The Pursuit of Excellence

There's a generally accepted theory that no-one can be good at everything - we all have our strengths and weaknesses. But this idea is problematic for children's fiction writers in today's competitive market, because we have to achieve excellence - or near excellence - in so many categories: voice, concept, plot, character, description, action, dialogue etc. It's no wonder that it takes so long to get published - I myself have been writing children's fiction for nearly ten years and I'm only now starting to hit the required standard in most of the categories. I took a certain relish in reporting my long apprenticeship to my Oxford crit group, but I have to admit that if anyone had told me it would take this long ten years ago, you'd be reading someone else's blog right now.

The drive for excellence is a great thing for the reader and we are constantly told that a "golden age of children's publishing is upon us." To a certain extent, this competition is good for the writer too, because there is no room to be lazy unless you have a strong brand or mega franchise to rely on. But it's a tough, tough world to break into and you not only need to be excellent at the categories I listed above, but also to have excellent drive and persistence. Forget trying to come straight out of education and have a career in fiction writing – to do this you need to be either unusually lucky or unusually talented. And most of us, sadly, are neither.

I'm sure we can all, right now, summon up the names of half a dozen books that are distinctly less than excellent. Mostly, they will be titles with big deals and marketing spend behind them. These are the books we like to talk woefully about on message boards:

"I couldn't even finish it – can you believe it's selling so well?"

"I should give up trying to write something good and just churn out one of these Twilight/Hunger Games/Harry Potter rip-offs."

Which is great in theory, but harder when thousands of other people are doing exactly that. The law of averages says that some of them will get past the gatekeepers. Again, I fear that the law of averages doesn't have a lot of room for little old me.

They say that all you need is one person to say "yes" to your book to get it published. This is a wonderful, empowering statement that is as fictional as your manuscript. True, you do need an editor to love your book, because they are the ones who will champion it around the organisation. But few editors have control of acquisitions, so you also need their boss to love it and the people from sales & marketing and the booksellers and everyone else who will be involved in the journey from screen to shelf (or screen to screen in the case of e-books). It's very hard to influence the acquisitions process once the manuscript leaves your hands (believe me, I've tried), so your best chance for success lies in the manuscript itself.

Thus, I give you my one-step guide to publishing success: write a book so excellent that no-one could possibly say no to it. And while you're at it, why not build a better mousetrap and be the first person on Mars? Half measures are for losers ;-)

Nick.

Rereadability

Over a year ago, I wrote a post called Unputdownability, which considered how to write a compulsively readable children’s novel. Lots of people seem to have got rather good at this in the meantime, and I often see comments on Amazon from young readers discussing how quickly they raced through a book. I remember leaving my own eleven-year-old daughter a copy of Skulduggery Pleasant at 8am on a school day and returning at 6pm to find that she’d read the whole thing!

But, as much as I want to write the unputdownable novel, I do feel a pang of sadness at the idea that my book might be tossed away so quickly. With children’s authors averaging one novel a year, that’s a long time to wait before my next one comes out. Will a young reader even remember my name once that new book makes it to the marketplace? It’s true that this problem becomes lessened as a writer’s career progresses – if I love the new Marcus Sedgwick novel, for instance, he has a ten-year back catalogue for me to peruse. But for a debut author, it’s tough to make a reputation that will stick.

Looking back over the comments on that earlier post, I saw one mentioning rereadability, which I thought was an excellent way to keep your work alive in the reader’s mind. Imagine if, in that year, a teenager reread your book four or five times? Then they would certainly remember you. But then I hit a deeper problem – what makes a book rereadable? Is it just the fact that it was readable in the first place? So I don’t claim to have any answers on this one – consider what follows as discussion points rather than hard-and-fast rules.

• Brevity - A short book is going to be quicker to read, and reread. Certainly, when I’m selecting a book or a film from my shelf, I’m always drawn to the shorter ones. But is that only a time-poor adult problem? My daughter has just reread Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix for the third time in six months!


• Being Either Really Memorable or Totally Forgettable - I’m certainly more likely to reread a book if I remember bits from it I really liked. Memorable characters, dialogue and scenes draw me in a second time. Paradoxically, though, I’m also likely to reread a book if I don’t remember anything about it – that’s like experiencing the whole thing anew. Sadly, in the latter case, I may get halfway through and remember why I put it down the first time.


• Clever Plot Construction - Much is made of films like The Sixth Sense and Inception, of which the posters will say: “You just have to see it a second time!” By having a massive twist or a mind-bendingly complex plot, such films ensure that patrons will buy another ticket so they can explore what they missed on the first viewing. Of course, you can do this with books too, but I think it’s a harder trick to pull off. Readers are very adept at flicking back and forth through a book, picking out those little clues that you thought were so carefully buried. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t books with an amazing twist at the end that makes you see the whole story in a different light. Please feel free to suggest some in the comments.


• The Feelgood Factor - Books that make you laugh or feel good are definitely going to promote rereadability. That’s not to say that there aren’t plenty of days when I feel like something weighty, but a comedy will always hit the spot, regardless of whether I’m feeling up or down. Again, this is maybe an adult thing – teenagers seem to have an endless appetite for darkness and death at the moment.


• A Terrific Ending - I can’t stress how important it is to end a book well, especially when you consider rereadability. No-one is going to wade through the whole thing again if the resolution isn’t rewarding. I wonder, for instance, how many people read The Knife of Never Letting Go when it first came out, and then didn’t look at it again until Patrick Ness had finished the trilogy?

Ok, there’s your starter for ten. Is there a formula for rereadability? Or is it simply a case of writing a completely brilliant book in the first place? Your comments, please.

Nick.

Confidence Trick

I have nothing at all to say this week.

Nick.


That's the blog I want to write every time I sit down at my laptop on a Friday morning. The one that lets me read Metro, or suck down a cappuccino or stare out the train window. The one that frees me from the tyranny of the blank page and sticks two fingers up at the reader. Look at me! It's Friday and I don't care!

Except somehow I'm writing a blog post about how I don't want to write a blog post. Because writing something, anything at all, is a victory over that tiny voice at the back of my head that tells me I'm worthless. The voice that was taunting me all yesterday, stopping me from writing the book that could one day be published. It's taunting me even now, reminding me of how no-one commented on my blog the other week – as if that really means anything.

Writing is the ultimate victory of confidence over reason. It isn't reasonable to spend your day living in imaginary worlds full of invented people. It isn't reasonable to think you'll get published when more talented people than you have failed. It isn't reasonable to think that you'll sell any books in a crowded marketplace or get nominated for awards or even win one. A lot of people drop out of the race when they realise how far the odds are stacked against them. But isn't it amazing how many people stay in the game?

I could spend a hundred blog posts speculating on why people choose to write. Some will claim they do it for love, or to satisfy a burning urge to share their stories with the world. Many, I suspect myself included, do it to gain approval (I blame the parents!). Whatever their reason, these writers manage - for hours at a time - to quiet those voices and push forwards. First drafts often seem to exist as a way of managing imperfection, a parole agreement that allows you to get away with all the bad writing and glaring inconsistencies with the promise that you'll fix it in the edit. In many ways, writing successfully is a trick, a way of telling your mind that what you're doing isn't important, but knowing somewhere deep down that it's utterly vital.

The game changes up when you win a competition, get an agent or find a publisher. Now you feel the weight of genuine expectation on you, whether real or imagined. Simply writing any old crap is not an option anymore – you really have to deliver. This achievement can be empowering, a confidence boost that helps to temper your more "artistic" impulses and guides your work closer to the market. But I've also seen the genuine anguish of writers who have been signed to an agent for a while, but not yet sold a book – the unspoken fear that they will get dumped and be further back than when they started.

So that's where I am right now. Maybe I need to stop writing this and get back to that tricky chapter full of exposition that I've been avoiding. Perhaps this wasn't the best blog post in the world ever, but I have – in just over an hour – made something out of nothing. And that bit of alchemy is a trick worth celebrating, I'd say. Now where's my cappuccino?

Nick.

Keeping Busy

I was chatting to another author at the SCBWI Buyers Party the other night and commiserating about their workload. In response, they expressed surprise that I managed to fit in everything I was doing. And after thinking about it, I was surprised too. Can I really have been out four nights this week? Do I really have two SCBWI crit group meetings in the same seven day period? How have I somehow managed to write 5,000 words, re-plot the third act of my book and go to work every day? Not to mention fitting in writing a blog post.

For me, like many others, writing is a part-time job. At least, it feels like a job, even if the work I'm doing is with the promise of payment rather than an actual wage. I have a demanding day job to supply that, as well as all the meetings I can eat. And then there's my SCBWI work and social events to fit in, plus a wife and children who demand my attendance on a regular basis. And not just my physical attendance, either, they need me to switch off all of the other stuff in my brain and actually, like, pay attention.

Keeping busy does have its benefits in that you can avoid what mindfulness experts call "the ruminating mind," the part of your brain that chews over what you've done and said and haven't done, making problems where there weren't any to start with. As long as you are in the moment, dealing with stuff, there's no room to worry - that's the theory, at least. And I am nothing if not a worrier!

But there's a hitch here - the ruminating mind is actually essential to being a writer. The same thought processes that lead you to worry about what will happen if you forget to lock the back door, also allow you to imagine a post-apocalyptic future colonised entirely by telepathic ducks. Therefore, it's not surprising that so many writers are neurotic, or that they fight that by overloading themselves like a Buckaroo mule.

Perhaps the more you do, the more you can do. Certainly, all the hours I've spent on trains this week have allowed me to write those 5,000 words. But I still feel bad about not doing more. Why didn't I finish the book last week? What happens if I don't finish it next week? My agent is accommodating my ever-changing deadline for this novel with good grace, but at some point I will have to deliver an actual first draft. Perhaps I'm just in the middle of some very elaborate avoidance behaviour...

I set high standards for my work, and I know I'm not the only one. But those standards often tip into the category of unreachable. And unachievable goals, as any motivational expert will tell you, are not a strategy for happiness. If only I had time in my schedule to think up some better ones ;-)

Nick.

Small is Beautiful

I'm excited to report that my first proper author interview is published today, in Wyvern Magazine. I've known the team behind Wyvern Publications for a while, and they asked me some great questions, to which I've tried to find great answers. In case you're not totally wild about me (is that possible?), there are several more interviews, articles and original fiction in the 50 page June edition, which costs a mere £2.

*Promotional section ends. Mostly.*

I say mostly, because I thought this was a perfect opportunity to talk about small presses like Wyvern and the great work they do in the fiction market. As you know, the publishing industry is becoming increasingly polarised, with big publishers looking for books that will have big sales and self-publishers flooding into the market via the e-book. The midlist - those books with a definite, but not mass appeal - is being squeezed out. Some of this midlist will move to the larger independent publishers, but these are also suffering from the increased costs and lower profit margins affecting the whole book trade. Independents can take more risks than the majors, but not that many.

So that brings us to the small press. Employing a tiny staff, often on a part-time basis, they aren't able to publish many books each year. In fact, many have grown out of self-publishing, in a desire to achieve more than the fleeting pleasure of seeing your name on the cover of a paperback. These companies aren't run for profit or fame, but mostly for love. More than that, a small press can develop a vision and identity, taking the founder's author brand and expanding it into an editorial strategy that attracts likeminded contributors. Just don't make the mistake of thinking that small presses put out substandard books that couldn't find a home elsewhere - with so few releases each year, their commitment to quality has to be just as high as other publishers.

Where small fiction presses like Wyvern and Bridge House excel, is in the promotion of forms long ignored in our novel-obsessed society: short stories, plays and poetry. They give a platform for developing writers and illustrators. They allow us to read delightful books that were too far off-trend for other publishers to consider. Sometimes they publish work that was actually too on-trend to get noticed in a crowded market (Wyvern have a vampire anthology called Fangtales that comes out later this year). Small presses, with their not-for-profit slant, are also a perfect place to publish charity books.

Some of you might be detecting a whiff of hypocrisy here. If I love small presses so much, why haven't I offered my work to be published by one? Well, my mealy-mouthed answer is to say that things are different for me - I have an agent and I'm also dealing in mass-market concepts that are aimed above the midlist. I happen to think that a traditional form of publishing will be the one that serves my work and intended audience best. And in case you don't believe me, I listened to Nicola Morgan saying a very similar thing in a talk at Foyles last night. But as to how my career progresses once I've built up a readership? I guess we'll talk again once that's happened.

To conclude, I think Wyvern Publications is a smart operation with real charm. You can read a lot more about where they came from and what kind of books they publish in Head Editor Holly Stacey's interview with Tall Tales and Short Stories.

Nick.

Your Cut-Out-and-Keep SCBWI Marketing Session

Rather than pontificating at random for a few hundred words (as per usual), I thought I'd do something a bit different with the blog this week. I'm running a discussion session this evening at the SCBWI retreat about marketing and I thought I'd lay out my agenda and thoughts here. That way anyone who isn't coming gets a chance to participate too! If you are attending the retreat, you might want to wait until after the session to read this, as I'll be covering some of this material as part of the discussion.

• What is marketing? What forms can it take?
  
  This is hard to answer definitively, because marketing constantly mutates, adapting to new forms of media. I work in the marketing department of a large UK brand, and our campaigns are often divided into Above the Line and Below the Line. Above the Line refers to mass campaigns which use traditional broadcast media like TV, newspapers and magazines. These campaigns have a wide reach, but are necessarily pretty generic. Below the Line is all about targeting individual customers and getting them to make a purchase, so it tends to be shorter term and you need to be very clear who your customer is.
  
  Publishers do very little Above the Line marketing, especially for children's books. Even the adverts in magazines or in public locations etc. are highly targeted – take a trip on the tube and see how many adverts there are for books that aren't crime, thriller or chick-lit (almost none).
  
  Any marketing budget that a publisher allocates to you is too precious to be spent Above the Line, it has to be used to reach consumers who have a strong chance of buying your book. This is the beauty of web advertising and social media - you can track a user from reading a tweet all the way to buying your book on Amazon. Below The Line marketing delivers measurable results.
  
  Of course, many of the newer forms of internet marketing blur "The Line." Is viral marketing targeted or does it just float around from person to person like a dandelion seed? And what about Twitter, which is fast becoming a massive broadcast outlet for assorted brands and public figures?



• How much marketing will a publisher do and how much is an author expected to do themselves?
  
  The general rule of thumb here is: the more money your publisher has spent to acquire your book, the more marketing budget they will allocate to it. You can see the blizzard of publicity that The Emerald Atlas is attracting at the moment. You may also note the crazy auction price it achieved at Bologna last year…
  
  It's every writer's dream to get a six-figure book deal, but be careful what you wish for. I'm working on a project right now with a multi-million pound marketing budget and the pressure to deliver is intense. If you have a big advance, failing to meet your publisher's sales projections might mean that you never get another chance.
  
  The short answer to the heading question is – expect to do a lot of the marketing yourself. But you might get a nice publicist like Nina Douglas to help.



• Your publisher's marketing budget – spending it wisely
  
  Assuming you do get a few quid from the petty cash tin, what should you do with it? You may be better concentrating on small-ticket promotional items like bookmarks, postcards and the like to stretch the budget as far as it will go. Should you ask your publisher to pay for your website or will you get something better for half the cost if you find someone yourself? Publisher-built websites can sometimes be quite impersonal and may struggle to include content that will bring the reader back for another visit. What about book trailers? They sound daunting, but you probably know someone with the video production skills to make a good job of it.



• The book trailer – do you need one? Who will see it?
  
  Books are quite difficult to market over the internet – the cover photo is usually small and the format of a webpage makes it hard to concentrate on even a chapter presented online. Plus, words are designed to come alive in your head, not via Flash Media. What the book trailer does is to sneak your novel into one of the key places that teenagers hang out online – YouTube. By dramatising elements of your story, you can sell the theme and even the tone of your novel in a very short amount of time. And it needs to be short, because a) everybody's attention span is shot to hell b) you've probably had to make the trailer yourself on the cheap and every second is costing you money.



• School visits
  
  I've never made a school visit, so my experience here is limited. I do know that they are a superb way to market a book to your actual target audience. Some authors are so popular that, if they had time, they could schedule a visit every school day of the year. And these are not the megastar authors either, in fact when your sales go into the millions you will tend to do less public appearances, not more. In some ways, visiting loads of schools can be like an apprenticeship for authors early in their career - writers like Jacqueline Wilson and Caroline Lawrence have built huge followings by really working the school circuit.
  
  By and large, children love school visits, but opinion amongst parents can be mixed. I know my wife objects to having to buy a book by an author she's never heard of, and there can be a lot of peer-pressure amongst the children to make a purchase. But this is also why school visits are such an effective way to reach readers, and authors do get paid for their time as well.



• Getting spotted as an unpublished author – how to stand out from the crowd and sell yourself effectively to agents and editors
  
  
  • Step 1 – Don't be crazy, obsessive or impossibly needy.
  
  
  • Step 2 – If you are crazy, obsessive or impossibly needy, don't let anybody know.
  
  The internet is a wonderful device for preserving your anonymity. Unfortunately, some writers don't seem to realise that and spend a lot of time telling everyone their problems and seeking sympathy. It's one thing if their problems are personal ones, and let's face it we all go through some pretty grotty periods in our lives. But once writers start bitching about the issues they face getting into print, then they can become publishing poison.
  
  Google yourself right now. What do you find? Do you have a blog, an open Facebook page or a Twitter account? What have you written about yourself on the Ning? All of these resources are a keystroke away for any agent or editor. If you set the wrong tone, or don't look sufficiently professional, that glimmer of interest from an agent will become a form rejection. And you'll never know about it.
  
  Believe me, I've said one or two things online I've regretted in the past. But this is what making mistakes is all about...



• Social media – getting the best out of Facebook and Twitter.
  
  Where to start? One thing that the internet is not short of is advice on marketing using social media. You can even pay companies to attract Twitter/Facebook followers for you – I can't imagine anyone but the most desperate taking up that option.
  
  Social media is ultra-low-cost and very effective if used the right way. It is also enormously time consuming, so it favours the time-rich and cash-poor. Students of the power of social media marketing might like to study the case of Talli Roland who framed the publication of her debut e-book as a David and Goliath struggle against Amazon, and managed to get it into the top 25 Kindle chart.



• To blog or not to blog?
  
  The question of whether to blog might seem a bit redundant, considering what you're reading right now. But it is very pertinent. There was a time (about a year ago) when every writer felt they needed a blog, and I watched the blog roll on the SCBWI Ning expanding on a weekly basis. But recently, there's been a definite retreat from this position. Fatigue can set in quite quickly when you have a blog that no-one seems to read week-in, week-out. More than that, there are so many writers' blogs that having a good blog is no longer a guarantee of getting noticed. But there are alternatives to a personal blog, which brings me onto my next point...



• The benefits and drawbacks of group blogging
  
  More and more authors, especially published ones, are scaling down their personal blogging and joining group blogs. By pooling resources, likeminded writers can provide daily content to readers but themselves only have to post on a fortnightly or even monthly basis. Being a group blogger is like getting to join a gang, and you know that the other members will rally round and comment on your posts – which looks great to any new visitor to the site.
  
  The drawback of group blogging is the diffusion of personal voice, because it's much harder for someone to follow your individual posts in the way they could with a personal blog. But the flipside is discovering other writers whose work is equally fascinating.
  
  I could say more on group blogs, but check out Candy Gourlay's great post on the subject from last week.



• What is a platform, and how vital is it for a children's author?
  
  According to this blog post by the estimable Nathan Bransford:
  

  Platform is the number of eyeballs you can summon as you promote your book.

  
  Platforms are good because they allow you to build an audience before you even publish a word. You are part of my platform, along with everyone else reading this blog. I know that if I brought out a book tomorrow (ok, it won't be quite that soon), I could rely on quite a few people to buy it, even if it was dreadful (but I'm sincerely hoping it won't be). Talli Roland built a huge platform on Twitter to prepare for her book launch and priced her product low to entice them to buy.
  
  I remain a little unconvinced about platforms for children's authors, simply because it's so hard to get actual children involved. Maybe new initiatives like Girls Heart Books will change that.

Right, that's more than enough words from me! What's your take on all this?

Nick.

Taking Responsibility

I don't read a lot of interviews with rappers, but one caught my eye the other week. The journalist was talking to Tyler The Creator of internet buzz band Odd Future (who not-at-all-coincidentally had just released his official debut album). To give them their full name, Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All aspire to be the Sex Pistols of their day, and Tyler has amassed quite a reputation for the extreme self-loathing, homophobia and violent misogyny that pepper his lyrics.

What interested me wasn't so much that he was doing this (antipathy and violence towards women/gay men has pretty much been a staple of hip hop ever since it was invented) but his rejection of any responsibility towards his audience. When asked if he ever considers the effect his music might have:

"I never think of that. I just make sh*t I want to listen to. Not everyone's got to like it.

Now, Tyler is only twenty and he recorded his first album when he was sixteen. So in a very real way he is in exactly the same place as his audience. What makes him different is his undeniable musical talent and a direct line to millions of his peers. Should he censor himself? Would I even know his name if he had?

To bring things back to writing, this argument - between self-expression and self-control - is one that often troubles me as a children's author. I spoke of responsibility in an earlier post and got a range of responses. Some people applauded me, some were apprehensive at the idea of having to be more mature than their audience. I can understand this latter viewpoint - one of the things that makes a successful children's author is the ability to think (and, more importantly, feel) as your reader does.

I'm not just talking about avoiding inappropriate content in our books, because we have a raft of gatekeepers to grouse about that and make up somewhat arbitrary rules about which words are acceptable and which aren't. How about our political views? How far should we go to push our own agenda within our fiction, bearing in mind how malleable our readership might be? I've realised that my work-in-progress is quite political compared to what I've written in the past - I'm trying to temper my approach to be more sociological than socialist.

But responsibility isn't about sanitising everything contentious from what we do. After all, a writer with nothing to say is a waste of space. We can't expect to be able to hold back our views, fears and aspirations, because they bleed into every word we write. Tyler The Creator's fury towards his absent father and rejection of the female role models who tried to mould him is palpable. If not always laudable.

Creative people are often very troubled, which doesn't always make them the most appropriate people to be talking to our children. But on the other hand, who better to engage, challenge and inspire them? Life is not a bed of sweet-smelling flowers and shouldn't children be aware of the complexities and agonies of our world?

However, that gritty reality needs to be filtered through our own consciences and informed by the knowledge of how children learn and develop. In terms of taking responsibility, what we leave out of our books is as important as what we put in.

Nick.