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A short email from me today, with a single thought in it. Here it is:

Creative writers and, really, creators of almost any sort,
are often asked to perform their best work without any kind of support.

No financial support: you have to write and edit and perfect an entire damn novel before you get to find out whether anyone wants it or has a use for it. For most us, that’s like asking us to do one year’s worth of work before finding out if we’re going to get paid anything at all.

No institutional support: you’ll be doing your work alone. There’s no big surrounding environment to say, “Yes, we’ve asked you to do this difficult thing, but don’t worry, there are career structures for people like you, here is a team which is made up of people like you, and here’s a canteen that offers cheap lattes because we know you like them.”

No tech or knowhow support: If you’re self-publishing, there are quite a few tech dashboards to deal with. If you’re not, you still have to grapple with the intricacies of agent-hunting, which involves a certain knowhow, a knowledge of what to do and how to do it. Either way, there’s a whole lot of technical knowledge which you don’t have, and other people do, and which you will need to master in order to succeed.

And often the support of our loved ones is passive rather than active. “Oh, Joan? Yeah, she loves writing. She’s upstairs now tapping away. I think it’s something about orcs this time? Or is it medieval sailors? Or something to do with tsetse flies? Anyway, yeah, I’m sure it’s great.” I don’t want to knock that kind of support, because that’s necessary too, but there’s a big gap between that and the sort that really sees your project and understands and endorses your passion for it.

And – jeepers. That’s a big ask, right?

In any well-run office, we recognise the need to bring new members of staff onto the team with care. An introduction to the job, to the team, to the tech, to the staff parties and the in-jokes and all the rest of it. Mess that stuff up and you very likely won’t get the best from that newbie – and the newbie, very likely, will be wondering whether to look around for a different job.

And at one level, that basic isolation doesn’t change. I’m playing around on a new project at the moment – very literary, very quirky – and it’s completely unclear whether anyone at all will want to buy it. So am I writing for myself or an audience? For free or for pay? I don’t know. The process of finding out is still months away.

And in the end, Jericho Writers can’t solve that problem for you. No one can. The essence of it is hard-wired into our industry.

But we will do what we can. We ask our Writer Support people to be friends and guides first. We ask them to be absolutely honest with anyone who rings up or emails in. We set them absolutely no sales targets. They aren’t there to sell; they’re there to help.

We also want to enrich our community – and will have a lot more to share later this year. Membership of that community will remain free to all. I know that plenty of writers have come to depend deeply on friendships and relationships first formed in that community.

And then there’s the matter of ethos too. Of course, we aim to work with professional editors, and professional tutors, and so on. We demand a high standard of work and are constantly monitoring it. But do our editor-tutor-mentors just deliver the work and move on? Or do they actually care? Are they invested in the work and the people whose work they nourish? In the end, we don’t ask for mere professionalism. We also want to work with people of genuine passion.

So that’s the thought. This writing game of ours is tough. It’s isolated. It’s probably doubly hard in the context of a global pandemic. Plenty of people have struggled.

We can’t change that basic struggle. Writing is tough because it’s competitive and difficult. It’s tough making the Olympics too, and for essentially the same reason. But we can recognise the challenge. And many of us know what it’s like from our own experience. We’re on your side.

I once wrote a book – The Lieutenant’s Lover – which was a historical novel set mostly in the St Petersburg of 1917 and then, after a long gap, in 1945/46 Berlin.

(The book was my first and only proper romance, though it had big elements of historical adventure too. The heroine was forty-something by the time of the Berlin chapters. She was also a sergeant in the Red Army and had just experienced a pretty bruising thirty years. The cover designer chose to represent her as an extremely elegant young woman, with immaculate make-up and a jauntily fashionable chapeau. I don’t think he knew a lot about the Red Army.)

(Oh, and look, am I allowed two parentheses, even right at the start of an email? Yes? No? Yes. OK, so I also want to tell you that my German publisher liked the book but said that it was a bit different from my earlier fiction, which hadn’t had been primarily romance. So they asked, could I please adopt a penname for the work? I said yes. My full name is, as it happens, Thomas Henry Bingham, so I suggested that Tom Henry might work fine. They said OK, but they were thinking a woman’s name might be better …? I quite liked that idea, and was going to publish under the name Emma Makepeace, which I still think is a GENIUS name. Unfortunately, something happened to foul up the deal and that book was never published in German. I still have the petticoats though, just in case.)

Anyway, the point of this email is neither cover design, nor pennames.

I want to talk research. In this case, my research had to do with two well-studied historical periods, but really any kind of fiction might call for research. If you’re writing a psychological thriller where one character works in an advertising office, you need to know how advertising offices work. If there’s a bit of ocean-sailing adventure, you need to be able to tell port from starboard. Even if your work is totally speculative – full of androids working uranium mines on prison planets – you need to know something about uranium and the technology behind those androids and have a working model of the gravity / atmosphere / geology of your planet.

To do that research, you’ll naturally hit Wikipedia and you’ll pick up some books.

In my case, I learned a lot about the very interesting politics of Germany’s post-war occupation. The Western allies took very different approaches to the management of their sectors. The Soviets had, from the start, a no intention of anything other than a complete takeover of theirs.

I like my history and I gobbled up plenty of textbooks and learned loads. But there’s a huge difference between regular history and the stuff that’s of interest to a novelist. So yes, you need to know the broader political history of a time. (Or a bit of formal geology, if you’re researching uranium mines. Or a bit of marketing theory if you’re researching ad agencies.)

But ultimately you are in search of detail.

So take my characters in 1946 Berlin. I knew a lot about the politics. I knew a lot about reconstruction of the city and the teams of women chipping mortar off fallen bricks so the things could be reused. I had some curious little family details. (My wife’s grandparents were German/Poles who ended up in Munich at the end of the war and lived in a refugee camp for years.)

But none of that answered my questions. What did characters eat? What did they cook on? What occupation-bureaucracy did they have to deal with? With paper money almost worthless, what did they barter with?

The best answers to those questions didn’t come from formal history books, but from ordinary diaries and memoirs. It didn’t even matter if those memoirs were badly written. They just needed to be chatty, discursive, full of detail.

Those details are the ones to pounce on.

Same thing with uranium mines. It’s all very well to read things in Wikipedia like this: “In conventional mining, ores are processed by grinding the ore materials to a uniform particle size and then treating the ore to extract the uranium by chemical leaching.”

Good. You need to know that. But that doesn’t get us close to the felt experience of being a uranium miner. Uranium is radioactive. Humans need sheltering from the exposure. Open-cast uranium mining is therefore mostly done by miners operating inside sealed cabs in order to prevent them breathing in radioactive dust.

But what happens when the sun shines on one of those cabs? Do they get hot? Are they air-conditioned? Does the driver even have the ability to open a window? What are the washdown procedures after work? What happens if you have a mechanical breakdown and have to leave the cab?

Answering those questions will get your fictional miner ever closer to a believable character with a believable set of experiences.

And you’re not just looking for details. You’re hunting for words. With uranium, it’s words like yellowcake, roll-front deposits, Geiger counter, shear zone, gamma ray spectrometer, heap leach, contamination, haul truck, primary crusher, and so on. With a vocabulary like that, you can already feel the credibility of the story beginning to build.

Another trick: have your characters toss those words off as though they’re ordinary, not needing more explanation. It doesn’t really matter whether your reader completely understands the nature of yellowcake or knows how a primary crusher operates. If your characters use those terms with the fluency of the very familiar, your entire setting gains in authority. You’ll actually get more colour and credibility that way than if you burrow into a detailed description of the crusher. (Unless it matters of course. If you’re about to drop an aggressive robot into a primary crusher, then yes please, tell us about it.)

And accuracy?

Well, look, I’m an imagination-first kind of guy. If I’m considering whether or not to read a novel, the recommendation that “it’s very accurate on the topic of post-war Berlin / modern ad agencies / uranium mining,” is likely to make my heart sink. In the end, I think Imagination needs to dominate poor old Fact, the plain Jane of that sisterly pairing.

But the more you know, the more your imagination can leap. Very often, you’ll find yourself holding back from a sentence you might want to write because you don’t quite know the factual detail needed to support it. So accumulate the facts, then leave them behind. Or, if the facts are wonderful, place them front and centre. I once wrote a book about the 1920s/30s oil industry. There were two or three major oil strikes described in that book and they were all closely based on the actual facts of what happened.

And often fact just trumps anything that you might have dreamed up. A tiny example: in my research for the oil book, I read about a driller who fell out of the derrick onto the roof of the pumping shed and from there to the ground. He broke multiple bones but, while he was waiting for medical help, he said to his co-workers, ‘Well, ain’t you going to find a cigarette for this broken-assed son-of-a-bitch?’

That’s such beautiful colour, you can’t help but want to use it.

Even Plain Jane has her moments in the sun. Grab em. Use em. Have fun with them.

What are you researching? What bountiful colour and detail has Plain Jane given to you? And who out there writes under a penname of the opposite sex? Maybe one of you is actually called Emma and writes under the name Butch Ribeye, or something. I'm really hoping so.

It’s conventional to talk about publishing as split into two camps, two rival poles:

There is Trad Land, populated by literary agents and Big Publishers and imprints whose colophons drip with history and just a little (nay, more than a little) snobbery. Back in the day, those places smelled of tweed and pipe-smoke. Women wore earnest glasses and looked mildly frazzled. They felt like places where you could talk about sentence structure without being laughed at and where all but the very rawest publicists had a hundred tales about Embarrassing Incidents involving Major Authors.

Then there’s Planet Indie. (And yes: I’m muddling up my poles, lands and planets in a giant astro-geographical soup. But phooey to you. I live in a world beyond Lobachevsky and out here, in my universe, everything makes perfect sense.)

On Planet Indie, things don’t smell of tweed and pipe-smoke. No one really knows what a colophon is. The only person who wears earnest glasses is you, if that happens to be the look you’re rocking. Planet Indie doesn’t have an assembly of gleaming towers in London and New York. It has – well, it has your bedroom and your living room and, quite often, the coffee shop you most often go to for caffeine / company / an internet connection that doesn’t curl up and die on you.

Both places produce an awful lot of books and an awful lot of sales.

Fiction is largely read electronically these days. Perhaps about seven-tenths of all fiction is consumed digitally (mostly e-book but a good splash of audio.) Add in the print fiction that is purchased online and cyberspace accounts for more than three quarters of all fiction sales. That’s territory which indie authors can compete for very successfully indeed. During our Self-Pub month (for members), I spoke to Marie Force who has sold ten million books, the vast majority of which she’s sold as an indie and the vast-vast majority of which will have sold in e-form.

And yes: it’s still true that traditional acclaim tends to accrue to trad-published authors – print media doesn’t review indie authors, for no good reason beyond simple laziness. The result is that “authors you’ve heard of” and “authors who’ve sold a gazillion books” are non-identical sets. There’s plenty of overlap, of course, but media hoo-hah is not even remotely a reliable guide to book sales.

Now all this, really, is by way of preamble, pre-canter, and pre-gallop, to the thing I really wanted to say. Namely this:

Lots of IDIOTS – myself included – often talk as though there are only two ways to get published. Trad-land and Planet Indie. So when writers get rejected by literary agents, they often have a tendency to think of self-pub as their primary fallback.

But, oh my friends, I have led you into grave error. There aren’t really two types of publishing, there are three.

There’s Trad-land, with its agents, its colophons and its gleaming metropolitan towers.

There’s Planet Indie, with its book sales, its productivity, and its faint smell of pyjamas.

And there’s a whole scattered archipelago, the Micronesia of Publishing, populated by innumerable little micro-publishers, each of whom publish rather few titles and sell rather few books.

But, of my friends, in those islands there be riches. Some examples:

Risky literary fiction

The bigger publishers need to sell a reasonably large volume of any title to justify the launch costs. That now tends to rule out more challenging or more experimental fiction, except from authors already famous enough to sell pretty much anything.

So a slew of really excellent literary micro-publishers has sprung into being. We’ve had as it happens a long association with the two principals behind Galley Beggar Press, a tiny publisher whose authors have won, or been short- or longlisted for, pretty much every major literary award you can think of. In terms of sheer quality of output, I doubt if there’s any Big 5 firm who could compete.

But Galley Beggar isn’t unique. It’s part of a vigorous international constellation of such firms. They are producing some of the best fiction in the world today.

Niche non-fiction

Let’s say you’ve written a really important book about the history of needlework in the early Colonial period. Or – a book I kinda want to buy – a history of bilge pumps from 1500 to the present day. The world needs projects of passion like that, and no sane person would ever judge the worth of such books by the volume of sales they generate.

No agent will touch those books. A 15% commission of Not Very Much is – um, let me get my calculator – approximately Not Very Much At All. So agents don’t want them.

But you might not want to self-publish, and why should you? There’ll be a micro-publisher somewhere whose range on the history of maritime technology is badly missing something on bilge-pumps. They need your book.

Niche memoir

Or let’s say you’ve written a memoir with a mental health theme. Or an Iranian one. Those books may well be too niche to grace the front tables of a major bookstore. The big publishers aren’t well set-up to sell them. Agents don’t want them, for that precise reason.

But there’ll be a publisher out there who absolutely does want those books and has an audience greedy to read them. You won’t reach a large volume of readers, but you will reach the readers you most want to reach. Those publishers too do a great job.

***

These reflections remind us that a lot of the advice out there on the internet – and a lot of the advice we give as Jericho Writers – is simply ignoring one of the most important ecosystems in publishing.

We ignore it because the collective volume of sales is not that huge, but also because the geography of this archipelago is so hard to define. We at JW can point you at all the literary agents in the world. We’ve placed clients with all the Big 5 on multiple occasions. But we don’t know even 10% of the micro-publishers out there. No one does.

You, as author, simply have to navigate your own seas. You know your niche. You can find out the publishers who publish work for that niche. Dig out contact details. Address them direct. You don’t need an agent. You don’t need to feel timid or underqualified. If you’ve written that book on bilge-pumps, then someone wants it. Find them. Do a deal. Get published.

And if you do get published, then I bow to you. There’s as much honour and majesty in getting your book on bilge-pumps published by a passionate and knowledgeable house as there is in getting your samey police procedural published by a big house that publishes a million other samey police procedurals.

I’ll probably slip back into dividing the world into trad and indie, just because the habit is so ingrained. But please don’t forget that when I do so, I LIE. There are three broad camps, not two, and they all count.

One of the strangest experiences in any author’s life arrives the moment they sign their first two-book deal. (And yes: fiction is normally sold in chunks of two. There’s no rigorous logic operating there, except that the first book is the one that attracted the publisher and the second one gives them another opportunity to profit from the success of the first. It also, incidentally, gives them the opportunity to compound their loss if the first book loses money, as most first books do. And yes: Publishing Logic is not really the same thing as actual Logic-Logic.)

Anyway: we were talking about strangeness. And your first book almost certainly came to you in a rush of inspiration. Yes! I have to write that story. My head is full of these characters, these events, and I have to set them down.

That opening burst of inspiration eventually produced a manuscript, some rejections, an acceptance and a book deal. Well done you.

But it also produces, right now, the expectation – indeed, the contractual obligation – that you will write another book of the same standard.

Yikes! That inspiration? Where did it come from? How do you invoke it? How do you ask it to strike again, in the exact same spot as before, and in a timely enough way that you can meet the date written into your contract?

The ask seems impossible. Seems – and sometimes is. I know a couple of authors whose second books simply didn’t meet the levels of their first. In one case, I know the author simply bashed out a serviceable but uninspired second novel because she didn’t know what else to do. Her career never recovered.

But there are solutions. There are ways for you to invoke that inspiration. To find it reliably and, as it were, to order.

The trick is to forget about the bolt of lightning. That’s not what you’re looking for. You’re searching for the tickle of interest, a quickening of interest, the red thread lying in the blue.

Here’s a news story that tickled me today:

The sheriff’s office announced Monday that [a woman from’ Salt Lake County], who had been missing since before Thanksgiving, had been found alive in an area not far from where she was camping. Authorities said the woman, who had yet to be publicly identified, “had lost a significant amount of weight and was weak” when she was found. She was lauded by the sheriff’s office as “resourceful,” living off grass, moss and water from a river.

“We now believe she knowingly chose to remain in the area over the months since November 2020,” the sheriff’s office said in a news release.

The bit I love about that is the grass and the moss. It’s such a great novelistic detail. “Living off squirrels, edible tubers and insects” would have given a totally different and (to me) less interesting tale.

Or another example:

I was with a friend yesterday, who told me that she’d had a spate of burst tyres on her car. Each time she had a burst tyre, she got a call the next day from her (rather dodgy) ex, asking how she was. When she became suspicious at these coincidences, she checked her car and found a tracking device fixed to the inside rim of her wheel arch.

Or – 

Well, when I was wondering what to write about for my last book, I started browsing the website of the National Crime Agency and other similar outfits. There, I saw some references to antiquities fraud, which intrigued me. That criss-crossed with the idea that King Arthur was a genuine figure of the early Welsh Dark Ages. And what if …?

What you notice here is that the story never arrives fully formed. It doesn’t even really present itself as a story, exactly. Not even the raw material for a story. At most, it presents as a kind of doorway into something. A portal.

It is your task to bundle your way through that opening. To be active, not passive.

So the woman in Utah with the moss and the grass: why was she there? What was it like for her? Was she running from something? Or to something? Who missed her? Who was looking for her?

I don’t have much interest in what the actual answers to those questions are. Personally, I tend to discard the actual facts of any real-world story pretty quickly. It’s your answers that matter, not the actual facts of the case.

Take that friend with the dodgy ex. The person in question threw the tracker away, changed her phone number, cut any kind of contact with the nutter. That was the end of her story, but your story would leave the actual facts almost immediately. Maybe she put a tracker on his car? Or started to mess with his head by popping her tracker onto the side of a lorry bound for France. Or …?

The moral here, really, is that life – and your reading, and your existing interests – already furnish you with a million ideas for stories, far more than you could ever write.

Your task is to notice those trembles of interest, then explore actively. Discard anything that doesn’t open out into something yet more inviting. Explore the pathways left open as deeply and actively as you can. “Actively” here means reading. It means writing. It means starting to write notes on possible stories.

Inspiration can strike anyone, anywhere. But it only kindles fire when you’re at your desk, ready and working.