Guest Review: Write Away, by Elizabeth George

For some time I've had a copy of this book on my shelf, waiting to be read: when Helen Parker sent this review to me, I took the book down from my shelf for a quick flick through and sure enough, an hour and a half later I was still reading it. Either I'm a compulsive reader, or this is an excellent book. You decide! My thanks to Helen for this review. You can find her blog here; her first book (a ghostwritten biography) is about to be published.


As the Sunday Times says on the front cover of this book: ‘A perfect DIY guide for the determined new novelist’ and as Mariella Frostrup says on the back cover: ‘Indispensable’. I’ve read many books that discuss the dos and don’ts of writing and, in my opinion, this is one of the best.

Write away: One Novelist's Approach to Fiction and the Writing Life by Elizabeth George does exactly what it says on the tin – sorry, cover; it guides the writer patiently and thoroughly through the many difficult stages of writing a novel. From the very first sentence it persuades the reader that writing a novel is not just possible, it’s actually achievable:

I find it both fascinating and disconcerting when I discover yet another person who believes that writing can’t be taught. Frankly I don’t understand this point of view.

And if Elizabeth George says that, then I believe her.

Elizabeth George is the author of the bestselling Inspector Linley novels. She has also been a writing teacher for many years and plans her book in logical, well defined chapters covering the usual subjects: character, story, plot, place and dialogue but she also discusses in great depth the trickier (for me anyway) subject of viewpoint. As Ms George says:

You have to have a point of view in the novel and wise is the writer who makes her decision about point of view early in the process. This one element of craft is crucial because it’s part of how a writer dramatizes events. It also is critical to how the story is structured (as you will see I hope), and often it’s part of the entire artistic idea behind the novel.

This is a book that speaks to you as an equal, not a book that talks down, up, or in a roundabout way to a would-be novelist. It’s more about technique than talent because Elizabeth George believes that the former can be taught whilst the latter is presumably either God-given or just given out to those who have the discipline to write year after year, day after day, hour after hour, same time, same place because as she says, ‘A lot of writing is being able to delay gratification’. Read the chapter on the value of ‘bum glue’ and you’ll realize that you simply can’t, or don’t want to, argue with Ms George’s belief that writing your novel is simply ‘moving it forward a sentence at a time’.

I feel there are many of us who would benefit from the author’s no-nonsense approach to writing, unfortunately I believe her writing classes take place only in the USA although her novels are all, to my knowledge, set in the UK.

If nothing else, you must read chapter twenty-two where The Process in a Nutshell sets out the writing of your novel in fourteen difficult, bone-wearying, hurdle-jumping stages. The book preceding this list clearly and simply tells you how to do it and for any remaining doubters, here’s what Elizabeth George tells her students on the first day of her creative writing course:

• You will be published if you possess three qualities; talent, passion and discipline.


• You will probably be published if you possess two of these three qualities: either a combination of talent and discipline or a combination of passion and discipline.


• You will likely be published if you possess neither talent nor passion but still have discipline.

Please note; she never says you will not be published.

Get Well Soon, Sally

My dear friend Sally Zigmond, who often comments here, is in hospital. She broke her femur in a fall on Friday evening and had surgery to repair the damage yesterday morning. She'll probably be in hospital for the rest of the week.

I know that several of her friends read this blog, so if any of you would like to send her flowers, get-well-soon cards or a little choice reading material, drop me an email (hprw at tesco dot net) and I'll send you details.

Any Questions?

If you're trying to find out something specific about publishing, you don't have to plough through all of my posts to find out if I've already answered your question: you can search this blog by using the little search box right at the top of this page; and you can explore related posts by clicking on the subjects listed under the Labels heading over on the right hand side of this page.

If you have searched, and have played with the labels, and you still haven't found what you're looking for, then please ask your publishing-related questions in the comments to this post. I'll do my best to point you in the right direction, or to write a new post especially for you, or to find someone who has more authority than I do to answer your question. It might take me a little time to sort that out, but I will do it. Eventually.

Testing! (Ignore This)

I'll probably delete this post in a couple of hours: I'm just trying to see if I've set things up properly so my blog posts feed onto Twitter. Everything seems to be in place, and apparently it's working fine--apart from the little detail that nothing is actually appearing there....

Potential Market Is Not Enough

Let us suppose you have a brilliant idea for a non-fiction book. You research the market for that idea, and realise it's huge; so you write your proposal and your sample chapters and send your submission off into the world. And back it comes, on a tidal wave of rejections. What went wrong?

It could be that your idea of a huge potential market does not match the publishing business’s perception of huge.

It could be that you've submitted it to the wrong places: an agent who represents writers of young adult science-fiction isn't going to consider a cookery book, and neither will a publisher of literary fiction.

It could be that you've submitted in the wrong way: if you are asked to send your proposal by snail mail but you've submitted electronically, your submission probably wasn’t even looked at before being deleted.

Perhaps you sent the wrong material. If you are asked for the first three chapters and a proposal which includes a market analysis and marketing plan, then don't send an outline, demand a ghost-writer, and suggest that the publisher could throw your launch party at the Ritz and send you on an international book tour (especially if your proposal is for a book about the canal system of the English countryside). Similarly, while a handful of endorsements by established, well-known professionals might well impress, a list of congratulatory comments from the unpublished writers at your critique group and a blurb from your Aunt Sophie who once had a letter published in the Grimsby Gazette probably won't do the trick.

Finally, if you've put together a carefully-researched proposal in which you've demonstrated a clear gap in the market and have sent it to the most appropriate agents and editors for your genre but it still gets rejected, then there's a good chance that your writing just isn't good enough yet.

Trios: The White Road And Other Stories, by Tania Hershman

Following the lovely response to her appearance in my Trios series, Tania Hershman is feeling particularly generous: she has offered to give away not just one copy of her lovely book, The White Road and Other Stories, but two. Step forward, Cindy Caldon and Miriam Drori: you'll each be getting a copy in due course (and if Tania hasn't already emailed you to ask for your addresses, just let her know as soon as you can, so she can get the books off to you). Congratulations to both of you: it's a lovely book.

(And Cindy, if you post a link to your blog or website in the comments here I'll turn it into a nice little clickable link for you. If you want.)

Trios: Diary Of An On-Call Girl, by E E Bloggs: Selling TV Rights

This latest Trios offering looks at Diary of an On-call Girl: True Stories from the Front Line, the memoirs of an anonymous police officer, P. C. Bloggs. This week Dan Collins, Bloggs' publisher at Monday Books, discusses how TV rights to her book were sold; the next piece in the series looks at the importance of title and cover design; and the final article, written by P. C. Bloggs herself, considers the problems of writing her book while still working full-time as a police officer.

P. C. Bloggs will be interviewed by Woman's Hour on BBC Radio Four on June 15 (the program begins at 10am), and her book is then going to be serialised on Woman's Hour every day that week. You can listen at 10.45am and again at 7.45pm each day, but I bet there's a listen again option if you miss it. Which, of course, you won't!


I'd hate to give the impression that I know a great deal about the alchemy involved in selling book rights to TV, because I don't. It's not like we're experts—we've sold the rights to just two books, and been approached for the rights to three others (details below). But based on our own experiences and those of friends in the industry, this is what we know—or what we think we know, anyway.

Just selling the rights doesn't mean your book will make it to TV. Usually, you (meaning the publisher) will have been approached by an independent production company looking to buy an option to the rights to a given title. They then hawk the idea round the broadcasters and hope for a bite. No bites means no TV show, and that's pretty much where it ends. I don't know how many books get optioned and never make it to the screen, but I think the answer is probably 'a lot'. This means that there's not much money to be made out of this unless your book actually gets made. The option fee, which gives the purchaser the exclusive right to look at ways of adapting the book, is typically quite small.

We turned down an approach for Wasting Police Time by a company approaching us on behalf of the 'Pub Landlord' Al Murray because they were only offering £1,500 for the option. We thought that was derisory. Turns out it's quite normal. Well, you live and (hopefully) learn.

If they get their 'bite', the TV company will usually then pay you a rights fee—a one-off payment of perhaps double or treble the option fee (this is either 'on account of' or 'not on account of' the option fee; one of these phrases means that the option fee comes off the rights fee, but I'm not sure which one it is. The former, I think). Then you ought to get an additional fee 'per half hour of TV'—say £5,000.

Thus, if you sell the rights to your book and it gets made into an eight-part series of 30 minute episodes you can expect to clear £1,500 for the option, £3,000 for the rights and £40,000 for the show itself. I say 'clear', but obviously you have to pay the author (and the taxman).

How such income is split between the publisher and author varies. Some publishing contracts pay royalties on a 90/10 split in favour of the author. Ours are 50/50. We justify this in two ways. As with most small, independent publishers, our authors tend not to have the sort of following which makes them hot properties before they even put pen to paper (compared with—say—Ross Kemp, whose book about gangs was nailed-on as a TV series from the moment it was conceived). Additionally, the books themselves tend to need quite a lot of editing work. Thus, we argue, if TV are interested it will be in some (possibly quite large) part down to the work we do. If we involve lawyers—which we do—then we pay their fees. The legal bill for reading and amending the contract for the rights to Diary Of An On Call Girl cost more than we have made out of selling the rights, so far. Given that there is no guarantee it will ever get made (and thus that we will ever recoup the difference), I don't think it's unfair that we defray those costs out of the upfront fee. We could, of course, not use lawyers—but with all the additional stuff to think about, like repeat fees, DVD rights, internet rights, other broadcast rights, what credit the author and the book get if the darn thing makes it to telly and so on, it's a brave publisher who simply trusts his own judgment. We have sold the rights to two of our titles—Frank Chalk's teacher's lament It's Your Time You're Wasting (to SMG, who own Chris Evans' Ginger Productions and make Taggart, Goodbye Mr Chips and lots of other stuff), and the aforementioned Diary Of An On Call Girl. We're currently in negotiations with Alison 'Lily Allen's Mum' Owen's company to sell the rights to Wasting Police Time and Perverting the Course of Justice, and a writer has just started work on Curse of the Al Dulaimi Hotel (And Other Half-truths from Baghdad) in the hope of being commissioned directly by one of the major broadcasters.


My thanks to Dan Collins, publisher of Monday Books, for this piece.

Guest Post: How Book Design Affects Readability

A couple of weeks ago I was talking on the phone with Maggie Dana (who comments here regularly as Mags), and she mentioned to me that as well as being a writer, she works as a book designer and typesetter. We talked about how good typesetting not only makes books so much more readable, but more desirable too, and more likely to be bought; and then our converstation moved on. When Scott Pack's name came up, I mentioned to Maggie that he'd sent me a copy of The Sonnets, which is published by Scott's imprint The Friday Project, and which was sitting on the desk right beside me at the time. I told her how I particularly liked its internal design, and felt that the typesetter had done a better-than-average job on it: the clever font-choice and careful spacing of the text on the page beautifully enhanced the measured flow of the prose. Maggie laughed, and told me to turn to the copyright page and there it was: "Typeset by Maggie Dana". After that I had to ask her to write me a piece about typesetting and here it is, for you to share.



Pinned to my notice board amid a jumble of typeface lists, dog-eared business cards, and photos of my grandchildren, is a sticky note that keeps me honest when I’m tempted to get too experimental or too fancy with a book design project. It says:

A typographer’s first obligation is to the reader.

This holds true for all printed media from newspapers to billboards, but nowhere is it as crucial as in a book. How many times have you picked one up, only to find yourself putting it back on the shelf and wondering why? Perhaps it was by your favourite author or had glowing reviews; maybe it was a bestseller with a gorgeous cover and a tantalising blurb on the back. But when you opened the book and began to read, you changed your mind.

Why?

More than likely it was the text design. Something about it got in the way of readability. It could’ve been an inappropriate font, not enough leading (space between the lines), or a visual distraction such as a page number halfway down each outside margin. There are numerous ways for the appearance of a book’s page to turn off a potential reader.

A book’s design (I’m talking interior page design here, not covers) has one major purpose and that is to make the words on the page end up in the reader’s mind as effortlessly and as seamlessly as possible. Doesn’t matter if the book is a novel, a textbook, a dictionary, or even a car repair manual, the principle is the same. If the reader is motivated to absorb the information but finds himself unable to do so, the design is not doing its job.

I recently read about a study conducted at the University of Michigan involving the complex interplay of effort, motivation, and cognitive crunching. A group of college students were given written instructions for a regular exercise routine. Half the students received their instructions printed in a plain, readable font; the other half’s instructions were in a decorative font that looked as if it had been written by hand with a Japanese paintbrush. It was unfamiliar and hard to read.

The findings were remarkable. The students whose instructions were printed in the simple, unadorned font, were much more open to the prospect of exercising. Apparently, their brains equated ease of readability with ease of doing push-ups and crunches. On the other hand, those who struggled through the Japanese brushstrokes had no intention of heading to the gym. The reading had tired them out.

The instructions were identical; the only difference was the font, which boils down to this: a good designer will always use a font that’s appropriate for the task at hand. In the case of books, this means a serif font such as Garamond, Goudy, Sabon, or Times. A font with no serifs like Futura or Helvetica, while great for headlines and motorway signs, isn’t suitable for a book’s running text. It takes longer to read and it tires the eye. So will lines of type that are too close together or too far apart. Either way, you’ll find yourself reading the same line twice, or skipping one altogether.

It was my son Paul who really brought home to me the importance of good book design back when I first started in the business quite a few years ago. We were on the train, heading for New York where I had some appointments with publishers and he had a job interview. Paul, a freelance programmer who already had several programming languages under his belt, was adding yet another, and doing it in a major hurry. He showed me his textbook and said it was the best he’d ever read when it came to absorbing complex information. The design was crisp and clean, with an excellent choice of fonts and colours, plenty of white space, effective illustrations, and not too many bells and whistles such as icons, starbursts, and time bombs that seem to inhabit most computer manuals these days. Clearly, that book’s designer had done his or her job, and done it well, because my son, who had precisely three days to learn the new language not only landed that particular freelance gig, but several others as well.

So the next time you pick up a book, take a moment to examine the interior design and see if it appeals to you, if it makes reading the book a pleasure because, mostly, that’s what reading’s all about. Unless, of course, you’re trying to learn a new programming language in under three days!


Maggie Dana was born and raised in England, but has lived in Connecticut for many years. A book designer and typesetter, Maggie is also the author of six books for children. Her first novel for grownups, Beachcombing, will be published on 5 June, 2009, by Macmillan New Writing.

Do Agents Edit? And Is It Really Their Job?

Literary agents have two main functions. They separate the best writing from the rest, so that editors can spend more time editing and producing the best books they can; and they get their clients the best deal possible—which doesn't always mean going for the biggest advance.

Is it also part of an agent's job to provide writers with editorial advice? I would say yes. In order to get the best deal for their clients they have to know that the book is as good as it can be before it goes out, and doing this requires some degree of editing. It might not be substantial (although sometimes it is): it could consist of a couple of general comments or it could be a far more rigorous and penetrating process.

Some agents say that they don't edit their clients’ work and while this might well be true, it doesn't mean that they offer no editorial advice at all. They do it every time they reject a submission and comment “I didn’t love this enough”, or "this is not right for me". Such comments constitute valuable editorial advice. Even more valuable is the blank rejection which implies that the writing is just not good enough, which every writer would be wise to pay close attention to no matter how hurtful they find it.

Twitter, Facebook And Me

Some time ago, in a strange fit of enthusiasm, I signed up to Twitter and was immediately bewildered: I didn't understand how Twitter worked, didn't see what it was for, and didn't know what to do with it. So I ignored my account but have since received a few emails telling me that someone (usually a name I recognised from here) was following me.

I now notice that quite a lot of people are coming to this blog from Twitter. Which is lovely of them: but I don't know why, or how.

I would be grateful if someone could explain to me in words of one non-technical syllable how Twitter works, and how it could be of use to me and my blog. Can I somehow feed my blog posts (or at least part of them) into Twitter automatically, or do I have to actually go there and do it myself? And is there any way I can be notified if someone has linked to my blog from there without Sitemeter first spilling the beans?

And what's all this about Facebook? I've signed up there, too, but have found it just as perplexing as Twitter. People keep linking to this blog from there too, but here Sitemeter fails me: it won't reveal precisely where those links are. It's driving me mad.

Someone please put me out of my misery. I'll make you a nice cup of tea as a reward. Earl Grey, of course, in a lovely china cup.

Guest Review: Mortification: Writers' Stories Of Their Public Shame, Edited By Robin Robertson

My thanks to Katy Jackson for this review.

I first read this book some years ago and its stories are both compelling and appalling. It's essential reading for anyone considering a writing career: but be prepared to cringe!

If I was published, nay, when I am published, my life will be long one colourful conga of delights. My make up will never run or cause me to look like a performance mime artist. I will lose that last stone of flab and my wrinkles will disappear overnight. I will waft from suave literary luncheon to sophisticated cocktail party in a fragrant cloud of peer approval and tinkling laughter. Everybody will love me unconditionally and without pause, hesitation or deviation. Yes, when I am published, my life will be transformed.

But like some rather more intimate acts, the event itself can be something of an anti-climax full of accidental clumsy embarrassment and unintentional hilarity. Mortification: Writers' Stories of Their Public Shame gathers together contributions from seventy writers who share their shame, blushes, mishaps and misdemeanours in a collection of laugh-out-loud funny tales of book signings gone wrong, AWOL public appearances, and fragile egos crushed at the hands of jaded local radio presenters. With pieces from Margaret Atwood, Julian Barnes, Val McDermid, Colm Toibin and Andrew Motion among others, this collection of writers’ tales of the should-have-expected is a charming and hysterical account of what really happens on the other side of the gulf of publication. From cases of mistaken identity and the self-inflicted wounds of over-indulgence to a whip-cracking S&M prostitute at a literary festival, Mortification is a cringe-inducing carnival of delights. Or as satellite TV would probably put it, when good writers go bad.

It is life affirming to know that even the finest and best known writers have ignominy thrust upon them and suffer humiliation and rejection at the hands of an occasionally indifferent world. Whether published or not (-yet-), Mortification also reminds us not to take ourselves too seriously or to let our attention-craving ego strap itself too firmly into the driving seat only at our own peril. This wildly entertaining book provides the perfect antidote to an attack of the writers' blues. You will never look at a literary event in quite the same way again.

Katy blogs at Moving Back, Moving On. Her first book, The Self-build Survival Guide, was published in 2007 and its publication day came, as it turned out in the wonderful bad timing of things, as she was in the process of splitting up with her long-term partner. She probably spent the day itself up a ladder, painting and muttering swear words. She is currently working on her next book.

Save Salt Publishing, One Book At A Time

In a horrible example of synchronicity I have today discovered that Salt Publishing, home to Tania Hershman's wonderful collection The White Road and Other Stories (which has featured for the last three weeks in my Trios series) is desperately short of cash.

From Salt's blog, Salt Confidential:

As many of you will know, Jen and I have been struggling to keep Salt moving since June last year when the economic downturn began to affect our press. Our three year funding ends this year: we've £4,000 due from Arts Council England in a final payment, but cannot apply through Grants for the Arts for further funding for Salt's operations. Spring sales were down nearly 80% on the previous year, and despite April's much improved trading, the past twelve months has left us with a budget deficit of over £55,000. It's proving to be a very big hole and we're having to take some drastic measures to save our business.

Here's how you can help us to save Salt and all our work with hundreds of authors around the world.

JUST ONE BOOK

1. Please buy just one book, right now. We don't mind from where, you can buy it from us or from Amazon, your local shop or megastore, online or offline. If you buy just one book now, you'll help to save Salt. Timing is absolutely everything here. We need cash now to stay afloat. If you love literature, help keep it alive. All it takes is just one book sale. Go to our online store and help us keep going.

UK and International
http://www.saltpublishing.com/shop/index.php

USA
http://www.saltpublishing.com/shop-us/index.php

I am now off to buy at least one book from Salt Publishing, and I ask all of you to do the same. And while you're at it, buy something from another independent publisher or two. If no one buys their books, they can't publish ours. I think that makes sense.

Income: Self Publishing vs Mainstream Publication

I always advise writers to exhaust all possible routes into commercial publication before they consider self-publishing their work. Recently, I was told that I was wrong. The reasoning went something like this:

Forget about going to one of the big publishers. Put your work out yourself, pay for your own barcode and ISBN, and hire someone to sell it for a cut of the cover price. You’ll make far more money out of it than you’d earn in royalties.

On a book-by-book basis, that’s probably true. A typical royalty for a commercially-published book is 10%, which equates to a per-unit rate of 90p on a book with a cover price of £9. With self-publishing you can set your own cover price, so it’s possible to earn far more per copy.

There are costs associated with those self-publishing sales, though: it would be difficult to hire anyone competent to sell your books on percentage, as each bookshop visit would barely cover the travelling costs incurred even if every bookshop approached took half a dozen copies each.

Even if you do the legwork yourself you’re still likely to end up losing money because of those travelling costs, and because you will only be able to cover a very small part of the country.

Commercial publishers have their own sales and distribution networks in place. Their sales representatives frequently visit every bookshop in the country, and discuss their new and forthcoming books.

Commercial publishers also have publicity departments which routinely send out stacks of review copies to TV programmes, newspapers and magazines, to ensure that potential readers will get to hear about each book as it is released.

The self-publisher simply cannot match this vast sales machine, and so is unlikely to sell anything like as many books: few self-published titles sell more than one hundred copies, while most commercially-published books sell more than a thousand.

And that’s why I almost always recommend mainstream publishing rather than self-publishing. It is likely that the royalty rate per book will be lower than with self-publishing: but the overall sales, and therefore the total amount earned, and the number of readers reached will be so much better that mainstream publication has to be the obvious first choice.

What Happens When An Agent Gives Up?

It can seem, sometimes, that agents make too little effort on behalf of their clients—particularly their newer, unpublished ones.

There are relatively few major fiction publishers in the United Kingdom. If an agent can’t place a book after ten or fifteen submissions, they might not try further: chances are there won’t be any other good-enough, big enough publishers which they think would “fit” the book well. So it might seem that an agent has made only a handful of submissions before advising their disappointed clients that the book has failed to sell, and that they should move on and write a new, more commercial book. In this situation writers are often left feeling that there’s not been nearly enough effort made on behalf of their precious books—especially when they consider the pages and pages of publishers that are listed in the Writer’s Handbook. To make it worse, it’s almost impossible for a writer to then find another agent to take their book on, as the highest-earning routes for it have already been exhausted.

But all is not lost. There are some wonderful smaller presses which fall beneath most agents’ radars because of their lower (or non-existent) advances. These presses usually accept unagented submissions, so there's nothing to stop a writer from making submissions for themselves if their agent gives up on their books.

Some of these presses produce beautiful books, and achieve sales that the bigger presses envy: Sarah Bower's The Needle in the Blood, from the consistently good Snowbooks, and Catherine O'Flynn's What Was Lost (or try this edition, with a much-improved jacket design), from Tindal Street Press, are prime examples.

Writers have to be careful: there are plenty of vanity publishers out there masquerading as small presses. And I'd still always advise a writer to find an agent to check and negotiate any contract before they signed. But if an agent is unable to place a book, that doesn't mean it's unpublishable.

Trios: The White Road and Other Stories, by Tania Hershman: The Bookseller’s View

Sara Crowley has had fiction published by Pulp.Net, 3:AM, elimae, flashquake, Litro, Cella's Round Trip, Dogmatika, Red Peter, Better Non Sequitur, and a variety of other lovely places. “Salted”, her novel in progress, was shortlisted for the 2007 Faber/Book Tokens Not Yet Published Award. She is, among many other things, a bookseller at Waterstones and if you visit her blog you’ll be able to see photographs of some of her displays of the short story collections she so enthusiastically promotes—including one with Tania’s book in centre-stage. I wish that every bookshop had its own Sara Crowley, and offer her my warmest thanks for this piece.


I am a writer, mother, and part time bookseller in the fiction section of a large branch of Waterstones. I like to read and write short and long fiction; each has its own craft, skill, and reward. Novels outsell short story collections though, and there are a number of customers who are resistant to them. I understand how satisfying it is to immerse oneself in a lengthy story, but just as we are capable of listening to, and appreciating, both singles and albums, I don’t see the need to pick one form of writing and reject the other.

I maintain a short story collection display case and have no difficulty in filling the nineteen available spaces. I like to mix classic must-reads (Sylvia Plath's Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams, Raymond Carver's Where I'm Calling from) with new voices (Lee Rourke's Everyday, Neil Smith's Bang Crunch) and contemporary greats (Lorrie Moore's The Collected Stories of Lorrie Moore, Ali Smith's The First Person and Other Stories). I hope there’s something for everyone, and regularly change things to keep the display fresh. My colleague (who runs the fiction section) has a vast knowledge of fiction past and present; between us I think we offer wonderful range.

Customers often bring in reviews they have cut from the paper, or ask for a book they heard about on the radio. I’m not sure that short story collections get the necessary publicity in the press to generate buzz about them so one way of attracting potential buyers is to write a bookseller’s review. One of my favourite authors is Janice Galloway, so I ordered in copies of her superb collection Where You Find it, wrote a glowing review, and have sold 55 copies so far. It really pleases me to think that I have helped people to discover such a talented writer, and it proves that if good quality work is visible then people will buy it. Tania Hershman’s name may not be familiar to people yet, but if they read my recommendation and pick up The White Road and Other Stories they will see that it is beautifully produced and it offers something a little different, as Tania prefaces the stories with snippets of scientific articles that have inspired her. She is a very skilled writer, so reading a passage or two is likely to make the customer buy the book.

It’s sad to think that without publicity some wonderful books can remain undiscovered.


Two weeks ago we heard how Tania Hershman promoted her book, The White Road and Other Stories; and last week Jen Hamilton-Emery of Salt Publishing discussed some of the difficulties involved in running an independent press.

If you'd like to be in with a chance to win a copy of The White Road and Other Stories, then answer this question: which magazine's articles inspired many of the stories in Tania's collection? Answers to tania@thewhiteroadandotherstories.com. You have until May 27 to get your emails to her, after which time she will select one winner at random from all of the entries she receives.

Guest Post: The Implications Of Second-Hand Book Sales

My thanks to Nicola Morgan for this post.


Second-hand books—what’s not to like? The ultimate in recycling, they raise money for charities and independent second-hand bookshops, and offer cheap reading material for those who can’t afford the full price.

At which point, allow me to draw some deep breaths, because I’m trying to be moderate and not mount my hobby-horse for a full-scale rant. Nor would I like you to think that I would steal the food from the mouths of starving babies who are helped by Oxfam and the like. Thing is, I know that at some point I am going to mention Amazon Marketplace....

Let me start by being incontrovertibly reasonable and stating What I Have No Problem With:

• The genuinely second-hand trade in out-of-print books (even though you’ll often have difficulty in determining whether they are, so let’s rephrase that to “books which you can’t buy or order new”).
  
  
• Ditto out-of-copyright books (because the author has been dead a long time—seventy years in UK law—and they can’t use the money).
  
  
• The argument that one’s book being sold in a second-hand shop may create new readers, who may buy or recommend your other books.
  
  
• The giving of used books to schools, libraries (if only they would accept them, but thereby hangs another gripe), hospitals, prisons or any other such organisation where the books will be read on-site.
  
  
• Any scheme which offers good reading material for people on low incomes or reluctant readers.

Thing is, the second-hand book trade poses a specific problem for authors because of how we earn from our work. The advance + royalty system means that we earn when a new copy of our book is sold, but not if it’s sold second-hand (you may know that in the UK now, visual artists DO earn a second royalty when their work is re-sold in a gallery or at auction).

So, any second-hand purchase which replaces a full-price purchase is lost income. This wasn’t a big deal when second-hand book-selling was small business. But now, it’s HUGE.

Take Oxfam. From figures I could quickly find, each Oxfam bookshop would expect to make around £175,000 per year; and bearing in mind they don’t pay most staff and don’t pay business rates, they have an advantage over “ordinary” second-hand bookshops, many of which are complaining about unfair competition. In 2002, Oxfam sold 12 million books in the UK, and with many new shops opening every year that figure must have grown. Forgive me if I don’t search for that info for you—I’m trying to write a book and earn a living at the moment....

Now, I’d hate to knock Oxfam. But I do argue for an informed choice. And my choice is to give money to my favoured charities (which may include Oxfam), but to buy books from a proper shop and support authors and literature.

But what about people who can’t afford full-price books?

• It’s not only just the economically deprived who use charity shops. People on all incomes use charity shops, for many good reasons.


• But, if you want to save money, use public libraries, where books are free AND the author earns money each time. So, don’t throw the poverty line at me—libraries are the best levellers of all.

And, er... Amazon Marketplace?

Thing about Amazon Marketplace is that the word “second-hand” takes on a blurry hue. Every author I know has found their books listed, sometimes for absurd prices (one of mine is currently available for 1p—apart from the HUGE postage charge) as being second-hand before publication day. Where do these books come from? Back of a lorry? Returns to publishers (which means they’ve already had the royalty payment DEDUCTED from the author, sometimes at a higher rate than the royalty paid to the author in the first place—oh, don’t get me started on that)? I once had a consignment of books go completely missing between warehouse and a school where I was doing a talk. I’d love to know precisely who ended up making money on them—it sure as hell wasn’t me.

Amazon Marketplace is a stunning business model: three parties make a profit—Amazon, the seller, and the postal service. Never mind the author, eh?

Look, don’t get me wrong: I’m all for free trade; I’m all for people getting a bargain; I’m all for charities making money; I’m even all for businesses making a profit. But what I’m most for is every customer making an informed choice. And if you don’t care about the author, fine: that’s your choice.

I call the concept Fair Reading. It’s explained in detail on this Facebook group. I am not telling people not to buy second-hand, or to feel guilty if they do—I want everyone to be aware:

• that most authors earn very little—according to recent Society of Authors figures (for the UK) two thirds of professional authors earn less than half the average wage;
  
  
• that author income is based on a few pence earned on each new book sold;
  
  
• that if authors can’t earn from writing, they won’t be able to write, and then we’ll all be the poorer.

I have been remarkably moderate today, for me. Another day, remind me to tell you what happened when I spoke to people (yes, really, people) at Amazon about it. And I also tried to work out how we could do for authors what was done for artists in the EU—the Authors Licensing and Collecting Authority could manage the collection of second-hand royalties—but we reckoned that it would be too punitive to the charities and we don’t want to knock charities. So, all I’m left with is the power of education and the generosity of people’s natures and sense of fairness: do join me in spreading the word about informed choice and Fair Reading.

The message is simple: Buy your books at the best price you can for the author, or borrow from a public library. If we love books, we need authors.

©2009 Nicola Morgan

What Is Grammar For?

Horrible grammar is fine in dialogue if it suits the character who is speaking: but iffy grammar anywhere else is a sure way to get rejected.

Grammar isn't elitist; it isn't a set of rules designed to exclude certain people: it's part of a code (the other parts including punctuation, spelling, logic and rhetoric) which has evolved in order to ensure clear and effective communication. You can object to it all you want, but if you get it wrong your meaning won't be clear. And as writers, isn't communication our aim? Communication of ideas, stories, themes: if we don't communicate effectively, we're stuffed. So, if we don't bother with grammar (or logic, punctuation, spelling and the rest), then we're failing before we begin.

Message-Board Plagiarism (Part II)

This piece is one of a small group of my published posts which recently decided to hide themselves from view and move to my drafts folder. I am inept, and don't know why that happened, but I'm posting them all again and hope that this time they stay where they're put. Apologies for any confusion.


My earlier post about message-board plagiarism and copyright infringement kicked up a bit of a storm at a writers’ message-board.

The discussion centred around comments like, “I don’t know what the fuss is about,” and, “what harm does it do?”

The answer is simple: it’s against the law!

Such use is theft: not just of intellectual rights, but of cold, hard cash—albeit indirectly. By reproducing articles elsewhere, you’re using up rights to those articles which the author might otherwise get paid for.

When an article is bought by a newspaper or magazine, it will usually appear in both the print and the online editions. If the writer retains all other rights to the piece, they are free to sell it elsewhere. I’ve done it, and so have most of my writer friends. My standard procedure is to let the new editor know exactly where a piece first appeared, and when, and to give an undertaking not to offer it elsewhere for a reasonable amount of time after their publication (which can mean days, weeks or months, depending on the periodical I’m negotiating with and how much they are going to pay me). If the new editor subsequently discovers the piece elsewhere within our agreed timeframe then I'd be trouble, and would lose the sale—whether I had agreed to the second use or not. It can be difficult to develop good relationships with editors: appearing dishonest, even when it’s due to someone else's lazy habits, lays waste to all that effort, and makes it pretty unlikely that I’ll ever work for them again.

But my main objection to this casual copy-and-paste misuse isn’t fuelled by any potential financial loss. What really irks me is the total disregard that such copyright infringement shows for writers and our work. It’s bad enough when non-writers see no value in our efforts: when other writers treat our work with such a shameful lack of respect, it’s reprehensible.

Manuscript Display Sites: What Are The Chances?

On Authonomy’s message-board a while ago, a writer commented that she thought that HarperCollins would probably find one manuscript on Authonomy each month that was good enough to publish.

One a year might be a more reasonable hope.

When I was an editor I’d have been thrilled to find one publishable submission a month. But the vast majority of submissions I received weren't even readable, let alone publishable. Perhaps 10% were coherently written and showed a reasonable understanding of spelling, grammar and punctuation: but we considered very little of that 10% for publication because most of it just wasn’t suitable for our lists. We published non-fiction but fiction made up about half of the submissions we received; and the non-fiction that was submitted rarely fitted into the genres we worked within.

Based on what little I’ve read on Authonomy I’d say that a lot of the writing showcased there would come in the top 10%, so is already ahead of the game. But most of it is still a fair distance away from being publishable, as is perhaps evidenced by the fact that so far, just one book has been picked up for publication from the many that appear there.

Trios: Devil's Gold, by Julie Korzenco

Congratulations to Eric Stallsworth, whose name has just been pulled out of a virtual hat over at Julie Korzenko's house. He'll soon be receiving a copy of Julie's novel Devil's Gold, which kicked off my Trios series a few weeks ago.

Commiserations to those of you who weren't lucky this time round: all is not lost, though, as there's still time to join in the rush for a copy of Tania Hershman's wonderful The White Road and Other Stories which you can read about here.

Trios: The White Road and Other Stories, by Tania Hershman: The Publisher’s View

Salt Publishing is a tiny independent press which specialises in publishing strong literary fiction and poetry. As is so often the case for independent presses, Salt has struggled to remain in business: but, thanks to the determination of its proprietors and their incredible ability to find exceptional authors, Salt Publishing now has an established and growing reputation for publishing beautiful, exciting books which people actually want to read, including Tania Hershman's collection of beautiful short stories, The White Road and Other Stories. My thanks to Jen Hamilton-Emery, Salt Publishing’s co-founder and publisher, for this piece.


For eight years I did, quite literally, conduct my life from within a small press. Salt, which both me and my husband run, lived in a room off our living room. During this time the walls in the hall took on the colour of cardboard, and our garage and shower room were redesignated as warehousing space. Our every waking minute was spent in the office – before breakfast, last thing at night, in between dinner courses, we juggled sending emails, typesetting, packaging and franking books. Salt was as intimate a part of our daily lives as our children were, though they got less of our time by far.

In June 2008, Salt moved to an office two miles down the road in the next village. We have our house and back and our sanity restored. But I do think there’s something to that old adage ‘you don’t have to be mad to work here, but it helps’ that keeps us going as a small press. Life at Salt is challenging yet rewarding in ways that most conventional employment isn’t. And quite possibly in ways that working in a large publishing house isn’t.

For a small press to survive and thrive, it has to find its niche. Forget trying to compete with the big guys; many of them happily sell shed-loads of books at a loss, aiming for quantity over profit and instead making their money on the selling of TV, film and translation rights. Small presses however have to think smart. They have to become known as the best in their chosen field, and some have done this extremely well, becoming the leading expert in areas such as welding (Woodhead Publishing) and autism (Jessica Kingsley Publishing). For literary publishers however, things are that bit tougher.

Go to any newspaper and look at the book reviews section. Chances are that at least 75% of literary reviews are of books published by corporate publishers or large independents. That is the power of employing a team of publicists with entertainment budgets. At Salt we have a small board and a team of commissioning editors. Two of us run Salt’s operations (Chris and me), we both decide which books are to be published, negotiate contracts with the author or their agent, pull together all the bibliographic data and manage its flow through the various book systems around the world to ensure that every book shop and on-line retailer knows about it, copy edit, typeset, proof, design the cover, liase with the printer and work with the author to promote and market the book. We are lucky that we now have a part-time member of staff who packages, franks and sends orders and review copies – until recently we also did this ourselves and you wouldn’t believe how time consuming or problematic getting books from point A to point B can be. We have a couple of interns who now help us phone bookshops and other places we think would be interested in stocking or promoting our books, as well as working on converting texts into ebooks (all this too used to be us). We load and manage our website, plus our on-line shop and our blogs, Facebook Fanclub (over 3,000 members), as well as do our best to answer emails. And we have three children, ages three, ten and twelve, all at different schools.

All of this is good fun. And a lot of work. It’s work that we hope pays off through people buying our books and bringing in the income we need to keep going. So far, this hasn’t been the case, and although our sales have been growing (until the credit crunch set in, when they dropped by 12%) we have had to rely on various grants from the Arts Council England, as well as odd pots of money from the Department of Trade and Industry, the Australia Council and overseas governments for translation grants. Our particular areas of publishing – poetry and short stories – do not lend themselves to huge rights deals that the big players can negotiate with film companies. We have had several stories and poems on the radio and in anthologies, but not to the extent that we have the luxury of not keeping an eye on the profit margin of our book sales.

Despite this however, we remain positive. Positive that our sales will grow again, once people get over the fear of spending money and we won’t need to rely on those hard-to-get grants. And we continue to be proud of our publishing. Basically, we love our books. We love that we can publish work that we feel deserve to be shared with the world, without having to concern ourselves with whims and fads that the big players have to. Salt’s niche is two of the trickiest areas of publishing but because they are genres that matter to us personally, we are on a mission to make them count. It’s hard to describe the feeling we get when we come across a manuscript that knocks our socks off, or when books arrive in the office, freshly printed, or when an author first gets their book in their hands and loves it. Or going into a bookshop and seeing Salt books on the shelf. Or hearing that one of our authors has been shortlisted for a prize, or, as happened recently, publicly commended by judges of a major award (Tania Hershman by the Orange Prize judges). All of that is why we do it.

Life in a small press? I wouldn’t change it for the world.


Last week we heard how Tania Hershman has promoted her book, The White Road and Other Stories; and next week Sara Crowley reveals how a good bookseller can make all the difference to the sales of a book.

If you'd like to win a copy of The White Road and Other Stories, then answer this question: which magazine's articles inspired many of the stories in Tania's collection? Answers to Tania at tania@thewhiteroadandotherstories.com. You have until May 27 to get your emails to her, after which time she will select one winner at random from all of the entries she receives.

Editors Use Google Too

Writers work very hard on their books and if they don't want to waste all that effort, it is essential that they present them in the best way possible. This means they must follow all available submission guidelines to the letter, and be courteous in all subsequent correspondence with the people they’ve submitted to: but there's more to consider than just that.

One of the first things that an editor or agent will do now, on the rare occasion that a thoughtful, well-written and appropriate submission ends up on their desk, is to run a quick internet search for the writer’s name.

This reveals a lot about the writer’s work: most publications and competition placements from the last decade or so should appear somewhere or other.

It also reveals a lot about the writer. Especially if they belong to writers’ message boards where the posts are open for all to see.

If their posts routinely contain careless errors or sloppy grammar, or are hectoring or bullying in nature, lacking in logic, or wildly misinformed, how do you think the agent or editor is going to respond?

Guest Review: The Writer's Springboard, by Margaret Graham

My thanks to Kate Kelly for this review: I'd not come across this book before she submitted her review, and it's a real delight.

Margaret Graham is a bestselling author with twelve novels to her credit. She is also an excellent writing tutor and mentor who runs a number of workshops and writing classes, so she is well positioned to produce a handbook like this on the craft of writing.

The Writer's Springboard contains much of the content of her classes covering a broad spectrum of writing skills from the basics of Point of View and Show not Tell, to the more complex topics of structure and voice. She also gives clear examples, in a ‘before and after’ format, to clarify these points.

This little book has a huge amount of information crammed into its pages, maybe too much. It’s not a book that can be read cover to cover in one sitting, but is more a book to be taken a chunk at a time in order to fully absorb the wealth of advice and information it contains. But for this very reason it makes an excellent reference book that you will revisit again and again and still find something new. It is well laid out in a logical way, and it is therefore easy to find your way around.

I’ve read a number of books of this ilk and there are others, perhaps, that would be better suited for beginners than this one. But if you are a writer with a bit of experience who is looking to develop and hone your craft, then this is a book that you will keep coming back to.


Kate Kelly is a UK-based science fiction writer. By day she works as a marine scientist, but at night she returns to her first love—writing. Her short fiction has been published in a number of SF and horror magazines and anthologies, and she was winner of the 2008 Western Gazette Award for a local writer in the Yeovil Prize, being shortlisted in both the novel and short story categories. She is currently working of a couple of children’s novels, and hunting for an agent.

Centralising The Slush Pile

This piece is one of a group of posts which appeared on my blog some time ago but then decided to remove themselves from public view and hide in my drafts folder instead. It was probably because I did something foolish, but I'm not quite sure what! Here it is again, for your reading pleasure. And apologies for the confusion.


I’ve seen it suggested that a centralised slush-pile might help some of the bigger publishers consider reopening their doors to submissions. The reasoning goes that by centralising submissions, duplicates could be avoided and the whole system could be streamlined. On the face of it this idea is appealing, but it could cause all sorts of trouble.

First, the pile would have to be separated into fiction and non-fiction, and then further, into genres. So you’d need a team of readers to handle this, who would have to be experienced in all different genres, and who could separate the good writing from the bad.

Once the good work was separated from the bad, and sorted by type and genre, it would have to be read by specialist readers to decide which list/imprint would be best. To do this, the readers would need a detailed knowledge of each and every imprint’s requirements, what each one had bought (both published and as-yet unpublished), and what would fit into the gaps that were left. As this is a centralised slush-pile there are no list-specific editors available, this work will have to be done by general readers, who are not likely to have all of that information available to them. And as the editors employed by the scheme would not be involved in directly editing or publishing any of the work involved, good editors are unlikely to even consider taking on the task.

Because of the volume and nature of submissions, lots of time-intensive, soul-destroying work would be involved in filtering a central slush-pile: but who would pay for it? Publishers have a system that works for them already: why would they stump up more money for a system that wouldn’t necessarily give them any further benefits? And just suppose that a book from this centralised slush-pile was sent to one imprint and subsequently became a huge best-seller: what sort of reaction would you expect from the lists which weren’t given a chance to consider it?

Agents

Most writers can benefit in all sorts of ways from having a good agent: agents make sure that their clients' work gets seen by the very best publishers, and they negotiate contracts which squeeze out every last drop of value for their clients. I've written several blog posts about agents, and am certain to write more.

Many agents have websites and blogs, and here are links to several. This is by no means an exhaustive list as the Writer's Handbook (and other similar guides) already do that so much better than I could. These are the places that I find the most readable, informative and fun. Do please let me know if any of the links are broken, so that I can correct them; and if you know of a useful and informative agent website or blog, do please link to it in the comments so that we can keep this list as up-to-date as possible.


UK agents:

Andrew Lownie is a London-based literary agent with a preference for non-fiction, and his website has a good list of articles and opinion-pieces of interest to writers. Subscribe to Andrew's newsletter: it's consistently informative and funny.

Simon Trewin heads up United Agents and has a very useful blog.


American agents:

Jenny Bent, of The Bent Agency, has a new blog with a few very useful posts already in place.

BookEnds, LLC is a New Jersey-based literary agency with a blog written by Jessica Faust.

Nathan Bransford blogs frequently and is very well-regarded. He's an agent with Curtis Brown in San Francisco.

Dystel and Goderich is an agency in New York, with an interesting blog which all of its agents seem to contribute to.

Colleen Lindsay is an agent at Fine Print Literary Management and her blog, The Swivet, is on my list of essential daily reading.

Pub Rants: a blog from Kristin Nelson of the Nelson Literary Agency in Denver. Make sure you subscribe to her agency's newsletter, which is always good.

Rants and Ramblings is the blog of Rachelle Gardner, a literary agent at the WordServe Literary Group. WordServe represents Christian writers, and works out of Colorado.

Janet Reid is based in New York. She has her own blog which is updated almost daily, her own website, and works at Fine Print Literary Management.

The Rejecter: a blog written by an anonymous assistant at a literary agency.

Miss Snark was a much-loved, but incognito, New York-based literary agent who stopped blogging in 2007. Her blog remains available, and is well worth reading. And no, I don't know who she was.

Two Excellent Posts About Self-Publishing

A couple of days ago Nicola Morgan blogged about some of the problems which self-published writers face; and today Victoria Strauss of Writer Beware discussed the growing trend for self-published writers to call themselves "indie" publishers.

Read both posts. They are excellent. I wish I'd written them.

(Apologies for my relative silence this week: I hope you don't feel ignored. I'm just a bit busy with work right now, but it shouldn't last too long.)

Editorial Agencies

Suppose you’ve written a book which has received nothing but rejections, but you don’t understand how you could improve it. One way to get specific advice is to pay for an editorial assessment of the book which should point you in the right direction.

Editorial agencies are not without their problems: there are plenty which offer very expensive bad advice; and there are a few which are out-and-out scams (Edit Ink, anyone?). Some, though, provide a useful service: Sharon Maas, who had three novels published by HarperCollins, doubts that her first book would have been published at all had she not first worked with an editorial agency to improve it, and I’ve heard good things about others, too.

Writing a good book and using a good editorial agency to improve it won’t guarantee immediate publication, though, as Sally Zigmond discovered; and even the good agencies won’t always get it right—if you write in a genre they aren’t familiar with, or in a style they don’t particularly like (regardless of its literary merit), then you’re not going to get the best advice. And using the wrong agency for your particular book, even if it’s a good one, can be an expensive mistake to make: those reports can cost hundreds, if not thousands, of pounds.

If you’re determined to use an editorial agency to improve your book, how should you proceed? You need to find a few reputable agencies: either through personal recommendation, or through your own research. They must be run and staffed by people who are qualified to do the work: either by having appropriate editorial experience, or by being published writers themselves. They must be able to demonstrate that their reports have been effective: most will provide a list of clients and testimonials. And when you check, you’ll find those testimonials corroborated elsewhere, by people who are not in the agencies’ employ, and who have had a good degree of publishing success as a result of the advice that they received.

Trios: The White Road and Other Stories, by Tania Hershman: Self-Promotion

Tania Hershman is a former science journalist who has recently been commended by the judges of the 2009 Orange Award for New Writers. Her first short story collection, The White Road and Other Stories, is published by Salt Modern Fiction (and has been very favourably reviewed by Sally Zigmond, who comments here regularly). Her short stories have been widely published in print journals and online, and she is the founder and editor of The Short Review, a site dedicated to reviewing short story collections and anthologies. She has generously offered to give away a signed copy of The White Road to one of my readers: you'll find the details at the end of this piece. My thanks to her for contributing.


My first book, The White Road and Other Stories, was published in September 2008 by Salt Publishing, a small press based in the UK. I was delighted when they offered me a book deal. After having had an agent for several years with no result (she dealt only with mainstream publishers and they all told her, "come back when she's written a novel,") I decided to take matters into my own hands and submit stories myself to Salt. The agent and I have now parted ways amicably.

Being published by a small press has meant for me that I have a personal connection with my editor, Jen Hamilton-Emery, rather than feeling lost in a large publishing house. I made suggestions about the book cover, and Salt came up with what I consider the perfect cover. I chose what stories to include and proofed the manuscript several times, but apart from that didn't have any other input into the process, which was fine by me. I was thrilled when the book was published, I think it is beautiful.

Jen made it very clear to me, and to fellow Salt authors I am in touch with, that Salt doesn’t have the resources to do much promotion and that I would need to be very involved in this. Before the book came out I was given a long author questionnaire to fill out listing potential reviewers, competitions the book could be submitted to, author events I might appear at, and other ideas for promotion.

I wasn't quite prepared for how much work promoting a book would be and in some ways it has been overwhelming. I had experience building websites, I built my own site and the online review journal I edit, The Short Review, so I always planned to build a website for the book. This has links to excerpts of the stories, videos of me reading at a short story conference, some of the stories which having been broadcast on BBC Radio and podcasts, and it also has some background and "added value" material about the book. Half the stories in my book are inspired by articles from the weekly UK magazine New Scientist so I created a page explaining my concept of "science-inspired fiction", with links to other books and websites that I see as fitting into this category. Another page explains flash fiction (which is the other half of my book), with links to many online literary magazines that publish flash fiction. I get a lot of hits to the website from people searching for "flash fiction", so I am doing more than just selling my book, I am providing resources for writers.

Another good idea was my partnering with Eco-Libris, a company which "balances out" the trees used to print books by planting a tree for every book. I pay them a small sum per copy printed, and they plant a tree. They are very active online, they took part in my Virtual Book Tour (see below) and they publicised my book on green websites far and wide. I joined forces with them because I hated to think of the amount of paper involved in my book, and our partnership has exceeded my expectations!

In terms of reviews, Salt has been fabulous, sending out review copies to anyone I've asked them to send to, wherever in the world, and this, together with my nudging of the reviewers, has resulted in quite a few reviews. Because of the connection to their articles, I was very eager that New Scientist see the book, and hoped they would review it. Getting them a review copy was a struggle, the books kept getting lost, but Jen persevered and I kept in close contact with them to ensure they remembered who I was. This paid off: not only did they reprint the title story, The White Road, on their website, with a link to the article that had inspired it, they reviewed the book in their Christmas Books Special: Best of 2008! I sold two hundred copies in one week at Christmas and was for a time in Amazon UK's Top Ten Bestselling Short Story Collections, and I believe this was down to the New Scientist review.

Reviews are vital, especially for short story collections which get far less attention than novels, and this was why I set up The Short Review eighteen months ago to focus exclusively on reviewing short story collections. I now have over forty reviewers worldwide reviewing ten books, new and older, every month. In the end, I decided I couldn't commission anyone to review my book for the site, this smacked too much of nepotism, but I have received a lot of attention because of The Short Review, which was wonderful yet unexpected, and this has definitely had a positive effect on my book, with reviewers asking for a review copy of my book to "return the good karma".

Being a small press with limited resources, Salt have seized the opportunities the Internet provides, and are very dynamic and active on their website, blogs and Facebook pages. I have also been one of Salt's "guinea pigs" for their Cyclone Virtual Book Tour program: I found eleven blogs willing to host a stop on my tour, and was interviewed by a blog a week over eleven weeks, about various aspects of my writing, my reading, my life — anything and everything. This was wonderful, yet exhausting, even though I didn't have to travel anywhere! I am not sure how much this translated into direct sales, but I strongly believe it created a buzz. I used my websites, my blog, Facebook, MySpace, RedRoom (a website for authors), and various online writing communities (WriteWords, Zoetrope), to publicise every leg of the tour, as well as any reviews the book receives. I also signed up to be an Amazon author, and blogged on Amazon.com's page for my book. A recent review on Amazon (by someone I don't know) mentioned "the hype on the internet and in New Scientist", so I guess something is working!

It's been six months and while the Virtual Tour is over, book promotion goes on and several reviews have just been published, in an Australian print magazine and two book blogs, with others forthcoming in the US, Canada and the UK, I hope. I was recently in the UK and took part in the launch of a short story anthology at Jewish Book Week, and although that wasn't about my book, they stocked The White Road and Other Stories in the festival bookshop, and I talked about it during the event. I also went back to my high school in London and spoke to a group of 14-year-olds about writing. I was trying to think "out of the box" about book promotion and had seen from their website that they had a creative writing society so I wrote to them and offered to come. They were thrilled, it was a wonderful experience — and I was amazed when three of them bought books! They have invited me to come back and do a flash fiction workshop next time I am in England. I also alerted the universities I studied at and the mentioned me in their alumni newsletters, from which my websites have had a number of hits.

So, to sum up, promoting a book is hard work, and not, I believe, just for those published by small presses. Authors have to do a lot these days, whoever the publisher is and whether it is a short story collection or a novel. I expect to be promoting my books for many more months, if not a year or two. I put all the time and effort into writing the stories, Salt put all the time, money and effort into producing the book, the least I can do is try and do what I can to get copies sold, from the point of view of my royalties as well as readership. I am trying not to let this interfere too much with my current writing, but it does, there is no getting away from that. That is part of having a book, and I wouldn't have it any other way. However continuing to write and publish new short stories, and enter into short story competitions, also serves to publicise my book.

Next week we hear from Jen Hamilton-Emery of Salt Publishing, when she discusses the difficulties involved in running an independent press; and the week after it's Sara Crowley's turn, when she reveals how a good bookseller can make all the difference to the sales of a book.

If you'd like to be in with a chance to win a copy of The White Road and Other Stories, then answer this question: which magazine's articles inspired many of the stories in Tania's collection? Answers to tania@thewhiteroadandotherstories.com. You have until May 27 to get your emails to her, after which time she will select one winner at random from all of the entries she receives.

Bookshops And Booksellers

I've written a few posts about bookselling which you can find here. I buy books from the big chains, the independents, online and from real, physical shops. There are all sorts of booksellers out there and most of them do a wonderful job. Support writers and spend lots of money in bookshops. It's the only way.

If you have a favourite bookshop or bookseller, whether independent or part of a chain, then post a link to its website here and I'll add it to my list. I could especially do with some bookshops which aren't based in the UK.


UK Bookshops And Booksellers

The Big Green Bookshop in Wood Green, North London, has a great blog called Open A Bookshop, What Could Possibly Go Wrong? A real delight.

Bookseller Crow is in Crystal Palace, South London, and has a blog (you might have to scroll down a bit to find the latest update) and an online shop.

The Children's Bookshop in Edinburgh is run by publisher Fidra Books, and has a very informative blog.

Joseph's Bookstore. Finchley, North London. It comes highly recommended.

Mostly Books, Abingdon, has a lovely blog.

Wenlock Books in Much Wenlock has a very quiet blog which is rarely updated but the shop is a real treat: it sells new and second-hand books, and dispenses cake on Saturday mornings. It's one of my favourites.


Online Booksellers

Most of the big chains have online bookshops: I'll leave it up to you to find those for yourself!

Here's Amazon in the UK.

This is Abe Books, which lists the stock of second-hand booksellers worldwide alongside a good search facility. It's particularly useful for finding obscure and out-of-print titles at good prices.

Professional Organisations

There are many professional organisations which can be of interest to writers and publishers: here are a few. Please add any suggestions to the comments here, so I can keep this list up to date.

Association of Online Publishers

The Booksellers Association

International Publishers Association

The Publishers Association

The Society of Authors

Bookselling: Chains vs Independents

As so many of our bookshops are now part of large chains, and the bulk of book buying for those chains is carried out by a central buying office, the stock you see on the shelves has become homogenous and neutral. Stock in an Edinburgh branch of Waterstones is almost identical to stock in the Exeter branch.

Most branches will have a small section for local interest books (by local authors, perhaps, or about local history) but the majority of the titles that they carry will be found in all of their branches.

While I don’t hold any grudges against Waterstones or any other chain (I’ll cheerfully admit that I’ve spent weeks of my life lurking in their stacks), I do worry about the impact that they’ve had on bookselling’s independent sector. While relatively few independent bookstores now remain, thirty years ago they were a feature of almost every high street: each one had its own personality, which was reflected in its stock, and the people who shopped in them. I fondly remember a bookshop in Ealing Broadway (opposite the train station: can anyone else remember it?) where I used to buy short story anthologies, poetry, and experimental fiction, much of which I still own; and another bookshop on Kentish Town high road where twenty years ago I bought all sorts of books from new writers, published by emerging presses. I doubt that any branch of Waterstones would even consider stocking half of those the titles: and yet they’re (almost!) all brilliantly written, and many contain work from newcomers who are now household names.

So now, when ever I go anywhere, I make an effort to find any independent bookshops that I can. Some are a little less organised than Waterstones or Borders; and they don’t usually have much in the way of three-for-twos; but they more than make up for those failings by having staff who can find you the perfect title out of their brilliant range of fascinating books.

Vanity Presses: Might They Steal Your Work?

I've been alerted to an anonymous complaint concerning a UK vanity press.

It concerns a writer who withdrew his submission as soon as he realised that he was dealing with a vanity press rather than a mainstream publisher. He asked for his material to be returned: but he's alleging that now publication is no longer an option the vanity press is ignoring all his attempts to contact it and has not returned any of the materials he supplied, despite repeated requests for it to do so.

Now, in this writer's situation I wouldn't be too worried: I'm sure he won't have been foolish enough to send in his only copy of the material, so he should still have a copy at home, safe and sound, to submit to somewhere more reputable; and this vanity press isn't going to publish his book unless he pays for it to do so, as it just doesn't have the sales channels available to make money by actually selling copies of it like good publishers do.

However, if you have had similar (or more sinister) problems with a vanity publisher I'd really like to hear from you, either in the comments to this thread or by email. You can reach me on "hprw at tesco dot net", and I'll keep all correspondence confidential.

Publishers: Size Isn’t Everything

Publishers fall into several different categories.

Right at the top of the heap are the few big conglomerates like HarperCollins and the Random House Group. These houses measure their turnover in millions, and each publish thousands of books a year.

Then come the independents: smaller publishing houses with widely varying turnovers, which print fewer titles than the really big boys. This is a very broad category which includes established, relatively large houses like Canongate, which has a reputation for publishing more cutting-edge fiction than most (I thoroughly recommend Scarlett Thomas’s The End Of Mr Y, and Andrew Davidson’s The Gargoyle); smaller publishers like the gorgeous Snowbooks (which published Sarah Bower’s spellbinding The Needle in the Blood); and the very small publishers like Myrmidon (which is publishing Hope Against Hope by my friend Sally Zigmond later this year), which publish relatively few books but which nevertheless do very well with what they publish.

While many independents are likely to struggle in the current financial crisis, the big publishers aren’t having too good a time either: some of their smaller imprints, many of which were originally independent publishers, might well close as publishers contract and regroup (and some already have).

Independent publishers can be further divided into two groups: those with good sales and distribution in place, and those without. Small independents will sometimes ride piggyback on the shoulders of the bigger ones and borrow their sales and distribution services to get their books into bookshops, just as the independent Long Barn Books does: its books are sold by Simon and Schuster and distributed by HarperCollins.

Some independents, however, have no distribution deal in place and instead rely on online sales (from their website, and from places like Amazon and Waterstone’s website, which all offer for sale anything with an ISBN); and on the sales that their authors make. But without a sales and distribution deal in place, publishers find it almost impossible to get their books into bookshops: and as bookshop placement leads to sales, a publisher with no distribution will have low sales, low income and a worrying future.

While some of the independent publishers without strong distribution have an increasing reputation for publishing wonderful books, others are not so reputable and border on vanity publishing. The difference, here, has to lie in the quality of the books they publish. Because while some small presses publish some very questionable titles others publish fabulous books (and Salt Publishing and Bluechrome come first to my mind) which look gorgeous, and which deserve to sell as strongly as titles from any of the bigger houses—go and buy some books from them now.