Week Fourteen: Four-Point Commercial Checklist

"Murder will out," they say, and many in publishing still claim to believe the same of good books. "Great writing will always find a market," we are told as writers, along with that golden oldie, "All good authors will be published eventually."

This sop to our vanity is no longer true, if it ever was. Or it can be true if we are prepared to self-publish.

Not every writer will get their books into the shops. And the journey to get them there - and keep them there - is more complicated and fiendish than anyone outside commercial fiction would ever believe.

Commercial publishing is shrinking, and author lists are shrinking with it. More rapidly than ever. There is every possibility that you will write a good book this year or next, perhaps even a great book, yet be unable to place it with a reputable publisher. Or you may have talent and a reasonable track record, yet fail to attract a publisher willing to go to contract on the strength of a proposal alone. Meanwhile the bills have to be paid ...

It's tempting to assume that every book taken on is now a major risk for publishers, except new work by the very top names - or complete unknowns. Yes, dear new writers with good books, you are not in too bad a position in terms of attracting publishing deals. New writers have not yet 'failed', so you will always be more attractive to the money people whom editors have to convince when they decide to acquire a book. But woe betide if your debut sells less well than expected. Because it's all about sales these days. And I can perfectly understand why publishing is fast becoming a closed shop. In this culture of fear, risk-taking is akin to professional suicide. Far better to give a flat no - or offer the most meagre terms possible - than lose money on a book deal and face the firing squad yourself.

So what's the answer to this narrowing of the publishing arteries?

As I see it, there are several courses open to writers in this position. You can resign yourself to diminishing advances and precarious contracts, and maybe even shift into self-publishing, or you can change what you're writing to become even more commercial, in the hope that this will save you from the graveyard of good writers that has become mid-list publishing.

Literary writers will, quite rightly, reject that last idea. Literary fiction has always been a precarious medium - and anyway, out there on the razor's edge is the best place for experimental fiction to thrive. If you expect no money, and are happier with a small publisher who understands what you're trying to do and will support you with that, you will not miss earning your living by words alone.

"I'm not compromising my creative spirit to churn out a blockbuster. I love this garret."

Mid-list authors keen to explore the freedom and adventure of self-publishing may shrug off traditional publishing at this point and find a new path through these dangerous waters, and good luck to them. I have paddled there myself and know it can be very liberating to self-publish, not to mention lucrative.

For truly commercial writers who do not wish to self-publish, however, adapting to the demands of this brave new marketplace is the only viable response. Nobody wants to drag themselves to the desk every morning feeling like a dinosaur, reading their sales figures with a heart sinking as rapidly as the numbers.

But what does it mean, to write more commercially?

The answers change in specifics according to each publisher and genre, but in general you need to ensure this simple Four-Point Commercial Checklist applies to your manuscript, at least to some degree:

Strong or high-concept story, preferably strikingly original in some elements, but not so original that it won't fit into current book categories. Check it can be described in a simple phrase - or better still in the title itself.

High stakes action. Start with life and death, then work upwards. The more people potentially affected by your story, the higher the stakes.

Accessible, cleanly written prose. Your book can be as complicated plot-wise as you like, but it must be written for as broad a readership as possible. Keep sentences uncluttered, say what you mean, be elegant if you wish - but save your deathless prose for your literary alter-ego.

Larger-than-life characters that keep a reader turning the pages. (You may think you write these anyway, but it's a fair bet you don't. Think larger. No, even larger than that. You need characters a reader will never forget.)

As you can see from that list, writing more commercially is nothing to do with writing in a popular genre or following trends or writing longer or shorter books. It's about making your books memorable without becoming melodramatic, and simple without becoming simplistic.

It comes down to being a great storyteller. And above all this, you also have to believe in your story and not write in in a cynical, 'this will get me published' way.

Tough, huh?

"Jim knew he only had thirty seconds to save the entire universe ..." Are your stakes high enough?

If you knuckle down and do all those things, and still can't get a publisher to take your book, let's face it, you're screwed. But don't worry. There's always self-publishing. More on that in another post.

Oh, and my latest novel WITCHRISE is published today!

QUESTION: What do you think makes a book commercial these days? And would you ever change the way you write just to keep being published?

Week Thirteen: Why Novels Are Like Apples

The best-laid plots ...

I've been thinking this week about plots, genres, and how they can so easily go awry when you're not watching. Literary novels can go off in any direction they want. But most commercial novels are all about the plot. Characters are important, yes. Vitally important. Characters are what drive the novel forward, after all. But in general they have to do something for the book to take off. The Hundred Year Old Man is fascinating - but it's not until he Climbed out Of A Window and Disappeared that we started buying his story in droves.

So let's cram as many events as possible into our stories, the new writer might say. If action and plot are what is required, let's put something amazing in each chapter, and crown it with a genre twist.

But of course this will not work. Yes, we want action as well as character. But what we do not want is chaos. Fiction is like real life, but it is not real life. It has to be controlled, fenced in, kept in order by its creator. Stories must stick to the plan. Worlds must cohere. Mild-mannered country folk cannot run away and become international jewel thieves - unless that is the crux of your story. (See The Hobbit for details.)

Stick with the genre you came in with. At least for this book.

Genre is all-important in this. Genre tells you your parameters and how far you can push them. It can feel like a limitation at times, but more often it's a liberation. It allows you to focus, really focus, on language, the nuts and bolts of writing, on narrative, on dialogue, on pacing and structure, and forget - to some extent, once you've set it down in outline - about plot. Like a partner at a dance, you need to stick with the genre you came in with or risk losing your reader's trust. (From Dusk Till Dawn is a notable exception in film terms, which I stumbled across one night on the television and watched with my jaw hanging open.) In other words, you can't start out writing a comic novel, then turn it into a romance, then rev it up into a thriller, then shift it into political drama, then develop a cop buddy story, then ...

You get the idea.

It's perfectly possible to write like that, of course. No one is stopping you from writing anything, especially in these brave days of self-publishing. But successes with that kind of genre merry-go-round are going to be rare. You need great skill to negotiate the comic and the dramatic, to keep romance bubbling away while exploring political issues, and so on. Great skill only comes with experience, the kind of writing experience that tells you not to bother in the first place. And if you did bother, you'd need a brave - or foolish - agent to take it on.

The way I see it, novels are like fruit. And they enjoy the same limitations and structural integrity as fruit. So a novel that begins as an apple should end as an apple.

Novels are like apples. An apple never becomes a banana halfway through being eaten.

A novel that starts life as an apple should not turn yellow and become a banana by act two, or morph gently into a mango in the closing chapters.

This does not mean we cannot mix genres. Not in the slightest. A pineapple is a mixed genre fruit. But it's still a pineapple. It doesn't forget which two genres make up its DNA, if you see what I mean. It doesn't add a third one as an experiment just because things are getting boring.

So even if she does not make a plan, the commercial writer needs to know, at least at a subconscious level, what kind of novel she is writing. And though she may not know the exact details of the journey at the outset, she must understand that it cannot suddenly become a different category of novel, or not without risk to its integrity. Romances need to stay romantic. Thrillers scare you till the end. And baddies always get punished, even if it takes a ten book series to catch them.

I write mixed genre novels: this is an historical paranormal romance. But I planned it that way and did not deviate from its exact parameters. It started as mixed genre, and ended the same way.

To steer the story to its conclusion without mishap, you only need to keep chanting, 'Steady as she goes.' And if it feels like your romance or historical is flagging in that so-called soggy middle, don't reach for the hand grenade or the unexpected kidnap. It's not a touch of international thriller you need to excite the reader. It's electric prose. It's a feeling of inevitability. It's narrative drive. It's brilliantly illuminated characters. It's good old-fashioned excellence in writing. Nothing more.

QUESTION: Have you ever written a book that began one way, then unexpectedly turned into something quite different, and what did you do about it? Was it successful?

Week Twelve: The Company of Writers

RNA Conference 2014. Yes, that's me in the foreground. Photo by Anita Chapman.

My apologies for the late posting of this blog. I recently returned from a long weekend at the annual conference of the Romantic Novelists Association and have been recovering. Since the conference is what's uppermost in my mind right now, my blog post this week will be about the key reasons for novelists to attend a writers' conference, plus some associated thoughts.

Richard Lee (Waterstones, at podium) and Matt Bates (WHS Travel) talk sales to a packed lecture theatre, RNA Conference 2014

Conference-going can be exhausting. It does not have to be, you can always duck out and spend a few hours alone in your room, or go for a walk or drive to clear your head. But I spend so much of my life locked in a small room with my thoughts, I prefer to suffer exhaustion and not waste a moment of the conference experience napping or walking. When I am not much older, I suspect slipping away to my room will become a necessary part of staying the course, because it is genuinely tiring to get up early, go to bed late, move relentlessly from one session to coffee break to another session, chat with fellow writers, and perhaps attend the odd kitchen party, all for two to three days in a row. But for now, I'm still pushing through the pain barrier to make the most of my time there, albeit with a rictus grin on my face ...

So here are the chief reasons why a writer, especially one new to the industry and hoping to be published in the future, should attend a writers' conference. At a conference, we can:

• Swop horror stories about writing and publishing
• Allow ourselves fresh hope
• Develop a feel for the market
• Take the opportunity to show our work to agents and editors
• Bare our souls
• Drink deep
• Take (and compare) notes
• Learn from experts
• Give presentations and share our knowledge
• Become part of a community

Coffee time chat with fellow authors, RNA Conference 2014

At this year's RNA conference there was much talk of 'the death of the midlist', i.e. the increasing erosion of those writers and titles which are not expected to sell mega bucketloads, but normally sell a reasonable amount, and so get published but do not enjoy the kind of massive promotional push from their publishers that a writer such as Stephen King or Philippa Gregory might expect. (Ironically the kind of writers who desperately need that push are the ones who rarely get it, the financial risk being considered too steep.) Advances for midlisters are dwindling along with their sales, and publishers are dropping huge swathes of midlist authors in favour of brand-new faces or top-notch commercial hits. This cull is not about talent or market fit. It's simply about money and there not being enough of it to go round. So the new and the sure-fire get it instead of the cannon fodder.

There is no easy answer to this dwindling of earnings. Some writers have called for publishers to pay their authors larger percentages as royalties, and there is a case for this; the 8-10% we traditionally enjoy on paperback retail sales was fine back in the days before the collapse of the Net Book Agreement, when discounted sales were not permitted and most successful writers made a good living. Now though, with piracy and supermarket discounts and multi-media competition working against us, and our much-beleaguered books selling in far smaller numbers at knock-down prices, that meagre 10% barely allows us to earn out our advances - if we got one at all. Digital royalties are improving and approaching 30-40% in most places now, but of course digital prices are even lower. So we lose out both ways.

A drinks reception sponsored by Kindle Direct Publishing: some famous faces here ...

Conferences are places where the open discussion of such problems can happen in a wide arena packed with industry die-hards and newbies alike, some traditionally published, some self-published, some unpublished but ever-hopeful of success. But success has become a moveable feast. Success for writers used to be six-figure contracts and all the trimmings: book launches, posh dinners with agents, international tours. Now, for the midlist at least - the stalwart foot soldiers of publishing - it has become about selling enough to stay in work, even selling enough to stay alive. And it feels as though nearly everyone below superstar level is suffering, even those who seemed unassailable ten years ago.

So a conference not only gives us a chance to talk to our heroes and press our latest manuscript into the hands of agents and editors, it also allows us to discuss these industry failings en masse, and hopefully suggest remedies to each other.

Not that the remedy to publishing's current sickness lies in our hands alone. But we can suggest ways to continue making money from our art, to diversify, to seek new outlets for our writing, perhaps to leap into the wind and become publishers ourselves. And even though the outlook is bleak, there is still the solace of the company of other writers, other creative souls trapped in the same impasse, passing the bottle at some late night party in student accommodation ... just like the old days.

QUESTION: do you attend writers' conferences, and what do you hope to gain from them? Has attendance at a conference ever improved your writing and forwarded your career?

Week Eleven: Good versus Evil Characters

Is Heathcliff evil?

Here's a strange thing about characters and readers. Readers tend to want main characters to be nice and to do the 'right thing', so they can identify with them while they read, and so feel nice themselves. To assure themselves that they too would do the right thing, if it came down to it. That's the theory of the main character, anyway. That as a reader you enter the skin of the narrator - usually the protagonist in today's fiction - and look out through their eyes. And if the view becomes a bit icky or disturbing or inconsistent, well, you might put that book down and tiptoe away without finishing it.

In nineteenth century fiction, writers could often get away with problematic and even downright evil main characters by telling their story via an innocent - and therefore untarnished - narrator. Wuthering Heights, for instance. But secondhand narration has gone out of fashion, along with the epistolary style - telling a story through a series of letters - and apart from bestselling gems like Bridget Jones' Diary and Diary of a Wimpy Kid, readers prefer straight narration to other ways of telling a story.

As a writer - this applies more to genre fiction than literary fiction, but is still apparent even among the literati - you are being constantly urged by editors to make your main characters nicer. To stop them sleeping with the wrong people, stealing, telling fibs, murdering their loved ones. This is not so difficult for writers who tell their stories within a fictional corridor where 'baddies' rarely do anything worse than give you a bad job reference or steal your boyfriend. But even within that limitation the concept of character morality is equally as valid as it is for a crime novel or historical drama, where you might reasonably expect the most gruesome murders, kidnappings, massacres, beheadings. The parameters change, but the reality remains: main characters must do the right thing, and do it consistently, without ambiguity.

His Dark Lady: Shakespeare's mistress

So how to cope when your story demands a morally questionable action on the part of your main character, but even as you are writing the scene you can hear your editor's polite refusal in your head, or beyond that, some reviewer's outraged objection? I have had some rather cross responses to my portrayal of Shakespeare in my Lucy Morgan trilogy, with reviewers complaining that it is 'unfair' to suggest WS slept with other people behind his wife's back - even though his sonnets and his long absence from the marital bed hardly paint a picture of fidelity. And in this case, there is something more to be said about tarnishing the reputation of a long-dead person - a national hero, no less - with scurrilous suggestions of immoral goings-on backstage that no one at this remove of time can ever possibly prove. Or not without a time machine.

But all this begs questions about our role as authors, and our responsibilities both to readers and to fiction as a whole. Should we pay lip-service to some unlikely and unspoken ideal of morality in order to avoid causing controversy, or write what we feel to be the truth in our story (fiction should represent 'truth' to the writer at least, if to nobody else) and accept that our choices may be unpopular with some readers? And if we do shrug off the limitations of morality and pursue a dangerous fictional truth, what have we achieved besides making our books uncomfortable to read and probably unsaleable?

Why not just throw up our hands and accept that what the majority of our readers want - even in a crime novel - is a consistent world with nice, unthreatening main characters, where 'bad' people are punished and right nearly always triumphs?

Well, that's the wise thing to do. We all want to be read, after all. Read and paid.

But people are complicated. And characters are people, or ought to be. Characters should be capable of possessing both good and evil, humour and horror, love and hate, and above all they should be allowed to hold conflicting opinions. To be contrary. To fall in love with two different people at the same time. To say they want one thing but actually go after something completely different. To be human. This is where publishers suppress more demanding fiction. Being experienced in the realities of selling books, they rightly know that the vast majority of readers dislike too much complexity and can handle only a small amount of contrariness. So they insist that characters should be consistent, should be strictly one thing or another, so that we can all sell books and make a reasonable living.

Consistent! 

Show me a person who is genuinely consistent, and I'll bet you it's a corpse.

Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn: an ambiguous read.

I'm still hoping that fiction - which moves like the sea in waves of fashion - will shift eventually into a place where inconsistency is the new gold standard. Where writers are praised for creating deeply ambiguous characters capable of holding two diametrically opposed beliefs simultaneously without risking the loss of internal logic. Where readers fight to be confused and manipulated and lied to. And not patronised. That may be why Gillian Flynn's 'Gone Girl' was so popular, even though many found it an uncomfortable read. Because in this age of superfast broadband and social media our view of life and morality is becoming both more simplistic and more sophisticated, more clear-cut and more ambiguous, and we are beginning to demand fiction that reflects our own uncertainties in the face of this new, constantly shifting, inherently contradictory social morality. 

QUESTION: Should fictional main characters be nicer and more consistent than real people? If so, why?

Week Ten: Planning Your Novel

For me, not planning my novels before writing them would be like marrying someone I had never met.

A novel starts with a single idea. Sometimes a line or two of dialogue. Most often for me it's a visual scene in my head. Two lovers parting at dawn. A man creeping through the darkness, a knife in his hand. A body twisting slowly in the wind ...

From that idea or line or concept or image springs the plan. The blueprint of a novel.

Some writers - probably shaking their heads over my foolishness at this very moment - eschew the plan. They are 'pantsers', i.e. they write by the seats of their pants. They have no desire to know how their novel ends; that would spoil the surprise! So they sit down and write out that line of dialogue or that image in their head, and whizz, they're away, thumping the keys, page after page until they discover who dunnit.

I can't speak for those people, as I have never done that. Or at least not with any success. For me, things go badly awry when I attempt to write without making a plan. For years I wrote literary-style novels that meandered this way and that, and were either unfinished or became curiously flat and lost in the end stages compared to the great energy and promise of their opening chapters.

Then I fell on hard times, and like many writers, turned to pulp fiction to scratch a living.

The discipline of writing pulp fiction to a deadline has always been a fantastic training ground for writers ...

Writing pulp fiction was my great salvation as a novelist. The money was not wonderful, and neither were the novels themselves, but it was work I could easily do at home while breastfeeding baby twins.

The parameters were fairly narrow: not formulaic, per se, but certainly there were strict expectations about length and content. And deadlines were tough. Having only 8-10 weeks in which to write an 85,000 word novel was not unusual. So I learned in a hurry how to plan and structure one of these novels so it would not fall apart in the middle. And my editors wanted - demanded, in fact! - a synopsis before they would commission a new book from me. So I would plan the novel from start to finish over a few days, then write a shiny one or two page synopsis to hook them into offering for it. Then the finished book had to match the expectations set up by this synopsis, of course, so it would morph into a working outline for me to follow as well as a selling document.

After years of drifting along fruitlessly in a literary dream, writing a novel became all about structure: beginning, middle, end; goal, obstacle, resolution; trigger, disaster, success.

In basic terms, your main character enters the first scene in one situation, then turns in a different direction because of some triggering action or event. A new goal has been set for them: win the lover's heart, rescue the hostage, save the world, or perhaps just survive a series of dangerous obstacles. These obstacles need to behave like a crescendo: each is more dangerous than the last, until the ultimate test is faced. In some genres, they call this 'the dark moment', the point at which things seem to be going the heroine's way at last, and then abruptly, a mistake is made, a baddy comes back to life, and all hope is lost.

Our intrepid hero and heroine, braving the whirlpool .... James Gillray: Britannia between Scylla & Charybdis.

As writers we have to steer our characters through the whirlpool of this 'dark moment' and out the other side into catharsis, to sail on into the future, all questions answered, all loose threads drawn up and satisfactorily resolved.

At some level at least, your plan needs to represent the successive stages of this archetypal story. You may be quite mechanical about it, estimating chapter length and events within each chapter, or chart graphs on a whiteboard or a series of sticky Post-It notes. Or you may dash off a loose plan on the back of an envelope, then pin it above your desk - or chuck it in the bin. Whatever works for you is best. But if it's not working, you may want to try another method. I highly recommend the whiteboard and stickies route. I have a thought, scribble it on a stickie, then push it onto the wall next to my desk while I work. It saves having to reach for a notebook, then recall which notebook and where I put it.

The trick is remembering to check your stickies occasionally. Not find them after you've finished the novel, and think, ah ...

Every story has a shape, a 'story arc' that exists in the head long before it exists on paper. For truly massive, multiple-character novels, this shape can be horrendously complex to plot out, taking in many different events in any number of characters' lives, so their high points and low points all coincide to create a really strong climax.

The important point of planning is to establish that arc in your subconscious, so while you're typing away furiously late at night, lost in a character's struggle, some deep-buried part of your brain is remembering that story arc and instinctively laying it down and sticking to it as each scene unfolds.

But if you really can't face the idea of knowing in advance how your novel will end, there's always the no-planning, 'just type Chapter 1 and start writing' approach. Good luck with that!

QUESTION: are you a planner or a pantser?

Week Nine: Juggling Pseudonyms

Increasingly, writers are being asked to split themselves in two. Or three, or four. Or five.

Writing as schizophrenia: the freedoms and hazards of the multiple-pseudonym approach.

I'm not talking about being a writer and also having to develop the skills of a marketing and promotional campaign manager, public speaker, social media guru and whatever else lies ahead for us in this increasingly beleaguered profession. I'm talking about the need to write different genres under different names.

For the uninitiated, this may seem like nonsense. Stick to one name, and publish whatever you like under it. Well, it's an option. But because of the way the human psyche works, or perhaps because of the way publishing has worked for the past few hundred years, a writer tends to be associated with a certain kind of publication. So let's say you have always written crime fiction, then suddenly produce something different - say, historical romance - under the same name, you are likely to land yourself in trouble.

Firstly, you will annoy your loyal readership by producing something that nonplusses them. Secondly, you will annoy your new readers who, loving your fabulous romance, order some of your backlist only to find themselves reading crime fiction.

By Joanne Rowling, aka J.K. Rowling, aka Robert Galbraith

This may be one possible reason J.K. Rowling chose to publish her new crime novels as Robert Galbraith (the fact that male writers often reach a wider readership and are more likely to be nominated for literary prizes and win them is a whole other kettle of publishing fish).

So you say, right, my writing name will be Jane Acrostic for crime, and Jane (or Joe) Bloggs for romance.

Then you realise the awful truth.

Because it doesn't stop there, at the choice of a pen-name. All writers are now expected to promote themselves wildly and without shame, like people who leave saucy business cards in phone boxes. If they don't, and subsequently fail to sell, or even if they do and subsequently fail to sell, they may end up without a publisher.

So both these writers - Jane Acrostic and Jane/Joe Bloggs - need separate Twitter accounts. And Facebook accounts. And probably email accounts. And blogs. And reader lists. And marketing plans. And bloggers to reach out to.

Some writers plough on and write in other genres under a third or fourth pseudonym. The sky's the limit if you are a flexible enough writer, and have the time and patience to tweet and blog under a gazillion names.

You could keep stories under each pen-name in separate notebooks or doc folders, to avoid confusion.

In this cannon fodder-rich, advance-poor world of books, you may find yourself split another way: between traditional publishing and self-publishing. You may be an established traditional novelist with flagging returns who chooses to self-publish their rights-reverted backlist. Or you may be unable to make ends meet on the advance offered by your traditional publisher, so have to moonlight as Juliet Boobs on Smashwords or Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing, tossing off a quick sexy read every few weeks to draw in a few extra pounds to feed the electricity meter. Or maybe you got funnelled into writing one kind of book early on, and have always yearned to write something totally different.

So let's say you choose to go down this route, writing in several different genres. How might it work?

I have done this myself, writing historical and YA fiction as Victoria Lamb and steamy historical romance as Elizabeth Moss, both for traditional publishers, not to mention a few other names that collectively bring home the bacon. My brother tells me this is known as a 'portfolio career' in music, which is his field. I know how it works for me. But everyone is different. I shall describe my own experience here, and hope others may comment on this post to share their experiences too.

By me

Also by me

First, you need to discuss a change of genre with your agent and/or editor, if you have one. They will probably be resistant; it's hard to establish a writer's name in the first place, let alone TWO names. But let's assume your first name is flagging a bit, and they are less hard to persuade. Or you are 'between publishers' and free to relaunch your career. Unless you plan to self-publish - in which case you might want to consider making writerly friends within the new genre and finding someone who might advise you on a quid pro quo basis - then you will probably need to produce a large sample of the proposed manuscript and a synopsis, to indicate ability to work in this new genre. You may even need to produce the entire book before a contract will be agreed. (Some hard grafters do this every time, though I try to avoid it at all costs. There's always another bill waiting to be paid ...)

Once a change of genre is approved - and this is far from certain, publishers being shy of change at the moment and inclined not to take risks - you will need to discuss your new name.

Yes, this is by me too

Some writers - like Iain Banks/Iain M. Banks - have chosen to use the same name, but stuck an initial in the mix for the new genre. I personally find that confusing, but that's just me. You might want to use another related name, or something personal to you - Lamb was my mother's pseudonym, Moss my first married surname, and Victoria and Elizabeth are my middle names. Or you could be totally cynical and choose something that fits the new genre: something hard or sinister for crime, something sexy and enticing for romance. Never forget, your mission is to build an entirely new persona, and your pseudonym will be at the forefront of that effort.

By my mum, Charlotte Lamb

If you find it hard to juggle several writing names, get organised. Use whiteboards or corkboards, and list projects, accounts and contacts under each name. Be careful with online passwords for email/blogs etc; you're supposed to have different ones for each account, and not keep a written record, so make sure each password is memorable for that name, or use some Master Password software to help you. I frequently use Twitter on iPad, which allows me to keep all my Twitter accounts permanently logged in and switch between them with a couple of flicks, so I can post easily on different accounts within a space of seconds. TweetDeck also allows this, though I find it unwieldy with more than three or four names, as it lists accounts horizontally instead of on separate flickable pages. You may want to see what works best for you.

Develop a solid persona for each name, and stick to it wherever possible. I tend to leap between names on social media, as so many people know I have several, there's no point hiding the fact, plus I find it amusing to troll myself under another name. But you may prefer to draw a strict line between them. Certainly it is less confusing for readers if you keep each pseudonym in a separate 'box' and never mix them up. I find it a touch dishonest to create totally new biogs for each name, but that's only because so many people know who I really am in person. If you're keeping them separate, and will never meet anyone in the flesh, you can invent a whole new life for your biog. Just make sure you don't 'come out' later and risk alienating people who only read your books because they wrongly believed you were from Basingstoke, or a former concert violinist, or a devout Anglican.

By - you guessed it - me!

If you choose to do a public event under one pen-name, and are reasonably well-known under another, be aware you may be exposed at that point. People take photos, and innocently blog or tweet them, unaware of your guilty secret. So if you don't want your trad publishers or your jam-making Quaker romance fans to know you also wrote that smutty tale of swinging couples, don't turn up at the London Fetish Fair to promote it - unless clad in a concealing gimp mask.

Decide early on how much promo you can manage for each name, and which name will benefit most from each kind of promotion. Book marketing is not 'one size fits all.' To sell in a new genre, you usually need to do some research: find out where your main readership is likely to be hanging out on social media, or sites like Goodreads, then target it. Make as many friends as you can, insinuate yourself into groups, copy what other writers do. Yes, it's a bit creepy. But you can relax somewhat once the initial push is done. You just need to get your new pseudonym known and accepted in the best places for your book, and after that, you can concentrate on the new books you're writing and on building a career in that genre.

And if you think all that sounds like bloody hard work, it is. Welcome to my day.

QUESTION: Do you have more than one pen-name, and how do you cope with the separate promo? Or do you have a question about writing under more than one name?

Week Eight: Dealing With Rejection

Dear Novelist, your book sucks.

This week I have decided to talk about how writers can deal with rejection. I've written about this before elsewhere, so here are my expanded thoughts. I hope they're as useful to anyone facing this situation as they have been to me. Please do join in and comment afterwards!
 

Why does it hurt so much to have a novel rejected? 

By the time you’ve finished a novel, it’s become a part of you. To have it rejected by an agent or publisher can feel like a personal affront. And indeed sometimes it is personal. A novel is an extension of who we are, yes, but when a book is rejected, occasionally it's not because the book sucks: you may not be the most marketable person around, and these days publishers want authors they can sell, not shy types with odd histories. They may pass on a reasonable book from someone with no social media presence, or whose track record makes them nervous.

The first is fixable. Get yourself a Twitter and Facebook account, and learn how to blog with the rest of us poor promo-monkeys. The second is more insidious. You may need to be equally sneaky if earlier books have bombed and no one will touch you. Send out your book under a different name, and remember to create a whole new persona to go with it - including new social media accounts! (There's no escape from it, is there?)

Yet rejection is an intrinsic part of the publishing business. We can fix these problems, but we still go through it at some stage, and sometimes it’s the quickest way to improve, to get a feel for what's currently good and what's not. 

So, how to cope with the hurt of rejection, and still keep writing and believing in yourself?

Stay professional (even if it kills you). Allow yourself some natural moments of pique - throwing darts at the rejection letter used to be a favourite of mine, before everything became electronic - then get yourself in hand again. Rejection is horrible. But you can’t please everyone all of the time, and you can never be entirely sure why a book was rejected, so you might as well shrug it off and move on. It’s as simple as that. 

Learn to shrug off rejection and keep writing. There's always the next book.

Still seething? Okay. Ask yourself, was your rejection justified?

Consider whether your work was less polished than it should have been, missing some vital element that would have made it more successful, or if it was on the wrong track altogether. Then act on your findings. This should not be an emotional decision. If advice or feedback came with the rejection, take some time to digest the hurt, then sit back and assess it coolly. Not all advice is helpful. Some of it may be plain wrong. Perhaps you simply sent your book to the wrong person, or the right person at the wrong time. We all know of famous novels that were rejected and became bestsellers. We all know - or should by now have started to understand - that an editorial judgement on your novel is not the word of God.

People can be wrong about a book. Even en masse. 

On the other hand, few novels spring fully formed from a writer’s mind. Even a rejection note may be useful if it spurs you into action that may get your novel accepted elsewhere.

If you choose to revise, submit again to different places. Be brave and send out your work as soon as any changes have been implemented. Be sure you target the right people. Check that the agent or publisher handles your genre. Sometimes a rejection has a simple explanation like that and is no reflection on your work. One example of an ‘unseen’ disadvantage is when a similar book or writer has already been accepted, so they can’t commit to yours because of a potential clash of interests. This may seem incredible when you've written a niche book for a niche market. But in fact it happens quite frequently. Subjects are up there, in the ether, and people pluck them down at the same time with astonishing frequency. Then it becomes a case of who writes the damn book first. If you were too slow, you may have missed your window.

Or perhaps the publisher is feeling worried about a particular genre or sub-genre, and has decided to stop accepting it for the time being. This also happens. Genres have trends. They become wildly fashionable, and everyone jumps on the bandwagon. Then abruptly, sometimes for no obvious reason, those books crash into obscurity. The market is saturated and nobody wants them anymore. Again, don't be slow if chasing a bandwagon. They can move with surreal speed.

This happened recently to erotica. In the wake of Fifty Shades of Grey, everyone wanted to write S&M adult novels. For months, there were whole bookcases, not just shelves, devoted to erotic tales in otherwise prudish high street stores. Straight novels could not get a look in. Then suddenly, BANG, the rows of generic grey/black erotic covers vanished, almost overnight. To find them on the high street now, you'll have to search a few dusty high-up shelves somewhere between Fiction A-Z and Romance. S&M erotica is back where it came from: the dungeon. So again, act swiftly or not at all. By the time you notice it's a popular trend, and start to knock out your own bestseller, the bandwagon may have tumbled into a ravine.

Forget that book, and write something new!

This can be the hardest advice to follow when you’ve pinned your hopes on one particular novel, one wonderful group of characters, one high-concept plot that cannot fail.

I initially wrote THE EARL & HIS TIGER for Mills & Boon Historicals. They rejected it. I self-published and have sold over 36,000 downloads so far. That's one way of dealing with rejection.

But as with so many things, the battle-cry for writers these days is, 'Diversify or die!'

If you feel you can't rewrite that book anymore, and are unsure where else to send it anyway, then put the rejected ms aside and write a new story. Knuckle down and do the best job you can. Always finish what you start. Then send the new novel out again to publishers or your agent. If you can demonstrate that you’re more than a one-book writer, it tends to work in your favour, especially with agents who need to keep believing that you are worth representing. New writing also allows you to create much-needed emotional space between yourself and a rejection. It spreads the load, if you like, of emotional angst. Now you have TWO novels to worry about, not one!

However, don’t keep starting new stories rather than improving work that’s been rejected. You should always take the time to fix a story if several people have told you it needs attention and you truly believe it can be salvaged. But don't get hung up on this. It takes most writers several years - and at least three or four novels - to really get into the swing of this novel-writing lark.

It's a complex and often mysterious process, writing a novel, and rejections only serve to underline that point. NOBODY knows for sure what's going to work for readers, what's going to be popular, what's going to sell. You may feel sure your book will sell, but in fact, it's a lottery. If there was some kind of clear criteria to tell us which books are sure hits, and which will bomb, we would have more millionaire writers. As it is, most writers exist in a kind of twilight zone, somewhere between broke and just pulling even. They sell enough to be worth publishing, but not enough to get a poster advert in an underground station. And even they get rejected sometimes. You are NOT alone!

GIRL NUMBER ONE was rejected by over a dozen publishers. I rewrote it, self-published it September 2015, and in its first ten weeks it has sold over 15,000 copies and had 1.5 million page reads on Kindle Unlimited. The moral of this tale? Editors are not infallible judges of saleability.

Besides, getting used to shrugging and starting again is part of an essential process of hardening up that writers need to undergo. So when that unpleasant rejection letter arrives, you can pull a face, eat some chocolate cake, then remind yourself, ‘There’s always the next book.’ 

QUESTION:  Have you found a good way to combat rejection?

Week Seven: Learn To Love Your Synopsis

I've been writing a new synopsis this week, so this topic is of acute interest to me. The discussion that follows is an amalgam of several I have written before on the art of writing a synopsis.

What Is A Synopsis? 

Generally speaking, a synopsis is a short document, sometimes one page, maybe 2-3, in which you briefly describe your main characters and the chief action of your story. Leave out anyone and anything non-essential. It's not a blurb - i.e. cover copy. That merely sets out a scenario without giving you the end result. In the synopsis you must tell the reader not only how it starts, but how it ends. And you're in trouble if you don't actually know by now.

 

This is a selling document, so write and present it professionally. Check your spelling and punctuation. Try to sound sane. This may be your only chance to showcase your writing skills to a busy agent or editor.

Whatever you do, keep the synopsis easy to read and check that, even if the book is dark, it never feels depressing or dull. If you enjoyed writing your book, let it show in the synopsis. Let your story shine.

Be a great synopsis writer: it's never too soon to start taking your work seriously.

 

What's the Point of a Synopsis?

Writers hate the synopsis. It interferes with the old illusion that writing fiction is a mysterious creative process, handed to us by a lyre-playing Muse, to be messed with at our peril. It makes our writing feel like a grubby commercial venture.

But you have to tell agents and publishers what's in it for them, just as a blurb tells the reader what to expect inside the covers of a book. Though a synopsis is more than an extended blurb. It has to achieve a number of goals. First, and most importantly, it should tell the person reading it what happens in the book. Note, not what the book is about, per se, but what happens and in what order.

Produce professional-looking synopses

Don't Include Everything

That's trickier than it sounds. Good novels often have sub-plots that weave through the main plot. So should we mention those or leave them out? If they have a genuine bearing on the main plot, they need to be in the synopsis. If not, then we can safely leave them out.

Some synopses are only a page long. With two to three pages, you can afford to mention the milk-maid's dalliance with the master, which provokes the son to leave home and join the army, which makes the wife hate the husband - and the freckle-faced milk-maid - when her beloved boy is subsequently killed in action. Otherwise, just start with the granddaughter packing her bags years later ...

Only mention these subsidiary details in passing. A few words should suffice.

Basically, a synopsis should sketch out the plot, location and main characters without going into too much detail. It should convey genre, where appropriate. Best not to open though with 'This is a funny book.' Keep the slick one-liners for the 3-minute pitch.

But Always Tell Them How It Ends

One common thing writers feel instinctively when describing their stories in advance is that they shouldn't reveal the ending. 'I won't tell you what happens after that ... but it's very exciting.' We don't do that in the synopsis. It's a non-fictional document. It's like packaging. It should tell the buyer what's inside, and how many grams of fat, and is that saturated or Omega-3?

In the synopsis, we tell the editor precisely what happens at the end, and why. Yes, even if it's going to spoil it for them.

Be A Little Imperfect

Having said all that, the synopsis must be a flexible document above all else. It should be constructed like a house in an earthquake zone, to move subtly with changes of mind and heart. It should not resist such changes and tumble down, killing your protagonists in their beds. Agents and publishers have an infuriating tendency to ask for changes. Sometimes they ask for them at the start of the writing process and sometimes halfway through. (Or later, when the book is actually finished.) You will need to be open to those changes, and not have your story so tightly bound together that no daylight can be admitted between plot points.

So the ideal synopsis is a little imperfect: it should err on the side of being too lightly written, kept flexible, with gaps - rather than holes - left for the editor's input, and neither too pithy nor over-ornate. A synopsis should always suggest rather than state baldly.

Keep things flexible

A Collaborative Document

Never forget that your synopsis will become, in many cases, a collaborative document. Writing a novel isn't quite like writing a screenplay, but by the end of the process, a number of different experts - often with clashing views on how a novel or even a synopsis should be written - will have stuck their fingers in the pie of your story and cheerfully wiggled them about. So be prepared for interference and try to view it as helpful in most cases. By the end, you may no longer recognise the novel you intended to write. C'est la vie!

Not Written On Loo Roll

Sadly, the days of the writer as an eccentric genius who goes off into a hotel room for ninety days and emerges with a ground-breaking novel written on a roll of perforated paper are long gone.

The synopsis has become unavoidable for most people, and can be one of the banes of a writer's life. But it represents the key to the first gate of the contract, beyond which a writer may not pass without permission. This may not be ideal for every writer, and there is a strong case for rebellion. But while the people who pay our wages continue to say we have to produce them, it might be wiser simply to capitulate.

QUESTION: do you love or hate writing a synopsis, and have you got any tips on how to do it?

Week Six: Novel Avoidance Syndrome

Okay, huddle up. It's time for an awful truth to be exposed.

Novels do not want to be written.

How silly she is, I hear you cry, novels do not have a mind of their own. Novels are inanimate objects. In fact, they are both invisible and ineffable while still unwritten. Novels come from our own heads, ergo the author must be in command of the novel-writing process, not the novel itself.

The machine gun hammer of keys should be all your brain hears. Not the siren call of new ideas ...

Well, yes. And most of us are in command of our novels, most of the time. But sadly, at some point, if circumstances are right for revolt, the novel may end up leading the author round by the nose.

Novel-In-Charge or Novel Avoidance Syndrome are closely linked, and are both diseases that manifest in various forms, some less serious than others, some positively fatal if allowed to progress unchallenged.

When the novel wrests control from the author, there may be stubborn runaway characters with minds of their own, narratives which demand to be in first person instead of third, plots that won't follow your synopsis, books that refuse to finish, books that refuse to start, and worst of all, those dastardly novels that simply stick their thumbs in their belts partway through and refuse pointblank to be written at all.

Sometimes there's a subtle progression from hiccup to total collapse. The novel does not always make it obvious to the author what's about to happen by manifesting the tricks noted above. Instead, your novel simply creeps away into the back of your head when you're looking the other way, a potentially dangerous shift which allows a space to open up. A space where other ideas - more beguiling, far superior ideas - may begin to take the place of your current novel. Then BANG, you wake up one day and your novel has gone.

There may be other, less obvious warning signs of imminent collapse.

You take more coffee breaks than you should. You stop for unnecessary research. You gaze out of the window. You watch the entire boxset of something vaguely connected to your novel's background. You accept invitations to lunch. You shop online. You tweet all morning and share funny photos on Facebook. You put off writing for a day, then fail to come back the following morning. You suddenly decide to cook a special supper. Every evening. For several hours when you would normally be writing.

If you've spent your precious writing time browsing in the local library, there may be worse problems ahead than a late fine.

This is how the final collapse may happen. Late one evening, after a successful day at the word-face, often when you're feeling on top form and the novel is swimming along nicely, you find yourself reaching for a notepad or the back of an envelope to scribble down an idea which has just flashed through your teeming brain.

Wow, you think. That's the best novel idea since *insert name of Famous Novel here*. I must write this book. But not yet, of course. First I must finish Novel One. Brilliant, two fantastic ideas one after the other. I'm on a roll. What a clever author I am.

The next day, you wake up with this new novel idea still bubbling away in your head. Go away, you say firmly. I'm writing Novel One first. And so you slope off to your desk, or where/however you write, and try to concentrate on today's word count.

But bizarrely the going has become heavy since the day before. Your boots stick in the mud. You may be taking enemy fire. After some valiant attempts to write, you pause, puzzled, and read back what you've written so far.

To your horror, the novel that was racing along superbly now sounds thin. Your great story idea, once so promising, is hollow and superficial. It lacks ... Well, it lacks what Novel Two is clearly bursting with.

You are dismayed. What now? You look at your unfinished typescript, and suddenly you can't face that long trudge through mud to the finish line, through howling wind and rain.

But Novel Two ... Ah now, that's a charming prospect. The sunny uplands of that intriguing first chapter beckon, a story so compulsive it will almost write itself, characters so powerfully drawn you can see that writing award dancing before your eyes.

So you throw Novel One aside, type Chapter One again, and head off into the glorious unknown, whistling a happy tune.

A few weeks or months later, you find yourself reaching for a notepad or the back of an envelope to scribble down the most exhilarating idea for a new novel that you've ever had. Wow, you think. This is bloody brilliant, it's bound to be a pageturner ...

STOP!!!

Okay. Here are some ways to deal with Novel Avoidance Syndrome. You learn these as you get more experienced as a writer, mainly from having suffered too many times from lost and broken novels. So here is my approach.

In the early stages, note when you are taking too many breaks from writing, whatever the reason, and change your schedule to push yourself back into the book. Put your head down and write whatever comes out, even if it sounds like garbage to your ears. It may be garbage, but equally it may not. Your creative brain may be out of kilter and you can no longer tell. Just stick it down anyway. The theory is, you can't rewrite what hasn't been written.

And ignore pleadings from the soul that the book is flawed in some way. These are often dream voices from a weary psyche, begging you to stop working so it can rest. If the book is genuinely broken, promise yourself you will start again. BUT NOT UNTIL YOU HAVE FINISHED THE WHOLE NOVEL. Only when you have finished will you - or another reader - be able to see if this 'broken plot' thing is an illusion of the writing process, or a true problem.

And new novel ideas? The ones that come in the night, or while staring out of a rainy window?

Always keep a notepad on hand.

Write the new novel plot down in a notepad, or type it up in a few spare moments, then put that new idea away AND DO NOT THINK OF IT AGAIN.

Exercise self-discipline, even if you think of creative writing as something floaty and marvellous. It really isn't. It's actually hard work. It's a job like any other, like collecting the bins or doing someone's annual accounts.

Tell yourself, There is nothing wrong with the novel I am writing. Repeat after me, one novel at a time. Finish what you start, regardless. Consider the novel writing process as akin to clearing your plate. Eat those lovely greens. Type THE END, and then you can get that notepad out and type Chapter One of your new novel.

Teach yourself to succeed by teaching yourself to finish. Visualize yourself finishing your current book and starting a new one. Don't despair, don't give up. Keep on truckin'.


And if all that fails, don't ask me to read your unfinished book and explain why you no longer want to write it. I've told you. It's all in the mind.

QUESTION: Have you ever suffered from Novel Avoidance Syndrome, and if so, how did you beat it? Or are you in its grip right now?

Answers in the comment box below please. Thanks for taking part in the debate!