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Last week, we talked about how you can manage your affairs effectively even if you feel daunted by the potential scale of the marketing challenges involved in modern bookselling.

This week I want to pick up the thought I ended with: leaky pipes and thirsty sweet peas.

Let’s assume your book is on sale on Amazon. Let’s assume you can throw as much traffic as that page as you could reasonably wish.

I don’t know whether your book is for sale yet, but the second assumption is certainly true. You can throw traffic at your Amazon page. As much as you want. You can buy advertising on Facebook, on Bookbub and on Amazon itself. There are dozens of other traffic sources available too.

So the two basic needs for any sale campaign are perfectly doable. You can create the product and you can generate a flow of potential buyers.

So is there anything to stop your book selling well, pleasing readers and putting money in your pocket?

Well: yes and no.

No: there’s no reason why that shouldn’t be possible in theory.

But yes: most indie authors (and plenty of trad publishers) foul it up in practice. And it’s not too hard to figure out why. 

Let’s start with a simple thought experiment. What would it be for a book’s marketing campaign to run perfectly? What would perfection actually look like? And to simplify the thought experiment, let’s refine that a little. Assume all your book sales are on Amazon – or at least, let’s ignore other retailers for now.

So, a perfectly tuned marketing machine would look like this:

• Have you visible on any Amazon search page where your readers are likely to gather
• Convert 100% of those readers to visit your book page
• Induce 100% of those readers to buy your book
• Compel 100% of those readers to read your book right to the end
• Complete their journey by (a) reviewing the book, (b) buying the next in the series, and (c) signing up to your readers’ club
• Get readers to open and read every email you send
• Get 100% sales from your mailing list when you next launch a book

If 1000 people saw your book listed on an Amazon search page, that would convert into 1000 sales, 1000 reviews, and 1000 additions to your email list.

Now, OK, that won’t happen, but the thought experiment is still useful. Let’s look again at the marketing funnel and identify what the key conversion points are:

1. Have you visible on Amazon search.
   You need to fully optimise your title, subtitle, categories and keywords to achieve this. That means identifying the key bestseller lists where your readers are likely to assemble and figuring out what search terms people actually use to find books like yours.
   
   
2. Persuade those readers to visit your book page.
   The only conversion tools you have here are title, cover, price and reviews. Price isn’t really a factor on its own, in the sense that you’ll be competing against other similarly priced titles. Equally, you’re not very likely to stand out from the competition via title alone or (in the early days) reviews. So that says that getting your cover right is a vastly important factor. Perhaps the single most important one in selling your book.
   
   
3. Induce 100% of those readers to buy your book.
    OK, so now you have got potential readers to leave the search page and arrive at your book page. Great. That’s a key step in your conversion channel. And please note, that while a lot of readers will find your book page via some kind of Amazon search, plenty of readers will arrive directly at your book page from somewhere else completely: a social media post, a link in an ebook, an email, a blogger talking about your book, or anything else. So for some readers at least the Amazon leg of the marketing journey starts right here, with your book page.

Amazon, of course, controls most of the real estate of your book page, so you have a limited number of elements under your direct control. The key ones there are: cover (again, and in a larger size this time), title, blurb, price and reviews. Of these, the two critical ones are going to be blurb and cover.

Oh yes, and for plenty of readers, but not all, the purchase decision will be swayed by a quick visit to the “Look Inside” view of your book. The key conversion factor there? A blindingly good bit of opening text.

4. Compel 100% of your readers to read your book right to the end
 No doubt about what the key factor here is: does your book please the reader? Most books aren’t read. According to data gathered by analytics company, Jellybooks: “On average, fewer than half of the books tested were finished by a majority of readers. Most readers typically give up on a book in the early chapters. Women tend to quit after 50 to 100 pages, men after 30 to 50. Only 5 percent of the books Jellybooks tested were completed by more than 75 percent of readers. Sixty percent of books fell into a range where 25 percent to 50 percent of test readers finished them.”

That’s scary stuff. Most readers don’t finish most books. But the absolute key conversion factor in terms of your longer term career is simply this: Does your book get read? Would anyone want to buy another book by you?

5. Get all your readers to (a) review the book, (b) buy the next in the series, and (c) sign up to your readers’ club
 Writing an amazing book will be the biggest conversion factor here (and by a mile), but how good is your ebook at performing those other chores?

It’s not uncommon, still, for trad-published books to do an appalling job of hooking readers in for the long haul, but plenty of indies mess up as well. If you only have a timid “Please subscribe to my newsletter” somewhere in the copyright notices and other boring rubbish at the back of the book, then no one will subscribe. So your mailing list won’t grow. Similarly, if you don’t ask for reviews at all, or don’t ask in the right way, or don’t supply a one-click link to the relevant review page, then you’re not likely to get reviews.

6. Get readers to open and read every email they send
 It’s not uncommon for big publishers to have a single-digit open rate on their emails. Open rates for individual authors writing to their readers should be thirty percent or more. A really well-curated list can manage 50%. And those open rates matter, because when you come to send out the email that really matters to you – the launch email, the buy-my-book one – it’s not the number of names on your list that matters. It’s the number of people who bother to read what you’ve sent them.

What makes the difference here? It’s how much value your emails generally deliver, plus some technicalities around avoiding users’ spam filters and that kind of thing. Mostly though, it’s content, content, content. Do you write stuff that readers want to read?

7. Get 100% sales from your list at launch
 The conversion factor here will be an accumulation of everything else. But really? If people love your books and open your emails, they’ll buy the next book when you tell em it’s ready to go.

Now, pretty obviously, no one has the perfect marketing system, or anything close.

If your book page converts at even 20%, that will be an excellent result. (In other words, 1 in every 5 readers will end up buying your book having landed on your book page.) If you are selling your ebook at $4.99, you would do well to achieve even that conversion rate.

If 75% of readers actually finish your book, that will place you amongst the most successful titles out there.

As for email list sign ups, you would do well to get 1 in every 10 people signing up for your list.

An open rate of 40% on emails would be strong.

And what about the percentage of people who, having bought book #1 in your series, go on to buy books #2, #3 and #4? That’s a massively important stat. If you have a series that is three or more books long, then you should be aiming for a series readthrough of 50% or better. (ie: if you sell 1000 copies of book #1, you sell at least 500 of book #3.)

These things matter a vast amount.

Go back to the idea we started with: you have a book. You can easily generate traffic to the relevant sales page. Bingo. Your career is made.

Except that it costs you money to generate that traffic. And whether that traffic will end up generating revenue depends entirely on how leaky your sales system is.

And when do you think paid advertising is likely to work the best:

1. When your marketing pipes are leaking paid traffic all over the place?
2. Or when each one of those joints in your marketing network are as watertight as humanly possible?

Put like that, it’s really obvious that advertising just can’t work if the rest of your system is leaky. Indeed, since the price of ads will be driven up by professional authors who have a non-leaky system, there’s no chance at all that authors with a badly leaking system can make money.

And that’s why, in almost every case, when people tell me “I tried advertising but it didn’t work”, the principal issue doesn’t lie in the advertising itself. It lies in all the stuff that has to be right before any kind of marketing activity is going to succeed.

That’s why most people fussing over their blog tour, or their social media posts, or their CPC on Facebook ads are simply looking at the wrong thing. Those things matter only if the rest of your system is already up to scratch.

These considerations are most keenly felt by indie authors, as they have all the levers of marketing power under their own direct control. But trad authors face the same basic challenge: building a leak-proof marketing system. Yes, it’ll be their publishers who face the challenge of driving traffic to a page, but in the end, it’s the author who cares most about the end result.

Is your book good enough?

Is your cover strong?

Is your blurb attractive?

Do readers sign up to and engage with your mailing list?

You need your answers here to be emphatically positive. If you are an indie, and you recognise that you could do better on these issues, then your first task is to fix them.

If you’re trad-published, and these things aren’t right, then you need to do what you can to secure the changes you need. (Which will be harder, because you don’t have direct control.)

These things are hard. And they are time-consuming. And some of them cost money. (Primarily editorial help and book covers.) But you have to do them anyway.

If your irrigation pipes leak, your plants won’t get watered, no matter how wildly you turn the tap.

If your irrigation pipes are reasonably watertight, then watering your plants is child’s play.

Sermon over.

I am now going to supervise my children using a real and actual hose to water some real and actual sweet peas. My prediction? We will all get very wet.

I like tea and I need reading glasses.

I mention this only because both activities require some basic accessories: a china cup in one case and a pair of glasses in the other.

But those accessories aren’t actually glued to me and I often put them down. Because I’m absent-minded, I often forget where I put them or, indeed, that I had them with me at all.

The result? I leave a trail of tea mugs and reading glasses wherever I go. When I’m on the phone, I’ll often walk into the garden or down the road outside the house. (Walking is good for brain activity and conversations, in my opinion, happen better outdoors.) Trouble is, I’ll often have a cup of tea in my hand, put it down when it’s finished, then forget that I’ve done so. It’s perfectly common for me to find a mug of tea in our vegetable patch, a pair of glasses on a box hedge, or any empty cup, with a pair of glasses in, on the verge outside our gate.

This sounds like a mildly chaotic (if agreeably bucolic) way of life, and I suppose it is. While more organised people buy designer glasses for eighty pounds the pair, I buy my glasses from Amazon, ten pounds for three. So when the kids sit on a pair, or I leave them in a café, or a hedge somewhere just grows over their carcass, I don’t really mind. Just chalk the cost up to me being me.

Now, I mention this because earlier in the week I talked to Rachel Abbott about her career in self-publishing.

(Short recap if you missed the webinar: she built a tech company, sold it and retired. But when she retired she wrote a book that became the #1 bestseller on Amazon for eleven weeks. That book launched a whole new career and Rachel has been a huge-selling author ever since.)

And:

Rachel is organised and productive.

She has self-pub books, books with Amazon Publishing, and books with a Big 5 firm. She sells overseas in multiple languages. She has an agent and multiple editors and a virtual assistant in Serbia.

She divides her marketing efforts up by type of reader. (Red-hot: her passionate fans. Warm: people who have read a book or so, but aren’t yet addicts. Cold: people who haven’t yet read her stuff.)

She thinks about ad platforms and her Facebook page and her Facebook group and email lists.

She manages multiple series. And has to write the damn books. And deal with edits. And do all that while (in theory) retired and enjoying the gentler life.

All this is kind of intimidating to the rest of humankind.

What if you’re not quite so superhuman? What if – just to pick an example – your kids are quite likely to come in from the garden having found your glasses in the strawberry bed? Or rescued from the roof of a car before it drove away?

Well.

A few thoughts.

First, this isn’t just about self-pub

Certainly, self-pubbers have more on their plates than trad-authors do, but any really high-profile author is juggling a lot. I know of one reasonably successful literary author, who has mastered the art of being a literary author. Hanging out at the right parties, knowing the right people, popping up on the right talk shows, and all that. Her books aren’t actually all that good, but she’s parlayed a middling level talent into quite a successful career by just working her own specific channels as hard as she can.

The short message is that flourishing careers involve complexity, whether you’re trad-published & literary or self-published and genre. You can reduce the challenges by going trad, but you certainly don’t eliminate them.

Second, write well

Being a good writer always, always helps. Marketing bad books is a pretty much impossible exercise. (Not quite, but almost.) Marketing good ones ought to be, and is, a much simpler exercise. The heart of any writer’s job lies exactly where you want it to: putting the right words in the right order.

Third, focus on what works for you

What works for you? What things are you good at? What do you enjoy?

If you love the chatter and hubbub of Facebook, then go for it. Use it strategically, and with a clear plan in mind, but you can certainly make that the centre of your marketing work.

If you like the mix of creativity (ad creation) and geekiness (ad dashboards) involved in advertising, then ride that tiger.

If you like direct communication with your reader – which you should; you’re a writer – then a mailing list should certainly be at the centre of things for you.

And so on.

You can’t be good at everything and you don’t need to be good at everything. You need roughly three reliable traffic sources to succeed. In self-pub, those sources might be your mailing list, promo sites (like Bookbub) and one paid advertising platform.

In trad-land, you need decent supermarket uptake, plus a good presence on Amazon, plus some additional means of driving interest in your books. (A successful publicity campaign can work, but don’t just assume that what your publisher does will be sufficient. It usually isn’t.)

Fourth, get the basics right

Any marketing, whether trad or indie, will basically fail unless you have the basics right. I started to write a checklist and why it matters so much, then realised the topic was big enough – and important enough – for a whole separate email.

I’ll write that email another time but, for now, just know that getting the basics right is critical. Do you love your blurb? Is your cover stunning, and appealing to the exact right audience? Is your pricing right? Do you have authentic book reviews (or a plan for getting them)?

You don’t have to have a Rachel Abbott level of organisation to achieve those things. You just need to realise that they matter and you need to go on worrying at them until they’re right.

Cheer for the disorganised

So yes, if you are a Monarch of the Spreadsheet, an Empress of the List, you’re lucky. I’m not.

If you are capable of hanging onto a cup of tea or a pair of glasses for an entire day without losing them, then you’re lucky. I’m not.

But writing well, focusing on what matters, and finding a small handful of things that you can do well? That’s enough. Trad or indie, that’s enough.

And the heart of it all? The bit that matters most? It’s the ability to put sentences together in a way that pleases readers. Nothing else.

Now I’m off to go and find tea mugs amidst the bindweed. It’s sunny here and the tulips are out.

I wrote an email before this one – reread it – didn’t like – and scrapped it. So here instead is a workhorse of an email. A sixteen-hand carthorse with shaggy fetlocks and a willingness to pull heavy farm implements in the rain.

Because we’ve just relaunched our own website, the theme of this email is what your author site needs to do – and the most practical way to do it.

Rule the first: get a site.

If you’re even half-serious about making a living from writing, then you need a site. No real author-led marketing can happen without it.

Rule the second: Build like you mean it

Everyone knows what to expect from the domain name of an author site. You either want to be harrybingham.com (or.co.uk, or whatever) or – if you share a name with someone more famous than you – something like jamesdeanauthor.com.

Don’t go for something funky like crazypinkrabbits.com, no matter how appealing that is to you. Your most basic bit of branding simply needs to identify your site as the thing that readers are looking for when they search. That means either just yourname.com or yournameauthor.com. Save the jokes for your author bio.

Equally, although you can get free hosting if you choose a site like yourname.wordpress.com, you should spend the (fairly small) additional cost in direct hosting – that means cutting out the “.wordpress” part of that domain address.

Rule the third: Simplify yourself

Yes, I know. You are a complex human creature with thoughts and opinions on the poetry of Robert Frost, how to bake sourdough, the state of coffee farmers in Nicaragua, bluegrass music, eighteenth century epistolatory novels, and women’s soccer.

But shut up about it.

Your website is not a platform for you. It is a platform for your books.

If you want to discuss all the poetry/sourdough/soccer stuff, then feel free to do so – but somewhere different. Your author website is a marketing asset. Keep it that way.

Rule the fourth: Use the right tools

These days, you need to WordPress. There are simple drag-and-drop website builders out there, but they will all limit you in the longer run if you seek to develop your site. WordPress is insanely powerful with a tool for every need you could possibly have. So use it.

WordPress comes with a million different themes on offer. (The website theme is the bit of code that acts as the chassis for everything else.) Don’t get bogged down in trying to choose and don’t let your web designer just pick something he or she is familiar with. The best theme for your site is Parallax for Writers by GoCreate. When you buy the theme (for $600), you’ll get most of your site set up for free. More info here.

Rule the fifth: if in doubt, pay someone

Ten years ago, I didn’t have a website. I didn’t quite see the point.

Then I got a contract for my work in America. I flew out to New York to meet the team. And someone said, “Oh, you need a website.” So I built one. In an afternoon. And quite a pretty site it was too.

The whole thing cost me a few bucks a month.

But it was still limited. When I redeveloped the site, I wanted a few add-ons that I couldn’t get from my simple site. So I paid someone about a grand, because I didn’t want the hassle of doing the work myself. On the one hand, that’s quite a lot of money. On the other hand, no serious author is without a properly designed and properly functioning website, so it’s money you need to spend.

The short message is that you either need to do the work yourself, or pay someone. You can’t just avoid the issue.

Rule the sixth: brand for the future

A lot of authors, seeing their first ever book cover, decide to place the cover art at the centre of their entire site design.

And then – the paperback looks different from the hardback.

Your US cover looks different from your UK cover.

Your second book uses different colour and cover art.

Your fancily designed website soon loses touch with the books that readers are actually looking at.

The answer to this conundrum is simply to make sure that your website embodies your brand, not your book. So if you’re writing cosy crime, your site will feature quilts and grannies and cats and the like. If you’re writing second world war historical fiction, you’ll have soldiers and tanks and planes of the right vintage. If you’re writing gritty police procedural, you’ll use monochromes and cityscapes with splashes of bright acid colour.

Do that, and your site art won’t need to change every time you change a cover.

***

Now all of this sounds like – and is – sensible advice, but I’ve so far skirted the issue of what a website is actually for. And you need to understand this, because most authors – and most publishers – get it wrong. So listen carefully as I tell you:

The Golden Rule

The purpose of your website is to collect email addresses.

That’s it. The core purpose.

Yes, you may also achieve other things. (Provide a way for your readers to contact you. Provide a way for media opportunities to reach you. Provide a bio for those interested. Provide a longer guide to your books than Amazon offers. And so on.)

But all those things are ancillary. The thing that actually matters is that your website is a stellar way to collect the email addresses of the people who land there. That way, you can communicate directly with them whenever you want.

As it happens, I’m doing a (member-only) webinar on mailing lists tonight. If you can listen along then do. If not, then catch up on replay.

But, long story short, mailing lists are the most powerful tool any author possesses. They have driven my own self-pub career. My own trad career. And they drive Jericho Writers too.

My author website picks up email addresses from about two thirds of the people who land on it. If I hadn’t made that email collection central to the design, my conversion rate would be far lower – perhaps in the low sing digits – and my author career would have been far different.

I won’t talk long here about how to optimise for email collection, but I will say that you need a proper landing page (ie: one stripped of all normal navigation tools). Therte’s a bit more on this in the PSes if you want to know more.

That is all from me.

This carthorse of an email intends to plod steadily towards a barn full of hay, a bucket of warm water, a groom with a curry comb, and heaps of fresh straw.

If you've got questions about websites, then ask away in the comments and I'll do my best to answer. Oh yes, and if you can, hop onto the mailing list webinar this evening. The topic is a very important one.

As you know, I’m on a George Saunders kick at the moment, and this email closes a trilogy inspired by his Swim In A Pond In The Rain. More about all that in a second – but first up, just a word to say that there's some important housekeeping material in the first comment below this post. All important stuff - and you're quite likely to be affected, so do take a look.

Righty-ho. Editing. Writing and editing:-

I want to start with something Saunders says at the very beginning of his work. He says this:

Years ago, on the phone with Bill Buford, then fiction editor of The New Yorker, enduring some painful edits, feeling a little insecure, I went fishing for a compliment: ‘But what do you like about the story?’ I whined. There was a long pause. And Bill said this: ‘Well, I read a line. And I like it … enough to read the next.’

… I’ve taken a lot of comfort in this idea over the years. I don’t need a big theory of fiction to write it. I don’t have to worry about anything but: Would a reasonable person, reading line four, get enough of a jolt to go on to line five?

In a way, that’s the whole deal, right? If someone enjoys our writing enough to read it through at a happy canter, we’ve won. Some readers will find more in a book than others. Some people will rank us higher or lower than some other comparable authors. But don’t be fussy. If someone reads our work, line by line, to the end, we’ve done what we came to do.

In the past week or two, I’ve run a self-editing webinar where I live-edited about 1000 words of text, over the space of about an hour. We also spent time, you and I, with that white chairs / green terraces exercise, where we all spent a lot of time trying to find a way to say something simple in about ten words (without, I think, yet finding a completely satisfactory answer.)

Many of you will have felt a little frustrated by the amount of time I’m willing to spend on apparently minor things. (Does whitely work as an adjective? Can Dan talk about his sister standing outside his door, when he doesn’t actually know if she’s standing or not?)

And, just to be clear, I really am willing to spend time on minor things. When I fuss over minutiae on a webinar, I’m not putting on a show simply because I have an hour-long gig to deliver. I’m doing in public what I do all the time in private. The truth, indeed, is worse than you fear. In an hour-long webinar, I’m conscious of the need to entertain and keep moving. At home, with no one watching, I’ll just redo the same damn sentence as long as it takes to make me happy.

So yes: I am picky. And yes: I too subscribe to the Buford Theory of Fiction (BTF): If sentence N is good enough, they’ll read sentence N + 1, and …

According to that theory, micro-blockages in a piece of text can accumulate to lethal effect. If you write a sentence that forces the reader to pause and re-construe the sentence in her head, you’ve created a momentary interruption in the flow. A few such interruptions in the course of a book are perhaps inevitable. But two or three such blockages on a single page? That book is one that the BTF tells you will never be read.

So editing is good for that reason.

But Saunders says – let’s call this the Saunders Theory of Fiction, the STF – that editing is also the process that creates highly organised fiction (or, if you prefer, simply good fiction.) Here is Saunders again:

We can reduce all writing to this: we read a line, have a reaction to it, trust (accept) that reaction, and do something in response, instantaneously, by intuition.

That’s it.

Over and over.

It’s kind of crazy but, in my experience, that’s the whole game: (1) becoming convinced that there is a voice inside you that really, really knows what it likes, and (2) getting better at hearing that voice and acting on its behalf.

(I always like Gore Vidal’s way of saying something similar: ‘Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.’ That’s simple, reliable advice. Just apply it – and boom! Twenty years later, you’ll be a good writer.)

But Saunders presses home a wider point, which is that the repetitious action of read / react / change / re-read ends up building into something that is you, but is also bigger than you. More humane. Funnier. More observant. More insightful. More nuanced. More coherent.

On the one hand, you’re not that funny, that observant, that nuanced – but you can be a bit of all those things, sometimes. So you capture the funny when the funny is there. Four paragraphs later, a phrase floats onto the page that has more deftness, more nuance than the thing you replaced. Your page still isn’t that funny, or that nuanced, but what the hell? You’re only on round #4 of the editing. You’ve got lots more opportunities to find the humane / observant / funny / tender, etc. Each time you adjust the manuscript, the book will have more of you breathing in it, but a better, perfected sort of you.

What’s more, as the book takes shape, your story starts pushing things at you. The decisions you make about sentence 8 on page 197 are informed by the 196 pages you’ve already read and the 112 pages that follow (and whose content you already know.)

An example: my current work in progress is based in a secure psychiatric hospital on the west coast of Wales. The hospital has something of the air of a ‘fortress built by Nature for herself’, but my description of the hospital never quite found a way to make the surrounding ocean feel present and alive. There’s a scene where my character first arrives at the hospital, and I’d already reviewed and rewritten that scene a dozen or more times without finding a way to get the sea in there (or, indeed, realizing that I needed to.) But by the time I’d finished the book and had the whole of it, so to speak, in my hand, I felt precisely what the deficiency was and started – Saunders-like – to scramble towards a solution.

As that process continues, the themes and metaphors of the book will start to take shape and cohere, by themselves. I won’t be thinking, “Gee, need to make more of the sea-as-metaphor.” I’ll just react to sentences and scenes, and go on making my fiddlesome little corrections, until I start to get happy. And, based on past experience, I predict that when I get happy enough to say ‘Finished’, the book will have taken on enough complexity and coherence to be something of value in the world.

That’s all from me, but do remember to take a look immediately below in the comments, because there lurk truffles.

I mentioned last week that I was reading George Saunders’ A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, a book about reading and writing. It’s a very good book and I recommend it.

At one point, Saunders writes:

I’ve worked with so many wildly talented young writers over the years that I feel qualified to say that there are two things that separate writers who go on to publish from those who don’t.

First, a willingness to revise.

Second, the extent to which the writer has learned to make causality.

I’ve probably worked with as many writers as Saunders has. (Though, young? Tush! The oldest client of ours to become a top 10 bestseller was the 84-year-old Barbara Tate. You don’t need to be young to have something to say.) And on that willingness-to-revise issue: well, he’s right.

The most frustrating writers I’ve ever dealt with are ones who come to us with a really strong manuscript, which they then don’t revise. I remember one writer in particular who had a genuinely interesting and well-written manuscript. It needed a brisk haircut, three or four weeks in the workshop, and it would have been ready to meet some agents. And – it never did. It never got there. I’d look at version N+1 of the manuscript and be genuinely perplexed. Had I in fact received version N by mistake? And then I’d look and I’d find that, no, sure enough, a few specific paragraphs had changed in response to very specific comments by me.

But those comments had always been simply illustrative of more general points: “Your characterisation is sometimes sloppily general, for example on page 243, where you say …” The issue on page 243 might have been fixed, but the manuscript just didn’t reflect the broader comment I’d been struggling to get across.

I think it’s probably true to say that not one of those authors has ever been published. And honestly? They didn’t deserve it either.

Really, though, I want to focus on Saunders’s other issue: causality.

He writes:

Making causality doesn’t seem sexy or particularly literary. It’s a workmanlike thing, to make A cause B … But it’s the hardest thing to learn. It doesn’t come naturally, not to most of us. But that’s really all a story is: a series of things that happen in sequence, in which we can discern a pattern of causality …

This is important, because causation is what create the appearance of meaning.

“The queen died, and then the king died” (E.M. Forster’s famous formulation) describes two unrelated events happening in sequence. It doesn’t mean anything. “The queen died, and the king died of grief” puts those events into relation; we understand that one caused the other. The sequence, now infused with causality, means: “That king really loved his queen.”

And yes: just yes.

Causality gives stories meaning, which gives them purpose. You can’t have a memorable or interesting story that doesn’t have layers of meaning – and rich causal relationships.

But I want to pick at this a bit more, not least because Saunders addresses himself, in large part, to literary writers. But we genre authors are in the same old boat, with the same sails, ropes and steering tackle.

We have the same aim: write an engaging story! And the same means of propulsion: characters at move in the world, events connecting up via chains of causality.

Yet things only start to get interesting when the causality gets complicated and (preferably) a little but murky too.

An example:

Let’s say you want your detective novel to end with the baddie taking your protagonist, an unarmed female detective, hostage down at the now-deserted docks. OK, good. That sounds like a perfectly good strategy to me.

But why would your unarmed female detective go and explore those dark and deserted docks by herself? Those of us who write police stories have an eternal battle: we want drama, but police forces really don’t. The author solution to any plot-climax is: get the protagonist one-to-one and face to-face with the baddie. The police solution is: deploy overwhelming force so the baddie has absolutely no chance to get one-to-one and face to-face with anyone.

The classic authorial response involves some kind of side-shuffle. Damn! The detective’s phone is out of signal. Damn! She’d call for help, but she’s in trouble with her boss, so ... Damn! She would call for help, but she has a stone in her shoe and …

And, OK, you do probably need a thing-in-the-world type solution like these. Such things help.

But they can’t be all. That can’t be your everything.

Saunders, remember, links causality with meaning – and a lost phone signal doesn’t deliver any kind of interesting meaning at all. So you need to pair up your thing-in-the-world solution with something fuzzier, darker and more capable of complex interpretation. So:

• Your protagonist is half in love with the dark marauder at the docks.
• She feels that dark marauder is her – that he embodies a part of what she is.
• She thinks the dark marauder may be her father; she doesn’t know if she wants to capture him or free him.
• Or something else

In one of my novels, The Dead House, my character investigates a number of disappearances. It turns out that the victims have been forced into a life of religious service, that they did not invite and cannot escape. At the crucial point in the book, my character, Fiona, has pieced together about 80% of the mystery. She knows enough that she could escape it – but doesn’t. Her investigation leads her – alone – down a dark country path. There she finds the clue that completes her understanding of the case, but also leads to her capture. She too is about to be forced into a life of painfully narrow religious service.

So why? Why does she go alone?

Well, yes: I provided the reader with enough thing-in-the-world type explanations to satisfy the most basic objections. But that wouldn’t have been enough. That would have delivered an excuse, yes, but no meaning. 

So I tried to write the relevant scenes with a sense of longing as well as one of horror. After the book’s denouement, one of the rescued prisoners (a Russian woman) sits and talks with Fiona. Here’s a (very trimmed down) version of what happens:

We sit.

Opposite each other at a short refectory table. Like staring into a mirror, except that she is taller than me, and very pale. The skin and eyes of a land close to the High Arctic.

Her kirtle is beaded around the neckline, where mine is plain, but the bootstring lacing at the front is the same. The grey cloth is the same. The weight of scratchy wool. The thin, almost sheer, undershirt.

I say, ‘Last night. You saw me through the glass? I thought I felt it.’

‘Yes. You are a police?’

‘A police officer. Yes.’

‘Last night, when I see you, I—’

‘Yes?’

I think this is what I wanted to know. The reason I asked to see this woman. I want to understand what she felt. What she saw.

She says, ‘I don’t know. I have two thought. One is, you are real one. You are really here to do this thing [life as a religious anchorite].’ She sweeps her hand from wimple down towards the hem of her skirt. ‘You have this in your face which say, “Yes, I am come to really do this.” But also, I think, this woman make us free. How, I don’t know, but . . . this woman make us free.’

And that’s causality operating the way Saunders means. It’s not really the click of billiard balls he’s after – a pattern that could be fully described in mathematics alone – it’s the murk of human-to-human causation.

Was Fiona there to rescue prisoners? Or submit to a life of religious service? In the end, she chooses the rescue option. (Of course. Duh! I have a series to write.) But we feel the temptation of the other course too. The terrible beauty. The way it could attract a character like mine.

So why did she let herself be caught? Because she wanted to be caught. Even phrasing it like that is too crass, too simple – but that basic pull of attraction was an essential ingredient in the cassoulet.

So, folks. Revise lots. Work with causality yes, but make it complicated. Dodgy phone signals are fine, up to a point, but your deeper meanings – your story purpose – those will always lie buried in a complex human heart.

And how about you? Are you struggling with a problem of causation where your thing-in-the-world solution just feels insufficient. Or have you read something which inspired you to dig out deeper, more ambiguous connections in your own work? Let me know below, and we'll all have a Heated Debate.