend to have specific genres that they’re most comfortable with. So a designer who’s great for upmarket women’s fiction may be awful for genre romance . . . and may not even want to touch space-opera type SF. 2. You Google “Pre-made book covers” (or similar) Same idea, except that here you’ll be buying covers that pro designers have designed for a particular commission, but then not gone on to use. So you can get pro covers for (typically) $49 to $99, some of which are just excellent. A good site to start with is Self-Pub Book Covers. I’m not always convinced they have the best material out there, but they certainly have a lot of it! 3. You Run a Competition 99 Designs offers a design-based solution for your book cover needs. So does Design Crowd. So do others in that arena. The idea here is that you set a prize. Different designers from around the world compete for your prize. You award it to the design you love the most (or pay nothing if none of the designs pleases you.) Don’t low-ball this, though. A bottom-end sized prize will get you bottom-end type entries. And you don’t want bottom end. 4. You Create your Own Design Probably using Canva, or its cooler sister, Colorcinch. Those two tools are, by a country mile, the best design-tool-for-idiots out there. There are plenty of templates, a lot of scope within the free packages, and they\'re fun to play with. So what’s not to like? 5. You Use a Friend or Relative And I don’t mean Auntie Ira, who likes messing about on her laptop now and again. I mean a friend or relative who has actual design skills (as in: makes a living as a pro designer in some way.) All of those options can work. In the rest of this piece, I’m assuming you are actually commissioning someone . . . but even if you use one of the other routes, the basic tips & advice apply in just the same way. Two last comments: Golden Rule #1Get this right! If the first design isn’t good enough, spend more money.Almost good-enough isn’t good enough. Scary, right? Because self-publishing book covers matter a lot, because the quality of competition (from both indies & trad publishers) has increased, and because design processes are necessarily open-ended. But that brings us to the second, and more reassuring rule: Golden Rule #2Your first cover is (nearly always) your most expensive How come? Because that’s where you evolve the look which will apply to all the titles you ever do. So, for example, my book covers are stark black-and-white images, with bright text. The basic look is fixed. The fonts are fixed. The only real variables left are (a) what image to use? and (b) what colour are we going to go through this time. Some of my later-in-series covers have taken just a couple of hours to build at a fraction of the original cost. OK. Preamble done. Now let’s turn to the design guidelines themselves . . . 1. Don’t Be Too Specific Unless you are a designer (and maybe even then), you should avoid thinking that you know what you want. You probably don’t. The perfect book cover will be one that you only know when you see it. If your design brief is hyper-detailed (“I want a kitchen table and a silver coffee pot, and an range cooker in front of a cottage window …”), you really aren’t giving the designer any room to use their best imagination. 2. Don’t Be Too Literal Let’s say your book is called ‘The Parting’, you might be tempted to depict a parting on the front cover. So you might go for two lovers, with outstretched arms, torn apart. Maybe you might even have a tear-line ripping down the middle of the book. That says Parting, doesn’t it? So it must be a good cover, right? Well, actually, no, not at all. It’s way too literal. You need a cover to convey a mood, not a word. So a much better cover would be a cafe table with two seats, but only one cup of coffee. Perhaps one person (a woman, probably) in the shot, but only half seen. And that gives you all you need. The title – which conveys loss – and a picture which in that context tells you something about the post-parting atmosphere. Beautiful, simple – and oblique. Anything too direct will almost certainly feel heavy handed. 3. Do Be Specific About Atmosphere Your cover designer is not going to read your book, so they won’t know about setting, atmosphere, mood, protagonist or anything else, unless you tell them. So let’s take that idea we just discarded (the coffee pot and an range cooker one), a good way of sending the right kind of message to the designer might be as follows: “This book is a quiet domestic drama set in rural Ireland. The protagonist is a 34-year-old Irish woman, living quietly alone in a pleasant rural cottage.” You might even want to offer more texture than that, but you can see what you’re trying to do. You’re giving the kind of guidance that might indeed end up with coffee-pots, range cookers, cottage-windows, but which also might express the same kind of domesticities in a million other ways, too. Give the designer creative freedom within boundaries that you set. The boundaries give you what you want. The freedom gives you the best possible ideas. Here for exampke is just such a cosy/domestic cover that evokes exactly the right ideas, but without the specific images we first thought of. 4. Do Offer Sample Images By all means, include a section in your design brief which says, “The following images evoke the kind of landscape I have in mind,” and then includes let’s say 8-12 smallish images, copied from Google images, which convey the kind of landscape you have in mind. And of course, you don’t have to limit yourself to landscapes. Just offer a collection of the kind of images (cities, people, homes, lakes, whatever) that cover the approximate territory you have in mind. Again, don’t be too specific. Don’t search for the perfect image. For one thing, the perfect image may be copyright and not available for purchase. For another thing, you are the author, not the designer. Give the designer room to breathe. Offering a wider spread of images is a good way to encourage creativity in your designer. 5. Do Mention Authors Who Write in Your Niche If you are writing a quiet Irish-set romance, then refer the designer to a handful of authors who write in the same area. Partly, there may well be designers who know those authors and who will get instantly what kind of book you are writing. But partly, too, any competent designer will head straight to Amazon to see what others are doing. That means that a designer stands the best chance of being able to create a design that acknowledges the current market trends, while adding a genuinely original tweak or two. 6. Do Refer The Designer to Book Covers, in Your Genre, That You Like It will really help a designer if you say, “I like the following book covers”, and include thumbnails of (let’s say) a dozen or so books that you rate. If you come across covers where you really love the image but don’t rate the typography, for example, then say so. It doesn’t matter if you find yourself liking both pale-and-mysterious images for a crime novel, let’s say, and dark-and-bloody ones. If your taste includes both areas, then it’s fine to let the designer know. It’s their job to interpret your guidance to come up with a cover that pleases you. If you try to hard to be consistent in your choices, you are quite likely excluding some possible covers that would, in fact, delight you. 7. Do Include All Cover Text The designer needs to know what elements they have to handle in the cover design. So if you want title and author name and shout line and puff or review, then you need to tell the designer upfront. If you don’t, you risk evolving a brilliant design which then becomes cluttered with an excess of text. (A shout line, by the way means something like this: “In rural Ireland, nobody hears you”. A puff or review is something like this: “Literally a genius.” – Maeve Binchy. Never make up reviews. And remember that jokes which seem funny to you at the time don’t tend to seem funny on the page.) These thoughts bring us to rule 7a: 7A. Keep Cover Text Very Economical Title, fine, but don’t let that title exceed six words or so, unless you want a purely typographical cover. Author’s name, well, yes, you’re not going to leave that off. Shout line or puff: it’s easy to decide to cram text in, but remember that the more text you have, the simpler your actual design needs to be. You can’t have any real complexity in the image if you have a lot of text and for most books, the image should take priority. Note that you’ll see lots of successful commercial covers that do have a fair bit of text, but that’s because they’ve many quotes from major national newspapers. If your text is not equally strong, you probably want to prioritise the image. 8. Be Open to Purely Typographic Covers There are some fantastic text-only covers out there. Against Happiness by Eric G. Wilson is one example (below). If your book could handle a text-only design, don’t write a design brief that blocks that route. If your genre is commercial fiction, you probably need an image. But upmarket fiction and anything non-fictiony can certainly handle a text-only design. 9. Keep the Image Simple – Think Thumbnail Simple images work. Complex ones don’t. Complex ones don’t even work at full-size – but they are car-crashes when seen at thumbnail size. And if your thumbnail view doesn’t work, you will get no eyeballs on your book page anyway. So keep it simple. That means, probably, two main visual elements only: A woman’s coat, plus a flight of steps. Bingo, that’s a cover. A guy’s back, walking away from a burning building. Bingo, that’s a cover. A rowing boat, rocking at a misty jetty. Bingo, that’s a cover. A woman walking up a flight of steps, while a flock of doves fly overhead, a rosebush smothers a garden wall and a pair of wedding rings glint from a silver bowl, shown in inset format … that’s not a book cover, it’s a car-wreck. It’s a total mess and will never work and never sell your book. For an example of the simple, complete cover, try this, for example. No doves, no rosebush, no rings . . . but it works, right? 10. Clichés are Good Well, sort of, since we sort of hate clichés. They’re like a red rag to a bull to us. We will rewrite text a million times rather than allow the merest whiff of cliché to invade our precious text, but that’s the text. On the cover, we love cliché. Or, to be precise, we love the instant communication that the clichés offer. So you can laugh all you like about the familiar clichés of the front-of-store book tables – but if you follow that link, you’ll see that nearly all the covers they’re laughing at are really good covers. Man lurking by fence: yes, a cliché, but what atmospheric covers! Woman in long white dress: yes, a cliché, but what lovely, buyable covers those are! And so on. Clichés work because they quickly (i) identify the type of book, (ii) appeal to the right kind of audience, and (iii) encourage a casual browser to click through to find out more about the book itself. (You’ll also notice, by the way, that the clichéd covers keep it simple, reinforcing our earlier point about the beauties of simplicity.) 11. Be Realistic Nearly all books put out by publishers use stock images from image libraries, that are combined and tweaked and textured and layered in ways that make them look amazing. Your designer will have access to commercial image libraries and should be able to find things that you love that impose no additional cost on you beyond that initial design fee. And a good designer will be able to use those images to create something every bit as good as those produced by a traditional publisher. But that’s all. If you want a hand-crafted illustration by a professional illustrator or painter, you are talking about an investment, plus you are sort of committed upfront. So if you bought £500 or £1,000 worth of an illustrator’s time, you kind of have to use the image that results, even if that’s not really quite the image you had in your mind. Unless you have stupid amounts of money to throw at this, forget about commissioning an original illustration. You don’t need to do that to create a wonderful cover. Most professional covers never use anything beyond stock images. I’ve had more than a dozen books published, and those have typically been published in multiple countries across the world, and not one of those book covers used an original illustration. (Plus, those stock libraries do include drawings, so if you want a drawing of Paris, let’s say, ask the designer to find one. Don’t commission your own.) 12. Don’t Ask Your Cousin, Brother, Aunt, or Friend for Help They probably aren’t professional book cover designers, and this, remember, is the project on which you are now professionally engaged yourself. You can’t say to your them after they’ve spent twenty hours on your cover, “You know what? I know we’ve put a lot of work into this, but on reflection, I don’t think that cover looks right. Do you have any other ideas at all?” And you have to be able to say that. If you feel you can’t, you have the wrong designer. 13. Don’t Please Yourself, Please the Reader You aren’t always the best person to make the final decision on cover, as the book is highly personal to you. Do get the views of other readers, but don’t allow the final choice to be decided by a simple poll. When you get feedback from readers, you need to think hard about how much weight to give each bit of feedback. If you are writing gentle chick-lit, then the views of someone who reads that kind of thing are much more significant than someone who doesn’t. Equally, someone who is trying to please you is much less useful than someone who just expresses their view and doesn’t give a damn about what you think. You want honesty, here, not touchy-feeliness. 14. Demand the Hat I read a book by a sell-a-million-on-Kindle type author, which contained the following anecdote (and apologies for not referencing the book: I just haven’t been able to place the quote). A Jewish grandmother takes her grandson to the beach. He’s wearing his swimsuit, his sunhat and all is well … until he is swept away by a giant wave. The grandmother shakes her fist at heaven and shouts at God, “Have I not been your faithful servant? Have I not kept the law? Raised a family? Honoured you in all that I do? Now give me back my grandson.” Sure enough, the clouds part, there is a rumble of thunder, and a second giant wave deposits the grandson on the beach unharmed. The grandmother inspects her child, then once again yells upwards, “HE WAS WEARING A HAT!” Moral of that fine story: don’t be satisfied until you are really, truly satisfied in every detail. If you have any kind of personal relationship with the designer, you can’t be obstreperous about the very last shade of red in the shout line. And you have to be that obstreperous if you want a perfect book cover. 15. Always Consider the Thumbnail Some designs look great at full size and just dwindle down to nothing when they get to Amazon’s thumbnail view (which is a mere 160 pixels high). Find thumbnail covers you like and figure what works. You need intelligible text, images with clarity. 16. Put the Assignment out to Tender More controversial, but I personally would recommend using a contest-based service to select your designer. The idea of these services is that you put your brief online, and thousands of designers review that brief to see if it’s something that appeals to their creativity. With a good service, you’ll get 100+ designs to choose from. You can rate them, discard them, encourage modifications, and massage your way to a shortlist, then a finalist. Many of the designs you get will be, quite frankly, poor – but unless you really try to low-ball the budget, you should get a slew of really attractive designs from which to make your selection. Services that offer this kind of system include 99designs, Designcrowd, elance and others. There are two huge advantages of this service: (1) you get a massive range of ideas and approaches to choose from, and (2) because you will start working in detail only with an idea that is very close to cooked, from your point of view, you won’t suffer from the don’t-demand-the-hat problem mentioned above. In terms of budget, I would think you should be setting aside about £350 or $500 if you are genuinely ambitious for your work. You can get the job done for less, but your odds of a not-quite-good-enough cover go down the more you low-ball it. 17. The Final Tip And finally. Covers are essential to piquing the reader’s interest, but no book has ever sold well on Amazon unless it tells a good story and is presented properly. If you want to be a professional author (and that includes any indie author who genuinely wants to make sales), you must be even more obsessive about your text than you are about your cover design. That means getting professional feedback on your text and it means making sure that the copyediting is up to scratch (even if it doesn’t quite have to be as good as a professionally published text.) We offer both those services and we are excellent at both things. If you really want to make a go of your book, don’t get a perfect cover that encloses a so-so text. Get both things right. Click for more on our editorial services – and go get yourself a fabulous book.

When you sit down to write, with that all-important, all-consuming story bursting to get out of your mind and onto the page, you’re facing a multitude of decisions to do with technique and style. One of the very first things you’ll need to consider, and one of the most important, is which narrative voice to use. Do you want to be intimate, and employ the first person? J D Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye is a fine example of this at its most gripping and involving, as is Meg Rosoff’s How I Live Now. Or do you want to adopt something that’s more universal, such as a third person omniscient point of view? Most contemporary novelists write in the third person limited, which means that the narrative is limited to what the protagonist knows, and everything is filtered through the protagonist’s viewpoint. Point of view is important and allows the writer to play with perspective.  With the rise of post-modernism and other theories that questioned accepted fictional structures, the omniscient narrator fell out of fashion. Novelists began to play games with perception, and the unreliable narrator came to the fore. This can be delivered in the first person or the third person. Ian McEwan’s third person Atonement presents itself as a straightforward novel, but actually has a sting in the tail, which causes the reader to question all that has gone before; you can contrast this with Kazuo Ishiguro’s first person The Remains of the Day, where the narrator isn’t quite telling us the truth.  The omniscient narrator has been used for centuries. Homer’s Iliad, which stands at the very beginning of Western literature, is a fine example of a narrator who knows everything: the gods, the heroes, even the details of individual battles.  When you sit down to tell your story, you may find your writing naturally falls into it. It’s what we’ve been brought up on: Once upon a time, there was a little princess… Of course, the narrator / narrative voice isn’t actually omniscient (he/she isn’t God). The effect of it suggests there is a separate entity from the other characters in the book, able to see all of them and even know what’s happening in their hearts and minds. It’s a powerful tool, and if used properly, it can lend an authoritative sheen to your work. Omniscient Narrator: Definition An omniscient narrator is the all-knowing voice in a story. The narrator has greater insight into the narrative events; context; and the characters\' motives, unspoken thoughts, and experiences, than any individual character does. It is also known as an intrusive narrator and is (usually) in the third person singular:  “When Sebastian walked through the heavy committee room door, a group of people were already there, seated and rustling papers. The light was dim, electricity guttering, their faces obscure. The commander was tapping his fingers on the table-top. Outside, buses clattered down the road, bursting with commuters on their way to work, checking their newspapers, feeling for loose change in their pockets, staring at pigeons, little knowing that what was happening in this tiny room off Whitehall would affect each and every one of them today…”  The narrative switches from Sebastian to the people on the buses; but the voice, being omniscient, is able to convince the reader it knows what’s going on. It also allows the narrator to paint a wider picture and create suspense.  The omniscient narrative voice is totally in charge of the story: like a director, pointing you towards images and people as it sees fit, acting in the same way as a camera. The omniscient narrator feeds us information about characters and plot in a structured, orderly way to maximise atmosphere, tension and suspense.  What Is The Omniscient Point Of View And How Can You Use It To Your Advantage? The advantage of an omniscient point of view is that you can write about any aspect of the story you like. Ursula Le Guin, in A Wizard of Earthsea, uses it to great effect: she begins with a description of the island of Gont, rising up above the waves, and then focuses in on the island itself, and a boy, Ged, who is to be the hero of the story. The world that she creates has the texture of myth and truth, in part because of this narrative choice. The narrative voice sounds confident and traditional: it urges the reader to listen.  There are problems with the third person omniscient. When you have too many characters in a room together, a writer can start “head-hopping”: that is, switching from one character to another.  “John was angry, and said so. Sarah was sad because she wanted to go out. Henry, on the other hand, was pleased.”  Too much of this can be fragmented and unconvincing. It can be done well: D H Lawrence is always doing it, for example; and there are many passages in Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast which gain their power from head-hopping; but most debut authors are advised to avoid it as much as possible.  You can still use third person omniscient and gain better effects: “John was angry, and said so. Sarah, turning away, continued to apply her lipstick in defiance. Henry threw his car keys onto the table, and sat down.”  The main advantage of a third person omniscient narrator is scope. The disadvantage is that you’ve got to make sure that you know everything about the story – you have to be able to understand it and its world inside out, otherwise it can come across as unconvincing.  What Is An Example Of An Omniscient Narrator? Charles Dickens’ 19th century novel, A Tale of Two Cities, is a classic example of the technique. It famously begins:  “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope,it was the winter of despair …”  These kind of general, sweeping statements are probably best avoided in your novel (unless you really know your onions). 19th century novelists also have a tendency to step in to comment on the action: George Eliot, in Middlemarch, moves seamlessly between commenting on action and going into people’s thoughts and feelings.  The following, from Celeste Ng, in her debut Everything I Never Told You (2014), deploys the omniscient narrator in a more modern fashion:  “Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet. 1977, May 3, six thirty in the morning, no one knows anything but this innocuous fact: Lydia is late for breakfast. As always, next to her cereal bowl, her mother has placed a sharpened pencil and Lydia’s physics homework, six problems flagged with small ticks. Driving to work, Lydia’s father nudges the dial toward WXKP, Northwest Ohio’s Best News Source, vexed by the crackles of static. On the stairs, Lydia’s brother yawns, still twined in the tail end of his dream. And in her chair in the corner of the kitchen, Lydia’s sister hunches moon-eyed over her cornflakes, sucking them to pieces one by one, waiting for Lydia to appear. It’s she who says, at last, “Lydia’s taking a long time today.”  Right from the start, the narrative voice tells you things that the characters are unaware of. The effect of this is to heighten suspense. She switches from character to character, painting a picture of a family going about its business: the father in the car, the brother on the stairs, the sister eating cornflakes. It’s a haunting effect, and it’s something that a third person limited narration couldn’t achieve.  The omniscient narrator, then, can offer up plenty of exciting avenues for your writing. But you have to plan especially carefully. Avoid the portentous and the heavy, and aim for clarity, and watch your writing take off. 

Have you just finished your novel and are ready to begin your search for an agent? Well, we’re here to help!  WANT TO JUMP STRAIGHT TO THE AGENT LIST? CLICK HERE  Erotica Erotic fiction has always been a popular genre. We only have to look at Mills & Boon for a client list chock-a-block of erotic and romance writers. But that appreciation for the erotic genre hasn’t always been expressed by mainstream literary agents and publishers.  In fact, agents tended to be wary – and in some cases, snobby – of the genre. Fearing it wasn’t profitable enough for the erotic manuscripts in the wider market. However, that all changed following the release of E.L James’ Fifty Shades of Grey series in 2011/12. It seems the trilogy began to change the perception of the genre within the industry.  We can look at Helen Hardt (Follow Me Darkly) and Helen Hoang (Kiss Quotient) to see how popular erotica has become. Agents and publishers have finally learnt the value of well-written erotic fiction. Even the most high-brow literary agency now accepts submissions from authors in this genre.  So, if you’re an erotic fiction writer looking for representation, give yourself the best chance of success by making sure your manuscript, query letter, and synopsis are in perfect shape before sending out your query. You only get one chance to make a first impression. If you’re still in the writing/editing stage you can also check out our blogs on how to write erotica, and our guide to writing sex in fiction.  And if you’re ready to query agents, then read on.    AgentMatch And How To Use It There are plenty of erotica-loving agents, but you won\'t want to approach them all. The best way to develop and refine your own shortlist of UK agents for erotica is to visit AgentMatch, our literary agent database, and use the search tools on the left to make your selection.  With AgentMatch you can select by genre (e.g. erotica), country, the agent’s level of experience, their appetite for new clients, and much more. You can even save your search results and come back to them, allowing you to work through them one by one, at your own pace. Each profile has been researched thoroughly including what agents like to read in their spare time, information on their most recent deals, manuscript wishlists, submission requirements, and exclusive interviews.  You can sign-up for a 7-day free trial which will give you a good feel for the data and functionality. Or join us as a premium member and get unlimited access to AgentMatch.  UK Agents For Erotica  To get you started we’ve selected a list of 20 UK agents looking for erotica:  [am_show_agents id=24] More Resources   We’re here to help you at every step in your writing and querying process. Check out our favourite blogs that can assist you in putting together your query letter and synopsis, and if you want valuable, personal feedback on your writing you can book a fifteen-minute One-to-One with an agent of your choice. Premium members can also get a free query letter review from our lovely Writers Support team!    Happy searching, and good luck on your querying journey!   

You have a manuscript. You want it published. You know that you probably need a literary agent. But that, roughly, is where your certainty ends. And no worries: all newbie writers are in a very similar position. So here are all the questions you’re probably worrying about right now … plus some candid and totally straightforward answers. Tuck in. Have fun. And if there are other questions you’d like to ask about, just drop us a line. What are literary agents. What do agents do? ... and what is the role of the agent vs that of the publisher? Agents are primarily salespeople: their job is to sell your manuscript to a publisher. In effect, they make their living from selling your intellectual property. The buyers of that IP – your publisher, in other words – will produce and market the book to retailers and, ultimately, to readers themselves. But though literary agents are primarily salespeople, they will also: Help you edit your book into shape prior to sale (though they will only do this if your manuscript is pretty stellar in the first place.) Figure out which editors at which publishing houses are right for your work. Figure out the best approach to selling your manuscript Oversee the publication process Step in, if and when problems arise Negotiate additional rights sales (eg: TV and film, foreign rights, audio, and so on) Offer long term advice and career guidance Agents may work solo, but typically work as part of a larger literary agency, which may have anywhere from two to a dozen or more agents. Most agents are based in New York or London, though in the US especially you’ll find literary agents in most large cities. Are literary agents free? If not, what do they cost? Literary agents charge nothing upfront. There is no fixed fee attached to their services. So how do they get paid? Instead, they charge commission, typically 15% for sales of your work to domestic publishers and 20% for more complex sales (eg: foreign or TV sales.) The two great things about this arrangement are (A) that you only pay for an agent if they succeed in selling your work, and (B) their financial incentives are almost completely aligned with yours. The not-such-a-small downside is that literary agents won’t agree to represent you unless they think they can make money. That means getting an agent is an extremely competitive business – an agent typically takes about 1 manuscript from every 1000 that she receives. (About 2/3 of agents are women.) That level of competition shouldn\'t frighten you exactly, but it should nudge you in the direction of thinking hard about the quality of what you\'re putting out there. Is your manuscript really ready to go? Have you edited it hard? Does the story shine? The single biggest mistake you can make is to send your book out before it\'s ready. If in doubt: do more. Do I need to have an agent? Are they worth it? Most big trade publishers take work seriously only if it comes via a literary agent. That means if you are writing a novel or mainstream non-fiction, you do really need an agent. That 15% commission might sting a little, but think about it. You get a seasoned pro to sell your work, advise you editorially, assist with any problems in the publication process, sell additional rights, and manage your career. Quite likely, that 15% is the best money you’ll ever spend. If your agent can’t earn you multiples of what you would have achieved on your own, then they’re not really doing their job. If you are intending to self-publish, of course, an agent is totally unnecessary – at least for now. When your sales are massive, agents will be begging you for your business ... What are literary agents looking for? Go into any large bookstore. Look on the front tables. Ignore the work of past bestsellers and focus on books by debut or other newer authors. Those books right there are the ones that literary agents are looking to buy: the sort of commercially successful debut work that commands big bucks from publishers. To find the kind of books that are making waves in your genre, you can: Look at what books in your genre are being heavily promoted by the bookstore. (Again: ignore major past bestsellers. So Stephen King will always command massive shelf space in the “horror” section, but he does that because he’s Stephen King.) Look at what books in your genre are on sale at a major supermarket. Look at Amazon bestseller lists in your genre, ignoring ignore books by self-published authors and by past bestsellers. That’ll leave you with newer, successful traditionally published authors in your genre. In a nutshell: agents are looking for books that are the same-but-different. That is, they take an existing successful concept and give it a twist that re-energises it for the same broad audience. Another thing you’ll hear from most agents is that they’re looking for an original and compelling voice – that is, they want your writing to sound fresh and distinctive. Easier said than done, we know! Where can I find literary agents? You’re in the right place. Jericho Writers has a service called AgentMatch, which represents a complete database of all literary agents in the US, UK and elsewhere. That database allows you to sort in a million different ways – for example, “Agents looking for science fiction” or “Agents in a smaller agency currently looking to expand their list.” It’s a natural first stop for almost any writer. Go here to see what AgentMatch looks like. Go here to get your free, 7-day trial (and free means free: we don’t even ask for payment details). Easy, right? How many literary agents should I query? Because it’s hard to get an agent, we strongly recommend that writers query about 10-12 agents when they are ready to submit their work. Why 10-12? Why not more? Why not fewer? We\'ll tell you: Why not more?Realistically, there are probably only 6-10 strong potential publishers for your book. That\'s one for for each of the Big 5 publishers, maybe a couple more for leading imprints within each publishing house, and maybe one or two large independent publishers too. (ie: big publishers, but just not quite on that Big 5 scale.) And publishers are harder to get than agents. Yes, most agents will sell most of the manuscripts they take on ... but their overall success rate is still probably only 2 out of 3, or something like that. So if you can\'t get 1 agent in 10 or 12 to take you on, the chances are you won\'t find a publisher. What that tells you is you need to do more damn work on your book. Only then will you be confident of success. Why not fewer?If you only go to a handful of agents, you\'ll find that some are busy, some aren\'t quite right for your book and ... whoops. You\'ve run out of agents. And if you query 10 agents, and still get nowhere: well, you know that you need to take a further look at your manuscript. If you query 10, and get an offer of representation - then well done you! Which literary agents should I choose? Let’s say, you’ve got your manuscript into shape (quite possibly with the help of our amazing editorial services). You\'ve decided (sensibly) to look for about 10-12 agents to approach. How do you pick those dozen? How do you find the ones most likely to respond to your submission? Well, there’s no fixed rule there, but here’s what we’d suggest: Look for agents who are looking to build their list. That means looking for newer / younger agents – possibly someone who has just set up their own agency, or someone who has just been promoted to agent within a larger agency. Look for agents who are open to work in your genre – AgentMatch can help with this, but do always check back against the agent’s own site, as AgentMatch doesn’t always update the instant an agent makes a change. Look for agents where you feel a point of contact. Maybe that’s something they’ve said in a blog post or interview. Maybe that’s because they represent an author you love. Or possibly something else. But look for something that speaks to you. Those three guidelines should be your guiding principles. You\'re looking for agents who want you (ie: they want new clients and they\'re active in your genre.) And you\'re looking for agents that you quite likely have something in common with (ie: those ones with some areas of identifiable overlap.) You should be able to find these agents with a morning or two\'s search. Again, you can get your AgentMatch trial here. Now it\'s time to send your work out ... How do I query a literary agent? What an agent wants to see when you query them can be a little variable, so do always check an agent’s website for details. That said, when it comes to fiction, most agents want to see: A query letter (also called a covering letter in the UK.) Details on how to write a query letter can be found here. A synopsis. A synopsis is basically a short, neutral summary of your story. To be clear, this is nothing like the blurb you’ll find on the back of a book. More info on how to write a great synopsis here. A chunk of your book itself. Typically agents want about 10,000 words / 3 chapters / 50 pages. But again, do check the agent’s site, because requirements vary quite widely. Writing a great submission pack is absolutely essential. It’s not too much to say that the fate of your query depends on it, and nothing else. To make absolutely sure you put together a great submission pack, use the Agent Submission Builder available free right here. That tool tells you how to structure both query letter and synopsis, and explains how to provide the content that the agent is looking to find. Why do literary agents reject manuscripts? The most common reason for rejection is simply that your manuscript just isn’t (yet) good enough to make the grade. An agent, or other professional reader, can very quickly tell whether: Your writing itself is poor. (If your writing itself doesn’t feel competent and professional, an agent will say ‘no’ without reading more.) Your basic concept is flawed (for example, there just isn’t a market for eco-thrillers that include long, long explanations of why plastic pollution is bad.) That said, there are a million other reasons why your manuscript might not get an instant Yes. Common reasons are: A given agent is just too busy. Their other work with existing clients is currently active enough that they have no time to spend on the slushpile. Something random. For example, an agent is looking for new clients, they like your stuff … but they’ve just taken on something really similar and can’t handle both. You haven’t properly understood what an agent’s tastes and interests are. In some cases, that’s because agents are poor at explaining what they’re after. In other cases, it’s because the information is out there, but you haven’t properly absorbed it. You haven’t queried enough agents. As we’ve already said, you need to go out to at least 10 agents to get a real feel for the market. If you are rejected, don\'t feel too downcast. I\'m Harry Bingham and I\'ve been published all over the world, in fiction, and non-fiction, multiple times. But have I been rejected? You betcha. So many times I can\'t even vaguely remember how often. By agents. By publishers. By TV and film companies. And truthfully? I hardly care. All you need is one Yes. A million Noes are neither here nor there. What if a literary agent wants to call or meet me? If an agent wants to call you or meet with you, it’s highly likely that they are very interested in your work. Any exchange between the two of you is likely to involve as much of them marketing themselves to you, as the other way round. Great. That’s the good news. In terms of you marketing yourself to the agent, you’ve already done most of the work. Your manuscript IS your marketing tool. If that’s in really great shape, you’ve done 99% of what you need to do. That said, you can make yourself seem even better, if: You are reasonably articulate. Trad publishers may want to push you out on book tours or newspaper interviews. If you can string a sentence together when in public, that’s helpful. For non-fiction authors, indeed, this capacity can be essential. I remember one Jericho Writers client who had written a great non-fiction book that got interest from three major NY publishers. Trouble was, they all wanted to meet the guy before they confirmed their indicative offers. At meetings, he was a difficult combination of over-confident and not truly articulate. None of those three offers materialised. Whoops! You are prepared for the idea that agents may want some editorial changes to your manuscript or title. Unless you really hate the idea presented by the agent, you are strongly advised to be open to their suggestions. That doesn’t mean to say there can be no further discussion … but if you seem closed to any advice at all, an agent may think you are not going to be a valuable client. A lot of the selling, however, will come from the agent’s side not yours. After all, if one capable agent loves your work, the chances are there\'ll be another one who thinks the exact same thing.So things you want to ask include: Why did you like this book? What made it stand out to you? That’s not you seeking praise. That’s you checking that your understanding of the book’s purpose matches what your agent sees. What editorial issues do you see in this book? What will I need to work on? Most books will need further work before submission. So you better make sure that you’re going to be happy with the agent’s workplan. What is the agent’s policy on communications? Will they check a draft submissions list with you? How often would they update you with progress? If your work is rejected by publishers, will the agent still want you as a client? Another way to put this is, is the agent making the choice to represent you, or the book? How involved will the agent want to be in developing and thinking about the next book you write? How involved will the agent be during the publication process? Do they intend to accompany you to publishers’ meetings? What is the agent’s attitude to self-publishing? Will they be OK with you self-publishing some material at some point in your career? It\'s worth laying down this marker now. You may well have no current intention to self-publish, but increasingly professional authors will straddle both traditional and indie publishing routes. How are foreign rights handled? How are TV and film rights handled? That gives you a great set of talking points … but in the end, your decision will be made as much in terms of chemistry as anything else. Yes, you want your agent to give the right answers to these questions – but most agents will. If you come away from your agent feeling excited, then you’ve found a perfect match. If you come away with more negative feelings, then you really may prefer to go on looking. What do I do if a literary agent rejects me? Let\'s say you\'ve sent out your work to 10-12 intelligently chosen literary agents. Here\'s the spectrum of possible responses: An agent offers you representation An agent offers you representation if you make certain changes to your book An agent gives you a warm, but reluctant, rejection after having read your manuscript in full An agent doesn\'t ask for your full manuscript, but rejects your submission in a warm, encouraging and clearly personal way. (That is: the email or letter isn\'t just boilerplate that goes out to everyone.) An agent sends you out a form rejection You hear absolutely nothing at all. Unfortunately for writers, the vast majority of responses fall into the last two categories. That\'s just the brutal fact of competition in this hardest of industries. So what do you do? Well, you can give up and play golf. But you\'re not going to do that, because you\'re a writer to the tips of your tippy toes, so you\'re going to saddle up again and try again. The options facing you are roughly these: Query more agents. Not recommended unless you had 2-3 near misses from this batch of submissions. Revise your novel. Write a new book Self-publish. There are virtues to all of these routes. When it comes to revising your novel, I would urge you to consider getting editorial help (of the sort that we provide, for example.) Professional, third party editorial feedback remains THE gold-standard way to analyse and improve a manuscript. That\'s why we offer the service. That\'s why so many of our editorial clients go on to succeed. If you\'ve had some near-misses with agents, that\'s a screamingly huge clue telling you not to give up. If you\'re that close already, one more heave with a top quality editor (like one of ours) may well do the trick. If you think that there may be a fundamental issue with the concept behind your book, then writing a new book can be a great idea. What I would say, is that you need to make sure that your basic skills are in shape. Editorial feedback on your current manuscript is one great learning tool. Going on a writing course (like, yes, one of ours) is also a really good step to take. And because you\'ve already written one book, you\'ll be in vastly better shape to absorb and make use of the skills transmitted. And self-publishing? Well, look, I love self-publishing. But I do think you need to attack it as a Plan A type option, not a fallback because you couldn\'t crack the trad industry. Standards in self-published books are now very high, and it\'s going to be seriously hard to build a career and a loyal readership unless your books are of a quality to rub shoulders with anyone else\'s in your genre. More than ready to get the ball rolling with agents, but just need a little push? Or perhaps you’ve had a few rejections but aren’t sure why? Our Agent Submission Pack Review gives you detailed professional advice on how to perfect your submission and increase your chances of securing an agent.   Agents + trad publishing vs self-publishing: which is better? OK, this is a real apples-and-oranges question if ever there was one. The two publishing routes simply offer very different things and require very different approaches. The books and authors best suited to trad publishing are just different from those best suited to self-publishing. That said, for a rough guide, self-publishing will tend to be favoured by: Authors with quite an entrepreneurial, small business mindset Authors writing genre fiction (or subject-led non fiction, for example “How to write a business plan” or “Equine Care: all you need to know about looking after your horse”.) For authors of fiction, ones who write in series, rather than standalones Authors who have the capacity to be quite prolific. It’s common enough for indie authors to set 20 books as their benchmark for when they can make a full-time living from writing. Personally, I think that benchmark should be set a lot lower than that – but the point about being prolific is good, no matter what. Authors who aren’t afraid of a little tech and a few numbers. You certainly don’t need to be massively technical or numerate, but you will need to deal with a few different platforms and services and you will be dealing with some spreadsheets and some dashboards. If you hate and loathe those things, you’ll never realistically make a go of self-publishing. Authors who primarily want to make a living from writing. That means that the various other attractions of trad publishing (the kudos, having your book in physical bookstores, getting book reviews in newspapers, etc) are of relatively lower value. Traditional publishing on the other hand will work better for authors who: Prefer to hand the whole publishing process over to others Write more literary fiction, or one-off works of non-fiction (eg: “Fear: Trump in the White House”) Write standalones rather than series Are not especially prolific, and who don’t especially want to be Authors who really don’t want to get down and dirty with mailing lists and ad-tech and all that Authors who place a high value on the various things that tradititional publishing can offer (the kudos, your books in physical stores, the possibility of newspaper reviews, etc) Truth is, you probably already know which kind of author you are – and if you think you know, you’re probably right! Who do I need ? Literary agents vs managers vs publicists. If you have a book to sell then you need a literary agent, period. The term “manager” just isn’t really used in the literary world, but in effect your agent is your manager. They’re going to be the one making sales on your behalf, turning down bad offers, chasing good ones, advising you on which opportunity to pursue next. And because your financial incentives are highly aligned with your agent’s, you can (nearly always) rely on the basic truthfulness of what you’re being told. On the agent versus publicist question: well, this is usually asked by people who have self-published their work on Amazon, find it’s not selling, and are wondering what to do next. If you’re in that position, then you need to ask yourself, what you really want. If you want to self-publish, then you don’t need an agent or a publicist: you need a self-publishing strategy and you need to write more books. You can find our short guide to self-pub right here. But you’ll notice that guide doesn’t talk about agents or publicists at all. Those guys can’t help. A lot of writers will want to reject that advice. Their argument will be, roughly, “Yes, but I have self-published. My book exists. Now I just need to get the word out.” Hmm. Well, an agent definitely can’t help with that: their job is selling manuscripts to publishers and you’ve chosen to self-publish. You can reverse that decision and seek trad publication instead (that’s fine), but you can’t both self-publish and have a trad deal. Hiring a publicist is a very slightly better idea, but it’s still a terrible one. For one thing, a half-decent publicist will cost $10,000 or more … and for another thing, they’ll reject the assignment. A publicist needs something to work with, and “self-pub author releases new book” just isn’t a news story. There are way over 7,000,000 e-books on Amazon. What makes yours special? Why would a newspaper or radio show want to cover your book? And truthfully, even if – which would never happen – you got a 1,000 word book review in the New York Times Review of Books, possibly the world’s most prestigious review outlet, what then? The answer is you’d sell maybe 20 or 30 additional copies, then everything would go back to just the way it was. $10,000 for 30 extra sales? It doesn’t even remotely add up. That’s why no indie author that I know uses a traditional publicist in any meaningful way. It just isn’t how self-published books get sold. (What does? Well: email lists, price promotions, book discount sites, paid advertising, cross promotions with other authors … and a whole bunch of other stuff that has nothing to do with traditionally oriented publicity.) In short: either self-publish properly, or seek proper traditional publication. Attempting some mash-up of the two will be a horribly costly way to sell almost no books at all. Oh yes, and I know that’s not what you wanted to hear, so sorry!

This meditation on story structure in the novel comes from William Kowalski, author of \'Eddie’s Bastard\', \'The Hundred Hearts\' and other novels. The excerpt is taken from his ebook/PDF, \'Writing for First Time Novelists\'. The full text of that ebook can be downloaded for free here. If you’ve ever taken a class on literary theory, or read any amount of literary criticism, likely you will have heard the term “narrative arc”. It’s also likely you will have heard a large number of other literary terms as well, but you will find that I don’t concern myself with them in this book, because they are of absolutely no interest to me whatsoever. If I felt it would make me a better writer, I would do nothing but talk about literary theory all day long. But I have always felt that literary theory makes me a worse writer, in the sense that it makes me more self-conscious and worried about whether my work stands up to a set of academic standards. I think fiction began to die the day it became the property of academia, and I hope it will wriggle free one day and escape into the wild again. Until then, I just keep typing. Literary theory may describe literature, but mastering it will not make you a better writer, any more than studying Newton’s laws of motion will make you a better baseball player. I write by instinct, not by a set of rules. There are some aspects of basic literary theory that are important for any writer to know, but they needn’t be obfuscated by the sorts of complicated terms people typically use to make themselves sound more important. You really only need to know a handful of concepts. Of these, narrative arc is probably the most important, from a story-telling point of view. So what does it mean? All it means is this: Your story needs a clear beginning, middle, and ending, and each part needs to measure up to a different set of standards in order to be considered successful. In addition, there is the symbiosis that takes place when all parts are working together perfectly to create something that is far greater than their sum. This is when we say that a book comes alive in your hands. You can feel it happening, both as a reader and a writer. It’s quite miraculous, and it can’t always be planned. In fact, it is rarely accomplished on purpose. Beginnings The beginning of a book should immerse us in your world right away. Don’t be coy about it, and don’t be disingenuous, either. Tell us what we need to know to make sense of things. Use plenty of detail. We want to get a nice feel for the setting, and we want to be as impressed by your characters as we are by meeting people in real life. When I say impressed, I don’t mean we should think they are great. I mean they should literally impress themselves upon us, through all the senses (except, perhaps, taste). Your beginning should also give us the sense that we are on a journey. We don’t need to know where just yet, although we should know before page 50 or so… say, about three chapters in. This is usually the amount of pages an agent or editor will ask to read when they are trying to make up their mind about a book. The reason for this is simple: if your beginning hasn’t hooked them, it probably won’t hook other readers either, and they will put the book down and move on. Many people will tell you that you need to be even more immediate with your grasp, and that your very first paragraph needs to be arresting, amazing, startling, and unlike anything anyone has ever read before. That’s a pretty tall order. While I am all in favor of strong writing, I have to say that this particular approach to fiction strikes me as something that has evolved in order to compete with film and television. Books were never meant to do this. Novels are for people who are in it for both the journey and the destination, and they’re in no hurry; it’s not necessary to begin your tale with dramatic action in order to hook us. Hook us, certainly. But there is nothing wrong with a book that unfolds gradually, as opposed to one that begins with an explosion, and leaves us to watch the fallout for the next three or four hundred pages. Middles If the first 50 pages can be said to be the beginning of a book, then from page 51 up until about maybe thirty pages from the end can be called the middle. The middle is the longest part of any book, just like a chess game’s longest part is the mid-game. This is where all the stuff happens. Nearly everything that is memorable about a book will take place here. The worst thing that can be said about the middle of a book is that it sags or falls flat. Have you ever seen the St. Louis Arch? This is the image that always comes to my mind whenever I hear anyone talk about story arc. What if it was to sag? What would it look like then? It would fail at its most basic task, which was simply to arc. If your story sags in the middle, it means that things are not moving along at the same pace they were at the beginning. Readers are growing bored. Something went wrong somewhere. One simple rule I follow is this: something must happen on every page. Something – no matter how small or seemingly insignificant – must happen always be happening. When things stop happening, that’s when your story runs into trouble. A story is not as symmetrical as the arch in the picture, of course. The apex of the arc, which we usually call the climax, is actually much closer to the end than the beginning. The whole middle builds up to that climax. Endings And then, of course, comes the last important piece: the ending. I’ve always secretly resented it that a story has to contain anything, just like it’s always annoyed me that an 80’s-era rock song has to contain a guitar solo. It feels formulaic to me, and when I was younger I really despised anything that smacked of formula. But over time, I’ve learned that stories tend to follow a certain pattern for the same reason that every other aspect of literature exists: because that is what people respond to. This is rooted not in fascism or in the desire of one group to control another group, as my hyper-sensitive teenaged self believed, but in simple human psychology, which in turn has its roots in biology. Storytelling is one of the most important things people do. To explore this, let’s take what is probably the oldest story of all: the story of a hunt. Want more? Go get William’s free, full ebook Writing for First Time Novelists, by going here. If you want more on plotting etc from this site, try our info on Plot, and More about Plot.

You asked. We answered. You’ve written your manuscript. You’ve edited hard. You are now on your fourth, seventh, nineteenth draft. You still absolutely believe in your basic concept and you are certain that you have a vocation for writing / authoring. But here’s the thing: you know your work isn’t yet good enough. Maybe you know that just because you’ve got that feelings in my bones. (And believe me: I’ve been there too.) Or maybe you’ve tried actually sending your work out to literary agents and had nothing but pre-printed rejection emails. (Or, worse, but very common – you haven’t even heard back.) So what next? It feels like a Catch-22. You want expert editing to help you over the last remaining hurdles, but the people who look like they ought to be helping you – those literary agents – aren’t even replying to your emails. So now what? And do these darn agents edit manuscripts, yes or no? Well, if you want the short answer, then it’s: Yes, they do edit manuscripts, but alsoNo, no, they really don’t. If that explanation doesn’t seem totally helpful, then I’ll see if I can make it a little clearer. When Agents Get Involved In Editing And when (more often) they don’t. When it comes to your dealings with literary agents, it’s essential to remember that these guys do not charge you anything upfront. Not a dollar, not a dime. I’ve had an agent for twenty years and I have never paid even one single penny for his or (with my first agent) her services – or not directly anyway. Because the way that agents get their money is by earning commissions on sales to publishers. So if you take the first book in my Fiona Griffiths series, my agent has made sales – and earned commission – on sales to publishers in Britain, America, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and further afield. He’s also been involved in the sale of TV rights. He’s also done a terrific audio deal for me. There may be other deals down the road too. Each time one of these deals happens, I get a wodge of money arriving in my bank account, from which the agent has deducted his little (and well-earned) sliver. The consequence of this “no fee / commission only” payment structure is that agents only get paid for their time if they make a sale – and then only if that sale is for enough money to pay them back for all that they’ve done. That’s should be easy-ish if the sale is to a Big 5 publisher and brings some overseas book deals in its wake. If the only sale is to a mid-sized or micro domestic publisher, then the agent is probably (privately) disappointed. The Tottering Slushpile If the commission-only way of doing business seems challenging, that challenge is compounded by the sheer volume of submissions that literary agents receive. That total varies from agent to agent, but about 2,000 submissions per agent per year would be typical. Of that an agent may find only 2-3 manuscripts that seem destined for the kind of advances that will generate enough revenue for an agent. The result? Predictably enough, agents will reject the vast majority of manuscripts that come their way. It’s not just that they don’t have the time to deal with those manuscripts and those clients, it’s that there’s no money in them. Most manuscripts that agents receive are just unsaleable. So When do Agents Edit? Agents will get involved in editorial advice when they come across a manuscript that: Has an excellent, saleable idea. Is written with a competent professionalism. Has a strong story. Is in the top 1%, or maybe the top 0.5% of all submissions. Is not ready to be sent to publishers as it stands. In effect, when an agent offers to get involved editorially, they are thinking, roughly: “Look, if I sent this manuscript out as it is, I might get offers, but I don’t think they’d be very strong ones... and actually, I might just get fistful of rejections. And I certainly don’t want that. “Then again, I can’t helpfeeling that this manuscript could do really well, if I put in the 2-3 dozen hours needed to get this manuscript into shape. Yes, the writer themselves will be doing the actual work here – my job will be one of guidance only; I’m not going to be making hands-on changes to the manuscript myself. “But with my input, and if the writer works hard and makes the changes I recommend? Then yes, I think this could be a really profitable (and fun, and artistically rewarding) project. I’m going to reach out to this author. Yay!“ As a writer, that’s good to hear on a number of levels. You don’t want a real estate guy who just dumps your house on the market without telling you to mow your overgrown lawn and fix that sagging guttering. You want the real estate person who forces you to fix the house up for sale, in order that you get the very best price. So the fact that agents are willing to be engaged, active and intelligent in how they sell your book is great to hear. But from your perspective, as writer, there are two crucial qualifications to take away. Crucial Thing the FirstYour manuscript has to be really, really good already.You can’t just use agents as a free pass to solving the difficulties that you and your manuscript face. If you send an agent a mediocre manuscript, you stand no chance at all of engaging them qua editor. In fact, because the competition is so intense, you won’t get an agent involved even if your book is really quite good. The sad fact is that “really quite good” isn’t even close to the standard agents are looking for. Crucial Thing the SecondSome agents are really strong editorially, and love doing it.Others just aren’t that strong and don’t pretend to be. After all, an agent’s core job is as a saleswoman (or, less often in this industry, salesman.) My first agent – who was great – told me directly when I engaged her that she just wasn’t that great at editing books, but she was a powerhouse when it came to selling them. These days, I’d say that all agents have had to become more hands on when it comes to polishing manuscripts prior to sale, but there’s still a reason why editors edit, and agents sell. In effect, using an agent as an editor is a bit like using a carpenter as a bricklayer. Sure, carpenters are skilled and multi-talented. They’ll probably do a pretty good job of building that wall, but . . . If You Want An Editor, Hire An Editor! There are plenty of freelance editors around. We at Jericho Writers built our business and our reputation by offering superb editorial advice to writers just like you. Get a manuscript assessment here. And what you get is editing, editing, editing. You pay for our input, and you get our full, committed, detailed assessment of your manuscript, along with a ton of recommendations about what to do and how to do it. Now you probably think that, because we make money from editing, and because we’ve had a huge number of success stories, I’m going to tell you to rush over to us for editorial help. Well, no. I’m not. You can’t use editorial input as a shortcut. Successful writers always put the hard yards in themselves. Some writers think something like this: “Hey, I’ve completed my manuscript. I’ve done a couple of quick read-throughs for typos and that kind of thing. I’ve emailed my manuscript out to a few dozen literary agents, but no one offered to take me on and they won’t help me edit my book, even though I asked really nicely. So, OK, maybe I need to pay someone to get this book into shape.” If you think like that, then you won’t make the grade as a writer and, to be honest with you, you aren’t the sort of client that we especially love dealing with. I mean, sure, we’ll work with anyone, and we’ll do our level professional best for you. But our favourite clients? They are always, always the super-committed ones. Remember: Writing is rewriting. Self-editing is the art of sifting through your manuscript and checking it for everything. Surplus words, sentences, paragraphs and scenes. Faulty, vague or unconvincing characterisation. Weak dialogue. Weak plotting. Problems with pace or viewpoint. Basically, you need to think like an author and work these things out for yourself, as far as you are possibly able. You will benefit in three ways. First, your manuscript will get better (probably a lot better). Secondly, your own skills as an author will grow. Thirdly, your pride and confidence will – quite rightly – grow and blossom. So, OK, you do all that and then you may still need editorial help. And that’s fine. Maybe you’ll just know for yourself that your manuscript needs work. Or maybe you’ll try your luck with literary agents and not get the response you wanted. Or maybe you’ve been scratching away at a dissatisfaction with your work, and have found yourself going round in circles. If you fit into any of those categories, then, yes, you do need third party editorial help and, yes, we at Jericho Writers would absolutely love to give it. We are here to deliver outstanding editorial services to committed writers, and we would be deeply honoured to work with you. If you\'re interested in our copyediting services, please click here. In the meantime, happy writing, happy editing and (when you’re good and ready to send your work out) happy agent-hunting too!

Slaying The Myths There are many contrasting opinions on the internet as to whether agents actually care about slushpile-type submissions. Well, no one knows literary agents better than us, so we’ll tell you straight what’s true and what’s not. And, above all, the thing to bear in mind is this: most hyper-successful authors of today were once slushpile authors, just like you. Literary agents accepting unsolicited submissions is how the majority of deals between agents and writers come about. Any agent will tell you that, yes, there is plenty of dross in the slushpile – but there are diamonds too. And most agents love that search for diamonds. So, with no more ado, here are the myths … and here is the truth. Definition: What Is The Slush Pile? What is the slushpile? It’s basically all unsolicited submissions to literary agents. And since most submissions to literary agents are unsolicited – that is, the agent doesn’t know about you upfront; there is no back-corridor of private recommendation involved – the simple truth is that most submissions to agents, the overwhelming majority in fact, are slushpile submissions. So what isn’t a slushpile submission? Examples would be: One of an agent’s existing clients recommends a particular new writer, and the agent looks at that writer’s work.An agent comes across a broadcaster or journalist with interesting things to say on a particular topic, and makes contact directly to enquire about a possible book.One literary agent leaves her firm and her clients are parcelled out to other agents. And so on. Yes, these can all be important channels of client-acquisition for an agent. And yes, more senior, more experienced agents may source quite a high proportion of their new clients through routes like these. But at pretty much every literary agency in London and New York, the vast majority of incoming submissions will come via the slushpile – people like you, packaging up their work and sending it off, with fingers crossed and candles lit. And at pretty much every literary agency in New York and London, those submissions will be sifted, sorted and taken seriously. And no wonder! JK Rowling came through the slushpile. So did Hilary Mantel. So did Dan Brown. So did … well, most authors. And that’s why, though the term “slushpile” sounds dismissive, it really isn’t. It doesn’t mean “these manuscripts are rubbish.” It means, “these manuscripts are the feedstock for our industry”. Yes, there’s trash in there, but there are nuggets of pure gold as well. So don\'t be put off; \"slush pile hell\" really isn\'t all that bad. Slushpile Myths … And Slushpile Realities Myth #1: Agents Don’t Want Slush Pile Submissions. It’s true that there are some agents who really don’t. Those would include (a) agents winding their business down prior to retirement, (b) those agents who are senior enough that they can find good new authors via private recommendations, etc, (c) those who source a majority of their new clients from the media and other ‘celebrity’ type sources. But those guys are in a minority – and are usually very easy to spot. Basically, high profile agents are usually in that category. Ditto many (but not all) older ones. Ditto those with a client list stuffed full of bestsellers. Unless you have a media/celeb background, or you have real reason to think your work is remarkable, you should simply avoid those agents. They’re probably not right for you. (After all: would you really want to be those guys’ least important client? I’m thinking not.) Apart from those guys – who account for maybe only 5-10% of all agents – pretty much everyone wants submissions. We know incredibly reputable, well-established agencies with fabulous clients who have consulted with us to discover exactly how they can increase their slushpiles. Why? It’s simple: the slushpile is where the brilliant authors lie. After all, as every literary agent knows, J.K. Rowling came from the slushpile. So did Zadie Smith. So did Hilary Mantel. (See for example this interview.) So, if to comes to that, did I, along with pretty much ALL new writers. Apart from existing celebrity and media types, pretty much every single new fantastic author emerges from the slushpile or, these days, from an out-of-nowhere self-publishing success. Because agents know that and because agents have to keep their client lists replenished with new talent, they care about the slushpile. In those hills, there be gold. Myth #2: Agents Don’t Look At 99% Of The Manuscripts That Get Submitted. They do. OK, there may be times when agents are just overwhelmed with work and things go pear-shaped, but those times are exceptions, at any rate in any well-run agency. But good agencies, nearly always, will look at everything that comes in. But notice that I say “look at”, not “read”. The truth is that about 90% of manuscript submissions reveal themselves as not-good-enough very quickly indeed. There are three basic ways a submission can fail. Those are: A writer simply can’t put a sentence together. Those famous ‘green ink’ manuscripts are actually relatively rare. They’re the smallest category we’re dealing with here. If you’re together enough to be reading this blog post, you’re almost certainly not in that category. Some agents have actually died from an excess of bad grammar.The concept for the book just can’t work. A Young Adult book that’s 150,000 words long? A cosy little book about the author’s talking parrot? A highly didactic work of fantasy-fiction aimed at teaching 8 year old kids about groundwater pollution? There are, unfortunately, books which fail before you hit the opening sentence. The most common problem is that they haven’t answered the question of what would make this book stand out from the crowd. You must have a good answer to that question.There are signs of clunky, awkward or amateurish writing on the opening page. Our friends at the Writers’ Workshop periodically run events called ‘Slushpile Live’, where (remarkably brave) writers read their opening page out to a panel of literary agents. Those agents then play Simon Cowell and say what they really think, live, with no previous exposure to the writer or the manuscript. And the good manuscripts are really, really easy to spot. Ditto the ones that are clearly not yet strong enough. That sounds brutal, but it’s not really. There’s a quality threshold to enter the industry. You have to meet that threshold. If you don’t, then no one wishes you ill, but your work is not yet ready. If your work fails any of these three tests, it’ll be rejected – and the agent may spend as little as a minute making the decision. That’s not because the agent is evil, but because you haven’t yet met the standard. If you pass the opening scrutiny (good concept, check; decent writing, check), the agent simply has to read on. If your first three chapters still glitter with promise, they have to request the rest. And if the rest of the manuscript is wonderful – well, hell, you’ve got representation. (Did we hear someone whimpering in there?) Myth #3: It’s An Agent’s Job To Deal With The Slushpile. It isn’t. Talk to any agent at all and they will tell you that their regular day job (from, say, 9 am to 6 pm) is to work constantly on behalf of their existing authors: negotiating contracts, chasing up royalties, solving problems, meeting publishers. Of course agents know that if they don’t take on new and fabulous authors, their business will slowly wither – but 99% of agents will be dealing with their slushpile material during evenings and weekends. (These guys work hard: they’re always reading.) That means you need to cut agents some slack. There just will be times when life goes crazy for them. The big book fairs (London, Frankfurt, Bologna) are always very intense. If several existing authors deliver manuscripts at much the same sort of time, the agent in question HAS to prioritise those and will simply have to neglect his growing slushpile until they’re properly dealt with. It also means you need to take care of the agent’s reasonable needs. If your covering letter is a little too long, or unclear about what kind of book yours is, or makes any of those other niggly-but-annoying mistakes that agents often talk about – well, hell, remember that the agent is probably reading your stuff at 9.30pm, after a full day in the office. That’s not a good time to start annoying somebody with trivial little details that it was your job to get right in the first place. So get them right. Myth #4: Good Agents Will Offer Feedback To Slush Pile Writers. Not true. Never true, in fact. Yes, if an agent loves a book, they might offer representation even though they know that that book will need to go through another couple of drafts. (Or more. I spoke to one agent recently who was working with a writer on his sixth draft. So don\'t be afraid to be your own editor, but also know that you can query an agent with your work before it\'s \'perfect\'.) But agents can only offer that much input to actual or probable clients. There’s no way they can get into discussions on the 999 in 1,000 manuscripts they don’t take on. (And, anyway, if a detailed editorial input is what you’re after right now, why would you go to an agent whose main job is about selling manuscripts, not editing them?) Myth #5: Agents Get Their Assistants To Do The Work For Them. This is sometimes kind of true, but the implications are way different from what you think. When you see writers on the Internet saying, “Oh, that agent, I know he never read my work because [whatever particular piece of evidence is summoned in this particular instance,” they might actually be right. Basically, as agents get more senior, they’re increasingly likely to delegate chunks of their day to day activity. So, very roughly, the picture looks like this: New/young/hungry agents: they want to actively build client lists, as they don’t have a body of existing authors to sustain them. Those guys can’t afford to delegate anything to anyone, and probably don’t have assistants anyway. Every single interaction you have in relation to these manuscripts comes straight from the agent him or herself.Established agents. These guys are still open to new clients. They might take on 1-2 new authors a year, straight from the slushpile. But a lot of these folks will have some kind of assistant, and a big part of that assistant’s role is to do a first-cut filtration of the slushpile. It’ll work differently in different agencies (one notable agency, for example, employs a reader whose only job is to reduce the slushpile). Others will use their PAs as first-cut readers. Or whatever. But even so, these people will be looking at the top 1-5% from their slushpile and making their own decisions. If you get rejected before this stage, you may well get a note from the assistant’s desk. After that, the note will more likely come direct from the agent.Senior agents. These guys may never directly read a slushpile submission, but they will have a system that places the very best-of-the-best manuscripts on their desks – perhaps at the rate of 1-2 a month. It’s unlikely that these folk ever send a sorry-but-no message, unless yours is that truly exceptional manuscript which gave them pause. Now if you get rejected by an agent’s assistant (or reader, or even receptionist) you might think that you simply haven’t had an opportunity to put your work in front of the only person whose decision matters. But that’s not true! Any half-competent agency knows that the slushpile could well contain the next JK Rowling, the next Stephenie Meyer. They can’t afford to let those gems get away – and they mostly don’t. I know one leading London agency whose receptionists are hired, mostly, for their literary skills. Yes, they need to be able to answer the phone without dropping it, but their essential function is to act as really thoughtful, careful readers of a manuscript. They are trained very carefully and supervised very closely. And they get it right! It just isn’t that hard, in truth. Most manuscripts that come to any agency are just clearly not good enough. As the quality level rises, the decisions get tougher – but those decisions are passed upwards in the chain until they reach the person competent to make the decision. But absolutely no one can afford to be the person who said no to Rowling/Meyer/Suzanne Collins/whoever, so if your MS has real merit it will come to sit on the right desk. Myth #6: Agents Only Care About Bestsellers, They’re Only In This Game For The Money. Just wrong, this one. No one goes into the literary business for money. I mean, that would be like going to the Sahara for its watersports. Every single agent I know is in the biz because they love books, love stories, love writing, love authors. They love written culture and being in the swim of its creation. I don’t know a single agent who would take on a work he didn’t like (*) just for the dosh. It just doesn’t happen. All that said, of course agents are keen to represent books that may sell a lot of copies. That’s called being a sane businessperson and doing a great job for your clients. If my agent didn’t want my books to sell by the truckload, I’d get a different agent. [David Godwin took on Pippa Middleton for her party book. Since David Godwin is noted for his high-end literary list, her addition to that list raised a few eyebrows at the time.] Myth #7: Agents Care About Your Social Media Profile. Of course they don’t. If you got a manuscript in your slushpile that was just as amazingly brilliant as Wolf Hall, why would you give a tuppenny damn about the author’s Twitter following? Answer, you wouldn’t. There are exceptions, of course, but they only work positively, not negatively. So Ben Goldacre (author of Bad Science, etc.) has a massive online presence and that presence would impel any sane agent/editor to offer hm a deal. But you need Twitter followers in the tens of thousands (ideally hundreds of thousands) to make a real difference there. Ditto, when it comes to blog followers. If you have that, great. If not, don’t worry about it. Few writers do, and very few novelists do. Myth #8: Agents Care About Who You Are, What You Look Like, How Old You Are, Etc. They don’t. Or rather, it’s the same as above. Most writers (including yours truly, Harry Bingham) are middle-aged writers of no particular beauty or celebrity, and that’s just the way it is. Which is fine. No one cares. Indeed agents will often remind you that Mary Wesley began a string of bestselling books in her seventies. On the other hand, if you are incredibly beautiful and would be wonderful on TV and have an incredible backstory, those things will help, a bit, but not much. Asked to choose between a comely author with a mediocre manuscript and a plain one with a wonderful one, every agent on the planet will prefer the latter. So will publishers. Click here for more tips on finding an agent.