5 in 5: lessons learned about writing

May 27, 2020 in writing

It was approximately this time five years ago when I was ambushed by a minor breakdown following yet another 11-hour day working for peanuts at a translation agency. Like a confident French marshal during the early days of the Napoleonic Wars, the breakdown had been amassing its forces for some time, and when it struck, it tore a hole through my paltry defences and sent me spinning to the sofa, where I was to remain for some hours. After the screams had ceased and the smoke cleared, I was left with a single word echoing in my head: Quit. I did so the next day, and I’m still pretty certain it was the best decision I’ve ever made.

What I’m not so certain about was my next decision: to write for myself instead of translating other people’s words. Actually, it wasn’t even a decision; it was a need. Have I enjoyed it? Sort of. Does it frustrate me? Constantly. Can I do without it? No, unfortunately not. I shape my entire life around it. It influences the way I structure my day, how I speak and listen to people, what entertainment I consume, whether I feel halfway satisfied or like a fraud in the evening. It has been responsible for my greatest sense of achievement—seeing my novel on a bookstore shelf—and my lowest ebbs. Five years in, I still don’t feel qualified to talk about writing in any capacity beyond offering the broadest of sketches. But I’d like to mark the occasion, if only for myself, by offering five lessons I’ve learned about writing.

I will never be satisfied and will always beat myself up

This one is hardly a newsflash. It may be endemic to all people who create something they believe in both 100% and 0% and tend towards the self-critical rather than the self-aggrandising. I did hope, though, that at some point my level of satisfaction at my work might increase from ‘modicum’ to ‘pinch’ (or maybe a punch). Alas not. It’s funny, because up until the moment a piece is published, I can declare to myself that ‘this is the best I can do and the best it will be’. The moment after publication is when my other set of eyes automatically takes over and I can only see poor word choices, verbose description, repetition, similes that don’t work (like the Napoleonic one above) and clunky dialogue. By that point, though, it’s too late to take the work back and attack it with a red pen. But then I suppose this is for the best: if I always saw what I wrote through my other set of eyes, I wouldn’t have the confidence to throw something out there in the world. And in a way it’s good to be this critical, because it means I’ll hopefully never release the literary equivalent of Be Here Now.

Having your book published is not fun

Getting By the Feet of Men published turned my hair grey. Not all of it, just some at the sides. Chalk it up to discovering a typo in the epigraph in the weeks leading up to publication, fighting for every single review, worrying about sales and hating the cover I was saddled with. There’s very little to enjoy about any of the promotion side of it. And even though my sales figures were way better than I ever expected them to be, realising how many hours had been required to sell a few hundred copies was pretty sobering. What the whole foray into the world of publishing taught me, though, is to enjoy the time when I’m sitting at my desk, bringing a story to life. Because that’s pretty much as good as it gets. The rest is crazy amount of behind-the-scenes work and disappointment and factors beyond your control.

I think I’ve found a writing style that works for me

I didn’t realise this until the first reviews came in for By the Feet of Men, but over the past five years I’ve developed a writing style, and the best way I can summarise it is: storyboard prose. By this I mean when I write scenes I visualise them as movie storyboards and then describe what I see in as few words as possible. I was recommended to do this ten years ago by a guy I used to work with in Amsterdam; I gave him a long, messy chapter of a terrible novel I was writing at the time, and he ripped it to threads before rewriting one scene using the storyboard method. It was all the more impressive given he was (and probably still is) Dutch, and wrote in a far clearer, sparser way than I did. His advice has remained with me ever since, and my writing has gradually shaped itself around the format. I’m not saying it’s instantly recognisable (Pricesque? Prician? Maybe I should change my last name), but it at least gives me something to work with.

The short story format is brutal

Here’s how many short stories I’ve written each year since I started doing it ‘professionally’:

2015: 17 stories

2016: 28 stories

2017: 18 stories

2018: 13 stories

2019: 11 stories

2020: 2 stories

Since that heady peak in 2016, when I was churning out approximately one short story every two weeks, the amount has fallen year on year to a stunning low in the first half of 2020. This isn’t due to laziness, though: it’s because I don’t think the amount of effort that I put into the short story is balanced out by the payoff if (and that’s a big if) it gets published.

A typical cycle for me would be this: I spend a week or two writing the story, then put it aside for a few weeks, revise it, put it aside for another few weeks, then revise it once more. Then I send it off to a publication calling for submissions, hear nothing for six months, before ultimately receiving either an acceptance or (more likely) a rejection. If it’s accepted, I wait another three to six months until the short story is published – online, in print or both – and a handful of people read it. And then it’s gone, into the ether, never to be read again.

That’s a great deal of energy I could be putting into something more worthwhile, which is why, starting in 2018, I switched my focus to writing essays. For whatever reason, essays seem to be read and green-lit quicker by online publications and there’s usually no fee to submit them. Plus, I have the feeling that the marketplace for creative nonfiction, critical analysis, personal essays and so on is much less crowded than for short stories – each of the five I wrote last year quickly found a home. Of course, this might just mean I’m not very good at writing short stories.

Realising which formats work for me has taken the edge of desperation out of my fingers when I sit down and replaced it with a dash of assurance. Now, instead of asking myself, ‘How am I going to get this published?’, I think ‘this is what I want to say’.

And finally…the fear of failure doesn’t go away

My greatest fear at present—within the context of writing, that is—is that I won’t be able to find a home for my next novel, Mekong Lights. After a year of promotion and sales and reviews for By the Feet of Men, I’m back to querying agents and receiving either rejections or no response at all. What if it doesn’t get picked up? That’s two full years of effort for nothing and I’ll be a failure. Or, at least, that’s how I think each time I open up an email containing the line “Not one for me, I’m afraid”. But that’s not true. Yes, I will have ‘failed’ to sell the novel and yes, realising nobody is interested in reading what I’ve written is a miserable feeling, but that doesn’t make the endeavour itself a failure. It most certainly isn’t a waste of time, because if nothing else it was two years of practice. I juggled with more perspectives, tackled a more complex plot, tried my hand at social commentary, loosened up a little with my dialogue. Most importantly of all, I enjoyed it while I was writing it and, like I said above, that’s pretty much the most a writer can hope for. Or maybe it isn’t; maybe five years is too soon to be drawing any conclusions. I’ll check back in in 2025 and let you know.

What nobody tells you when you sign with an independent publisher

February 10, 2020 in writing, marketing

The email arrives when you’ve already given up hope: “Dear XX, we have reviewed your novel and would like to offer you a contract.” No way, you think. It must be a mistake. But you read the email again. And once more for good measure. It’s not a mistake. After two hundred pitches, 50 rejections, sleepless nights and a chest full of heartache, somebody is finally offering to buy and market your novel. It’s an independent publisher, operating, if not at the margins of the industry, then somewhere in between the Big Five nucleus and the online-only agencies that publish one poetry chapbook every quarter. You pitched to them directly after giving up hope of attracting an agent, and somehow the gambit has paid off. Your manuscript went through a three-person internal review and survived. Now all that’s left for you to do is put your name to that contract. The hard work has finally paid off. You can sit back and relax.

Except obviously that’s not true. In fact, writing, pitching and selling the novel was the easy part. The real work starts now.

Here’s the news: if you sign with an independent publisher, nobody gives a damn. You weren’t the name at the heart of a bidding war between Penguin and Simon & Schuster. You don’t have a super-agent who’s going to wangle you a spot in the New Yorker. You aren’t joining the hallowed ranks of literary titans who give you more credibility simply by association. That puts you at the back of the queue for everything. From reviews to coverage to space on the shelves, you’re going to have a mountain to climb to get your novel seen, read and heard about.

Here are 7 things that nobody tells you when you sign for an independent publisher.

1. Your publishing house doesn’t believe in you.

There are two models for independent publishers to follow. One (less likely): every book is a labour of love into which the team puts its blood and guts, and then uses every channel at its disposal to turn that book into a mild success. The publisher believes in the author and the message, and will leave no stone unturned to win them the audience they deserve. Two (more likely): the publisher snaps up any title on which it believes it may be able to turn a profit, does the bare minimum to produce and market it, and waits to see if the gamble pays off. It doesn’t really matter either way: the publisher spreads its bets, buying up a few crime titles here, a few erotic thrillers there, and something literary once in a while just to mix things up. It always has a core genre and audience to fall back on that are guaranteed to produce sales (self-help books are good for that). Sure, the publisher will tell you they see a bright future for your book, but you’ll never find them championing it in any corner of the internet beyond getting it into online stores. So once you’re done typing, it’s time to start hyping.

2. You have no say in the cover or blurb.

Now this is probably the same for the major publishing houses, too, but for some reason people have the notion that because an independent publisher isn’t as well known , it means the author has free rein when it comes to slapping a cover together and scribbling a description for the back. The opposite is true. Independent publishers are nothing if not canny; as said above, they’re seeking to maximise sales while keeping the work involved to a minimum. Designing a cover is that minimum: they’ll take an image, motif or general design that has worked in the past, farm the work out to a freelancer, give them an hour to tweak it just enough to make it unique, and then cross their fingers that it’ll draw a few eyes. They’re not interested in creating something beautiful or instantly iconic. They have a blueprint that works, and that’s what they’ll stick to. And no author will be able to convince them otherwise, even if they hate the end product (like a certain me with mine).

3. You’re going to have to fight for every review, interview and mention.

This one can hit an indie author like a claw hammer. You start off putting together a list of book bloggers and platforms who you then contact by email. You think, seeing as there’s an army of reviewers out there, many of whom profess to love your genre on their website (under ‘review policy’), that the responses will come flooding in. After all, a publisher liked your work enough to take it, and you’re offering your book to people free of charge as a paperback or e-book. Getting all the reviews you need should be a breeze, right?

Nope.

Book bloggers are busy as street cleaners at Pride. They receive hundreds of review requests per week, usually work full-time jobs, try to read and review multiple novels each month, and maintain a website featuring book giveaways, blog tours, guest posts and more. They aren’t all going to answer you. Don’t forget you’re not at the front of the queue, either. In fact, it’s more like this: Big 5 publishers > authors the reviewer has worked with before > authors who have managed to create a little buzz > independent authors > self-published authors. There may be other constraints, too. Many reviewers prefer paperbacks, for example. Some prefer to review only people of colour or LGBTQ authors. Others might have a predilection for steampunk, but no time for post-apocalyptic fiction. Once you narrow down the field, you find you’ll be lucky to get one response from every seven emails you send out.

Don’t expect your publisher to help you here, either. They might have a database of contacts, yes, but it takes around 20 minutes to check out a website, see if the blogger is accepting requests and craft a personal email to send them. You have to do that on your time.

4. Websites with a strong readership probably won’t be interested in you.

Generally speaking, websites with a healthy daily readership are not going to respond to your requests for interview or review. Why would they? They curated that readership by creating content that garners interest, and unless that interest happens to be ‘indie authors from Slough who wrote their first horror novel at the age of 52’, you can rest assured that nothing you suggest will be worth their time or coverage. Scale down your aspirations as much as you can. Stop looking for an email address to pitch to The Guardian or Wired. It’s not going to happen (unless you know somebody on the staff). Instead, focus on building your launch pad and collecting fuel – that means seeking out niche websites with a sympathetic management team that receives a few hundred or thousand clicks per day, and then offering to write a guest post or begging for an interview. The more times you do this, the greater the online footprint for your book. When it comes to writing and then pitching your next novel to literary agents, they might— if they’re interested in your manuscript — end up finding those posts you wrote and being impressed by your tenacity. It may even swing their decision in your favour.

5. Review copies will only become available a couple months prior to publication.

About all those reviews you’re trying so hard to get: many reviewers prefer to read paperbacks and will give precedence to those authors who are prepared to provide one. The problem is that although your independent publisher has promised it’ll make review copies available to you, it isn’t planning on doing so until the book is actually in the warehouse – around two months prior to the publication date. Now, as stated, book bloggers are busy people. If you come to them and ask them to read your book within 8 weeks, they’re probably either going to delete your email or inform you that they’ll take your book, but they have 322 other books to read first. You have two choices here: you can wait until those precious review copies are sitting in the warehouse, which means it’ll probably be too late to get many positive responses at all, or you can place your own print order large enough that your publisher will fire up the printers and then send these copies to you well before release. Yes, it’s expensive – in addition to buying the books yourself, you have to pay for the envelopes and shipping fees. But how many reviews do you want to see on Goodreads, Amazon and wherever else come release day?

6. Your publicist will only start promotion a month before your book is released.

Insofar as your publisher assigns a publicist to your cause, don’t expect them to help you until the finish line is already in sight. This publicist is not a literary agent – they aren’t there to work behind the scenes for their 10%, securing interviews and exclusives and deals in your name. They are people employed by the publisher to hammer out a press release or two, send out a blanket email to a list of reviewers and post a few nice things about your book on the company social media page (which invariably has around 200 followers). They don’t have time to do much more than that, because they have 20 other authors for whom they also need to write press releases and send out emails. In other words, even though you’ll start seeing activity in the four to six weeks prior to your novel’s release, it will almost certainly bring little to no reward. The onus is on you.

7. You’ll have to lean pretty heavily on your friends and family to get the sales ball rolling.

As release day looms, you have a handful of reviews, some good, some average, a few barely literate. You’ve done all you can to get your book out there on every channel you can think of, and you’ve bagged some ‘TBR’ tags on Goodreads. There are even a few libraries in the UK and US that have placed pre-orders. Still, if you want to have any chance of your book being seen by people outside your Twitter feed and the blogosphere, you’re going to have to beg as many people as you can to do you a solid and buy that book while it’s still fresh. If you can get enough people to place a pre-order on (sigh) Amazon just before release day, you have a chance of breaking into the top 100-200 releases for your specific genre. And once it’s in that chart, even if it’s for a day, there’s a chance people you don’t know will take a punt on an unknown quantity and keep you there for a little longer. And a little longer until eventually the snowball becomes a…slightly bigger snowball and you have a few hundred sales to your name. Because this is what you’re signing up for: you spend a year writing the thing, another year making revisions and pitching it, and yet another year waiting for it to be released, and then your book spends a week in the ‘New Releases’ section of Waterstones and it disappears without trace just in time for the next one to be pushed out into the world.

Nobody said it was easy. Up to you if you want to go through with it.

does kind of make it worthwhile when you walk into a bookstore and see it on the shelf, though

The truth about book blogger reviews (part 2)

October 29, 2019 in writing

The question I asked myself recently was whether I felt like the nine months of promotional work I did for By the Feet of Men – which mainly consisted of contacting book bloggers – was worth it. The answer: yes and no.

The good

The novel has managed to carve out its own niche, no matter how tiny, in the massive dystopian fiction genre. The response has been mostly positive from reviewers. I gained a few good pull quotes to use on the Amazon editorial section. A couple of reviews even gained a little traction on Twitter (100 retweets, 100 likes, etc.).

The bad

Out of the 30 book bloggers who received a paperback copy of the novel, only 4 (13%) actually read the book and posted a review before or in the month after the publication date. I actually received a higher response rate from bloggers to whom I sent an electronic copy. That’s a poor return on an investment. I do, of course, understand that to send somebody a book is not a contract under which they are obliged to provide a review. As stated, these people are extremely busy and their bedside tables are probably overflowing with books. It’s a gamble, and by and large it didn’t pay off on this occasion. Next time I may receive a higher return – or I might restrict myself to sending out electronic copies only.

The ugly

The only part of the book-blogger promotional process that bothered me is this: I followed up with a few of the reviewers who had seemed most keen on being sent a paperback copy and who promised to read it in advance of (or by) the release date. My email was a thing of curiosity more than anything – I asked only if they had indeed received their copy and if they were still planning on reading it, so that I could gauge whether any more reviews might be coming in post release. Of the 10 emails I sent to follow up on the paperbacks, I received three responses: one stating they had forgotten about it, one assuring me it was still on the pile, and one saying that they had never received the book. The other seven never responded. I was ghosted by my book bloggers.

There’s no judgement here from me. After all, there are no certainties in business. And book blogging is a business. But there are a few lessons to be learned from this experience, especially for authors who are just setting out on the promotion trail:

1. Perhaps most obviously, giving somebody a paperback does not guarantee a review. Your novel may be forgotten or end up on the bottom of the pile, or the recipient may experience a change in their personal life that puts a stop to their blogging career. In other words, it’s a good idea to think twice about whether to spend the money on posting physical copies or channelling the funds into another way to promote the book.

2. Even if a blogger sends you the most enthusiastic response in the world stating that they are dying to read your novel, you may never hear from them again. It’s important not to take it personally. Tastes and opinions change, and what seemed appealing back in March may be unpalatable in September. Sure, it would be polite for a person to say if they no longer wanted to read your work, but how many times have you decided to ignore an email rather than get into a potentially uncomfortable back and forth with someone?

3. This is something I’m working on: don’t obsess over reviews. Contact bloggers, magazines and relevant people by all means, but restrict checking in on the various review platforms to once a week. If you do it too often, those numbers will take over your life. And you’ll forget why you wrote your book in the first place.

The truth about book blogger reviews (part 1)

October 25, 2019 in writing

When I started looking at ways to secure some advanced publicity for my dystopian climate fiction novel By the Feet of Men, book bloggers were at the heart of my strategy. As my book was being released with an independent publisher, I didn’t have the luxury of relying on a curated list of contact, and few big-name publications have the ink to spare on indie releases when there are already so many titles being pushed out by the Big Five. There was also the matter of my publicist failing to respond to any of my enquiries before abruptly quitting a month prior to the book’s release, leaving me to take care of everything.

But that was okay, because the book bloggers were there for me. I’d read numerous accounts about how awesome they are. I’d checked out Goodreads and seen how influential some of them could be in generating interest among their followers. I’d made a few casual searches on Google and seen that there were literally thousands of them out there, all around the world, eager to read the latest in whichever genres it was they preferred. I read somewhere online that a new novel needed at least 25 reviews on Amazon and Goodreads by its release date to look credible to a casual browser. I had my publisher send me 40 review copies – their policy was that they only sent out review copies themselves up to six weeks prior to publication, a time window that I thought was much too short. With so many novels being released year in, year out, it was important to get a head start and contact people as soon as possible. Besides, by starting seven months before the publication date, I was sure to get the 25 reviews I’d set for myself.

It didn’t take me long to realise how misplaced my confidence was. Book bloggers are busier than a department store at Christmas time. Checking out their ‘About’ page is like reading the biography of three people at once: full-time lawyer, mother or father of two, fundraiser at weekends and bookaholic who receives 300 review requests per month. In many cases, I felt guilty at contacting these people and asking to take up the free time (if any) that they had left.

In general, it was more difficult than I’d imagined to actually find bloggers who were open to receiving requests. Trawling a book blogger index was like looking for survivors after a battle, the vast majority having been rendered unavailable or taken offline altogether by a relentless barrage of emails. Even when I did unearth one, I had to make sure my book complied with the list of accepted genres and formats and time frames. In total, perhaps one in seven were suitable for what I needed.

I sent out around 200 queries to book bloggers over the course of six months, and received approximately 30 positive responses from people willing to read the book by the end of August 2019 (the official release date was on 1 September). I bought a bale of padded envelopes, stuffed the paperbacks inside, took them to the post office and accepted the financial hit required to send a book from Berlin to places like Missouri, Perth and Glasgow. The books disappeared into the postal system and into the world, and I put them to the back of my mind.

As the release date drew closer, I checked in on Goodreads, Amazon and Twitter every couple of days to see how the reviews were coming along. Amazon was dead, but there were some signs of life on Goodreads: a couple of bloggers posted their reviews in April, three more added theirs in May. June was quiet, but things picked up again in July. As expected, August was the best month, with 15+ reviews being added to the title’s listing on the platform. Since the first week of September, things have stalled a little, but the novel has been marked as ‘to read’ or ‘currently reading’ by 117 people. For an indie title with virtually zero backing from the publisher, that sounds like a pretty okay return.

So how did I feel about the whole process? That’s the exciting cliffhanger that’ll be resolved in part 2.