Week Twenty-Seven: How To Make Your Novel A Bestseller

Yes, this blog is about How To Write A Novel, and we have been straying quite deep into How To Sell A Novel territory recently, but bear with me. Normal service will be resumed next week with a post by the lovely and talented author Samantha Tonge on books and writing.

Some weeks ago, the more attentive among you may recall me blogging about how I wrote a thriller last year, but it was rejected umpteen times, so I gave up trying to place it traditionally and self-published instead. The whole story of that decision is here: Writing My First Thriller.

That was GIRL NUMBER ONE, which I self-published September 21st.

Seven weeks ago.

I tweeted about the book, shared it repeatedly on Facebook - which I bet was annoying to some of my long-suffering friends, but what you can do? - and organised a Thunderclap (see this post) to push it up a notch.

Last night I checked the book's UK ranking and was over the moon to see how far it had risen.

As you can see, after only 49 days on Amazon, GIRL NUMBER ONE had broken the Top 50 barrier in the UK Kindle store and was, spookily, at No. 49. One place for every day! (Though it changes hourly.)

UPDATE (December 10th 2015)
GIRL NUMBER ONE reached the #1 spot in UK Kindle store, following 40 days in the Top 100

Basic Promo
This achievement is something I never believed could be possible for any self-published book of mine. Especially given my rather haphazard approach to promo. I don't blog very often, and mostly just tweet my book links or chat about my writing on Facebook. I don't keep an email list - which I should, and probably will have to in the future - and although I initially paid a few quid for two ad campaigns on Facebook and Amazon, they were both of only a few days' duration and didn't make any marked difference to my sales. I currently have a Goodreads Giveaway in hand, but that's only after the book reached the Top 50!

So how on earth did I manage this? How did a disorganized mother of five who homeschools and writes her books in odd, snatched moments possibly manage to sell quite so many books?  Here are some thoughts on what has happened ...

Key Ingredients For An Indie Bestseller
The first thing that got my book into the Top 50 10 on Amazon UK is LUCK.

I know that sounds horribly random. But it is true. No one really knows what makes one book sell and another equally good book struggle. Most experienced book trade professionals will admit this. Without good luck, you might as well pack up now and go home. So one of the key elements of big book sales, whether traditional or self-published, is totally out of your hands. I hope that's a comfort. It is to me, because I know that if I fail to sell well in the future I can blame my lack of success on bad luck.

So make sure you get lucky. But okay, let's assume you can make your own luck, or at least facilitate it. How might you do that as a self-published writer?

Have a good title. By which I mean a title that works extremely well within its genre. A title that lets a reader know what kind of book it is, and therefore indicates if they might like it. But it should be a title that does all this without - if possible - being too derivative or unoriginal. In some cases, an eccentric, standout title could make sales explode. In other cases, a title like that could kill an otherwise good book. So be careful.

Have a great cover. Again, this is often about genre. The cover must reinforce the title and be genre-appropriate. At the browsing stage on Amazon, it's all about visuals. If the main font isn't readable in a thumbnail, or the cover itself looks indistinct, confusing, or just plain dull, then you could be in trouble. This doesn't demand great skills. I can only draw stick people, I am no talented artist. Yet I made my own cover for GIRL NUMBER ONE by buying a spooky-looking woods photo online, then fiddling with it on Pic Monkey. During this process, I kept in mind the colours and fonts and design features commonly used in other psychological thrillers so that readers could see at a glance what kind of book it is. And it seems to have worked.

GIRL NUMBER ONE (UK)

Write a strong, succinct, genre-appropriate blurb. This is not the place to get creative and show off your purple prose. Be clear and tempting at the same time. Suggest something intriguing where you can. If your genre is popular fiction, do not be afraid to be a bit crass with your book description if it works. Present your book confidently, as you hope a publicity team would do if you were traditionally published. (Not all traditional publishers make an effort to help writers with promo, by the way. Just in case you are dreaming that they do.) In other words, it should look and sound exactly like something on the back of the kind of books you are in competition with in your genre.

Get your Amazon categories and keywords working for you. These are very important. When you self-publish, you can choose two categories where your books should be listed, and seven keywords for other elements of your story. Some keywords will get you into bestseller lists once your book begins to sell, and this can help readers 'discover' your book. Discoverability is absolutely fundamental to selling books on Amazon, which has gazillions of books on sale. Your book is left to drift on that vast ocean,and you need to find ways to draw attention to it. Not just in the first weeks or months of publication, but sometimes up to a year after publication. After that, your best bet for making sales is to publish another book.

Start to build a backlist. You need to build a readership and a brand identity as a writer, because branding your books will appeal strongly to readers. Readers like to know what to expect from a writer, just like you want to know what flavour crisps you're about to eat, in case it's Worcester Sauce and not good ol' Cheese 'n' Onion. That's always been a problem for me because I write so many different books under different names. And this being my debut thriller as Jane Holland meant I had no reassuring 'brand' to offer any would-be readers. Looking at my other books would show them only poetry. They had to take everything on trust.

So I polished up two other thrillerish books I had in the bottom drawer, and published them alongside GIRL NUMBER ONE. Hey presto, I had created an instant portfolio!

Now when people buy either of those other books, they see GIRL NUMBER ONE in the Also Bought strip, and vice versa. And that gives my debut title, I like to feel, more validity. Borrowed pedigree. Because it's no longer alone but part of a 'list'.

Keep belting them out to build your portfolio.

Get your price right. Unfortunately, the craze for free books has led to readers expecting something for nothing, or at least for as little as possible. While big names can still attract healthy sales with large price tags, most writers need to be modest with their expectations of wealth. So price your book appropriately for its genre, length and general market fit if you want to make strong sales. I had to drop my price from £1.99 to 99p to crack the Top 100, and while that was a large drop for me (only 35% royalty instead of 70%) the increase in sales volume has been worth it.


Finally, write a page-turning book that fits the market as well as bringing something new to it. To succeed in a mass market arena, a book that is not being championed by some external factor, like a book prize or the fact that its author is a celebrity, needs to be gripping above all else. I don't mean in a thriller sense, but simply in the sense that once you have started reading this book, you simply must finish it. That's what you need for lasting success. So write clear, consistent prose that will appeal to a broad swathe of readers and keep those cliffhangers coming. Otherwise you will not attract a mass readership who will buy all your books and - most importantly - trumpet your books to other people. If you're a more literary writer, that's fine but you can't expect to sell heavily unless you can win a prize or attract attention some other way; the readership for literary fiction is not broad enough.

Because the final element in selling books is to get other people to sell it for you. Past a certain sales point, the author ceases to perform a practical function in actual day-to-day sales, and that is when high visibility and readers take her/his place. The kind of readers every author wants, the lovely ones who connect on social media and say spontaneously to their friends, 'Listen, you MUST read this book!'

And if you think that sounds like a tall order, you're right. Which is why I'm already working on my next novel, suspicious that I'm going to wake up soon and discover it was all a dream ...

QUESTION: What makes you buy a book on Amazon? What makes you choose to pass on it? How can you apply your findings to your own promotional efforts?

Week Twenty-Six: Art and the Novelist

Arts and crafts. Two different areas of expertise linked by some common threads. And the definition of both is reasonably simple. Art is about talent and inspiration and individual choice. Craft is about skill and knowledge and experience. You can't have art without talent, but you can have craft without art. Yet both can contain elements of the other.

Painting a picture comes down to art. Hand-knitting a Christmas jumper is certainly craft. Thus far we are agreed, I suspect. Yet to paint well you need to have learned some technique first, which indicates craft, and not all jumpers are equal: some are more beautifully knitted and shaped than others, which suggests that art and talent have played a part. Again, not a huge stretch.

But move into the field of literature, and the terrain becomes boggier.

Poetry is an art as much as a craft, most people would probably agree. Poetry is about delicate, minute choices, and rhythm that is akin to music, and a highly individual view of the world.

But is writing a novel an art or a craft? Can writing any novel - from Booker Prize winners down to the latest potboiler - ever be seen in the same light as poetry?

OMG, this paragraph is going on FOREVER.

Is there more artistry and reliance on inspiration when putting down words in prose, one after the other, in the manner of a conveyor belt, than there is a sense of craft involved in the process, of skilled knowledge built on experience and talent?

The long haul nature of writing a novel tends it towards craft. As a whole product, it's too unwieldy to be something built out of the artistic impulse alone. Specialised skill and knowledge, not to mention discipline, are required throughout. In the same way, making a bronze statue is a craft as well as an art. Yet at a molecular level, at the language and sentence level of writing a novel, it could be argued that art plays as large a part as craft.

What that comes down to is choice. The choice of the artist. Blue here, but what kind of blue, and how much? Applied in what manner? Repeated where? Highlighted or echoed how?

In the same way as a painter with a brush, we select words to a particular end. To shock, to inform, to depict, to illustrate, to confuse ... And once chosen, we arrange them in an order that seems to reflect the needs of the story at that point. We repeat them for effect. Or oppose them with different words.

But how does it all END? I was sure I knew when I started, 357 pages ago ...

We stop and consider our sentences. We alternative short with long, simple with multi-clause, semi-colons with commas. Then we arrange them in paragraphs. Blunt and pithy here, descriptive and relaxed there. We develop ideas along with the paragraphs, rising and falling, inevitably returning to the same themes again and again.

We shape our story into chapters, ending with high points, providing the reader with low points too, present them with the abyss to make the heights more dizzying. We develop arcs throughout, shifting our characters from one incarnation to another, giving them foils, tripping them up with plot obstacles. We think about our people, we make them the focus of our attention, we constantly bring them and their relationships to the fore. And we keep the thread of our theme running throughout the novel like a name stamped in a stick of rock, hopefully becoming clearer and sharper with every bite.

Overall, this feels more like craft than art. Perhaps because writers can only learn by writing. By serving a rather prosaic apprenticeship of writing and being rejected, and of rewriting, and sweating over our novels like steel workers. Yet we also use the language of art to describe ourselves and our processes. We say blithely that language and grammar, punctuation and syntax, the artistry part of writing, the small details, these constitute our toolkit. The story itself is our "canvas". Yet if we are artists, we are rough, uncouth types, in blue overalls rather than smocks, using a chisel rather than a fine, camel hair brush. We hew story over long months, and all our most important choices seem to be blunt-edged and large-scale.

But here's the thing. 

We cannot see the shape of the novel while we're writing it. 

Not until we finish and step back.

While we're at the wordface, the work has to be done on faith, by touch alone, step by careful step, like someone groping their way across an unfamiliar room in the dark. During the actual writing, the final shape can only be felt, sensed rather than seen, like a spider's web in the writer's head.

So the best novelists write with one finger touched lightly to the nearest thread, listening for the almost imperceptible tremors that tell them how far they are from the centre and how close to the prey, keeping them invisibly connected to the whole.

That sounds more like art to me. And so the argument continues ...

My latest arts and crafts offering, on sale now at Amazon only.

QUESTION: Are novelists artists or crafts people, or a bit of both? And if you are a writer, how do you see the process? As artistry or craftswork?

Week Twenty-Five: Promoting Books, or, We Interrupt this blog for a THUNDERCLAP

UPDATE: July 2016

The new revised edition of GIRL NUMBER ONE is out August 9th 2016 with Thomas & Mercer, and I'm running a NEW Thunderclap Campaign to help promote it. 

Do support me by clicking the link below!

Girl Number One on THUNDERCLAP 

Forgive the theatrics. But it's all in a good cause. Honest.

As a writer, you may have heard of 'Thunderclap'. It is rapidly becoming THE new method of promoting books on social media. But what on earth is it? And how does it work?

Let me explain ...

You may have 100 followers on Twitter or 5000. Fair enough. You may even have a few thousand friends on Facebook. Great stuff. But using Thunderclap, you basically harness the combined social reach of 100 or more friends and followers, giving you a MASSIVE group to which you can promote your book.

You join up at Thunderclap and decide on your goal - 100 people tweeting a link to your book on Amazon along with a short promotional message is the method I went for - then start asking other people in your social media reach, i.e. your friends on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr or LinkedIn, to "support" the campaign.

Supporting a campaign means visiting the Thunderclap site, agreeing to let them access your info on one or more social media accounts - just like when you access any app like Instagram that posts elsewhere for you - and clicking Support This Campaign.

You can choose which social media account you want to use for supporting it, then Thunderclap will post the other person's campaign tweet or post ONCE ONLY on a certain date at a certain pre-arranged time.

That's the THUNDERCLAP effect. One hundred people or more at once saying, 'Read this book!'across a range of widely differing social media accounts.

And for those who feel this will be an annoyance, I doubt it. Many of the people who are supporting my campaign do not particularly overlap in their friends with my own, so a hundred or so tweets or posts going out to several hundred thousand people is unlikely to cause much annoyance.

And it's FREE. No obligation to buy and no hidden cost to you. Just an agreement to let Thunderclap post my chosen tweet on your account come Monday October 19th.

But there's a catch ...

If you don't reach your chosen number of supporters - which is 100 for me - then it will not happen at all. The campaign will have failed, and no messages will go out anywhere.

To help boost my numbers, I joined the Thunderclap Campaigns Facebook group and agreed to reciprocate with other campaigns in return for votes. Without that help, I doubt I would have made my goal. Worth considering.

A large proportion of people who share your message asking for supporters WILL NOT support the Thunderclap campaign themselves, for whatever reason: some may dislike allowing access to their account even for a one-off tweet or share; some openly dislike book promotion in any form (a staggering number of these also believe it's possible for independent authors without publisher back-up to sell books without actually telling anyone about them, just by being nice and hoping people notice they are authors, LOL); others may not want the kind of book you've written to appear on their social media feed. I myself discreetly passed on reciprocating with some of the writers who backed my campaign, mainly because I did not want to seem to be supporting certain kinds of dodgy erotica. I felt bad about that, but staying 'on message' is important on social media.

UPDATE

After The Thunderclap

Following my Thunderclap on Monday at 5pm, when 117 people on social media reposted my message to a social reach of nearly 655K people, to check out GIRL NUMBER ONE on Amazon, at first nothing seemed to happen.

It was a little worrying.

Then slowly sales started rolling in late that evening, and the day finished at 100 copies sold at £1.99 during that 24-hour period. The borrowed pages read (via Kindle Unlimited) reached 14,000.

The ranking shot up 70 places to #150.

That was the Thunderclap effect and I was fairly pleased with it. It's now starting to subside a little, as one might expect. But you can help stop the slide by sharing this post, my book details, or buying the book itself in paperback or ebook.

Many thanks!

UPDATE ON THE UPDATE 

November 16th 2015

It is now almost ONE MONTH since the Thunderclap for Girl Number One.  

Today, the book is at #14 in the UK Kindle chart.

As far as I'm concerned, a well-organized Thunderclap campaign with strong follow-up promotional efforts on social media can reap huge rewards.

Overall, feedback and response have been very positive. One (male) writer on Twitter told me it was a mistake to do a Thunderclap as it would 'put people off the book' and was annoyed when I disagreed. I believe it's safe to say he was mistaken.

UPDATE ON THE UPDATE ON THE UPDATE

December 6th 2015

It is now a little short of two months since the Thunderclap.

 GIRL NUMBER ONE is #5 in the UK Kindle store

A few days ago it reached #3, my highest-ever ranking with any book.

Nuff said.

UPDATE:

GIRL NUMBER ONE 

reached #1 in the UK Kindle chart

mid-December 2015

and stayed there nearly a full week.

THANKS!!!

GIRL NUMBER on Amazon UK and on Amazon US.  

UPDATE: July 2016
The new revised edition of GIRL NUMBER ONE is out August 9th 2016 with Thomas & Mercer, and I'm running a NEW Thunderclap Campaign to help promote it. 

Do support me by clicking the link below!

Girl Number One on THUNDERCLAP

Week Twenty-Four: Writing My First Contemporary Thriller

Those who know me well will agree that I am a genre-hopper. I hop from one genre to another with scant regard for market positioning, or what publishers and retailers like to call 'author branding'. This is one explanation why, despite having written several dozen novels, I am not a star in any one genre. (I will leave the other possible explanations for you to guess at on your own.) But that does not mean I would not like to be!

About a year and a half ago, while I was still knee-deep in an historical fiction series, it was suggested to me by a senior editor that I should write a contemporary thriller. A crime novel, but not a police procedural. Being a rabid fan of Lee Child's Jack Reacher novels, I embraced the idea with enthusiasm and excitement. At last, a chance to show what I could achieve as a contemporary writer within a popular mass-market genre.

But of course it's also an over-crowded market, and the novel I produced over the next year did not appeal to the editor who first suggested it. It went through several laborious redrafts, then was sent out to other publishers. Nobody wanted it. The rejections differed as to detail but the overall message was the same. Like the three bears' porridge, it was too hot, too cold, too salty, too sweet etc. for the market.

The project was then handed back to me, with the suggestion that I should self-publish.

To say I was disappointed is grossly to understate the matter. It was a serious blow to my self-confidence as a writer, especially as I was by that stage out of contract with all my publishers. After some years in traditionally published historical fiction, that book represented my calling-card script as a contemporary writer. A calling-card that had been handed back to me by a disdainful majordomo, and the door slammed in my face.

After some time nursing my wounds - I wish I could say 'downing tequila on a desert island' but I'm not that cool - I sorted through all the rejections I had seen and picked out the main thrust of their issues. I worked out how I could rewrite the book to 'fix' it. One key change was making my main protagonist older. A simple enough change, on the face of it. But of course that involved rewriting every single page of the book, because in the process of recasting her character, her narrative voice had to change, to mature, to harden. Rather like me as a writer ...

I really wish I had not chosen to write this scary scene so late at night ...

The main differences I noted between writing GIRL NUMBER ONE (the title of my thriller) and my previous novels, mostly either historical fiction or romances, were as follows:

Pace - a contemporary thriller is fast and furious. It has to be, to deliver the requisite thrills and keep an easily distracted reader turning the page. So introspection and description take a back seat, and action comes to the fore. The verb becomes king here, the adjective and adverb have to be rooted out. Not 'I thought' or 'I saw' (I chose a first person narrator) but 'I did'. Dialogue can take the place of internal monologue, which means it has to work harder, to underline character, drop clues and turn the plot.

Tone - the narration of a contemporary thriller is terse, or at least that's how I prefer it. It's also highly self-aware. This is someone who observes everything around them, whether a trained or natural detective, constantly noticing, examining, deciphering, unravelling, understanding. And often without an excess of emotional response, as emotion tends to hamper that process. (Emotional response being the sine qua non of the romantic novel, I often found myself working at the opposite end of the narrative spectrum to my other books.)

Character - the characters in a contemporary thriller are not, in general, those you might encounter in other genres (though that rather depends on the writer). They have to be boldly drawn, sometimes even starkly and at speed, because a thriller is about action and reaction, rather than a leisurely character study. But the main protagonists also need qualities that others around them noticeably lack: massive intelligence, strength, resolve, courage, generosity, kindness, plus a few special skills. They must leap off the page without being caricatures, and linger in the reader's memory, not least because some of them may become suspects later.

Where the narrator is concerned, assuming that is your chief protagonist, we need the reader to care about that person deeply. Otherwise, there will be little reason to keep reading when he or she is put in danger. Such a character must be sympathetic and strongly-drawn enough to elicit an emotional response from the reader. By which I really mean, he or she must feel true.

Truth - a contemporary thriller should seem realistic, even more so than romantic or historical fiction, and the actions of its characters must be completely believable too, even when your plot is unlikely or even preposterous at times. So how to achieve this? In the same way as a sci-fi or fantasy novel, you have to anchor the world of your novel somewhere that feels very realistic, and therefore works to distract the reader from the unlikeliness of your plot.

In my case, I decided to follow the well-worn advice, write what you know, and achieve narrative truth that way. So I based the world of my debut thriller on the Cornish village in which I was actually living at the time of writing. I was then able to describe, with absolute accuracy and consistency, the village layout and its surrounding area, the views, the flowers in bloom at each season, the likely weather, the very feel of the air ... A bit of a cheat, perhaps, but I wanted to nail that 'truth' element of the thriller first-time-out.

Did I manage to nail it though?

The proof of the thriller is in the reading, and I hope you will give mine a shot. You can find a free sample or buy GIRL NUMBER ONE on Amazon. Digital only at the moment, with paperback POD to follow.

GIRL NUMBER ONE Amazon US

GIRL NUMBER ONE Amazon UK

UPDATE: GIRL NUMBER ONE is currently at #3 in the UK Kindle Store (as of December 3rd 2015)

Week Twenty-Three: The Rehabilitation Of Lost Novels

If there's one thing most novelists have in abundance, it's failed or unwanted novels in the bottom drawer. And perhaps most of them deserve to be there, products of a mind not yet attuned to the rigorous demands of plot, structure, narrative.

But among those lost manuscripts, there may be the occasional gem. Something worth retrieving from that bottom drawer, dusting off, polishing, and resetting in a more publishable context.

Here follows the story of how my latest new release, MIRANDA, came into existence.

Thirteen years ago, I gave birth to twin boys, and immediately began to write a novel. It sounds strange, but I felt released by their birth like a sprinter by the starting pistol. You might think breastfeeding and caring for newborns twins should have kept me too busy to write. But at the time, I had not written for some years. I had been wandering in a creative desert, afraid of failure but thirsting for inspiration, and suddenly being granted that inspiration was like stumbling across an oasis.

So I jumped straight in and slurped up all the water!

Besides, these were not my first children, and in a way, the twins proved relatively easy to care for in those muddled early days after a birth. I had a loving partner who was only too happy to do his share, and two older girls for baby-minding, and the twins shared a cot and seemed to keep each other company, which meant fewer needy wakings between night feeds. So perhaps my situation was a little easier than most mothers of twins.

I had agreed to manage nights alone - as breast-feeding is a hard job to share! - so I bought a baby monitor and set up a temporary study for myself. Because within days of the birth, I had been blessed with an idea for a story. A story about the generations, about handing things on to your children. Not just possessions, but genetic material, memories, looks, personality, even secrets. The book had to be written, it would not be still. So I started to write, mostly at night, and kept an ear open for the babies over the monitor.

"Never resist when inspiration strikes, but get it down as quickly as possible."

Wasn't I tired? Well, oddly enough, no. I felt light as a bird in those first months after the birth. I felt as if I had slept all through that long, dragging twin pregnancy, and now I had been released from my burden and was floating!

I have never needed much sleep, and having to breastfeed twins gave me the perfect excuse to stay awake all night, then cat-nap during the day. It was a glorious experience, and I look back on that time as one of enhanced creativity, where I was totally alert and aware, and everything just flowed ... after years of stagnancy.

My partner's mother visited us during that period, and scolded me for being so self-indulgent as to be writing a novel when I should be concentrating on my newborns. Her disapproval was tangible. Mothers should not be writers, was her opinion. But I paid no attention. Babies don't know what you're doing when they're asleep. So I kept writing.

The book took six weeks to write. It wasn't a long novel, only 70,000 words. I initially called it THE BLOOD ARK, thinking about genetics, and after some tweaks, I sent out the first three chapters to a few agents, as my former agent had retired. None of them were interested. I had committed the cardinal sin of stepping away from my 'chosen' genre. My debut novel - about women in sport, marketed as chick-lit - had bombed, and this was a very different book. This was literary fiction, and there was no getting around that.

Easily disheartened, I put the novel away without any more attempts to place it. I decided it must be flawed beyond redemption if three or four agents had turned it down. (Yes, I was very naive.)

Being a bit deranged, I had got pregnant again when the twins were only six months old, and the new pregnancy and two house moves in quick succession were consuming my energy. Soon after that, I started writing erotic fiction to help pay the bills, and forgot all about THE BLOOD ARK. My literary novel in the bottom drawer. The book that had to be written, but would probably never be published.

"I can fix this book ... I just need more experience."

Enter Kindle Direct Publishing and the brave new world of self-publishing. And my own independent publishing venture that sprang out of that, Thimblerig Books.

I had long intended to resurrect my literary novel. But my memory of it was of a deeply flawed book that would need masses of rewrites and also be hard to place, having been written over a decade ago. Then this summer, I had a rush of blood, opened the ancient file, and started to read.

The book was a lot better than I remembered. Having written many novels since putting this one away, I saw at once how the structural issues - that had seemed insurmountable when I abandoned it in the early noughties - could be fixed with a few rigorous tweaks. I set to work, and after only a few weeks, the book was ready for copy-editing.

The biggest change, for me, was the title. It had been THE BLOOD ARK in my head since its inception. But now, with a stronger grasp of the market, I saw how that sounded too much like a thriller and would fail to reach the right readership. I toyed with various fashionable alternatives - titles with the words GIRL or WOMAN are very popular right now, as are curious phrases, like ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE or ME BEFORE YOU. But in the end, I decided on something very simple. And more in keeping with the original inspiration for the story.

So I present to you MIRANDA, the novel of my postpartum insomnia, taken down, dusted off, tweaked and retweaked, edited and repackaged thirteen years on.

MIRANDA: on sale now at Amazon

No abandoned novel is ever entirely lost to the world. It can be neglected and forgotten, but you never know when it may resurface in your consciousness. So if you have any novels languishing in that bottom drawer, why not take them out and read them again? Take notes, be generous to yourself, look at them structurally above all else - structure is usually where you'll find the most serious flaws in an abandoned novel - and consider, from your position of greater experience, how they could be fixed.

Rewrite in sections, trying to avoid any major changes that will alter or over-write the DNA of your original idea. Novels, it seems to me, come to us with their themes intact. (Even if we don't recognise that at the time.) So when we rewrite in any major way, we risk destroying that thematic integrity. Too massive a change can 'corrupt' the original idea, to borrow a word from computing, and the book will always be flawed after that, however much we struggle to fix it.

Unfortunately, if the original concept was flawed, and only major rewrites that change the book's thematic structure can hope to fix it, you may be better off giving up and starting a new project instead. Some books are beyond redemption. (Often because of botched rewrites in the past, before you were experienced enough to understand what you were doing, or perhaps because of bad advice.) But it may be worth trying again later, because the more books you write, the more experienced you become as a novelist, and the greater the distance you are putting between yourself and any earlier, failed novels. You may also become either famous enough to make it financially worthwhile to brush off old material and resubmit, or poor enough to make it imperative that you find new books to flog.

So the convergence of these three factors is usually required before a writer can successfully mine for lost gold:

EXPERIENCE - Writing is a craft, and the better the craftsperson, the better the artifact. So no attempt at writing a novel is wasted, as you are learning all the time you are failing.

DISTANCE - Think of Henry James and his 'figure in the carpet' analogy. The closer you are to a failed work of fiction, the less likely you are to see the pattern clearly. Step back a few years, or even a decade, and what needs fixing may suddenly spring out at you.

NECESSITY - It's damn hard work, fixing a flawed novel. Only people with great need or too much time on their hands are likely to manage it without failing again. And no good novelist has too much time on their hands ...

In the end, only you can know for sure whether your abandoned novel is worth saving from that dusty bottom drawer. But if it is, rejoice. For there is no satisfaction like the rehabilitation of a long-lost story.

MIRANDA is published by Thimblerig Books on Friday August 21st 2015.

QUESTION: Do you have any old unpublished novels you want to resurrect and rehabilitate?

Week Twenty-Two: Criticisms, Mistakes, and Mosquito Stings

HOORAH! I'm off to the Romantic Novelists' Association annual conference in a couple of days. There will be wine, women and, very probably, song. Kitchen parties. Important lectures. Coffee and meal-time networking. Secret deals may be brokered, book ideas suggested, agents and publishers hooked, new writers inspired, and much booze will be drunk.

So don't expect any writerly coherence from me until at least a few days afterwards. You can follow the mayhem on Twitter though if you like: https://twitter.com/janeholland1

Meanwhile, here's a question.

Question: should novelists ignore critical reviews or take them on board if they seem honest (rather than, say, the venom of an anonymous rival)?

Allow me to elaborate on this.

Some writers resent readers who like to broadcast their opinions on social media and blogs or Goodreads. They may consider their feedback to be artistic interference or, even worse, wholly unimportant to them. These are writers who proudly do not read their reviews, and sometimes not even the novels of their peers. They may write in solitude, keeping their writing unpolluted by outside influence.

Other writers see publication as an open exchange of ideas, and embrace feedback, both positive and negative, weeding out responses to find what works best for them - and even changing the way they write at times in response to reviewers.

You can probably guess which side I would pick in a tug-of-war, given the nature of this blog.

However, while thorough and thoughtful reviews, either positive or negative, are always welcome, they are no longer in the majority. As places like Net Galley continue to grow, seeding free novels left, right and centre, inexperienced or hostile bloggers seem to have grown in numbers, and sadly some take free books for granted. They trash new novels without a second thought as to the damage they may be doing to a budding career, or even to an author's psyche. Who cares about such things, eh? Authors get paid, after all, so they deserve a good kicking.  (Erm, they get paid peanuts, in general, dear readers, and sometimes not even that.)

To add to this problem, a vocal minority of bloggers appear to hate authors and everything they stand for, I'm unsure why, but you get that vibe as soon as any unfortunate author is naive enough to announce their identity on Twitter or Goodreads when replying to their conversations about books. 'Live tweeting' books has become part of that trend, nearly always undertaken to crush an author by reading their new book and tweeting instant (nearly always hostile) reactions: 'OMG, I hate this heroine, that scene was totally shit!' and so on.

And even if you are not being given a kicking, but are merely dismissed as incompetent or boring, some critical reviews can be very difficult to swallow. Sometimes they contain nonsense best left by the wayside, like comments about the author's appearance or character, or views which indicate ignorance of the book's subject matter. This happens quite frequently with historicals, for instance, where a blogger decides they know more about an historical period than the writer who spent a year or more researching it. This is often based on the watching of a television series like The Tudors, which contained more errors and historical inaccuracies than you can shake a stick at, but is frequently taken for truth by readers who then complain your book did not contain the same errors!

I have had furious reviewers trounce my Tudor novels for not being respectful enough towards Queen Elizabeth II (sic) or for retreading the boring familiar territory of Henry VII (sic) and his nine wives (sic), and even listened to one expert blogger explain to her friends that she had given my book a lower rating because she had done history at college and I had used twentieth-century names for some of my Tudor characters. One was a medieval name, the other from ancient Greece. Oh dear ...

It can be particularly frustrating when hostile reviews are lauded by other readers and taken as an indication that the writer's research is flawed and/or her books not worth reading. When every new book is struggling for attention in a desperately overcrowded marketplace, and editors look at places like Goodreads and Amazon for signs that an author has a promising career ahead, enough of these uncomplimentary reviews could perhaps depress initial sales and get a writer dumped by her publisher.

So, as writers, should we read our reviews or not? Should we engage readers - as many publishers press us to do - or run like hell for the nearest exit? And do hostile reviews make any difference to our careers?

Having been foolish enough to 'correct' a mistaken reviewer in the past and have my head bitten off by dozens of her outraged friends, I now feel it is best to smile grimly at such mistakes and trashings, and move on. Perhaps even to join the ranks of those writers who disdain the reading of their own reviews and prefer to work in an ivory tower, considering the mosquito stings of blogger critiques as below their attention.

But of course my feet are firmly on the ground. No ivory towers for me, alas.

And there are still plenty of very lovely reviewers out there, doing their best for the writers and books they love. As writers, we have to focus on those people, and thank them for their efforts, and be grateful for what we are given. Otherwise we would very swiftly give up writing books and hide in a dark cave for the rest of our lives.

So I shall continue to muddle along, occasionally reading reviews of my books when I can't avoid it, groaning at the bad 'uns, smiling at the lovely ones, and trying not to be so swayed by all those differing opinions that I can no longer make my own decisions about the books I write.

And now for the gratuitous book plug.

My latest rom com as Beth Good, published five days ago by Thimblerig Books, is THE ODDEST LITTLE BEACH SHOP.

No historical characters, you'll be relieved to hear. Just a sexy ogre for a hero, plus plenty of Cornish pasty and sandy beach scenes, as requested by my friends on Facebook.

Why not enjoy the FREE sample available now on Amazon?

Guest Post and Giveaway: Alison Morton on Writing Trilogies

Alison Morton's ROMA NOVA trilogy

Trilogies. As a reader, I love them. What is more satisfying than following a set of characters off into a new adventure, the sheer joy of seeing them develop as people, facing up to new challenges, discovering new family secrets or buried treasure or resolving long and bitter rivalries over the generations? Or perhaps they have a more internal theme focusing on the emotional ups and downs of three generations of women who come to live in a new country and pass wisdom up and down the family chain.

But I’m also a serial reader.

When I put the third book of a trilogy down, I’ve been known to sniff, gulp and reach for a strong cup of tea. The world I have loved for nearly three hundred thousand words has shut its door, the characters have vanished to the other side of nowhere.  Then to my joy (and not a little relief) I discover the author has written a fourth book, a follow-on. I have my credit card out before you can say ‘Harry Potter’.

As a writer, it’s both similar and different. When I started my first novel, INCEPTIO, I had no idea what I was doing. Writing was an impulse, a reaction to a dire film and thinking I could produce something better. But not even halfway through the first draft, I realised I had a far bigger story than I’d anticipated.

So I did the classic thing - I turned it into a trilogy.

The trilogy dilemma

SUCCESSIO, the last Roma Nova thriller in the original trilogy, set off into the world last June. The heroine had finished her journey with birth and deaths, traumas and triumphs, and I had closed her file on my computer. Now for wine, sun and leisure.

But one of the main secondary characters was whispering in my head, ‘Tell my story. You know you want to. Think of all those readers, begging for more. You’ll get fat, lounging by the pool. Get back to work!’

Juno!

Yes, this was the tough, no-nonsense Praetorian Aurelia Mitela insisting. Now, it’s not good for your future health if you disobey a Praetorian special forces officer, let alone one who’s also one of the most powerful women in Roma Nova. And her story of undercover work, loss, struggle and living at the most dangerous time in Roma Nova for three centuries – the Great Rebellion – was too tempting.

So begins a second trilogy within the Roma Nova world; it starts in the late 1960s with AURELIA and reaches to the 1980s. Fascinating how technology and attitudes have changed in fifty years! Research traps abound; some inventions we think recent were around in the late 1960s, others are surprisingly modern.  

This time round, I have the benefit of my own experience plus Roma Nova is familiar territory. But the gods punish hubris so I re-read the first trilogy and marked up the passages that referred back to the times when Aurelia had been a young woman. With a new three-book cycle within an established series, readers can start their Roma Nova adventure with AURELIA without having to plough through the first three.

But I do hope they will be so entranced, they'll want to go back and grab the first three books!

 AURELIA is out now in ebook (various formats) and paperback.

AURELIA: available now on Amazon

 Late 1960s Roma Nova, the last Roman colony that has survived into the 20th century. Aurelia Mitela is alone – her partner gone, her child sickly and her mother dead – and forced to give up her beloved career as a Praetorian officer.

But her country needs her unique skills. Somebody is smuggling silver – Roma Nova’s lifeblood – on an industrial scale. Sent to Berlin to investigate, she encounters the mysterious and attractive Miklós, a known smuggler who knows too much and Caius Tellus, a Roma Novan she has despised and feared since childhood.

Barely escaping a trap set by a gang boss intent on terminating her, she discovers that her old enemy is at the heart of all her troubles and pursues him back home to Roma Nova...

Buy from Amazon: http://authl.it/B00WIQL08A?d

Other retailer links here: http://alison-morton.com/books-2/aurelia/where-to-buy-aurelia/

Read about Alison and Roma Nova: www.alison-morton.com

Connect with her on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/AlisonMortonAuthor

Twitter: https://twitter.com/alison_morton @alison_morton

 GIVEAWAY!

A signed copy of AURELIA (paperback) is available to one of our lucky readers!

Just comment below, telling us whether you prefer to read stand-alone fiction or a series like a trilogy, and your name will be entered into a draw. (UK only)

The draw will take place on Monday 25th, so please do remember to check back to see if you've won!

Week Twenty-One: Narrative Choices

Week 21 - my blog comes of age!

First off, a huge thank you to everyone who has bought the ebook of this blog so far. Every single purchase is vastly appreciated. And thank you to those who have spared the time to review the book too. It has seven 5 star reviews so far!

You really do make a difference to a book's success by buying and reviewing. So thank you.

If you have no idea what I'm talking about, I expanded the first 20 weeks of this How To Write A Novel blog into a great value ebook, and you can download it for only £1.99 here:

21 WAYS TO WRITE A COMMERCIAL NOVEL.

So, onward and upward!

This month I've been looking back through some advice I gave to writers a few years back when editing women's fiction for Salt Publishing. While rummaging through those old documents, I found some interesting thoughts on narrative voice and point of view characters, and decided to share them on the blog.

The voice you adopt for each novel is a vital thing. It informs your entire book from line one, and can make or break a story. Yet it's surprising how few writers invest serious time in considering the voice or voices they have chosen to tell their story. This is something I've had to think about quite frequently myself over the past year, because even though I have nearly thirty published novels, and dozens of short fiction titles out there, you never stop learning new tricks in this business, however old a dog you become.

So I thought I'd discuss narrative voice this week.

Choices over the kind of narrative voice we use in each story seem to happen instinctively for most people. This may be because voice comes first for them, like a whisper in the dark, or because experienced writers have an instinctive grasp of the whole from the part.

To expand on that last idea, the first scene, the first line, even the very first word you choose to write: these should automatically inform the book to come. They tell us upfront who's speaking - and perhaps as crucially, why. They may suggest character, plot, motive, context, even ultimate destination. It is not too far of a push to say that the first page of a novel can behave like a blueprint of the whole novel. Macrocosm and microcosm in perfect harmony. The big in the small, and vice versa.

At least, that's the ideal. How does your first page measure up?

• Check your first line. Does it intrigue? Does it suggest? Does it cause a double-take?
• Have you in some way invoked the magical territory, as the storyteller does with the traditional line, 'Once upon a time ...' ?
•  Is the character whose voice we hear powerfully drawn enough from word one to make us stop and settle down to hear his or her story?
• Voice is the writer's as much as the character's. What about your first page tells us what a special writer you are and why it would be worth reading your book?
• Can we 'see' what is going on? This is a visual age so don't neglect to build a picture in the reader's mind. Whatever you see when you close your eyes and think of that first page, THAT is what you need to draw with language.
• Clear, broad, generous, confident gestures. Don't skimp. Give them the works.

Giving the reader the works ...

The novel I'm working on right now is becoming an impromptu experiment with point of view. This is mostly designed to obfuscate - great word and much-underused - a plot twist that I need to keep buried as long as possible, but also to solve a narrative-specific problem I had. The jury is still out on whether it will work, but right now the book is being written in both first person and third person.

Fussy? Possibly. Confusing? Maybe that too, but I do want the reader to be pushed a little off-balance by the telling. Hopefully though not so much of either of those that the book will fail because of it.

Intention is everything with narrative choices. Doing something like that - splitting the narrative in some unorthodox or risky way, or stretching it out to include more than two or three point-of-view voices, for instance - just because it sounds like an interesting idea ... That's never wise. It's a literary move, perhaps. To experiment is a natural urge for an avant-garde writer, and thank goodness someone is doing it for those of us who can't. Genre writers tend to follow a smoother, better-worn path where narrative is concerned. The tried and tested. But the slippery narrator is everywhere today. The strange but intimate little voice in the ear, spooking and confusing and charming and intriguing the reader. That's what many editors are looking for right now. Only it takes nerves to go after that with real gusto. To take the inevitable risks and hope someone left the safety net in place. Because sometimes, when you do it, even the editor who asked for such things specifically may back off, saying, 'Actually, no. It doesn't quite work. Good luck elsewhere.'

These are some of the obstacles we face as writers. The stick, and nothing but. The poisoned carrot. The hand that turns out to be empty when we tap it. The bottle of air.

So why keep writing?

I know why I keep writing and trying to sell novels, by hook or by crook. To eat, for sure. To pay my bills and keep a roof over my children's heads. But also because I cannot countenance making my living, or whatever scratchings I can make if a living is denied to me, in any other way. Despite all the hard knocks and betrayals, this is still the business for me. Putting down a word like the first stone in a drystone wall. Then another. Then another. Then another. And watching a new world begin to take shape from that silent accretion. Because the rush of a well-wrought sentence is better than cocaine.

QUESTION: If your narrator is not secretly you, who the hell is it?

21 Ways To Write A Commercial Novel

I'm thrilled to be able to announce that the first twenty-odd weeks of this Creative Writing blog have been turned into an ebook!

Many thanks to everyone who contributed comments.

Bursting with up-to-date information and entertaining anecdotes from the world of writing and publishing, this guide also features helpful comments on writing from both new and established writers, including Rowan Coleman, Katie Fforde, Judy Astley, Lesley Cookman, Nuala Ni Chonchuir, Alison Morton, Elizabeth Moss and many, many others. A goldmine of advice for writers from an author of over twenty commercial novels, covering these general topics:

Beginnings
Fake It Till You Make It
Commercial Ideas
Research
Planning
Hooks And Teasers
How To Open Chapters
How To Close Chapters
Writing A Commercial Scene
Location, Location, Location
Writing Complex Characters
Staying Commercial
Novel Avoidance Syndrome
Writing The Commercial Synopsis
Dealing With Rejection
Other Writers
Four-Point Commercial Checklist
Changing Identities
Ten-Point Guide To The Commercial Novella
Writing Your Novel
Rowan Coleman’s Advice To New Writers 

It's entitled 21 Ways To Write A Commercial Novel and is out now as an ebook, only available on Amazon Kindle. 

Grab your digital version of this CW blog now - enlarged and with comments added! - from Amazon

Week Twenty: Ten Ways To Tackle The Novella

Writing a briskly paced novella can easily be fitted between longer projects.

Apologies for taking so long to resume my weekly posts on How To Write A Novel. I was beset by health issues while trying to finish my novel, and time got away from me.

But you behold me back in the saddle, and ready to apply the crop. If you'll forgive the slightly BDSM metaphor.

There have been times this year when I have not felt able to grapple with the larger canvas of my novel, but wished to produce shorter fiction for self-publishing. (One must eat, after all.) On those occasions, I have turned to the tricky form known as the novella. The novella is not long enough for the label of 'novel' yet too long for a short story. It's generally considered to begin at about the 15,000 word mark, or sometimes 20. And it ends in the region of 40,000 words whereafter it can safely be considered a novel.

I have one short festive novella for sale at the moment, recently published, as an illustration of the lower word band: The Oddest Little Christmas Shop. And its sister novella, published during the summer under the pen-name Beth Good, which is rather longer: The Oddest Little Chocolate Shop. But even that is still too short to be a novel. Both these novellas have sold very well.

So how do you approach the writing of a novella as opposed to the novel form? Are there any inherent differences, apart from the merely technical one of length?

Here are TEN WAYS to tackle the writing of a novella.


1. One Plot To Rule Them All
The novella does not have room for multiple subplots. Decide in advance on your main plot, and perhaps one closely matched subplot, then execute the narration as simply as possible.  


2. Clear Premise or Theme
All stories have a basic premise or theme - crime never pays, or love conquers all - but in a novel, these 'messages' can be complex or layered. In a novella, the premise should be so simple or clear-cut, it can be gleaned from a one sentence description of your story.

3. A Few Good Characters
The novella is not the best place to unfold a sprawling family saga. Think of it as a cross between a fairy tale and a Beckett play. You can have more characters than a short story could comfortably hold, if you wish, but you will achieve greater intensity by focusing on a narrow range - say, two to five characters at most.

4. There Can Be Only One
Closely allied to No. 1, this is a requirement for simple narration. I don't mean simplistic - you could chose a strong and complex character as your narrator. Even an unreliable narrator. But choose either first person or only one third person POV narrator. If you stray from this, your style of narration should remain consistent, at least.

A short festive novella: one narrator, one POV, one storyline.

5. Short Scenes, Kept In Proportion
Avoid overly drawn-out ten page scenes. Plan your novella as a series of beats, like musical notation. Important scenes are a long beat, transitional scenes a short one. But even your 'big' scenes will be shorter than in a traditional novel. Think minimalism.

6. Keep The Line Taut
All stories require tension and conflict, but in a novel, you have time to build slowly to a climax if you wish. In a novella, as in a short story, you need to hit the ground running. Establish your basic conflict in the first pages, then add to it in each new scene until you reach maximum tension, like the Buckaroo game where the donkey eventually kicks off his load.

7. Experiment With Structure
I normally divide my novellas into chapters, because I feel that provides a novel-like structure to shorter fiction. But you could experiment with alternative methods of division: a line break between sections could work well in a short novella with only one narrator, and maintain tone very nicely. Or you could break up sections with a repeated gimmick: a quatrain of poetry, for instance, or a riddle, quotation or aphorism in italics. Have fun with it!

8. Rounding Out And Tying Up
Some writers approach the novella as a novel in microcosm. But a novel may have very different reasons to a novella for existing, and one thing that divides them is the idea of overarching structure. A novel's overarching purpose or structure may be very complex indeed, even diffuse, which fits our way of reading novels over an extended period. With a story that can be read in one sitting, plot structure needs to be strongly rounded, with a distinct sense of closure or completion, as any loose ends or vague petering out will be glaringly obvious.  

Sometimes a novella is so successful, it can spawn a series or brand: Oddest Little Chocolate Shop

9. Pitching To Publishers - Or Not
Within popular genres such as science fiction, fantasy or romance, there is a traditional market for the novella. Many publishers, especially those who run a strong digital list, will take on a good novella that fits their guidelines on length and content. If you have written a niche/genre novella, look at publishers' guidelines for submissions within that field. Many digital start-ups, for instance, welcome novella writers. Though be warned, you are unlikely to be paid much. My advice, therefore, is to self-publish where possible, and market on social media as a 'quick read' to fans of that genre. For non-genre novellas, especially shorter ones, the market remains vague and unpromising. Good luck!

10. The Novella Series
The short form of the novella lends itself well to a series. This can be linked by title alone - see my Oddest Little novella brand above - or by characters, setting, or even theme. It is always useful to plan the series before starting, but you may come to it after one or two publications have been successful. Probably best to keep word count and structural divisions similar between titles, as readers expect this. Maintaining a particular narrative style will also please readers who liked your first book for it. A five book series is a good length for a series, especially for shorter novellas, and when self-publishing, you can produce a higher priced omnibus edition at the end.

QUESTION: What makes you choose to read a novella rather than a novel?