How I Got Published (Part II): Daniel Blythe

A little later than planned, here's the second part of Daniel Blythe's account of how he became a professional, published writer (you can read the first part here). Read and it and boggle.


No publisher, no new book on the horizon and a dearth of new ideas and enthusiasm – that's where I was when we left my publishing career in 2000, with a new baby taking up a lot of the spare time anyway. I was down, but didn't really have time to think about it.

During this time my agent tried, and failed, to sell my novel for 8-to-12-year-olds to every children's publisher in town. They just didn't want to know. I had no idea what I was doing wrong. It felt like when you get on a losing streak at Scrabble and just can't get back into that winning groove. I wanted to scream from the rooftops "I am PUBLISHED, for God's sake. Four novels! Count 'em! Do you think I am some newbie wannabe?" At one point (such was the state of my confidence) I remember saying to my agent, "You are *telling* them about my previous books, aren't you...?"

However. One of the publishers with whom my agent had made connections was David Shelley at Allison and Busby, and I started to talk to him about an 80s film book – which turned in to an 80s music book. Despite David being a few years younger than me we shared similar musical tastes and the book, a 500-page whopper, slowly took shape during 2001 and was published, first in hardback and then in paperback. It got extensively reviewed in regional papers up and down the country, got me lots of radio interest and even, thanks to an enterprising chap at BBC Leeds called John Ryan (who is now running BBC Radio Manchester) a co-presenting slot on an Eighties radio show. Suddenly, I was not only a non-fiction writer but also a DJ too!

Thanks to The Encyclopaedia of Classic 80's Pop, I had re-invented myself. More non-fiction followed – Dadlands: The Alternative Handbook for New Fathers for Wiley, about my experiences of fatherhood, and I Hate Christmas: A Manifesto for the Modern-day Scrooge for Allison and Busby. Both still get a bit of media interest to this day. My agent was doing a great job – putting me out there, matching me up with editors who liked my ideas. And now, a new novel finally came to fruition, in the form of a manuscript called Cruel Summer which I had been working on since 2003. Another 500-page whopper, it ended up being called This Is The Day (my agent suggested Cruel Summer was "a bit too Bananarama") and it was sold to Allison & Busby in 2006, appearing as a trade paperback in 2007 and – hooray! – this time, finally, a paperback a year later. A wine-and-nibbles launch at Blackwells helped shift a few copies, as did some more radio slots. Although the half-promised Richard and Judy appearance for I Hate Christmas hadn't materialized, I had good reason to be thankful to my new publishers.

Diversity, survival, eclecticism – these were my new watchwords. I started up a novel class for the Workers' Educational Association, still running to this day. A chance encounter with some Writers In Schools and a conference workshop by the inspirational Two Steves got me inspired to go into primary schools, delivering workshops and doing author "appearances". The paying gigs began to pile up. More non-fiction commissions came along – the latest being two books for Pen & Sword. My agent sold my idea for X Marks the Box: How to Make Politics Work for You, a political book for non-political people, to Icon Books – a small publisher in the Faber distribution network. That was written with the support of the Authors' Foundation, and will be out soon. And I successfully applied for an Arts Council award in 2008 to write my new children's book – which my agent still believes in, and is still trying to find a home for.

I also returned to the Doctor Who fold when the BBC's Creative Consultant, Justin Richards (himself a writer of hugely popular books for young people) invited me to write one of the Autumn 2009 books featuring David Tennant – last chance to write for the Tenth Doctor before he stands down! I jumped at the chance, and wrote Doctor Who: Autonomy in an intense 7-month period. The "Doctor Who" books are a very different proposition now – they are written by invitation, rather than the editors accepting unsolicited ideas. They are shorter and punchier than the chunky 90s novels and aimed at a younger readership. They have, of course, a huge publicity machine behind them, "Doctor Who" now being a massive, populist, multi-media success story (rather than the slightly embarrassing anachronism it was seen as in the early 1990s). And – somewhat less in the authors' favour – they now pay on the basis of a fixed fee, rather than an advance and royalties. So, not much wiggle-room for my agent to negotiate on. But it is a good fixed fee, and there is a bonus built in once the title sells over a certain number of copies. And, for goodness' sake, I needed the work, and I know I can write "Doctor Who" – I have been a fan since I first cowered behind a cushion at Davros in 1975.

So now, here I am – a working and teaching writer, an educator, an Author In Schools, a sometime radio presenter, and still a would-be children's writer. What have I learned from all this? That you need to diversify to survive, and never take anything for granted. That you just keep plugging away. And that if you have a good agent, hang on to them through thick and thin – this spring, I mark thirteen years with mine, and I'm hoping neither of us is going anywhere else in the foreseeable future.


My thanks to Dan for suggesting this series to me, and for kicking it off so very well. If any publishers are reading, Dan's two excellent children's books (both with good series potential) remain unpublished; and if any writers reading this have a good publication story to tell, I'd be very pleased to hear about it.

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.

How Readers Drive Publishing

Publishing is a business which produces books in order to sell them. It depends on writers, agents, editors, designers, illustrators, copy-editors and printers to produce those books; and on marketing staff, publicists, sales agents, wholesalers, distributors, bookshops and booksellers to sell those books.

All of the people who are involved in the production and sales of books depend on one thing to fund the work that they do: the reader. And because readers fund publishing, they drive the whole of the publishing process. When readers don't buy books, the publishers lose money and everyone involved in that supply-chain suffers.

So when publishers recognise that a particular type of book doesn't sell well they stop publishing it, or they stop publishing so much of it and get really picky about the books in that genre which they will consider.

Conversely, when publishers notice that a particular type of book is selling very well, they will look for others of that type to publish.

If publishers won't consider a particular genre, agents won't be able to sell it to them; so agents quickly learn what publishers will and will not consider. As those agents don't eat if they don't make sales, they don't take on books they don't think they can sell no matter how much literary merits those books might have.

So please: don't suggest that literary agents are unfairly stifling new writers because of their own personal agendas, or that publishing is ignoring whole swathes of talented writers because those writers write stuff that is somehow too contentious or unpopular to make it onto their lists: agents, editors and publishers all look to the reader when deciding what to take on, and if readers aren't prepared to buy a particular type of book, then that type of book is very unlikely to get published.

It comes down to this: to stand a chance of being published, your book has to be well-written, but that’s not enough on its own. If readers are likely to buy your book and it is well-written, then it has a good chance of getting published; but if publishers know from their years of experience that a book like yours is unlikely to attract enough readers to make it commercially viable then it is not going to get published no matter how well-written it is.

Guest Post: Being A Writer, by Dave Dittell

Few writers make much money from their writing alone, and most depend on other work to provide them with a living wage. Dave Dittell is one of many writers who amazes me: how can he be as productive as he is with so little writing time available? I offer him my thanks for this contribution to my blog, and my admiration for all that he achieves.


Wake up, shut off alarm, don't snooze. Used to be a snoozer, but now you're not. Now you're a teacher. It seemed a perfect fit for a budding writer, a chance to immerse yourself in the English language. Your day job would be related to your dream job; it felt like cheating.

Yesterday: taught all day, wrote all afternoon, prepared and graded papers into late night. Now it's early. Still dark out. Four hours sleep. More papers to grade. You spend five minutes per paper max, but it's still too much. Can you really help someone become a better writer in under five minutes a day?

Coffee. Bathroom smells like coffee-pee. Spit out showerwater yellow with caffeine. Never spend more time showering than it takes to grade a paper.

Teaching is two jobs. The in-class job and the out-of-class job. Your third job is writing. You need at least four hours of sleep, so writing is only part-time, even though you'd do it all day if you could.

You have meetings, you have projects. Projects move forward, projects fall apart. Class goes well, class falls apart. Every day, inside your class room, you stand before them and provide hope and strength and knowledge. You represent opportunity; you represent it so well that your class has a future fireman, a future astronaut, a future Air Force pilot. And eleven future engineers, which you think is funny. There are no future writers, but then again, you're a future writer.

Should they want this?

Grade papers. Run-on sentence, run-on sentence, fragment, fragment, run-on sentence, past/present inconsistent, run-on sentence. Same mistakes every week, but they're getting it. Some of them could barely write in English when they first walked through the door. Run-on sentence, fragment, fragment, singular/plural inconsistency, run-on sentence. How can you get Jake to try, Sarah to stop thinking about her mom's cancer, Frank to stop disrupting class? Can you really bring yourself to mention ADD to a twelve year-old's parents?

When you write, you think of them.

When you teach, you think about your stories.

Mouth tastes of reheated coffee. You used to drink coffee and not sleep for hours. Now you sip right up until the moment you collapse.

Get to school early and jot a few notes on your lesson plan. Come up with a good line, an important plot point, and tuck it into your back pocket.

Class starts in twenty minutes and it's the only time of the day when you have absolutely nothing to do. No papers to grade, no blank page, no vocabulary words to pretend you didn't look up the night before.

This is the twenty minutes of the day you most look forward to, more than the writing, because, during the writing, all you can think about is how it's still just the part-time job.


Dave Dittell is a 25 year-old screenwriter currently at work adapting a comedic novel for 363 Entertainment. He operates Alphabet Soup Kitchen, a blog dedicated to young and struggling writers, and has volunteered and worked in education throughout the past five years.

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.

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?

Writers’ Groups

Writing is such a solitary profession that it’s often difficult to know if you’re doing it right when you receive no feedback or advice. So it makes sense to try to find a local writing group where you can discuss your work and perhaps make a few like-minded friends.

Just don’t expect it to always work out as you’d hoped.