I May Be Some Time (Again)

Here's the thing. Remember that new computer which rescued me from having to undergo a complete internet withdrawal a couple of weeks ago? Well, it's slowly collapsing under the weight of its own short circuits, and so it looks like I'm going to actually have to buy a new computer now.

If I don't appear for a few days, then, don't worry. I'll be back. And mean while, here's an eye-watering new plagiarism story to keep you going. I can't understand why writers would do this but still it happens.

How I Got Published (Part I): Daniel Blythe

Daniel Blythe is one of those rare creatures: a writer who makes his living from his writing work. He's also a regular contributor to this blog, and can be found in the comments-streams on many of my posts. His latest book is Autonomy, and is a Doctor Who novelisation. Here's the story of his route into publication: I hope that it will be the first of many to appear here.


I've learned a few lessons from my years of being published – not all of them pleasant. They are:

1) Philip Pullman was absolutely right when he said that the three things you need are talent, luck and hard work, and that the only one you have any control over is the hard work.

2) You probably aren't ready to be published when you think you are.

3) Even after you have become published, most people in publishing will treat you like an annoyance, a lackey or an irrelevance. The fact that there would be no "publishing industry" without you and thousands like you is totally lost on them.

My breakthrough – after a couple of years of unpaid short stories in the small press and so on – came in 1992 when Peter Darvill-Evans of Virgin Books invited submissions for his range of original Doctor Who fiction, a new idea at the time. My proposal for The Dimension Riders was accepted in 1992 and the book came out in November 1993 in time for the 30th anniversary of Doctor Who. It was hugely exciting to see stacks (yes, really, stacks) of my books in bookshops – on shelves, on tables and even on the floor. And it was very satisfying to keep sneaking into these bookshops and moving them to even more prominent positions.

After that, I did a second book for Peter's successor at Virgin, Rebecca Levene, called Infinite Requiem, which sold pretty much the same – both books received a small advance (under £2k, as I recall) but did very well in royalties. Virgin knew what they were doing. They could afford to take on new, unknown writers and pay them peanuts, because it was the Doctor Who brand and Sylvester McCoy's face doing the selling. One more short story in a Virgin anthology and I moved on – very amicably. I tried them with a couple more ideas, I think, but nothing really gelled.

I was trying my "proper novels" with editors, and receiving often quite patronising responses. The fact that I was published – *published*! – and my books had sold tens of thousands of copies was met with an indifferent shrug from the Katies and the Melissas. But I'd been writing what became The Cut, and this helped me to get an agent. I queried ten, but the one I eventually found was young, keen, clever and seemed on my wavelength. We met up in London for a chat, and clicked. She took me on, read the first half of The Cut and seemed very enthusiastic about selling it. Over the course of the next few months, she tried several publishers and got the frustration of the "rave rejections" – i.e. "we love it, but..." Eventually it ended up on the desk of Tony Lacey at Penguin and it happened to be the sort of thing he was looking for. It was published as a Penguin paperback in 1998, and got decent bookshop exposure and went to a reprint. The advance was a mid-range four figures, but I was just happy to have anything. I had an agent, who had sold my novel to a big publisher. Things were up and running, and I was still only twenty-eight.

I'd like to say this started off a productive and long-running association with Penguin, but I'd be lying. They bought my next novel, Losing Faith – for about double the advance paid on The Cut – and then sneaked it out into the bookshops under cover of darkness, with about as much publicity as the Much Binding In The Marsh Fete gets. In fact, I'm sure the Much Binding Fete gets a lot more, as it would have a notice in the parish newsletter and a mention in the Binding Gazette. To everyone's feigned astonishment but mine, Losing Faith didn't do terribly well in trade paperback and Penguin declined a) the option on my next book and b) to do the B-format paperback of Losing Faith.

I am normally a mild-mannered person. But this is the only time I can recall actually screaming and swearing (most unprofessionally) down the phone at my agent. I literally could not understand how this had happened. It was in the contract that they would do the paperback. It was IN. THE. CONTRACT. So that was my lesson for 1999 – a publishing contract, when they want it to be, is not worth the paper it's written on. I'd been pinning a lot of hopes on the paperback – being told I was not having one really felt like being kicked while I was down.

I kept my agent. It wasn't her fault. (And where, after all, was I going to find another one? It would be like dumping a nice girlfriend just because she hadn't helped you not to lose your job.)

But it was my lowest point as a professional writer. I had assumed – naively – that once you were published, it opened doors. That you would no longer be ignored and treated like the least important cog in the machine. That the advances gradually crept up, sneaking towards "proper salary" level, until the big breakthrough novel on Book Five or Six, when it would all go mad. To say I'd had a major reality-check would be an understatement.

So there I was at the age of twenty-nine, feeling as if I was right back at the start again. Where did it all go wrong? Where would it go from here?

Luckily, an opportunity was just around the corner – one which would change my writing life for ever...


And no, it wasn't meeting me, as Daniel and I didn't become acquainted until much later on. You can read the second part of his story next Tuesday, and if you have your own story of publication which you'd like to see featured here, email it to me at "HPRW at tesco dot net". I'll look forward to hearing from you.

How I Got Published: Tell Your Story

I keep reading comments online which insist that you can only get a book deal if you have mysterious connections in the publishing business; and how it's absolutely impossible for new writers to get published at all.

The logic of these arguments is fundamentally flawed, and they're just not true; but how to convince people of that? It must sound so very reasonable if you're an unpublished writer floundering around in the wasteland of the slush-pile, or drowning in a sea of rejections. I can waffle on all I like about the alchemical mix of talent, market awareness, persistence and luck which it takes to get a book written and published well from this side of the publication fence; but unpublished writers don't want alchemy, they want real information, something more concrete and clear. They want a magic key which opens publishing's door for them: they want to see what transforms an unpublished writer into a published one.

Daniel Blythe, a writer who comments here regularly, has had a stroke of brilliance (again: he's good at that). He's suggested that I start to include in my blog writers' own accounts of how they got published.

So, tomorrow the first in what I hope will be a new series: Daniel Blythe will tell us how he first got published. His is a cracking story which shows just how talent, wit and hard work can make you very lucky indeed.

If you've been published and would like to contribute your own story, just email it to me (my address is over there, in the right-hand column) with "HPRW: How I Got Published" in the subject-line. I'm looking forward to reading your contributions, and will use as many of them as I can.

For Unpublished Writers Everywhere

I can understand your frustrations. I can understand your longings to be published. I can even understand you considering calling yourself "prepublished" in an ironic, post-modernist way.

But what ever you do, please don't actually do it. It's embarrassing, and will draw the attention of the Point And Laugh Brigade.

My thanks to Editorial Anonymous for making this clear.

Dashes And Ellipses

Better late than never, we are now celebrating National Punctuation Day while simultaneously giving me a chance to indulge in a couple of my favourite obsessions: nitpicking, and dashes (and don't get me started on semicolons or we'll have to extend the event to last all week). This post first appeared on my other blog, The Self-Publishing Review, which is why it already has a few comments attached to it.


Somewhere in one of my comments, Sally has asked me for some more information about dashes and ellipses. Do, therefore, please blame her for the following rather boring post.

It's difficult to give exact rules for the correct usage for either the dash or the ellipsis as much depends on house style: the most important rule to remember is to be consistent. Choose one way and stick to it throughout your work. Use a "find and replace" to locate all examples once you've finished, just to ensure your consistency. And once you've done that don't get into a lather about them, as so much depends on the editor or publisher you're working with.

For the ellipsis, the usual convention is that it has a space after, but not before, or between each individual dot; and that if one ends a sentence, then you add a full stop so you get four dots in a row, and that full stop will naturally necessitate that a capital letter follows. So we use ellipses like this in the middle of a sentence... and like this at the end.... Ellipses indicate a trailing off (for example, in speech), rather than an interruption or abrupt halt, for which you use a dash.

Some houses prefer no spaces at all on either side of their ellipses and some (although happily, these are in the minority as I think it looks awful) prefer a space either side. I'm not sure which one I think is worse.

Dashes are more tricky. House style dictates, as usual. First rule is to remember that they are NOT interchangeable with hyphens, and that you need to show the difference between dashes and hyphens, usually by using two hyphens without a space between them to indicate a dash.

Whether or not you use a space either side of your dashes, like this:

text -- text

or don't, like this:

text--text

is up to you and the dictates of your style guide. I usually default to the latter, with no spaces, as it's what is preferred by the Chicago manual, which is what most American publishers default to when they're unsure.

Then you have to consider em- and en-dashes: the en and em refers to how much room they should take up on the line. The choice here is, once again, mostly a matter of house style although strictly speaking there are specific situations when each one should be used. If I'm in any doubt I usually default to the em-dash throughout rather than the en, as it's easier to differentiate from hyphens and so leads to a clearer text.

Finally, I'd ask everyone to use as few dashes and ellipses as possible as otherwise your text is going to look like the punctuation-spider has been sick all over it. Not a pretty thing, and very distracting to the reader.

There. I just hope Sally is grateful. After all--she asked.

Moving From Self-Published To Mainstream Publication

If you've self-published then you've already tested your book, as a product, on the marketplace. If it failed to sell in any great numbers, then in the eyes of a lot of publishers, you’ve proved that it doesn't have the potential to sell in sufficient quantities for them to take it on. This might well be because you, as a publisher, don't have access to the same sales and marketing clout that the bigger publishers employ, but many of those big publishers aren’t interested in that: all they see is the numbers they find on Nielsen’s sales reports. As far as they’re concerned, your book hasn't sold well and so you've shown that it's an uncommercial product.

This probably means that those publishers miss out on a few books with real potential: but as publishers have so many titles to pick and choose from, it's no wonder they tend to dismiss books so easily.

Why Good Writing Gets Rejected

I have a reasonable amount of experience of the publishing world: I worked as a non-fiction editor for a book-packaging company which gave me direct experience of editing for some of the best publishing houses in the world. In the process, I learned a little about the publishing business; the differences between good and publishable; and the horrible truth about the slush pile.

I've had a reasonable amount of non-fiction published and so have seen that it is possible for complete unknowns to get themselves good publishing deals with a little bit of luck and a lot of hard work.

I've also had all of the novels I've written so far rejected. I've won all sorts of prizes for my fiction and have received only positive comments from agents and editors, so I know I'm competent: but what went wrong?

While I'll agree that my second novel is overlong and far too quiet, I still consider my first to be good-to-excellent—but, having worked in publishing for so many years, I can understand why it hasn't been published, despite a few very near misses: it would have been very difficult for the sales reps to sell it into bookshops.

Without my editorial experience I would be far less able to understand why that's so important; and without my non-fiction publications I might have gone on to conclude that it's impossible for a newcomer to get published. I'm lucky: I can see this from all sides and while I would dearly love to see my novels in print, I can understand why they are not.

I can only imagine how painful it must be for good writers without similar industry experience to understand why their excellent work has been rejected.

Vanity Publishing or Self-Publishing?

How can vanity publishers and self-publishers be distinguished from one another? And why is it important that we make this distinction?

When an author self-publishes then the copyright page of his book bears the name of his imprint; his publishing company—even if it publishes just one title—owns his ISBN and the publication rights to that book. As publisher he’ll know exactly how many copies of his book have been printed, where and when they have been sold, and who to. Consequently he remains in full control of both the production and distribution of his own books.

A vanity publisher, however, will usually have its imprint listed on the copyright page of each book it publishes, and will control most aspects of their production and printing; consequently, the author will not have authority in the publication of his own book, nor will he have immediate access to vital information about stock levels and sales records. While vanity publishers often masquerade as mainstream or self-publishing services, their books usually carry the name of their own imprint: and by definition, if the imprint doesn’t belong to the author, it’s impossible for them to have self-published the book.

If you're considering self-publishing your book then it's important that you understand this: otherwise you could end up making a very costly mistake, and losing your precious first rights to an unscrupulous vanity publisher.

I Might Be Some Time....

My computer is struggling again: it seems that my hard drive is failing.

I've got plans for a replacement, which shouldn't take me too long to arrange: what will cause problems, though, is updating all my drivers and the operating system: downloads take AGES on dial-up.

I'll get it done as soon as I can: but it might well be a few days before I'm properly back online. Meanwhile, enjoy the few posts I've already scheduled, and play nicely while I'm gone.

How Much Can Writers Get Away With?

We know that writers have to get their work as close to perfect as possible to get it published: but the fact that publishers insist on paying editors to then edit those books before they are published implies to some that books don't have to be quite as perfect as is commonly thought before they are submitted. And if that's the case, what mistakes can writers get away with when they submit their work and what can't they afford to get wrong?

1. The basics of spelling, grammar and punctuation must be there. If the odd error has sneaked into your work then you're not facing an automatic rejection; if you show a persistent-but-consistent error which is relatively easy to correct, like using a hyphen where you should use a dash, then again you're not doing yourself too much harm. But if you misspell several words on every page, you don't seem to understand the correct use of the comma, and you pepper your whole manuscript with extended ellipses then that is going to signal to an editor that your book will need a substantial amount of work to get right—and will probably lead to rejection.
2. It's always possible to strengthen something: if a character isn't quite believable a good writer can work them more deeply into their scenes; new scenes can plug holes in gappy plots; structures can be consolidated or broken down; and a swingeing edit can work wonders on a flagging story-line, increasing the pace and tightening the story. The problem comes when all of these things need a lot of attention: the book will be very time-consuming to edit and with so much in need of revision it's difficult to be sure that the book will end up publishable. Rejection is the probable result.
3. The story has to be good. There is absolutely no point at all in constructing the perfect plot around a story which no one is interested in, or a story which people find repellent. Your story has to be really good, not just good enough.
4. If you have a good story and have perfected the structure, plot and characterisation, you still cannot guarantee that you have written a publishable book. What you also really have to have is a good voice—a unique, engaging and enticing voice. And this is the one thing that you have to get completely right if you want to be published because it's the one thing a good editor cannot help you with. It infuses every page of your manuscript and informs everything that you write. The stronger your voice, the more leeway you will be allowed with the rest of the book, and the more likely you are to get published regardless of what errors might lurk in your texts.

Manuscript Display Sites

The concept behind a manuscript display site is simple: provide writers with a forum in which to display their work, in the hopes that an editor or agent will come browsing and discover a literary gem hiding among the HTML. Over the years plenty of these sites have come and gone so that now, new versions are often referred to as a YADS: “yet another display site”.

Some display sites are just that: no frills, no extras, just a shop-window for manuscripts. Others have writers’ message-boards attached; some have review systems coupled with complicating rating systems. Authonomy comes to us courtesy of HarperCollins, and offers a manuscript display site, comment facility and message-board; while YouWriteOn offers vanity publishing in conjunction with Legend Press, which has put many people off what might otherwise be an excellent peer review facility.

These sites all have a couple of things in common.

The standard of writing on such sites ranges from good to poor, with that latter end making up the vast majority of the work on show. And despite what you might read online, I’ve only heard of a single book being published as a result of a browsing editor or agent spotting it in these electronic slush-piles: apart from that one title, the successes that have happened have all come about because the writers involved submitted their work in the usual way.

If you want to find out more about the history of manuscript display sites, then go to this post at Writer Beware's blog and make sure you read all the comments that have been made: there’s a fabulous discussion attached to it.

PublishAmerica Twitters!

The infamous vanity publisher PublishAmerica has joined Twitter! This delights me because while PublishAmerica can (and apparently does) delete all critical comments or difficult questions from its own message board, it doesn't have the same power on Twitter; and while it can block people from following it there (and yes, it's already blocked me: I twitter as HPRW) it can't prevent the people it blocks from reading its tweets via a simple search.

If you twitter too and would like to help inform people of the truth about PublishAmerica, here are a few preformed tweets for you. All you have to do is copy-and-paste them into your tweet-box exactly as they are, and send them into the twitterverse. Here we go:

"Traditional" (commercial) publishers don't ask their authors to buy their own books. #PublishAmerica does.

#PublishAmerica on Writer Beware's "Two Thumbs down" list of publishers to avoid: http://bit.ly/2DUZ63 Please retweet!

#PublishAmerica should name bookstores which are buying its books + give titles too. Otherwise, PA is promoting PA and not its books. Right?

@PublishAmerica wrote, "203 new authors knocked on our door today": how many PA authors have to buy their own books to make any sales?

@PublishAmerica, you claim to be "america's number one book publisher": what's your authors' average royalty payment? How many get $0.00?

@PublishAmerica, you claim to be "america's number one book publisher": how many copies do each of your titles sell, on average?

@PublishAmerica, you claim to be "america's number one book publisher": how many PA books have reached the New York Times Best Seller list?

@PublishAmerica: how many sales make a bestselling #PublishAmerica book? And how many of those copies does the author pay for?

Anyone considering submitting to #PublishAmerica read this first: http://bit.ly/LULLc Please retweet!

Anyone want to know more about #PublishAmerica? Read "Bewares and Background Checks" at the AbsoluteWrite.com forum.

Are your #PublishAmerica royalty statements wrong? Contact the Maryland Attorney General. Please retweet!

Atlanta Nights by Travis Tea: deliberately terrible, #PublishAmerica still offered to publish despite claims to select the best. Please RT!

Before signing with #PublishAmerica, go to book store and ask if they stock PA books. If not, ask why, and LISTEN CAREFULLY.

Check out AbsoluteWrite.com forum, "Bewares and Background Checks". #PublishAmerica has its own section due to hundreds of complaints.

Check out how #PublishAmerica talks to its authors on the PA message board: http://bit.ly/1sMEwt

Considering submitting to #PublishAmerica? Google "Atlanta Nights" by Travis Tea, and "Crack of Death" by Sharla Tann. Please retweet!

Crack of Death by Sharla Tann: deliberately awful, and still #PublishAmerica offered to publish it. Please retweet!

Look here for accurate info about #PublishAmerica from professional writers and editors. http://bit.ly/1wRmoK

RT @HPRW How Publishing Really Works: PublishAmerica Twitters! http://bit.ly/ga2Qdb

RT @LJHatton: How #publishamerica treats authors who question PA's service. http://tinyurl.com/o6z98m Professionals DO NOT act this way.

RT: @P_N_Elrod: How PublishAmerica deals with its writers: http://bit.ly/11niR4

RT: @P_N_Elrod: How PublishAmerica editors deal with the books: http://bit.ly/p3nm3

RT: @P_N_Elrod: With Publishamerica accepting SO MANY new writers each week, [they can't] possibly give each a proper edit.

This from a pro editor: RT: @skyladawn: At the risk of being blasted...if you're a #PublishAmerica author, just don't query me. Please.

Try to find a story of someone being successfully published by #PublishAmerica. Let me know if you find one.

Vanity publishers make most of their money from their authors, not from readers. Guess where #PublishAmerica makes most of its money from?

What #PublishAmerica authors have to do to get booksignings: http://bit.ly/f8GDf Please retweet!

What professional writers, editors and agents say about #PublishAmerica: http://bit.ly/YAa2A Please retweet!

Why does #PublishAmerica ignore its authors questions on PA messageboard and delete all those which show PA in a bad light?

I'm sure there are plenty more that you can think of, but make sure that you don't get yourself into trouble: don't make any libellous comments, or confront or upset any of the authors who have already signed up with PublishAmerica: it won't help, and it could cause hurt and harm. Remember to include a #PublishAmerica hashtag in your tweets, and do copy them into the comments section below so that we can all use them if we want to.

Get twittering!


Edited to add: I've added lots more more useful tweets to the list (with the permission of the original twitterers, obviously) so you now have more to choose from. PublishAmerica has now started to block people from following them, and has hidden its tweets from anyone but those following it; but all that does is stop its efforts to use Twitter to publicise its business, while "our" tweets will remain visible to all who search for PublishAmerica.

Trios: The Einstein Girl, by Philip Sington: Selling Literary Fiction

Samantha Fanaken works as part of Random House's sales team as a Senior Key Account Manager, and here she discusses selling literary fiction into bookshops.

One of the most enjoyable parts of working for a literary publisher like CCV is reading large piles of paper that will one day turn into books. Reading a book long before it has a cover means you come to it with no assumptions, only the enthusiastic description from the editor when they asked you to read it.

It’s hugely useful to have read as much of our fiction list as possible before presenting them to retailers. Non-fiction is easier to categorise, it’s usually simpler to assess whether a book will appeal to classic military history buffs or foodies etc, whereas fiction is much more subjective.

So, it’s helpful to know a book before trying to recommend it – so you can do the quick reductive ‘it’s a bit blah meets blah’ or ‘if you liked that, you’ll love this’ but then go on to talk about a book in more detail – the characters you can’t stop thinking about, the scenes that stay with you, the plot twists.

The Einstein Girl has much to offer. It has a rich seam of history, set in Berlin just before Hitler comes to power, and uses a little-known fact from Albert Einstein’s life as its core. There’s a mystery to be solved - a young woman is found naked in the woods outside the city with a leaflet to a lecture by Albert Einstein in her hand as the only clue to her identity. There’s a sweet sad love story between her and her psychiatrist, a man battling with his own scars left by the Great War. Slowly between their conversations and the psychiatrist’s own research, the greater story of Einstein’s family and its secrets unravel.

Enough sly pitching of the book at you. Read it, it’s great.

So, reading the book helps give me a steer on the potential readers and how we might best reach them through our retailers. When talking to a retailer like Waterstone’s, who are very supportive of new and developing writers, we have a good discussion around who might buy the book and whether that makes it a candidate for promotion front of store in its first outing in hardback or trade paperback, or whether it’s best to push the paperback a year later. In this instance, I’m pleased to report Waterstone’s are as keen as I am on The Einstein Girl and it is available in all stores in their 3 for 2 throughout August.


Philip's editor at Harvill Secker has kindly squirrelled away five copies of The Einstein Girl for us. If you'd like to be in the running for one of them, all you have to do is answer the following question: where did the designers find the photograph which appears on the cover of The Einstein Girl? Send your answers to "competition at philipsington dot com": next week, Philip will select the five winners at random and I'll announce them here.