Our Articles

A short one today. And a little bonus.

The bonus is that I’m doing a FREE webinar today at 12.00. The theme is elevator pitches and specifically how to:

1. Build a pitch that fully expresses the DNA of your novel;
2. Use that insight to help your novel fully express the delicious idea at its heart;
3. Use that work when it comes to selling your book

I’ll give you a clue right now: Part C is the easy one.

If you're a Premium Member, you may already have done our Take Your Novel From Good to Great course. If so, you can ignore this offer as the content of the webinar is very similar to module one of that course. If you aren't a Premium Member and haven’t done that first lesson, then this is a good opportunity to scope it out! As I say, it’s completely free - just sign up here to register.

Now then...

Last week, I ended a long series of emails on selling with a question to you all, via Feedback Friday. Or four questions in fact:

• What matters to do you in writing?
• What do you want to get out of this?
• What do you think the biggest obstacles are?
• What would help?

It’s really worth taking a look at how people answered.

On the first two questions – what matters – people mostly agreed. “Just seeing my books out there in some form or other would be cool.” Entertaining readers was a near-universal goal. People often wanted to be able to sustain themselves by writing, but no one had dreams of vast wealth from it.

Other comments that spoke to me:

• A lot of people spoke about “the pure joy writing inspires, the fun we have putting pen to paper.” That’s true for me too. It has remained the one absolute constant through my career.
• “Recognition. The biggest buzz of all is when readers tell me they laughed or cried, or felt that constricted feeling in their throat — the feeling of something that *really* matters.” And yes, same here.
• “I want to be traditionally published and have a readership that likes my stories.” A lot of you were in that rough area, although I noted an increasing awareness of the various upsides of digital-first and sel-publishing options.
• “I’m already getting what I want out of this. It may sound crass, but all I ever wanted was to get my stuff out there. I’m achieving this now [via self-pub].”

And a special mention for this comment, which we can all relate to:

• "What matters to me in writing? I love it. Even when I hate it, I love it."

On obstacles

Comments that struck a chord were:

• “It is my first time writing, and turning a passion and an interest into something commercially marketable with no prior knowledge of the industry, standards, expectations, process, etc. – it’s terrifying.”
• “Second guessing every decision is really slowing things down and stopping me writing fresh stuff.”
• “Time. There is never enough time to write, to research the market, do the marketing, without all the things that Life throws at me.”
• “The system. Agents are the gatekeepers and agents are human. They pass certain things I would throw out. The publishers publish certain books I would never buy, but they regard as commercial. Thank goodness there are Indie Press and self-publishing routes.”

On what would help

Some really good feedback here:

• “A little marketing genie would be good.”
• “Time. Money … But also actionable advice, feedback, safe spaces to ask questions. Knowing I’m not alone … Community has been more of a help than I realistically ever thought it would be.”
• “Help would help. Much like people who climb Everest, I would really appreciate the help of a Sherpa. Someone who’s seen and done it all. Someone who knows the secrets and can guide my feet over the dangerous terrain. I’m happy to do the hard yards. I want to get to the peak and plant my flag. But I can’t do it alone.”
• “A guide on what makes a good story and how to slice and dice away nonsense.”
• “Blue skies and sunshine …Someone to do all the advertising. Marketing, promotional stuff.”
• “What do I think would help? A kick up the arse. I’ve had some wonderful feedback on my work from some lovely people here. I’m deeply grateful for their kind words. They inspire me enormously.”
• “Access to professionals at a reasonable cost to those of us who are struggling to find the spare cash. I think JW already do this with their [premium membership service].”

And look, we know where you're coming from.

We'll use your insights to shape Jericho Writers Premium Membership for the coming year. We have a strong sense of what you want, and will be making some really huge improvements in 2025. We won’t announce anything until we’re closer to launch, but we’re aiming high.

If you're not already a Premium Member, remember: today is Black Friday: a day of dark commercial magic, where we try to make your wishes come true! If you join us today, you’ll do so at the best price we’ve offered all year - and your writing, as well as your chances of publication WILL improve. We'd honestly love to welcome you, because this community gets better, the more voices it has.

*

FEEDBACK FRIDAY: An Especially Lovely One

And because it's a special Friday, let's have an especially lovely Feedback challenge.

So: I want a passage of yours (about 250 words) that you really love. Give us any context we need, and tell us why you love it. That's it.

Post yours here when you're ready.

***

My two daughters are, just possibly, turning into writers. They love starting novels – all called “Murder in the Stableyard”, or rough variants on that. Then they write a cast list, which involves perhaps half a dozen individuals, notably girls 2-3 years older than my two. Then they extend the cast list by adding about four horses. Then they ask me to praise them. Then they write a first sentence or two. Then … they start again with a new novel.

Some of you giving comments on Feedback Friday last week, noted that writerly procrastination did at least deliver a very clean house and a punctual approach to on-coming chores.

I have not noticed the same effect with my kids.

Till soon,

Harry

Last week, I threw out a Feedback Friday challenge based off the first volume of our Good To Great course.

The essence of that task, and of the course material, was to consider your book’s elevator pitch not as a final thought – a sticker glued on to the book cover at the final minute – but as a blueprint for production. What’s the book’s DNA? What are its most essential ingredients, the elements that make it up? If your book is to succeed, that answer has to be compelling. Your book will stand, naked, on a bookstore table (or an Amazon page) that’s crowded with repeat bestsellers and authors much better known than you. There’s no way to win that contest except by having an idea that shines so bright and attractively that your book compels attention.

The course video (which I urge you to watch; it’s free) talks about how to start with an ultra-short pitch/blueprint – a list of ingredients even – and how to build out from there. To characters, to settings, to themes, and so on.

The aim here is that every aspect of your book should be firmly founded on your core idea – and that the idea itself should be so compelling that the book can’t not sell. The absolute key is to make sure that every part of your book lines up behind a single great idea.

Pitching backwards

Now, I hope it’s obvious that that’s a sound way to build a book… and yet – have I told you too late? Almost all of you reading this email have already written all or part of your manuscript. So me telling you now that you should have done something 60,000 words ago may not exactly strike you as terribly helpful. (One of you on Townhouse said that “pitching backwards feels like a feat of gymnastics” – which is a fair comment.)

And yet –

It is helpful. These things are helpful at any stage and every stage. If you know what you’re aiming at – a book where everything lines up perfectly behind one stellar idea –you can always navigate from where you are to where you need to be.

The trick is to navigate without cheating.

What you mustn’t ask is:

“How do I take the material I have already concocted and make it look as though it obeys these rules?”

What you must ask is:

“Honestly – does my material feel like it all lines up in this way? And is the idea strong enough? And, having thought these things through, are there adjustments I should make to the stuff I’ve already written, even though I know it will cost me weeks of work to make those adjustments?”

Anything else, you can bodge if you like. You can have a character who’s a bit limp, a scene that’s a bit weak, a plot turn that’s a bit contrived, a setting that’s a bit bland. All those things – and your book can still sell. None of my books has gone out into the world with no bodging anywhere.

But a weak idea? Or a book that doesn’t manifest the strong one that you started with? That book won’t sell. And it doesn’t deserve to.

So yes, pitching backwards is an arse-over-tip way to do things. (That lovely phrase comes courtesy of my sister’s long-ago riding instructor, a woman so sweary, she’d make Princess Anne look genteel.) But if you didn’t do the exercise properly when you started out, you need to do it properly now.

Is your idea strong enough?

Is there total unity between that idea and everything else in the book – characters, themes, settings, everything? Are those things so tightly glued together that your book feels somehow inevitable, necessary?

Those are the questions you must ask.

They matter.

And pitch backwards if you have to.

Standing stones and character Verdicts

When I set these Feedback Friday tasks, I’m often surprised at what comes back. Those surprises are always positive; I always learn something.

Last week, I realised that we build character up in layers. To we humans, the top layer is the one that matters most. To a pitch-concerned novelist, it’s the bottom layer.

Here’s what I mean:

Who is Fiona Griffiths? How do we describe her? Here’s how I think about forming an answer:

Standing Stones

I start with some key facts – rocks projecting unmissably from the landscape. They’re the things that any explanation of Fiona has to acknowledge. Any triangulation has to start from there. So:

• Fiona had Cotards Syndrome as a teenager (she used to think she was dead).
• Fiona doesn’t know her true birth mother or father. She was found in the back of her adoptive father’s car when she was about 2 years old. For a long time, she was mute.
• Her adoptive father was (is?) a criminal.
• Fiona can be violent. (A creepy witness once felt her bum. She broke his fingers and dislocated his knee. She was a police officer at the time.)
• Fiona has a double first in Philosophy from the University of Cambridge – and won a university philosophy prize to boot.
• At the start of the series, she’d never really had a proper boyfriend. When at university, she had a phase of thinking she was lesbian.
• Fiona is a detective.

All these things are facts. They’re not things that are up for argument or discussion. They refer back to things that happened or are true in the present. They’re standing stones, your rocks, the first and most critical layer of character-formation.

(And in parenthesis: my character is quite big and highly coloured. If your character’s own standing stones are a little lower to the ground, that’s fine. You’re just writing a different kind of book.)

Dispositions

Now we get to the next level up – dispositions, ways of summarising your emerging character.

So, again for Fiona, we have something like this:

Fiona is electrically intelligent. She’s Sherlock Holmes level bright.

She adores murder investigation. It’s one of very few things that fully engages her.

She’s a dunce about many things-in-the-world. Her knowledge of pop culture is near-zero. She’s a hopeless cook. She has no dress sense. If there’s a glass wall in an office or a bus shelter, she’s quite likely to walk straight into it.

She’s funny. She’ll make you laugh.

Dead people calm her. She likes them. She feels them to be friends.

Yes, novel-detectives are always mavericks. But Fiona really is. Illegal handguns? Growing and smoking her own weed? Solo mission to shoot up some bad guys? Throwing Russian baddies off a cliff? Yep, that’s Fiona. (And that’s just book one.)

These things are facts, too. I mean, you couldn’t reasonably disagree about whether Fiona is intelligent or not. But this set of facts doesn’t have that standing stone like quality: single, obtrusive, unmistakable, un-ignorable – the marker-events of a person’s life.

This second list of ours – ‘dispositions’ – doesn’t comprise things as singular as our standing stones. You don’t really know whether Fiona is genuinely funny until you’ve heard her for a bit. If she makes you laugh once, that could be a one-off. But if she does it again and again, then you have to say, yes, she’s funny. Same thing with her intelligence. Same thing with her dunce-in-the-world-ness.

So, our second level of character analysis gets to things that are definite facts, but they’re not singular facts. They’re more like dispositions – repeated observations of a trait.

And then, we get to our third level –

Verdicts

Is our character conscientious?

Does she have a sense of right and wrong?

Is she loyal?

Is she open to new things, or does she prefer the tried-and-trusted?

Is she valiant – or, perhaps better, what is it that brings out her valour? When does she show her courage?

We as people like to discuss these things in relation to others, and as novelists we like to discuss them in relation to our characters. (And roughly: Fiona is not conscientious, she has a strong sense of right and wrong, she is loyal, she is open to the new, she is valiant in almost any context.)

But?

I don’t think these things should form part of your character analysis, or not really. I think something like the opposite is the truth. You build your character on the basis of your standing stones and your dispositions. Then you follow that character through the course of your story, writing her as carefully as you can. Then you can stand back and judge. Conscientious, yes or no? Valiant, yes or no?

As it happens, I think that in most cases, those questions won’t even have easy answers. I just gave a quick-fire set of responses in relation to Fiona, but they’re not very good.

Is Fiona conscientious? Yes: she goes way beyond expectations in anything murder-related. But in other spheres, she’s hopelessly unreliable. So: going through endless phone records because there’s just possibly a lead buried in there somewhere? Yes, she’ll do that, and without being asked. But: filling out a simple pension form, because someone in her office needs her to do it? Nope, she’ll avoid that until someone pretty much forces her.

Why I’m even talking about this

The reason why I’m plappering on about this (this word, courtesy of my elder daughter) is that when I asked you to give me your pitch / theme / character details, a lot of you shot straight through to the character verdict level. And I don’t want that. When you’re putting together the blueprint for your novel, the standing stones are way more important. The dispositions are next most important. The character verdicts don’t really matter at all – they’re something to argue about once the novel is finished.

I hope that makes sense. In any case, since this week’s Feedback Friday is going to hammer away at this topic, it’ll make sense before I have done with you, or I’ll want to know the raisin why.

This email is too long, so I will not tell you about the extraordinary encounter I had just yesterday with – but no. This email is too long.

***

FEEDBACK FRIDAY: STANDING STONES

Right. Character. I want you to outline your character’s:

• Standing Stones. Big, singular, formative events or facts in your character’s life.
• Dispositions. Unmistakeable traits that run right through the book.
• Verdicts. What do you make of the character you’ve just created. (And, psst, I don’t really care about this bit of the answer. Nor should you.)

Do you want an extra bonus point? You do? Then also please tell me:

• Your ultra-short pitch or list of ingredients.

What we really, really want to see here is a lovely reverberation between the pitch and the standing stones. We want to think, ‘Oh yes, that character with that past in that story situation and that setting? Sounds glorious. Tell me more.’ If you do that, you’ve won. When you're ready, post yours here.

Over to you.

Til soon.

Harry

There’s a sweet sadness about early September, isn’t there? The leaves aren’t quite turning, but they’re thinking about it. It isn’t quite cold enough for socks again, but my morning toes aren’t always so sure about that. The kids go off to school again, bravely, marking off their little transitions towards adulthood. And holiday mess is either put away, or lying around in piles, eyeing us balefully, awaiting disposal.

I mostly like the season – I just don’t want the kids to get a day older, really. I’d happily glue them into some groundhog present, where school always involves projects on the Vikings, and science classes revolve around magnets and things dangling on string.

And as for you? Ah me and oh my gosh – you’re to go back to school too, my hearties, and starting RIGHT NOW. Because, this week, we have a new course out, and it’s a goodie.

Specifically, we know that most readers of this email are reasonably seasoned writers. Few of you are hesitating over the very first pages of your very first manuscript. Far more of you are deep into your first novel, or working on your second or third. You’ve mostly wrestled not just with writing a book, but with editing it too. Plenty of you have made a serious assault on Planet Agent, and are planning further raids with some sober expectation of success.

This course is for you: the serious, competent, experienced writer. We call it Good To Great, because that’s the hurdle you now need to clear. You need to go from acceptable competence to writing something so compelling that an agent (or editor, or reader) can’t refuse the proposition you offer.

That’s a big ask. I’d say that plenty of people – if they’re serious, competent and committed – can end up putting together a decent novel. Something shipshape and watertight. A novel that feels tight and well-fashioned.

But none of that is enough. The competition writers face is heinous. If you’re a debut athlete, you work your way through multiple lower-level competitions until you’re expected to face an Olympic final. If you’re a debut writer? You get no kindness at all. No mercy. You are sent in to compete, immediately, against the most famous writers of the day. Your books are sold at the exact same price. And those other writers have a vast advantage in terms of sales footprint and brand recognition and marketing oomph. So, yeah, good luck.

This course is my best attempt to give you that luck.

Our aim is to help you, the competent writer, bring your book to the point at which an agent has to take it seriously. Yes, personal tastes and market movements will always play their part, but quality is still the most important factor in what gets bought and sold. Quality is the thing that kicks open doors, that arrests the flow of an acquisitions committee.

The first lesson in the course is free to all and I honestly think it’s one of the most useful teaching tools I’ve ever produced. The lesson is entitled ‘Pitch, Theme, Character’, but really it’s about how to lay out the foundations of your novel so that saleability is built in from the very start.

Most people (the merely competent authors) write the book that they want to write then consider their pitch as a kind of marketing sticker to be glued on top.

You, my fine furry friend, are not aiming at the merely competent. Your pitch is not going to be glued on; it’s going to be foundational. And it’s not just the story idea that matters here. We’re want to ensure that absolutely everything lines up behind a stellar pitch: plot, character, themes, settings – everything.

If you can do that – find a compelling pitch, and centre every aspect of your novel on fully delivering that basic promise – then the only remaining challenge is one of execution. And, OK, execution is a challenge, but it’s a doable one (and one which other lessons in the course will attack in plenty of detail.)

The first lesson is, as I say, free. You can find out about it here. The whole course is available to Premium Members and I’d just love it if you took the whole lot.

Feedback Friday this week is going to pick up on the task in that first video, so do please get stuck in. With any practical accomplishment, it’s never enough to read, or listen to, theory. You have to put it into practice. Actually shaping the words on a page or screen IS part of the learning activity. And when you team that up with Feedback Friday – where lots of intelligent and constructive writers in the same basic place as you offer a ton of thoughtful feedback – well, the learning impact is doubled, or trebled, I’m certain.

The leaves are on the turn. It’s back to school time. Your toes are cold. Let’s up and at em.

***

FEEDBACK FRIDAY: PITCH, THEME, CHARACTER

You need to register for the course here to get your first lesson free.

Watch that video; the assignment won’t really make sense without it.

Then, I want:

A total of about 300 words that comprises your:

• Very short pitch for the novel. (Nothing fancy or clever or abstract please. A short list of key ingredients is fine.)
• Notes on theme, character, settings, and anything else that seems relevant to you.

I want to see a great pitch and a set of notes which tells me that your book will be firmly centred on those strong foundations.

This could, just possibly, be the most important and transformative writing exercise you ever do, so jump to it.

That's it from me. Post yours here.

Til soon.

Harry