The Literary Conference: Writing in the Digital Age

A new event for your diary: on June 8th and 9th, in London, The Literary Consultancy is holding a fab-sounding conference entitled The Literary Conference: Writing in the Digital Age.

I'm on a panel with Kate Mosse, chaired by Guardian literary editor, Claire Armitstead. This is an event I'm REALLY looking forward to! We're going to be talking about what the new publishing models and possibilities mean for authors, how everything is changing and how we can all make the most of it without losing sight of the important bit: writing a great book.

I'm also on a panel at the Cambridge Wordfest about how to get published, on Saturday 14th April. No link yet, but you can be sure I'll let you know.

Meanwhile, DO sign up to the June conference. The programme looks quite wonderful.

Pitch your pitch - it's back!

Would you like the readers of this blog (and me) to help shape your pitch, that tricky paragraph that goes in the covering letter and hooks you a fabulous agent and/or publisher? Well, we've done that on this blog before and we're going to do it again. Hooray!

Here's what to do:

A. First read some of the previous posts about pitches and hooks. For example, this one and this one.
B. Second, read the post about 25-word pitches here, and at least some of the 117 comments!
C. Then, if you'd like us to help with your pitch, do this:

1. Email your pitch paragraph to me at writingtutor@hotmail.co.uk, in the body of the email, not as an attachment.
2. In the email, tell me whether you want your real name used, and tell me what genre the book is and, if for children, the age range.
3. Make sure that your pitch is as good as you can make it, following these guidelines:

• every word must count
• it needs must-read factor, in keeping with the genre
• it should focus on the main character (if fiction)
• it must be specific and not general - eg not "it's about redemption" but "it's about an angry young man who...because...and then"
• it must indicate how the story ends or at least where the journey is heading
• it should not contain rhetorical questions
• the tone must reflect the tone of the book
• it must be objective and therefore contain no praisey bits. You cannot say "beautifully written", for example. Though you can say "fast-moving".
• your target word count is as close to 160 words as possible
• in essence, your aim is to make someone who would normally read and love this genre be desperate to read this book :)) 

Hook 'em with a pointy hook!

I usually get a lot of people sending pitches in for this so I can't promise to include yours. What I do promise is that I will not set you up for failure, in the sense that I won't put it on the blog if I think you are going to get mostly negative feedback. My blog readers are an incredibly supportive and sensible bunch and feedback has been of high quality but sometimes I feel that a pitch isn't really ready for public scrutiny and then I won't put it up. But if I don't put yours up it might be just that I didn't have space! I also try to vary the genres.

Meanwhile, today I am wearing my red pointy boots at an award ceremony that Wasted is shortlisted for. It's called the RED award and personally I think I should win simply because the cover is red. And so are my boots. What more does anyone want??

Crabbit's Tips for Writers - 5: Ingredients of Poor Writing

You may remember that last year I started a set of Crabbit's Tips for Writers. Here's No 5. To find the others, go to the list of labels on the right (scroll down) and choose Crabbit's Tips for Writers. You can also go here to download the pretty pdf and print it out, if you so wish.

Write a Great Synopsis launches at a crazy intro price! Wot? AND Tweet Right??

Announcing the launch of Write a Great Synopsis - hooray! All your troubles are at an end. Well, the ones relating to writing synopses, anyway. And that's quite enough to be going on with.

To celebrate, I have a crazy price promotion until the end of January: Write a GREAT Synopsis and Tweet Right - The Sensible Person's Guide to Twitter will each be stupid cheap on Amazon. I'm aiming for 99p, but VAT and currency fluctuations, along with Amazon's naughtiness, are making that hard to acheive. So, forgive me if it's £1 or even - gasps - £1.02.

But only till the end of January. So hurry! Unfortunately, I can't do the same price promotion on other platforms, and have less control over the price, but I'm going to try to set it low on Lulu, which feeds ibookstore etc, but it can't be lower than Amazon. (*growls*)

Here are the links to the books on Amazon UK:

Write a Great Synopsis on Amazon UK - for Kindle AND laptops/ipads/etc if you download the FREE Kindle app

Tweet Right on Amazon UK - as above.

For non-UK purchases, please see the Amazon.com site and do a search for the titles.

Spread the word - Crabbit has gone mad. And remember: it's January only. Imagine how weird it would be for a book on synopsis-writing to be near the top of the charts :) Together, we can do it.

And tonight on Twitter there will be fizz, as soon as I'm back from Oxford, where I had mucho fun with some workshoppers and a whole load of imaginary characters. Join us!

Where am I?

Today, the WAGSynopsis blog tour visits How Publishing Really Works and dances all over Jane's house.

Tomorrow, I will be over at Talli Roland's sparkly blog. Both those posts give you chances to enter the BIG WAGSynopsis Comp, with prizes of actual synopsis critiques from actual me.

Tomorrow, Friday, is OFFICIAL LAUNCH DAY, when the book will OFFICIALLY be available. Certain eagle-eyed people among you have spotted that it sneakily already is :)

So there. Today and tomorrow I'm on trains (which is why I can't put those links on the blog tour sidebar yet) and talking to lovely writers in Oxford this evening.

Play nicely.

All writers should self-publish

No, I haven't gone entirely mad. Or even, I venture to say, a tiny bit mad. Nor have I started to believe the self-publishing-is-the-answer-to-everything and the publishing-is-completely-broken rubbish.

I am, as you know, a published (more than 90 books) author who has also ventured into self-publishing, and who is enjoying it. I dare even say succeeding, though John Locke need not watch his back. But my steps into self-publishing do not mean turning up my nose at traditional (hate that word but... ) publishing: yes, I still want to be published by publishers. Pretty please. And, especially, to have my books in proper bookshops.


And I believe all writers should self-publish.

I'll rephrase that: I believe that all writers should self-publish something. (Unless they have worked in a publishing company themselves.) 

Why? Because I think that self-publishing teaches us a great deal, if we choose to listen, and I believe it teaches us a great deal about how difficult publishing is.

Actually, no: publishing is easy. Anyone can publish a book and publishing ebooks is child's play. (Literally; I heard of a teacher whose primary pupils publish their own work to Kindle, actually doing the publishing bit themselves.)

Yes, publishing is easy but selling is hard. And it's the selling of our books that causes published writers so many gripes about their publishers.

That's why I think we'd all benefit (and our future publishers would benefit) if we tried to publish something ourselves. Our increased understanding would both make us able to contribute better to the marketing process with our future publisher and more appreciative of why disappointments do happen. Also, we'd be more realistic and professional-sounding in our pitches. No longer would we believe that our lovely book was certain to sell tens of thousands if it really wasn't. Our ideas, our pitches, our writing, our consideration of our readers - all these would, I venture, be tighter, more professional, more likely to be realised.

I'm quite prepared to admit that what I've learnt through publishing Tweet Right, Mondays are Red and Write a Great Synopsis leads me to be a little less harsh on publishers who have made mistakes, either in their decisions to publish (or not publish) or in their failure to sell as many copies of an author's books as they should.

It's harder than we think to reach those readers. Only when we've tried to sell something in a market where there are hundreds of thousands of competitors can we truly know how hard it is. We become, I think, more connected to the reader who buys our book, buys it from us, not from some middleman.


So, yes, self-publish in order to learn what it's like on the other side.

But does this mean I'm letting publishers off the hook? Oh, no! I'd also like every publisher to try to write a book. I'd like them to know what it feels like to put our precious oeuvre, perhaps the work of two years or more, into someone else's hands and watch it sink and vanish, as most do. I'd like them to deal with negative reviews and poor sales, when we only have that one book to earn our crust with that year. Don't get me wrong: I love what I do and I choose to do it, and the same can be said for almost all of us. I do NOT want you to get the violins out. Nevertheless, it's harder than most publishers think. It's more emotional, more raw, more distracting, more damn gutwrenching

And both writers and publishers should understand a little more of the challenges of the other.