University creative writing courses absolutely have their place. Plenty of people get a huge amount out of them. If that’s you, I’m genuinely pleased. Writing should be joyful, and if a university course lit that fire for you, brilliant.
But they’re not for everyone — and they’re not for me.
Here’s why I’ve always struggled with the university model (with all due respect to the exceptions out there):
They often overlook genre fiction, which is where the vast majority of readers (and many writers) live
They’re often run by people with slender commercial track records
They don’t tend to focus on the business side of writing — things like agents, submission, and marketing
Self-publishing is often ignored entirely
It’s rare to get feedback on an entire manuscript, start to finish
They don’t properly grapple with plot (because that’s not something you can do by workshopping a couple of chapters)
The focus leans more toward earning a degree than getting a damn book published
Now, none of that makes university courses bad — it just means they have different goals. I care far more about getting a book published than I do about getting a degree. Your preferences may vary and it’s perfectly OK if they do.
But the reason I raise this is the workshopping phenomenon. Here’s how it works:
A university gathers together a bunch of people who care a lot about words and writing. They set a challenge: you’re going to write the kind of book that might get published by a cool literary imprint somewhere. Then, they ask Anna to read out 1– 2,000 words of her draft novel, so that Brian and Ciara and Dan and Ezzie and the rest of them can offer their thoughts. This whole process is overseen by an Author of a couple of works, often not even full novels, (whom two of the students secretly fancy) and it’s important to all of the students that they have the approbation of the Author of the two SLNs and so Brian and Ciara and all the rest of them get stuck in and try to show off how cool and literary they are as they give Anna her feedback.
And look: there are worse things in the world. In fact, what I’ve just described is among life’s better things and loads of people who go through one of these courses will enjoy one of the most rewarding years of their life. So good. If that’s your thing, then go for it. (Though, uh, read the PSes below before you sign up for anything.)
My reason for telling you all this? Because of the phenomenon that is the Universal Workshop Voice. It’s a thing. I’ve given classes in the past where someone reads me a snatch of their work and I can identify – immediately and accurately – that this has been through the university-style workshopping process.
A paragraph might start out like this:
A fly, a fat one, landed on his forearm. Ulf stared at it for a moment, then swatted it with his free hand, killing it. Leaving a fat purple stain, and nothing else.
I don’t know if that paragraph has any merit. I just made it up now for the purpose of this email. Whether it would ever find a place in one of my books, I don’t know. Probably not. But if you ran that paragraph past Anna and Brian and the gang, it would turn into something like this:
A fly, fat and freighted with the alien armaments of its kind, landed on his forearm. The blow, when it arrived, shocked even Ulf with its ferocity, a blow born of some dark ancestral killing field, a rapid-fire conversation between neurons that left Ulf himself a mere bystander. Where once there had been insect there was now only pulp, grapey and softly dripping.
And I don’t even hate that. I mean: I can’t quite imagine wanting to read that book, but maybe someone would.
Really, my concern here is that Anna’s piece, Brian’s, Ciara’s, Dan’s and Ezzie’s are all sounding pretty damn similar – and they’re sounding similar because the workshopping process exerts the same basic gravity on them all.
And from my personal editing process, that’s not what I want at all.
I want to sound like me. I uncover what my tastes are by just going at my manuscript, again and again, sentence by sentence, page by page. I don’t know if that produces the best book. It probably doesn't. I mean: if Hilary Mantel or Sally Rooney or Gillian Flynn were to edit one of my first draft manuscripts, presumably it would start to take on their particular genius-level shine.
But sod em. I don’t care. This is my book not theirs, and I don’t want their tastes interfering – and I definitely don’t want the Author of two barely-novels to exert any weight at all. And Ezzie? Nice girl and all that, but she can shove off. I don’t want her tastes (or Anna-Brian-Ciara-Dan’s) anywhere near my word-choices.
I suppose I could justify my attitude in commercial terms – agents and editors prioritise authors with a distinctive voice. Readers probably do too, if only in the sense that those books wind up more memorable.
But that’s kind of fake. My motive isn’t really commercial; it’s just my personal version of bolshiness. I don’t want to write like Ezzie. I want to write like me.
And the way I do it? Editing and editing and editing and editing. And yes, using my knowledge of craft to shape my decisions. But mostly working with my own taste. What sounds like me? What do I think is funny? What atmosphere feels right for this scene? Is this sentence better as 10 words or 8? Or lose it completely?
And flies freighted with alien armaments? Yes gods. Spare me. I’m pleased the damn thing got splattered.
Til soon,
Harry
FEEDBACK FRIDAY
This week, it’s Assignment Fourfrom Debi Alper's Introduction to Self-Editing course. (It's FREE to Premium Members! And if you’re not a Premium Member, you know what to do: join us here,or buy the course as a one-off for £99 here.)
So, Debi wants you to:
Find a short paragraph from your novel and experiment with different POV’s. If you’re working with multiple characters, ensure each voice is clearly different. Post in the forum (remember to log in first) and share which POV you’ve decided on and why. See if others agree with you.
Once you’ve submitted your manuscript – for a critique, or even to an editor – you will receive a number of responses. Amongst the most common is: “But I just didn’t like the main character.” This can be very dispiriting to hear, particularly if you’ve put enormous amounts of effort into your hero. But if somebody feels it, there’s a good chance that they’re right.
The tricky thing, of course, is understanding what it is that makes a character likeable. A corollary to this is “relatable”. There is a maxim that a reader must be able to “relate” to a main character; that is, put him or herself into that character’s shoes. I don’t particularly subscribe to this theory – I no more relate to Achilles in the Iliad than I do to Dorothea in Middlemarch – but I still want to read about them. However, this is something that concerns editors and readers alike, and in order to work within the modern book market, it's absolutely something that must be considered.
It is also the case that you want your protagonist to be human: that is, to err, to be impulsive, jealous sometimes, angry when things don’t go well. Think of Bridget Jones and her pratfalls. A character who is entirely good is simply flat, like a pious child in a Victorian children’s book.
There are many examples of protagonists whose very weaknesses are what make us empathise with them: this is often the case in tragedy. Othello’s jealousy is something we can understand, and in him we see it extending far beyond the usual bounds. Yet we also see someone whose jealousy we don’t understand: that is, the villain, Iago.
What’s the difference? It’s the age-old distinction between protagonist and antagonist. They will have similar qualities: bravery, quick-wittedness perhaps, intelligence certainly. But it’s how they use those qualities which compels us either to like or to despise them. If the intelligence is used for selfish or cowardly ends, as with Iago, then we hate him; if the intelligence is blinded by love, as with Othello, then we empathise and, indeed, sympathise.
Here are some pointers, then, to consider, when you’re crafting your likeable protagonist.
1. Situation
Your character can be in a position of power, or in a more relative position of weakness. It is often suggested that protagonists in positions of power are not “relatable”. Again, I don’t like this line of thought, as fiction is about exploring other worlds, including those of people who hold power. We need to be able to explore what the rich think, as well as the poor; all minds and all milieus are the realm of fiction.
However, it’s still important to render your protagonist likeable within that role. A king can be kindly, for example, and still be a king – and through him, we can still explore what it means to be a king.
Resist the temptation to put your character in a bad situation simply in order to engender sympathy. Writers can go too far in this direction, by loading misfortunes onto the protagonist. Keep it straightforward and remember that it’s about emotional connection: we want the protagonist to be in a better place by the end, which means psychologically, not necessarily in physical terms.
2. Actions
In order to be likeable, the protagonist should...
2. Actions
In order to be likeable, the protagonist should engage our sympathy with a selfless act.
I always think about Aladdin in the Disney film of that name. At the start, he steals from a stallholder. As an adult, you can’t help but think that stealing is wrong, and that he’s therefore a bad egg. But then, almost immediately, he sees two hungry children, and gives them the apple, and bingo – we like him. He goes hungry, and the fault to the stallholder diminishes.
You can also have a rude protagonist, but if they help someone or give something up for a selfless reason, immediately it makes the reader connect. Children's books have been exploring this recently: Frances Hardinge does a good line in spiky female heroines who speak their mind.
3. Vitality
Too often, in manuscripts, I see characters who don’t make decisions, who are flat and lifeless on the page. Make sure that your main character is taking the reins: thinking things through, looking ahead and moving towards that final point. This, too, will make your reader engage, and will lead them onwards to the end.
You must also link the character's development to the main plot. When the events of the plot are reached, the protagonist should be tested, and in being tested, gain our sympathy. This can be moral as well as physical: the king can give away his treasure; the soldier can fight a dragon; the nurse can save the patient.
Always remember: you must like your main character as well. Try to get to know them in as well-rounded a way as possible; and if you love your protagonist, your readers will, too.
Over the last couple of weeks, in celebration of our new Introduction to Self-Editing video course, I’ve spoken about how I (repeatedly and compulsively) correct my manuscript before I ever get to the holy words, THE END.
Once I do hit those words, I’ll do multiple edits thereafter – some of them with a single, targeted purpose. Other times driven by a much more general hunt for dissatisfaction. On those hunts, I’m always looking for something I don’t love. That’s it. Anything that offends me, or niggles at me. Sand in the shoe: that kind of annoyance, both minor and impossible to ignore.
Every writer knows that, yes, yes, you have to delete surplus words. Stephen King (a former journalist) once tossed out the idea that the final draft needs to be first draft minus 10%.
And, OK, that’s not a horrible rule, so SK’s first drafts were probably leaner than most, because he was a professional writer before he ever became a novelist. But SK clearly doesn’t follow his own rule these days, because his work has become quite baggy. And in any case, it makes no sense to set a target for deletions. You have to let your manuscript tell you how long it wants to be. I’d guess that a majority of you need to cut more than just 10%. Cuts of 20-30% are often, often essential. We once made a bestseller by doing a hands-on edit of a manuscript that took it from 180,000+ words to about 90,000.
There are two reasons why this whole economy drive matters.
The first is simply that the force of a novel comes down to this equation:
Force = Emotional powerdivided by the number of words.
If the first term remains constant, then just cutting the second one will always, always improve things.
That sounds dully mechanical, but I’m repeatedly struck by how relentless cutting delivers a kind of magic. Sticky mid-book patches in a novel can throw a somewhat glum, depressed feel over the whole damn thing. Brutal, hard cutting can just relieve that at (almost) a stroke. Two to three days spent on deletions make more of a reliable impact than any other editing intervention I can think of. The novel lifts in the water. Feels harder. Sails faster. The whole craft has more purpose.
Cutting does that every time. Wow.
But the other big reason I love cutting is that it exposes the gaps. If your writing is flabby and unconcentrated, you can easily fail to notice that there may be huge things you aren’t saying. You have this background sense of “this writing is possibly a little baggy,” so maybe you make some cuts to address that issue, but you don’t go far enough, so the issue nags anyway.
But –
Because you’ve used one paragraph instead of one sentence to get your characters out of the gym and into the taxi, and because you’ve used two sentences to describe clothing, and one to describe a coffee spillage, you think (correctly) that it’s high time you got your character to meet her partner for the Big Argument. So you rush her off to her Big Argument, but never realise all the stuff you haven’t done. Have you properly described the setting where the Big Argument takes place? Did you depict her emotions in the taxi? Did you add a hint of that past infideility which is colouring her perspective?
The best way to find gaps in your manuscript is to cut so hard that there’s no excess verbiage to cover them. Once you strip back the word count, you start to feel where the novel feels empty – lacking. So you add those things back (but rich text, not duplicative, pointless text) and your novel stays lean – but takes on whole layers of new meaning.
This is a beautiful discipline, because the stuff you cut is always tedious – unnecessarily long ways of saying things that are often quite boring in themselves. Needless dialogue. Statements about settings that really add nothing in terms of atmosphere or feel.
And then – you see the gaps. Kayleigh is meant to be worried about her upcoming meeting with Jon, but she’s hardly given him a thought – all that clothes description and coffee spillage got in the way. And how could she be going through all this and not be thinking about what happened to her mother under the exact same circumstances 25 years earlier? And what was it like to enter a completely empty house, its front door swinging open and water everywhere?
The gaps you find are always more interesting than the text you removed, so the whole passage (and the whole book) just gets more layered and dense and powerful.
If you want more on this, I talk about it in my How To Write a Novel course and, in even more depth, in our Take Your Novel From Good To Great course. Both those courses are free to Premium Members, and if you haven’t yet caught up with the relevant bits, then I’d strongly recommend that you do. If you’re not yet a PM, you can get a taster lesson for free here. Or, why not become a PM today? It’s like wearing a rainbow in your hair, but not as damp.
That’s it from me. Last Sunday, my girls had a football tournament. And look, I love my kids, and it’s great that girls are into football now, and there’s everything to be said for community endeavour, and there was a pizza van there and almost-adequate coffee.
But – oh sweet Lord – we started before 8.00 am. And didn’t finish until after 5.00. And I had to watch every damn game. Every damn one, both girls. And now whenever I close my eyes, I see yards and yards of blue nylon, and sunshine, and kids air-kicking balls as they rolled gently along an empty goalmouth.
I earned beer that night, and plenty of it.
Til soon.
Harry
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FEEDBACK FRIDAY
This week, it’s Assignment Three from Debi Alper's Introduction to Self-Editing course. (It's FREE to Premium Members! And if you’re not a Premium Member, you know what to do: join us here,or buy the course as a one-off for £99 here.)
So, Debi wants you to:
Find a paragraph from your novel that has a strong voice, check for the points mentioned in the lesson, and post it in the forum.
Last week, I talked about my micro-editing habit. This week, we expand a bit. The kind of editing I’m going to talk about here is something I also do in the course of writing the first draft, but it operates at a less micro-level.
I told you that I find it hard to make forward progress if I know that parts of the manuscript behind me are messy – and I write detective novels, whose construction is intricate. I don’t plot out my books in huge advance detail. (I might do, if I thought I could do it, but I can’t, so I don’t.)
(Oh yes, and this email is all about editing, because Assignment Two of Debi Alper's Introduction to Self-Editing course is live and online right now.)
The kind of things that might send me scurrying backwards are things like:
Character change
In one of my books, something wasn’t working – and I realised that by making a key character male, and in very male surroundings, I had lost something that I wanted. So I jumped back, and made that person a woman: a commanding, powerful, unsettling presence. That shift unlocked something for me; it opened narratives that wouldn’t have existed with a man in that same role.
That’s an example of why I think that in-draft edits can be almost essential at times. Why charge on with writing your draft if you know that you made a misstep early on? Correct that misstep and then see what you have? Yes, you lose time in making the correction, but you’re going to have to make it anyway – and by making it early, you avoid compounding your error.
Plot complications
The architecture of a complex mystery novel is at the outer end of fictional complexity. For me, a good detective novel should make perfect sense as you read it – and does, in fact, make a kind of mathematically complete sense if properly analysed – but readers should also be a bit challenged by it. Ask someone to summarise who-did-what-to-whom-and-why in, say, a Raymond Chandler novel and most readers would turn a little white.
That’s a sweet, enjoyable challenge for the reader, but for me as author, it’s kind of head-wrenching. “Oh hold on, I need a way for X to have escaped from secure confinement, but he also needs to have chosen to go back in, but he needs to have done so in a way that Y couldn’t have known about, so ….”
Those thoughts are crucial to good fiction-making and, for me, they’re ones I always deal with as they arise. Again, getting these things right are (for me) key to forward motion. If I just try to plough on knowing that there are tweaks to make behind me, it just complicates my whole onward plotting process. Solving the niggles when I see them basically removes them from my mental to-do list and makes it easier to focus on what lies ahead.
Settings
Settings are like a character in my books. If a key setting is awry, that also feels like a block to forward progress, so I’ll go and scratch away at the issue until it feels sorted.
Boring bits
And look, no first draft is ever perfect. My first drafts are pretty decent … but that’s only because they’ve been heavily revised before I even hit the final full stop. But, as I work, I’m also generally on the lookout for any material that just seems heavy, long-winded, dull, repetitive, undramatic – anything along those lines.
The reason is partly my messy-room aversion. But it’s also because a boring bit definitely tells you that there’s a problem which needs addressing – but it also often indicates a fundamental plot problem that needs sorting out.
So, let’s take the sort of example that I often run up against. We might have a situation like this:
There’s a murder and an investigation
Things go well for a bit, then the regular police investigation starts running into problems and looks like it’s going nowhere. (This kind of issue is basically compulsory in my kind of fiction. The only alternative is that the police are busily chasing up the wrong set of leads.)
So there often needs to be an “oh, no, this isn’t working” bit … which can often look a bit dull, because it is frustrating to those involved.
Now that’s all fine, except that what if the boring bit is too long? Quite often, the writer – me, for example – will create something dramatic in order to break the tedium. A man with a gun. An assault. A terrible revelation. And it’s easy to think, “Oh great, off we trot again. There was a dull bit, but it was only a few pages long, and now we’re on the road again.”
And OK, that approach may be just what your book needs … but maybe 50% of the time what it really needed was you to go back and delete the boring bit. The added drama now just locks in that boring bit and sets you off on the wrong path.
In the end, any bad bit in your book is telling you that there’s an issue and you may need to delete the last 5,000 words, say, to get back to the last bit where you felt truly settled. Plot is a sequence of stones laid one upon the other. If you sense a wobble, go back to the wobble. Sort it out. Then start building again.
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FEEDBACK FRIDAY
This week, it’s Assignment Two from Debi’sIntroduction to Self-Editingcourse. (Free to Premium Members. And if you’re not a Premium Member, then don’t be a Hufflepuff – slither in to membership here or buy the course as a one-off for £99 here.)
So, Debi wants you to:
Find a paragraph from your novel that focuses on one of your characters and post it in the forum.
Check for the points mentioned in this lesson, and don’t forget to offer feedback to others.
You’ve completed a draft of a novel? Congratulations! That’s a huge achievement and one you should celebrate. But now the hard work starts because the first draft of anything is crap.
We all work in different ways but fiddling with every word you write in a first draft can kill your creativity. If you invest too much time in perfecting your prose early on, you may find it harder to murder those carefully crafted darlings when you come to edit and realise that whole scene serves no purpose.
But a first draft is also perfect simply because it exists, and now you have something to work on. Exciting, right?
1. Start with the big picture and ask yourself some searching questions
What is this book?
Where will it sit in bookshops? Is it crime, fantasy, romance? Literary or commercial?
Who are your target readers? What are you offering them that is different from every other novel in that genre?
Now zoom into the specifics of your book...
Title
Elevator pitch and blurb
Synopsis.
These things help you to define the identity of your novel – and everything in the draft should expand from that central identity. A synopsis is particularly useful for establishing the spine of your story, the pivots and the turning points – as well as highlighting any sub-plots and diversions you may decide to get rid of.
2. Look at the structure
Where does your story start?
If the first line of your synopsis refers to something that happens three or four chapters into your draft, that’s probably a sign you have started your story too early and have written your way in. Don’t panic! Nothing is ever wasted in creative writing. Those chapters were there because you, the author, needed them – but the reader doesn’t, so they have to go.
It’s also possible to start your story too late, e.g., when you’re desperate to grab the reader’s attention on the first page - so the story starts with a bang but then the next chapter moves to backstory. The first chapter promises something which then isn’t fulfilled. In this case, it might be better to start the story earlier in time.
Where does it end?
Somewhere close to the end, there should be a peak to your narrative arc: the point where everything is at its most endangered, when everything could be won or lost, and the stakes are at their highest.
After that, the resolution has to be credible as a believable result of everything we’ve seen so far. It also needs to satisfy your target readers. If you’re writing crime, fans of the genre will expect the bad guys to be held to account at the end. In romance, fans want the happy couple to be together on the last page, having overcome all the obstacles you gave them to handle. But resist the temptation to tie up every thread too neatly. Allow readers to imagine that your characters carry on living after the story ends.
How do you get from the beginning to the end?
Are you writing in a linear, chronological timeline? This works well because things happen to the characters at the same time as the reader experiences them, giving us the best chance to relate to your main characters.
If you’re not showing the action chronologically (e.g., using parallel timelines, or a circular structure) make sure the reader always knows where they are in the timeline and how one scene fits in with the ones we’ve seen before.
Between the beginning and end of your novel, your plot should be a series of peaks and troughs. After any intense action, the characters – and the readers – need a chance to draw breath before they have to deal with a new obstacle. Think in terms of cause and effect, action and consequence, fortunately/unfortunately.
3. Identify the narrative drive
Every scene has to push your story forward in some way or another. Look at each scene, or unit of action, and identify the narrative triangle by writing the following in three sentences:
Where you start
What happens
Where you end up.
If both the plot and the characters are in the same place at the end of the scene as they were at the beginning, that’s a sign the pace has stalled and that scene is not earning its keep.
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4. Now think about your characters
They are the reader’s representatives in this fictional world. You will need at least one main character who carries us through from beginning to end, but not so many that the reader doesn’t know who to focus on or root for.
Plot and character should be inextricably interwoven. At the beginning of each new scene, ask yourself:
What does the character want here?
What do they do to get it?
What gets in the way?
What are the consequences and the next link in the chain?
5. Make sure you understand how voice, POV and psychic distance work
Watch out for any head-hopping and make sure we experience the action through the characters’ perceptions, using not just their senses but also sharing their internal reactions.
6. The final polish
Only start the fine detail of checking that each and every word is carefully chosen, and your prose has a pleasing rhythm, once everything else is in place.
Month two equals Point of View. An important moment in all writers’ lives: with our fingers pausing above the keyboard, our characters’ voices in our mind’s ear, we have to choose how to represent them on the page. Will the character be an ‘I’, a ‘he’ or a ‘she’? Maybe they’ll even be a ‘you’.
More decisions: who is the narrator? You - the author, or a character? And how far from the story do they stand as they relate your tale? Are they in the present moment, or in the future describing the past, or even in the past or present describing the future?
It’s true, Point of View is a technical decision, and a defining one. As my tutor, Andrew Miller, says, it can feel a bit ‘under the bonnet’. I liken it to the moment a builder digs foundations, setting the exact footprint and structure of the house. It can be altered if later you decide to change things… but it’ll cost you. Best to be secure in your choice of how many rooms and floor-levels before the concrete footings get poured.
I’ve been paying close attention to the tutorials and reading material, figuring out how my two main characters are turning up on the page and trying out different options. Instead of first person, how do they sound in third person close? The effort is paying dividends. I’ve decided to stick with my first instinct – a character narrator in first person peripheral, telling the story of the other character in third person close. Now that I have learned the techniques, listened to the lectures on pros vs cons, I’m able to append my “Err, because I want to” gut feeling with considered justification. And that, my friends, has definitely helped my confidence.
Confidence is important in this strange and sublime world of conjuring beauty through words on a page. In The Writing Life, Annie Dillard suggests painting, unlike writing, pleases the senses while you do it. Indeed! When I am adrift, suffering doubt and imposter syndrome, I have often thought how lucky painters are. What relief it would be to back up one step and see all of it – the whole novel, its brilliance and its weaknesses – and know immediately how to improve it. Reading Annie’s words made me think of the often quoted, “writing is easy, you just sit at the typewriter and bleed”. Whoever it was that actually said this (Quote Investigator steers us away from it being the great Hemingway) I reckon I know the feeling.
What’s this got to do with Point of View month? Well, I find I am able to push my imposter syndrome demon a little further away every time I improve my technical skills. Gaining a sense of accomplishment - of capability - when it comes to the methodical building blocks of writing gives me solid foundations on which I may play and push my limits. Practicing writing in each point of view means I can demonstrate the benefits of one versus another to myself – and it’s a reminder that this is a key aspect of being a writer I will always have control over: working on my skills.
Annie Dillard also quotes an unnamed, well-known writer who is asked by a university student, “Do you think I could be a writer?”
“Well,” the well-known writer said, “I don’t know… Do you like sentences?”
I do. Sentences and words. This is the level I like to play in, where I feel happiest. This is why month two of the Ultimate Novel Writing Programme, in all its technical, structural glory, has been fun. There’s been lots and lots of fascinating insights from the tutors, many excellent exchanges between fellow students and access to a huge well of writing masterclasses.
Imposter syndrome nerves still lie ahead of me on my road to publication – the thought of trying to sell my writerly wares to the publishing gatekeepers gives me regular heebie-jeebies. But that’s a story for another month – in fact it’ll be the last third or so of the Ultimate Novel Writing Programme’s year when I’ll get expert schooling in the art of confidently querying literary agents.
For now, from my point of view (written in first person central, present tense, with a sprinkling of second person) it is becoming very clear that structure, support and plenty of hand holding is the Ultimate way.
I hope you’ll pop by next month when the topic will be ‘Setting’.
Happy writing, all!
Rachel
Rachel Davidson is a long-term Premium Member of Jericho Writers prior to joining our Writer Support Team, Rachel loves helping hopeful writers, such as herself, to solve their problems and take a step or two closer to achieving their writing dreams. Rachel has previously self-published a trilogy, the first of which achieved bestseller status in fourteen Amazon categories in the UK, US, Australia and Canada and is now seeking her traditional publishing debut with her latest manuscript. You can find out more about Rachel via her Instagram @RachelDavidsonAuthor.
If I can win a writing competition, then you can too.
I received notification that I was in the Friday Night Live (but on Saturday) Final at London Festival of Writing on 21 June 2024. I was visiting Italica, an ancient Roman city just north of Seville in Spain, when the email landed. Later that evening, as the sun dipped towards the horizon, I was perched on a golden beach in Algorrobo Costa watching successions of waves fold over before spilling onto the shore. In my journal – it goes everywhere with me – I wrote:
“Friday Night Live (FNL) – I’m one of the lucky eight. How did that happen?”
Back in 2022, I entered First 500, Jericho’s online competition, with a much less polished opening of my novel. That piece was Highly Commended, though not in the final. But it was encouraging. Much writing time passed.
I completed Jericho’s Ultimate Novel Writing Programme (UNWP) in Spring 2024. And signed up for my first ever Festival of Writing (LFOW). I drafted my historical novel, MANUMISSION*, during the course. I remember preparing my First 500 words carefully before entering FNL. After all, every writer knows their opening page is vital to hook readers with a clear setting and atmosphere, questions raised, and most importantly, a character that readers can invest in. I entered FNL without expectations. For me, it’s easier to set expectations low, rather than be disappointed I didn’t win.
London Festival of Writing 2024 was a fantastic experience. On the day of the Grand Final, I immersed myself in fantastic workshops, learning so much my brain was fit to explode with new ideas. I revealed my horrid imposter syndrome to fellow writers only to discover this is totally normal and affects many creative people. At one point, I took myself off to practice my piece. I read it aloud, slowed the pace, and really thought about what the words meant to me.
The competition took place before the gala dinner. The room was enormous, set for a banquet, and full of people. Finalists were called to the stage in turn to read their work. There’s a special magic forged when a writer’s words fall into the space between them and their audience. After reading, literary agents on the panel gave each finalist generous feedback. Many of us received full manuscript requests. Amazing!
When MANUMISSION won, Debi Alper congratulated me and told me to remember to breathe, the best advice. I’m still grateful and astonished that fellow writers voted for my work. That was the first time I read to a live audience in the room, although I have previously read at online events. Nerves on the day were alleviated by my amazing writing group. Thank you, gang! We were all mentored by Dr Anna Vaught on the UNWC. Friends for life now. We cheer each other on.
Being a FNL winner is an incredible honour, but it also has practical benefits. Two literary agents wish to see my novel when it is ready. I’ve used the prize to help me grapple with tricky structural and line edits. I’m currently on the fourth editing round. My novel is creeping closer to becoming the book I first envisioned.
If you are going to the next LFOW (and you should go – it’s a transformative experience), you are eligible to enter FNL. Believe in your story, hone your opening page, and share it with trusted readers for valuable constructive feedback. Then work on it, and work on it some more. And enter the competition.
I wish you GOOD LUCK!
Kate Sheehan-Finn
*A bit about my book:
At the heart of MANUMISSION, a historical epic set in the second century AD ancient Roman Empire, is an overarching question: who is Barates of Palmyra? This question arose when I first read the bilingual inscription that Syrian Barates commissioned to commemorate his Romano-British wife and freed slave, Regina of the Catuvellauni. The memorial was set up in Arbeia, South Shields, near Newcastle Upon Tyne, in Northeast England. So, what was a Syrian man doing in Britain more than 1800 years ago? MANUMISSION jumps into the gaping holes in the historical and archaeological record to recreate Barates’ adventures.
We’ve all read sentences that made us pause; not because the words moved us profoundly, but because they didn’t sit right. Recently, I read a mystery novel that stereotyped all Hindus as being vegetarian, stating that their homes smelled of garlic and spices. Being a Hindu myself, this didn’t resonate well. I eat most things and I’d like to the think the Coastal Breeze and Wild Rhubarb diffusers I’ve scattered around my home make it smell heavenly! Stereotypes like these are based on assumptions, give readers false impressions and beliefs, and don’t reflect people’s individuality or full humanity.
Whether you’re writing a heart-racing historical romance book, a moving memoir, a corporate blog post or a non-fiction book about the Empire, readers want authenticity. People want to see themselves, their culture, their identity and their experience reflected accurately. Editing with empathy is a responsible way to ensure writing is accurate and respectful across all genres.
What is Authenticity Editing?
It reviews the way marginalised groups, identities, cultures and experiences are portrayed in creative work (e.g. book, script, game, movie, marketing, adverts), and is usually done when creators are exploring unfamiliar topics. For example, if a character has autism and the writer has no experience of this, they can work with an authenticity expert who has autism to accurately represent it.
Authenticity editing uncovers unconscious bias, stereotypes, offensive content, clichés and inaccurate facts that writers unintentionally include.
Why does it matter?
Everyone has the creative freedom to write what they want. You don’t have to follow Mark Twain’s famous piece of writing advice and ‘write what you know’ to avoid being criticised; instead, ‘write what you don’t know’ but do it responsibly and respectfully.
Writers might thoroughly research resources to understand the unfamiliar, but even the well-intentioned writer can get things wrong – a shame when so much time and emotional investment is poured into writing.
Authenticity editing fills writers’ knowledge-gaps and strengthens their work with lived perspectives, ensuring that the language is used contextually, carefully and responsibly to minimise misrepresentation and harmful depictions.
Is Authenticity Editing a form of ‘book policing’?!
Authenticity editing doesn’t have the power to censor books – the publishing house makes final publication decisions. If representation is poor or harmful, readers might leave negative reviews, critics call out writers on social media or publishers might cancel contracts, leading to reputational risk. Authenticity editing can help writers avoid mistakes that lead to outcry before publishing.
Authenticity Editing matters in every genre
Many people think that authenticity editing is only used to assess race and cultures, but many topics are reviewed which most genres will explore:
Social identities such as race and ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, age, spirituality and religion, disability, body size, socioeconomic status and neurodiversity.
First-hand experiences that are difficult to portray without experiencing them, e.g. being a carer, fostering or adoption, homelessness, medical conditions, e.g. brain trauma.
Specialist professional knowledge, e.g. armed forces, healthcare or medical sectors, the police and lawyers, need to be portrayed convincingly.
4 tips for editing with empathy
1. Be curious
When you come across anything that’s outside your knowledge and experience, don’t assume or judge - ask questions. Is the portrayal based on stereotypes or clichés? Is your source of research credible and trusted? Instead of basing things on assumptions from Google searches, reach out to specific communities to explore what they say about being represented. What does their lived experience reveal?
2. Collaborate with authenticity editors (aka sensitivity or cultural accuracy readers)
Authenticity editors are ‘critical friends’, offering constructive feedback and expertise from lived perspectives. They have a greater capacity to identify harmful misrepresentation, offensive phrases, inaccuracies or stereotypes than people who are not part of it and are in better positions to suggest changes, helping writers make informed decisions on how to improve and strengthen work.
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2. Collaborate with authenticity editors (aka sensitivity or cultural accuracy readers)
Authenticity editors are ‘critical friends’, offering constructive feedback and expertise from lived perspectives. They have a greater capacity to identify harmful misrepresentation, offensive phrases, inaccuracies or stereotypes than people who are not part of it and are in better positions to suggest changes, helping writers make informed decisions on how to improve and strengthen work.
3. Be conscious of your language
Language evolves, as do the terms used to describe identities, relationships and experiences. Be conscious of outdated and harmful language. Use diversity/inclusive style guides or voices from specific communities to inform your choice of language and keep it contextual. For example, if a character in your work is supposed to be sexist, racist or homophobic and is hurling abuse at another character, this can have a place in the pages as long you make it clear that you don’t personally share views with the unsavoury character. This can be achieved in many ways, e.g. the unpleasant character gets their comeuppance or another character argues against their views.
4. Embrace the feedback!
When feedback reveals problematic language or areas of concern, embrace it as an opportunity to learn more about your own unconscious biases and the areas you’re writing about, rather than being defensive. This adds to your growth as a writer and a human being, which will lead to inclusive writing in future that will resonate with more readers.
Ever been to a bookstore and wondered what all the little images on the book spines mean? All those H's, penguins and sowers lining the shelves? Well, they are the logos of the publishing companies who have published that book.
Take a look at the rows of books in any bookstore and you will most probably be looking at the emblems for the Big 5 publishers and their many imprints, as well as a smattering of independent (indie) publishers.
With so many amazing publishing houses out there, the perfect home for you book may well be out there, but how do you know where to look, and who are the most reputable?
In this article we will be looking at the very best book publishers, how publishing companies work, and how to get published by a traditional publishing house.
The publishing industry can be a little tricky to understand, but by the end of this article you will be armed with all the knowledge you need when it comes to choosing the best book publishing companies for your work.
How Do You Search For A Publisher?
Finding a book publisher can be hard, especially if you're hoping to be traditionally published by some of the top publishers in the business. Where do you begin, and what information is important for you to know before you start submitting your manuscript to some of the largest book publishers? Is there anything to be said for self publishing, and what types of publishing should you avoid?
Do I Need A Literary Agent?
Yes, you will most likely need to be represented by a literary agent before you (via your agent) can start submitting to bigger traditional publishers. Nevertheless, there’s no harm in window shopping; it might even provide you with a focal point if you are still working on getting an agent.
For more information on how to find a literary agent, read more here.
Where To Start
If you’re feeling overwhelmed by the number of book publishers out there, I’ll be listing the top five biggest publishing houses, some of the best educational publishers and those who publish children’s books, as well as some of my personal favourite independent book publishers.
Read on to discover the very best publishers, covering all book genres across the globe.
The Big Five Book Publishers
While aiming high can be daunting to some authors, literary agents will often wish to submit your manuscript to the top publishing companies first. After all, not only do they have the most power and influence, but they also know what they're doing - most of them have been publishing books for over a hundred years!
Who Are The Big Five?
The biggest and most successful traditional publishers in the world are often referred to as 'The Big Five'. So I will be starting with them.
These are the five powerhouse trade publishing houses which are most well known and widely recognised. Within them you will find many other recognised imprints (publishing houses owned by them) whose logos appear on the spine on the book.
Let’s take a look at them in more detail.
Simon & Schuster
Simon & Schuster is where we begin our big five journey, as this publishing company holds an annual revenue of $830 million. They have over 35 imprints, including notable ones such as Howard Books, Scribner, and Touchstone, and they release over 2,000 books a year! Some of their biggest titles as of late are Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat by Samin Nosrat and The Institute by Stephen King.
Founded in 1924, Simon & Schuster remains a prominent publisher today, publishing a variety of genres along with big names such as renown authors F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jodi Picoult and Philippa Gregory.
They also offer many opportunities for those wanting to pursue a career in publishing and are one of the biggest names in the industry to work.
HarperCollins
With an annual revenue of $1.5 billion, HarperCollins has no shortage of good books and authors.
Their notable imprints include Avon Romance, Harlequin Enterprises, Harper, and William Morrow, and their titles range broadly. Some of the top books as of late are Girl, Stop Apologizing by Rachel Hollis and The Last Romantics by Tara Conklin.
Authors published originally by Harper include Mark Twain, the Brontë sisters, H. G. Wells and Agatha Christie. A book deal from this giant will most certainly help with book sales!
Established in 1843, Macmillan Publishers is still going strong.
With $1.4 billion in annual revenue, there are many publishing routes and imprints available through them, namely Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Picador, St Martin's Press, and Thomas Dunne Books.
Some of their biggest titles from the recent past that you may have heard of include The Great Alone by Kristin Hannah and Me by Elton John.
With an eclectic list of authors under its belt (from W B Yeats to Leigh Bardugo), and a global market with countless possible genres to publish under, you’d be wise to consider them an ideal place for your book to end up.
Penguin Random House
Everyone recognises that little penguin on book spines in bookstores, and everyone is familiar with the orange Penguin Classics books, but what else do you know about this iconic publisher?
With over 15,000 books published a year, not only is Penguin Random House one of the top five, it may well be the top of the top five.
Their annual revenue exceeds $3.3 billion, and they have countless notable imprints such as Knopf Doubleday, Crown Publishing, and Viking Press. They also have many famous authors under their wing, including books like The Testaments by Margaret Atwood, and The Guardians by John Grisham.
As of 2021, Penguin Random House employs approximately 10,000 people globally and has published 15,000 titles annually under its 250 divisions and imprints.
Hachette Livre
Looking for a European based publisher with more published books a year than Penguin? Then take a look at the Hachette book group.
Hachette Livre has an annual revenue of $2.7 billion and nearly 200 imprints. Some of these include Grand Central Publishing, Little, Brown and Company, Headline, and Mulholland Books.
Their biggest titles in the recent past include Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell and Little Weirds by Jenny Slate. they have also published names such as James Patterson, Martina Cole, Donna Tartt, and Celeste Ng.
Growing steadily since their merger in 1992, Hachette Livre has a lot to offer both you and your book.
Best Educational Book Publishers
Looking for a reliable and quality educational book publisher, or someone who specialises in nonfiction titles?
This can be more difficult than you think, but thankfully I’m here to shorten the list for you. These publishers are looking specifically for educational books, quality hardback textbooks and the like.
This won't be helpful if you're looking to get your fictional manuscript published, but if it's educational materials you write, then read on!
Bertelsmann Education Group
Bertelsmann is a media, services and education company that operates in about 50 countries around the world. The online education and service offerings are primarily in the healthcare and technology sectors, as well as in higher education. With an annual revenue of around $300 million, this group has no shortage of educational texts, resources, and reliable online connections.
Scholastic
I can’t recall how many Scholastic book fairs I went to as a child. Perhaps you went to some as well, given that Scholastic is both an educational publisher and a popular children’s publisher.
Their book sales are always consistent and their annual revenue is roughly $1.7 billion. Their notable imprints include Arthur A. Levine, Klutz Press, and Orchard Books. While their educational books are extremely popular for grades K-12, their YA fiction remains the most popular (no doubt you’ve heard of Harry Potter and The Hunger Games, right?).
Pearson Education
Have you ever used DuoLingo for your language learning needs? Did you know that Pearson Education has recently partnered with them?
There’s a lot of other notable mentions surrounding Pearson, such as their annual revenue of $1 billion, and their well-known imprints (Adobe Press, Heinemann, Prentice Hall, Wharton Publishing). Their most popular publications are always subject textbooks for higher education, and for good reason.
McGraw-Hill Education
One of the largest publishers in American education is Mcgraw-Hill. Their annual revenue often exceeds $1.7 billion, and they are well known for their many editions of test prep books (SAT and ACT) and elementary school math textbooks.
Their most notable imprints include Glencoe/McGraw-Hill, Macmillan/McGraw-Hill, and McGraw-Hill Higher Education, no doubt familiar to you if you’ve been involved in any American education system.
Wiley
While Wiley has a lot to offer in terms of non-educational publishing, their For Dummies series of educational books is one of their top sellers.
With an annual revenue of $1.7 billion, their various instructional titles are big hits in the publishing world. Their most notable imprints include Bloomberg Press, Capstone, Hungry Minds, and Wiley-Blackwell, and they continue to publish a large variety of titles, both educational and otherwise.
Cengage Learning
Publishing both hard cover print books and maintaining a dedicated digital library can be difficult, but Cengage learning can do it all.
From imprints that publish specifically for grades K-12 as well as books for higher education learning, Cengage is a wonderful publisher to consider. Cengage is also the owner of the National Geographic Education division, made to bring excitement to classrooms worldwide.
With an annual revenue of $1.7 billion, it’s safe to say that this publisher is one of the educational publishing powerhouses.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
You may have already heard of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, or HMH for short.
This publisher specializes in different disciplines including business and economics, biography and memoirs, children’s books, cookbooks, health and wellness, and more. They make more than $1.4 billion annually, with many notable imprints: Clarion, Graphia, John Joseph Adams Books, and Sandpiper among them.
Their largest and most recent titles include elementary school textbooks in all subjects, as well as cookbooks.
Best Children’s Book Publishers
Some of the top selling books published today are for children or young adults. However, writing and publishing for children and young adults can be a lot harder than you would think!
Although young adult novels have really flown off the shelves in the last twenty years, and often offer the most variety in terms of diversity, content and audience, young adult fiction, middle grade fiction and picture books still remain one of the most competitive markets in the publishing world.
Here are some of the best choices for children’s book publishing today, and how you can reach out to them (via your literary agent, of course).
Bloomsbury
With offices around the world and prominent publishing houses in both the US and the UK, Bloomsbury Books is a top contender for children’s book publishing (they also publish a vast array of nonfiction books including political nonfiction).
Established in 1986, Bloomsbury has many popular children’s book authors across every age group. With an annual revenue of $150 million, Bloomsbury USA Books for Young Readers was established in 2002. Their YA fiction has grown increasingly popular, their authors often topping the New York Times Bestseller list.
If they're good enough for the likes of J K Rowling, Sarah J Maas, and Samantha Shannon, then I'm sure your book will be more than happy in this home.
Ladybird Books
It's impossible for anyone over the age of thirty to not have fond memories of their first Ladybird hardback book as a child. Who doesn't remember their favourite fairytales presented in that iconic little book with a plump ladybird on the cover?
UK-based and another division of the Penguin Group, Ladybird books is perfect if you’ve got a bedtime story to tell. Their lineup of children’s books is primarily geared toward younger audiences, from toddlers to roughly age ten. They have many award winning series published under their name, including many Peppa Pig books, as well as an educational division with their famous Peter and Jane reading guides and other titles where they have teamed up with names such as BBC Earth.
Their annual revenue is roughly $17 million.
Chronicle Books
San Francisco-based favourite Chronicle Books, with a $10 million revenue, has a wonderful eye for the unique and aesthetic storyteller.
Their children’s books are beloved and unique, and this small independent publisher receives more than 1,000 submissions a month for their young adult department alone! They publish most type of children’s books including activity books, art books, board books, picture books, chapter books, middle grade, games, and gift and stationery items.
Hogs Back Books
Hogs Back Books publishes fiction books aimed at children up to 10, as well as early readers for children up to 14, and teenage fiction.
Amongst its most notable titles, Boris the Boastful Frog was recommended by The Telegraph in 2013 as one of the best books of the year for young children. They are a small family-owned and independent publisher, and the small selection that they choose to publish is beautiful and heartfelt.
Arbordale Publishing
With just about $1 million in annual income, Arbordale Publishing isn’t the largest in US children’s publishing. However, their books are aligned to Common Core, Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), as well as state education standards.
Arbordale books are vetted by experts and professionals from a variety of organizations including NASA, JPL, Project Learning Tree, USFWS, SeaWorld, the Cherokee Nation and others. They publish an average of 20 books per year.
Immedium
Based in San Francisco, CA, Immedium is influenced by an increasingly diverse world. While they are a small company and make an average of $150k in annual revenue, they have wonderful illustrations and ideas for children’s books.
Immedium publishes subjects range from eye-catching children’s books to contemporary non-fiction, including commentaries on art, popular culture, and multicultural issues.
Kids Can Press
Kids Can Press is a Canadian-owned publisher of children’s books, with a list of over 500 picture books, non-fiction and fiction titles for toddlers to young adults and an estimated annual revenue of over $10 million.
The Kids Can Press list includes characters such as Franklin the Turtle—the single most successful publishing franchise in the history of Canadian publishing, which has sold over 65 million books in over 30 languages around the world.
Publishing only around 25 books a year, Quirk Books is based in Philadelphia and is searching for the most original, cool, and fun ideas out there. Is your book creative enough for Quirk? It’s one of my favourite publishing companies, having taken the helm on series such as the Miss Peregrine anthology by Ransom Riggs, which has won many literary awards.
August House Publishers
A more traditional publishing company, August House Publishers are seeking children’s book authors committed to folktales, diverse and memorable. They enjoy stories from many diverse backgrounds, as well as stories that work well as oral tales, stories meant to be passed on from generation to generation. They also have a soft spot for scary stories and stories that can be used in a classroom environment.
With almost $50 million a year in revenue ABDO is a formidable children’s book publisher.
Based in Edina, Minnesota, this family-owned book publishing company specializes in non-fiction books for the school library market. From engaging nonfiction to illustrated titles, ABDO has both educational and fantastical book titles for children of all ages.
Best Independent Book Publishers
Are you looking for a smaller company to publish your book? This is a better option if you are still seeking a traditional publishing company, but want to work with them directly
There are many benefits of working with an independent book publishing company. Smaller companies often accept unsolicited submissions (ie you don't need to have a literary agent and can approach them yourself), especially if the submission is more unique and experimental in nature.
Plus, independent publishers often offer a more hands-on approach for new and inexperienced authors. the downside is that their budgets and reach may not be as large as that of the big five, so you are less likely to get an astronomical advance or become an international bestseller. But it's not impossible!
Let’s check out some of the best in the business...
Autumn House Press
Autumn House Press is an independent, non-profit literary publishing company based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania that was founded in 1998. They began as a publishing company strictly for poetry, but they have since expanded to include fiction and nonfiction.
Autumn House Press’s especially notable titles include Anxious Attachments by Beth Alvarado and Not Dead Yet and Other Stories by Hadley Moore.
Tupelo Press
Tupelo Press is an American not-for-profit literary press founded in 1999. It produced its first titles in 2001, publishing poetry, fiction and nonfiction. Tupelo Press publishes the winners of its national poetry competitions, as well as manuscripts accepted through general submission. Awards given by Tupelo Press include the Dorset Prize, the Berkshire Prize for a First or Second Book of Poetry, and the Snowbound Series Chapbook Award. They have a lot to offer as an independent book publisher.
Influx Press
Hackney-based London independent publisher, Influx Press, was founded in 2011. They focus on site-specific literature closely linked to precise places across the UK and beyond.
They have printed unique books such as How Pale the Winter Has Made Us by Adam Scovell and A Door Behind a Door by Yelena Moskovich.
Fledgling Press
Fledgling is an exciting and innovative publisher founded in Edingburgh, Scotland. Their focus is primarily on Scottish talent, but they still consider writers from other parts of the world.
Founded in 2000, Fledgling Press have have launched the writing careers of award winning authors including Helen Grant, Philip Caveney and Alex Nye.
Graywolf Press
Graywolf Press is an independent, non-profit publisher located in Minneapolis, Minnesota. They publish fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. Graywolf Press currently publishes about 27 books a year, including the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize winner, the recipient of the Emily Dickinson First Book Award, and several translations supported by the Lannan Foundation. Their published work is bold and award winning.
New Directions
New Directions was founded in 1936 and they publish about 30 new titles a year. They publish anything regarding literary fiction, poetry, memoir, nonfiction, and their annual revenue is roughly $1 million per year.
It was the first American publisher of authors including Henry Miller, Vladimir Nabokov, and Jorge Luis Borges, among others.
Tin House Books
Publisher of award-winning books of literary fiction, nonfiction, and poetry; home to a renowned workshop and seminar series; and partner of a critically acclaimed podcast, Tin House champions writing that is artful, dynamic, and original.
Europa Editions is an independent trade publisher based in New York. The company was founded in 2005 by the owners of the Italian press Edizioni E/O and specializes in literary fiction, mysteries, and narrative non-fiction. They have a few imprints, namely Tonga Books, and a series for mysteries known as Europa World Noir.
City Lights Publishers
Known for publishing Howl and other poems by Allen Ginsberg, City Lights Publishers is a great independent publishing option. Founded in 1955, with nearly 300 books in print, City Lights publishes cutting-edge fiction, poetry, memoirs, literary translations and books on vital social and political issues.
For over fifty years, City Lights has been a champion of progressive thinking, fighting against the forces of conservatism and censorship.
Forest Avenue Press
Forest Avenue Press, founded in 2012 in Portland, Oregon, publishes literary fiction on a joyride and the occasional memoir. While they are currently a small-scale operation, they are growing in popularity in the Pacific Northwest.
And That's Not All Of Them...
And that is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the best publishers to consider! The best thing to do, when looking at what publisher to approach or consider, is to look at the books you love or that are most similar to your own and look at who publishes them.
You may well be surprised, and they may well not even be on this list (which doesn't make them any less fabulous).
A Publisher For Every Writer
Writing a book and finishing it is a huge achievement in itself. Choosing whether to self-publish, look for an agent, or approach indie publishing houses yourself is the next step..and a large one.
So take your time and choose your route to publication wisely. While I hope you found a few excellent book publishers to consider from this list, do keep in mind that there are many more that are worth your consideration. And however you choose to get your book out into the world (and all options come with a list of pros and cons) they all ultimately all lead to the same thing - holding your book in your hand one day and having others enjoy your words.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who Are The Big 5 In Publishing?
The big five publishers in the world are:
Harper Collins
Simon & Schuster
Macmillan
Hachette
Penguin Random House
These five publishers make up over 90% of hardback book sales in the US and over 80% of paperbacks sold.
What Is The Most Prestigious Book Publisher?
In terms of the most established book publisher, Cambridge University Press, dating back to 1534. But in terms of revenue, iPenguin Random House generated revenues of 3.8 billion euros in 2020, up from 3.63 in the previous year.
Which Publisher Is Best For First Time Authors?
The best thing a first time author can do is find a great literary agent that specialises in whatever genre they write. Through that agent they will then have access to the very best publishers. Without an agent, you can't get near the Big 5!
How Do You Pick A Publisher?
To have access to the top publishers you need a literary agent, and they will know who to approach. But if you want to approach smaller publishers without an agent, or just curious as to who you'd like publishing your book, then simply take a look at books that are similar to the one you have written and see who publishes them.
Indie and traditional Basic | Intermediate | Advanced
Launching a book is the most exciting moment in an author’s journey, but it’s also the scariest. You only really appreciate the sheer scale of the competition facing you when you’re getting ready to launch your book into the world.
And launch is confusing too. There are so many strategies out there, but which one is right for you? You can easily feel that you have to do everything – which is impossible – so you end up feeling like a failure before you even start.
So let’s make things clear and simple. We’re going to show you four strategies for how to plan a book launch. They are:
New author (first book launch)
Intermediate author (third book launch)
Advanced author (tenth book launch, let’s say)
Traditionally published author
Obviously, these strategies are guidelines only. If you have specific assets (a well-listened to podcast, for example), then you’re going to make use of them in cross-promoting, no matter where you are in your publishing journey.
Likewise, you have skills and preferences and those need to play a part too. If you just hate tech, you probably aren’t going to get heavily involved in advertising. If you’re great on social media, you’re going to want to be active there. And so on.
In short, what follows is a set of guidelines for you to adapt around who you are. If you don’t follow one exact recipe in what follows, that’s not you being dumb. That’s you intelligently adapting an approach around your specific needs.
Oh, and yes, I know you want to plunge straight in here, but don’t.
The single thing which will most determine the success or failure of your book is the quality of your preparation.
If you’re so impatient to get to launch that you’ve rushed your cover, or your text, or any of the other essentials, you’ll simply be leaving a big fat heap of money on the table for someone else to pick up.
Think of launch as a bucket where you are trying to scoop up as many readers, fans, sales and reviews as possible. If you don’t make damn sure that bucket is sealed and watertight before you start, you are going to leak readers like crazy. You can work like seven devils and still not be rewarded for all your effort.
So before we get to your launch plans, we’re going to run you through a checklist. If you’re solid on all those bullet points, then please proceed to launch. If you’re wobbly on some of the checklist items, then fix those things before doing anything else.
Preparation: it’s boring, but it matters.
Your Book Launch Checklist
So you have an upcoming book, and you feel ready to launch it into the world. Here’s your checklist, organised in rough order of priority.
The Essentials
This first set of bullets are things that you just can’t compromise on. Yes, you can theoretically publish a book if you haven’t done these things, but you can’t do it well. So for a successful book launch, don’t skimp.
Completed text.
Professional editorial review. I’ve put this in italics, just because Jericho Writers offers a very high quality editorial service and we have an obvious interest in boosting editorial services. But I’ve been a pro author for twenty years, and I’ve never once launched a book without a third party editorial review. And you know what? My books have always got better. So: yes, I’m biased. And yes, editorial help makes a difference.
Copy editing / proofreading. Same thing here. You will need help with copyediting, unless you want your book to go out into the world strewn with errors. We also offer copyediting help but honestly? This is an area where you can save money. If you’re friends with an English teacher, or librarian, or anyone else you trust to read a text very closely and pick up errors, then go with that. You DO need a second set of eyes to review your text. You SHOULD save money here if you can. A few errors won’t hurt anyone.
Quality cover. Don’t skimp. Get this right. If you only 95% like the design you have, then go on until you’re at 100%. The first cover you ever make will be the most expensive, because that’s where you’re evolving the strategy for the entire series. Once you have the basic template, your future covers will be easy. But get this right.
Categories and keywords. Get this right: an hour or two’s work upfront will pay dividends for literally years to come.
Front matter. This is the “Look Inside” portion of your e-book. This is where you convert the curious browser into the brand-new reader. So make sure that the front part of your e-book helps that conversion process. You need to be clear about what your book is, and why someone should read it.
End matter. This is so crucial. The platform for all your future launches is the readers you collect from this one. And the place to collect those readers? Is right after they’ve finished your book and are still in a state of focused excitement about it. In particular, the back of your book is the place where you need to (A) offer a free download and (B) solicit reviews.
Free download offer. You need to offer your core readers a freebie. The basic offer is, “Hey, do you want a free story / video explainer / set of cheat sheets / anything else?” Not all readers will engage with that offer, but your best readers WILL engage … and you’ll get their email address … and that email list will form the basis of everything else you do.
Email collection system. You can’t just offer people a free story (or other incentive). You also have to deliver it. That is going to mean you have an author website with the right technology on it, or you are going to use a third party service (like the ever-excellent Bookfunnel) to collect the email address and deliver the book.
Email service provider. You need to be signed up with a Mailchimp or ConvertKit, or some similar company. Those guys are going to collect emails for you, automate emails, send emails, and everything else.
If you need more than that (and you probably do), we have an exceptionally good self-publishing video course. That course is expensive to buy – because it’s really, really good – so don’t buy it. That course, plus a ton of other incredibly good stuff, is available FREE to members of Jericho Writers. And if you’re serious about your writing, we’d love to welcome you as a member. You can find out more about us and how to become a member right here.
The Nice-To-Haves
What follows are things that you may well already have in place, or think you absolutely need. Advanced authors are likely to tick every one of these boxes. For newer authors – well, you can’t do absolutely everything all in a single go. So don’t panic.
Facebook author page. You need to make sure that your profile picture is 100% consistent with your book cover visuals. You need to add content at least weekly and – this is the important bit – that your content is very narrowly focused on your ideal reader. So if you are writing non-fiction about training dogs, then your Facebook page should be very narrowly focused on that topic, and nothing else. If you have to choose between 100 passionate fans and 1000 people half of whom are there for the freebies or the cute puppy pictures, then choose the 100 every time. The “not all that interested” brigade will ruin your engagement metrics and blur your audience definition. Focus matters. Scale doesn’t – or not nearly so much.
Amazon Author Central page. It’s an easy win this one, so you probably want to take care of it. Basically: Amazon lets you build your own author profile on their system. Will it sell books for you? Not really. Maybe a few.
Author website with blog. You'll notice that I DO think you need an email collection system that works, and for most authors the actual story-for-email exchange will be done on their website. But that’s by far the most important element of any author site. If you also want to blog, then do, but it’s no big deal. If you blog, then see what I’ve said above about the Facebook author page. Narrow focus is much, much more important than just grabbing random sets of eyeballs.
Facebook tracking pixel. If you want to use some more advanced ad techniques on Facebook, then you’ll want a tracking pixel on your site, so Facebook (in its incredibly creepy way) can watch when its users visit your site. Even if you don’t use that data now, you probably want to start collecting it, so Facebook can start populating its creepy databases.
Twitter. Oh heck. Some people love Twitter. If you do, then you’re already on it. If you’re not, well, maybe you don’t want to be. I don’t think it sells books, so don’t worry.
The “Why Bother?” List
Somethings that people say you ought to do, you don’t need to do. Including:
Your Goodreads profile
Printing flyers / postcards
Press releases
A launch party. I mean that’s fun, and you should probably have one. But you should have one because it’s fun celebrating with your friends. It’s not a serious book launch technique.
Book trailer. Not much point here, unless you have a significant TikTok audience, or similar.
Giveaways, unless these are very carefully targeted.
OK. Checklist all done and dusted? Then let’s move onto three book launch plans, graded according to author experience. We start easy, and build from there.
A Book Launch Plan For The First Time Author
This is your first book launch. And your first job is to set your expectations appropriately.
You will not make much money from this book. You will not reach many readers. You will not get many reviews. You will probably lose money, if you take into account all your upfront costs.
All the same, this book launch really matters. This first-of-series book is going to be your little ambassador to the Big Wide World. It’s where the majority of all your series readers ever are going to start. So the quality of the book matters. Ditto the number and quality of reviews. The quality of your cover and book description. And so on.
This is your first book and nobody knows you. So this is like one of those little bits of cheese they give you as tasters, when they want you to buy the whole damn cheese. It’s free to nibble, but you pay to gorge. In short: price your book free or at £0.99/$0.99. Or yo-yo between those two price points. Or kick the price up to £4.99/$4.99, so when you slash the price to free, it looks like a great offer to readers.
At this stage, you’re not looking to make revenue. You’re looking to:
Build reviews
Populate your Also Boughts with the right type of readers (more on that in a second)
Collect emails for your mailing list
If you tick those three boxes in a satisfactory way, don’t worry too much if your revenue is small to negligible. You are building a platform for the future.
2. Ask For Reviews
At the end of your book, include a note to the reader that you would love them to review your book. Tell them how to do it and say how much it means to you personally. Those direct appeals really help secure reviews.
Oh, and it probably goes without saying that you should never buy reviews or anything of that sort. Amazon will sniff those things out and send an army of tiny robots to invade your bloodstream and turn your skin yellow.
3. Offer A Free Download
We sort of covered this in the checklist material, but it’s so important I’m going to say it again.
You need to offer your readers a free download. They get a story (or video, or cheat sheet, or whatever). You get their email address and permission to contact them.
This is the rock that stands at the heart of everything else you ever do. Don’t neglect it. Get the details right. You have to make this part work.
4. Friends And Family
It’s fine to ask your friends and family to buy your book and leave an honest review, BUT only ask those people who actually like and regularly read your specific genre. If your mother only ever readers slasher-zombie-horror books and you only write Sweet Romance, then her purchase of your romance book will be an active negative.
How come? Because Amazon needs to understand who the readers of your book are, and if you start, in effect, saying to Amazon “this Sweet Romance book will be enjoyed by readers of Slasher-Zombie-Horror” then Amazon won’t know how to market your book.
Key lesson: A bad sale is worse than no sale at all. Don’t be tempted.
5. Hit Your Email List (If You Have One)
Let’s say you’ve already released a free novella via, for example, Instafreebie. That release will give you a list of email addresses. You can and should go to those people and say, “hey, I’d love you to buy my book [or get the free download]. But in particular, I’d really love it if you left a review for me on Amazon. I’m just starting out in my career and those reviews are invaluable for me – and they’re so helpful to other readers too. Thanks so much.”
6. Go Narrow
Don’t be tempted by Apple and all those other book stores. You are better off going all in on Amazon. Yes, you lose the (pretty meagre) sales available from Apple and co, but in return you gain access to Kindle Unlimited readers, who may easily make up 50% of your income, or even more.
This isn’t even a marginal decision, to be honest with you. When you have 3+ books out and are making $10,000+ in sales revenue, then maybe you have a decision to make. But starting out? Go narrow. You’ll do far better.
7. Don’t Go For Pre-orders
Pre-orders stink.
Why would you want to drive traffic to an Amazon page that has zero reviews and which doesn’t actually let readers get a book on their devices right now this second?
Answer: you wouldn’t. So launch naked. No pre-orders at all, please.
(And yes, there are exceptions to this rule, but if you are a newbie, then you’re not one of them.)
8. AMS Adverts
AMS – Amazon Marketing Services, Amazon’s own in-house ad-platform – is a great but frustrating ad platform.
It’s great, because it’s easy to build ads that convert well and make money. It’s frustrating because the interface is dire and because the ads are really hard to scale. (Unlike on Facebook, where you just have to throw more money at the service.)
But still: AMS ads are great for new authors, because they’re cheap and because the sales and reviews will mount up over time.
(Also, and this post is in part an overview for what works at the moment, Amazon will surely give AMS a much-needed overhaul as currently, the interface is just embarrassingly bad.)
9. Free / Discounted Book Sites
There are sites like Robin Reads, ENT, Freebooksy and others that build large databases of readers interested in free or discounted titles. Those lists are segmented by genre, so if you write Space Opera you won’t be bothering people who only love Cosy Mystery.
You definitely want to drop some money on those sites. Get your book right in front of people specifically looking for titles like yours. And yes, those email lists go to discount hounds, but a lot of those discount hounds are looking for a new series to commit to and enjoy, so they want their “taster” experience to be free (or low cost). Thereafter they’ll be happy to pay full e-book prices.
Oh yes, and while Bookbub is the biggest discounted book site by a mile, you are extremely unlikely to get access to it at this stage in your career. So start smaller and build up.
Expert tip: you probably want to stack promotions if you can. It’s better to drop $300 over several promo sites at the exact same time, than to pay the same money in split promotions. Especially on Amazon, big, bold promos work better than multiple small ones.
Expert tip II: Use the great Nicholas Erik for an always up-to-date guide of which book sites are great and which ones are just meh. Get his insights here.
10. Blog Tours, Etc
I’ve listed this last on the checklist, because I think it’s optional. I don’t think you get a lot of readers from blog tours, soliciting reviews from bloggers, etc.
But – this is your first book. Maybe you just want to get out there and you will get some readers, and those readers are gold dust for you at this stage. So if you want to go for it, go chase around some bloggers in your niche. If you can’t be bothered, then don’t bother – and don’t feel guilty either.
Is all this doing your head in? I’m not surprised. There’s a lot to take in and it can seem overwhelming. The solution for most people will be to take a really good step-by-step course that just walks you through the entire process.
We have just such a course – here – and it’s superb. Inspirational, practical, and lavishly documented. Trouble is, our course, like all the other good uns on the market, is really expensive. So don’t buy it. That course, and a ton of other good stuff, is available totally free to members of Jericho Writers. If you’re serious about your writing & your publishing, then we’d love to have you join us. All the info you need is right here. We look forward to meeting you!
A Book Launch Plan For The Intermediate Author
This is maybe your third or fourth book launch. Some of the strategies above are either second nature to you now, or they’ve dropped away completely. (Approaching friends and family is mostly a first-book-only thing. Ditto blog tours and the like.)
So for your third or fourth book launch, you’re going to use all of the above strategies – where they make sense – and then add / elaborate as follows:
1. Sophisticated Use Of Email Lists
With our first book launch, we just thumped out a “buy my book now” email to the few names we had on our list, and we got what we got.
OK, but that was then. Now we have a stronger list, and we can play things a little more cleverly. Because here’s the thing:
Amazon likes email-driven sales surges (and drives your book high up the bestseller charts as a result).
Amazon LOVES strong and steady sales surges, especially those that continue over four or (play safe) five days.
So, assuming that we have a decently performing list of, let’s say, 2,000 names or more, we’re not just going to bang out a “buy my book” email on the day of launch. Instead, we’re going to divide that list into three or four roughly equal slices, and launch emails on day #1, day #2, day #3, with reminder emails to non-openers on days #3, #4, and #5. (Or something like that. The principle is more important than the exact way you choose to implement it.)
The resulting steady pattern of sales will signal to Amazon that this book isn’t a one-day wonder. There’s real selling strength behind it. That signal will prompt Amazon to work harder, and for longer, than it otherwise would.
This simple, free email strategy remains the most powerful single strategy at your disposal. If you do this well, and little else, you can still achieve great things.
2. Get Reviews From Your Best Readers
Once you are developing your email list nicely, you can go to your best readers and offer them an Advance Review Copy of your forthcoming book, in exchange for a review once they’ve read it. You’re not asking them for fake reviews. You want honest verdicts. But crucially, you want anyone with an ARC to post their review within 48 hours of your book being launched. That’s the part that really, really matters.
How come? Because with all your activity around launch, the visibility of your new title will never be as high as this again (give or take a huge Bookbub promo, perhaps.) That visibility means that a ton of totally new readers will be finding your work for the first time. And that means, you want to populate your page with reviews as soon as humanly possible. Waiting 30-60 days for the reviews to populate organically will slaughter your conversions at the time when your Amazon book page has its maximum levels of traffic.
So get your readers engaged early. And feel free to nudge them. Get the reviews, and get them fast!
3. Series Listings In Your End-matter
The best place to sell your e-books? Your other e-books.
As you start to build out your list, make sure you go back to the e-books you already have out on sale and list all your titles. Make sure that you include the series number and a very short blurb (50-100 words is plenty) for each book. You also, of course, need to include purchase links for each book with link text that’s more tentative (“Find out more”) than pushy (“Buy now!”).
4. Remarketing Ads On Facebook And Google
Both Facebook and Google let you “remarket” to your “almost-but-not-quite” customers.
So Google allows you to push ads at people have who have recently visited your website. Facebook does the same, but also lets you market to specific audience groups – for example, people on your mailing list, or people who didn’t open and click your launch email.
Because these ads are going to a very warm audience, they tend to have an excellent conversion rate, with good CTRs and low CPCs.
Even so, before you start to advertise with any kind of meaningful budget, you do need to test carefully to get the right creative. It remains a lot easier to waste money with ads than it is to make it. Take care!
5. Series-level Promos
Now that you have a series of books to play with, you can get a bit more creative with the way you structure your promos. You should no longer think about promoting a book, but about the series. So if you’re launching #3 in your series, you might want to arrange things like this:
Book #1. Free promo. Use Freebooksy, ENT, and other sites to promote the freebie. Make sure you stack promos to deliver downloads in the necessary volumes.
Book #2. Use a Kindle Countdown deal to earn 70% royalties at £0.99/$0.99. Maybe use some of the other promo sites to support this offer. Maybe try some remarketing ads, using a carousel to display all three of the products you have for sale.
Book #3. Launch, launch, launch! This is where you’re going to spend most of your firepower.
You’ll use your email list to support the launch, of course, but you’ll probably want to draw attention to the other offers too. The more your whole series increases its visibility in Amazon, the more new readers will pour into your series as a whole, with all the lovely readthrough sales you’ll collect over the long term.
6. Think Kindle Unlimited
If you’re still intermediate in terms of sales and list, then you should stick with Kindle Unlimited. It’ll simplify your life, and make you more money.
But you also need to have a KU mindset, because the way you make money on Apple/Kobo/etc is different from the way you’ll earn money on KU. The essence of effective Kindle Unlimited marketing is simple. You want to achieve big bursts of visibility. As much visibility as possible, extended over a minimum of four days, but ideally for a week or even more.
That extended big-burst visibility will earn you money for weeks and weeks. You’ll see a surge in page reads that dies off slowly rather than fast. Granular, drip-drip-drip marketing techniques cannot achieve this effect. On this model, you’d do much better to have a big budget, 0% ROI promotion that really lifts visibility, than to have a couple of nicely performing little campaigns that achieve decent ROI but don’t really impact visibility.
With the first lesson of our brand new Premium Member course Introduction to Self-Editing launching this week, I thought I'd share my own editing process with you. I honestly don’t know how much it helps to understand another writer’s process. What matters to you isn’t how I write best, but how you do. There’s not one way to play this game, there are a million. But if you’re interested, and in the hope that it helps, here’s how I edit.
The first thing to say is that, in my case, there’s no real distinction between my writing and my editing. I self-correct all the time as I write. My paragraphs are very often short, but if I write a reasonably meaty three or four sentence paragraph, I’ll almost always tweak it and nudge it into shape before moving onto the next. Indeed, I quite often edit a sentence before I’ve even hit the final full stop.
Why so twitchy? Well, a few things. I’m a natural fidget. I’m not at the threshold for ADHD, but I’m certainly that way inclined. But also, I’m like my wife. She can’t quite be content in a messy or ugly room. She’ll always seek to remedy what can be remedied before she can really make herself comfortable and turn to whatever it is that brought her there.
Same with me and bad sentences. Asking me to write new text when there’s messy text just behind me? It doesn’t work. The nagging distraction of that baggy sentence, that poorly chosen word, will stop me fully attending to whatever’s next.
Here’s the start of an upcoming Fiona novel:
Imagine this.
A cold night. A scatter of snow. Not much, but there’s a fierce frost, so the hard surfaces around here – paving stones, gravel, brick walls, iron gates – are glazed with diamonds. No leaves left on the trees, or not many, but the tree trunks have an iced glitter, as though constructing some new armour.
The light? Not much. A little moon naked under scraps of cloud. Streetlamps shining their joyless yellow. The colour of the last rags of autumn, but dimmer. More suppressed. Draining colour, not revealing it.
In the street: no cars moving. Almost none parked, if it comes to that. On this street, the cars – the BMWs and the Mercs, the Range Rovers and the Teslas – are sheltered behind walls, in garages, protected by the red blinks of security alarms.
And a white van, its lights off.
And two people moving. Not quiet, but not loud. Not furtive, but efficient. Dressed dark, dressed warm. Which, in this weather, is also a way to say that their shapes and faces are lost, muffled, disguised.
That’s how the text looks now. It’ll change again before publication, but nothing there really annoys me.
Here’s my editing journey to get there:
Imagine this.
A cold night. A scatter of snow.
These words went down first thing and I haven’t changed them. The first two words are critical: it’s not normal Fiona-speak – she doesn’t normally address the reader in any way – but they matter here for a reason which will become clear much, much later.
The cold / scatter of snow details are – for me – nice and easy: that way of giving physical detail is an established part of the Fiona voice. I like it because the voice is clear and well-differentiated, but I also love it because it’s so compact. For those writers who are still slave to the “Gotta have a main verb” dictum, the same seven words would have come out a bit like this:
It was a cold night, with a scatter of snow on the ground.
To my mind, all the additional words there are essentially dull and add nothing. So if I were a slave-to-the-verb kind of writer, I’d have added juice. Something like this:
The night was cold, with a light scatter of snow hardening beneath the frost.
And, OK, I like that more, except I’m always bothered by the word ‘with’ in this context – it’s just a lazy way to add bolt detail onto an existing unit. So I’d probably have replaced the ‘with’, by writing:
The night was cold and an earlier scatter of snow now hardened beneath the frost.
I’d be pretty much happy with that now – ‘hardened’ feels more active and, literally, harder than ‘hardening’ – but as I say, my Fiona-voice just skips over all that hoopla, and delivers all the information in two sentence fragments boasting a combined 7 words.
Then we got to this bit:
Not much [snow], but there’s a fierce frost, so the hard surfaces around here – paving stones, gravel, brick walls, iron gates – are glazed with diamonds. No leaves left on the trees, or not many, but the tree trunks have an iced glitter, as though constructing some new armour.
I had to pick away at that bit to get it into shape. An earlier version used the word ‘frost’ twice and I kept wanting to glaze things.
The leaves on trees bit is sort of dull, except that the reader has no idea yet of time of year, so this was my way of telling the reader that we were in November, not January.
The list of hard surfaces – paving stones and the rest – is also dull, but it’s dull in a quiet suburban way, which is just right for the location. I do not love the ‘around here’ phrase. Where else would the hard surfaces be? So those two words need to go: an edit that still needs to happen.
I like the ‘some new armour’ image: that’s true to Fiona’s voice, but it also delivers a sense of battle-readiness.
The next paragraph also needed some tweaking and plucking:
The light? Not much. A little moon naked under scraps of cloud. Streetlamps shining their joyless yellow. The colour of the last rags of autumn, but dimmer. More suppressed. Draining colour, not revealing it.
Again, the first two sentence fragments (four words in total) just went down on the page and stayed there. The moon and cloud stuff is quite like me – I’ve probably used something like that phrase before – but I’m happy with it. Should it be a little moon or not? I don’t quite know, but it’s going to stay little for now.
Also (I’m only just noticing now; I don’t observe these things as I write) I especially like it that we have these themes of battle and vulnerability emerging from the text. Although we’re really just describing a theme, we already have a hint of battle (armour), a hint of vulnerability (a naked moon) and references to draining colour – a disguise, not a revelation. All this means that the description has a kind of sprung quality. Nothing dark has happened yet, but you already know this is a crime novel, not a romance.
Then I had to tinker quite a lot to get the next bit right. I want to paint the colour of a suburban street, with a little snow on the ground, not much of a moon, and sodium-type street lighting. I could just say ‘The street is it by yellowy-orange sodium lights’ or something like that. But the point isn’t really the colour, is it? It’s the feeling. And what is the feeling? Well, that’s the bit I had to struggle to get to.
What I’ve ended up with combines joyless, rags, dim, suppressed and draining colour. Listed out like that, it feels alarmingly single-note, but I think it works OK on the page. In effect, we start out with a colour description (‘joyless yellow’) then work through a chain of thought to figure out that what’s really happening here is an emptying out of colour, not any kind of addition.
Oh yes, and some editors would worry about the repetition of the word ‘colour’, but I’m not fussed. The repetition doesn’t feel accidental or obtrusive, so it’s fine with me.
And so on.
The two people in the white van dump a corpse in one of these wealthy suburban gardens and then vanish. The book is about the investigation and shenanigans that follow. The chapter doesn’t quite say ‘they dump a corpse’, but it gets reasonably close… and this is a crime novel, so readers assume (correctly) that murder is going to be on the agenda.
All this is how my editing process runs, always. It often starts before I hit a full-stop. It usually starts before I reach the end of a paragraph. It is very pedantic. It cares about two unnecessary words or a not-quite-perfect word choice.
It’s utterly hard-wired and instinctive. The act of writing and the act of editing are so conjoined, I don’t really think of them as separate.
I don’t consult a style manual for these edits. In the end, what drives me is a sense of dissatisfaction with bad text and happiness with good text. My whole writing-editing journey is just about making 1,000,000 tiny choices that move me from a mostly-grumpy place to a largely-happy one.
Next week, I’ll talk a bit about my more macro-edits. Till then, I have the moon to worry about. Little, or not little? Hmm…
***
FEEDBACK FRIDAY
For the next few weeks, instead of posting into the Feedback Friday forum, I want you to post into the Introduction To Self-Editing forum. Remember, to log in first. The task I set each week will correlate with what Debi Alper teaches in that week's lesson, so if you're not a Premium Member yet and want to get the video teaching that goes along with the task, you can join here, or purchase the course as a one-off here.
This week's assignment from the course:
Share a plot summary (can be written out as a synopsis or just with bullet points) in the forum. Point out where you think tweaks to structure, plot, and pace might be required, and see if others agree.
This month, we’re talking editing. Indeed, if you’re a Premium Member, I very much hope you’ll trot along to my live-editing workshop this coming Tuesday. (Log in and find details here. Not a member? Join us today.)
And I want to start the month with a short but important message. It’s one you already know, yes, but it’s a point we can all easily lose.
It’s this:
Writers are hopelessly vulnerable to Impostor Syndrome.
That might be part of our psychological make-up (dreamy, introverted, bookish) – but I don’t think it’s mostly that. Perhaps it isn’t that at all.
If I were a stone-walling guy, I’d drop my tools in the late afternoon and look at my day’s work and think, 'Yes, I just built that.'
If I were a drainage-contractor or a chimney-sweep, I could count my accomplishment in yards of drain unblocked, or so many vertical feet of chimney cleared. (I once cleaned my own chimneys, then set the house on fire, but it was only a little fire, and the fire brigade came, not once but three times, and the kids were all at home with friends, and got to watch everything, and the firemen let the kids try on their helmets and climb around the fire engine, and everyone had a very nice time.)
And, OK, lots of white-collar jobs can’t be measured by the yard, but there’s still a rhythm of feedback: client meetings, reports, ad campaigns, emails. What’s unusual about the job of novelist is that you have essentially two ways to measure accomplishment, the first of which is phoney and stupid and you know it to be those things. So, novelists can measure accomplishment, via:
Word Counts. Which gives you a sort of feedback, the way a dry stone wall gives you feedback as you build it, but if the words are sh*te, then the feedback is meaningless. And because you know that, you don’t trust the feedback. And because first drafts are first drafty, the words probably are sh*te, so you are right to be suspicious.
Book deals. And yes, a book deal comes with an actual contract, signed by a serious and moneyed counterpart. And there’s money. And there’s the whole hoop-la of publication. So this is serious, meaningful feedback. Same thing with self-pub: you don’t achieve meaningful sales unless your work has been good, so sales is also a metric that matters. But book deals come along once in a blue moon. I mean, if you produce a book a year and work with a standard two-book deal, then you only get confirmation that you’re not an idiot once every two years. That’s a very long time.
So authors get regular meaningless feedback (word counts) and very, very infrequent feedback that matters (book deal, or successful book launch.)
And a lot of what we do involves creating a bad first draft so we can then turn it slowly into a good final draft.
The result? Impostor Syndrome is endemic among writers. It’s endemic among proper published authors too. I know plenty of top 10 bestselling novelists who are pretty much guaranteed to feel like their work is hopeless before they (once again) do what they do and produce an excellent book.
The solution? There ain’t no solution, except to recognise the problem. You will feel that your work is inadequate, because – right now – it is inadequate. And that’s fine. That’s a stage we clamber through to get to adequate and then excellent.
The ladder from rubbish to excellent is Editing. It’s self-editing to start with and – even if you’re wise enough to get a Manuscript Assessment from us – it’s still self-editing after that, because it’s still you that has to choose how to react to your editor’s comments.
So. Write, edit, publish, repeat. You may only get meaningful feedback on your output about once a year. That’s just the way it is. Other indicators may not be accurate. You are not an impostor. You’re a writer.
FEEDBACK FRIDAY
We’ll get back to text-analysis next week, but this week, let’s just throw it open. Do you struggle with something like Impostor Syndrome? How do you solve it? Just open up about the issue; you’ll get a LOT of understanding, and you might find suggestions that help. Come and fake it till you make it here.
***
And look: in my defence, I did clean the chimney, and perfectly well. But some idiots had removed most of the flue, so the more I cleaned the chimney, the more the debris fell into a big pile of dry material that I couldn’t access, or see, or have any reason to believe existed. Two or three sparks and – fire. The kids arranged chairs as though for a pop-up cinema and watched the entire show with glee.
Til soon.
Harry
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Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. These cookies ensure basic functionalities and security features of the website, anonymously.
Cookie
Duration
Description
__cfduid
1 month
The cookie is used by cdn services like CloudFare to identify individual clients behind a shared IP address and apply security settings on a per-client basis. It does not correspond to any user ID in the web application and does not store any personally identifiable information.
__stripe_mid
1 year
This cookie is set by Stripe payment gateway. This cookie is used to enable payment on the website without storing any patment information on a server.
__stripe_sid
30 minutes
This cookie is set by Stripe payment gateway. This cookie is used to enable payment on the website without storing any patment information on a server.
cookielawinfo-checbox-analytics
11 months
This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Analytics".
cookielawinfo-checbox-functional
11 months
The cookie is set by GDPR cookie consent to record the user consent for the cookies in the category "Functional".
cookielawinfo-checbox-others
11 months
This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Other.
cookielawinfo-checkbox-advertisement
1 year
The cookie is set by GDPR cookie consent to record the user consent for the cookies in the category "Advertisement".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-necessary
11 months
This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Necessary".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-performance
11 months
This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Performance".
JSESSIONID
Used by sites written in JSP. General purpose platform session cookies that are used to maintain users' state across page requests.
PHPSESSID
This cookie is native to PHP applications. The cookie is used to store and identify a users' unique session ID for the purpose of managing user session on the website. The cookie is a session cookies and is deleted when all the browser windows are closed.
viewed_cookie_policy
11 months
The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. It does not store any personal data.
Functional cookies help to perform certain functionalities like sharing the content of the website on social media platforms, collect feedbacks, and other third-party features.
Cookie
Duration
Description
__cf_bm
30 minutes
This cookie is set by CloudFare. The cookie is used to support Cloudfare Bot Management.
Performance cookies are used to understand and analyze the key performance indexes of the website which helps in delivering a better user experience for the visitors.
Cookie
Duration
Description
_gat
1 minute
This cookies is installed by Google Universal Analytics to throttle the request rate to limit the colllection of data on high traffic sites.
GCLB
12 hours
This cookie is known as Google Cloud Load Balancer set by the provider Google. This cookie is used for external HTTPS load balancing of the cloud infrastructure with Google.
Analytical cookies are used to understand how visitors interact with the website. These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc.
Cookie
Duration
Description
_ga
2 years
This cookie is installed by Google Analytics. The cookie is used to calculate visitor, session, campaign data and keep track of site usage for the site's analytics report. The cookies store information anonymously and assign a randomly generated number to identify unique visitors.
_gid
1 day
This cookie is installed by Google Analytics. The cookie is used to store information of how visitors use a website and helps in creating an analytics report of how the website is doing. The data collected including the number visitors, the source where they have come from, and the pages visted in an anonymous form.
_hjFirstSeen
30 minutes
This is set by Hotjar to identify a new user’s first session. It stores a true/false value, indicating whether this was the first time Hotjar saw this user. It is used by Recording filters to identify new user sessions.
Advertisement cookies are used to provide visitors with relevant ads and marketing campaigns. These cookies track visitors across websites and collect information to provide customized ads.
Cookie
Duration
Description
NID
6 months
This cookie is used to a profile based on user's interest and display personalized ads to the users.
Other uncategorized cookies are those that are being analyzed and have not been classified into a category as yet.
Cookie
Duration
Description
_hjAbsoluteSessionInProgress
30 minutes
No description
_hjid
1 year
This cookie is set by Hotjar. This cookie is set when the customer first lands on a page with the Hotjar script. It is used to persist the random user ID, unique to that site on the browser. This ensures that behavior in subsequent visits to the same site will be attributed to the same user ID.
