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This email is, I guess, the third in a set of missives about marketing. (Here’s the first one, here’s the second.) If I were more thoughtful and more organised, today’s email would probably have appeared first not third – and, arguably, it’s the most important of the three so far.

Those of you with time machines can zoom around reorganising space-time to rectify my shortcomings. The rest of you can simply consider this one deep truth:

Marketing costs are a tax payable on bad product design.

Bad books won’t sell profitably under any circumstances. Good books still need marketing, but the power of that marketing will be vastly greater, longer lasting, and more profitable.

Obvious, right? And of course, to write a good book, you need a decent plot, you need great characters, you need all the yadda-yadda blah-blah that I talk about in these emails.

But it’s not enough to write a good book. You need to write a saleable good book. (And, by the way, I know I often sound like a novelist talking only to novelists, but I do also write non-fiction and much of what I say – including every word of this email – applies to non-fiction too.)

Readers are going to encounter your work in a bookshop – which may have upwards of 50,000 titles – or on Amazon, which has millions of titles. As readers, that diversity as great. As authors, we find that competition terrifying.

Let’s assume that your book is good. You’ve ticked the boxes for plot and character and prose and all that. But why the hooting heck should anyone buy your book? If you’re writing spy fiction, why should anyone buy your books over John Le Carre’s? If you’re writing psych thrillers, why should anyone buy your work, not Gillian Flynn or Patricia Highsmith? In most markets, premium products sell at a premium price. In Booksland, the best books ever written sell at the same price as yours, in the same locations, and in unlimited quantities.

So why should anyone buy your book? Why, why, why, why?

Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields.

If you don’t have a priest / doctor / field combo to consult, then here’s a suggestion:

Readers will engage with your book, if something about it piques their interest.

Please note, I’m not saying “buy” – I’m saying “engage with”. I’m thinking about a reader picking up a book from a bookstore table and turning it over in their hands and reading the blurb and sticking their thumb into the book to find a chunk of text to read. On Amazon, I’m talking about a reader engaging with the ‘look Inside’ feature or scrolling down to read reader reviews. Obviously, not all of those readers will convert to buyers, but you’re in the game.

Please also note, I’m saying “piques interest”. That’s all. I’m not saying “a potential reader has considered every aspect of your book in detail, consulted newspaper reviews, Amazon reviews, inspected Goodreads, and compared a sample of your prose against Le Carre / Highsmith / Flynn / Nabokov.”

You don’t need all that. You just need to pique the reader’s interest and secure some engagement. Achieve those things, and it’s then down to the deeper, broader qualities of your book to achieve the sale.

And what is it to pique interest – in any context, not just books?

It’s to give somebody a snippet of information which sparks interest in learning more.

For example, friends of ours recently went camping and invited us over for a Saturday supper. To pique my interest, they said, “It’s a campsite with its own climbing wall.” Eight words, that instantly engaged me – because I love climbing – and immediately made me want to learn more.

Or:

“A lawn mower robot means you never have to mow again.” If you have a sizeable lawn, as I do, those words instantly make you want to enquire further.

Or:

“The kids’ summer fete: £4 for 10 games.”

You instantly want to know what kind of games are on offer, when this thing is taking place, how certain is it that there will be thunderstorms, whether there will be a hog roast, how the hog in question feels about this, and much else.

In not one of these cases does the snippet of information represent an even remotely complete picture of the thing described. A proper description of the fete needs to talk about barbecues and whack-the-rat and gym displays and archery and pony rides. A proper description of a lawn mower robot needs to explain about wire tangles and set-up hassles and how tiny sticks on the lawn will make the robot yap like a sad puppy until it runs out of battery.

A complete description doesn’t matter. It’s actually a negative at this very first introductory stage. Your description simply needs to deliver a snippet of information which sparks interest in learning more. That’s the whole deal.

That’s why great elevator pitches can be – should be – ridiculously short:

Campsite, with climbing wall.

Robot lawn mower.

Orphan goes to wizard school.

If you have any length to your pitch, you’re saying too much. You haven’t yet found the single point that nudges your potential reader into engagement.

Equally, if your elevator pitch is artistic, you’re missing the point. There’s nothing remotely artistic about the pitches I’ve just given you. They’re just words shoved together. The point is to highlight the thing of interest fast and clearly. That’s all.

I often hear pitches like, “A queen who came to conquer – but learned to yield.” And, ye gods, that’s all summer dress and no boots. Forget the dress. I want the boots.

Suppose, instead, you’d said, “An alternative history novel: Mary Queen of Scots invades England at the head of a 50,000 strong army.” Wouldn’t you instantly want to learn more? (Or rather, if that kind of history is vaguely your thing, wouldn’t you want to learn more? You can’t sell a comb to a bald man.) Being specific is good. Being clear is good. Being blunt is good. Being artistic and unclear is utterly useless.

And here’s another key point: the elevator pitch is for you. It’s so you know what you’re selling.

Nowhere, ever, does JK Rowling’s marketing material say, “Orphan goes to wizard school.” Nowhere, ever, does the marketing blurb for my Fiona Griffiths novels say, “A detective who used to think she was dead.”

If you think an elevator pitch is for the reader, you’re thinking about it backwards. It’s for you. You need to know your elevator pitch so you can check your product design is right. It’s also so you can check that every single itty-bitty part of the universe surrounding your product – your book – harmonises with that basic offer.

Next week, I’ll explain further what I mean. I’ll take my own Fiona novels and show you how I try to make sure that my elevator pitch exists always and everywhere in the Fiona universe – from the text of the books to the design of the covers, and much more beyond.

But the deployment of the pitch is secondary to the thing itself. What’s your pitch? What makes someone want to learn more?

Don’t be long-winded. Don’t describe the whole thing. Don’t be artistic. Don’t be clever.

Think of your pitch as something you scribble on a Post-It note at the top of your screen. An eight-word memo to yourself. “What’s going to pique the reader’s interest? This is.”

There are fifty thousand competitors in a good-sized bookshop. Ten million or so competitors on Amazon. And none of that has to matter, because you’ve got your pitch. Campsite + climbing wall. Robot + lawn. Orphan + wizard school. Something to arrest the roving eye.

Til soon.

Harry

Good morning, everyone!

This week, we're joined by Clara Foster, who has recently joined Aevitas Creative Management UK after 18 months as an agency assistant at The Blair Partnership. Clara is building her list and is looking to represent authors of adult fiction and select non-fiction. She is especially looking for upmarket fiction with a literary spin, stories driven by the complex emotions of the women at their centre, and anything that draws from historical or folkloric narratives in a new way. In non-fiction, she is looking for practical but not prescriptive guides aimed at women.

Clara is active on Twitter @cla_foster where you can learn more about her work.

"The relationship between author and agent is a partnership ... It’s important to me that authors know they can say no to their agent. At the same time, I want authors to recognise that our goal is to use our expertise to help them create the careers and lives that they want."

Hi Clara, thanks for speaking with us today!

What brought you to agenting?

That’s a long story but put simply: a long process of elimination. I went to university to study Classics but ended up switching to English. I always say that editing is like reverse engineering an English degree, so I thought being an editor was what I wanted. I had some great experience and spent a summer as an assistant at Harper Collins – but it taught me that while I did want to edit, being an editor wasn’t quite what I wanted.

Being an editor is a really hard job! There’s a certain way you have to approach a book: not just “How do we pitch this as a brilliant piece of writing?” but “How do we pitch this as a commercial object?” You still have to think about that as an agent to an extent, but you’re not quite so bound by those ‘straight-to-consumer’ strictures. There’s more freedom being on the outside and selling inwards. As an agent, you edit, you pitch, you sell, you talk to people, you find talent, you negotiate contracts, you work out how everything is going to look holistically… I’m biased, but to me, it’s the best job there is.

What’s your favourite thing about being an agent?

It’s hard to pick! For the pure fun of it, I love an auction. There is no greater fun to be had in the workday than when you have four people bidding on the same book. Because you pretty much know that whatever happens, you’ll get to bring great news to an author. And it really shows the work that you’ve put in, that the author has put in, plus all the help you’ve received from the whole team at your agency… Auctions are a fairly good sign that it’s all paid off.

But then, there’s something endlessly exciting about discovering new writing. I think that might just tip it as my favourite part of being an agent. Unless you’re competing with other agents – which sometimes you are! – it feels like you have found something really important that nobody else has seen. I think that’s really thrilling.

Then again, ask me in six months and you may get a completely different answer. I have a sneaky feeling that my favourite part of the job is just whichever great thing I’ve had the chance to do most recently.

What’s at the top of your fiction wishlist?

I’m looking for contemporary upmarket or accessible literary fiction, led by what I call ‘intensely emotional women.’ I want to find something that feels like Luster by Raven Leilani or The Guest by Emma Cline – they are driven entirely by character and emotion, with a constant vacillation between despair, anger, and hope. Authors who do this really well often play with genre so you don’t quite know where these books sit. Take The Guest, for example. It’s marketed as a commercial thriller but when you look at interviews with Emma Cline, she talks about wanting to create a narrative with the tension of a short story stretched over the length of a novel. I think it’s a masterpiece of craft, and I’m looking for something that plays with form, character and genre in the same way.

On the other side of things, I love book club fiction that pulls from different genres. I especially love anything grounded in history, folklore or mythology, especially if it includes new takes on old ideas or twists on familiar tropes. Overall, I’m looking for a great story. Strong prose and interesting characters are pretty crucial, because when push comes to shove they are as big a part of the story as anything else. But if I find something with a high-stakes plot that gets me invested, I’ll be happy.

How about non-fiction?

What I really want at the minute is a practical non-fiction book by women, for women. I want to see a how-to or practical guide that's not necessarily prescriptive but fills a gap in knowledge that we don't have. Something that gets me to think about how my life could look, where problems in my life lie, and how to fix them.

Is there any genre you would rather not receive?

I’m not really looking for memoir or narrative non-fiction; if I want a story, I tend to look to fiction instead.

I’m not a huge rom-com fan, and I’m not looking for general women’s fiction. A lot of other agents handle women’s fiction really well, and I think it’s always best to let those who really truly love a genre champion the stories within it. I’m also not personally into horror or crime and thriller.

But with that said, I do like to be surprised. Sometimes writing will land in my inbox or I’ll stumble across something in an anthology and realise that it’s nothing like what I was looking for and still exactly what I wanted. That’s the great thing about agenting: you can put out all these rules but a good manuscript can have you breaking every single one.

What does the average day in the life of an agent look like for you?

The order may change, but the things that we do on a day-to-day basis are usually the same. When you work as an agent, you’re always scouting for talent. That means being in the submissions inbox, reading anthologies, going to author events and book launches, or doing pitching sessions with organisations set up to help writers.

There’s also a lot of admin involved: managing contracts and royalties, for example, or setting up meetings with editors and scouts since you always need to stay in contact and keep an eye on what they’re looking for. It’s always a good idea to get to know as many people in the industry as you can—publishing is really a business of relationships. Not only is it useful to be on good terms with an author’s publishing team, for example, in case something somewhere goes wrong (because that’s life and inevitably at some point something will go wrong somehow, somewhere) and you need to step in, but you just never know when someone will step out of the woodwork with a brilliant opportunity or idea or introduction. Plus it’s fun. Publishing people, for the most part, are a pretty sociable bunch: we like to chat!

Speaking of which, you need to talk to your colleagues about what’s going well (or not), what’s selling in the market, maybe ask for advice on a specific manuscript or sale-in-progress. Aevitas is especially great because it’s a hugely collaborative environment; everyone is in constant conversation about their projects and that’s an incredibly useful and productive way to work. If I’m not talking to my agent colleagues in the office, I’ll need to be in conversation with our brilliant rights director, or our fabulous contracts manager, or our superstar book-to-screen team. And then we have twice-weekly meetings with our American colleagues, which is a complete boon because there’s such a huge wealth of knowledge there—not just in terms of years of agenting experience, but also in knowing a market that may use the same language but is actually pretty different. Publishing is so global now, and US deals can be crucial for some authors, so you want to know that you’re always on the right track.

Then of course, when you have manuscripts on the go (which is pretty much always), you’ll spend time reading and editing. I also like to be in touch with my authors on a regular basis. I don’t just want to know how the book is coming along, I want to make sure they feel supported. Every so often, we’ll take a look at how things are progressing in an author’s career and discuss how they feel about it: Are things going the way they expected? Are they heading in a direction that suits them? If not, how are we going to change that? Again, it all comes back to relationships.

(And, of course, there are lots of emails. Lots and lots of emails.)

What do you think makes a good agent-author relationship?

As agents, I’m sure we all think about the right way to have a relationship with our authors. Everyone will do it differently because everyone works differently and I don't think that's a bad thing. For me, what's absolutely paramount is that the relationship between author and agent is a partnership. That's how I want to work with my authors.

Agents spend years learning how to be useful to our clients, and that means that by trade, we have knowledge that is useful and – I hope – should be listened to. That doesn’t necessarily mean that an agent and an author are always going to agree. It doesn’t even mean that the agent will automatically have the right of it. It’s important to me that authors know they can say no to their agent. At the same time, I want authors to recognise that our goal is to use our expertise to help them create the careers and lives that they want. If an agent says something you disagree with, it can be helpful to circle back and question whether their advice is useful, even if it’s not something you wanted to hear.

It’s a fine balance, there’s a lot of give and take, and I think it’s important to have regular communication so you can build a relationship where no one is going to feel unheard or uncomfortable speaking their mind.

Is there anything you like to see in a query letter, or anything you don’t like?

Query letters are so difficult. They’re like one small piece of an author’s heart and soul that they’ve had to put onto a page to grab an agent’s attention. There’s a weird balance where a query letter does not and cannot count for everything, but at the same time as an agent, you’re reading so many queries that you have to make use of them. For me, a great query letter counts in your favour much more than a poor query letter counts against you, because I know how hard they are to write.

I like query letters to be short and sweet. I don’t mind the order too much – you can open by explaining why you’re querying me, or you can launch straight into the blurb. I do want to see both of those details though. If I’m taking time out of my day (often outside of working hours) to read your submission, I do want to feel that you’ve contacted me for a reason. So, put my name in the query letter and show me somehow that you know who I am and what’s on my wishlist. I also want a taste of what I’m going to be reading – not a full synopsis, just a blurb like you would see on the back of a book.

Then, give me a little bit of information about who you are and why that’s relevant to what you’re sending me. If you’ve written a book on Welsh folklore and you’re Welsh, that’s relevant. If the main character is a classical pianist and you’re also a classical pianist, that’s relevant. Anything about your background that will help me understand why you’ve written what you’ve written is great. It’s also good to let me know if the book has been long-listed for a prize or anything like that.

As for things I don’t want to see… Sometimes I’ll get queries where the author says: “This is the most extraordinary piece of literature you’ll ever see,” or “This is going to win a Pulitzer.” On the other end of the spectrum, I’ve seen queries include lines like: “I’m sorry for wasting your time.” If you don’t believe in your work, why should I? At the same time, don’t be arrogant. It’s always a balance.

Some agents love synopses, others don't. Where do you stand on them and are there any things that you look for?

Usually, my method is to read the query letter, read the sample, and then if I like the sample, I’ll go back and read the synopsis to see where the plot is going. For me, the synopsis is only relevant if I’m already hooked and think the query is something I might like to represent.

A synopsis, in my opinion, should not be longer than one side of A4 paper. I don’t want to see fifteen pages detailing everything that happens; a synopsis should be more like the bare bones of the story, including the ending.

Is there anything in the opening pages of a manuscript that grabs you? Anything you don’t like to see?

I’m always looking for voice and that can manifest in all sorts of ways. It’s difficult: you can try to give pieces of advice such as getting straight into the action, but sometimes an author will do something that you ordinarily don’t like, and they’ll do it so well that it really works. So, I try not to be too prescriptive about what I do or don’t want.

There are some openings that you see cropping up time and time again. If you’re reading 50 queries in a day and you read the same opening scenario several times, it’s going to lose impact. As an example, I’ve seen a lot of YA and adult fantasy that opens with a girl stealing something, or a thief down on their luck. I read four openings like that just the other day. Or in thriller and mystery – not really genres I represent so I haven’t personally experienced this, but I’ve heard that a lot of those manuscripts open with a character vomiting...

Some authors have questions about submissions etiquette: how long to wait for a response, what to do if they want to resubmit their work, etc. Do you have any guidance for authors trying to navigate the process?

Yes, check the submission guidelines on an agent’s page. If you’re submitting to me through QueryManager, it will send an automatic response that receipts the submission and says I aim to get back to everyone within 30 days. If you haven’t heard from me within the timeline I set out, feel free to come back and nudge me. Just don’t email me expecting a response two weeks after you’ve sent me something.

As for resubmitting… I think before you send something out, you should make sure you’re really ready to do so. It’s possible to withdraw a submission on QueryManager so you can revise it, but it’s going to make me wonder why you submitted it in the first place if it wasn’t ready.

Are there any books that you've enjoyed recently?

I've finally gotten around to reading Julia Armfield’s Salt Slow. It’s been on my radar since it came out but I was just too busy to get round to it. I spend a lot of time reading romantasy for work so I was looking for something different, and I'm lucky enough to live close enough to BookBar that it’s become my favourite haunt. One of the great booksellers in there suggested Salt Slow which is now out in a really beautiful, teeny paperback, and so I had a fabulous time reading that!

I'm also finishing something a bit unusual for me: Super-Infinite by Katherine Rundell. I don't read a lot of non-fiction but she’s stunningly brilliant and I love her middle grade fiction. Also, I studied Renaissance literature for my degree so I couldn’t help coming across John Donne. I think anyone who studies Donne ends up having a difficult relationship with him because he’s a brilliant poet but such a strange guy. Having someone as erudite and passionate and thoughtful as Katherine Rundell take you through his life is, I think, a reminder of how far that thoughtfulness and passion can get you as a writer. How brilliant it is to hear from people who really know their stuff. I think that applies across the board, even in fiction; when you are writing something that you really know and understand, it always shines through. I think that’s something so important for writing.

Outside the world of books, what hobbies and passions do you have?

I used to bake a lot, now I just make cookies. I have this one cookie recipe and every time anything goes wrong, you’ll find me in the kitchen baking cookies.

One thing I’m hoping to get into more – because finding the time is an issue – is ceramics. I’ve always been slightly obsessed with them and I’d love to spend time throwing pottery. Publishing is so cerebral and there’s something incredibly meditative about working at the wheel with your hands.

Do you have any last pieces of advice for authors going through the querying process?

Have grace for yourself and for others. It's a really tough process, so please know that as agents, we know you're doing your best and please remember that we are also doing our best. A lot of the querying process, particularly reading submissions, gets done outside of our working hours in our free time so we can give the best chance we can to every query that comes our way.

It’s hard, but stick to your guns. If someone comes to you with a vision for your book, consider whether or not it aligns with yours. Sometimes it won't, other times it will: an agent might suggest a new direction to take and you’ll realise you hadn’t considered it before but it really works. So keep an open mind – but at the end of the day, know that it’s your work.

If you’re struggling with your query letter and synopsis, do check out our free resources on our website. We have lots of info to help you on your way. Or, better still, if you’re a member with us, our lovely Writers Support team will be happy to offer you a free query letter review!

A couple of weeks back, I wrote a piece on marketing your books. The gist of that email was that you needed to generate meaningful Amazon book sales through your own means, through the course of a week or a little bit less. If you do that successfully, Amazon’s own marketing bots will spring into action and take over – and, surprise surprise, Amazon’s quite good at selling books. 

There’s easily enough empirical evidence to demonstrate the power of this approach. It’s how most (not all) indie authors conduct their affairs. Put simply: it works. 

But that advice feels a bit narrow and technocratic. It doesn’t feel as though it has much to do with books. Your approach could well be the same no matter what you wanted to sell on Amazon. Dry cat food, mosaic tiles, novelty slippers, inflatable unicorns. 

And maybe too that advice feels remote from the things that marketers normally obsess over: slogans, images, emotional pull. Don’t those things matter? Isn’t that the heart and point of marketing? 

Well, OK. Let’s try and knit these things together. Three observations: 

One: books are an unusual product category. If you’re selling inflatable unicorns or dry cat food, you probably aren’t bringing out dozens of new products every month – whereas a large publisher is committed to producing thousands of new titles a year. What’s more, in the inflatable unicorn market, when you produce a new style of unicorn, you’re probably retiring some older products at the same time. That’s not true in books-land. The ocean of books you compete with gets larger all the time. Old e-books never die. 

Two: when you buy your unicorns from Amazon, you don’t give a horse’s damn about the seller. I mean, yes, you want to know that the product will inflate, will look as pictured, will scatter rainbows, and all the rest. But you have no personal relationship with the seller. If the seller offered one (“Hey Inflatable Fan, Be so kind to sign up to my corporate mail-list so I can advertise you my great unicorns.”), I expect you’d politely decline. Again, it’s not like that with books. Readers like authors; authors like readers. The respect is two way and wholly genuine. 

Three: Marketing folks have a reputation for being superficial for a reason. In Banbury, the nearest big town to me, there’s a Mondelez factory. That factory churns out coffee pods, amongst other things, but the multinational itself makes a gazillion different things. Oreos and Toblerone and Philadelphia and Milka and Cote D’Or and Cadbury and Bournvita and very much else. Each of those brands has marketing people earnestly trying to deepen the brand values of Toblerone, or whatever else. But Toblerone isn’t made by smiling Swiss milk-maids. It’s made in giant factories like the one in Banbury. The marketing stuff is just glued on, cynically, to a mass-manufactured industrial product. 

So. 

You. Books. Readers. How does marketing work in the very unusual product category you inhabit? 

The first thing to say is that your marketing work can’t be skin-deep. The opposite. 

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: 

1. You need a great elevator pitch; and 

2. That elevator pitch needs to permeate every page of your novel. 

If you think of those books that have utterly nailed elevator pitch (for example, Twilight, Harry Potter, Girl With a Dragon Tattoo, To Kill a Mockingbird, Sherlock Holmes, Wolf Hall), it’s more or less literally true that the elevator pitch is present on every page. That deep promise to the reader is maintained always and everywhere. 

Put another way: if your book were chocolate, you really would have to make it using smiling milk-maids. With books there are no factories, no cheating. 

Second, your marketing can’t live on the page and nowhere else. The opposite. The book cover needs to embrace your central promise. The title does too. The blurb does. Good lord: your name does. If you were writing sweet romance and your name was Kelly McSavage, I’d suggest changing your name. 

And it’s not just things-you-find-on-a-book which matter. It’s your website. It’s your social media presence. It’s the tone of your mailing list. It’s the images on your ads. 

What you want to achieve is a perfect integration between the deep promise of the book (“American teen falls in love with vampire”) and every other element that touches readers. I’m not a huge lover of Twilight myself, but that book cover – black background, bare arms, a red apple – contains the whole promise. So does the title. So does everything else. 

Your marketing needs to be like that – only, pretty please, with fewer vampires. 

And third: you. 

You’re not a factory belching out coffee-flavoured smoke in a medium-lovely south Midlands town. You’re a smiling milk-maid. That apple-cheeked, full-skirted, tumble-haired miss skipping down from those flower-strewn pastures: that’s you. 

To put the same thing just a wee bit more clearly: you are a core part of your book’s marketing. So if you are writing sweet romance novels, your communications to your readers (via social media, or emails, or the author’s note in the back of your book, or at a festival, or wherever else) needs to be in sync. 

If people come to your Twitter feed because they like your sweet romance novels, they don’t want to find you moaning about Brexit, or spreading covid conspiracy chat, or exchanging tips on how to make money at crypto. I’m not saying you can’t do all those excellent things, I’m just saying you can’t do that on your author-Twitter account, or your author Facebook page, or your author mailing list. 

Everything has to line up. The elevator pitch. The book itself. The title. The cover. Your digital footprint. Your reader communications. You. 

Do that, write well, market effectively on Amazon – and your books will sell. 

It’s easy when you know how, right? 

Til soon. 

Harry 

It’s hot here. There’s an outdoor pool near me and I was there the other day with a load of people stretched out on sun loungers, chatting, reading or fiddling with phones. 

Now the phone-fiddlers, we can sneer at and discard. To them I say, Phooey. To them I say, Pah. To them I say, Get a life, bud. 

The chatters? We have to make room for those in our world. Human connection, face to face? We want more of that, not less. 

But the readers? Ah, the readers! Those people feed us. Without the readers, we’d be reduced to beggary, hawking our unwanted stories for a crust of yesterday’s bread. 

And there are two types of reader. There are magazine-readers and there are book-readers. Magazine reading is interesting. There's something intentionally provisional about reading a magazine. You're almost announcing to the world that you are happy to be interrupted. Your attention span is held anywhere from the five seconds it takes to look at a picture to the few minutes it takes to read an article. You’re saying, I’m a bit bored and I’d welcome interruption. 

With books on the other hand, you announce the opposite. You say I am busy in this other world of mine. I intend to be busy in this place for the next hour or two or three. So please take your idle chatter somewhere else: I have no time for you. 

There is almost no way of consuming art which demands more commitment. Yes, some plays or operas have a long running time. But they are still relatively passive. You commit to them when you buy a ticket and again when you turn up. Thereafter, the default action is to stay sitting and watching. You don’t have to commit; you have to sit. 

With a novel, on the other hand, that default doesn’t exist. It is perfectly acceptable to put your book down and never pick it up again. If you continue reading, it is because you have truly committed to the three or four or six hours it takes you to finish that book. Each finished book, is a little victory, a marathon completed. 

To help your reader complete that marathon, you mostly have to do all those good things that we always talk about. Build a great plot. Develop a great character. Clothe your story in rich settings. And so on. Those things are the backbone, always. 

But I have a little soft spot for treats scattered for the reader. Treats that almost directly acknowledge how committed the reader has been and how much they have earned this little bonbon. 

So, for example, in my Love Story, With Murders, Fiona is interviewing a somewhat self-absorbed Englishwoman. She asks a question and: 

.. Gets a shrug, not an answer. 

‘Sophie, we need a “Yes” or a “No”.’ 

‘Look, he didn’t talk to me about any of that. There’s a cottage he used to go to. He shared it with his brother and sister. We used to go as a family, in summer mostly. It’s a bit …’ 

She makes a face. A face which says, ‘I’m too precious to deal with anything muddy, or wet, or rustic, or basic.’ It’s a face the English have used about the Welsh for fifteen centuries. Fifteen centuries, during which they stole our farmland, murdered our princes and scattered castles, a giant Saxon screw you, the length and breadth of the country. 

Wales is the world capital of medieval castles, the world’s most conquered nation. Either that, or the most belligerent. 

‘Twll dîn pob Sais,’ I say. 

‘Pardon?’ 

‘Doesn’t matter. The address of the cottage, please.’ 

That’s it. Unless you speak Welsh, what Fiona says to Sophie Hinton is completely opaque. The (English-speaking) reader is waiting for an explanation that never comes. 

Except it does. A full 200 pages later, Fiona is in Glasgow, Scotland and this happens: 

Two kids pass my car. One of them raps on my window. I wind my window down and say, ‘Yes?’ The kid says something in an accent so thick I don’t understand it. I reply in Welsh, the same thing as I said to Sophie Hinton. Twll dîn pob Sais. Every Englishman an arsehole. He goes off muttering. He might as well be speaking Icelandic. 

I guess there’s something funny there. Fiona was apparently conducting her Sophie Hinton interview in a vaguely professional manner, but just slipped into Welsh when she wanted to insult Hinton and her entire people. And because Hinton didn’t know Welsh, she didn’t know she’d been insulted. 

But also: the later little episode in Scotland is something very close to a direct acknowledgement of the reader’s support. “You’ve stuck it out almost to the end of the book, so here’s a little gift of mine. You wanted to know what that phrase meant two hundred pages back and I didn’t tell you. But you’ve stuck with me all this time so here’s your reward. And a little laugh. And a thank you.” 

Or another example – again towards the end of a book, a reward for commitment. 

In this case, the allusion goes right back to a previous book, which is picked up again in this one. In that other book, Fiona encounters a young woman, Francesca / Cesca, who keeps some dope in a ‘Little hippy-dippy Indian box.’ Cesca thinks Fiona is quite odd (which she is) and calls her ‘Ess’, short for ‘Strange Detective.’ This isn’t a deeply important relationship, but it is significant enough that any reader of the series will certainly remember it. 

And then, towards the end of The Deepest Grave, Fiona’s just had a rough night. She’s about to make some arrests. It’s four in the morning, but she makes a call: 

I ring off. Call Cesca. 

She answers, sleepily. 

‘Cesca, it’s me. Your strange detective.’ 

‘Ess? Hi. Are you OK?’ 

‘I’m fine. Where are you? Right now. Where are you?’ 

Plas Du, is the answer. Her mother’s house near Llantwit. 

‘Good. That’s good. Then do you want to see how this ends? This investigation of mine.’ 

She does. 

I tell her to shift herself over here. ‘And Cesca. That little hippy-dippy box of yours. Do you still have it?’ 

There’s a short pause, then, ‘You want me to bring you a joint?’ 

That High Rising Terminal. A generational thing. 

‘No. Not one joint. Bring everything you’ve got. I’m not in a one-joint place right now.’ 

She says OK. Says it, enthusiastically enough that I can actually hear her leaping out of bed, starting to get organised. 

I ring off. 

Again, there’s a kind of joke here. Cesca thinks, ‘You’re a detective? You want me to bring you a joint? At four in the morning?’ And Fiona is irritable: ‘No, of course I don’t want one joint. I want to smoke until I fall over.’ That’s clearly not the way His Majesty’s Constabulary is meant to behave. 

But alongside that joke, the passage delivers a reward. You’re saying, “You are a proper, loyal, committed reader, so I know that you do in fact remember that hippy-dippy Indian box. And I have created and gift-wrapped this little incident especially for you. I could have procured a joint from pretty much anywhere, but I did it this way because I knew you would particularly relish this way of doing things. Thank you.” 

These tiny little episodes have the quality of a conversation directly between author and reader, a conversation that the character herself is not really part of. 

I don't think these things make all the difference. They certainly don't make or break a book. But I know that as a reader, I relish such things. And as a writer, I love creating them. Little buried sweetmeats, ones that only the right sort of reader can enjoy. 

Go well. And have a bonbon. 

Til soon. 

Harry 

The hardest thing in our game: writing a decent book.

The second hardest thing: marketing it.

Big publishers, you might think, have cracked the second of those tasks. That’s what they’re for, after all. They don’t write the books. They don’t print the books. Selling the damn things is what they’re all about.

But most novels lose money, even when sold by Harper Collins, or Penguin Random House, or whoever else. Good books can simply disappear for essentially no reason. Book marketing remains hard, even when you’re Penguin.

And, OK, the rather clickbait-y title of this email might make it sound as though I have solved this last great mystery. And of course, I haven't. But I can tell you truthfully the one marketing trick which will always work for any well written and well packaged book.

Here it is:

1. Find an online platform that can reach almost every reader in the world. You want that platform to know the purchasing habits of those readers, their tastes and preferences. You want that platform to hold your readers’ card and shipping details. You want that platform to be utterly trusted when it comes to e-commerce and delivery times and all that. You want that platform to be best-in-class when it comes to the delivery of e-books and audio-books. And look, I don’t know about you, but I think Amazon might fit the bill.
2. Convince Amazon to market the heck out of your book.
3. That’s it. You just hand over control to the best in the business.

Amazon doesn’t put ads on the side of buses. It won’t book TV spots to promote your book. But it can:

• Place you on bestseller lists.
• Place you on niche sub-bestseller lists that appeal directly to the most passionate readers in your genre.
• Send emails out to likely buyers.
• Place you on hot new release lists.
• Place you on “also bought” lists.
• Give you best seller icons to distinguish your book from its competitors.
• Give you sales volumes that will lead to a tide of new reviews.
• Give you additional visibility in Kindle Unlimited, if you have signed up to that programme.

Given that Amazon knows pretty much every reader in the English-speaking world, and given that it knows their habits and preferences, and holds their bank card details, if Amazon starts marketing your book, you will make sales. You can’t not.

Remember, the caveat, though. You can't market rubbish. If your book cover is bad, or your blurb is not interesting, or your actual text is disappointing, Amazon will soon lose interest in any idea of helping you. It can be lured into presenting your book to readers, but if those readers do not and up purchasing the book, Amazon will soon look for better opportunities elsewhere.

But if your book is strong, Amazon can find readers who want a book like yours at the exact time those readers are looking for their next read. There has never been a more powerful way to market books, ever.

So how do you persuade Amazon to put your book at the centre of its marketing activity?

The answer is straightforward. You create enough of a sales platform to pique Amazon’s interest. To put it more precisely, you need to build enough sales over four to seven days to make Amazon think, “Gosh, this book has some real organic sales of its own. Readers are clearly buying it. The volume of sales – and the steadiness of sales – make me think that this book is worth promoting more widely.”

As soon as Amazon is engaged in promoting your book, you can hand over. Your job as a book marketer is to get Amazon working for you. As soon as it is fully engaged, you can ease off without feeling bad.

So your marketing challenge now comes down to this:

1. Make sure that your book packaging (the cover, the blurb, the pricing, the look-inside text and all that) is spot on.
2. Generating sales, on Amazon, over 4-7 days.

That already seems a narrower and more achievable goal than we started with, right? And there are good, reliable tools for generating sales. For example:

• Book promotion sites, like these. This is the best place to start for newbies – and, actually, it’s just the best place to start.
• Amazon ads. Easy to set up, but they’re hard to scale up – you can’t give yourself a real sales punch with these.
• Facebook ads. Harder to work with, but incredibly powerful. Don’t mess around here, though, without informing yourself first. Anything by Dave Gaughran is reliable. Ditto anything by Nicholas Erik. Ditto anything by Mark Dawson (though you may end up paying a fair bit.)
• Your mailing list. Ultimately, your mailing list will become the single most important engine behind all your sales. But you need to feed your mailing list and organic sales is the best way to do that. When you are starting out, however, you will find that outfits like BookSweeps offer a great way to get started.
• Social media, maybe. If you’re good at it. And you don’t need to be across every platform. The reverse is more likely true. If you like TikTok, then go all in on TikTok and largely ignore everything else. If you like Facebook, then go all in on that. If (like me) you hate all of that nonsense, then ignore it all and don’t feel bad.

You really only need to pick three elements from this list and two of them – promo sites and mailing list – are pretty much compulsory.

And again: remember the main point of this email. You don’t need to market all the time. You just need to market effectively enough for 4-7 days that Amazon gets the message and starts working for you.

That’s it. That’s how to market a book in a way that always works.

And, to be clear, Amazon’s attention will move on. It always does. If your week-long marketing blitz delivers enough sales to engage Amazon’s marketing bots, then you win yourself about a month of Amazon-love in total. You’ll find visibility – and sales – spikes as Amazon gets interested, then gently falls away. A month or two after launch, those heady sales spikes will feel unbearably distant.

But that’s the way it goes. And, in that happy month or two, you can generate easily enough sales to make some money and build up your mailing list for your next launch.

Here endeth the lesson. Good luck. Feed those bots.

Til soon.

Harry

I just realised that I write quite often about beginning a novel, and not all that often about ending it. 

And yes: beginnings are important. If you don’t get your reader onto the story-train in that opening chapter, you’ve basically lost the game before it’s really started. 

And also: if you don’t set expectations just so in those opening pages, you’re likely to confuse your reader or upset them later in the book – another way to lose the game. 

But endings matter too. To a huge extent, they set an architecture for the whole book. They determine the way you understand it. What if Lizzie Bennet hadn’t married Darcy? What if Atticus Finch had secured the peaceful release of the falsely accused Tom? What if James Bond just bungled things when he came to defuse the bomb? 

Endings matter at least as much as beginnings and the reason I don’t talk about them much is simply that endings mostly write themselves. 

I don’t know about your experience, but my endings generally pass in a rush. It’s as though the entirety of the preceding novel is there to allow me to write the final chunk in a blaze of understanding and joy. 

The understanding is: I know my characters. I know how all my little plot intricacies need to play out. I know what the grand finale needs to deliver. The prior 90,000 words involved me figuring those things out. The last 20,000 are my reward. 

The joy is partly the ease of writing. But it’s also the joy of completing the arc. It’s like writing one long punchline, where you already know that the joke is going to land. I’ve certainly had some spectacularly happy writing sessions that haven’t involved endings. (Giving Fiona hypothermia in the snows of Love Story, with Murders was joyous. And I did enjoy burying her underground in The Dead House.) But mostly – the writing sessions I remember with most pleasure involve endings. Words flowing and the text satisfying. 

So maybe you don’t need help with the endings. I think there’s an argument that if the preceding story has worked properly, the ending should just fall into place. But here, for what it’s worth, is a checklist to keep at hand … 

Exterior drama 

Have you properly completed your exterior drama? In the kind of books I write, that’ll typically involve some good splash of violence – a sinking boat, a fight, a burning building. But that’s not necessary. In Pride and Prejudice, the exterior ‘drama’ involves a naïve girl eloping with Mr Wrong and the Romantic Hero doing (off-screen) what Romantic Heroes are there to do. The off-screen quality of that drama is probably a little underweight for a modern audience, but so long as you have some dramatic action that’s well suited to your genre and readership, you’re fine. 

Interior drama 

The flipside of the exterior action needs to be some serious internal pressure. In a standalone novel, that pressure needs to have the sense of being pivotal – life-altering, life-defining. In a series novel, you can’t quite get away with a new life-defining moment with every instalment, but the stakes still need to be high. Series characters take a bit of a battering as a result. (I once did an ‘interview’ with Fiona, in which she grumped at me for giving her a rough time. Reading it back, I have to say that she’s in the right. I’ll never tell her that though.) 

Romantic relationship 

Most books, not all, will involve a romantic relationship. And – of course – the pressures of your grand finale are also pressures that test and define that relationship. You definitely don’t have to kiss and get married at the end of every book. I’ve ended a book with my protagonist ending what had seemed like a strong and constructive relationship. But when your character enters the furnaces of your ending, everything is tested, everything will either prove itself durable or fallible. The relationship can’t simply be as it was before. (Again, series characters need to play those things differently, but ‘differently’ doesn’t mean you can just ignore the issue.) 

Other key friendships / relationships 

Of course, there are a ton of other relationships that build up over the course of a book. Those might be best-friend type relationships, or children, or parents. They can (importantly) be office colleagues, which sounds dull but they can matter too. My detective’s relationship with her boss and other colleagues is just quite central to the architecture of her life and the books. These relationships too don’t need profound alteration necessarily, but they need some token of ending. A boss hugging your character (when he/she never normally would), or talking about a promotion, or offering a holiday – those things sound trivial, but they can define something important about everyone’s relationship to what has just happened. You don’t necessarily need much here. Half a page? A page? That might be ample. But if you book misses that page, it’ll never quite satisfy as it ought to. 

Mystery resolution 

Most books – not just crime novels – will often have some kind of mystery at the heart. That mystery will probably be unfolded in your grand action-climax, but that won’t always be true. Modern fiction has (rightly) moved away from that moustache-twirling final chapter where the Great Detective reveals the mystery to a completely static audience. But it’ll often be the case that little questions and niggles remain. Those things need to be addressed. It’s even OK if they’re addressed by saying, “We’ll never know exactly how / why / who X.” But you need to resolve your mysteries or acknowledge that you haven’t. 

Movement 

And, since we’ve just dissed static and moustache-twirling final chapters, I’d add that maintaining some kind of motion still matters at the end. Just as you’ll want to move settings fairly frequently in your middle chapters, I think you’ll want to do the same at the end. Physical motion is still a good way to convey story motion. 

The closing shot 

And –  

There’s a theory in film-structure that the opening shot should show the ‘Before’ state of a character and the closing shot should show the ‘After’ – where the before/after vignettes somehow encapsulate the alteration brought about by the story. So to take the (vastly excellent) Miss Congeniality movie, the opening shot shows Sandra Bullock as goofy, unkempt, and without close female friends. The closing shot shows her kempt, still her, but now with close female friends. That’s the key transition in the movie. 

I don’t quite like the mechanical nature of these movie plotting guides, but I do think it’s worth reflecting on the closing shot. What are you wanting to show? What’s the image of your character that you want to leave with your reader? In one of my books, a girl had been long separated from her father. Fiona’s last act in the book is to rejoin the two. She’s not physically present when the two meet – she’s set up the meeting, but remains in a car outside, watching. And that maybe is just the right tone for the book. Fiona plays this almost Christ-like role – suffering for others, undoing wrongs – but nevertheless remains on the outside of ordinary human society. That point isn’t made in any direct way, but it doesn’t have to be. An indirect point lingers longer than one made more crudely. 

*** 

That’s it from me. The excellence of this email’s start and middle sections means that the ending will now write itself in a burst of creative joy: 

Til soon. 

Harry