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The best thing about finishing your book in 2026 is the staggering array of options for reaching your readers. But here’s the catch: if you pick the wrong route, you could face a detour into disappointment or, worse, a total dead end. Knowing which path to take is daunting. As an author who has navigated the Big 5, worked with agile indies, and self-published my own hits, I’ve seen the pitfalls and the shortcuts. So, fasten your seatbelt. Let’s plot the route that suits your book’s unique DNA.

1. The Watercooler Wonder

Is your novel driven by juicy moral dilemmas or a what if hook that demands to be debated? Agents and publishers call this ‘upmarket’ or ‘book club’ fiction. It’s the sweet spot where commercial pacing meets literary depth. Because these books rely on word-of-mouth and physical visibility, the right publisher is essential.

• Your Destination: A major traditional imprint. You need their sales and marketing teams to get your book into high-street windows and supermarket shelves where reading groups congregate. The prestige can also help you score screen and translation deals.
• Question to ask yourself: When I tell people the elevator pitch, do they immediately start arguing about what they would do in my character’s shoes? If yes, you’ve got a Watercooler Wonder.

2. The Hot Take

Is your book inspired by a TikTok trend, a current news event, or a cultural moment that’s white-hot right now? Trends move at the speed of swipes. And trad publishing, which can take 18 months or more from contract to shelf, is way too slow.

• Your Destination: An agile Indie press or high-quality self-publishing. You need a route that values speed-to-market so your story or guide lands while the conversation is still happening.
• Question to ask yourself: Will the central theme of this book feel so last year next year? If the answer is yes, embrace the heat and move into the fast lane.

3. The Binge-worthy Brand

Are you a prolific writer of romance, cosy mystery, or high-octane thrillers with six more plotted out? Then you could become a brand that appeals to hungry genre readers, who’re dying for the next book from their new favourite author. To succeed here, you need to be up-front and online.

• Your Destination: A digital-first specialist. They can use metadata, rapid-release schedules, and direct-to-reader lists to make your name a brand. Many also do translations because these stories can go global.
• Question to ask yourself: can I imagine a whole shelf full of books with the same huge appeal, rather than crafting one title at a time? If you’re a storytelling machine, and write the pages as fast as a reader will turn them, a digital partner could match your speed and ambitions!

4. The Cult Classic

Are you writing life-changing non-fiction, a specialised memoir, or a genre so specific it hasn’t hit the mainstream yet (Dinosaur Detectives, anyone)? If your audience is small but incredibly passionate, a big publisher might not make the sums add up. But for you, ‘niche’ is a superpower. You don't need a million readers; you need the right five thousand.

• Your Destination: Self-publishing or a bespoke small press. And you can use non-fiction content beyond books, in audiobooks, courses or paid Substack posts.  Selling direct also means you keep more profit.
• Question to ask yourself: Do I already know exactly where my readers hang out online because I am one of them? Then you don't need a gatekeeper to show you the way – or take any of your royalties! Cult books thrive on indie energy.

5. The Voice of a Generation

Is it your unusual, captivating, or experimental prose that everyone comments on first? Sometimes the hook isn't the plot—it's the way you see the world. Literary fiction or experimental memoir requires a prestige route where the brand is built on critical acclaim and awards.

• Your Destination: A literary specialist: either a boutique imprint within a big house or a prestigious independent press. They have the kudos to get your book into the hands of prize jurors and critics.
• Question to ask yourself: Is my book’s greatest strength its voice or rarity? If so, you want to find an editor with the same passion.

Remember too that books can change lanes. I first self-published my 5:2 books but conventional publishers soon made an offer that got them in stores and translated into multiple languages!

The path to publication isn't a straight road; as writers, we now have to power to pick and choose the route that matches our writing and our deepest bookish desires. Pick well and you’ll find your dream destination…

Want to dive deeper into finding your route? I'll be at the London Festival of Writing this year exploring these decisions in two panels: 'Deciding what route to publication is right for you' and 'Writing in Multiple Genres.' And if you're leaning toward the traditional route, my Path to Publication course starting 20 April 2026 walks you through crafting the query letters and synopses that open those doors.

People planning to self-publish are often advised to target a commercial genre and write a book that matches its readers’ expectations. Many indies have built successful careers on that principle, e.g. JD Kirk, Rachel Maclean and LJ Ross. However, self-publishing can also be a brilliant channel for non-commercial manuscripts in small niche markets that you want to get into the hands of readers for your own reasons. 

For example, you may have had a remarkable life experience that you’d like to share to benefit or inspire others. Or you might wish to leave a printed written record of your family or local history for the benefit of future generations. Unless you’re a celebrity, such projects are unlikely to appeal to traditional publishers, whose business model is to acquire only those books that will make a significant profit on their investment in editing, design, production, and marketing.  

As an indie author who calls the shots, you are free to publish whatever you like, regardless of profitability. Profit and sales are not the only justifications for self-publishing. Professor Dr Alison Baverstock, teaching the publishing degree at Kingston University, once said self-publishing can be justified even for a print run of a single copy. Scale and financial gain aren’t everything.   

Indeed, some of the most rewarding self-publishing projects I’ve been involved with have been low budget and low profit. In some cases, the resulting books haven’t even been put up for sale, but given away.  

My very first self-publishing project was a collection of blog posts raising awareness and understanding of what it’s like to live with Type 1 Diabetes, which affects my husband and our daughter, and by extension our whole family. No commercial publisher would have touched it, but it was a sufficiently worthwhile project to gain endorsement from the CEO of JDRF, the Type 1 Diabetes charity, and BBC Radio 4 Today anchor Justin Webb, whose son had recently been diagnosed with Type 1.  

More recently, I self-published a funny little novella – a quirky blend of second-chance romance, magical realism, and a tribute to the beauty of the Cotswold countryside in spring, and a complete departure from my established line of cosy mystery novels. Mrs Morris Changes Lanes (the title a cheeky take on Christopher Isherwood’s classic Berlin novel, Mr Norris Changes Trains) was so niche a proposition that I knew it wouldn’t sell in huge quantities, but I loved the story so much that I was prepared to invest in a beautiful hand-drawn cover by Rachel Lawston (www.lawstondesign.com) and a professional edit by Alison Jack, who had provided design and editorial services for all my self-published books. I was very proud of the resulting books. The novella took years to break even, but I’m so glad I had the skills and courage to make it happen.  

I was also involved with a series of local history books in my home village, for which I was one of the contributing writers. We had a very limited target market: local residents and the village diaspora. Yet sales have not only covered production costs, but made enough profit to fund substantial donations to local causes. 

I’ve worked on two books produced to be given away, both memoirs of terminally ill men who wanted to turn their typescripts into printed books before they died. Perhaps the most rewarding moment of my whole self-publishing career was receiving a photo of one of these gentleman with a huge smile on his face as he held the printed proof of his book. He died the next day. 

I’m delighted that two alumni of my Simply Self Publish course have recently used what they’ve learned to launch their own very valid niche book projects of their own: John Goodall’s The Infallible Fortune Teller, a widower’s memoir about his marriage to an Iranian, and Stella Darvey Joory’s Rachel: A Life in a Turbulent Country, a biographical novel based on the life of her mother. “This book was my life’s work,” says Stella.  

So, if you have a passion project that you’d like to share with the world, I hope these case studies convince you that self-publishing could be just what you need to turn your vision into reality.  

Find out more about the Simply Self Publish course here (insert link). Registrations are now open for the next course, which will run April-June. I look forward to hearing about your self-publishing ambitions.  

© Debbie Young 2026 

Last chance to register for the Spring 2026 Simply Self Publish course, which kicks off 7 April. To find out more, check out the course and brochure here.

There is a fair amount of – understandable – authorial concern about what publishers actually want.

Do they just want to follow the same-again-but-slightly-different formula? So if werewolves and vampires are all the rage, are publishers cynical enough simply to want a same-again W + V story but with a twist (set in an Inuit village, set in Edwardian London, told through the voice of a were-druid)?

Or are publishers more Zen than that? Do they wait with an open mind, not asking or expecting anything from the next manuscript they open, just waiting to see if this new tale feels new and amazing and just insistent on being published?

Because there’s reasonable support for both hypotheses, you’ll see plenty of online chat amongst writers debating this question.

But the answer is simple, and encouraging. It’s simply this: publishers operate in both ways. In fact, it’s probably fair to say that nearly all publishers operate in both ways pretty much all the time.

First, the cookie-cutter approach.

Yes, publishers like making money and they’re not complete idiots.

So if they notice were-books selling like hot garlic on a full-moon night, they will naturally want to get their hands on were-books. They’ll operate in precisely the way I’ve just described, applying a two-stage test:

1. Does this book involve werewolves and vampires?
2. If so, does it do so in a way that moves the boundary forward in some way? Does this book promise to seem fresh to a reader who’s already deeply steeped in the genre?

That second question is a complex one, because agents can’t determine the answer in light of books that have already been published. If your book gets taken on by an agent now, it may be 12-18 months before it’s available for sale. So really agents are reading the submissions pile. They’re talking to editors about what they're acquiring right now. They’re trying to judge from that evidence what will feel fresh in a year or so’s time.

Because agents have access to a much wider data pool than you do, they’re well-equipped to answer that question in a way that you’re not. And – tough. There’s no workaround, except knowing your genre and writing at what you take to be its leading edge.

There are times of publishing frenzy when this cookie cutter approach works with an insane intensity. That was true of vampire-lit. It was true of misery-memoirs. It was most astonishingly (but briefly) true of spanking novels, in the wake of 50 Shades Of Grey.

But most genres operate like this, at lower pressure, all the time. A crime editor needs to buy crime books. He or she simply won’t find a dozen astonishing novels a year, so they’ll be perfectly content to buy on the same-but-different basis. And that makes life easy. Cover designers know what kind of designs to use. Marketers know what approach they need to use. Publicists know what doors to knock on. And so on.

All that said, no one has ever entered into the books trade in order to pursue a same-but-different approach. It just never happens.

If you hang around with publishers (at glorious festivals like ours, for example), you’ll hear them talk repeatedly about passion. They all claim that theirs is an industry driven by passion, and it really is. You could work in a vinyl flooring business and have no strong feelings at all about the stuff you make and sell. That is never, ever true of publishing – not at any level, or in any firm.

So, publishers do buy cookie-cutter books and they do so all the time and without any sense of shame and they’re perfectly right to do just that.

But they also buy the bolts-from-the-blue, the lightning-strikes, the black swans. Lincoln in the Bardo and Twilight and Gone Girl and Where the Crawdads Sing, and any number of other books that looked at what everyone else was writing and just said, “Yeah, don’t care.”

Now, it’s also true that publishers have to operate under the shadow of the spreadsheet, the invisible maths of profit and loss.

Some editors, faced with something astonishing, will have a failure of faith. Roughly, “Yes, I liked this, but can I get a minimum of 10-25,000 people to think the same way? I’m not sure. This is weird.”

But phooey. Some people are cowards. There are plenty of publishers out there. There are, in fact, for any genre, easily enough editors at easily enough imprints that a really good book will find its home.

Here’s a story from film (the quote comes from this Guardian article):

As Six Feet Under producer and director Alan Poul recalls: “The story is that they did a focus group with The Sopranos pilot and it got horrendous reactions. It was one of the lowest-testing focus group scores ever – people just couldn’t understand the idea of this protagonist who wasn’t super-handsome. Chris [Albrecht from HBO] was faced with the choice of tinkering with it or just putting it on as it was. And he went with the latter. That single decision changed the face of television.”

As a group, publishing is more like HBO than not. It’ll take a risk.

In television, that kind of gutsiness is difficult and rare – because budgets are big, schedules are small, and failures matter.

In publishing? None of that’s true. Budgets are piffling. Books are abundant. Failures are so common that it’s the successes which are genuinely unusual.

From the same article, HBO’s current CEO says:

“To this day, we don’t test things,” he says. “We don’t do research about what sorts of shows we should make or what talent we should work with. It’s never been something that HBO has relied on. For me, it’s just been: ‘Is this a good show? Do we like it? Does it feel different?’"

In TV, that’s so unusual, they write articles about it. In publishing, it’s completely standard. No one ever tests. They do conduct research, yes, but (in my sense at least) that’s more because research is something that big corporates feel they have to do. I think the impact of that research is marginal at best. In the end, an editor’s judgement matters more.

The moral for you?

Don’t worry about it. Don’t sweat it. Immerse yourself in your genre, yes. (And if you don’t have a clear genre, just immerse yourself in the kind of books you like. Read lots. Read intelligently.)

After that, just write the story that grips you. Let that character invade your head. Find the voice. Believe in it. Write really well. (Craft matters hugely. It’s key.)

In the end, it just doesn’t matter much whether your book is another cookie from the same mould (but with interesting differences from the last one) or whether it’s genuinely, startlingly different. Both books – if they’re good enough – will find a home.

Publishing is a capacious industry. Its appetite is omnivorous.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / Keeping it simple

Plain vanilla this week, folks. Just give us a passage – 250-300 words, plus a little context - and we’ll give you the best feedback we’ve got. Both barrels of it.

Please title your post in this format: title / genre / [anything else we need to know]. That will help others navigate a big old forum with speed. When you're ready, you can post your work here.

Til soon.

Harry

The first thing is that all agents will be drawn to different things. I am not a visual person so I am often not drawn to mood boards (I find them overwhelming), and I will scroll past most pitches that rely upon listing tropes. This is because many books in the same genre will be able to list the same tropes and it doesn’t really tell me anything about your book.  

Six key tips for pitching:

1. Genre/ title/ word count is really important. At a first glance it tells me if a project is something I COULD work on. 

2. A snappy one-line pitch is helpful, and I have requested many pitches over the years based on a hooky one-line. But they are hard to do well. So I am really looking for a short pitch that can tell me: who I am following, where we start, inciting incident (doesn’t have to be action but it will be the catalyst that changes things for the main character) and then where we are going/ who we are going with. This last bit will set up if it’s a new romance, if it’s a horror story, if we’re going on a quest, involved in a battle and so on. Whatever is at the heart of your book. 

3. Unique Selling Points are hard to get across in a short pitch but try and think about what makes your book special. When you talk about it what makes you excited? What makes your story stand out from potentially many other stories with similar plot points/ tropes? I always look for the pitches that tell me something about the book I am considering reading beyond vague vibes.  

4. Although I like comparisons, if you rely on the comps to be your whole pitch, I will likely scroll past. Comps help us work out the vibes of the book and how we might market it, but they do not tell us about your plot. 

As an author, approaching genre can be tricky – particularly when you consider the line between what could be considered as ‘book club’ and what counts as ‘literary’ fiction. How do you know where your manuscript sits in the market?  

As a literary agent, I spend a good chunk of my career working on fiction, thinking about how novels are marketed and trying to gauge which publishers will go for the projects I’m handling. Equally, in my work with Jericho Writers as an editor, I find it’s something that authors are always curious about: when their manuscript is ready to go to agents, how should it be pitched, and why?  

Here, I hope to unpack some of the distinctions between literary and book club fiction and help you understand five key differences between them. However, the book club and literary genres are areas of fiction where there is some overlap – it’s not so definitive as, say, thriller vs romance as a contrast of genres. Inevitably, therefore, there will be some crossover.  

In fairly broad strokes, book club is often based around more ‘traditional’ plot structures and development, whereas literary might tend to be more experimental – and foreground elements of voice, dialogue, and characterisation over plot. This could be put as simply as prioritising plot vs prioritising stylistic elements.  

Structure and character arcs: clear or ambiguous? 

When approaching story structure and characterisation, most novels will follow a traditional three-act structure: set-up, confrontation, resolution. Whereas this is typically adhered to in the plot development, building of narrative tension and character arcs of book club novels, in literary fiction the boundaries are a little more blurred.  

Literary fiction tends to be more led by theme and character; so, if your novel is written with this three-act structure informed mainly by plot events then it would fall into the book club genre. Equally, if your novel is written in a way in which this three-act structure isn’t so clearly defined (and perhaps your writing foregrounds those other stylistic aspects), then you’re likely working in the literary genre.  

Writing style and voice 

In terms of writing style, literary fiction is often championed as ‘voice-driven’. So, in the same way that structure and characterisation might inform approaches to the shape of literary fiction, so too does this level of characterisation-led storytelling often shape how that story is told. That is, literary fiction could be accessed through a unique voice with certain quirks, streams of consciousness, or in a writing style with this that reflects the character’s psyche.  

In a literary fiction novel about an unreliable narrator, the voice might be unbroken in this stream of consciousness form, or a style point might be adopted. No punctuation for dialogue, for example.  

In the way that structure generally sticks more to the traditional three-act story format in book club fiction, an unreliable narrator might in that case be shown through the escalation and reveal of plot events that highlight dishonesty.   

Consider your novel’s concept 

Think about the ‘high concept’ of your novel. Can your novel easily be pitched in a one-or-two sentence summary that will universally be understood?  

Typically, if your novel has a high concept – if it’s an easily pitch-able ‘x does y and what happens will lead to z’ sort of a set-up – then you are writing more clearly in the book club arena.  

If the concept of the novel isn’t so easy to pitch in a one- or two-liner and is more informed by themes, then that sounds like a work of literary fiction.  

Your reading habits are a tell 

In as much as the old adage ‘write what you know’ holds water, so too does ‘pitch the genre that you know’. If your reading habits tend towards book club fiction, the tendency will be that you write book club fiction. The same is true for literary fiction.  

So, when you get to that stage of submitting your novel to agents and thinking about how to pitch the genre, a key thing to do would be to work backwards in thinking about how your work might reflect your reading habits, and how this might have informed the novel you’ve written. 

Remember, the line is blurred

Lastly, to caveat all this at the very end… you’ve probably come across a big literary hit being republished as a book club edition with questions for discussion at the end. The boundaries are clear in the distinctions I’ve outlined above, but the end product of this all is publishing as a business: these genre boundaries aren’t, as mentioned, akin to romance vs. horror.  

Although you should definitely understand what you’re writing and how you should pitch it, there is room for manoeuvre in a publishing market that is (we hope) constantly developing. 

A book is a book is a book

Books are books, right? It doesn’t really matter whether you read them on a phone or a Kindle, or whether you read the paper sort. A book is a book is a book.

And yes, a pulpy thriller is very different from a piece of classy literary fiction, but most passionate readers read widely – the pulpy thrillers and the literary fiction and the niche non-fiction and work in translation and other things that just happen to strike our eyes and our appetites at the right moment on a sunny day. That’s the best way to read.

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NEWSFLASH

We’ve extended the application deadline for Ultimate Novel Writing Programme and the Novel Writing Course to Sunday 22 March. The course starts on 1 April, so this is your last chance saloooooooon.

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At first glance, the market for books operates just as you might imagine.

Everyone sells in all formats

Ebooks are usually said to account for maybe 25% of the overall books market. I’m sceptical of those estimates, however, certainly as applied to novelists.

Self-publishers – who are overwhelmingly ebooky – don’t generally assign ISBN data to their books and those sales are excluded from most industry data. Further, the “25% overall” figure ignores vast genre disparities. Non-fiction (especially reference) is heavily print-led. So is children’s fiction.

Indeed, I had an argument just now with an AI-bot, challenging its summary and it acknowledged, “You're right that once we look specifically at adult fiction and account for the "dark matter" of the industry—self-published digital sales—the picture shifts significantly … the adult fiction category is the one place where electronic formats (e-books and audiobooks combined) are arguably the primary way people consume stories today.”

So let’s say that for adult fiction, electronic formats account for half or more of unit sales. (Print, being more expensive, accounts for more than half of revenues.)

Naturally, trad publishers offer books across every major format.

All digital-first and indie publishers do the same.

It’s true that the digital-first folk can’t usually reach High Street bookstores, but they can easily offer print books through Amazon and Amazon is still by far the most consequential bookshop in the world, accounting for more than half of most trad publishers’ revenues.

So no matter how you publish, everyone can publish in all formats, with ease.

And yet …

Despite all this, the market for books cleaves into two vast hemispheres with stunningly few points of connection.

Tradworld looks to physical bookshops as its north star.

It thinks about print before ebook. It thinks about physical bookstores before Amazon. It thinks about critical acclaim from newspapers and other sources far more than it does about reader reviews on Amazon.

To be clear, this isn’t a dumb strategy. Tradworld publishers make very healthy profits. Ten or fifteen years ago, I thought there was a significant chance that traditional publishers would just fold up and shrink to a fraction of their previous size. They haven’t. They’ve thrived.

In the meantime, there’s a flourishing host of digital-first publishers (including self-publishers, all of whom are digitally-led.)

Those guys – the Digifirsters – don’t care about physical bookshops: they have no access.

They don’t care about newspapers and traditional sources of literary praise: they don’t get any love from those places and, even if they did, it would make no difference to sales.

They may or may not care about Apple and other non-Amazon bookshops, but really Amazon is the thing. The Digifirsters are all about selling on Amazon. They arguably have more in common with people who sell household wares on Amazon than they do with the fine old literary houses who once sold Jane Austen or Herman Melville.

And as I say, these worlds barely connect – or connect to a remarkably small degree.

You can literally sell 1,000,000 ebooks on Amazon and yet struggle to shift 20,000 paperbacks through physical stores.

You can sell 1,000,000 ebooks and yet have zero reviews in newspapers. Indeed, it’s stranger than that. If newspapers do end up writing about you, they’ll say things like, “the million-copy selling author that no one’s ever heard of.” By which they mean, “the million-copy selling author that we’ve never noticed because we were looking in the opposite direction.”

What’s more, Tradworld still operates in a universe where there are such things as nation-states. Woe betide you if you sell a British book to an American reader, or vice versa.

Digifirsters don’t really notice the existence of nation-states. Book covers, blurbs, marketing strategies and digital support in general cross continents, with barely more than a tweak or two along the way.

What this means for you

All this is my own long and winding road leading up to Mount Useful.

And on the tippy-toppy summit of Mount Useful there is a sign which says: “You need to know what kind of book yours is.”

If your book is better suited to the Digifirsters, you may as well skip over agents (to start with) and submit straight to the better digital-first houses. Or, if you approach agents, you should do so aware that those agents are not about to get you a trad deal with Penguin Random House. And, of course, if your book is naturally digifirst, then self-publishing is also an option, and a very good one.

If on the other hand, your book is better suited to Tradworld, then you need to go there (via an agent) without much pondering the alternatives.

There are some general pointers to how to understand your book.

Is it commercial genre fiction, with plot more important than prose style? It might well be digital-first.

Is it a standalone book, not part of a series? It might be more suited for trad.

Is it going to appeal to somewhat self-important newspaper reviewers? Think trad.

Do you see a properly global (albeit English-speaking) market for your book? If so, digital publishing beckons.

And so on.

These are hints, not final determinations. I said the two hemispheres connect to a remarkably small degree, and that’s true. But there are still plenty of books where you could choose to go either way, and your final judgement needs to take into account all the factors, including of course your own preferences.

And – as usual, this email is too long

And – as so often, it’s hard to set out reliable, general rules.

But –

Worry ye not, oh Friends of Jericho. We created a whole month of events to help you tease these things out for yourself. We thought for a very long time about what to call this group of events – we summoned brand advisors, logo designers, and a troupe of creative artistes from Mongolia – and, for reasons that now escape me, we ended up calling it GETTING PUBLISHED MONTH.

We have sessions on self-pub, on publishing with digital-first publishers, and on traditional publishing, as seen through the eyes of a literary agent. If you’re worried about which route is right for you, then you really need to join (and watch them back on replay).

The sessions are open to Premium Members only but – and here’s a tip you can use at any time – you can join us for just one month for £30 (using the “Flex” option). Just be sure to cancel your membership to prevent auto-renew. Or get 10% off pay-upfront and pay-monthly plans by using the hard-to-remember code GETPUBLISHED10 at checkout, offer ends 31 March.

That’s it from me. I leave you with a sea shanty and a small ginger biscuit.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / Ask us anything

Simple Feedback Friday this week. Do you have any questions? Then ask. I’ll do what I can to chip in, but I hope the Hive Mind gives generously of its honeyed wisdom. Please title your post in this format: Genre / question / [anything else if you want]. That helps others navigate a big old forum with speed. When you're ready, you can post it here.

Til soon.

Harry

Before I start, I just want to say that you guys did a good job on the Johari window / Feedback Friday exercise last week.

When I wrote the email and then set the exercise, I did wonder if lots of you would just think, “Huh? What?” and ignore the challenge. But you didn’t. If you haven’t already looked at the discussion, then do. (If you’re not a member of Townhouse, that link won’t work, but you can sign up for free here. You now don’t even need to set a password: you can just use your Google account to wave the magic wand.)

Anyway. Hold-scanning: the topic of the email.

I used to climb pretty regularly at a climbing wall centre in Oxford. I’m not an especially good climber, but there were plenty of really strong people climbing there.

Indoor climbing (especially bouldering, which is what I mainly did) tends to be short and intense. You attempt a hard route, and either get to the top (yay!) or drop off at some point along the way. Either way, your muscles should be burning a bit, so that even if you want to re-attempt the route, you need to rest a couple of minutes before you’re in a state to go again.

So: you have two minutes when you’re resting and not climbing. Or, in fact, you have quite a lot of those two-minute windows. What do you do with them?

One option is just to lie on your back and pant and look at the super-climbers who seem to bounce up routes that you can’t even contemplate.

But there’s an alternate strategy, and a better one.

You still lie on your back. And pant. And look at the super-climbers.

But this time, you really look at them. When they move so effortlessly onto that bulgy yellow hold you can barely reach, do you notice that they rock their weight away from it, before moving back towards it? Maybe that pendulum motion is part of what gives them that mysterious ability to grab it.

Or as they swarm up that overhanging wall, do you notice that they’re not readjusting their hands on the hold each time?  Maybe the seconds they shave from not readjusting their grip means they’re less likely to run out of puff near the top?

The climber who uses his or her lying-down-and-panting time to study other climbers is much more likely to progress than the rest.

The same is true, my darling sparrow, my blue-footed booby, of you.

Obviously, when you write, you work hard at putting down the best prose you can to tell the strongest story possible. Jolly good. Here’s a fresh worm for you by way of reward.

But what about when you’re doing the writer-equivalent of lying down and panting? What do you do then?

Specifically, when you read published work by others, how do you read it?

I know when I was engaged in writing my first novel, I became obsessed with trying to understand how other writers were achieving the effects they were achieving. If they did something great – how did they do it? If they did something disappointing – what lay behind that failure?

The act of reading changed completely for me. I’m now a bit less obsessive than I was, but not all that much. My editor-brain is now so automatic, I can’t switch it off.

It should be the same for you.

When you’re reading, not writing – use that time to learn. Every novel (and plenty of non-fiction) has things to teach you, but you’ll only hear those teachings if you’re alert to the messages.

If you read a book by John Smith – are his sentences better than yours? Are his descriptions more evocative? If they are: why? Does he use more complex words? (Probably not.) Does he pick out better details? If so, what makes those details better than yours? Are you not writing your description as well, or are you not seeing the scene in the first place with as much clarity?

If you read a book by Jane Brown – is her plotting better? More exciting? How does she generate the excitement? Is it greater speed (more car chases)? Or is it greater depth (greater emotional jeopardy during the chase)?

You have to track these things down. It’ll change the way you read, but so much the better. It should do.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / That bulgy yellow hold

Bit of an experiment this week, but let’s give it a go.

Take a 250-word chunk of text from your work in progress. Pop it up on Townhouse with title, genre, and any context we need.

Please title your post in this format: Genre / title / [anything else if you want]. That helps others navigate a big old forum with speed. When you're ready, you can post it here.

Then – ignore your work. Go and jump around on other people’s posts. In each case, read the work and give a comment on it. Aim to do that with 5-10 posts in total.

And I don’t just want a comment – I want a useful comment.

A comment that’s good is, “The second sentence is given particular menace by noting the knife’s blade as well as the vase of daffodils. This is a domestic scene, yes, but we already feel the edge of danger.” That’s specific and reproducible. OK, you may not want to write a knife-blade and daffodil sentence of your own, but you can use the insight you just had when writing your own material.

A lousy comment is, “I really liked this. It felt atmospheric.” That’s not specific at all. (What did you like? How did the author create the atmosphere?) And because it’s not specific, it’s not reproducible. It gives you no insight into how you can achieve (or avoid) the same effects.

I don’t actually mind if you pop work of published authors up on Townhouse instead of your own. But the heart of this exercise is in the comments you make. Flap to it, my crested grebe. Jump to it, you wagtails and oystercatchers. I’m going to be very interested to see how we do.

Til soon.

Harry

With the return of Meet Your Match coming up, we wanted to share the advice of our Meet Your Match 2024 winner, Alessandra Ranelli, to get her top tips for polishing your pitch until it shines. This advice originally appeared in our newsletter in April 2024.

Alessandra's debut novel Murder at the Hotel Orient will be published in the UK on the 30th April 2026 (pre-order here) and in the US on the 19th May 2026 (pre-order here).

Four Things Your Pitch (Probably) Needs

1. A Hook

I know, you’re sick of reading this advice. If you already know your hook, great. If you need help, I recommend a technique I call Finding your Glimmer, which is part of my pitching ritual. Meditate, and recall the initial idea, moment, or question that inspired you. Chances are, that initial spark is closely related to the hook that will make readers buy your book.

2. Be the Same but Different

I can feel you rolling your eyes. Here is a trick: use the comp title plus a clarification.

In my query letter, I quote from one agent who described my book as a “Naughty version of THE MAID.”

• [adjective] + Comp: Dystopian Peter Pan (Lord of the Flies)
• Comp but [Adjective]: Twilight but kinky (50 Shades of Grey)
• Comp with [Noun]: Pride & Prejudice with Spice (Bridgerton Novels)
• Comp for [Target Audience]: Harry Potter for Gen Z (Fourth Wing)
• Comp in [Unique Location]: Scooby Doo in a Retirement Home (Thursday Murder Club)

3. Clear Stakes

To ensure the stakes and motivation are clear, review your pitch with the unstoppable curiosity of a toddler. Why? Why? Why?

Example: Susan Smith has one mission: destroy James Weatherby, and this boat cruise is her perfect chance…

This is going to leave readers asking why? in a bad way.Is Susan an assassin? A vengeful ex? While we’re at it, who even is Susan? Is she a teen or an adult? Be intriguing, not vague.

4. Genre

This can be explicit (In this YA romantasy…) or implied by description.

-Investigate indicates mystery or crime

-Love triangle points to romance

-High School Freshman implies YA.

Your comps may also indicate your genre, without wasting word count.

Things Your Pitch Probably Doesn’t Need

1. Your character’s name.

What’s in a name? Well, unless they’re a historical figure, not much. Consider using their job title, age, relationship status, nationality, or something that provides more information. If they’re a historical figure, their last name often suffices. Sometimes you do need a character’s name, but it’s rare you need their full name.

2. The whole story.

Focus on the inciting incident, save the twist for the synopsis. Think of this like a seduction. Leave them wanting more.

3. Modal verbs, or passive verbs. Aim to use active verbs and eliminate modal verbs. She must battle can be She battles.

4. To Follow Traditional Grammar Rules

This advice is just for social media pitches, where character count, well, counts.

- Don’t spell out numbers under 10, use digits.

- Replace and with &. Use emojis, with caution.

- Go ahead: use conjunctions or adverbs. I know, I know, Stephen King taught you never to use adverbs. He’s usually right. But Stephen King probably isn’t reading your tweet. I, on the other hand, look forward to seeing your pitches, and hope to see some of these tips employed there. Good luck and happy pitching, everyone.

Mysteriously,

Alessandra Ranelli

PS: If you want more advice, or to learn my secret ritual for developing pitches, there’s a post on my website with examples....