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In today’s blog post, I’m going to be sharing the PERFECT way to plan your plot. It’s the method that trumps all other methods. If you’re not using this method, you’re doing it wrong. 

I joke. I joke. Don’t come at me. 

If you’ve been around the writing world for any length of time, you’ve probably come across all sorts of advice about how to plan your novel. Some people swear by spreadsheets and scene-by-scene breakdowns. Others can’t imagine plotting a single thing in advance, insisting that creativity comes from discovery, not planning. 

It can feel overwhelming, especially if someone claims a particular method is a game-changer and you try it, only to find it just…. doesn’t work for you. 

Here’s the truth: there is no single perfect way to plan your plot. 

And that’s not bad news. If you’re someone who came to this post hoping for a magical answer to your plot woes and feel disappointed, bear with me. The fact that there is no one perfect way to plan a novel is actually great news. 

Writing is personal 

Every writer has a different creative process. For some, plotting every beat in advance provides a safety net. For others, too much structure can feel like handcuffs. And a lot of us fall somewhere in the middle, enjoying a bit of guidance while leaving space for surprises. 

The most important thing isn’t to force yourself into a method that doesn’t feel right, but to experiment until you find the approach that helps you get the words on the page. 

Take me, for example. I’m editing my fifth book (fifth to be published, eleventy-billionth if you include the novels I tried to write before I got published), and even now I’m still experimenting with my process. I’ve tried hardcore plotting: My first and second books had spreadsheets that may have called my sanity into question. I’ve tried pantsing: My third book was written with a vague idea of the beginning and ending in mind. And I’ve tried doing a bit of both, which seems to work better for me, but even now I still experiment with how much plotting works for me. 

We’re about to dive into Build Your Book Month, which has a snazzy tagline of ‘outline your entire novel in 1 month’. This headline can sometimes scare people. They think, ‘I’m not a plotter so none of this will be relevant to me’. But the way we’ve designed this month is not to force a particular method on you, but to explore different aspects of story that you should think about before or as you write, whether that’s mapping it out in a spreadsheet or just turning ideas over in your head. 

Plotters, Pantsers, and everyone in between 

Writers often divide themselves into two camps: 

• Plotters carefully map out their stories before writing. They might use beat sheets, the Three-Act Structure, or even a chapter-by-chapter outline. They like knowing where the story is headed and feel more confident when they can see the big picture. 

• Pantsers (short for “seat-of-your-pants” writers) dive straight into drafting without a clear plan. They thrive on discovery, letting the characters take the lead and uncovering twists as they write. 

But a lot of writers actually live in the grey area between these extremes. Maybe you sketch a rough outline but let it shift as you go (this is what I do). Maybe you write the first act freely, then pause to outline the rest. The beauty is that there’s no wrong way to do it as long as it gets you writing. Maybe you plan out the direction of the story, but you do it all in your head before drafting that scene. 

During Build Your Book Month, you’ll get to experiment. Want to see how character flaws can generate plot? That’s exactly what Liz Monument will cover in Designing Characters That Drive the Plot. Curious how multiple POVs could work in your novel? My Multiple POVs Without the Chaos workshop has you covered. 

The point isn’t to pick sides. It’s to discover what blend of planning and discovery helps you finish your novel. 

The world's most successful bookstore.

As you know, I’ve got a lot of kids. (How many? Not sure. I haven’t counted recently.)

And – kids grow up. They read books, then move on. And in that wake lie scattered books about football, books about horses, books about fantasy realms, books about dragon taming, books about wizardry, books about witches, books about cats who fight, books about mischief-causing cats, books about entertaining cows, books about rabbits, books about fighting, and a whole mountain more.

We wanted to get rid of this scatter, to make more space on the shelves. We could have taken them to the dump, or to a charity store, but I hit on the idea of giving them away in the school playground. My bookstore was called:

GRABBIT & GO BOOKS

Its slogan was going to be ‘The world’s finest bookstore’ but, on reflection, we thought there was some room for argument, so we struck out the word ‘finest’ and replaced it with ‘cheapest’. The price of every book was £0.00, unless you were paying in dollars in which case we charged $0.00.

Our one real condition was that we didn’t want kids wandering off with just one book. We wanted to get rid of the things, so if a boy picked up a book about football, I shoved a stack of other football books at him, and he wandered away with ten.

(And by the way, if you are ever struggling with writer’s block, may I suggest you write the biography of a famous footballer? I’ll start you off:

Omar was sure that Mo would never be able to compete with these highly trained 18-year-olds. “Mo, you will never be able to compete with these highly trained 18-year-olds,” he said. “They are much bigger and stronger than you are.” But Mo simply grinned and juggled the ball. “You just watch, boss,” he laughed. He felt nervous at first, but then the game started. The skinny ten-year-old dribbled the ball round all 11 players on the opposition team and then dribbled around his own players too, a goat, and a Toyota pickup. He let fly a volley from the edge of the box. His kick was so strong, the ball tore through the net and was last seen overflying the Zambezi. Mo’s team ended up winning 109-0. At the end of the game, Omar chuckled and said, “With a little more training, you might be quite good one day.”

Write that same story, again and again, throw in something about a Champions League final, and make sure when somebody exclaims “Goal!”, they use at least 20 characters, including a great many exclamation marks.)

Picking books for kids is quite easy.

Boy with short hair? Football.

Older boy with shorter hair? Book about fighting.

Boy not interested in books on either topic? Diary of a Wimpy Kid.

Very young girl? Book about unicorns.

Young girl? Book about cats, horses or rabbits.

Older girl? Same thing, except make sure the cats are fighting.

Pre-teen girl? Book about teen girls committing / solving murder in a boarding school.

And zoom. The books went. I started with a fold-out picnic table so heavy with stacks of books that I didn’t have room for them all. I ended up with one carrier bag of discards which will probably, in time, find their way to a charity shop.

Reflections?

Well, first there was real excitement in the playground. Obviously, if I’d been giving away cakes, the cakes would have gone just as fast, but there’d have been less glee. A cake is only ever a cake. A book is a portal to – well, adventure. The unknown. It's a ship setting sail from a sparkling harbour. Giving books to kids was honestly one of my most joyous moments of the year.

Second: free works.

It just works. There’s joy in the giveaway. It’s not a tool that traditional publishers use very much, but it’s an indie author staple. Genre readers are – often, often, often – like kids. They want to find a new author that they can make theirs. Free is a way to shove your Book #1 novel to the top of their reading pile. And once it’s there, and once they’ve read it, there’s every chance they go on to buy everything else, full price, and happily. (And, uh, if you’re interested in self-publishing, I think we’ve got only two or three places left on the upcoming course. So, if you’re keen, pull your boots on.)

And third, lordy lord, all this loveliness does seem a little under threat.

Headline sales of print books remain basically static – up a bit in one year, down a bit in another – but since those headlines always exclude self-pub books, and since self-pub collectively is at least the size of Penguin Random House, it’s probable that overall sales today are close to all-time records.

So, yes, books sell and there’s not much sign of them not doing so.

But the cracks in the palace are big and getting bigger. Here’s a recent gloomy view from The Economist:

Students of literature at two American universities were given the first paragraphs of “Bleak House” by Charles Dickens and asked to read and then explain them. In other words: some students reading English literature were asked to read some English literature from the mid-19th century. How hard could it be?

Very, it turns out. The students were flummoxed by legal language and baffled by metaphor. A Dickensian description of fog left them totally fogged. They could not grasp basic vocabulary: one student thought that when a man was said to have “whiskers” it meant he was “in a room with an animal I think…A cat?” The problem was less that these students of literature were not literary and more that they were barely even literate.

Reading is in trouble. Multiple studies in multiple places seem to be showing the same thing. Adults are reading less. Children are reading less. Teenagers are reading a lot less. Very small children are being read to less; many are not being read to at all. Reading rates are lower among poorer children … but reading is down for everyone, everywhere.

The books that I gave away in the playground reflected that.

Those football books are, I’m sure, better for kids than video games, but they are a damn sight less enriching than (say) Susan Cooper, or Watership Down, or Lemony Snicket.

Books about conflict can be terrific, but they can also just be ugly. At one stage, my kids adored the Beast Quest series. (Adored them so much that I found them playing in the garden using six-foot wooden fenceposts as swords. I removed the posts and bought some plastic swords on Amazon, relieved to have escaped a trip to the emergency room.) But the series was ugly, ugly, ugly. It had no moral tuition in it. It was just slaughter. I didn’t give those books away; I destroyed them.

And behind those ugly books: an ugly publishing model. The books name ‘Adam Blade’ as an author, but multiple authors have written the series on (I would guess) a flat-fee basis. If I were one of those authors, I’d churn out the book as fast as I could. I’d deliver the book, get paid, move on. The purpose of that publishing model is almost literally to extinguish the author. I can’t really think why you’d hire authors these days, when you could simply AI the whole thing.

There are more wholesome approaches too. I don’t love the Wimpy Kid books, but they’re healthy enough and they get non-reading kids to read. So that’s a win. But the books are still responding to a basic sense of threat. They offer less, because they are aware that more will not be palatable.

The same things are true all the way across the scale. Some of the books my 12-year-old daughter reads have a level of worldliness and violence that I did not encounter in books until much later. But – today’s authors are fighting Netflix and phones and social media and video games. And, in a war, you have to fight. You can’t be picky about how you fight.

As for me? Well, my readers are predominantly women in the second half of life. That’s a literate, thoughtful demographic that it’s a pleasure to write for.

But the future me? The author writing this email in the Year of Our Lord 2075? I’m not too sure, but I’d bet that my present readers are better than his.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / Fight scene

OK, let’s have a fight scene. If you don’t have any physical conflict, then whatever comes closest. 250-300 words, plus title, genre, and any context you think we need. When you're ready, post your offering in Townhouse.

If you write like Philip Pullman, you get 100 points. If you write like Beast Quest, you are probably a robot.

Til soon.

Harry

Ooh, the pesky voice!  

When my debut novel NINE DOLLS won the Joffe Books Crime Prize in 2024, the judges said a lot of lovely things — but one line stuck with me: “It feels wholly original, with entirely its own voice.” 

I was both flattered and slightly stunned. Not because I didn’t want to believe it — but because it hadn’t come easily. I had to work hard for it: consciously, for instance across a whole week on the life changing Self-Edit Your Novel course run by the wonderful Debi Alper and Emma Darwin. But also subconsciously, as I questioned everything that my character ever did (or didn’t do), delving deeper into their mind. 

So, if you’re feeling a bit lost trying to “find your voice”, I promise you’re not alone. It doesn’t come in a flash of inspiration. It comes in layers. Below are a few things I learned along the way — my own list of Do’s and Don’ts—that helped me get closer to the kind of voice that felt, finally, like mine. 

Do...

1. Leave your fingerprint

Voice is like a fingerprint. It’s uniquely yours — formed by your scars, secrets, inside jokes, heartbreaks, and the way you see the world when no one else is watching. 

When I finally stopped trying to sound “literary” and started writing like I think — a bit messy, sometimes sharp, always curious — something shifted. The writing got warmer. It got truer. 

So, write from that place. Your voice is already in you — you just have to let it out without judgement. 

2. Gossip with your characters

You’ve probably heard that old writing exercise — take your character on a dinner date. Find out what they wear, eat, the music they listen to and all those good things. And yes, that’s important. But I’d urge you to go one step further: make them your gossip partner (or, even better, the subject of the gossip).  

That’s where the real gold is. What do they say behind someone’s back? What do they admit only when drunk? What do they pretend not to want? This is where character voice becomes textured and real — when you understand not just what your characters do, but why they do it. 

3. Say one thing, think another

This one was a game-changer for me: don’t let your characters say everything they think. Most of us have a filter — even the bluntest among us! We present one version of ourselves, while something else bubbles underneath. 

In fiction, we’re lucky: we get access to both the inside and outside of a character. Don’t be afraid to use it. Let your character say, “I’m so happy for you,” while thinking, I’d rather be hit by a truck than see you win again. That tension between outer words and inner truth? That’s the voice. That’s what makes it human. 

Rupa Mahadevan is an acclaimed author of psychological thrillers. Her debut novel, NINE DOLLS, won the Joffe Books Prize in 2024 and will be published on 25 September 2025. She grew up on the south-eastern coast of India and has lived on the south-eastern coast of Scotland for over 15 years. She now resides in Edinburgh with her husband and two children. When she isn’t working on Excel in her day job, she enjoys reading and imagining her own stories. 

Last week’s Feedback Friday asked for opening pages and (I’ve counted) about a quadzillion of you presented your openings.

And, as ever, there were good and bad and brilliant and baffling submissions across every genre and every possible topic. Also, as ever, a few themes came up for me as I ran my hands through this abundance.

One theme was: too fast, too fast, too fast, too fast!

Another was: too little, too little, too little!

I’ll get to what I mean in a moment, but first let’s remember what we want from that opening page.

We’re asking a busy person with 10,000 things in their head to leave the Real Actual World they live in and start to think about a person who never existed in a situation that never was. That’s a pretty loopy thing for anyone to want to do and they’re only going to want to do it if they care a bit about the character you’re presenting them with.

And yes, for the reader to care, they’ll need to know the story situation. (Aerobatic pilot engaged in a complex manouevre? Roman boy-king on the run for his life? Escaped witch hunted in a forest? Or whatever else.)

But before the story situation even matters, you have to do something else. You have to get the reader to believe that your person is real and that the world on which they tread is real. You have to start to grey out the reader’s Real Actual World and create one that is – or feels – more real.

So, creating a bond between reader and character: that’s the first thing.

The second has to do with establishing story, yes … but, right now, your entire project is a wee, fragile thing. You’re planting out your sweet-peas in early- or mid-May, a touch early, and the risk of frost (or a reader putting your book back on its pile in the bookstore) is still acute. So your story moves at this stage are careful, not huge. A foal can’t carry the load of a five-year-old hunter.

The typical story move for your opening section is therefore pretty small, pretty careful. Your main job here, lighting this candle, is simply to watch that the flame takes. The win here isn’t that you have a raging bonfire at the end of page one. The win is that the wick takes the flame and the flame establishes. Once it’s done so, you can make bigger, bolder moves in the confidence that the reader moves with you.

But that’s not quite all we ask from our openings.

The first-page reader is a sacred beast. The page-two-hundred reader? Pah! You can treat her like a fatted calf, to be pushed, prodded and barked around a muddy field. You can play rough games with that reader. She won’t mind.

But the first-page reader? Ah, this person is sacred, because they hold a bank card in their hand and they are trembling on the knife edge of desire. Will they buy or will they decline? They need to feel, somehow, from this opening page or two, that the story will deliver all that they want from it. And yes: this reader already has several sources of information. The way you’ve been shelved in a bookshop or on Amazon. The cover design. The title. The blurb.

So yes, those things help support a buy decision, but the opening page is the thing you ask to clinch it. So we need (A) the promise of a story big enough and moving enough to get the reader to part with some cash but (B) no moves so big that they break the developing relationship between reader and character.

Now that sounds like a contradiction, except that the reader is a skilled and subtle beast. They divine Big Story from tiny clues. And your third task with your opening page or two is: foreshadow the story that is to come.

The foreshadowing can certainly be oblique. It can reside in a mood, a sentence or two, a trivial incident, a handful of words. But (done right) you’ve passed a token from writer to reader: ‘I, the author, promise you that I will deliver on the story that you intuit (in some semi-conscious, hard-to-define) way. You can trust my future story, because my moves right now are so confident, so fully in control, you know I’m not going to mess up down the road.’

One very nice piece from Feedback Friday had a woman see a car that she recognised. The woman enters a pub to find its owner, but walks out again having not found him. That’s the very tiny (very newborn-foal-friendly) movement we start the novel with. But that tiny non-encounter nudges the character to remember her old tutor lying back in his seat and listening to the blues. The passage ended “I’d seen those eyes shut a few other times. I retract that he didn’t teach much; he taught me a thing or two.”

And poof! Even the dullest reader, even a clod with a headful of pudding, will intuit that there’s a love story here. And not too chaste either: we have blues music and sex and long afternoons with tumbled sheets all here … just barely mentioned.

That’s perfect.

So the too fast, too fast observation I started with comes down to writers hurrying to get their Big Story down on the page before the reader is really ready – before the reader has fully bonded with the character. The trouble with that hurrying speed is that the Big Story tends to crush the reader-character bond under its wheels. And the reader-character bond has to come first. Without that, nothing else exists or matters.

As for the too little, too little observation: there I want to say that some openings don’t do enough to gesture at the story that’s to come. They offer a Dramatic Incident, yes, but that Dramatic Incident doesn’t really do enough to guide me as to the shape of what’s to come.

And all this sounds complex, but it’s easy enough to do. Here, for not much reason except that the novel was to hand, is the opening of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited:

When I reached C Company lines, which were at the top of the hill, I paused and looked back at the camp, just coming into full view below me through the grey mist of early morning. We were leaving that day. When we marched in, three months before, the place was under snow; now the first leaves of spring were unfolding. I had reflected then that, whatever scenes of desolation lay ahead of us, I never feared one more brutal than this, and I reflected now that it had no single happy memory for me.

Here love had died between me and the army.

As the prologue continues, we learn that the narrator is a captain in the British Army of the Second World War. He’s about to move out of a Scottish training camp with his men.

That’s the bare situation and, yes, it’s interesting enough to sustain us and, yes, small enough that we don’t feel overcrowded by too much story too soon.

But look at those underlinings.

“Paused and looked back”: this whole book is a looking back, a reminiscence. Any novel written in the past tense is, technically, a reminiscence, but BR revels in its nostalgic gaze – makes a feature of it. (The time-of-war narrator looking back at his time-of-peace past emphasises the change in the world between Then and Now.)

“No single happy memory … loved had died”: this tells us that there’s a love story here, but an unhappy one, a failure.

That sounds rather bleak: why would you fork out for a book that’s all set to depress you? Except that I think there’s one more bit of (really lovely) foreshadowing which complicates that simple story. Because Waugh also says, “three months before, the place was under snow; now the first leaves of spring were unfolding.” That’s not a movement from happy to bleak; it’s the exact opposite.

So Waugh has given us two contradictory messages here. The most overt one is, “This is going to be a very bleak love story, with plenty of reminiscence.” But the secondary, almost hidden one is, “this is a story of growth, and bloom, and hope, and life.”

And, darn it, but that’s exactly what this book is: a sad love story (Ryder + Sebastian, and also Ryder + Julia) but also a very hopeful one (Ryder + God.)

Now, I wouldn’t suggest that writing a sad love story about God is a brilliant way to make sales in the 21^st century, but your story is what it is. Foreshadow that. Do it with wit. Do it obliquely. Do it with a sentence. Do it with an image. But do it gently. Don’t break the plant that hasn’t yet put down roots.

Got that? Good. Now execute.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / Opening page

Same exercise as last week.

If my yipper-yapper in this email has struck a chord, then revise that opening page. Upload that first 250-300 words (with title + genre) and write a line or two about what you’ve changed and why.

And you know what? Even if you’re dead happy with your opening, go ahead and edit that. Post in Townhouse here.

And remember:

1. Create the bond between reader & character
2. Move gently
3. Foreshadow the Big Story.

That’s enough of my yipper-yapper. Now up and at em.

Til soon.

Harry

Hello again! Welcome back to my series of insights into what it’s like to undertake the Ultimate Novel Writing Programme.  

Month six means I’m now halfway through the course. Time really does speed up when you’re having your mind stuffed full of wonderful writing skills. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the halfway-through-the-course milestone is marked with the topic of ‘Pacing and Tension’...  

A critical story requirement, ‘Pace and Tension’ is the stuff that compels a reader to begin reading, keeps them turning pages to the end and, ideally, still hooked on the story beyond the final page. It’s what inspires us to implore our friends that they simply must read this book, too. It is the stuff of publishing lore. It’s what marks out the okay story from the brilliant story.  

Gaining expertise in this month’s topic of writing-wizardry is relevant for all writers and all stories. I’m writing within the literary genre and so might be tempted to think that this month’s topic sounds a bit too genre-trope-driven. But I’d be wrong. Whilst my stories may not feature a murder, a city-centre car chase or a cat-stroking international criminal, they still need to intrigue and compel, evoke movement and transformation. What author doesn’t dream of the fabled ‘a real page turner, kept me hooked to the end’ type of five-star review?

There are many methods by which it’s possible to engender that compulsion to find out what’s going to happen, and it’s clear we’re to be schooled in all of them this month: how to reveal and withhold information; how to ratchet pace up and slow it down (which you might think decreases tension, but can, if deployed effectively, increase it); how to raise the stakes for the character and ensure that each scene plays a role in keeping the reader locked in.  

We’re also being reminded of how every single month’s topic leading up to this point has prepared us. For instance, the choice of how to structure the timeline of a story plays a significant role in building pace and intrigue - something we learned about in Month 1, ‘Planning’. Month 2's ‘Point of View’ choices - third person / first person / unreliable narrator – are another core technique. Come Month 3, we were learning about how choices regarding setting were vital to lift and deepen our stories: another useful mechanism for controlling pace and curiosity. Months 4 and 5 dealt with ‘Character’ and ‘Emotions & Senses’ – the starting point for any story tension. An unrelatable, boring character always stalls tension and damages pace, no matter how many craft tricks an author throws into the mix. 

So, yes, we are at the midpoint of the course - classically the pivotal moment in a novel, or as James Scott Bell (author of Write Your Novel From the Middle) put it, “…the moment that tells what the novel or movie is really about.”  

It’s a point of no return; arguably the biggest turning point of the story. It’s where characters discover what they truly need versus what they thought they wanted. At the very least, it is the point at which the reader understands this. With the midpoint, we get deeper stakes, sharper goals and consequences closing in, with characters having no choice but to move from reaction to intentional action.  

And, in a moment of beautiful synchronicity this midpoint has applied to me, as a student of the Ultimate Novel Writing Programme, too. Recently, my tutor, Andrew Miller – himself no stranger to writing deeply compelling page turners, as evidenced by his latest longlisting for the Booker Prize – asked me a simple question. One that is, in fact, a core question my story needs to answer if I am to be successful in the tension and pace stakes: “But, what is [the main character] going to do with her [ESP type] skills?”  

I gave him an answer, of sorts. But Andrew’s question stayed with me. It niggled at me, and nagged, and niggled some more – and I realised my first answer was not good enough. It had dealt with important aspects of characterisation and themes but didn’t answer how I was raising the stakes or fundamentally changing how my character turned up in the world. What to do…?  

Ah-hah! In due course, the perfect plot device popped into my mind – a set of scenes showing specific actions which demonstrate a tonal shift, the character’s emotional crystallisation from relative despondency to determination, the provocation to utilise her set of special skills and the consequences which round out the story arc and her emotional journey. I duly emailed Andrew with my corrected answer and received an encouraging ‘go-for-it’ reply. 

I think this is why the Ultimate Novel Writing Programme often ends up being the turning point in many author’s careers. At the same time as I’m learning about turning points in the craft (and writing about them in this here blog) I’m given a turning point all of my very own. Real life proof that points of no return do happen; movement forward, beyond perceived boundaries, boosts to my writerly heart, girding my conviction to keep on keeping on writing, seeking to be the best writer I can be.  

The tweak to my character’s plot is wholly my idea, but I got there because of a wise and timely question posed by an author and tutor who is steeped in experience about how stories, and lives, may turn upon such tiny moments.  

This month’s Ultimate Novel Writing Programme topic has already paid me its dividends: improving the potential of my manuscript. All I’ve got to do is go write it. Simples!  

Until next time… 

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.

My (kindly) 12-year-old daughter’s two favourite insults for me at the moment are:

“You’re lucky! You remember the dinosaurs.”

“You’re famous! You’re the before photo in a men’s fitness magazine.”

On the latter – hmph. I’m a man of steel, and have the blood results to prove it. On the former? Well, yes, I’ve kicked around a lot longer than my 12-year-old know-it-all, and it IS true that back in the day, getting published involved this:

Step 1                  Write an excellent book

Step 2                  Buy a physical (!) directory of agents. Pick some names at random.

Step 3                  Send a submission pack out. Wait. Then either win or lose

There was not meaningfully a self-pub option. There was no meaningful self-pub option.” Absolutely no one thought I should have a Twitter profile or a website or anything of the sort. My job description was: Write good books and (a long, long way short of that requirement) Be available for 2 weeks of publicity around launch, though even then most books got no publicity at all, so for a lot of authors, that requirement was rather easily met.

And these days?

Well, the list of requirements can seem endless.

Twitter. Insta. Facebook. BookTok.

Mailing lists, reader magnets, Bookfunnel, autoresponders.

Marketing plans.

If you’re self-pubbing, then the list gets more extensive yet. Facebook ads. Amazon ads. Amazon attribution. Canva. Dashboards. Image libraries. Promo sites. Newsletter swaps.

I’ve not even touched the edge of what people are told they ought to do.

So – and here roareth the dinosaur – what’s actually the least you can get away with? How much of this stuff is really necessary and how much is just a breathless Internet trying to eat your life?

The answer depends, of course, on whether you’re trad or self-pub, the requirements for the latter being significantly greater.

The lazy trad author

You need to write a really excellent book. No shortcuts there. Not with book #1 and never afterwards.

When you’re starting out, you are likely to want / need a course to build your skills and a manuscript assessment to develop your manuscript itself (and also for a basic reality check in terms of quality.)

Obviously, we sell those good things, so I’m hardly unbiased, but I think it’s a rare author who engages seriously with a good course or manuscript feedback who doesn’t come out much improved as a result. I’m not saying that these things are essential – just that most of you will find them very useful.

You also need a competent submission pack: a query letter to 10-12 well-chosen literary agents, a good synopsis, 10,000 (ish) words of good opening chapter.

Because the knowledge of how to do these things competently is much more widely disseminated now, I’d say the basic quality standard has certainly risen. It’s harder, these days, to get an agent with a lousy query than it was. Even so: what matters is the book. The rest of it is still not crucial.

And …?

And nothing. No Twitter account? I don’t care. No FB, no Insta, no stupid TikTok? Fine, I don’t care. Agents won’t either.

No mailing list? Well, I’d advise you to have one, but you can always do that later and it’s a good-to-have. It’s not essential. It’s certainly not something you need

Website? Well, yes, you should probably have one, but I don’t care if it’s one page long and not very informative. If you spend one afternoon on Squarespace, you’ll do fine.

Yes, publishers would love you to have a YouTube channel with 1,000,000+ views in the last year, but who cares? What matters is the book, the book, the book, the book. It’s not really a secret that lots of authors are introverts who love marketing as much as they love pushing plastic picnic forks into their toes, and publishers are happy to work with said introverts. It’s the book that matters.

These days, honestly, the chores facing the Modern Lazy Author (Trad variety) are not really more onerous than they were 20+ years ago.

The Somewhat Lazy Indie Author

You can’t actually be a lazy indie author – or, rather, you can: you’ll just be one with rather modest book sales.

So the things you need to look after are:

A splendid book. You can’t sell rubbish. The book still matters most, most, most.

A copy edit. I don’t mind if you seek out low budget options (a very picky friend, for example), but you can’t sell a badly edited book these days. I do honestly think that a manuscript assessment will help almost any first time indie author, simply because quality is the overwhelming objective here

A book cover: hire a pro. Spend what you need. Fuss over this. Get it right.

A website: keying off that book cover in terms of look and with a really good, functional newsletter signup page. Again, half a day on a popular website builder is plenty.

A mailing list. You can’t not do this. You need a reader magnet, a mailing list provider (I suggest MailerLite) and a delivery service (Bookfunnel; there’s no real contest here.)

Use of book promo sites around launch. This is simple. An hour or two is all you need.

A Facebook author page. I don’t mind much how inert it is. Busy and popular is better, of course, but I don’t bother and I do fine.

Facebook ads that work. Setting your system up takes time, but after that simply monitoring those ads should take only about an hour a week. Less is actually more here: too much tinkering will impair, not improve, performance.

Amazon ads are, in my view, kinda optional – and they only really work when everything else is humming. So for the Lazy Author scoping out what lies immediately ahead, I’d say that AA isn’t something to worry about for now.

That feels like a long and arduous list, but you note that I don’t ask you to engage with social media at all (except via ads.) And most of that list involves set-up chores, not maintenance chores. If you want to maintain that lot with 1 hour a week (Facebook) + 3 hours a month (mailing list) + 2 weeks of work around launch, then that’s genuinely plenty. Write a great book, then write another and another and another. Keep the marketing stuff low demand. That’s a plan that works just fine.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / Opening page

OK, an oldie but a goodie.

First 250-300 words of your book please. Minimal intro about what we’re about to read. (Give us a title and a genre, but nothing else.) When we read this opening, I want feedbackers to put themselves in the place of an agent. Your questions are: “Would I read more of this? Am I excited? Do I feel this writer has authority, that I trust them to tell this story?”

That’s the mission. Any questions? No? Then go for it. Post in Townhouse here.

Til soon.

Harry

I’ve been in the novel game for over twenty years now and let me tell you – times are tough. New writers and veterans alike are saying the same, whether they’re meeting for real-life lattes or virtual hugs: 

It’s never felt quite this brutal. 

Hooky new pitches get ignored, deals take months to finalise or are withdrawn at the last moment, publication and payments are delayed. And, worst of all, everyone seems to be ghosting each other. 

And yet… and yet, the knockout deals are still being done – and often it’s the debut writers, with no patchy sales records to put off agents or publishers – who are hitting the book trade headlines. 

But how many talented writers give up before getting to the deal stage, because the silence has ground them down? Or hear from friends about how tough it is, and decide not to submit at all? 

And how do you hold onto the passion that first drove you to write? As someone who has faced this as an author myself – and helped many writers to overcome the hurdles to get published, here are my GHOSTS golden rules for overcoming rejection (and its even meaner cousin, total indifference).

Gamify

if you reward yourself for taking more steps or eating more veg, approach querying in the same way. Focus not on finding the dream agent – who might be busy, or ill, or just plain rude – but on the numbers. Imagine there’s an app (maybe you want to make one) giving you rewards at 10, 50, 100 rejections – work out what the rewards are and look forward to reaching each milestone. 

Helicopter view

The ghosting is not about you. Zoom out and you’ll be able to see the context here – fewer editors are handling more books so they’re under more pressure. Even the best agents are being ghosted themselves. Concerns about AI, book piracy and shrinking profits make the snail-like publishing world even more glacial. 

Experienced authors like me – I was first published in 2003 – have seen how a previously polite industry doesn’t have time for ‘good’ manners. Maybe that’s a good thing, maybe not. But as authors we have to adapt our mindset to keep our sanity. Part of that is about keeping informed about the industry – knowledge is power. 

Obsess

Obsess about your work, not their response (or lack of it): you can’t control their reactions, any more than you can persuade someone to date you if they don’t feel that spark. But what you can do is present yourself and your query in the most captivating way possible. So every time you do a new pitch, aim to improve the hook, or ensure the opening chapters are designed to make the reader – in this case, your potential agent – need to know what happens next. Obsess over everything from the email subject – and whether your book’s title could be even stronger – to the comps and sign-off.    

I’ve had a couple of emails recently that I think have deserved a wider response. Here’s one:

“Please could you possibly say a little more about why the first example is ‘orrible and the second is OK. When does dialect become patronising? It’s a tricky thing to get right.”

And good: this is a good question, not least because these issues have become excessively fraught.

So here is an example of transcribing a character’s voice in a patronising way:

“Eet eez ’orrible to ’ear ze proud Frensh race beleettled in zis stooped manner.”

But what the character involved has actually said here is:

“It is horrible to hear the proud French race belittled in this stupid manner.”

The first sentence, by transcribing its pronunciations in a very literal way, makes the speaker come across as ludicrous – cartoony, a circus clown with a striped jumper, a string of onions and a comical moustache. But what’s actually comical? The sentence itself displays perfect command of English, and what’s being apparently laughed at here is an accent, over which the speaker has very little control.

And, golly gosh, that’s a slippery slope.

Most people writing a non-English character in this way will (if English) speak roughly RP, or Received Pronunciation – in effect, roughly what a BBC newsreader used to sound like. In the US, it’s much the same thing, except that the reference dialect is Standard American English.

(And, please note, in RP English, we say “She placed the glahss on the grahss next to her great big – handbag.” But we wouldn’t even conceive of inserting the letter H into the two italicised words to mark the weird pronunciation. Nor do we adjust the spelling to take care of the flat “a” sound in American and North-British versions of those words. So when it comes to our weird pronunciations, we don’t even think of trying to reflect them in spelling.)

And of course, as soon as you start to accord any kind of typographic privilege to a particular accent – whether RP or SAE – you get into all sorts of bother.

It’s one thing to have a comical Frenchman – France is a nuclear power and can look after itself – but do you really want to apply the same diminishing treatment to, say, a black resident of Harlem? Or a Scouser? Or a northern woman of Pakistani heritage? Or a Mexican immigrant?

The answer, if you haven’t already figured it out is, No, certainly not. Don’t go there. Step away from the quirky spellings.

That’s partly because of a perfectly legitimate anxiety about racism.

But it’s also just a recognition of modern linguistics. The RP / SAE dialects are simply two dialects amongst many, many others. They don’t come with a halo over them that says, “the king/President speaks this way, so this version is right and everything else is wrong.” The fact is that we all speak the dialect of our culture and each dialect has no more or less validity than the next.

That’s not just true of pronunciation. It’s true of grammar too. Any significant dialect has its own grammar, which may differ from SAE / RP grammar (which, by the way, each differ from each other.) So African-American Vernacular English has its own strict rules of grammar, that are just different from SAE – and not just different, but with subtleties that SAE struggles to cope with. SAE has four basic past tenses: I did buy it, I have bought it, I bought it, I had bought it. AAVE has five, but differently structured: I been bought it, I bought it, I done bought it, I did buy it, I do buy it.

What does all this tell us?

It tells us (duh!) that other people may speak differently from us.

It tells us (duh!) that it’s not respectful or, in fact, linguistically accurate, to privilege one set of accents or grammars over another.

And that means that the solution for a novelist is quite easy:

1. Don’t try to capture nuances of accent in the way you transcribe speech. We don’t write “grahss” if we try to capture how the king of England speaks. We don’t write “eet eez ’orrible” if we try to capture how President Macron expresses himself.
2. Do use the actual words that your character uses. President Macron is probably more likely than the rest of us to use the word voila even when speaking English. And if he says it, that’s what you write. Likewise, if a Black American character says finna (a contraction of fixing to or going to) then that’s the word you write down. It IS a word; it just isn’t an SAE / RP word. Don’t patronise your characters by editing their speech.
3. Do use the grammar that your character adopts. So if your character is African-American, she might say ‘I done bought it’, in which case you write, ‘I done bought it.’
4. For that matter, most of us are perfectly adept at code-shifting, so that same character might speak using AAVE when at home with her mother, but might use SAE when (say) running for President of the United States. And if your character code-shifts, you code-shift right along with her.
5. The same goes for English spoken as a second language. Let’s say your novel features a top French footballer, who possibly now plays for Real Madrid. Perhaps that footballer says, “I do not chase after the records.” No native English speaker would naturally put the word “the” into that sentence, and nearly all English footballers would say “don’t” rather than “do not.” So you don’t need to do anything as condescending as write “Eet ees ’orrible” in order to hear the Frenchness in the speaker. You just have a careful ear for those non-native uses and let the reader intuit the rest. They definitely will.

I think the only time this is liable to get complicated is in relation to languages that are highly related to English, but aren’t actually English.

A lot of you will have encountered the broad Yorkshire speech of Wuthering Heights. This for example:

'What are ye for?' he shouted. 'T' maister's down i' t' fowld. Go round by th' end o' t' laith, if ye went to spake to him.’

Would that be better with “the master’s down in the fold”? And well – I don’t know. You can call it both ways. The modern tendency would be to eliminate some of the non-standard spelling, but in Bronte’s day, the fact was that broad Yorkshire dialect (“Tyke”) was pretty much a language to itself, related to English in much the same way as Robert Burns’ Scots is. In which case – honour the language. Give it leg room. That’s what I chose to do with my Orcadian sailor, Caff, and deliberately wrote a version of Orcadian that was damn close to impenetrable to an ordinary reader.

And if you want to do that then, (a) have fun! It’s really entertaining. And (b) get it right. I don’t speak Orcadian, I’m not Scottish, and I’ve never been to the Orkneys. So I did the best that I could with books and online resources … then wrote to the editor of an Orkney newspaper and asked for her help. She was very happy to give that to me, and I was very happy to receive it, and my readers have the joy of having a little bit more Orcadian in their lives: something we all need.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / Non-standard speech

Before the task, I need to say that, in recent weeks I’ve been more remote from lovely Feedback Friday (FF) than I’d like to have been. That’s because of some tedious but time-consuming life nonsense that – I trow and I trust – is now mostly behind me. So, I’ll be getting back to FF with more vigour in the coming weeks.

And this week? Let’s just take a look at any chunk of text where you have a character speaking in a non-RP/SAE way. So that could be a regional or other dialect. Or it could be a non-native speaker. Or someone with cognitive difficulties. Or a talking animal. Or a professor in a kids book gabbling at a mile-a-minute. When you're ready, log in to our shiny new Townhouse and post yours here.

Dig out your chunks, and let’s have a look, innit?

Til soon.

Harry