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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 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

Hi, I’m Laina, and I write historical fiction as L M West. I’d been researching a woman accused of witchcraft here in Suffolk in 1645, and was just wondering what to do with everything I’d found out when lockdown hit. I’d thought of writing a leaflet for our local museum, but everything was on hold. So I thought I’d have a go at writing a novel: a childhood dream!

I was 66 years old, with no idea where to start – just a story in my head. I enrolled for two short online courses with Curtis Brown Creative, and at the same time joined Jericho Writers and watched a lot of their ‘How to’ videos. All this was invaluable, but when my first book was written, I had to decide what to do.

I’d assumed I’d take the traditional publishing route, but the more I read about that, the more I realised it was not for me. I didn’t want the pressure of deadlines, possible title changes, major editorial changes and someone else doing the cover art.

I watched all the Jericho Writers videos on self-publishing, which helped me to understand that it’s not for the faint-hearted. There is a huge amount to learn, particularly about things like layout, formatting, cover design and editing. Naively, I thought that writing a book was the hardest bit – how wrong I was!

Four years later, I have self-published four novels. The fifth is being edited at the moment. My books sell steadily, and I am very happy with my chosen path to publication. I sometimes wish I could hand the novels over to someone else and let them sort them out, but I get a huge sense of achievement and satisfaction from doing it myself.

Based on my experiences so far, here are my top tips for anyone else considering self-publishing.

Be realistic #1 - If you are not tech-savvy, it will make life harder.

You may need help, and you will have to pay for this.

Get your book professionally formatted.

You can employ people to do it for you, but I compared costs and decided to invest in Vellum. I’ve been very pleased with it. You put a Word file into it, and it sorts the layout for you. It was expensive, but I worked out that if I wrote two or more books, I’d have recouped the cost. I’m now quids in!

This is the big one...

Get a professional editorial report.

You need it, your book needs it, and your readers will thank you for it. I have used Jericho Writers editorial services for every book I’ve written, and they’ve been invaluable. It can be gutting – my first report suggested that I lose the first fifteen chapters of my novel as the action didn’t get started until chapter sixteen! I cried, threatened to give up, swore I was no good at writing, that it had all been a waste of time… but I came back to it a month later, chopped off the initial chapters as suggested, and started from there. And you know what? My editor was absolutely right! It was a much better book for it.

Interested in self-publishing your own novel? Then don't miss your chance to apply for this autumn's Simply Self-Publish course! Taught by indie expert Debbie Young, it offers a comprehensive guide to preparing your work for publication, building your author brand and marketing your books successfully.

Dialogue is one of the most important components of almost any novel. It performs a variety of vital functions, illuminating character, adding pace and driving plot – but writing it badly is one of the quickest ways to pull readers right out of your story.  

By badly, I mean inauthentically. Unrealistically. Writing dialogue that sounds nothing like real speech (or is simply not believable – on which more, later) is sure to inspire head-scratching at least, and wholesale abandonment of your novel at worst.  

So, here are five tips for making sure your characters’ speech truly sparkles.  

1. Mimic real speech patterns  

Engage in a little active listening. By which I mean, go to your local coffee shop, supermarket or pub and… eavesdrop a bit. Pay attention to how real people talk, and you’ll quickly notice that speech is full of uncertainty, informalities and interruptions. People frequently forget what they’re saying and drift wildly off topic. They also allow emotions to overtake their ideas, often becoming less articulate as their feelings heighten.  

You need to replicate this in your writing. While your characters should probably be more eloquent and less meandering than the average Tesco shopper (I’ll explain why in a minute), they also need to sound human.  

Consider the difference between one old friend asking another “Would you like a cup of tea?” or “D’you want a cuppa?” To me, the second feels far more natural.  

Using contractions is a key way to ensure your dialogue comes off as authentic (assuming you’re writing contemporary characters). True fact: I once abandoned a book I was partway through because every time a character should have said ‘don’t’, they said ‘do not’. It drove me to distraction. 

Also, think about how different the following exchange would be if the two characters I’ve invented for it were taking polite turns to speak, instead of cutting across one another:  

“That was a step too far, Alison.”  

“Too far? Rubbish. I didn’t go far enough.”  

“Careful, or you’ll leave me no choice but to – ” 

“Fire me? You can’t. I quit!”  

“Now see here, you can’t just – ” 

“Goodbye, Roger. And good luck. I think you’ll need it.” 

This back-of-an-envelope example hopefully demonstrates the point. Even with no dialogue tags or description, the rhythm of the conversation makes clear the power balance between these two people has just shifted. Alison is no longer prepared to put up with Roger’s nonsense, whatever it may be. Good for her, I say.  

2. Strike a sensible balance 

On the other hand, you can make your dialogue too realistic. If your characters spoke in precisely the way real people do, they’d bore your readers to tears. On the page, the sort of small talk most of us regularly engage in falls utterly flat – so avoid writing pointless chit-chat. 

You can’t afford to include speech that doesn’t advance your readers’ understanding of your characters, help you establish setting or propel your plot. Craft dialogue that’s articulate and efficient enough to deliver against one of these objectives, but not so perfect it feels jarring or too on-the-nose.  

3. Consider context 

If you’re the right age to have watched the TV show Dawson’s Creek, you’ll remember the furore around its dialogue, too. The criticism thrown at its writers was that they had a crop of teenagers striding around Massachusetts using the sort of vocabulary you’d expect from mid-lifers with English Literature PhDs. It was derided as unrealistic, though that didn’t stop me tuning in…