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Good morning, everyone!

Alice Caprio joined The Felicity Bryan Agency in 2023 following over 6 years working as a literary scout.

As an agent, Alice is building a list that spans middle grade and YA fiction across all genres, commercial adult fiction, and romance and fantasy for all ages. It is important for these books to have a clear international appeal, and to be commercial and bold. Alice is also keen to showcase diversity and underrepresented voices.

You can find Alice on Twitter to see more of what she's up to - @alice_caprio

Alice is also on the agent panel for our First 500 Novel Competition, so tune in to the live event (19:00 BST September 1, 2023) to hear her feedback for our 8 finalists.

Hi Alice, thanks for speaking with us today!

What brought you to agenting? And how does your previous role as a literary scout help you now as an agent?

I started out as a book scout, and my role there was to liaise with agencies and rights departments at publishing houses to find out about their upcoming books in the run up to important book fairs, which we would then report on. The role of a scout is often nebulous (even to those working within the industry!) but they are recognised as an important part of the equation when it comes to ensuring the success of a book. Part of our role as scouts is to help our international publishing clients curate their list in translation, narrowing it down to those couple of books specific to an editor’s taste that would work within a specific market. Most scouts nowadays also work across mediums, scouting for a variety of content creators, such as production companies, theatre companies, audio and video game companies, to select the best IP for them to adapt. It’s also a lot about networking, which is essentially what an agent has to do in being an advocate for an author and having those relationships with editors.

As a scout you get a very wide-ranging knowledge of different markets, across country and genre. I read very widely and then started specialising in kids and YA and science fiction and fantasy across all ages, so that gives me a really good sense of each list in the UK. I think because I've read so widely, I really know now what I love and enjoy, but also what works and what makes something work. And because I have an informed understanding of what works and why, across international markets, it means I’m able to have an active editorial input in a book and support the author in that way.

I’m really looking for books that speak to people across borders, about things we haven’t heard of enough. I’m looking for underrepresented voices, in a commercial make up where people can hear about experiences or from voices they wouldn’t come across normally in a format that is quite accessible and can be easily translated in various territories.

As a scout we were processing about 1000 books a month, across various languages too, so you read a book and then move on to the next thing. What I really liked about agenting is the ability to have a creative input and being able to work with the author to build their career, and being involved in the life of a book from start to finish.

What is a day in the life of an agent like for you?

At the moment I read a lot, as I have a lot of submissions coming through and I’m giving feedback to people requesting manuscripts. I’m also meeting with various editors and getting a sense of what they’re currently looking for. I’ve signed two authors, and am in the talking stages with a third, so I’m talking about these projects, and have been assisting them editorially and preparing them for submission. At the moment it’s very much about preparing editors for these projects and then reading and participating in pitch events and finding ways to come across new authors, which is allowing me to be proactive and give feedback.

What’s at the top of your fiction wish-list?

I am actively building a list that spans middle grade and YA fiction across all genres, commercial adult fiction, and romance and fantasy for all ages. I am on the hunt for stories that are smart, commercial and bold, with a clear international appeal.

I am passionate about showcasing diverse and underrepresented voices and I value books that do not shy away from representing the complexities of growing up whilst maintaining a joyful or uplifting quality. I am looking for books with fresh and exciting concepts, whose voices can cross borders and speak out about important topics in an accessible and authentic manner. More generally, I’m looking for captivating storytelling, engrossing world building and atmospheric real-world settings; writing that feels escapist in some way but remains grounded in real-life concerns.

When reading romance, I am drawn to lively secondary characters, unusual set-ups, engaging dialogue and irresistible chemistry between the leads. Humour is a plus and I enjoy a good trope, if explored creatively. Authors within the genre I rate highly include Jenny Ireland, Wibke Brueggemann, Ali Hazelwood, Jenna Evans Welch, Leah Johnson and Margot Wood.

I am always on the look-out for romantasy, high concept YA, dystopian YA, and retellings that feel distinctive. I am open to working with authors within these genres who have previously self-published, particularly if they have a TikTok or online presence. I tend to favour well-plotted, immersive fantasy novels with nuanced female leads, imaginative magic systems, high-stake adventures and courtly intrigue. I am not the agent for hard sci-fi but would be open to grounded sci-fi, particularly in the YA space. Whilst I enjoy high-fantasy settings, I tend to gravitate towards novels with accessible world-building, that might appeal to readers outside of fantasy. Novels I’ve recently enjoyed include The Wicked in Me by Suzanne Wright, The Serpent and the Wings of Night by Carissa Broadbent, A Far Wilder Magic by Allison Saft, The Book of Doors by Gareth Brown, Hide by Kiersten White and The Legendborn Cycle by Tracy Deonn.

At the other end of the spectrum, I am interested in cosy, low-stakes fantasy with heart, in the vein of TJ Klune and Travis Baldree. When it comes to historical YA, I enjoy immersive settings and stories with a speculative element. My latest coup de cœur was Dana Schwartz’s Anatomy: A Love Story.
In middle grade, I am drawn to sweeping adventures, stories with a speculative and magical twist or a spooky feel. I appreciate middle grade novels that do not talk down to the reader but remain fast-paced and fun. I am also on the search for contemporary stories with a timeless universal quality. Some of my favourite authors in the middle grade space include Kiran Millwood Hargrave, Michelle Harrison, Angharad Walker, Elle McNicoll, Nicola Penfold, Jordan Lees and Jack Meggitt-Phillips.

Is there any genre you’d rather not receive?

I’m not a huge fan of horror, but I will go for things that are a bit lighter and have a creepy gothic vibe or body horror, something in the vein of Rory Power or Krystal Sutherland.

I’m not usually a fan of straightforward historical fiction unless there’s a slightly speculative twist or it has a strong romance, or the world building is there to provide atmosphere.

Similarly, I don’t tend to go for murder mysteries but will always take a look at anything that subverts the genre. I also enjoy thrillers with a social consciousness in the vein of MA Bennett’s S.T.A.G.S and Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé’s Ace of Spades. For the time being, I am not open to picture books and illustrated fiction.

What do you want to see in a query letter? And what do you hate?

In think it should definitely be professional, because this will be a business relationship, even though I am someone who tries to have an accessible agenting style. I certainly don’t want authors to feel intimidated and I think getting that personal connection across in the query letter is great, but I do think there’s a professional boundary to be maintained in the ways that authors interact in that space. So do reference things that are relevant, like an author I’ve signed who resonated with you, but don’t be too personal.
I would also say that authors who are putting their work out there should be confident, and not apologetic or feeling like you’re taking up someone’s time. Be very clear, let me know why I’m the best person to see this and why you think we would work well together.

I really appreciate when someone can give me a good sense of their book through market comparisons, and for those to be well researched (rather than just including the most well-known and successful authors in a genre). It’s really interesting to think about what your book resembles tonally, and where it would sit in a bookshop.

It’s good to know where the author is based, because that will also inform the kind of conversations that I will have both with people here at the agency, but also with the author themselves, in terms of modes of communication and how we would work together, and I like to have these conversations early on. I also want to hear about people’s writing journeys, whether they have a presence anywhere, just things that might be a plus.

Any final words of advice for authors at any stage of the writing or submission process?

As an agency we always try and make sure that authors know that a rejection doesn’t mean that your book is not good enough, it’s just a very competitive industry and we want to make sure that we are so passionate about a book that we can make it stand out from the crowd and know that editors will love it because we’re the best champion for it. I think that sometimes that experience and feeling of constant rejection can be quite demoralising, and I imagine it’s difficult for authors when you’ve spent so long on a project. Making sure that you research agents and are only querying when you feel like it’s a good fit and taking that in stages and widening your scope gradually will help to minimise this. And also, being aware that there are many reasons why an agent might be unable to take you on that are not about the book not being good enough. If an agent doesn’t connect with the work, or they don’t have an editorial vision for it, or they already have very similar authors on their lists, it makes it difficult to be the best champion for your book, and that is what authors need. So, I think the overarching thing is that it is hard, but it’s not personal, and putting yourself out there in as many ways as you feel comfortable is really useful because there are so many opportunities that may not seem obvious, like pitching events on social media, and useful information to be found in many different places. Taking on feedback, either from agents or other authors, is also incredibly useful. Of course, you may get feedback that you don’t chime with and that’s okay, but a lot of the time people may be able to point things out that you can’t or offer you a unique perspective. I know that it is a hard process, but it will happen, and it’s that match made in heaven situation where someone will get an email and be really excited about your book from page one and that’s exactly what you want in an agent, someone who is really passionate about your book and has a vision for it.

I also think it’s useful for authors to know going into querying what they’re looking for in a relationship with an agent. Are they looking for someone who can assist editorially, or has certain connections, or can have a more personal bond and support? Because everyone works differently, and the best working relationships are those where you’re on the same page and can be honest with each other.

Check out Alice's AgentMatch profile for the full interview.

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!

This week, I want to talk about who’s buying your book. I don’t mean your eventual reader. I mean your publisher. It’s easy to assume your book will follow a particular sales pathway, when it really really won’t – and if it doesn’t fit the pathway you have in mind, you may end up failing no matter what the quality of your actual book.

That issue is easily corrected by simply understanding enough of the industry to know which bit of it you should be aiming at.

We’ll get to that in a second, but I also wanted to quote an email following last week’s Feedback Friday. The author – Katharine “the Cat” Kalypso, a Caucasian bear-wrestler – wrote to tell me:

Somehow, writing the pitch for my novel has really sharpened my understanding of the story trajectory and highlighted where a couple of subplots were detracting from the tension … I have written two post-it notes for my computer screen to ensure I cut the weakening waffle this time around: ‘complete clarity’ and ‘concision’.

Yes! That’s it. Writing a pitch should sharpen your understanding of the story trajectory. Not just that but, as we’ll see, it should float everywhere over the novel itself. That’s why I get driven nuts by pitches that offer cutesy little slogans for the book. “Romance, revenge – and a threat to the kingdom.” That kind of thing. Slogans like that might or might not be a good shout-line for a book once it’s packaged up with a strong cover and strong blurb and all the rest of it. But they’re not going to help you one tiny bit in checking whether your novel is built on the right lines. They’re also not going to tell you whether or not your story idea has the bite and snap necessary to compete on the bookshelves.

My favoured sort of pitches – aka, Really Rubbish Pitches™ – will help you with both those things. “Orphan + wizard school” would have been a terrible slogan and an impossible shout-line. But it would have told JK Rowling exactly what her book had to be about and ensured that the book would be insanely marketable when finished.

Anyway. I’m not going to get into that more now. Do please take a look at the Feedback Friday challenge this week though. It’s the last in our trilogy on pitches and (for me) the most exciting and important one.

Who’s your buyer?

Right.

Forget about pitching. Let’s think about selling.

Literary agent + Big 5 type auction

Many of you will simply think, “I’ll write the book, then hope to get an agent. If I get an agent, they can find me a publisher. If I can’t get an agent, then my book just isn’t good enough to sell and I will make my money wrestling bears in the Caucasus instead.”

And, OK, for lots of books and lots of authors, that’s a perfectly practical way to think. Indeed, it’s roughly how you ought to think, if you don’t want to self-publish and you are writing:

• Mainstream commercial fiction
• Bookclub fiction
• Mainstream literary fiction
• Mainstream non-fiction

Obviously, I’ve used the word ‘mainstream’ a lot there. What I mean is anything which could plausibly sit on the front tables of a decent bookshop. That’s what Big 5 publishers are aiming to publish. Literary agents will effectively only take you on if they think there’s a hope of a Big 5 sale. A decent book auction, of course, may be won by a major independent – a Kensington, a Faber, a Bloomsbury, for example – and any sane agent is completely happy with that outcome. But it’s the possibility of a Big 5 sale which pushes advances up. If an agent considers that there is effectively no hope of a Big 5 sale, any likely advance level is lower and perhaps very low indeed. Under those circumstances, an agent is unlikely to offer representation.

OK. This is a good model. It’s the model that – apart from my forays into self-pub – I’ve always followed.

But you need to bear in mind that publishers are still essentially focused on print. Yes, Amazon will in every case be their biggest buyer. Yes, audiobooks are huge and all publishers recognise this. And of course, no print-led publisher neglects the need to offer e-books too.

But still. For the biggest publishers, the dominant format is print – and that makes a difference. For example, a digital-first publisher will happily change a cover overnight if they feel it could help. A print-led publisher can’t have an e-book with one cover and a print book with another, so the cover you start with is the one that you’re stuck with. So books that are likely to have a largely digital readership may well benefit from a publisher focused on that exact niche.

Some writers may therefore prefer to target our next category:

Digital-first, with or without an agent

Digital-first houses are going to be very strong at selling:

• Genre romance
• Genre crime
• Genre anything

There’s not a clear distinction between the way I’m using ‘genre’ here and the way I’m using ‘mainstream’ earlier. My own crime novels are both ‘genre’ and ‘mainstream’. But very roughly, the more you bring something distinctive as a writer (in terms of writing, characterisation, and so on), the more likely you are to be considered mainstream. The more your books could be felt interchangeable with other books of the same genre (police procedurals, say), the more e-book friendly you are likely to be.

The classic illustration here is romance. Big publishers still handle romance, but these days the market is dominated by self-publishers and digital-firsters. The reason? Romance readers read A LOT. They aren’t going to pay $12.99 for a paperback when they could pay $3.99 for an e-book, so they read digitally for preference. Naturally enough, if the market is basically an e-book market, then publishers with a laser-like focus on that market are likely to do better.

The lesson for you? You need to figure out if your readers are likely to be heavily e-book driven. If they are, a Big 5 house is probably not going to bid for your book – and probably wouldn’t sell you very well if they did.

Oh yes, and just to be clear, all digital-first houses will take direct submissions. So an agent is great if you have one; inessential if you don’t.

Tiny print-led specialist, with or without an agent

That still leaves a fringe of other publishers with an intense, specialist focus. The publishers that get the most attention here are the slew of tiny publishers that often achieve astonishing success when it comes to getting literary books shortlisted for, or winning, the major prizes. But there are also small publishers that do well with (for example) mental health, or engineering, or military history.

If you get published by one of those guys, you may get very little money indeed. Plenty of them will either offer no advance at all or a purely notional, “thank you for choosing us” one. But who cares? If you’re Eimear McBride (author of A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing published by the tiny-but-excellent Galley Beggar Press) you probably don’t care that your first advance was small. Prize success and fame and (later) a book deal from Faber were probably ample compensations.

If your book is hyper-literary or hyper-specialist in some other dimension, then your natural next step is probably to find a publishing soul mate. An agent (working essentially for free and because they like your book) might be a companion in your search, if your book is literary. If your book is not a literary one, then you don’t need and probably wouldn’t benefit from an agent.

Or … do it yourself

As you know, I’m a big fan of self-publishing. That won’t work (probably) for literary fiction and is much more powerful if you’re writing a series. But lit fic apart, there aren’t many fields where self-pub can’t work for you. You can make loads of money, bond with huge numbers of readers and determine everything about the way your books are published. I’m not going to talk about all that here, because this email is long enough already, but don’t dismiss self-pub. It’s a wonderful way to publish.

Feedback Friday

Assignment for this week: Last week on pitches – and again, we’re shaking things up. This week, I want:

• Book title
• Short pitch only (12 words or less). I’m happy with just a list of ingredients if you want: ghosts + trains + Victorian curses, that kind of thing. And NO SLOGANS, no abstractions, no mysteries. I want nothing that would look good on the front of your book. Got that? Good. I’ll scream if you haven’t.
• 3 x 100-word max chunks from pages 1, 100, and 200 from your manuscript. What I want to see is whether your short pitch floats over and inhabits every page of your book. So I want you to go to (for example) page 100 in your manuscript and find anything – a word, a line, a bit of dialogue, some description, which alludes in some way, even obliquely, to your short pitch. If you haven’t got as far as page 200, then you can do page 1, 50 and 100, for example. And if your page 100 is unsuitable for some reason, then just dig out something from page 99 or 101. I just want to see that your short pitch floats right through your text.

That’s the assignment – and oh my goodness, it’s a good one. I did it with my own book here and pretty much yelped with excitement when I realised how completely my short pitch lived through the pages of my book. I never intended that outcome. I just wrote the best book I could … and ended up with that outcome.

I will look after Premium Members first and foremost, but everyone’s invited.

Not a Townhouse member? It’s free and easy to join. Info here.

Want to become a Premium Member? Join here. Use FRIDAY15 at checkout, and save 15%.

That’s it from me. Jobs for today: have a swim, mow the lawn, grow a beard, eat a plum.

Til soon.

Harry

We caught up with Helen Parusel, a Self-Edit Your Novel course alum and Jericho Writers member (who's also used our AgentMatch and editorial services) to hear about her journey to publication.

JW: We’re so pleased to hear your debut A Mother’s War was published with Boldwood Books recently. Can you tell us a little about yourself and your writing journey that led you up to this point?  

I come from London but have been living in Hamburg, Germany for over 25 years. Like so many of us, I always wanted to write a book, but there never seemed an appropriate time in daily life.

In order to avoid empty nest syndrome when my daughter left home to study, I decided that was the moment to start my writing journey. But how? I had no formal writing qualifications, had never had anything published and had no idea what skills were required to actually write a novel.

Stumbling around the internet I came across Jericho Writers and that changed everything. Working my way through every teaching video available, I studied the craft of writing and learnt about the fascinating world of publishing. I completed a novel and using the Jericho Writers AgentMatch service, I started the tortuous process of submission.

I didn’t receive a full manuscript request but one particular encouraging response from an agent at Curtis Brown inspired me to keep going. When lockdown arrived I joined a Curtis Brown Creative online writing course. By this time I had a new idea for a book, and the manuscript I worked on with Curtis Brown became A Mother’s War which was published in May.

JW: Can you tell us a little bit about the process your book went through from writing the first draft, through to publication?

I sent out my manuscript on submission, again using AgentMatch. This time, I received a full request. The agent felt it wasn’t quite ready and kindly gave me detailed feedback. She also invited me to resubmit. Not wanting to mess up this amazing opportunity, I decided I needed a professional manuscript assessment and turned to Jericho Writers. I read the profiles of their editors and came across Clare Coombes of the Liverpool Literary Agency. Amongst the things that attracted me to Clare was her love of WW2, historical fiction which was the genre of my novel.

Clare did a detailed, brilliant assessment which shone with knowledge and passion for the genre. She also loved my book! After a couple of video calls and numerous emails, she offered me representation; an unbelievable and wonderful moment. After that, things moved very fast. We edited for about six weeks and Clare submitted to about 12 publishers. Within three months I had a publishing deal!

JW: You were developing your craft for several years before you were published, is there anything you found particularly useful on your journey?

Definitely being part of a writing community such as Jericho Writers. The support, feedback and friendships are invaluable. Also a shout out for Debi Alper’s incredible Self-Edit Your Novel Course, and of course for Clare’s astute manuscript assessment.

JW: Were there any surprises along the way? Or perhaps anything you wished you had known earlier, or been prepared for?

I was stunned how many times a book is edited before it goes to print! I also didn’t realise I would be working on three books at once: marketing the one out now, finishing book two, and starting book three. It is all very intense, but I love it and am very grateful to have this opportunity.

JW: What advice would you give to writers working on their first draft?

Every writer has to find a way that works for them. Some throw out a messy first draft and just get the words down, others like me edit as they go. But what I would suggest is getting feedback and another perspective on your work, either through the Jericho Writers community or an online writing group. No one needs to write in isolation.

JW: We understand A Mother’s War is part of an exciting three-book deal with Boldwood Books. Can you let us know what are you working on now?

I have just submitted book two to my editor which is another WW2 story, this one set at the time of Austria’s annexation with Germany. Like my first book, it contains themes of romance, resistance and impossible choices.

About Helen

Helen is from London and now lives in Hamburg Germany with her husband, daughter and rescue dog.

After giving English lessons to retired Germans for twenty years, she became intrigued by many of their wartime stories which has inspired her writing. Helen’s childhood summer holidays were spent with family in Austria and she draws on her experiences for her second book.

Her debut novel, A Mother's War, was released in the summer of 2023.

You can follow Helen on Twitter and Instagram.

There’s an E. E. Cummings poem which tells us:

here is the deepest secret nobody knows

(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud

and the sky of the sky of a tree called life

And that’s what we’re talking about this week. The root of the root and the bud of the bud and the sky of the sky of a book called Sales.

Or, indeed, a book called Quality.

All this is a roundabout way to say that this week’s email is going to be talking (again) about elevator pitches and it’s going to invite you to forget completely that a pitch is meant to be about sales. Forget selling. Forget marketing. The pitch I want you to find is all about finding the root of the root and the bud of the bud.

We’ll get to Feedback Friday later in this email, but for now – clear your mind and chant:

• My pitch has nothing to do with sales.
• My pitch is not going to try to describe my book.
• My pitch is going to avoid all abstract nouns. (Revenge, honour, redemption, whatever.)
• My pitch is not the house; it is only the front door.
• My pitch is going to find the one little piece of crystal that somehow embodies the novel.
• My pitch is likely to have two or maybe three ingredients, probably not more.

To explain those points in a bit more detail –

Nothing to do with sales

Take my basic pitch for the Fiona Griffiths stuff: “detective who used to think she was dead.” That pitch never featured in any marketing material, nor could it, because that sentence gives away THE big secret of the book.

Not a book description

It doesn’t even vaguely describe the book, because you don’t know where or when the book is set or anything at all about the crime or investigation on which the book centres. As a book description, the pitch totally fails.

No abstractions

There are no abstract nouns in that pitch. In practice, the book deals centrally with some big abstractions. (What is it to feel alive? The book is all about the struggle to be human.) But the pitch has no interest in those big themes, or not really. There’s a detective. She is in recovery from a strange psychiatric illness. The tiny bit of information conveyed is very specific, very narrow.

Front door only

Most pitches I see are attempting to summarise an 80,000 word book in 12 words. That doesn’t work. You can’t do that – or not in any interesting way. All you can do is show people a front door that they want to walk through. One of your pitches from last week (one good enough to get a free agent 1-2-1) was simply this:

Dirty Pitch: A refugee crisis in space.

Boom! That doesn’t tell you much about the book – who’s the hero? What’s the story? Are we near future or far future? What specific goals and obstacles define the story? But it’s a front door you immediately want to walk through. You just instantly want to know more.

A little piece of crystal

A crystal is specific, not abstract. It’s tiny, but fully formed and perfect. And in the case of your book, it’s the root of the root (the deepest thing in your novel) and the bud of the bud (the thing from which everything else shoots and forms.)

So that take that “refugee crisis in space” pitch. You can already guess that those words will hover over every page of the novel. It’s the deepest thing and the most fruitful. It’s the source of everything else. It’s also the thing you’ll recall first, when you remember the novel 20 years later. That’s a perfect pitch.

Two or three ingredients

Lots of great pitches have just two ingredients:

Teen romance + vampires

Orphan + Wizard school

Refugee crisis + spaceships

Detective + thought she was dead

Some pitches need three ingredients. One of last week’s Feedback Friday winners came up with a pitch that effectively amounted to:

Ghosts + Orient Express (or similar) + Victorian curse

Take away any one of those ingredients and the book would seem a little thin. Pop all three in the pot and there’s just a little shiver of anticipation.

Another example (again drawn from one of your Feedback Friday entries):

Murder story + 1960s America.

That’s OK, but a bit dull, right? I mean, you might like murder stories and you might like that setting, but this pitch is giving no reason to pick up that book specifically. On the other hand, what about this:

Murder story + 1960s America + NASA space programme

Now you immediately want to read that book. The combination of ingredients coheres perfectly into something yumptious. You can already feel that if you started to over-describe your book (forgetting that your pitch is offering a door, not the whole house) you’d lose that instant pop of interest.

Two last things from me before we turn to this week’s Feedback Friday.

One: A couple of people, writing literary fiction, have complained that this pitching task is one required by genre fiction only. But that’s truly not the case. I found myself using Ian McEwan as an example of how successful literary novels always have a gleam of silver at their hearts. So Atonement had a famous dirty bit, Enduring Love had a bloke falling off a balloon, Amsterdam involves a euthanasia / murder story. And so on. In each case, the deeper purpose and themes of the novel offer proper, thoughtful, literary fare. But McEwan purchases his right to do the literary stuff, but making damn sure that there’s a gleam of silver in every book. If you’re writing literary fiction, and you are less famous than Ian McEwan, then I recommend you take the same approach.

Two: Are pitches about achieving sales? Or maximising quality?

The opposition is phoney. A good pitch deals with both things. Sure, it’s about sales, as those Ian McEwan examples show. Even when you’re as good as he is, you need a spark to make the sale.

At the same time, a good pitch is fundamentally about quality. Because a good book has a kind of holism and the little scrap you use for your pitch should say something really deep about what the novel is. What it does. Why it is. Why it’s necessary.

Go back to that simple pitch: “refugee crisis in space”. Would you want to read a book about a modern-day refugee crisis? An overcrowded camp in Calais? Trafficking gangs in Libya? Probably not. Move that same basic dynamic to space and of course you want to read more. What’s more – if the book is any good – it’ll shift your view of refugees. It’ll change you.

The root of the root and the bud of the bud.

Feedback Friday

Free agent feedback: Last week, I promised that three talented people would get a free agent 1-2-1. I’ve chosen the lucky three and you can read their winning pitches here:

The Runners

The Truth and Lies of Coraline Crow

The Necropolis Line

Congrats to the Chosen Ones and I’ll be giving away free 1-2-1s to Feedback Friday Folk as often as the mood takes me. I’ll honestly be surprised if at least one of those three books doesn’t end up in print.

Assignment for this week: Elevator pitches again please, but a bit different this time.

• Book title
• Short pitch only (12 words or less). I’m happy with just a list of ingredients if you want: ghosts + trains + Victoriana, that kind of thing.
• One para book description. So now you can describe the book in more detail. We want to feel the connection between the book and the longer description. Make sure we can feel the “bud of the bud and the root of the root” joining the short pitch and the longer description.

That’s the assignment, share them here. I will look after Premium Members first and foremost, but everyone’s invited.

Not a Townhouse member? It’s free and easy to join. Info here.

Want to become a Premium Member? Join here. Use FRIDAY15 at checkout, and save 15%.

That’s it from me for this week. Do have a go at this week’s exercise. It’s the simplest, but most productive exercise you can do for yourself.

Over to you.

Til soon.

Harry

If writing the first word, of the first line, of the first page of a book is akin to planting a seed, then preparing a manuscript for publication is similar to getting ready to harvest a crop.

Gardening and writing can both feel like rather solitary pursuits at times, can’t they? Editors pop up at just the right moment and advise on nurturing and harvesting that precious manuscript ‘crop’.

Why Hire A Book Editor? 

For me, an editor has always got to be a human being. Google ‘how to find an editor’, however, and the first thing offered will almost certainly be a glitzy editing software package.

These can be useful in certain circumstances, especially if your writing requires nuts and bolts work on spelling and grammar, but they can also be confusing to use.

Before you splash out on anything new and costly, be sure that you are already using all the automated editing features available on your existing software.

Software can never empathise. Software will never praise you for writing something which sings, nor ask you questions to help it understand what it is you mean. 

For me, at times of stress or difficult choices in life, nothing beats having a calm, empathetic (yet objective) person at your side.

There can be an adrenaline slump after that ‘whoop, whoop, I’ve finished my first draft!’ moment when you realise that the editing process means, in a way, starting all over again. Your editor should provide you with guidance, support and inspiration in equal measure.  

Our very first editors tend to come free within our family. For young writers, this kind of uber-positive (‘simply wonderful, darling…’) feedback is essential in building confidence and self-esteem, but most writers quickly grow to require something more objective. 

From there, people often refer to beta readers or book editors (or both) to help them further enhance their books.

I try to be as encouraging yet constructive as possible when I am editing.

I am working, for example, with a young and promising neurodiverse writer whose mother is concerned about the intensely macabre biographical content of her work. Up to this point in her writing life, her mum has been her greatest fan, so this dissent has come as a nasty shock to them both. My client is maturing fast as a writer and developing a remarkable authorial voice. It may not be one which her mother recognises or wants to hear, but her mother does not represent the extensive target market for the book in question.

An editor can see all this; and can reassure both parties and move them forward.  

What Does A Book Editor Do? 

A good editor (and yes, there are bad ones out there too) should read a manuscript objectively while wearing a few different hats: that of a future reader, of course, but those of a potential publisher or agent too.

An editor should also be able to ‘get inside your head’ to a degree: to understand what it is you are trying to achieve, even if you have not yet quite got there.  

It is essential to be clear in your mind if you hire an editor that you are not paying them to tell you that your book is utterly marvellous. You are paying them to tell you the truth and to help you make it more publishable.  

How To Decide What Kind Of Editing You Need

There are some confusing terms used to describe the many different types of book editing services which it may be helpful to explain here.  

Line Editing

Line editing means that your editor will read your text carefully, line by line, looking at how your text flows, your narrative style, and whether or not it is readable.

Line editing is more about making sure each sentence works and less about the ‘big picture’. 

You could opt for this service if you have written your manuscript – or part of it – as a bit of a stream of consciousness and you are now unsure what it is you have, or where to go or what to do with it next.  

Developmental Editing

If, however, you think that your book is ‘almost there’ but lacks something fundamental that you cannot quite pinpoint, then developmental editing might be for you.

This takes a step back from your completed manuscript and considers the overall structure: your content, plot, characters, and timeframe, for example.

Does it all combine into a convincing, compelling read? A developmental editor will make recommendations on how to rework any weaker sections for improvement, often giving you specific examples.  

I tend to provide a bit of both line editing and developmental editing in my own reports.

For example, I recently edited an excellent manuscript where a compelling plot was marred by an important secondary character lacking entirely in motivation for their actions (which would fall under developmental editing). I was able to demonstrate this by highlighting plot weaknesses and unconvincing dialogue and suggesting improvements (and that is line editing). A hint of smouldering unspoken passion for a central character and the plot suddenly snapped into sharp focus.

Sometimes all it takes is a nudge in the right direction from an editor to avoid a major rewrite. 

Proofreading

Proofreading is a specialist area of professional editing, one which should be undertaken immediately before publication.

Proofs are the final ‘set’ (i.e. in the final positions on the page), cover, and content of your book as it will appear once published.

Your proofreader should spot any final typesetting and copy errors in them and flag them up.

If your editor has done a good job, there should not be that many and you should then be able to ‘sign off’ a final corrected proof.

In theory, that is then exactly how the book should appear once published, but I once had an over-zealous publishing-house content editor make catastrophic changes to my text after it had been ‘signed off’ – the stuff of nightmares (and litigation)!  

You might now ask ‘why not get one person to do the lot at the same time’?

This may seem a logical economy but would not work well, as after any line editing or developmental editing, you will wish to restructure or rewrite to some degree, so premature proofreading would be pointless.

Proofing is also better undertaken by someone who has not had anything to do with the writing or editing process already.

A good editor should already have picked up on repeated errors in spelling or grammar but worrying about the nitty-gritty of typos tends to come at this later stage.  

How Editors Work

Your editor is there to decide whether your book ‘works’.

If it does, they will suggest ways to make it better still.

If it does not, they will explain why and recommend ways to put it right.  

I do this myself by:  

• Highlighting examples of weak writing within the text, often showing an improved version alongside it 
• Rewriting short sections where a writer is struggling for clarity, especially if the text has been over-written (this is common with opening chapters) 
• Recommending necessary changes to structure, plot, characters, narrative style etc 
• Pointing out over-used words or phrases (something we all do – my own are the word ‘little’ and a penchant for unnecessary adverbs) 

I may also suggest an alternative to the working title of a book, so expect this too. As writers we become used to thinking of a particular title from the first word on the first page and it is hard to see beyond that.

A few years ago, I edited a family-orientated illustrated history book which was called Growing a Cathedral. It was the last major published work of the veteran author, Elizabeth Sutherland. The weak title really bothered me – but she could not see past it. We eventually agreed a compromise: 'Sowing a cathedral' became instead the slightly tweaked title of the first chapter, while the book was issued under the much stronger title, Highland Cathedral. It is now in its third edition and still doing well. 

Somewhere in your editorial report, a good editor should compare/contrast your work with published books in the same genre. Sometimes it is difficult for a writer to see precisely where their work ‘sits’ in terms of the market.

It was helpful when early readers compared my book, Major Tom’s War, with Vera Brittain’s great memoir Testament of Youth and Michael Ondaatje’s novel The English Patient, for example, because I could then see how it falls somewhere between fiction and non-fiction.

These comparisons are useful to mention in a letter to a potential agent or publisher too which may be an agreed part of your report package if you go through an agency.

Editors can help you craft a synopsis too – often the hardest part of pulling together a submission following the completion of the editing stage.  

How Much Does An Editor Cost? 

A good editor has a curious blend of traits. You should be prepared to pay them for a service, and you must also be prepared to act on (or at least consider) their recommendations.  

If you are a young or new writer and you worry about the cost of hiring a professional, then try to find someone to undertake the task who isn't a close friend or family member, as they will be able to give you more objective feedback. Consider asking a neighbour, or anyone you know who's a journalist, teacher, or librarian.

Ask yourself this, though: will you be prepared to act on their recommendations if you are not invested enough in your own output to pay them something?

And is it fair to expect anyone to work (and yes, even if your 90,000 word manuscript is a shoo-in for a future Booker Prize, it is still work) for free? 

How To Find An Editor

Commissioning an editor may not in fact cost as much as you think.

Even so, once you have decided that you need an editor, beware of panic buying: it horrifies me how many people will Google 'editors' and then immediately hand over their money to the first algorithm which says ‘card details here’.

Always search for their company name online. Always check for feedback.  

There is a special place in hell reserved for ‘vanity’ publishers (which often pop up within the first few clicks online because of the sheer quantity of poor saps they have suckered before you). These will offer to edit, produce and even design a cover for your book and their sales pitch is often misleadingly slick.

One elderly friend ignored my advice a few years ago and signed up with a well-known ‘publisher’ without reading the small print. In return, he received a boxful of poorly edited and produced books with an unrecognisable cover illustration, and it cost him much heartbreak and most of his savings.  

If it sounds too good to be true, then it probably is. 

Editing Costs

The UK Chartered Institute for Editing and Proofreading (CIEP) currently suggests minimum hourly rates of £28.65 for proofreading, £33.30 for copyediting and £38.30 for substantial editing, rewriting and/or developmental editing. However, I would steer clear of any editor who tries to seal the deal by quoting for editing work by the hour.

I happen to read very fast, but I will generally read manuscripts submitted to me twice or even three times before writing an editorial report. Charging by the hour or even by the day would not work for me, or for my clients.  

Consider instead individual professional editors or agencies which will charge you according to the word length of your manuscript, as really this is the fairest way of doing it. Some editing projects will take a bit longer than others and most agency editors accept this: it evens out.  

Agency charges vary (see ours here), and the editor assigned to you will generally receive around half of the fee you pay, the other half covering core administration costs (for example marketing, writing, conference planning and the creation of the invaluable generic web links freelance editors can add into their reports).

Shop around, do not be afraid to ask questions and make sure you get as much bang for your buck as you possibly can. 

If you commission an independent professional editor, check their website (if they have one), ask for references from recent previous clients, and aim to make sure that they have already edited within your genre. 

Some professional book editors or editing companies provide a sample edit or two on their websites. These also offer a visual comparison between, for example, copy editing and line editing.

Before you sign a contract, expect to have a dialogue with your editor or agency (and if they resist this, find someone else). This helps ensure that you've found the right editor for you.

Three Good Questions To Ask An Editor:  

• ‘How long do you think it will take to read and edit my manuscript?’ (NB most agencies will agree this for you with the editor in advance) 
• ‘Have you ever written or worked on something in this particular genre before?’ 
• ‘Can you look particularly closely at my opening chapter/character development/timeline/ending?’ (it is always helpful to pinpoint areas of your manuscript which you think need work) 

Your Editor May Respond With Questions Of Their Own, So Expect Something Along These Lines: 

• ‘Has any other editor already worked on your text?’ 
• ‘How much of your story is based on real events and people?’ 
• 'Which authors inspire your writing?’ 

The Editing Process

Once you have received your report, you should be given a period of time for reflection on its content and then the option to have an email exchange or a Zoom chat to clarify any points or simply to talk through the content: I prefer Zoom, because I tend to form a picture of the writer in my head as I edit and I like to compare that preconception to reality! 

I often begin my reports by praising the writer for their courage in entrusting their seedling manuscript to my care and I am completely sincere about that. Although a few have come close, I have never yet been sent a manuscript where I thought ‘this is so good that I cannot help it grow.’  Agencies often have a fast track to an agent system for any manuscripts an editor considers ready to go out.  

Since starting to edit for Jericho a couple of years ago, one manuscript on which I have worked was sold as part of a historical fantasy book series to a major publisher, and that was just as exciting for me as it was for the author concerned. 

Finding An Editor

Editors must aim to be kind and positive without becoming over-friendly, at which point objectivity may be lost. Your editor’s name will never appear on your cover and probably not even in your list of acknowledgements. We provide secret support to help enhance your book. A recent client of mine had a superb manuscript but struggled to write convincing sex scenes from a female viewpoint: a challenge I much enjoyed resolving.

Editors must work with clients under the strictest confidentiality and should never divulge book or author names without consent.  

When basking in the glow of a successful book-harvest, you may not remember an editor’s face or name for long, or even acknowledge their existence to the outside world, but that does not matter a jot. As your editor, I will have helped you through the joyful ordeal that is book-growing, and that, for me at least, is reward enough.

Whether you opt for a freelance book editor or an editing company, regardless of the kind of editing service you choose, your book always remains precisely that - yours. 

This week – and inspired by your excellent responses to Feedback Friday – we’re going to be talking steam engines and the particular importance of not leaking steam. Or, if you happen to be more interested in books than engines, then the importance of not leaking pressure from your book.

The good news is that some quite small changes will deliver a substantial improvement in reader experience. Better still: the changes aren’t even hard. They’re about mindset more than anything else.

First though, with a tinkle of very small cymbals and a clatter on a kettle drum remanufactured from a dressmaker’s thimble, it’s time for …

Feedback Friday

Free agent feedback: Since our festival is approaching, I had the bright idea of helping you prepare for any agent one-to-ones you may have booked for our weekend in London.

This week, we’ll be giving away three free agent one-to-ones (the ones you can book at any time of the year). I’m going to pick the pitches I like the best. If you’re successful, you get to put your work directly in front of a literary agent and I very much hope that leads to good things. But of course, you gotta be in it to win it.

So, without further ado, let’s look at your pitch!

• Book title
• About your book: A maximum of one short sentence to identify basic genre / premise or whatever else someone might need to know. (“A contemporary police procedural set in Cardiff” for example.)
• Your pitch, the dirty version. “Robot which mows lawns”, for example. Maximum 12 words here and less is better.
• Your pitch, the pretty version. “Mow while you sleep – the lazy gardener’s route to perfect lawns,” for example. Max 25 words.

The dirty pitch is for you, no one else. It’s the Post-It you stick above your computer monitor. It’s the tag which reminds you of your book’s USP. The thing that keeps you centred. A five-word reminder to keep you on track as you write.

The pretty pitch is for the front of the book, maybe, in time.

And honestly? The pretty pitch doesn’t matter. The dirty one does.

The point of the dirty pitch is to make someone – in this case me – think, “Ooh, sounds interesting, tell me more.” I don’t want pretty. I want interesting. If you look at those two pitches for lawn robots, the first one would work miles better in any real-life conversation between you and your friends. If you gave a friend what sounds like a marketing pitch, they’d think you’d gone nuts. If you just used the dirty pitch to explain why you’ve got a new orange and black gadget on your grass, then anyone with a lawn will want to know more.

So, that’s the assignment. As usual, I’ll do what I can, but I will look after Premium Members first and foremost, but everyone’s invited.

Share them here.

Not a Townhouse member? It’s free and easy to join. Info here.

Want to become a Premium Member? Join here. Use FRIDAY15 at checkout, and save 15%.

Leaking steam

Steam engines existed before James Watt. Famously, Watt – then an instrument-maker at the University of Glasgow – became interested in the problem when he was asked to repair a model steam-engine that followed Thomas Newcomen’s basic design.

Newcomen’s engine worked, but badly. A coal-fired furnace boiled water, forcing steam into a cylinder which drove a piston. So far so good: a coal-fired power station uses the same system today.

But to get the piston back to its starting position, Newcomen’s device simply cooled the cylinder, turning steam back into water, altering the pressures and closing the piston.

This arrangement meant that the furnace was called upon to repeatedly warm the cylinder back up to a point where it didn’t immediately condense the steam. Watt’s little piece of genius was to create a separate condensing chamber, so that the furnace could deal with the steam only, not the cylinder too.

That was his speck of genius, but he was also a very good development engineer. Getting a really good seal for the piston wasn’t as important, but it was still important and he cared about every detail.

All through this development work, Watt saw his challenge as one of minimising waste. Minimising the waste of coal, minimising the waste of heat.

I tell you all this (fantastically interesting) stuff because I want you to think about your book in the exact same way.

At the moment, your manuscript resembles a Newcomen engine. Which is very good indeed! It means that you’ve done almost all the hard work. You’ve built a plot, you’ve engineered characters, you’ve thrown 80,000 words (or whatever) on the page. You have a manuscript.

But the challenges you’ve had so far are quite macro in scale: deliver a plot, write 80,000 words, and so on. At a certain stage, you need to flip things. You need to think about leakages of steam. Places where your book leaks reader-interest through tiny little cracks and crevices. Each one of those losses is small. Cumulatively, however, they can threaten to be lethal.

But which is better:

Sentence A. Burning brakes, upholstery damp and ghosts of fast food turned the air into a warm soup of smells that caught the back of my throat like two fingers.

Or:

Sentence B. The car smelled of hot brakes, damp upholstery and the ghosts of fast food.

You only have to drop those two on the page to see that the second one is better. The first one has a whole lot of baggy language “turned the air into a warm soup of smells” that really doesn’t add anything much. (Of course, smells change the air. What else could they change?) and the thing about catching the back of the throat “like two fingers” almost makes sense, but doesn’t quite. Really, for clarity, the sentence needs to read “like two fingers shoved down the throat as though seeking to produce retching.” But that’s way too cumbersome, so the author (rightly) cut off most of the baggage. Her only error was not cutting even more.

And the funny thing here is that the sentence is really good! I mean, those three smells placed together in a sentence are really evocative. The writer’s actually done the hard work (of building the engine) and not done the easy work (of preventing any steam leaking out from dodgy joins.)

Here are some other simple checks to make – of your opening page especially, but really of every line in your book:

Do you have tiny redundancies?

For example, “so she was happy with the situation as it stood” could probably (depending on context) be replaced by “she was happy with the situation” or even “She was happy.”

Likewise, it’s easy to write things like “clouds covered the sky” or the ”wind blew” or “the rain made the pavements wet”, but what else do we possibly expect clouds, wind and rain to do?

Simply tightening these tiny things means your story can convey the exact same amount of meaning, but in a much smaller space. That’s more pressure, less leakage – a better engine.

Do you switch points of view?

Yes, this is something you can do in a book, though (mostly not only) around chapter breaks. But changing POV on your first page? That’s literally disorienting the reader at a point where their #1 priority is getting themselves properly oriented. There are probably exceptions, of course, but in general, just don’t do this. It’ll almost always be a mistake.

Do you hop about in time?

I’ve talked about that before, so I won’t bang on about it now. But if your #1 task is to help the reader orient themselves in your book, then don’t disorient them by giving them multiple times – or indeed places – to deal with.

Do you fail to tell the reader where you are?

You don’t need to offer co-ordinates of time and place, but any drama needs to take place on a stage – and the readers needs to see that stage. So to my eyes, that sentence we looked at earlier – about hot brakes and damp upholstery – sets the scene beautifully. Whatever dramatic action we are about to witness feels placed. We know how to imagine the sequence of events that follows.

But it’s really common for writers just to jump straight into the action / dialogue without any meaningful explanation of where we are. Or sometimes, the author kind of ticks a box (“They were in the Great Hall of Ra-Thamar”), but without actually providing any material to help the reader imagine the place.

Do you rush?

It’s astonishing to me how many writers use their first page to say: heresmystoryitsgoingtobereallygreat.

If they have a fantasy world, they start to rush into an explanation of how the magic works. If they have (say) a Big Secret – a female character in historical fiction dresses as a man to get work – they want to reveal that secret on page #1.

And – slow down.

Secrets are fun when they wink at you and you have to tease them out. They’re just boring when they’re delivered like six-year-old secrets. (“Hey, Papa, I’ve got a really big secret. Do you want to know what it is? OK, then I’ll tell you.”)

That’s probably enough for this email, but I will say this:

Feedback Friday seems like an incredibly rich way to turn the somewhat abstract insights of this email into practice. There will be LOTS of opportunities for feedback – not just on opening pages but (as with the week coming) on elevator pitches, on query letters, on book covers, on marketing plans, on character descriptions, and so on. If you’re a Premium Member, then please tuck in to the full. We’ll support you the best we can. If you’re not a Premium Member, then please engage anyway.

Intelligent, respectful and constructive feedback is THE gold-standard way to improve your work. So let’s improve it.

Over to you.

Til soon.

Harry

Good morning, everyone!

This week, we're joined by Daisy Chandley, an Associate Agent at Peters, Fraser & Dunlop. Daisy joined PFD in 2019 and has been building her own list while also supporting Tim Bates and Annabel Merullo.

As an agent, Daisy represents a range of creative and informative non-fiction as well as adult fiction including literary, upmarket, mystery/thriller, rom-com and horror. She loves page-turning premises and compelling twists, and is keen to see anything that explores themes of sexuality, gender, race and disability.

You can learn more about Daisy on Twitter @daisychandley.

Hi Daisy, thanks for speaking with us today!

What brought you to agenting?

I’d always wanted to do something that involved writing in some way, but I’m certainly not an author myself, and I really wanted a role that also had a fast-paced, analytical side to it – I’d previously been thinking about going into law, so perhaps I was after something with a little arguing involved! After deciding to try and get into publishing and eventually landing an internship at a literary agency, I still didn’t entirely know what it would look like on a day to day basis, and couldn’t have imagined it would fit my incredibly niche criteria quite so well. I consider myself extremely lucky to be able to say that I truly love my job – no Sunday scaries for me!

What’s at the top of your fiction wish-list?

With fiction, my reading broadly falls into two main categories: sharp, witty and clever novels on the literary to upmarket commercial spectrum with just the right balance of emotion and edge, and things with a darker side, be it unputdownable psychological thrillers, uncrackable murder mysteries, or even a literary and original horror novel. With crime I prefer an amateur sleuth to a police procedural, but I’m open to anything with a strong hook and quality writing. Overall, whether it’s a delightfully fun and scandalous page-turner, or something more literary and strange, if it’s stylish and smart, I’d love to see it. And, though it’s easier said than done, I’m an absolute sucker for a really good twist. Across the board, I’m always looking for stories that explore sexuality, race, gender, and disability, and would love to hear from the many writers whose voices and experiences aren’t given enough space in publishing.

What’s at the top of your non-fiction wish list?

On the non-fiction side, I’m looking for bold new insights and underrepresented voices on popular science, nature writing, relationships, social issues and politics, and am always especially interested in fresh, playful and exciting writing on pop culture, love, and the internet. I’d also love to see illuminating narrative non-fiction, whether a beautiful and lyrical exploration, or an enthralling and explosive deep-dive. I’m very selective with memoir, but I could always be tempted by a seriously scandalous and brutally honest rollercoaster of a story in the vein of How To Murder Your Life or I’m Glad My Mom Died.

Is there any genre you’d rather not receive?

I don’t do YA/Children’s, and I’d rather not receive hard SFF although I am definitely interested in speculative fiction. As I mentioned, most memoirs aren’t for me, and nothing military please. I’m definitely open to (and a big fan of) romantic books, but they’ll need to be on the more literary side and have a very good dose of humour thrown in, plus a bit of bite, so the more traditional genre romances aren’t for my list.

What is a day in the life of an agent like for you?

It hugely varies, which is one of the main joys! Unless there’s anything hugely pressing or exciting waiting for me when I wake up, I usually start the day by taking stock of my submissions that have come in overnight, so I can check if there’s anything that immediately stands out as looking unquestionably up my street – everything else goes into my submission folder for me to dive into as soon as I get a spare moment. The rest of the day will be a combination of doing edits on clients’ proposals and manuscripts to get them ready to go to publishers, putting together submission lists for projects that are nearly ready to go, negotiating and drafting contracts, liaising between clients and editors, setting up and going to editor meetings, and general admin/emails. Some people always do their more creative work in the afternoon and more agent-y, email-y work in the morning, but for me it mostly depends on when I feel exactly the right amount of caffeinated for each task…

What do you want to see in a query letter?

I like them short and sweet: your pitch, the space you see your book fitting into and some comps to help illustrate that, a professional bio (where you’re based, previous publications of any kind, courses etc), perhaps one or two lines about why you chose to submit to that agent, and that’s pretty much it. Of course it’s lovely to briefly mention if you’re from where it’s set, or are writing from some personal experience, but a full-on backstory or an abundance of personal information isn’t necessary. Keep it friendly but professional – and try not to veer toward either pleading or showmanship!

Same question when it comes to the synopsis. What should writers do? What should they avoid?

I hear most writers feel a deep sense of dread at the mention of a synopsis, and I can completely understand why – while I love writing pitches, I can’t say that putting together a definitive A4 summary of your beloved, complicated, nuanced book for agents to look at is a task I envy. That said, I’m grateful to everyone who’s powered through, as they’re an absolutely invaluable part of your submissions package; they don’t just show me where the plot goes and how your extract fits into the wider narrative, but can also showcase the level of confidence and control you have over your story.

With that in mind, here’s a couple of tips for a solid synopsis – preferences will of course still differ agent to agent, so don’t be surprised if you see someone else saying something slightly different, and do always check each agency’s submission guidelines in case they have any specific requests.

1. Map out the whole plot start to end, rather than picking up where your submission leaves off, or leaving out the ending so we can enjoy your amazing twist without spoilers (or in the hopes of getting full MS requests to find out what happens) – I completely get that urge, but I really need to know where you’re going with it to know if there’s any chance of it being for me in the first place.
2. Aim for 1 side of A4, but don’t waste your one short and precious life trying to cut a few words or fiddling with the margins to keep to this – unless submission guidelines say otherwise, spilling a little onto a second is absolutely fine.
3. Shoot for the middle ground between bullet points and an essay – I actually think the average ‘plot’ section for a film on Wikipedia gets it about right! You don’t need to introduce every character, subplot, or conflict. Sometimes you’ll need to reference some seemingly minor or unrelated things that prove crucial to the plot (whether a well-planted clue or a turning point for a character’s development), which is absolutely fine, but we should be able to clearly follow the core story as we read.
4. Clear and concise writing is better than lyricism, and I’ll never mind a synopsis being on the stark or blunt side – this is a tool rather than a piece of creative writing in and of itself, and the best way to show yourself off as a writer here is demonstrating control over the plot and an understanding of what’s really driving it.
5. Stick to objective facts – rather than telling us how we as the reader might or should start to feel about a certain character in light of an important event, tell us how other characters start to feel about them, if we’re told this, or how they start acting differently in the text.
6. If it doesn’t move along the plot, alter a character’s motivations, or become a crucial piece of information later, take it out and see if someone reading the new version would still understand who’s done what, why, and ‘so what’. if so, it can probably stay gone!
7. No gimmicks, rhetorical questions, or funky layouts - just simple third person, objective, fully written out sentences. If the book jumps around in time then for me it’s up to you whether you state that at the start and do the synopsis in chronological order, or head up each paragraph with the time that section is set in.
8. Practice doing synopses for other books you love – despite sounding a bit like Year 6 homework, it can be really helpful in practicing making these judgement calls with a bit less personal investment.

In your opinion, what defines good writing?

This is such a tough one, as if I stacked up my five favourite books, it would be almost impossible to say there was one characteristic of the writing that was the same across them all, and which made them good. Besides, there are hugely acclaimed books which I wouldn’t for a minute say weren’t good, but which I personally can’t stand on a sentence level! On the whole in fiction, I suppose I’m more likely to be taken by writing that’s sharp and acerbic with moments of deeply felt emotion than writing that feels very sincere and lyrical throughout, but I can think of countless exceptions to that even as I type it…

Your dream submission lands in your inbox, tell us about it.

It’s happened more than once, and it’s a wonderful feeling! I rarely know a dream book until I see it, but perhaps because it’s summer I’m currently in an especially soft mood and would love to see a smart, stylish, literary ‘romcom’-ish thing in the vein of Laurie Colwin’s Happy All The Time, or Rebecca K Reilly’s brilliant Greta & Valdin (which is coming out in the UK soon, but you can get the gist from the blurb!).

What makes for a successful author-agent relationship? How can both parties get the most out of the relationship?

I think it hugely depends on the author, which I know isn’t helpful, but neither is a blanket statement, as different authors want and need entirely different approaches at every stage in the process. Something that’s always going to be useful is just being honest with your agent about what works for you – maybe you want to see every rejection you get, maybe deep down you only want to see the nice ones. Maybe you want to be poked and prodded if you miss a self-imposed deadline (and tutted at if you’re spotted live-tweeting a Sex and the City rewatch…) or maybe that’s your idea of overbearing hell. Maybe you’d always rather have a long and wonderfully tangential chat over the phone, or maybe you prefer to stick to emails. I’m lucky to have wonderful relationships with my clients, and no two of those relationships look quite the same.

What’s your favourite thing about being an agent?

It’s honestly hard to choose, but definitely up there is that coveted moment when something lands in your inbox that you can immediately tell is incredibly special and absolutely right for you, and that you can’t help but shout about from the rooftops (sometimes before you’ve even signed it…)

What are some of your favourite authors and books?

It’s incredibly tough to narrow it down but a handful of the authors past and present whose work I’ve loved are Patricia Lockwood, Elif Batuman, Torrey Peters, Gillian Flynn, Shirley Jackson, Raven Leilani, Max Porter, Carmen Maria Machado, Virginia Woolf, Sayaka Murata, Kiley Reid, Sally Rooney (sorry), George Saunders, Joan Didion, Amy Liptrot, Elif Batuman, Ottessa Moshfegh, J.D. Salinger, Donna Tartt, Jean Toomer, Tana French, Lorrie Moore, Bret Easton Ellis (more recent outbursts aside…) and Fernanda Melchor. As of this moment, it’s a tie for my favourite book between Susannah Moore’s In The Cut and Laurie Colwin’s Happy All The Time, so about as horrific and as delightful as you can get.

What interests or passions do you have beyond the world of books?

While I obviously do read for pleasure, people are sometimes surprised to hear that I’m not exactly motoring through books at superhuman speed in my spare time. I spend most of my day reading in one way or another and have no shame in diving into films and TV when I get home; I’ve been trying to watch at least 75 new films a year, which has been hugely fun and has filled some long overdue holes in my cultural knowledge, but I’ll always go back to Sex and the City and Broad City when my brain needs a hard reset. Outside the house, I’m a die-hard swimmer (the one time I put my phone down), and have even been getting into birdwatching – with special binoculars and everything – which I refuse to be embarrassed about…

Trends in TV and film often have a relationship with the publishing industry and are constantly changing. Do you have any advice for writers wondering whether or not to follow trends in their own writing?

It’s important to know about trends in books, film and TV, but I’d say that there are two main things you should use that knowledge for: your pitch letter, where you can draw out similarities between your work and popular genres or themes, and being aware of when a specific sub-genre or trend is at its peak and likely to be nearing saturation, meaning that if you’re writing in that space you’ll want to be even more careful about having a clear USP that sets it apart. While I currently say on my page on PFD’s website that I’m looking for things with elements of Succession or The White Lotus, knowing that agents are after that absolutely shouldn’t make someone embark on a Succession copycat book! For one thing, realistically by the time you finish it, that trend is likely to be on the wane, but most importantly, writing simply to try and fit a trend isn’t likely to produce exciting and fresh work that you’re really passionate about. Be aware of how your existing ideas share elements of trends for pitching purposes, and there’s nothing wrong with fleshing out some element slightly more that you think feels especially timely, or cutting back on something that you think is starting to feel a little overdone, but don’t shape or base your work around them.

Any final words of advice for authors at any stage of the writing or submission process?

Try and be patient, and stick to your guns – as the wise Lady Gaga once famously said, “there can be 100 people in a room and 99 of them don't believe in you but all it takes is one”

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 messy first draft might sound like a problem, but it’s actually a beautiful thing. Trying too hard to get things ‘right’ the first time stilts your ability to immerse yourself in your work and gives undue weight to your inner critic’s disapproval. Completing a chaotic first draft, on the other hand, means that you’ve allowed yourself to write freely and without self-judgement, in spontaneous pursuit of the right next words.

Your next step will be to revise your manuscript to improve it and take it closer to the final version you envisioned. 

Self-editing can be tough, forcing you to reckon with everything that’s ‘wrong’ with your manuscript. The more awareness you have of your work’s flaws, the better equipped you’ll be to work through them. The key is to self-edit thoroughly, patiently, and with equal amounts of mercilessness and self-compassion.

But let’s start from the beginning.

What Exactly Is Self-Editing?

Self-editing is the type of editing you do yourself, without the assistance of anyone else. These will be the first changes you make to your novel’s first draft, so the self-editing stage will typically involve radical edits. Expect to erase or rewrite entire chapters or scenes, insert additional scenes where necessary, change the subject matter or tone of particular dialogues, and generally work on exercising greater control over your writing.

Much like working with professional editors, a thorough self-edit will begin with big-picture elements and gradually focus on more minor details. Typically, writers perform at least three rounds of revisions, with some projects taking as many as nine or ten rounds. 

In addition to spurring specific changes, self-editing works as an exercise in reflection. After re-reading your manuscript (ideally after a little time away from it), you’ll encounter the words you actually wrote. This is the moment to bridge the gap between the book you wrote and the book you want to write. (Note that it’s completely fine if the book you ended up writing isn’t the one you set out to write — plans change.)

If you haven’t ever had to edit a manuscript-length project before, the many moving parts involved may end up overwhelming you. Some degree of frustration is probably inevitable, but by self-editing in an organised, strategic, and methodical way, you can prevent panic. 

Below, I’m listing seven important questions you should ask yourself while you edit your own writing — the idea is that these questions can help you stay focused on one thing for each editing iteration while ensuring you do a thorough job. 

1. What Do I Honestly Think Is Wrong With This Manuscript?

To embark on this process with a sense of control, take stock of where you are right now. Begin by reading through your work one more time, and making a note (but stopping yourself from editing on the go) of everything you aren’t happy with. 

Maybe a certain plot point comes too abruptly — note that down. Maybe a character’s development feels too slow and elaborate, and you’d like to include another scene, where change is more decisive. Maybe the opening doesn’t feel like it’s highlighting the right things anymore. Maybe the middle is too slow, or a specific scene needs rewriting.

When you’ve got a big list of everything you’d like to improve, you can use it to decide what to edit next — and writing things down will help quieten down your mind, helping you feel less overwhelmed. 

Ideally, start by looking at your plot’s major arc. If there are truly fundamental plot points you aren’t sure about (e.g. “the protagonist should not have ended up with character A, character B was the right one for them”), start there, because those adjustments will bring about a series of changes throughout the rest of the book. 

2. Which Element Of The Manuscript Will This Editing Round Focus On?

Before you begin each round of edits, identify what your focus will be. Making a plan can help you resist the temptation to multi-task editing several things at once, and trace throughlines to ensure satisfying big-picture arcs for your characters or overall plot. There’s always time to return to a specific scene to improve the minutiae.

A disclaimer here: there isn’t really a right and wrong way to self-edit, so if multi-tasking is the path that feels right, feel free to change up several things at once. Just make sure you return to check that arcs or plot points add up to a bigger structure that helps your story make an impact.

3. Is This Paragraph, Scene, Or Chapter Necessary?

Part of the fun of first drafts is the freedom you have to write without restraint. At this stage, asides, tangential jokes, and elaborate descriptions are all allowed — but that doesn’t mean they get to stay in your manuscript for eternity.

Every part of your manuscript should be contributing something. If it isn’t, you’ll either have to figure out how to make it contribute, or get rid of it. Either way, your manuscript will be more focused or more concise, and stronger.

Here’s an exercise to help you identify redundant chapters: when you’re working on your big-picture structural edit, spend some time listing out every chapter — either in a numbered list or in a spreadsheet. Try to summarise each one in a few words (e.g., “Keiko locates the murder weapon,” “Jon begins to doubt the loyalty of the AI bot”), then read through your summaries and try to determine whether each chapter contributes something of value in the form of character development, theme exploration, or plot progression. 

Next, when you’re editing each chapter with more detail, do the same for the scenes comprising a given chapter. Ask yourself if you’re slipping into accidental script writing, narrating every single action your character takes. Contrast these two examples: 

Unless Cathy’s breakfast is about to be part of a crime scene, there’s really no need to zoom into the minutiae of her meal in that much detail. As the writer, you can fast-forward to the important part. The same applies to the beginning and ending of dialogues: there’s no need for characters to engage in extended small talk. Use your novelist powers to lead the reader where they actually need to be.

Another example, to illustrate my point:

Before you hand your manuscript to a professional editor or send a sample to literary agents, you’ll also have to spend some time with each sentence, dwelling on the necessity of each individual word. If there are turns of phrase you’re sad to lose, by all means cut and paste them into another document, where you can return to them for other projects. Right now, focus on the needs of the manuscript at hand.

4. Does The Ending Conclude The Book In A Satisfactory And Logical Way?

Often, having trouble with the ending is a symptom of plot issues earlier on in your book. If you feel like something doesn’t quite click right with your ending, try to trace it back to the rest of the book, and see where it is that the problem really begins.

What ‘flavour’ does your book end on? Is this consistent with what you were working towards? Have you built up to that feeling throughout? End with a feeling of regret if it makes sense given what you’ve written before, but not if it’s an inexplicable change in direction.

If you’re choosing not to fully resolve every narrative thread and leave part of the story open-ended, try to write a few versions of the ending, each with a different degree of open-endedness. If you still feel like your original ending provided the right degree of closure and openness, that’s great — if not, this exercise can help you zoom in on what isn’t working in each version.

This being the self-editing stage, do your best to sharpen your ending, while remembering that there may be some more changes coming to this significant part of your book once you’ve heard back from beta readers and your editor. 

5. Does The Opening Hook The Reader And Emphasise The Right Themes?

You probably wrote your book’s opening first or early on in the writing process, and it's likely that your project has evolved quite dramatically since then. Re-read your first few chapters and reflect as honestly as you can on the pace of the opening — are you doing what you can to ensure your reader will keep on reading? Is your first sentence grabbing their attention? Many writers find that the real opening of their book is a few chapters into the story, as it sometimes takes a little while to find your feet. 

Though many books open with suspenseful, highly-dramatic first sentences (e.g., “The day my life changed forever, I had forgotten to pack my torch”), that level of drama is optional. Works of literary fiction in particular tend to opt for a low-key first sentence that introduces a problem, conflict, or personality, and works well without showing off. 

Compare these two ways to open the same scene:

The latter example isn’t about to win any Nobels, but it introduces Robin as a character, gives readers a sense of something he doesn’t want to do, and tells them he’s doing it anyway — whereas the former sentence is more generic and unmemorable. 

You’ll also need to ask yourself whether your opening scene still embodies the themes that have led your book to its end. If not, you may have to reconsider an altogether different opening.

6. Do The Characters Feel Like Real People Who Have Both Positive And Negative Traits, As Well As A Motivation And Backstory?

Skim through your manuscript and make a note of every major character’s trajectory through the story. Is it all adding up, and does each character feel like they’ve naturally arrived where they’re supposed to be at the end of the book? 

If you can’t really see them as people, that’s probably a sign they deserve a little bit of fleshing out. Here are a few aspects of characterisation to think about:

• Your characters’ goals
• Your characters’ flaws
• Your characters’ backstory
• How they interact differently with other characters
• Where they’re going to go next, after the book is over
• Whether major characters are dynamic or static

One way to get to know your characters better is to complete a character questionnaire, which provides some playful prompts to help you imagine their inner lives and behaviour.

7. If I Read It Aloud, Does It Still Sound Good?

Asking yourself this question will help you evaluate your work’s tone. Many writers sometimes slip into purple prose when they can’t hear their own writing, but quickly regret their choice of words when those same sentences are read aloud. 

Ideally, you should read your entire book out loud to yourself — but if you don’t have that much time, read out passages containing extensive descriptions of characters or landscapes, as well as dialogue. If you’re planning to work with an illustrator or cover designer, you can put those descriptions in another document so you can include them in your design brief. In the meantime, listen out for words that you’re embarrassed to say out loud (a classic purple prose flag), as well as sentences that sound a little off tonally.

A tone check can help you identify passages where you’ve tried too hard to make the writing sound good, ending up with overly elaborate vocabulary or convoluted syntax, or instances where humour doesn’t carry across successfully. 

Once you’re sure you’ve done the best you possibly can, it’s time to begin sharing your work with other people — be that informal beta readers, a professional editor, or literary agents reading a sample of your work. Whichever it is, it’s important that you know that self-editing is simply phase one of editing, and your manuscript will still undergo many revisions informed by external feedback. Approach the next stage with openness and courage — you’ve come a very long way already!