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Folks, this is the last Friday in April, which means it’s the last Friday in our self-editing month, which means that this is the last of our editing-themed emails. Outside my window, there is a chorus of sad ukelele music, accompanied by one sorrowful kettledrum and a blackbird with a nasty ear infection. The blackbird is consistently one semitone out of tune – but, you know, it has an ear infection, the poor thing. And who doesn’t love a kettledrum?

And, you know what, last week’s feedback Friday asked people to ADD text to a passage from their work in progress. Unusually for me, I thought that pretty much everyone doing the task ended up improving their passage. Sometimes that meant going from good to excellent. Sometimes it meant going from OK to better. But no one’s passage got worse. Not one.

But it’s also nearly always true that when people focus hard on deleting surplus text, that text gets better. Again, when we’ve done one of these exercises, there’s nearly always been a consistent improvement.

And at its heart, maybe 80% of editing comes down to just these three tasks:

AIM

If you don’t know what your elevator pitch is (the one that’s just for you, not for an agent or for anyone else on earth), it’s hard to check that your book is on track.

So yes, I think you need to understand your pitch before you start writing anything. But inevitably the act of writing the full text will change your understanding of that pitch, so you need to check, refine and tweak it before you get too stuck into editing. Remember the boxes, remember those imps.

SUBTRACT

Kill surplus text.

Be utterly perfectionist. Two unnecessary words in a 16-word sentence is a massive issue and those words have to go. Three descriptive sentences will in most cases be at least one too many. Figure out what the best bits of that description is and make it more compact.

Anything approaching a cliché should be treated in the same way as surplus text. It’s like a little bit of dead wood. A place where the reader’s eye is likely to skim forwards waiting for the narrative to engage properly again.

Nearly all this skimming happens on a near-microscopic level. Two or three words here. A sentence there. An underpowered image over yonder.

But those things are like plastics in the ocean or low-density cholesterols. The damn things cumulate. Slowly the poison the whole bloodstream fills / The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.

Don’t let that happen to you – either the verbiage, or the cholesterols or (if you’re a porpoise) the whole sea-plastics thing.

ADD

Then figure out where your work is underweight. At key moments in your book, you need to linger to get your reader to feel the depth of what happens. What does your character think about what’s happened? What do they feel? How does this connect with other things on their mind (a husband, a loss, a quest)? What is the experience like of having this thing happen to this person in this particular setting?

The challenge here is about layering. It’s about adding relatively small amounts of text in a way that adds whole layers of depth to the passage. We had our refresher on layering last week here.

And that’s it. Aim. Subtract. Add. I’m not saying that’s all that’s involved, but it is definitely most of what’s involved.

Grr. Attaboy. Attagirl.

Those ukeleles are starting to annoy me.

Feedback Friday: Edit, Edit, Edit

So, your choice of challenge for this week:

Aim: Give me your (just for you) elevator pitch plus a pretty one (for agents). Keep em short, please.

Add: As for last week, give me a 200-word passage to which you have added 50 words or so. The aim is for that extra material to add richness and depth to the action which you already have on the page.

Subtract: Give me two versions of the same passage, please. The first one needs to be 300+ words. The second one needs to be 250 words or fewer. And they both need to say the same thing. I’m looking for editing that produces no meaningful loss of content.

As always, give me title, genre, and a word or two of explanation if needed. This exercise is always open to all, but I’ll only give feedback to you lovely Premium Members. If you happen to think ‘Odzooks and Jiminy Cricket, given that the whole membership paradise is available for just £12.50 a month (approx. US$15.50), I really would have to be duller than a country-turnip not to avail myself of all this writerly goodness,’ you can just scuttle over here and do what needs to be done.

That’s it from me. Post yours here. I’m off to re-home a blackbird and murder some ukelele-ists.

Til soon.

Harry

This week – on Tuesday if you really have to know – I did a live event for Premium Members, in which I did some live editing of people’s work. Massive kudos to the people who put themselves up for such things; hat tip to each and every one of you.

There were some lovely pieces of work, include a mental-but-joyous piece on time travel and British sarcasm and anger management and English as spoken by Czechs. It also used ‘you’ as the narrative voice, which is a very rare choice but, honestly, I think it worked. (And I’m not usually a fan of fancy footwork for its own sake.)

Anyway. One theme which came out of the event is, I think, worth sharing more widely.

It’s this:

We’re often told, as writers, that novels should be pacy. The idea is that if a novel is ‘pacy’ readers will keep turning the pages. Indeed, that proposition is so close to universally accepted that ‘pacy page-turner’ feels almost like tautology.

I don’t agree. Yes, there are pacy page-turners. James Patterson is the most prominent practitioner of this approach. Pages seldom go by without a gunshot, a kiss, an escape, an explosion.

But other approaches are possible. Harlan Coben (a talented guy, who’s much funnier in real life than he chooses to be on the page) writes high-twist / high-event fiction, but he pauses much more. There’s more time for character and setting to bloom. Most commercial authors follow a template more like Coben’s than Patterson’s.

In the end, people turn the pages of a book, because they’re engaged in the story. Lots of explosions generates one kind of engagement, but really caring about characters generates another. The best books combine decent story with rich characters: that is, they are not-especially-pacy page-turners.

Okie-doke. That’s a long preamble, but now take a look at this. (From the Countess Elizabeth von Billigerkaese. She had a uniformed flunky cross the North Sea in a rowing boat to bring us the text; she thinks email is for poor people.)

Pam realised the landlady had mistaken her pause as a compliment. ‘I used to stay here with my husband. The last time was just before he became.., before he died. I think we were in this very room. It’s certainly changed a lot. I mean the rooms didn’t have an en-suite then,’ she added.

‘I’m so glad you liked it here enough to come back. Your last stay would have been when my aunt and her husband ran it. I took it over three years ago. I probably even still have the visitor’s books from when you stayed. Auntie kept everything.’

‘She was so kind and a great cook. The breakfasts were what kept us coming back.’

The landlady nodded. ‘She loved the business, not that she remembers much about it all now.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry. Dementia?’

Now this is good (and the passage gets better. Turns out the landlady believes in the spirit world and ‘communicates’ regularly with the dead. She assumes that’s why Pam is here: to reach her husband.) The piece is simple, but deft. Even from this tiny fragment, we feel Pam keen to please, to say the right thing. The landlady is played just right too. Not purple veils and rings on every finger. Just – a woman who really believes she can talk to the dead.

Good stuff.

But? For my money (and it’s always hard to judge these things out of context) we want a tiny bit more here. So Pam says to the landlady, ‘she was so kind and a great cook…’ That’s clearly Pam’s version of the socially necessary politeness. Oh, it was your aunt who used to run this place? You probably quite like her. I should say something positive.

But that doesn’t tell us what Pam really thought, so that’s something we might want to add. And what about Pam’s dead husband? He’s in Pam’s thoughts, because she’s here, in a place where they used to stay, remembering their last visit. And the room has changed its décor. And were the breakfasts all that good anyway?

Now, we can’t just fill in every detail that occurs to us – we don’t want to drown the text – but we can do something.

I wrote something impromptu on Tuesday, which I can’t now recover, but it went something like this:

‘I’m so glad you liked it here enough to come back. Your last stay would have been when my aunt and her husband ran it. I took it over three years ago. I probably even still have the visitor’s books from when you stayed. Auntie kept everything.’

‘She was so kind and a great cook. The breakfasts were what kept us coming back.’

Pam wasn’t sure that she had been a great cook. The breakfasts were abundant and full of meat, and her husband had loved them. But the only time Pam had cleared her plate, she ended up feeling rather like the new bolsters on the bed: overstuffed, yellow, inert. A slight sheen.

The landlady nodded. ‘She loved the business, not that she remembers much about it all now.’

That’s the addition of 50 words. That’s hardly going to capsize things, but here we have:

1.      Pam’s real thoughts as opposed to her purely social ones.

2.      Something connecting this dialogue back to her husband (whom she is surely thinking about.)

3.      Something that connects to the physical setting.

4.      And something that connects to the theme here. Those references to meat and inert bolsters put a little scent of death into this scene, without our needing to name it.

Now, of course, I don’t know the book and maybe this added piece of text is quite wrong for Pam, or her husband, or for the theme, or whatever. But assume that Countess Elizabeth sits down in her Schloss and adds 50 words of text to her own specifications that picks up the four elements above – inner Pam, husband, setting, theme.

Her book has just got a little less pacy, and a little bit more layered. Less shortcrust, more puff pastry.

Has it got better or worse? I’m pretty diddle-dum-certain that her book’s just got better – and not least because this is a significant passage. It’s the one where the book’s Big Idea is about to be introduced.

Layering matters, and you can do a lot with a little.

That’s it from me.

The Countess Elizabeth is annoyed with me. She handwrites her book on vellum made from calves reared on the Billigerkaese estate. Each time she makes a correction, it’s a lot of rewriting – and a lot of calves.

Feedback Friday

This is self-editing month and the task this week picks up from the event on Tuesday – and this email.

Please pick a passage where you sense a bit more layering is needed, and add those layers in, just as I did above. Aim to add about 50 words to a 200-word passage, but you can add 75 if you really must. You get points for lovely writing, of course, but in particular, we want to see you adding a lot of layers in as few words as possible. My 50 words above added four new layers to the text. See if you can do the same, or better.

What I want is:

Title

Genre

A line or so of explanation, if needed.

A 200-word passage with 50-75 words added in bold. The text you add should add layers of depth and richness to the passage you started with.

Got that? You’ve got that.

That’s it from me. Post yours here. I’m off to rescue some Bavarian calves … 

Til soon.

Harry

A slightly niche topic this week, but an important one.

On the whole, new writers think, “I have to make sales. It doesn’t matter who I’m selling to. I just need to sell as much as I can, and the more I sell, the more booksellers will love me, and the more publishers will love me, and the better my chances of being asked to write another book.”

That sounds terribly logical and, in bricksandmortarland, it is logical. Sales are sales. A supermarket doesn’t know or care whether Customer X is or is not the ‘right’ customer for the book they’ve just bought. If it turns out that your gran went shopping without her glasses and accidentally bought your sweet historical romance instead of the blood and guts Viking-monster-horror stuff she normally buys – well, that’s her tough luck. She discards the book unread. The superstore has its money. No one (except you) cares much about your gran.

But.

Amazon.

Amazon doesn’t work like that or think like that, and you need to be careful.

So let’s just say that you have a sweet historical romance to sell. Very imaginatively, you have called your novel My Sweet Historical Romance. The cover depicts a maiden dressed in white lace looking shyly up at the duke who will (by chapter 33) be thoroughly smitten with her.

Let’s also say that you are (I know you are) particularly kind to your gran and her circle of Viking-monster-horror-loving friends.

You ask your gran if she wouldn’t mind buying your new book. She’s happy to oblige. Her friends are also happy to oblige. You get a couple of dozen sales early on, when your book is newly launched.

Not bad, huh? I mean, two dozen is only two dozen, but Rome wasn’t built in a day, a journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step, and a ragbag of other assorted cliches to boot.

Except Amazon has a new product to offer and it has to figure out who might want it.

At first (judging from the cover, the title, your book blurb and all that), Amazon guessed that your book would mostly appeal to people who liked sweet historical romance and shyly smiling maidens and all that. But then a wave of Viking-monster types charged in and bought the book. So Amazon tries offering it to other people with those reading preferences.

At that point, one of two things happens.

Either, loads of people are shown the book and don’t buy it, so Amazon thinks the book must be rubbish and stops marketing it.

Or, people do buy the book, find it different to what they were expecting and to what they usually read, and stop reading the book partway through – and perhaps leave lacklustre reviews to boot.

These outcomes are both catastrophic.

The Amazon-stops-marketing-your-book option is bad, because you’ve just lost the services of the biggest and most sophisticated book retailer on the planet.

The lacklustre-response option is equally bad, however, because Amazon knows (via its huge Kindle-reading base) how much of an ebook gets read. If your book doesn’t get finished, Amazon will prefer to market what it sees as better products. Further, those lacklustre reviews are going to be a stone around your neck for years to come.

Either way, getting the wrong readers into your fiction early on will cause lasting (and very hard-to-reverse) damage to your sales.

If all this sounds a tad theoretical, then stay tuned.

Plenty of (mostly indie) authors aim to make money by using ads to direct traffic from Facebook to Amazon. What could possibly go wrong, right? For relatively small amounts of money, you can fish in the largest pool of users in the world and send them to your very own page in the world’s largest bookstore.

But unless you are careful to get Facebook sending the right readers your way, you’re going to end up sending the wrong ones. And, OK, you probably won’t find that you are sending Viking-monster-horror readers to your My Sweet Historical Romance bookpage, but you might find that you are sending (say) lovers of billionaire romance to your book page. Or lovers of raunchy romance. Or other readers in nearby but definitely different niches.

Any such misalignment of traffic and product will be just as injurious as the Viking-monster-horror example I started with.

You’ll get weak conversions, poor reviews and people failing to finish your book.

This email was sparked by a message from Dave Chesson at Kindlepreneur, who was running a profitable Amazon ad. (Or Faceboook ad; I forget which.) At one level, the arithmetic was simple. Chesson was spending X. The ads were generating X-plus-something. Everyone a winner, right?

Except that the ad was badly targeted. He noticed he was getting poor reviews – and reviews from people who clearly were not his target reader.

It’s not that easy creating an instantly profitable ad, but Chesson had done it. Yet he saw that the ad was doing him long-term injury, so he killed the ad. Protecting the quality of the book’s traffic was more important than making a few dollars of profit in those early days and weeks.

He was absolutely right to take that step. I’d have done the exact same thing.

Now, to be fair, there’s a big qualification here – namely, that once you have a decent sales record with Amazon, the beast will essentially know your readership and a few left-field readers won’t especially impair its ability or willingness to market your book. After all, readers are eclectic, and Amazon knows perfectly well that sometimes Viking-horror readers do also like a shyly smiling maiden or two. (And not just to sacrifice.)

But you have to approach the Amazon sales process in order, always. Train the beast carefully. Then feed it.

You’ll know when you have it nicely trained: your “customers who read this book also read” list will look like a nice collection of comparable authors. The sponsored ads (“Based on your recent views”) will also look, for the most part, like a logical collection.

This advice comes in large flaming letters for indie authors. For trad authors, who just don’t have much control over what their publishers choose to do, it makes less difference. But even there, just remember that bad sales are worse than no sales, especially early on.

Here endeth the lesson.

Feedback Friday

I’m doing a live feedback event next week, so your task this week is really simple. Premium Members can register for it here. 

I want, please, 250 words (max) that you really like. Also, title and genre.

I’m going to give live feedback on this stuff next week, so if you don’t want your work torn to shreds in front of a baying mob, please mark it: NO LIVE FEEDBACK.

(Truth is, I only pick work I already quite like and I’m never that mean. But if you don’t want the live experience, then please just tell me so.)

That’s it from me. Post yours here. I’m off to slay a sea-monster and plunder a couple of Lincolnshire villages.

Til soon.

Harry

Because I’m charging around in Wales with the kids – I’m going to keep it short this week.

One thought and one thought only:

There’s a heck of a lot of luck in writing.

The way we talk – the way I talk – often suggests that if you’re just good enough at your art and craft, you can force your way to success. And that’s just not true.

For sure:

A strong elevator pitch is the single most muscular thing you can do to maximise your chances. And I don’t mean that you write your book, then come up with the best single sentence with which to pitch it. I mean roughly the opposite of that. I mean you come up with a brilliant idea, then you write the book of the idea, then your pitch can be any old phrase that gestures at your brilliant idea.

But yes, the pitch matters.

Then too, you have to be able to write. You can’t achieve any kind of success without basic competence … but there are plenty of commercially successful writers who don’t have huge literary talents. Their sentences work, but never sing. That’s OK. That can definitely be enough.

And then on top of that, if you can actually write well, it really boosts your chances, not least because agents and editors do recognise good writing when they see it and they want to be close to it. They want to help it along.

But …

It’s still a game of luck. If three big supermarket chains take your book – based off little more than a title and a book cover – and if they sell that book at a nice little discount – then your book will be a bestseller. It’s not about whether the book deserves it or not. Just that number of feet walking past a well-displayed and sweetly discounted title WILL produce sales.

You can’t produce that outcome by force of will. A publisher can’t either. They all play the same game and all want the same outcome. They’re all professional. They all make nice book covers. They can all put together decent catalogues. They all know how to pitch.

Self-publishing is less chancy to be honest, but even big-selling authors don’t really know whether Series X is going to succeed as well as their big hit Series Y. They can put the same craft and market intelligence behind both, but in the end, they don’t know until they get the book out there.

So don’t judge yourself by sales. Aim for sales, yes – I always do. But it will be the Lady Luck herself, in her green-hemmed gown, who will determine whether you win or lose or just muddle through to some kind of draw.

Light a candle, eat a shamrock – and write another book.

Feedback Friday

Last week, another elevator pitch discussion kicked off (here; you need to be a logged into Townhouse to view that link.) The discussion is all good and the topic really, really matters. Take an owl ‘n’ imp refresher here.

Then just give me your pitch.

Let’s shake this up and you can give me:

Ingredients: 2-4 ingredients only. So your pitch looks like “teen romance + vampires”. Very short, and not even a sentence.

Short, messy: A short pitch (<15 words) that is for you only. It’s not going to go on a book or a movir poster, so keep it scruffy please.

Short, elegant: this is the line you want on the movie poster of your book. Or the back-of-book headline.

Longer version: Up to 50 words.

You don’t have to do ALL those pitches. Just offer what appeals. If you’ve done this before, then repeat the exercise but with a different book.

***

That’s it from me. Post yours here. Very normal service resumes next week.

Til soon.

Harry