Stroppy Author's guide to publishing

How was it for you?

2012-01-19T09:09:00.003Z

Still with PLR, but from a different angle today. The question this time is - can you maximise your PLR payments? I don't mean by visiting the sample libraries and borrowing your books, or even mobilising friends and family to do that. Borrowing books to raise PLR is a sad and desperate (and doomed) tactic that will cost more than it raises. No. I mean - to borrow a phrase from the Crabbit Old Bag of Help! I Need a Publisher - writing the right book at the right time in the right way to get as much PLR money as possible.

Some books are borrowed more than others. You're more likely to earn lots of PLR from a racy romance than a handbook on cello maintenance, for instance. People borrow books for different reasons. They borrow books that they don't want to buy - either because they don't want to keep them after reading them, or because they can't afford them in the first place.

Picture books get a lot of loans because many people can't afford to buy lots of books for their children. Many who could afford them think (wrongly) that the book will take 20 minutes to read and so it's poor value for £8.99 - forgetting they will read the book again and again. Genre fiction earns a lot because readers consider it disposable. They read a romance/western/sci-fi book and will never look at it again. They might get through several a week. That's an expensive habit if you pay for each book, so libraries are attractive suppliers. (Loans of genre fiction might soon be hit by Kindle use - we'll see.) Non-fiction loans seem to be down, probably because people are finding information online that they would previously have looked for in a book.

My PLR goes up, year on year, because I write a lot of books. But libraries are buying fewer books. That means that having a backlist already in the libraries is important, too. But old books fall apart and are thrown away, not to be replaced, so very old titles don't earn PLR.

So - what's borrowed? No detailed breakdown for this year is available yet (though the annual report from PLR is), so I took a look at my own titles to see what's earning most.

Of 150 registered titles, half the PLR comes from the top four titles - they are all children's fiction. Of the top 10 titles, 9 are fiction. More of my titles are non-fiction than fiction, so that's a very significant result. The non-fiction title in the top ten is a glossy, very visual book on volcanoes published by Dorling Kindersley. Of the 9 fiction, all except one are published by a very large publisher, and all published since 2007. The books with titles most likely to appeal to children (in my view) did not score higher than those with less intriguing titles. (The official info that has been released so far shows loans of children's fiction up slightly, loans of adult books slightly down.)

My top-earning title clocked up two and a half times as many loans in the UK as sales worldwide. It's called Too Dirty and is published by Hachette. All the top-selling fiction titles were for children aged 5-6. Even though the PLR is split 50:50 with the illustrator on these titles, the books generate a third of their advance each year in PLR.

The lesson from all this is that over its lifetime a book may earn more in PLR and ALCS payments than in fee/advance/royalties so we should be thinking about library-appeal as well as bookshop-appeal. Of course, the publisher is less interested in library-appeal so this has to be a covert agenda!

Which are your most-borrowed titles? Can we crowd-source enough info to put together a profile of the perfect book to write to get loads of PLR? Or at least, you might be able to maximise PLR-potential on your next book...

[PS - No, this is not an entirely serious proposal]

PLR =/= income tax (a curmudgeonly rant)

2012-01-18T08:54:00.001Z

Yesterday was PLR day - the day all writers in the UK can find out how much they've earned in Public Lending Rights. There's lots of comparing - did you get more or less than last year? Which was your top earning title? Can we spot any trends? There's grumbling and celebrating, misinformation, conclusions that reveal scant understanding of either maths or the PLR scheme and - most chilling of all - a rush of people who declare it's very nice but a shame they have to spend it all on their tax bill.

Perhaps they are not telling the truth - tax has to be paid by 31st Jan, but the PLR payment doesn't come through until February. But let's assume they are, since we should take people at their word unless we have good reason not to. (Probably all the disasters in my life stem from that naive principle - no matter.)

[Note for non-UK readers: In the UK, income tax on self-employed earnings is paid in January. You have to work out what you owe on the previous year's earnings, and pay half in advance for the coming year, on the assumption that you will earn the same. You can adjust this guess if you think your earnings will be different. You pay the second half of the estimate in July. The following January, what you've already paid is deducted from what you owe. If you earn the same every year, you effectively pay half in January and half in July. If your income increases, you pay extra in January as there's a catch-up payment.]

What's so wrong with using PLR to pay your tax? Two things - firstly, it's unpredictable. You never know how much your will get. It's worked out by tracking loans at a sample of libraries and extrapolating. Much more importantly, though, you shouldn't have to! Why ON EARTH are these writers not setting aside the tax on their earnings as they get paid? It is the ONLY sensible way to be a self-employed person. You put the tax in a deposit account and you don't touch it, NO MATTER WHAT.

Some authors have other jobs, and their personal allowance (the amount you can earn without paying tax) is used up on their employed earnings. So they need to set aside 22% (or 40%, depending on their income level) of their income from writing. That's really easy - no hard sums at all. Those of us who earn only from writing have a rather more complex calculation to do, but you can create a spreadsheet to work it out for you, and as a guideline if you set aside 25% of everything (so ignore the personal allowance) you will have about enough. If you expect to be paying higher rate tax, set aside 30-33% of everything, depending on how far over the 40% threshold you expect to go.

Yes, you have expenses to deduct - don't worry about it. You also have NI to pay. You might get some money left over in your tax account at the end - and the first time you can use that to make the advance payment. After a few years, you can afford to take out some of the excess and spend it. But not immediately.

And finally - the figures don't work. The amount of PLR you can earn is capped at £6,600, and this year (2010-11), 263 authors earned the maximum. Now, if you're earning £6,600 in PLR you are earning a lot from your books - your tax bill is going to be a LOT more than £6,600. Actually, it would be interesting to compare tax bills and PLR income: ignoring payments on account, my PLR this year is around an eighth of my tax liability - so it wouldn't be a lot of help. Most PLR payments (nearly 15,000 out of a total of 23,000) are for under £50, so that's not going to go far in anyone's tax bill. I assume, though, that these trifling payments aren't going to professional authors but to people who've written the odd one or two books, probably some time ago, and maybe on obscure topics.

Authors manage to look unprofessional enough - let's not look extra-unprofessional by screwing up our tax accounts, or even pretending to. It's not cool to adopt an 'I can't deal with accounts' pose, it just makes you look incompetent. If I were a publisher, I'd be wary of commissioning someone who doesn't have the sense to set their tax aside - they probably won't take deadlines seriously either. After all, tax doesn't come as a surprise! It's not as though you just landed on Go to Jail - you always knew it was coming. And while flights of fancy and working outside the rules may be essential to your creative work, there's a lot of uncreative work involved in being a professional writer, and you need your feet on the ground for that part.

OK, rant over. You can all rant back at me now :-)
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Devils and details

2012-01-02T09:01:00.005Z

That post about research doesn't apply only to non-fiction. Even when you're making things up, you need to get the lies right. I've been doing the final reality-check on one of the vampire stories and noticed just how many things need to be checked. Just these from a chapter in the middle:

"Two hours later, the train slid into Gare du Nord."

Check on Eurostar timetable that it takes just over two hours from St Pancras. It does.

"... Juliette at the front of the boat, standing like a figurehead against the setting sun"

Simple enough - but check a map of Paris to make sure the setting sun would be behind someone on a bateau mouche going past Notre Dame.

Same evening, after a lot has happened:

"See you in the hotel bar at 7.” An hour.

So what time was sunset in Paris in early November? Was there enough time for all that to happen? No. Sunset was 5:30. Not time to nearly drown, be rescued, go home, get changed, have a shower and arrange a meeting for 7 while 7 is still an hour in the future. Change to meeting in the bar at 9.

"The executioner's black hood..."

Look at engravings of numerous executions by guillotine: the executioner is never hooded. Change that.

Oh, and a much bigger issue I noticed - a key character is in Paris in one book and in Russia in another book. At the same time. Not even vampires can do that. Calendar change....

It's easy to think you know what's happening, but important to make sure it actually could happen like that. So this is just a reminder not to be complacent about the lies you tell.

Happy New Year!

Hearing voices

2011-12-18T10:13:00.002Z

This is a little post that is a really musing and half a question. Though it's skirting around some deep issues I don't have time to think about today. So you can think for me.

I've noticed, as I come to know more and more writers personally, and as other writers make more public appearances, that I now often hear the author's 'real' voice in my head as I read. I first noticed it reading The Woman Who Thought Too Much, a brilliant memoir by my friend the poet Joanne Limburg, perhaps because it was such a personal book. I read slowly, hearing every word as spoken by her. I was reading Margaret Atwood's Negotiating with the Dead the other day, and that was in her voice, too. It happens less with fiction, probably because most good fiction has its own voice, but it's still there to a degree.

Years ago, I did a PhD on literature that was mostly anonymous. I knew nothing at all about the authors I was spending my life with. Of course they had voices in my head, and I felt close to those (dead) people I spent years with. But I knew I invented their voices. It's different when the voice is a real one - one I might have heard earlier in the day in Waterstone's coffee shop or on the phone (or on radio 4).

All writers adopt a voice - a public voice, a literary voice, a this-is-all-I-will reveal voice, a this-is-how-I-want-you-to-see-me voice. It's our prerogative - even our necessity. It makes the book an artefact, a creation, rather than an extension of ourselves. If I hear Joanne speaking the words into my head, the artefactness of the book is lost. It's easy to be deceived into thinking it's pure Joanne (whatever that is).

It feels like it's one step away from being one of those nutters who sends Christmas cards to characters in The Archers. (That's a radio programme about farming, for you non-UK people. It's useful if you need hints and tips on preventing your beetroot getting root-and-mouth or whatever they're onto these days. It was invented by the BBC in their paternalistic role of educating the lowly farming masses by sneaking info in under the guise of entertainment.) Actually, I've just written a Christmas card to Joanne. I hope that doesn't make me a nutter. No, she was in my house on Saturday. I'm sure she's real. Perhaps I will re-address it to 'the real Joanne Limburg', just in case.

Of course, with a memoir, the artefactness is often trying to hide itself anyway - or maybe even trying not to be there. But the awareness that voice is not equal to writer, or narrator is not equal to writer, is one of the defining marks of an intelligent, sophisticated reader. Writers choose how to deal with that shadowy presence that stands between them and the words on the page. The narrator/voice might be a robust, chortling, self-aware character in his or her own right, standing to one side and saying 'look at this story, look what happened next'. Or s/he might be as thin and sticky as clingfilm so that you're barely aware of their presence and they're hard to see and peel away from the shape of the narrative. Or they might be the shadow-on-the-wall of the real writer. Oh, I am rambling on about narrators. And Plato's got in again. Time to stop.

I think there is some very deep issue with being a writer under all this. To do with how much you want to be in other people's heads and how much you don't. If you didn't want to at all, you wouldn't write (or you wouldn't publish). But - I don't know those readers! They can have my carefully constructed narratorial/discursive voice in their heads - that's what it's for - but I don't want them to think it's me. Perhaps that's why I don't like to be heard in real life - no readings, no school visits, no radio, not even any phone...

The question is - do you hear the writer's voice (if you know/have heard the writer) when you read their books? Does it bother you? Does it make reading different? Better? Worse?

Do your research

2011-12-07T13:06:00.005Z

I'm writing about sea cucumbers. They look like a sort of tube, or a dog turd, or a fat caterpillar. They live in the sea and are an animal, despite the name. In particular, I'm writing about the way a sea cucumber can turn itself almost liquid, ooze through a crack, then solidify the other side so that it can't be prised out. Cool, eh?

I found out about the sea cucumber trick on WebEcoist, which is not a specialist zoology site. It says this about the SC trick:

The sea cucumber can literally take on different body states – from hard to liquid – in order to defend itself. From wikipedia: “Like other echinoderms the cuke has a type of collagen in its skin capable of excreting or absorbing more water effectively changing from a ‘liquid’ to a ‘solid.’ They can turn their bodies into mush, climb through small cracks and then solidify into small lumps so that they cannot be extracted.”

It cites Wikipedia as its source, so off to Wikipedia.... but unfortunately this links to the page on antipredator adaptation which doesn't talk about the liquifying of sea cucumbers. The page on sea cucumbers, however, does:

A remarkable feature of these animals is the catch collagen that forms their body wall. This can be loosened and tightened at will, and if the animal wants to squeeze through a small gap, it can essentially liquefy its body and pour into the space. To keep itself safe in these crevices and cracks, the sea cucumber will hook up all its collagen fibres to make its body firm again.

Now that's not quite the same thing, is it? Hooking of collagen fibres is not the same thing as absorbing or losing water. So off to the first source Wikipedia cites for this info - it's an article in English, apparently in a French journal, but its website is in German. And it's moved. So... follow the link to another German website, which is not looking promising as this the University of Gottingen and the journal was supposed to be from the Université de Bourgogne. Searching finds nothing related. Googling the article title gives the same broken link. Move on...

Second source cited by Wikipedia is a book. But a book that is not in Cambridge University Library.

Back to Google, with sea cucumber and catch collagen, and thence to an advanced aquarists' site which says:

they have a compound in their skin called catch collagen - this tissue is under neurological control and is capable of changing from a 'liquid' to a 'solid' form very quickly (Brusca and Brusca 1990; Motokawa 1984a; Motokawa 1984b; Ruppert and Barnes 1994). This is one of the coolest things about echinoderms in general, and is one of the reasons that this group has been so successful. The ability of the catch collagen to change from liquid to solid form at will is how sea cucumbers manage to get themselves into such tiny holes in the live rock structure - they are able to ‘goopify’ their bodies (for lack of a better description), literally pour themselves into the hole they have chosen, and then solidify their skin to prevent anything from being able to remove them (Motokawa 1984a; Motokawa 1984b).

Real references - good:

Motokawa, T. 1984a. Catch connective tissue: the connective tissue with adjustable mechanical properties. Pp. 69-73 in B. F. Keegan and B. D. S. O'Connor, eds. Proceedings of the Fifth International Echinoderm Conference. Balkema, Rotterdam, NL.
Motokawa, T. 1984b. The viscosity change of the body-wall dermis of the sea cucumber Stichopus japonicus caused by mechanical and chemical stimulation. Comp. Biochem. Physiol. A, 77A:419-423.

But they're not in CUL either. Back to Google:

The compound is made of a material called 'catch collagen' which can change from liquid to solid when neurologically triggered. It does this so can squeeze into small spaces and then harden again. Another defense is they "pee" out all the water in their system and shrink into a small, hard rock.

So what is actually going on in this animal? By happy good fortune, I have a bint doing zoology at Oxford, with a tutor who is a world expert on marine thingies like these. Last port of call - Facebook.

But it wasn't last, because people are not always on Facebook when you need them to be. More fiddling around on Google reveals that 'catch collagen' is more properly called 'mutable collagenous tissue' or MCT. And now we get somewhere: there is an article in The Journal of Experimental Biology, 2002, that describes research into MCT in echinoderms. Current thinking, it appears, is that the sea cucumber controls the connections between fibrils of collagen by releasing chemicals into its tissues:

mutable collagenous structures consist of discontinuous collagen ﬁbrils organised into bundles (ﬁbres) by an elastomeric network of ﬁbrillin microﬁbrils and interconnected by a stress-transfer matrix consisting partly of stiparin, a glycoprotein that binds to and aggregates the ﬁbril…[etc]

There are chemicals that can prevent bridges forming between fibrils, so the creature loses its structure entirely, becoming flobbly. The chemical release is under neurological control. Hurray! Got there! (And Wikipedia was right this time, saying it 'hook[s] up its collagen fibres'.)

What will all this amount to? About 30 words in a book for reluctant readers on animals that do amazing things. But - and here's the real point - it is AT LEAST as important to do the research properly for a children's book as for an adult book. And although the book won't mention collagen or fibrils or MCT or any of that, at least it will NOT now say that the sea cucumber sucks water into its cells to make itself more liquid.

And, to the next person who asks, that is why I am paid £2 a word for a book like this. It took an hour's research to prevent me writing 'sea cucumbers absorb water to make their bodies gloopy' and write 'sea cucumbers use chemicals to change their bodies to gloop.' An hour well spent.

Disclaimer: This doesn't mean there are no errors in my books. But I do work hard to avoid them!
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How hard do you push?

2011-12-05T17:26:00.000Z

I've seen a few writer friends on Facebook recently promoting their own books as potential Christmas presents. This makes me feel uneasy, though I'm not really sure why. It's quite likely that some of these books would indeed make very good Christmas presents, and are probably very good books, and I wouldn't have thought of buying them otherwise. So why not? But I won't be buying any of them, nor will I be plugging my own books at Christmas.

People use Facebook in different ways, of course. And I don't mean people plugging their books on their professional Facebook pages - that's what those pages are for - but on their personal profiles, the pages for their friends and family. I have unfriended people in the past for using our 'friendship' as a means to try to sell me things (not books). It's not the occasional 'I have a new book out' - that's fine, it's news, it's an event to share with friends. It's the hardsell or the advertising with no news hook I don't like.

I have lots and lots of friends who are writers. I can't possibly read all their books and I certainly can't buy all their books. Perhaps that's the problem. If I didn't know lots of writers and weren't a writer myself, I might think 'Oh yes, I can buy X's book for Y for Christmas!' and get a buzz out of knowing the author. So maybe I'm just not approaching it in the right way.

Do you - or would you - use your personal Facebook profile to try to sell your books to your friends in a bit of blatant, shameless advertising? If so, please tell me off. But while doing so, please tell me how it's different from a friend who is - say - a plumber advertising his plumbing skills to me, or a friend who is a lawyer trying to get me to use his legal services on the back of our online/real friendship. Or perhaps it isn't different and you think it's OK. Isn't flagrant commercialism what LinkedIn is for, not Facebook? If I met a friend in the street and (s)he said 'why don't you buy my book? it makes a great Christmas present,' would that be OK? I don't think it would. Or am I just being an old fogey?

Why you still need to be able to speak publisher

2011-12-02T07:52:00.005Z

Things are a bit tricky here, so today I'm skiving my responsibilities and pointing you towards a post that helps you understand why you still need to be able to speak publisher. Read Reasons Not to Self-Publish in 2011-2012: A List by Edan Lepucki (and come back and tell me what you think, if you have the time). I don't agree with all of it, but there are some very important thoughts here. I particularly like that it draws on plenty of other intelligent blog posts to bring together its reasoning.

These are the bits I thought particularly pertinent:

You never hear readers grumble that traditional book publishing is too narrow and lacking in creativity. You only hear that from people who feel that their own book is being rejected because publishers are too cowardly and narrow-minded to see its true value.
Is it really possible for a self-published book to be rigorously edited? After all, the editor is in the pay of the author (which is a bit like putting the lion in charge of the lion tamer). If the editor thinks the book is too bad to publish, will they say so? Will the author listen? Or will the author just find a tamer editor if the first refuses the work? (And in a time of economic stress, the editor might not feel they can afford to turn down the work. Sooner or later, the author will come across an editor in possession of more desperation than integrity.)
What will happen when *all* the shit hits the fans? Publishers protect the public from the slush pile. The vast majority of rejected books are rejected for a good reason - they are rubbish. If all these books that are rubbish are unleashed on the poor, unsuspecting public, how will readers pick their way through the online slush pile?

This last point is one I've gone on about for a while. Publishers have a very valuable role in protecting readers from having to look for needles in haystacks. How will readers find the books that are well written, well structured, use punctuation properly and are not full of spelling errors if they have to wade through all the unedited, unmonitored, unselected cheap e-books online? I don't just mean now - but when every wannabe writer has published their first draft in the belief that it's good as it is?

At the moment, at least in the UK, many of the people who are self-publishing are often at least on the fringes of the publishing industry. They have been writing for years, going to classes or writing groups, submitting books that are repeatedly refused, perhaps - but they didn't just start writing yesterday. They are not all putting up total dross - there is some good stuff there, too. But it won't be long before every (wo)man and her/his dog is putting up their first unedited ramblings. It's easier to self-publish on Kindle than it is to write a pitch to an agent or publisher. So why bother? Pity the readers then, when the ratio of rubbish:readable veers further to the rubbish side. Will the reading public just give up? Will they just go off reading altogether? Or will they - irony - flock back to printed books once they have spent 100 times 99 cents on crap?

It's often said that the good writing rises to the top, but that's not true - look at some of the bestselling titles so far! And I don't mean that the type of genre fiction that does well is crap per se, but that a lot of the successful books are badly written and full of fundamental errors (poor spelling and grammar, for instance). Readers may fall for this for a while, when their Kindle is a new toy and they're keen to give cheap reads a go. But for how long? We will see. Eventually.
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Self-appraisal: what you have achieved this year?

2011-11-20T09:10:00.000Z


One thing I have not done - tidy my office

One of the things about being self-employed is that you don't get that annual appraisal thing that employed people get. Nor do you get the work Christmas lunch. *Note to self - line up some Cambridge writers for a work Christmas lunch.* It's worth doing your own annual appraisal, especially if you don't think you're getting anywhere. It might reassure you - or it might give you the kick you need to realise you really aren't getting anywhere and need to make some changes. (Hey, it's not my job to pull punches.)

You can set your own rules and your own standards. I live on my writing income, so if I'd written three wonderful novels and not yet sold them, that would be a failure. If you're a full-time pilot with five children and no partner, writing two pages might be a massive success. Be realistic.

I used to do an appraisal/audit at the end of every year - review what I'd done and set targets for the next year. It sounds very artificial, and it was done in a very lighthearted way, but I think it was valuable. I haven't done it for a while. It's two years since my life fell apart big-time and I feel I've done nothing since then. So time for a return to the end-of-year audit (end of two years, this time). Since Nov 2009 I have:

written 25 books (one was rejected at acquisitions, but I count the writing anyway - I'm not counting those I didn't send out)
been an RLF fellow one day a week for a year (harder than it sounds, as there was 5 hours travel each day as well as seeing the students)
been an RLF lector for a year and a bit (ongoing)
revised a set of seven revision guides that I wrote ages ago for a new edition (heavy rewrite)
taught two summer schools at Downing College, Cambridge
started working with three new publishers - *hello, publishers*
written a few articles
mentored a couple of people
given (very few) talks
got AS level Italian
continued this blog, if that counts. Intermittently, I admit.

What are the failures? Well, I've done very few book reviews; I've abandoned a couple of ambitious projects - or at least put them on hold; decided A2 Italian couldn't be worked around bint's GCSEs; NOT started my publishing company; not put any effort into selling new book ideas; not been to the Bologna book fair either year; not looked for a new agent after parting company with the old agent.

On balance, enough done. I think. Or maybe not. Time will tell. See if I'm still here next year....

Then you have to set your goals for next year. You choose the balance of realism and optimism, but remember that you're going to look back on it next year and assess how well you did. I'm not putting my goals here - it's not just that I can do without the public humiliation, but professionally it's not a good idea. But I'll let you know next year if I did them.

So - do your own professional writing audit. Or illustrating audit, if that's what you do. What have you tried? What have you achieved? What have you failed at? What will you do next year? Which skills do you want to develop? How? Treat your writing like a real job - if you don't, no one else will.

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How to speak publisher - D is for Delivery

2011-11-17T13:03:00.000Z

Delivery of a book, like that of a baby, may involve a lot of people in the run-up to the event but really only the mother/author can do the last, crucial bit. There are a few simple things to remember:

deliver your book on or before the agreed date
deliver the book that was commissioned and make sure it's finished (ie as good as it can be).

If you can't do both of these, ask your editor in advance which is most important to them. Should you send a less-than-perfect draft on time, or can they give you a bit more time to perfect it? If they can, you must perfect it by the next agreed date.

Whatever other compromises there are, you must deliver your book in a format the editor is happy with. This is likely to be a Word file, sent by email, though I have worked with a couple of publishers since 2000 who still wanted a printed copy (as well). Within the Word file, they might want something very specific - eg Times 12 point double-spacing with two-inch margins, or whatever. There is a reason for this, so if they specify it you must do it. The reason is not that they are boring old farts with no appreciation of your artistic formatting skills. It's that they know how to judge the length of a manuscript in their specified format. (This is less important when they can just look at the word-count in Word, but old habits die hard.) If you're working with a freelance editor or a small publishing company, it's often best to save your file in .doc format rather than the newer .docx format. It wastes time if the editor has to come back to you because she can't open the file on her antiquated computer system.

Deliver your book with a brief, polite email. Don't apologise for anything in your book. If they are going to find faults, they will find them without you pointing them out. And certainly don't say 'I'm sorry chapter six is a bit thin - my son was sick, and...'

If you know the editor well, you can be a bit chatty - ask after their children/holiday/health. Don't give a run-down of all the problems in your life even if you do know the editor well. It's not professional. What you should do, though, is alert the editor to any forthcoming events that will mean you're out of contact if they have any problems with the file or the book. So 'please check that you can open the file, as I won't be around for the next couple of days to resend it' is fine. Or 'I'm going to Borneo for three weeks next Wednesday so I'll be out of contact...' This is helpful information - if you don't tell them, you might hold up production of your book by several weeks and that won't be popular.

But really there is only one thing to say about delivery of your book: deliver your book, as agreed. No excuses, no crap, no delays, no 'corrupt files', no decorative effects, no pages stuffed in jiffy bags (unless specifically requested). Simple.

A note on PLR

2011-11-14T15:34:00.003Z

Today I got my notification of Irish PLR. Many writers I know have been saying their PLR payments have been dropping, year on year. (PLR is money from public lending rights, paid on books borrowed from libraries.) Generally, my UK PLR rises, perhaps because I keep writing books at a healthy rate. I'm not sure whether the Irish is up or down, but I thought I'd do a little statistical analysis to see which books earn the most.

I write children's non-fiction (trade and schools and libraries), children's fiction, and adult non-fiction (trade and academic). Here's the breakdown:

Type of book                     % of my registered titles            % of Irish PLR earnings

Adult non-fiction, trade             11                                              3
Adult non-fiction, academic        6                                             0
Children's non-fiction, S&L     58                                             19
Children's non-fiction, trade       11                                           23
Children's fiction                         13                                             56

Conclusions? If you want to maximise your PLR, write children's fiction - more than half the PLR income came from around a ninth of my books. Children's trade non-fiction is much more profitable than schools and libraries titles, showing that children are more interested in reading for fun than doing their homework. Who's surprised? Not me.

(And another conclusion? I haven't registered all my books.... though I did exclude some that are so old I don't really count them. Still, the total is seriously lower than the number of books I've actually published, so something has gone wrong somewhere.)

How to speak publisher - D is for Design

2011-11-10T09:00:00.001Z

There is a clause in every book contract that says the design (and some other things) is the sole preserve of the publisher. You should breathe a sigh of relief, as book design is a tricky thing.

Design is most obviously complicated in the case of an illustrated book. It's not just a case of picking the right illustrator or choosing the right photos. Pick up an illustrated book. Ignore the content of the pictures. What has the designer done? You need to look at where the pictures are on the pages, what size they are, how they relate to the text. Do they bleed off the edge of the page or are they surrounded by white space? Is text integrated into the pictures? Does it flow around them with a curved or jagged line, or is everything in rectangular blocks? How is white space used in and around the pictures?

Now look at the pictures themselves. How does the palette of colours used in the pictures work with the colour of the paper and any colour in the text? What does the style of the pictures tell you about the book? Are they whimsical, flippant, strong, aggressive, traditional, avant garde?

But design is important in even an unillustrated book. The design tells you a lot about the type of book you are reading. If the type is small and cramped and the margins are small the book is probably printed on thin, off-white paper and is most likely a cheap novel. It might be a mass market paperback bodice-ripper or a cheap edition of a classic. If there are large margins, lots of space between the lines (extravagant leading) and a font that is airy and leaves lots of space (long ascenders and descenders) you are reading either a book for reluctant readers or an expensive poetry book, or possibly a hardback novel which is shorter than you feel it should be for the money you spent. There are plenty of other elements of design: the running headers and footers; whether chapters start on a left- or right-hand page; how much space there is above a heading or chapter head; the font(s); the leading, the kerning of the title and headings; how many pages the book runs to ...

And I'm not even going to talk about the cover.

Book design is a specialist art. Good book designers make a book a thing of beauty. And book design is one of the reasons that e-books are currently inferior to real books. The look of the text is ugly, and that's a shame.

The designer rarely gets a credit on the acknowledgements page of the book, but they should. Their work is more visible to the reader than that of the editor or the proofreader. A useful trick for writers struggling with a book they can't evaluate is to print it out in a different font. Text looks different in a different font. The book you wrote in Arial (yuk) or Times New Roman (yuk) will look quite different if you print it in Goudy Old Style or Palatino. Suddenly, you can see the book with fresh eyes. Now - does your book suit a spindly, spidery font or an elegant, crisp font? Does that curly 'Q' really work? Do you have to change the font because of the style of one letter? (I often do.) *Now* you see what the book designer does.

PS If you can't see any difference, please leave the blog directly, do not pass Go, and do not collect £200 (as if!).

D is for Disconnect

2011-11-02T11:48:00.000Z

This is not really a How to Speak Publisher as it's just a word used in its usual sense...

I'm listening to yet another programme on books/writers on radio 4. Why is it that books and reading seem to get a massive amount of media coverage at the moment, but writers struggle to survive? If the public so likes books, why are publishers cutting commissioning and cutting the rates they pay on the books they do commission? Does the public really want books? I don't mean authors who are starting out - they have always had a hard time, and always will - but established, mid-list writers who have been making money for publishers for years and have a following. There is a massive disconnect between the public image of writers and books and the reality of being a writer and trying to sell a book.

I'm happy to work hard. I routinely write ten or more books a year (many are short - but all are books and take work). I work as many hours a week on writing as most people in other jobs work. Of course, if the publisher were not selling the books and making money, I could understand why my income drops year on year for the same amount work (or more work!) But the public is apparently gagging for books, if radio 4 is to be believed. So why the disconnect? Print costs have gone up; margins have gone down; publishers are scared of the future [come ON, guys - the future was always uncertain, that's why it's the future!] Books sell for the same or less, but the bookshops and distributors still want their cut, so that leaves only the author to dump the losses on. If the public didn't want books, that would be more understandable, but that's not how it looks. So the public is willing to buy, and the publishers cut the price. Er......

It's odd, isn't it? I accept that we live in a world of market forces, though there are some things that should not be subject just to market forces - the food supply, medicines, education. (A few books fall into the latter category.) I don't think writers should generally be subsidised if they can't write economically viable books. My view that writers should not usually get Arts Council grants is, I know, not widely held amongst writers. But if a publisher thinks a book will sell well enough to be worth publishing, it should pay a living wage to the writer - and the public should be able to buy a book without being complicit in the exploitation of the writer.

When the gatekeepers look like Cerberus

2011-10-24T15:41:00.003+01:00

One of the particular challenges of writing for children rather than adults (or even older teens) is that to get your book into the hands of the reader, you have first to get it past a gatekeeper. Your young readers may well want to read books with swearing, sex and violence in, but the gatekeepers don't want them to. The gatekeepers are teachers, librarians and parents. They are the ones who hold the purse strings, and they have to be satisfied that your book is 'suitable' for the little darlings in their care. Needless to say, their idea of 'suitable' rarely matches the readers' idea of 'desirable' and often doesn't match the writer's idea of 'realistic'.

I'm struggling at the moment to present an angry, disillusioned teenage character facing some very difficult issues in his life but without using any swear words. This type of character does swear. Almost all teens swear, and my teen readers are well aware of that (and swear themselves, I'm sure). I know the argument - parents will object, so the schools/libraries/bookshops can't stock the books if they are full of swearing. I remove the swearing, though with a weary sigh. But that's not the worst of it.

The books were supposed to be sexy, but they can't have any sex in them. The characters in these books are 17 and 18. They are over the age of consent. They don't have any full sex, but even references to sexual desire, or to consenting over-30s having sex, have to be very tame and ambiguous. I think I can trust the more knowing reader to fill in the gaps, so I'll let that go, too. And the unknowing younger teen will read on, oblivious to what might be happening.

One of the series features a historical serial killer who mutilates prostitutes. The gatekeepers don't like the prostitutes. This is where I do have problems. Er, actually, the killing is more offensive! This is not just an issue about books, is it? It gets right to the heart of attitudes towards what is and is not acceptable, not just in fiction but in life. We object more to prostitutes than to serial killers. Do we really?

Here are some activities in the books (before Blytonisation): swearing; wanting to have sex with someone; having sex with someone; drinking blood; drinking vodka; psycho killers cutting prostitutes to ribbons; inhumane experiments on people purchased as slaves; trying to drown someone; beheading someone. Which of these are normal activities that most people will engage in at some time in their lives? Swearing, drinking vodka, wanting to have sex, having sex. Which are activities to be discouraged, amongst both teens and adults, and which most people will never engage in? Drinking blood, trying to drown someone, beheading someone, cutting prostitutes to ribbons, conducting inhumane experiments on trafficked slaves. So which shall we remove from the books?

Could someone please explain to me why? If we show swearing, kids think swearing is OK? They start swearing? So if we show beheading, they think beheading is OK? They start beheading people? I'm quite glad my bint only swears at me if the alternative is being beheaded, but I don't think she swears because she's seen it in books! And she hasn't beheaded me, even though she must have come across the suggestion at some point.

I am absolutely not getting at my publisher or distributor here. I know we have to sell the books. There's no point in writing or publishing them if we don't. So I will write them in a way that means they will get past the gatekeepers. And I'm not really getting at teachers and librarians, though I do think they could maybe take a stand. What I am troubled by is the - real or imagined - parents who will object if their children read swear words but not if they read about cruelty. Who are these people who don't like to think their kids might discover people drink or have sex when they are older, but don't mind them thinking people kill each other from sexual jealousy and might get away with it?

Is it that the children know they should never follow the example of the serial killer (really? even the child with zero degrees of empathy?), but not know they shouldn't follow the example of the person who swears? Do we trust the reader to discern between undesirable and unacceptable? If we do, let them see the swear words. If we don't, don't let them see the criminal acts. I suppose including swearing, sex and drinking could be thought to normalise them. But they ARE normal, whether we like it or not. And doesn't showing violence on TV and in movies and video games - violence far worse and more graphic than that in most books - normalise violence, and acclimatise children to it? I suppose what I really want to know is, if you object to your child seeing swearing in a book, aren't you also a person who will object to your child seeing violence in a book? So you won't be buying the book anyway? Or have I got it all wrong? I'd really like to know.

Teach writing? Nah....

2011-10-22T14:11:00.000+01:00

Whether or not creative writing can be taught is a much debated question. My own view - and I've had creative writing students - is that creative writing courses can impart techniques and help students develop skills they have, but if they have no native talent the course is a waste of time and money. Some courses are a waste of time and money anyway, because of the way they are taught or the people who teach them, but that's a different matter. But this post isn't about courses - it's about the individual, one-to-one help that an experienced writer sometimes gives an emerging or novice writer. We have all been asked by new writers to read their work. Some of us do it for money. Some of use do it out of generosity, or guilt, or because we feel obliged or coerced. Some of us just say no. I say no, but that doesn't mean I won't help...

I have a new friend. I'll call him Adrian. Hello, Adrian - I'm sure you will recognise yourself, even with this different name. Adrian has written a long novel which he has been working on for much of this year. He has had feedback from several readers, some with publishing industry experience, so their comments are more likely to be useful than those of random friends and family. He has taken on board all their comments and made changes to his novel. I have not read his novel, nor do I intend to until it is published. I have read and commented on the synopsis and the first page - that's all. So can I be any use to Adrian in helping him develop his novel? I think so. Because I don't think I can teach him to write, but I might be able to help him to learn to write.

There are lots of guidelines - which lots of people treat as immutable laws - like 'show don't tell' and 'don't use 'was'' and so on. There are lots of distractions, like 'use 12 pt Times Roman' (I have never submitted a MS in 12pt Times Roman, and I have never had one rejected because it was in the wrong font). If I tell Adrian how I write, he might think that's my prescription for successful writing. It's not. It's possibly a very bad way to write - for other people. But it works for me. He will have his own way of writing that works for him. So much for the activity of writing - I'm not going to say 'you have to have a detailed plan' or 'never write a detailed plan'. But what I want to get Adrian to do, when I talk to him about his novel, is to understand what he is writing and how it works or could work. So I ask him questions like 'who is the narrator?' It is an omniscient narrator. 'Does this narrator have a character? Is he/she reliable? How do you switch between points of view? What are your main character's flaws? Which of his opinions do you share and which not? How does he change during the course of the book? Why?' And so on.

These are questions you can ask of any book. You can only answer them if you know the book, and if you are prepared to think about it. I'll let you into a secret. When you do an English degree at Cambridge, your supervisor lets you choose the texts you study (or did in my day). There is no limit. This doesn't mean the supervisor has read everything. It means the supervisor can give a supervision on a book they haven't read, just as I can help Adrian improve a novel I haven't seen. It's all about asking questions that get the writer/student to think intelligently about the book so that they make discoveries and increase their understanding. I have occasionally given Cambridge supervisions on books I haven't read. Once I gave a supervision on a book I hadn't read (all of), written in a language I didn't understand (very well). Because learning is not something that must be imparted by a teacher, but something that can come from within, possibly prompted by a helpful prodding person.

You wrote the book - you know it better than I do, or some other would-be helpful writerly or publishing type. You tell me about it - telling me about it is how you work out what you know and what you don't know. Then you can work out how to plug the gaps. This is rather how I work as an RLF fellow. If a student has written a doctoral thesis, or a novel, I'm not going to read all of it. I will read a bit and talk to them about the structure and any problems I can see in the sample I've read. Yes, I might explain to them how to use commas or why they need to write in shorter sentences, but the most useful bit, often, is getting them to explain why they have written something in the way they have and defend their choice. If they can't defend it, they realise it's probably wrong. The next stage is to work out how to fix it. But I want them to do that, not me. It's their book/thesis. And I'm lazy.

Of course, there is a role for the person who reads the book and says 'your pacing is all wrong' or 'the voice is inconsitent'. But if you have someone saying - 'tell me what happens in the first three chapters. Do you think that moves quickly enough to keep someone interested?' - you might be able to fix the pacing before you show it to someone else. I could write a list of questions to ask about your novel. But that's not the same. You really need a person who will keep pushing, with one question leading into another that depends on the answer you gave. Perhaps I should offer an editorial service that does not involve reading your book, but is basically £50 for an hour of being badgered remorselessly. Stroppy Author's Lazy Consultancy.

How to speak publisher - D is for Draft

2011-10-18T08:30:00.003+01:00

A draft is something you should keep to yourself. It is an unfinished book. You wouldn't serve someone a half-cooked meal, would you? Especially not if you were running a restaurant and expected them to pay for it? So don't send a publisher a draft of your book. It's not their job to tell you what to do with it to finish it, and it's certainly not their job to finish it for you; it's your job to know what it needs and do it.

There are two principal reasons for a publisher to refuse a book: it's crap and always will be; it's still crap but you could have made it OK. Oh, and there's a third - you sent them a book that is not the type they publish, or that they already have with a slightly different title. There's nothing you can do about the last bit except look at their catalogue and make sure they haven't just printed a book that is pretty much the same. The others are all in your control. (Most of this is covered wonderfully by the Crabbit Bat Nicola Morgan on Help! I Need a Publisher - write the right book at the right time in the right way and send it to the right publisher.)

There's sort of a fourth, which is that you have sent a good book to someone who just doesn't like it. That's bad luck and there is nothing you can do about editors' (or readers') tastes.

The issue of the draft addresses reason number two: it's still crap but you could have made it OK.

Now, all this doesn't mean that your book won't need any editing. Every book benefits from editing - and copy editing and proof-reading. But it should be finished in your view. The editor will still improve it. And if they can't improve it, they will be paid for doing nothing, so they can be grateful to you. If you can still find things - any things - wrong with your book it is not ready to send in.

Caveat: no book is ever perfect. This is not a licence to hold onto your book forever because it doesn't match up to the Platonic ideal you conceived when you planned the book. It has to be publishably good, not worthy of having been written by an omniscient god. If you hold on to your book for ages, tweaking and pithering about with it, you will never submit anything. And if you have a deadline imposed by a publisher, you have to submit by that deadline. Don't hang on to it for a bit longer because it isn't quite right. Read this post for a rant about the importance of meeting deadlines. Is this incompatible with everything else I have said? Not really - you just need to start the book early enough, and write it quickly enough, to leave time to correct and improve it before the deadline. That's easy, isn't it?

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How to speak publisher - C is for Copy editor

2011-10-15T08:26:00.004+01:00

A bit of a lurch back to C, I'm afraid - I just tried to link to C is for Copy editor from a post I'm just writing and found it was still saved as a draft. Oooops. Especially as the up-coming post is D is for Draft. So just imagine you have gone faster than the speed of light, like a neutrino, and come to C is for Copy editor some weeks ago. [Please don't start a discussion about the speed of light/neutrino thing - that was a flippant reference, not an informed and informing comment on the plausibility of the CERN result. Which, incidentally, I am prepared to accept is accurate. But that's another story, and was in another country, and besides, the wench is dead.]

The copy editor tidies up your writing at the detailed level. That sounds reasonable - they spot and correct the typing and grammatical errors, make sure everything is consistent, and make it all flow nicely. Sometimes it is reasonable, but sometimes the text becomes a battleground.

A good copy editor preserves your style and voice and corrects any errors. Their work should be invisible. They have impeccable grammar and no ego. They improve your book, whether it is fiction or non-fiction by making many or few (often imperceptible) changes, as necessary. That is the key - necessity. They don't change things for the sake of it.

A bad copy editor rewrites for the sake of it, stamping their own voice and style on your work. Perhaps they really want to be a writer, not an editor. [Fine, copy editor - write your own book. I've written this one already.] A really bad copy editor introduces grammatical errors, and sometimes even spelling errors. Believe me, they do. You would think, given that publishing is a competitive field, that it would be hard for someone with a poor grasp of grammar to get a job as a copy editor, but it happens. Copy editors who 'correct' to 'comprised of', and who don't recognise an ethical dative if it bites them, should be sent to a special circle of Hell. Where they will be bitten by ethical datives and hanged with the hanging prepositions they are so fond of.

The copy editor needs a good general knowledge and Classical education as well as an unrivalled command of English. Writers hate copy editors who mess with things and then get them wrong. Professional writers have generally checked their work carefully; copy editors should check any corrections they want to make equally carefully.

On the whole, I am blessed with very good editors. I have had only a couple of copy editors (in around 130 books) who really botched things. One I had to have fired; there was no option. We went back to the unedited text and started again with a new copy editor. Most have improved the books, and several have spotted errors that might otherwise have got through to press. Of course, there are still errors in my books - and they are my responsibility, not the copy editor's responsibility. (It's like children - when they do well, it's their own doing; when they do badly, we blame ourselves.)

A note to copy editors:

Yes, there are sometimes errors in our books; we are not infallible. But please *tell* us if you think there is an error, rather than just changing the text to what you think it should be. If I have missed out what seems to you to be a crucial reference to a prophecy of Nostradamus, that's because it's apocryphal - one of those bits that is generally supposed to be in Nostradamus but actually is not. I don't want you sticking that kind of error in my book - the kind of error I have deliberately avoided. You have joined in the webfest of Nostradamus-spotting - I've read Nostradamus in the original. Who's likely to be right? JUST ASK FIRST: sometimes you are right, and sometimes you are wrong. It is very, very difficult to spot factual errors that have been introduced into a book by a copy editor. (Grammatical and spelling errors, on the other hand, leap off the page at me - so if you want to add some errors please add that type.)

And another thing - I do know about English grammar, possibly more than you do. Writers vary in this, of course. Some are not very good at it and need lots of help from the copy editor. But you can tell, if you have a whole book to work with, whether or not someone can write correctly. If most of the book is error-free, then it behoves you to ask if you think something is wrong, or to check in one of those reference books about grammar and English usage. Or at least to flag your 'correction' so that we can argue with you about it.

A note to authors:

If you want to argue with your copy editor, you have to know what you are doing. You need to be able to defend your original text if you don't want it changed - you must explain why it has to be as you wrote it, and why it can't be as the copy editor wants it. Why is your wording better than theirs? Don't argue for the hell of it. Look dispassionately at your text and decide whether the copy editor has, actually, improved it. All writers benefit from the work of a good editor.

Except with a picture book text, which is a slightly special case, I recommend NOT looking at your manuscript when you get the copy-edited text, except to check things you think might be wrong. If the changes don't leap out at you, they are probably fine. Don't be precious about your text, and don't be a prima donna - especially with non-fiction. A non-fiction copy editor is - in my view - allowed to edit to improve clarity. A fiction editor should be more sensitive to the writer's style, though clarity is still important. (That's even more true of poetry, but this blog is not about poets.) There's no point in being obscure just because you think it makes you look clever - it doesn't; it makes you look arrogant, up yourself or incompetent. Unless you are Jeremy Prynne.

Ideally - and usually, in my experience - the copy editor is your partner in producing a good book. And they don't even get a credit in the book. So be nice to your copy editor. Don't get cross over tiny things, and if you don't agree, correct them politely with a good, clear and measured explanation. Finally: I'd like to say a big thank you to all the wonderful copy editors I've worked with over the years - you have improved my books in little unnoticeable ways, and I am grateful for that.

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Can't run, can't hide

2011-09-30T13:16:00.001+01:00

Yesterday I went to see an editor. While I was chatting to him, another editor - who I have known for a very long time, and written many books for - wandered past. It was a lovely surprise to see her. And then she asked me about this blog. She had come across it and worked out it's mine just from the writing style and content, without looking at my profile page. That's a very cool and talented editor. I take my hat off to her. And I will quake a little more in my boots, now.

[Not really - I am happy to own up to everything here. If I wanted the blog to be anonymous, it would be!]

How to speak publisher - D is for day job

2011-09-24T08:35:00.003+01:00

Many publishers assume writers have a so-called 'day job'. It helps them excuse (to themselves) the pitiful fees or advances they offer most writers; it's all OK, writers are doing something else for money. 'Don't give up the day job!' they say nervously, or with a laugh, when telling you the scandalously low offer. Now look here, publishers. Writing IS my day job. Just as editing is yours. That's why you want to commission me - because I'm a professional. So cut this crap about a day job.

Of course, no one comes out of an MA in Creative Writing, sends off the novel they have been working on for the last year and by return of post gets an advance they can live while writing the next novel . Or maybe someone has, once, done that, but it is not the usual way of proceeding. Sorry, MA hopefuls. So unless they are living on daddy's millions or a spouse with an income, most writers start off by doing something else while they're learning their craft. As do most actors, musicians, sculptors and artists of many other types. But that does not mean that the'll always have a day job. By the time you are commissioning them, they have obviously already learned their craft or you wouldn't want their book. It certainly does NOT mean that writing should be so poorly paid (for the writer, but not the editor, publisher, bookseller, bla bla) that a full-time writer can't support themselves . An actor in an amateur production is not paid; a writer knocking up stories for a tiny magazine is not paid (or not much). But once you are acting in TV series or writing for so-called reputable publishers, you should be paid because clearly your work is now good enough for someone to make money from it. And that someone should be you, not just other people.

There is something of a distinction to be made here between fiction and non-fiction writing, especially for children. It's easy for the publisher to think to themselves, 'Ah, she likes writing these stories, so she will want to do them anyway. Getting some money is a bonus.' (Crap, by the way - you want it, you pay for it.) They are less likely to think someone might spend their leisure time writing trade books about earthquakes, or fast cars, or textbooks about bacteria. But publishers still don't necessarily pay properly for these, especially the text book. After all, some text books are written by teachers, aren't they? And teachers have a day job so they don't need much money. Crap again - you want their time, you pay for it.

Some children's non-fiction is written for a flat fee. The fee should obviously reflect the amount of time the writer is expected to put in. So if you are offered a fee of £1500 for 48 pages (which used to be typical, but it's fallen over the last five years and you might be offered only £1200), you need to know how long you can afford to work for that money. We could get into lots of complicated stuff about finance here, but all I will say is that you must remember the £1500 is not your income but your turnover. It has to cover expenses such as computer costs and heating your house during the day while you work in it. It has to cover non-earning time such as the time you spend answering emails, chasing late payments and putting together proposals for books that are never sold to a publisher. So they're not going to get three weeks, are they? This is when they might mention the 'day job'. Hey, publishers: I will not work for virtually nothing so that your publishing company can make money on what they will otherwise claim is not a viable book. Is the editor working for less than the going rate? Or less than they were paid ten years ago? No. Are you paying less than the going rate for your electricity? No. What will happen if I go to Waitrose and ask if I can have my food for less this week because my overheads have risen? What do you think?

At the back of all this is the person who really does have a day job. There are plenty of people who are teachers, farmers, accountants and so on who have a steady income and also write. But that doesn't mean their time is not valuable! They are writing instead of playing with their children, watching television, visiting friends. If a publisher intends to make money from that person's writing, they should pay a fair rate for it. Anything else is exploitation. Fiction is tricky - writers write at different rates. I write at different rates! I have written a book that has taken ten years and a book that has taken two hours. Of course a publisher can't pay an advance of £400,000 because it took you 10 years to write your novel. What is not acceptable is for a publisher who wants to produce (say) an A level guide to budget £400 for the author, knowing that it means someone with at least degree-level skills in that subject will have to work for less than £5 an hour to do it, even if they do have a 'day job' that pays the bills. It's less than the minimum wage.

I have turned down (of course) requests to write a book for £200 - a 96-page book, not a 30-word board book. The publishers are affronted and say 'there are plenty of people wanting to be writers...' And I say, 'fine, use them. They are inexperienced, and you'll spend the extra on badgering or tutoring them and paying editors.' Yes, there are lots of people who want to be writers - but very few of them are any good. Most of the good ones (who are committed and ready) are already writers. Oh - and another thing: the deadlines usually suggest you don't have a day job as they could not be met by someone working odd evenings and weekends.

Isn't it rather odd that publishers consider the people who produce the main component of their product to be doing something else most of the time? Isn't it rather dodgy to build a multi-million dollar industry on a bunch of people whose attention is usually somewhere else? And is there any other industry that is so dismissive of its suppliers?

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How to speak publisher - D is for digital

2011-09-15T07:40:00.003+01:00

This post is not what you expect. It's not going to waffle on about the advantages or disadvantages of e-books and apps or digital rights. There's enough of that out there already. Instead I am going to tell you what digital really means. There is a lot of mystification going on - some deliberate and some just the result of extensive ignorance.

Let's start from the very beginning. 'Digital' means relating to or made from numbers. In terms of information technology, it means anything that can be reduced to the binary state of being stored as 0 and 1, or 'charge' and 'no charge' on a magnetic disk, tape, yadayadayada. A paper book has extension in 3-D space and cannot be stored as a sequence of 0s and 1s. However, it is produced (these days) from computer files that are digitally stored. You could see distributing and consuming books in digital form as a way of cutting out the final stage (paper). That's effectively what an e-book does.

On the other hand, an app adds extra bells and whistles. The book-words are still there, but there are also moving pictures, sound, interactivity. Those are still all stored digitally, though the creation and storage are more complex.

Here's a tekky bit. Look away if tekky bits make you queasy. Jump to the end of the purple part.

Converting just the book-words to the most basic digital format is extremely easy. Look, I can do it now. Take that first sentence: 'Let's start from the very beginning'. I won't do all of it, but here's how it goes:

Let - three letters. Each is an ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) character

L = 76

e = 101

t = 116

Now we reduce these to binary

76 = 1001100

101 = 1100101

116 = 1110100

So the first word is stored at the most basic level as 01001100 01100101 01110100 (without the spaces, but that shows you where the breaks are). Now you see why we aren't doing the whole sentence.

Anywhere in the world in any computer system that sequence will translate to 'Let'. That doesn't come with any information, such as font or colour or size, but the sequence of letters is the same. That is all your Kindle does - it converts the numbers back to letters and shows them on the screen. That's not so scary, is it? When you change the size, it's just showing the same thing differently. The 'change the size' instruction is separate from the storage of the text. So a simple e-book is very easy to create. It takes a bit of software that strips out all the crap from your Word File, or InDesign file, or whatever, and leaves pretty much just the letters, the part that can be digitised easily. It's slightly more complex than that, as there are things such as markers that tell the page of contents where to go to. But essentially it is a sequence of letters (ultimately, binary numbers) which is poured into a sort of software envelope that tells the e-book reader how to display it and what to do when you want to follow a link or turn the page. That's all there is to it. The different e-book readers use different envelopes and instructions, which is why you can't read all the different types on all the different readers.

An app is a very different kettle of fish. In an app, the text is the least of your worries. An app is essentially a computer program all on its own, whereas an e-book is not. Digitising pictures and sounds follows the same principle as digitising text. Do you want more tekky stuff? Look away if not.

A picture on the computer is stored as a series of tiny dots, called pixels. How many pixels are displayed in a given area determines the resolution of the picture. If there are more pixels, more detail can be shown in the picture and so it is a higher resolution picture. Each pixel is a colour. The colour is defined as a combination of red, green and blue light. For the proportion of each, there is a number showing the intensity of that colour. The numbers are in the range 0-255 (there is a reason for this range, but we don't need to go there now).

So, for each pixel, you have three numbers in the range 0-255.

Black is 000,000,000 (ie no light).
Bright red it 255,000,000 (ie all red and nothing else).
White is 255,255,255 (all colours in equal intensities).

A computer image (displayed, not for hi-res printing) typically has 72 pixels per inch. Is that number familiar? It should be if you are serious about this publishing lark. There are 72 points to an inch. Coincidence? No.

Back to the point: for each inch of image, we now have 72 sets of three numbers. The three numbers are each converted to binary. So that red pixel is represented by the sequence 01111111,00000000,00000000 - and there are 72 x 72 of these for a square inch of screen image, so you can see the info becomes very extensive very quickly. One letter is represented by just one of those numbers, remember.

(So is a picture worth a thousand words? Only if the picture is very small. I counted 90 characters in a square inch of text, so that would be 30 pixels-worth of info (three numbers per pixel, remember). A thousand words, at about six characters per word (including spaces), gives 333 pixels, or a picture about a quarter of an inch square. I'll go for the words, thanks.)

There are ways of compressing this information to make it much smaller, and the processes for compressing it are complicated. The computer, iPad, or whatever has to take the compressed picture information and restore it to full picture information - there's an extra step there that is not there with plain text.

Digitising the text, pictures and sound is the easy bit. The difficult bit is making the app work through time, with interactivity and animation. The techniques have all been around for a long time, but they take expert knowledge to do well - just as book design takes expert knowledge to do well. Animation is moving pictures - just one of those digitised pictures after another in a rapid sequence (a minimum of ten per second). Making the app do different things at different times or in response to the reader's actions takes proper computer programming. And that's where the problems start for publishers who don't have their own programmers. But we won't go into that just now.

The worst apps just present text and pictures with minimal animation or interactivity. There are apps out there (plenty of them, but I won't name names) which are no better than sort of animated stories we had on the BBC micro in the 1980s. They give digital a bad name. The good apps - Nosy Crow's Three Little Pigs, Faber's The Waste Land, Wolfram Alpha's The Elements - are brilliant marriages of interactivity, text, images and sound that deliver more than a paper book can. And they cost a fortune to develop. That's why all bets are off in the digital royalties department for a decent app, but you should get a decent (25% minimum) royalty on a straight e-book. Which point is why all this was relevant to you, as a writer. You need to know WHY a deal is good or bad.

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How to speak publisher - D is for dummy

2011-09-06T09:49:00.000+01:00

Dummy: stupid person, thing babies suck, or book with no content. Let's go for the last. This could be the Dummy's guide to Dummies.

A dummy is a plain-paper mock-up of a book that shows the size, paper quality, possibly the real cover, and other physical aspects. In novelty books, it shows paper-engineering features such as flaps, gatefolds and pop-ups. You'll see these dummies at book fairs. They are made by the publisher (or paper engineer) and you don't need to worry about them as a writer - unless you are also a paper engineer, of course.

Just to add to the confusion, if you write/illustrate picture books a dummy is something else. It is a mock-up of the finished book as you see it, with rough illustrations and text in place. It may be the right size, but it need not be. The point of the dummy is to show the editor the arrangement of pictures and text that you envisage. It's much easier to do with a dummy than by describing it. To make it, you make copies of your illustrations and print out the text (or scan in and add the text in Quark or whatever) and paste them onto pieces of paper. You can glue or stitch them into a book or leave them as loose pages as you wish. Loose pages are easier for the editor to photocopy for acquisitions meetings, but a bound dummy can give a better idea of what the book will be like. I'm not going to go into great detail about how to make a dummy as you can find out here and I want some breakfast now.

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How to speak publisher - C is for Character-led fiction

2011-08-24T18:09:00.005+01:00

Yes, we've slipped back to C after only a brief foray into D-land. Sorry.

Character-led fiction is those series of stories that are initiated by the publisher and often written by a whole team of writers. The first famous one was probably Animal Ark, written not by Lucy Daniels but by a collection of writers-for-hire. Publishers like character-led fiction because they don't have to pay very much for it and these series usually sell lots of copies.

The degree of control you are given over the story varies between publishers and lists. You may be supplied with a title, a set of characters, a plot outline and a 'bible' that will cover all the details that need to stay the same between volumes, such as the name of the protagonist's dog, their parents' jobs and do on. It really is like painting by number but with words. At the other end of the scale, you might just be given a title and the characters. Although this gives you more freedom, there is also a much greater chance of the editor coming back with niggles such as 'your plot is too similar to writer x's plot' or 'oh dear, the dog is called Slug in the other book...' (Problems which could have been avoided by having a bible.)

You won't have your name on any character-led fiction you write, which is probably a good thing as it tends to be anodyne and unchallenging. If you're given a full plot, it's not very interesting to write. But it can be a useful way of giving yourself a bit of training (at least in obedience) and gives you the chance to write in a style you might otherwise never try .

The pay varies. You might get a small royalty, or you might get a flat fee. You should try to make sure you get the PLR. If you can knock them off quickly and don't mind feeling like a writing slut, they're quite a useful source of income. It's not high art, but you can get some satisfaction from writing within strict boundaries and it can hone your plotting and character development skills. It's the equivalent of practising your scales, really. If you want to give it a go, Working Partners is a good place to start.

Before you attack my snobbish attitude, I'll just point out that I have actually done it and I am absolutely a writing slut - I'll write almost anything if someone is going to pay me.

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Over at ABBA

2011-08-09T08:58:00.000+01:00

Talking about the digital bits (and pieces) that have to be marshalled once you pick a book or series title.

Title troubles: Munching on the winding-sheet?

2011-08-03T17:30:00.001+01:00

Which comes first, the story or the title? Or even the cover image?

Are you any good at titles? I am sometimes good at titles. In the current week, I'm having to come up with no fewer than seven titles. Yes, seven. (But in case you think I am some kind of title-machine, you should know that I have a book I've been working on for years that doesn't have its final title yet.)

Four of the needed titles are for books in a series that includes books by other writers and have to fit into the greater scheme of things. They are rather formulaic and only one is proving at all difficult.

The other three are more important, and wholly mine, as they in my Vampire Dawn series. They have to work with books that are not yet written. We have likely cover images for two, and some content for two (not the same two). I came up with three titles today, but will probably keep only one of them, and that's Shroud-eating for Beginners. But maybe the publisher won't like it, and it will go back in the box of titles, perhaps to resurface later. Some titles are too enticing not to use.

One of the Vampire Dawn books, Dead on Arrival was inspired by the cover picture (you can see it on Facebook). It was one of a batch of pictures my lovely publisher found and sent to me - it was far and away the best and has set the style for the series.

But where does a title come from? I drove back from St Albans today trying to think of three Vampire Dawn titles. I think the process went like this: 'Think of words associated with death: dead, death, cemetery, graveyard, coffin, winding-sheet, shroud - ah, weren't vampires once called shroud-eaters? This is for new vampires, so...'

How do you come up with titles?
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Putting all our eggs in the digital basket

2011-07-28T11:00:00.000+01:00

"But will e-books make out-of-print history?"

The question (on twitter) came from Katherine Roberts, author of I Am the Great Horse and the Reclusive Muse blog. She is also the founder of Kindle Authors UK.

The answer is both 'yes' and 'no', of course. Any author who cares enough and has even minimal technical ability can convert their out-of-print books into various e-book formats. As long as they own the copyright, of course. That last point means those interminable character-led series (Animal Ark, etc) will disappear as soon as the publisher can't be bothered with them. And no bad thing, you might think.

At the moment, everyone is in a honeymoon period with the Kindle, Nook and their cohort. They can do no wrong (unless you believe they will 'kill the book'). Perhaps this is because most writers and agents (and even publishers) embraced technology very late in the day. How many of you have a manuscript on a five-and-a-quarter-inch floppy disk, written in WordStar or View? I have. That book is out of print. And, to be honest, it would be easier to scan it in, OCR it, and lay it out again than to work from the files. I'd have to dig around in my historic computer collection for all the bits and remember how to use them, and then find a way of getting the stuff off (no USB, no internet connection - we're talking things that were operated by a keen hamster in a wheel).

What did you do with your LPs? What did you do (if you're old enough) with your 8 mm home movies? What about those cassette tapes and video tapes? [Aside: I worked as RLF fellow in a university department where scriptwriting students had to submit their final pieces as audio cassette because that was what the rules still said. There was a healthy black market in C90s but a very long queue of people wanting to borrow the only known cassette recorder. This was 2008.] That's my first computer on the right: 1977. It used cassette tapes.

Just now, the iPad and the Kindle look shiny and new. Well, the iPad does. The Kindle, being mono, looks like a Z88 but relies on most people not remembering the Z88. Fast-forward 20 years. Actually, first of all, rewind 20 years. Let's line up our dinosaurs.

1991: No worldwide web (outside CERN); no text messages; no PDFs; no InDesign (1994); no Quark 3.3 (that was when it became real). We had email, of course, and the Internet for moving stuff. The book I published in 1991 was written (I think) on an Acorn Archimedes and delivered as a plain ASCII text file on a disk, with a paper print out. The book I delivered yesterday was written in Word, sent by email as a .docx file, and if I suggested posting any physical objects the publisher would think I'd gone mad.

Now let's go forwards. 2031: The Kindle will be a museum piece. Yes, of course data can easily be converted to other formats. Just like it's easy now to convert your WordStar documents. Ahem. You have to keep converting at every point of change or it gets hard. Try using your Quark 1.0 files now. It's always possible to write a converter - but as rule, it gets harder to use old files as time passes.

We will all be twenty years older in 2031. How much time will we be spending on converting our old books to new formats? Who will bother if we don't? Certainly not publishers, unless the book is a bestseller. Who will convert when you're dead? No one, probably.

I could reproduce the book from 1991 now because I have a printed copy. I had an electronic publishing business in the 1990s. Nothing we published can be read on modern technology, even though it was distributed on CD-ROMs. It was a proprietory format (like Kindle is). This doesn't bother me - the need for those books has passed. But it's a salutary warning.

Most of our e-books will disappear into the ether over time. They will be worse than out of print. You can get an out of print book in the library. I spent years working on books that had been their version of 'out of print' for 700 years. Digital archiving is a good and useful thing as long as we don't destroy the physical copies in our arrogant assumption that our formats are forever. But in two hundred years, will anyone be able to read a Kindle book? Will they in forty years? If we really needed to, we could convert something, yes. But not as easily as we can call up a physical book from the British Library stores.

If we write only for Kindle, we should consider those books to be more like magazine articles. Ephemeral, delivered for obsolescent technologies, ghosts of books. That's not inappropriate for many books, but some writers think they are writing for eternity (or at least for future generations). And as someone who has used a lot of popular culture for research, and found the copyright libraries lacking even in printed material, it will be a significant loss to future social historians. They'll have this year's vampire novels in 2211, but will they have whatever the craze is in twenty years' time?

We like to write post-apocalyptic novels. Post-apocalypse, none of the e-books will be available. We'll be thrown back on those old books and manuscripts that can be read by candlelight, and the Kindle-generation of literature will be lost. So no, electronic publishing will not make OOP a thing of the past. It makes it a thing of the future.

How to speak publisher - D is for deadline

2011-07-27T09:30:00.005+01:00

Which is why I have been absent without leave for so long. Deadlines come first.

The deadline is the appointment you have made for delivering your manuscript (or corrections to it) to your publisher. The key phrase there is 'you have made' - you agreed to this deadline, so you have to meet it. It is impolite to miss an appointment you've made, and it is deeply unprofessional to miss a deadline you agreed to. End of.

If being professional and polite aren't that high on your list of priorities, you probably shouldn't be reading this blog as it is for people who want to be professional writers and I prefer polite people. But if you feel a lapse once or twice won't matter too much to your overall image, let's look at some other consequences. I suppose these are really the explanation of why it is unprofessional and rude to miss deadlines.

You are not working in a vacuum. When you deliver your manuscript, an editor will read it. If you are delivering corrections, a copy editor is waiting for it, possibly an illustrator and a designer. Some of these people might be freelance and will have set aside time to work on your book. If your book doesn't turn up, they will have wasted time that no one will pay for. They still have to do the work on your book when it comes in and will be paid the same, even though they spent a day watching re-runs of Futurama or weeding the garden. Then it will have a knock-on effect on their other projects, or they will have to work over the weekend to get the book back on schedule. Shame on you. Even if the next people in the chain are not freelance, they will be (quite reasonably) annoyed if their own work plans are disrupted by your inefficiency. Those others in the chain are people, not just editors - remember that.

If you are so late the book can't be dragged back onto schedule, the publisher might miss the slot booked to print the book. At the moment, printers are trying to claw their way out of the grave they've been pushed into and might be able to accommodate your book anyway - but don't depend on it, and don't depend on things always being that way.

If you deliver late, there will be less time for everyone else to work on your book, so there's a good chance it will be a worse book. Those people aren't messing with your book for the hell of it - their job is to improve it. Yes, it can be improved.

What if you really can't meet a deadline? First, work out why. Here are the possibilities:

1. A personal disaster has befallen you - someone close to you has died, your partner has left you, your house has burnt down, someone close to you is very ill and you are their carer (or shared carer), you have fallen ill (properly ill, not man-flu)

2. A technological disaster has befallen you - your file has become corrupted or been deleted, the laptop it was on has been stolen, your computer has been disabled by a virus

3. You've simply run out of time - you mismanaged your time and there is too much left to do, what you have written is rubbish, what you have written doesn't match the brief/outline, the structure you picked isn't working, you got scared/blocked and couldn't carry on.

And now the solutions/stern chat:

1. Not your fault. No one is likely to hold you to the deadline. Tell the editor as soon as you are able to or, if you are not able to, get a friend to email your editor and alert them to the problem. Then you can forget about the book for now and do what you have to do.

Don't do this if you have a cold or something short term. If you have broken your leg, that gives you a few days but unless you are an armless person who types with your toes, it won't stop you finishing the book after that.

2. Use the back up. You WHAT? You don't have one? You can now leave the blog - this is for people who want to be professionals.

If you don't have a recent back up, stay up all night recreating the book from an older back up and consider it a useful lesson. I recommend you don't tell your editor you lost the file - they will think you are a bozo (and they will be right). A virtual dog ate my homework. The physical lack of a computer might cost you a day while you track down a library where you can use one, or one you can borrow or lease. You can probably catch up that day, but if not you must explain to the editor what has happened and how you are solving the problem and how long it will take (no more than a day, remember)

3. This doesn't happen the day before the deadline - you see it coming. If you really, really can't recover the situation, you have to talk to your editor as soon as it becomes clear to you that you can't meet the deadline. The editor wants your book to work - it's a lot of aggro if it doesn't. You can ask them to help you by reading what you've done and suggesting a different structure, or how to get it back on track, or whatever is needed. They won't be happy, but they won't be as unhappy as if you don't do this and just don't deliver, or deliver rubbish.

It will not be the end of the world - they will help you, or fire you. They won't send round a hit squad or kill your children. To them, it's one of many books - it's only the centre of the universe to you. If it is commissioned non-fiction, they might get an editor to fix the mess. If the mess is too messy, they might send you a kill fee and employ someone else to finish or rewrite it. I've done many a fix after a kill fee and I've also rewritten from scratch books that someone has screwed up or pulled out of. The industry has strategies to cope. It's more of a problem if you're writing a book someone else can't fix and it's in the catalogue already. Don't expect to be popular, but they will try to find a solution. For their benefit, not yours - it's not a favour. Don't ask them to publish your next book.

Things you must not do:

Lie about a major disaster that hasn't happened to you. How many mothers can you afford to kill off in the course of your career? Besides, now everything is transparent and you don't know who knows whom. You tell your editor you have to go to your mother's funeral and it's clear from Facebook you're shopping in Oxford Street. Your editor may not be your Facebook friend, but their flatmate/partner/parent/child/friend might be: 'My poor author, Stroppy, can't deliver because her mum died'. 'Oh, it says on her Facebook page she's going on a picnic with her daughters.'/'Oh, I know Stroppy - I'll send her a card.' See what I mean?

Just go off radar. Not responding to email and not answering the phone - for more than a day, when you might plausibly have network problems or be out - is cowardly and unprofessional. And unimaginative. You can do better than that.

Sending a garbled file (if you know how to make one - if not, learn). It can buy you a day at most. The editor should open it immediately to check it's readable (ie to check you haven't deliberately sent a garbled file) and then they will email you to ask you to resend it if they can't. If you're going to say later you were out, don't hang around on twitter saying 'yay, I finished my book, I'm going to have a coffee and read the paper'. I don't recommend the garbled-file route as you can't tell how much time it will buy you. If you only need another day, it will do. More than that, it's risky. If you have a trusting/lax editor they might not check the file until they want to start work on it, and that might be a week away. Then they will be embarrassed that they've left it so long, and you will have got lucky. But it might be tomorrow.

Make stupid excuses. Either be honest or be quiet.

On the whole, the more urgent the deadline, the more important it is to meet it. The deadline for an academic book may be years away, and in my experience the publishers will be so surprised if you deliver on time that they'll assume your book/contribution is not very good. That doesn't apply to real-world publishing, so if you're a refugee from academia, you're in for a surprise.

Oh, and one last thing. Your editors will really love you if you reliably meet deadlines. Which is stupid, but just goes to show how many people don't.

Now - don't you have a book to finish? Reading blogs is no excuse for missing your deadline!

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Am I rubbish at this?

2011-07-25T15:55:00.001+01:00

I've just seen an interesting blog post on 'which is the most important aspect of a novel?' Personally, I'd say the question is meaningless. Character and dialogue, for instance, can't be separated - you develop a character through what they do and say. Setting? How could setting ever be most important? You could write some dreary old crap, even if you set it an exotic Inca court where everyone ate parrot kebabs with the feathers still on from golden skewers. Setting must either be absolutely integral - the story couldn't take place anywhere else - or it's window dressing. Everything has to happen somewhere. (Doesn't it? Could I write a story set nowhere?)

The blogger's answer is 'character'. The post links to the author's Character Chart, which opens in Word and is so exhaustive I think I'll retire now I've read it. I'm not a great one for planning at the best of times, but I really don't need to know the date of my character's grandmother's birthday in order to write consistently. Really, I don't. And as for preferred home decor style, whether they have ever been fined, and their favourite board game - huh? Am I doing it all wrong? The characters come into my head and I watch them do things. Then I write it down. They are like real people. I can tell what real people are like even if I don't know when their grandmother was born or whether they wear contact lenses.

I have a serious suspicion that answering questionnaires about your characters is a displacement activity - it's easier than actually writing the story. And knowing the answers doesn't help you write the story. It is not knowing your character is an Asian psychopath with a liking for poodles that counts, it's being able to build an an Asian psychopath with a liking for poodles from nothing but words. That's the hard bit.

Seriously, though. Do you do all this stuff? I often have pictures of my characters, and perhaps a page of notes on them - but sometimes not. Sometimes I have nothing except what is in my head. How do you do it?

From Concept to Copy - by Mary Hoffman

2011-07-21T07:00:00.007+01:00

(via all sorts of other C-words, like Contract, Cover, Copy-editing, Coffee and Confusion)

Today we have a rare guest post as I'm honoured to be a stop of Mary Hoffman's blog tour for the launch of David (4th July, Bloomsbury - buy it!). This puts Mary in good company as the only other guest to date has been a pirate. And even then he was hijacked, he wasn't really a willing guest. Sadly, Mary, the pirate was not Johnny Depp. Or actually, I don't know - he might have been. I've not seen him.

But to the point. David is Mary's latest stand-alone historical novel and its ravishing. It follows the scurillous and exciting story of the model for Michelangelo's statue David - a character whose real name and history are unknown, so there?s plenty of scope for conjecture and imagination. As always, Mary's historical research is painstaking to the point of agonytaking and the book is beautifully atmospheric and vivid as well as exciting. Hey, there's sex and intrigue and spying and violence and art. What's not to like?

I'll hand over to Mary now, who explains the process of getting David from an inspirational spark to a book in the shops.

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Concept

In April 2006 I put this idea among a bunch of others in a document I prepared for my agent about possible further titles for Bloomsbury:

"The Real David (or The Boy David): Who modelled for Michelangelo's David? No-one knows so I would invent the story. He would be caught up in the rivalry between M and Leonardo."

At this stage I had written The Falconer's Knot and had the second half of a two-book contract to fulfil by writing 'something similar'. In the end, Bloomsbury chose Troubadour to complete that contract.

So that was some time after what I call my 'light-bulb moment'. That's the point where you get one in a whole sea of ideas that you think might turn into a book.

Contract

First books virtually always have to be complete before you submit. You can get away with a proposal and sample chapter when you have a few books under your belt. When you have a lot, just a proposal will do. If your Neilson figures are spectacular, you can probably just write half a sentence and get a contract.

What happened with David was that I wrote a proper proposal for it. In August 2008 on a train journey from Edinburgh to Oxford I wrote the full proposal for what became just 'David' and it won me a contract to write the book.

It contained phrases like 'Absolutely nothing is known about who, if anyone modelled for the David....This provides a perfect blank canvas for a novelist'. And 'What I propose is a colourful adventure story set in the turbulent years of the end of the fifteenth century and beginning of the sixteenth in Florence'.

I wrote the proposal on 2nd August, sent it to my agent on the same day. She forwarded it to my editor on 4th and got this the next day 'This proposal looks fantastic! Will be in touch'.

Although we agreed the advances in September, the signed contracts didn't arrive till mid-November. That's the book which has just come out this month in the UK and that was its real beginning.

City of Ships

I had to write that first, because I was already contracted to do that before starting on David. This is how writers like to work: one book about to come out, one being written currently and a contract under their belt for one or two more books.

Calendars, Carrara marble and the Computer

Research begins on the computer, my trusty MacBook Air laptop, with the much reviled Wikipedia. I think people who pooh-pooh Wikipedia completely misunderstand it. It is a brilliant first port of call for dates, links and bibliographies. That's while you are constructing a timeline (essential) for the background (if you are writing historical fiction) and a calendar of what actually happens in the period taken up by your novel - both the real and invented.

I belong to the London Library - I'm a Country Member, which means they post books to me. The annual fee is horrendous and you pay postage for the books on top of that but not only do they have almost every book I want to consult (another C-word), my membership allows me to read academic articles online which before just tantalised me with an opening paragraph.

The Carrara marble didn't enter the picture till quite far along but I like to have an object in my study that focuses my mind on the book in progress. I bought a small white cube of marble in a shop in Pisa on the same trip when I visited Carrara and saw the white scars on the mountainside from which the block that became David was excavated.

Coffee and cats

I am not a great believer in writing Rules; I prefer to think in terms of things that facilitate my writing. Two of the things that help me write. Black, freshly ground coffee and three Burmese cats, who are part of my family.

Chapter by Chapter

Once I start to write I try to keep at it steadily writing at least one chapter a week? it used to be two but by rate of strike has gone down as I've got older and Social Networking has got more distracting. So between 3,000 and 8,000 words a week, the further on in the novel the more words per day. But these are all going to be pretty much usable words because this is the D1 and I submit the D2.

As I'm writing I print out each chapter to put in a D1 cardboard wallet file. I also read it aloud to my husband, which is a great way of catching mistakes. Deeply frustrating for him because he asks 'what happens next?' and I don't know!

Once the first draft (D1) is finished I trawl through the whole thing again, using the printed document, picking up inconsistencies, correcting typos and checking timelines, etc. Sometimes I can find a glitch that means re-writing a whole section - aargh! I write corrections on the D1 and transfer to a new D2.

This goes off to editor and agent usually simultaneously and electronically. I am always too close to the deadline to give it first to my agent to submit to my editor.

Consequences

If I were to offer writing advice to anyone, in a single word, it would be the one above - consequences. Remember that however complicated your plot and varied your cast of characters, every action and incident had a consequence, even if it isn't revealed till much later.

The consequence of sending off a book is that you will get a response from your agent and editor. I submitted David by the end of July and I knew my publisher was going on holiday in the second half of August so if I was lucky I'd get David reaction before she left.

It just so happened Bloomsbury were giving a belated launch for Troubadour, when it came out in paperback, on 5th August last year so I met my editor at the party. By then I knew my agent loved it but I was on tenterhooks ages for my editor's reaction to say something. Then she said she was halfway through and loving it! By a miraculous coincidence, this was exactly a year after she had said the proposal looked fantastic!

I did get the proper email before she went away so really only about 2 weeks' wait this time with a preliminary halfway approval after a week, so a much quicker result or consequence than usual.

Cover visual

This came in September last year and though I am now used to it I was a bit shocked by it at first; it wasn't the 'real' David!

Readers think, quite mistakenly, that writers choose their own covers and make decisions about when to change them etc. But of course this is done by the publishers' design team and the approval of the Sales and Marketing teams has far greater weight than that of the author.

I have had several covers in the past showing scenes that not only did not occur within the book but could not have happened! And there is one American cover I hate so much I have to keep it hidden on my shelf!

But friends have told me that the cover for David works well and has good 'pick-up-ability' so I am content.

Copy-editing and corrections

These can seem to last for ever! I now get joint editing/copy-editing from two people and these suggestions came just before I left for a long weekend in Venice mid-November.

I did these edits by 28th November then had an hour-and-a-half's phone call at the end of January to tidy up remaining points. On 2nd February I was still arguing one half sentence with my editor!

The bound proof copy came on February 17th and the page proofs on 23rd. I had to correct these and get them back by 21st March . But I was still checking how one main character's name should be spelled right up to Easter.

Proof copy

Increasingly these days potential reviewers get a proof copy or bound proof of a book to read well before publication (see above). It will have some editing done but not be the finished version. On one never-to-be-forgotten occasion, I received a proof copy from America that had been set from an electronic of the un-edited D2! Characters' name were different and people were thanked in the acknowledgments that in the end did nothing.

I hope one day it will be worth a lot of money on eBay!

Copy

This means two things. [Or three - I wrote about a different kind of copy last month in How to Speak Publisher.] Firstly, material that appears on the back cover or jacket-flap, describing the book and its author. You should get to check all this and I did. Best too if the author reads all 'copy' for press releases, catalogues, Amazon etc. etc. If you don't, you will get emails from sharp-eyed fans telling you there is a mistake. (In one bit of catalogue copy, I was described as having only two children when I in fact have three!). And secondly - the finished copy! You usually get one in advance and then the rest of your free copies a month before publication. Holding that finished copy in your hands is the second book-end, the closing bracket that forms a pair with your 'light-bulb moment' when you first had the idea.

******************************************************************

And with that exhaustive tour, I think we can say goodbye to C and move on to D...

Thank you, Mary, and best of luck to both you and the lovely David! David is a wonderful book - I think it's Mary's best, so you should buy it.

D is for David

2011-07-20T07:54:00.002+01:00

And for Deadline. Two reasons there have not been any more How to Speak Publisher posts - tomorrow, Mary Hoffman visits on her David blog tour, and she has lots of 'C' words for us (not that one!) so I didn't dare move on to D before her visit.

Come back tomorrow to meet the lovely Mary and the very gorgeous David.

Elsewhere

2011-07-09T10:49:00.000+01:00

Today I'm over at Bart's Bookshelf talking about writing for reluctant readers, and at Awfully Big Blog Adventure talking to Mary Hoffman as part of ABBA's fantastic literary festival. ABBA have lots of posts from hoards of writers over the whole weekend, so go back there often!

And in the real world I'm at Kathryn Evan's farm in West Sussex having lots of fresh raspberries and fun! Have a lovely weekend, people.

How to speak publisher - C is for Cover

2011-07-07T09:37:00.002+01:00

The cover is the bit on the outside of the book. That doesn't take much explanation. It can be a flimsy bit of card if you've written a mass-market paperback or a cloth binding covered by a glossy dust wrapper if you've written a high-end hardback - or anything in between.

Then there's what goes on the cover. Crucially, it should have the title and your name. And it should have a nice and appropriate design. That's where things generally go wrong (though sometimes your name doesn't appear on the cover - with licensed character work, for instance). It comes as a surprise to most people who aren't involved in the process that the author has virtually no control over the cover of their book. The cover is designed by a designer. That's good, generally, as design is what designers are good at and writing is what writers are good at. It would be pretty rubbish if writers designed the cover and designers wrote the text, wouldn't it? Keep that in mind when you grumble about your next cover. But even though this sounds like a pretty obvious division of labour, there are often problems.

The first problem is that the designer rarely reads the book. This can lead to some ridiculous situations, when a black character is depicted as white, for instance, or a horse is the wrong size/type/colour. Then there's historical and scientific accuracy. An illustrator *should* check everything carefully before coming up with a cover picture, but they don't always do so. You may have a medieval knight in armour from the wrong period, or penguins outside an igloo (yep, had that one - poles apart, illustrator!) As author, you should see a rough of the cover in good time so that you can pick up on these details and have them changed. But that doesn't always happen. You may not see the cover until it has been passed by everyone else, and then your objections may fall on deaf ears. 'It's too late to change it,' the editor cries. 'No one will notice.' The last may be true, at least in some cases - but you've noticed and so it will niggle every time you see the book. (Or worse than niggle if it is (a) a really bad error or (b) you've not published many books yet.)

Leaving aside the covers that are just plain wrong, some covers are horrid, ugly, boring, or formulaic (they look like every other paranormal romance/Mr Gum-style silly book/sci-fi fantasy). This is where it gets tricky. The design of a cover is not just an aesthetic matter.The marketing droids have some input, as they know how the cover will resonate with booksellers and purchasers. There is a language of cover art and cover design which you may not speak but you hope the designer and marketing team do speak. The cover is shorthand for 'this book is about XXX; it might appeal to you if you liked YYY.' A lot of the distress authors feel at their book covers is that they feel the cover places their book in the wrong pigeonhole. You might think your novel is a staggering work of original genius that is really a one-off literary novel, but - even if it is - the publisher may think they will sell more if it has a pink glittery cover and picks up on the fluffy romance bits. The publisher is probably right. Cry if you must, but at least you will be able to afford a box of tissues. You don't want your book to look like every other book of that type, but you will sell more if its cover speaks the right dialect. Your paranormal romance won't sell as many copies if the cover is pale blue and yellow rather than black and red.

Some cover designs are just lazy. They use stock photos that have been used on a hundred other covers and they use unimaginative design and uninspiring fonts. You can grumble about this, but what it says really is 'yours is a routine book - it's not a list leader and we can't afford a better cover'. The publisher will struggle not to say this to you, so I will. They can't afford to set up a photo shoot with models who look like your characters; they can't afford to commission original artwork from Quentin Blake; they can't afford that better picture from Getty. No amount of author-whinging is going to get the budget increased. If you can find a better picture from a cheap picture agency, you could pitch that. But I don't give much for your chances if the rest of the design has been done.

The truth is, some publishers are really good at covers and some either are not or are lazy. I love my covers from Evans (Off the Rails is the best) and from Arcturus's adult list (Story of Physics comes out 31st July). There are others I don't like as much, but I'm not going to say which as they are publishers I might want to work with again. Arcturus are great and I have a lot of input. Evans give me the chance to say whether I like it, and I always do so I've never found out what would happen if I tried to argue. But there was one case in which I hated the cover, and the illustrations inside and so did the editor, but our objections fell on deaf ears. I was really pleased when a national newspaper refused to review it because of the horrid illustrations. (How petty am I? I'd rather be right than reviewed!)

If you really hate the cover, you need to be able to say exactly what you hate about it and you need to listen to the reasons the publisher gives for choosing it. You might just be wrong. Or they might be wrong. Unfortunately, they have the final say, wrong or not. As always, a strong argument is more likely to get a result than tears and tantrums. Stroppy does not always mean having a strop. And if you're going to be stroppy, you also have to be right.

Fun-suckers and 'trashback' in the land of figs

2011-07-03T09:06:00.000+01:00

This is generally a serious(ish) blog offering sound(ish) advice on writing. But I think Sundays should be a day off from serious(ish) professional stuff and so from now on Sunday posts will be more personal reflections on frivolous things. I might even try to make some tenuous link with writing, but I'm sure I won't always succeed.

So - who are the fun-suckers in the land of figs? They are proctors of Oxford University. I was in Oxford last weekend and wrote this post on the bus home. The pavements were littered with figs that have fallen from the trees. You didn't know there were figs in Oxford? Nor did I. But walk down Observatory Street or Woodstock Road, or countless other streets and you will find squished figs underfoot. They could do with an infestation of bushbabies to clear them up.

Instead, they have an infestation of fun-suckers.

When students at the university finish their exams, their friends meet them outside the exam halls and 'trash' them. Trashing involves the hurling of food, confetti, glitter, silly string, champagne (for the rich), beer (for the poor) and anything else that can be hurled over the exam-sitter who is, as the university demands, dressed in sub fusc and gown. (Sub fusc is a monochrome formal outfit with some arcane bits and pieces; a gown is a cut-down version of a real academic gown, with silly tatters in place of sleeves - except for scholars, who have better sleevelets.) You can see obvious objections to this - there's a lot of mess and someone has to clear it up, for a start. It disrupts the traffic (very briefly). But it is, basically, harmless fun.

I took part in the trashing of a certain chemistry student, who will remain nameless in case the fun-suckers want to pounce. I went with her student friends to wait for her. We had our bags searched (!) before being allowed to stand behind barriers and shout, wave balloons and throw confetti. A mixture of police and proctors (the university's own law-enforcers) told us not to open any bottles or cans of drink. Of course, officer, we just brought them along because bottles like an outing on a sunny day, we weren't going to open them. There was a lively trade between trashers in allowed items - biodegradable confetti, hats, garlands, balloons with strings that were not going to be released. Our serious trashing contingent had hidden in Magpie Lane; the vanguard was to offer immediate shouting and confetti and direct the trashee to the right place. The trashers used mobile phones to check the area for proctors and police before picking their venue.

Once in Magpie Lane, the trashing began: icing sugar, baked beans, turmeric, Guinness, gone-off sauce of some kind. The trashee loves this, by the way - it is a welcome release of exam tension. Not to be trashed is a sign of having no friends. To have friends who give up their time, their spare food (it uses up the stuff you can't be bothered to lug home at the end of term) and scarce money to celebrate the end of your exams is a wonderful thing. It is an act of cameraderie, affection, delight - a happy moment for all except the proctors. Yes, there are some baked beans on the floor. I'm sure the urban foxes will lick them up. There is some confetti, but so is there after weddings, and it soon disintegrates. It looks nice, anyway. It is happy, summer mess. It's part of the Oxford scene that tourists flock to see. Why try to kill it?

Students are fined for trashing if caught. Fines this year that I heard of were £50, £80 and £100. How much do your friends love you if they will risk that? There were six of us trashing the chemistry student - a potential £600 in fines if we were caught. And the trashee can be fined, too! One friend was fined £50 last week for pushing a pie into a friend's face. There was not even any littering, the pie stuck to him. Why? Because, the excuse goes, using food like this is an insult to homeless people. WTF? Did the fine go to feeding homeless people? No. Would homeless people even want half the gone-off stuff used in trashing? No. How about this, proctors? If you catch someone using food for trashing, tot up the value of the food and fine the group that amount and spend it all on food for homeless people. Or sell trashing licences in advance, with the money going for food in a homeless shelter. Instead of fun-sucking, help others benefit from the fun. Oh - and those bottles of champagne you confiscated - where did they go?? Not on fun, I hope.

Yesterday Small Bint went to her school-leaving prom - the same state secondary school the trashing sister left four years ago. Swarms of pierced and tattooed parents cheered meringue dresses and sharp suits arriving in stretch limos, milk floats, buses and even a fire engine. They loved it, all of them. The police lurked around the corner. Later in the night, I drove Small Bint to an after-party, past the police arresting the sharp suits. Why? What had they done? They are good boys - I know many of them. They were probably making a noise. It was 11.30 on a Friday on their last day of formal education. Surely a bit of noise is justified? Why launch them into the world with a police warning instead of shaking their hands and wishing them good luck in what will be tough times?

Is this relevant to writing? Yes. The expunging of fun is one of the curses of modern childhood and of education ruled by the National Curriculum. Let wonder and fun thrive. Don't stifle it. Throw beans, wear meringue dresses, shout with joy that you're out of that stifling school, read Asterix and fuck the literacy strategy with its narrow focus on reading for improvement instead of pleasure. Books are fun. Life is fun. If you don't want the fun, at least let the kids have it.

How to speak publisher - C is for Commissioning editor

2011-07-01T10:20:00.000+01:00

There are lots of different types of editor in a publishing company. At least there are several different editing roles, though in a small publishing house an editor may double up, performing more than one role. The commissioning editor is the one who - guess what? - commissions books. To you, the author, the commissioning editor is pretty close to god.

The commissioning editor builds the list. That's not writing down things to do that then never get done, like our own lists. It's thinking up and acquiring books that make a collection with coherence and integrity. Sounds posh, doesn't it? The commissioning editor commissions books either by deciding they want a certain book and looking for an author to write it, or by looking at proposals that come in and picking from them.

Your job as writer (with the help of your agent if you have one) is to identify the commissioning editors of lists into which your book would fit. There is no point in sending a proposal to a commissioning editor who does not have a list that it would suit. I can't stress that strongly enough. An editor is not likely to start a list just for your book. Nor are they likely to take a book that would compete directly with one already in their list (or in the list of another editor in the same publishing house).

If you are happy to write books to commission, rather than coming up with the ideas yourself first, you can contact commissioning editors of relevant lists and introduce yourself, explaining what you write. This only works for some types of books. Don't approach an editor at Faber saying you'd like to write some literary novels and would they get in touch, please, when they need some written? That doesn't happen. But if you want to write reading-scheme-type fiction for early readers, or books on cat care, or travel guides, you can approach a commissioning editor, with examples of your previous relevant publications, and ask if they have any openings in their list. Expect to be told 'No'. That's the default answer. You just might get lucky. Then they may say 'we're commissioning short stories with a scientific content supporting key stage 1 science' or some such. And then you decide if you can do it and want to do it.

The names of commissioning editors - especially those who are good to work with - are sometimes a closely guarded secret. Most commissioning editors are drowning under a deluge of unsolicited proposals and manuscripts (slush pile). To ask an author the name of their editor with the intention of sending them your own proposal or manuscript, especially if you are unpublished, is not polite. An editor will take more notice of something sent in with a name check: 'Stroppy Author gave me your name' or whatever. It suggests an endorsement from a writer they trust. We will not give those endorsements to people whose work we do not know (and consider good). So if you meet me at a party and I won't tell you the name of my editors, that's why. You can find the names of editors in the Writer's and Artist's Yearbook - or at least the name of the person to send your proposals to, which may or may not be the real commissioning editor.

If you phone a publishing company and ask the name of the commissioning editor for the list you are interested in, you may or may not be given it. I've been refused the email address of a commissioning editor by a telephone-answering Hitler. Even when I told her I'd already published more than 50 books of the same type, she was reluctant to give it to me. Funny way to run a business, employing staff to make it difficult for the buyers to acquire the product they sell. But then, publishing is a funny business.

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How to speak publisher - C is for Case study

2011-06-22T12:41:00.000+01:00

This is a rare, specifically non-fiction post. Except it isn't really, as the boundary between fiction and non-fiction is very - shall we say - blurred; imprecise.

Much children's non-fiction includes examples of things that have happened to real people - case studies, in grown-up speak. Now, if I were writing an academic text, a case study would be well-documented, would use verbatim quotes from someone who had agreed to be interviewed and whom I had met or at least emailed. That sounds like a real case study, doesn't it? Is that what you get in a children's book?

In the good old days of longer lead times and higher fees, I would try to apply this method to case studies in children's non-fiction. But it's not always viable. If I need the story of a child in Eritrea, how am going to find it? Not by going to Eritrea, I can tell you. For the last few years, most case studies have come from the web - of course. Short bits, I'd quote directly and credit with the original name. If I took a lot, and didn't have permission to use the case study, I'd change the names and vary the wording to avoid any permissions disputes. Do you think that's dishonest? How much time do you think someone can allocate to chasing permissions from websites that don't reply when writing a book for £1500 in four weeks? Publishers get what they pay for - actually, they get a lot more than they pay for - and there are corners that have to be cut.

Sometimes, I really did take my case studies from life, often from friends of my daughters. They kindly agreed to talk to me honestly about things such as their substance abuse or criminal activities. They wouldn't thank me for using their real names. Of course, books and their case studies vary. In a recent book about careers in vulcanology, I found lots of real vulcanologists and either emailed them or, if they proved elusive, took the information I needed from their professional websites. In a book about drug abuse, I took stories from real friends, but also testimonies from the web, particularly support groups and fora for drug abusers, and changed the wording and the names. Real stories, but with the details changed.

I haven't done a book based on case studies for a while, and things have changed in the three or four years since the last one. This time I have a totally new approach. There are still people I know who will give me some case studies. (This time it's on charity work in disaster zones and emergencies - please say in the comments if you work in this and I can talk to you! See what I did there? Used my blog as a source of case studies...) Many more are, again, coming from the web. But no longer just from the charity websites I might have used three years ago. This time round, I'm taking them from blogs, from YouTube - there is footage of rescue workers digging people from earthquake rubble, for instance - and from twitter. A quick request on twitter for people to talk to about charity work in emergencies brought in a few offers of stories. There are new ways for voices to be heard and so tracked down, and new ways of asking for help. Twitter means I can ask the whole world, and case studies can come to me - before I had to look for organisations or people to approach.

But remember that when you see in a book 'Sadia of Karachi said...' it probably means 'here are the rewritten words of Ahmed from Islamabad that I found on the Guardian website'. Privacy and copyright concerns, coupled with the tiny amounts of time and money allowed, mean that case studies - while not fictional - are certainly fictionalised. Publishers know this - of course they do; they're not prepared to pay the BBC to quote chunks from their website. (The BBC's proprietorial attitude to comments given them for free on pages financed by our licence fees is scandalous.) Publishers don't admit this goes on - they don't say 'go out and make up some case studies' - but if you sent in your book with a list of people they had to get permission from or pay, they would rapidly tell you where to go. I have, sometimes, been asked to give the contact details of my case studies and have refused. A teenager tells me he uses ketamine and I give his details to a publisher?! NO.

Oh, and look at the contract. You probably have to pay permissions yourself and are responsible for any breach of copyright or privacy cases. So a bit of fictionalising really is the only way if you want to make any money from the contract and keep your house.
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How to speak publisher - C is for Contract

2011-06-20T07:45:00.000+01:00

The contract is the aim of much of your writing - the publisher's promise to publish your book as long as you write it properly, the publisher is still solvent, and you can agree the terms. I'm not going to say anything about contractual terms here as I've covered pretty much everything in the series How to read a publishing contract. But I will repeat one important point - don't assume the contract is written in stone. Actually, two points - don't be cheated in your pitiful gratitude that someone wants your book.

The contract the publisher sends you is a starting point for negotiation. They may well say it is a standard contract (it is; that just means it's the template they start from) and that everyone else signs (possibly true, especially if they don't have any astute or professional authors in their stable). Of course, the terms in the contract will favour the publisher at every turn. There will be clauses that, if you query them, the publisher will claim 'will never be used'. Fine; if they will never be used they can be removed. Do not be bullied. They want your book or they would not have offered you the contract in the first place. Read it carefully, and maybe have it read by the Society of Authors (if you are in the UK). Make sure you understand it all. Yes, I know it's about ten pages long, written in legalese and boring. But that's exactly why you DO need to read and understand it.

Once you have signed the contract, you won't be able to change the terms unless some significant event changes things rather dramatically. So if you sign a contract saying you will deliver your book by 31 December, you have to do that. Running out of time is not a good reason for delivering late. Losing the book because you didn't back it up and your computer breaks is just professional negligence, so don't do that either. If your family is wiped out in a fire, that is a good reason but you need to tell the publisher long before the deadline. (If the tragedy happens a couple of days before the deadline, you will have written the book already, so it won't be a problem.)

A contract is not a gift, it is a professional agreement and you should enter into it as a professional, not as a grateful wannabe-writer. Just as no writer has an automatic right to have their book published (most books written or proposed are crap), so no publisher has the right to dictate unfair terms and have you agree to them. Don't sign away electronic rights for 2% (or nothing); don't agree to do endless publicity for nothing for a flat-fee book; don't agree to revise a flat-fee book as necessary for future editions without another fee. In short, don't agree to be exploited or cheated.
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How to speak publisher - C is for Copy

2011-06-15T07:07:00.000+01:00

Copy is the text you submit for publication in a book or article (the same term applies in newspaper and magazine publishing).

If your copy is 'clean' - and it should be - it will need little editing before it can be published. This doesn't mean that it's not covered in coffee stains and cat hairs, although it did also mean that in the days when you sent in a wodge of typewritten pages. It means that your copy is not peppered with grammatical mistakes and spelling errors, it hangs together properly and does what it says on the tin. Doing what it says on the tin is important. If you are supposed to submit a 500-word biography of a classical composer and you send 800 words that are mostly a critique of his music, you have done the wrong thing and can't expect the editor to be pleased - nor even to publish the work you have laboured over for so long. If your outline promised a 40,000-word novel for 10-year-olds, but you actually send 40,000 words written in language accessible only to a 13-year-old then again this is not what it said on the tin and you will be in trouble.

Editors like clean copy because it means they don't have to do much work. Or, rather, they only have to do their own work - they don't have to do the work you should have done properly in the first place. The bottom line is that 'copy' should be as close to the text finally published as possible. Improvements the editor makes, in consultation with you, should be adding the benefit of the editor's expertise and alternative view, not fixing the things you screwed up. The editor may work hard to fix the book they have already commissioned from you - but they sure as hell won't commission another if the copy you send is a mess. Copy is not a draft. Drafts are your steps towards copy.

Copy, of course, must also be presented in the correct way. That means an ordinary font - preferably Times New Roman - in a legible size (often 12 pt) with large margins and 1.5 or double spacing. Don't use lots of fancy styling and fonts and changes of colour or text size. Firstly, it annoys the editor to have to strip all that gumph out. Secondly, it obscures essential details, such as how long the copy is. An editor used to receiving all copy in 12 pt Times can see at a glance how many final pages your chapter will work out to - but if you have sent it in 14 pt Comic Sans they can't do that. You are making their job more difficult as well making yourself look unprofessional.

Now, it's not my job to tell you how to format your copy. There is plenty of advice on that elsewhere (Nicola Morgan pronounces on it now and then, so take a look on Help! I need a publisher). And there are plenty of people who blame their lack of a contract on having used Times 11.5 pt instead of Times 12 pt - not so. If your book is good, the editor is not going to turn it down for that reason. If it was turned down, it's because the editor didn't want it (for whatever reason).

If the editor gives you a house style to work to, follow it. If not, use a sensible and fairly plain format. It's your writing the editor is interested in, not your skill in making fancy Word documents. (In fact, making fancy Word documents is skill that has no market value whatsoever - designers work in Quark or InDesign, and no one makes a 'real' document in Word.) Making things look fancy is the designer's job - you're not the designer. The publisher has a designer. What it doesn't have is someone who can write decent copy. Do your job, and do it properly - leave other people's jobs for them to do!

How NOT to speak publisher - B is for bucket

2011-06-05T16:10:00.000+01:00

As some of you know, my Small BInt has been unwell for many months. I'm the sole breadwinner and the sole carer, and these two are incompatible in times of illness. I'm also now the educator in the midst of GCSEs, which stretches the time budget to breaking point. That's why there hasn't been much on here recently - sorry, patient readers.

How is this relevant? Well, it's relevant because none of us knows when someone else will need our time and love and emotional and creative energy, leaving little or none for work. And it's something worth thinking about if you want to be a professional writer (or, indeed, any type of freelance professional). How many months' money do you need in the bank for emergencies? How much will you tell your clients (publishers) if things start to go wrong? My answer to the first has always been £13,000 (after tax), which should last 6 months at a push, though I'm not sure how I arrived at this figure as the optimum. As for the second question - as little as you can get away with.

I have written before about telling publishers of your own health problems or difficulties, but those of your dependents are a rather different issue. It all seems even more out of control. If you're unwell yourself, you know how unwell you feel, what you might be able to - and how much information you are willing to share with the outside world. But when your child (or partner, or parent) is sick, you are dealing with someone else's feelings and privacy. It's very difficult. It's also very difficult because their sickness is so much more painful than your own, and the feelings of helplessness and despair are far more acute than if you are ill yourself.

I have shared very little of my Bint's illness with my publishers, and have only asked for any kind of concession from one client (who was extremely gracious and generous in giving it). Otherwise, I have turned work down or negotiated longer deadlines right at the start of the project. It's not their business, as long as I can continue to deliver work on time and up to standard, and I increase the likelihood of that by taking on very little. Of course, now I've blogged about it, they can all see it. But they also know I've delivered everything on time so there's no threat to them. And the GCSEs will be over soon, so the pressure will ease a little.

So B is for bucket (sick), and it's orange. And worn out. That's all you need to know. Other than that, yes I will deliver the MS, even if I'm up till 2am each night. And when she's better, I'll be working even harder to replenish that emergency fund.

Over there

2011-05-21T07:59:00.000+01:00

I'm blogging at the Other Place today - Awfully Big Blog Adventure - on writing for reluctant readers. Back here next week!

How to speak publisher - B is for BookScan

2011-05-19T09:05:00.000+01:00

Nielsen BookScan - words that can bring dread to the heart of an author. Or glee. BookScan is a data provider for the publishing industry. It collects sales figures for books from point-of-sale - so the number of books which are actually bought by people, rather than the number shipped to bookshops. It works across the industry, with sales figures from 31,500 bookshops tracked. Although some sales are not included (discount book clubs and supermarkets are key omissions), it has the best data available. Before BookScan, each publisher knew only its own sales. Bestseller lists and charts were compiled by sampling booksellers. Now the data are accurate and nearly universal. Publishers can see not only their own sales but their rivals' sales. It's all open. Unless you're an author...

Because, of course, Nielsen don't do this out of the goodness of their corporate hearts. They sell the information. Publishers pay to be able to see the figures, and figures are not available without payment. So you or I can't see the sales of our books or any competing books, but publishers can. If you propose a new book, the publisher can check how well similar books sell. If you approach a new publisher, they can see how well your last book sold. Which is fine if it sold really well, but if it didn't - perhaps because it was badly marketed, or a similar book by a more famous author came out a week earlier - they may not want to take a chance on your next book.

You used to be able pay to see sales figures for a single book, though today I can't find a link on the Nielsen site to do this - if anyone knows if you can still do it, please say in the comments. This may be OK, if irritating, if you've published one or two titles. But if you've published lots it's prohibitively expensive (it was about £10 per ISBN, I think). Personally, I think authors should have free access to their own sales figures. After all, it is data others are using to make decisions about us - whether to take our next book. Nielsen think this is commercial data - but for authors it is also personal data. Is it covered by data protection? Unlikely - it's probably classified as data about books, not data about authors. Do we have a right to see the data held about us, as we would if it were a credit rating? I think we should. (I've emailed Nielsen, but they haven't replied yet.) Perhaps it is something the Society of Authors could take up? If we had access to the data too, we could say in our next proposal 'my title xxx sold 80,000 copies'. Or we could shut up about it and choose a smaller publisher happier to accept more modest sales.

Shhhhh - work in progress

2011-05-13T21:09:00.000+01:00

Unpublished writers commonly ask 'how do I stop a publisher ripping off my idea if I send in an outline/story?' Of course, the answer is 'why would they?' Having ideas is the easy bit - writing the book is work. I have very, very occasionally heard of a publisher stealing an idea. On the whole, it's pointless (as well as unprofessional). They would still need to get someone to write the book, so if they like the idea, why not go with the person who is keen to write it? Unless they can't write for toffee, of course. But if you can't write for toffee, you're never going to get a publishing contract, so don't worry about it.

But that's rather a digression. What this is really about is how much you should say about a work in progress. Do you keep it a well-guarded secret in case people steal your idea? Or do you gossip about it endlessly? Most people who follow me on twitter (as @annerooney) know that I am writing a series of six vampire novels at the moment. Not many people know who the publisher is. I have leaked various plot details, but the very original premise of the series is not generally known. Writing a vampire series is hardly original. In fact, it's so unoriginal I feel I have to apologise for it constantly. But there are some things about this series that are very original, and those are the bits I don't leak - just in case.

I had to clear with the publisher that I would be talking about the series on twitter in advance of publication - in fact, while writing it. There's a sort of non-disclosure clause in the contract. I said I was going to talk about it on twitter and he didn't argue. The publisher is a laid-back sweetie and occasionally joins in the discussion on Facebook and twitter about the progress of #thosevampires (they have their own hashtag). But I would not make the central premise public at this point as that is risking not only my investment in the idea but the publisher's investment - and that's not fair. Plenty of people know that book 2 involves a nasty scene in Paris with a guillotine. But that's hardly enough to recreate the story - I'm sure everyone who reads that can come up with a completely different vampire story that involves a guillotine.

On the other hand, I'm currently playing around with three possible non-fiction proposals, trying to decide which to concentrate on - and I wouldn't discuss any of those on twitter until the contract's in the bag and the book quite well progressed. Whereas every fiction writer will do something completely different with the same details, the n-f books are entirely definable from the central idea. And although I like to think that my blend of experience and research skills is unique and no-one else would come up with quite the same book, I'm sure that given the basic idea many other writers could produce a very similar book. So about those potential books I can say nothing. Once I pick one, I can leak odd snippets of information and no-one will be able to guess the thread that links them. But until then, my lips are sealed.

I suppose the point is that it's fine to give away details of your work in progress as long as you don't give away enough of the central idea to risk compromising its originality. Maybe this is the grown-up version of 'will they steal my idea?' As soon as the publisher produces the catalogue, the central premise is there for all to see anyway. But by then, the books are in press and it's a bit late for someone else to start from scratch.

Small confession: I don't really know much about vampire novels, so my series is a bit out on a limb (but I didn't know that until I'd nearly finished book 2, so we're stuck with its bizarreness now). There - ignorance about how to write a vampire novel is the secret. Any help?
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How to speak publisher - B is for Bung

2011-05-10T09:13:00.000+01:00

Ever been tempted to buy a book because the bookshop labels it a 'staff choice' or 'one of our favourites'? Because it's in a three-for-two deal or some other promotion? As many people now know, these are not always 'real' staff favourites. The paid-for plugging of a book in a bookstore is a bung. A bogof, incidentally, is a type of bung - it's a 'buy one get one free' offer.

The iniquitous bung system was exposed in 2001 in an article in the Spectator. At that time, W.H.Smith was charging £10,000 to label a book a 'recommended read' and Amazon wanted £6,000 to call a title 'Book of the Month'. The quality of the book was pretty much immaterial - the booksellers who endorsed the books had often not even read them.

Although Waterstone's says that today's staff recommendations are genuine endorsements, it is still well known that the books on special offer in many bookshops, or on the tables at the front of the shop and so on, are there because the publisher has paid for them to be there.

Does it matter? OK, we can grumble about unfairness to authors - 'my book is not selling because it wasn't vigorously promoted'. More worrying is the suggestion to book-buyers that any particular book is really good, that it has been chosen by the bookseller for special promotion on the basis of its content. That, surely, is abusing the book-buyer's trust? But this post is not about the ethics of bookselling, it's about how to speak publisher. Now you know what a bung is - decide for yourself whether or not it is honest.

How to speak publisher - B is for Boring bits

2011-05-04T08:05:00.000+01:00

Not specifically publisher speak, so this is a bit of rogue entry. 'Boring bits' is not jargon for anything - it means the bits of your book that are boring in plain, ordinary English.

Some bits of a book are boring to write. On the whole, they are also boring to read. The obvious solution is not to write them so no one will have to read them. Is that a realistic ambition? Let's step back. What counts as boring?

Personally, I would always skip the Elvish claptrap and the doggerel verses in Lord of the Rings (LotR is not my preferred reading anyway, but I read it aloud to Big Bint over a period of 18 months). These are definitely boring bits. I skip some of the war in War and Peace. And I skip anything that goes into detail about vehicles or other mechanical stuff in anything - just not interested. But of course there are people who really like reading about war and vehicles, and possibly even Elvish claptrap, so they would think I'm skipping the best bits. No request for Tolstoy or Tolkien to miss these out - they're just not to my taste. It's my fault as a reader if I pick books I'm not interested in; that's not the same as the book being boring or having boring bits per se.

But in other books there are boring bits that anyone would find boring. In a non-fiction book, it might be setting out the basic rather dull info you need in order to understand the really exciting bit that will only make sense if it's built on a solid foundation. In a story/novel, you might need to move characters plausibly from one place to another, kick-start a train of events that will lead to a crisis, or add some form of explanation so that readers continue to believe in what's happening.

Here's an example. I currently have to get my heroine, a vampire who models for Jack Wills, from her home with her neurotic, controlling mother to a photo-shoot during which she will be guillotined by a rival during a mock-up of the French Revolution. That is not, I think, a boring premise for an episode. But she has to be invited to the shoot, persuade her mother to let her go, get there, do some non-threatening photos and so on before the exciting bit can happen. How long will the reader stay with me? I'm already thinking 'I don't want to write this bit, it's boring'.

Of course, as the writer you can skip ahead and write the exciting bit first, but how to stop the reader skipping ahead? There are conflicting demands here: the integrity and plausibility of the story depend on setting up the incident, but the readers need to be drawn through the less exciting parts or they won't even get to the 'good bit'. The answer, of course, is to stop the boring bits being boring. To do this, you need to insert lots of micro-narrative elements. In this example, it could be an argument with the mother in which it looks as though the girl won't get to the shoot. We have to want her to go, be on her side and keep reading. And I have to sneak info into this argument that moves the story forwards. In a non-fiction book, it requires showing why or how the foundation information is interesting. And that means creating wonder - an underrated commodity that needs a post of its own.

If your publisher thinks your book has boring bits, they will (if you're lucky) ask you to rewrite to remove them. What they really mean is remove the boring, not necessarily remove the bits - though you do need to check that the bits are actually essential and not just an indulgence (because you really like describing horses, for example). If you're unlucky, they'll just reject the book. It all depends on the ratio of boring:exciting.

If boring has an interest level of 0 and crisis has an interest level of 100, your book (of any type) must have no bits with a score of 0 and the rest going in a series of peaks with at least one getting to 100. Too intense for too long and it loses impact, but too long a stretch without anything exciting happening and it loses readers. The exact balance depends on the type of book/readers, but as a general rule if you find it boring to write, readers will find it boring to read. Don't go there. Add some excitement.

I might make an exception to that rule about vehicles - a tumbril can be exciting. When you think it's a two-wheeled cart, it doesn't look very interesting but once you know it's carrying a disgraced aristocrat to the guillotine, it gets a whole lot more engaging. Fill your writing with well-loaded tumbrils and expunge the carts.

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How to speak publisher - B is for Book

2011-04-27T07:27:00.000+01:00

'Then you should say what you mean,' the March Hare went on.

'I do,' Alice hastily replied; 'at least--at least I mean what I say--that's the same thing, you know.'

'Not the same thing a bit!' said the Hatter...

You might think 'book' is a rather basic term to include here. But not in publisher-speak. In fact, not in big-wide-world-speak, either.

If you tell someone you are writing a book, they will assume you mean a novel - and probably a novel for adults. That is not the definition of a book, but is a category of book. A book may also be intended for people of other ages, from babies to teenagers. It may be a bunch of lies (fiction) or all true (a non-fiction book). It may be a picture book, an academic text book, a school book, a book of jokes or puzzles or anecdotes, an anthology, a biography, an autobiography, a how-to book, a dictionary, a pop-up book, a coffee-table book, a colouring book.... there are lots of possibilities.

In publisher-speak a book may be any of these and, depending on the rights the publisher wishes to buy or grab, a CD, a Kindle book, a phone app, and the basis of a film, TV series, opera, theme park, set of merchandising or group of plushie toys. OK, the last don't count as the book, but you might find you've lost those when you thought you were selling a book.

The thing to look out for is the bit in the first paragraph where they define your book as 'the Work', thus making the IP (intellectual property) and the paperback or hardback book you are imagining one and the same thing. What do you mean by book? The physical object or the content? The problem is that 'book' is used in both senses and rarely does anyone specify which they mean. B is for Book should go alongside A is for Ambiguity.

How to speak publisher - B is for Blurb

2011-04-22T08:44:00.001+01:00

The blurb (in the UK) is the bit on the back cover of a book, or sometimes the jacketflap if your book is fancy enough to have a jacket, that says how wonderful it is. The blurb tells prospective readers a bit about the book and its job is to entice them into buying/reading the book, so it has to work hard, and be just right - like Baby Bear's porridge. In fact, the Baby Bear's Porridge model of writing is the key to the whole thing. Your book must be not too long and not too short, not too experimental and not to too boring... it must be 'just right' in all regards. The problem is, 'just right' depends on which bear is eating the porridge. Writing - and publishing - is the art of assessing the bear as it approaches, and plonking the right bowl of porridge on the table. But I digress.

The blurb must appeal to the target reader, so a literary novel will usually have a serious, measured blurb that bigs up the themes and intellectual context of the book:

Anna Karenin is a tale of love, anguish and despair set against the backdrop of the constraints of nineteenth-century Russian society as it waltzes inexorably towards disaster. Stifled in her marriage and bored by all her restricted life has to offer, Anna forms a passionate and ultimately tragic liaison with Count Vronsky - but her temporary fulfilment comes at the cost of ostracism, the loss of her children and everything dear to her.

A mass-market or genre novel will have a shorter blurb that plays to what the reader is expecting, and bigs up the plot and character stereotypes. It may overdose on rhetorical questions in the hope of creating an aura of suspense and excitement. If Anna Karenin were marketed as a romantic novel, it might have a blurb like this:

Bored by her adequate but dull husband, Anna is bowled over by the handsome, dangerous Count Vronsky. Throwing caution to the winds, she embarks on a whirlwind affair that brings the passion and adventure she craves. But how long can Anna live under the condemning glare of Russian society? Will love conquer all, or will the price be too high for the couple?

For a children's book, the blurb may be designed to appeal to gate-keepers (parents, teachers, librarians) rather than children, depending on the title. If it is to appeal to children, it will be short and may be humorous. You should have the chance to write, or at least approve, the blurb.

The blurb might include a 'puff' - a quote from another writer, a reviewer or a celebrity saying how great your book is. You or the publisher might ask a chosen more-famous-than-you person to read an advance copy and give you a puff. If the book is reprinted, the publisher might take choice quotes from reviews. If you're given or come across a comment you want the publishers to use, pass it on. (Actually, this is a matter of do as I say and not as I do. Personally, I don't pass on comments which were made off the record - in private conversation or emails. This is probably very stupid, and means I've missed out on puffs from some very senior figures, but it seems to me that it's dishonest, or at best disingenuous. Make your own choices.)

The blurb might include a paragraph of author biog:

Leo Tolstoy is an exciting new voice from Moscow. His writing is incisive and precise, giving a devastating critique of aristocratic Russian life. Anna Karenin is his first novel.

If the blurb has a biographical element, you should certainly have control of this. If the publishers use the last biog you sent them, it may well be out of date. If you filled in an author-info sheet, this will probably be used as the basis of the blurb (and catalogue copy), so bear that in mind when you fill in the sheet.

The publishers will want to mention your previous books, any qualifications or relevant experience that excuse your having written the book (so you've been a polar explorer if your novel is set in the Arctic, or you are a surgeon if your book is a neurosurgery text book). They will want to mention any awards or shortlistings as long as they are important enough. They won't want to mention that you won the short story competition in the Shepreth Evening News or won the Gower Beach award for a first poem. (Don't look for entry forms, these don't exist.) They certainly don't want to mention that you self-published your first six novels (unless these then became mainstream successes). If they can't think of anything else to say they will say you are an exciting new voice and this is your first novel, or some such other generic gumph. They want to make you sound interesting. If you are not interesting, that makes the job harder. So try to live an interesting life.

I hate writing blurbs. Summing up the book you've spent months writing in one or two paragraphs is a horrid task. But it's better to tackle it than let an Emma who hasn't read the books write the blurb. (All publishing bints are called Emma if they are not called Rebecca; bint is not a pejorative term in StroppyAuthorSpeak - my daughters are widely know as Big Bint and Small Bint.) I've just looked at some of my blurbs (written by Emmas) and realise I need to follow my own advice - one switches from second to third person in a single sentence. Aaaargh. Grounds for a reprint? Or just time to crawl under a stone? I can write, people, honestly I can... Please buy the book - the writing inside is much better.

Thanks to Mary Hoffman for pointing at that what we call a puff in the UK is 'blurb' in the US. Does anyone know the American word for what we call the blurb, please?
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No name, no hashtag

2011-04-20T08:58:00.001+01:00

As some of you know already, I'm spending the summer working on a series of vampire stories. Hooray! Who says publishers aren't commissioning vampire stories any more? These vampires have their own USP, which I'm not going to tell you just now. The vampires will leak all over twitter, of course, and that's my current problem.

Talking about your work in progress on twitter is natural gossip with friends, but it also alerts readers to what's coming and in that capacity it's publicity. While I was writing Story of Physics, I did lots of tweets about fascinating physics facts and anecdotes I came across as I did the research. (Any of you who think 'fascinating physics fact' is a contradiction in terms need to read the book when it comes out in July.) That was easy enough as the book had a title and the title became the hashtag. The vampires, on the other hand, don't have a series name or any of the six titles yet. The publisher wants the titles in time to put in the catalogue late in the summer. I didn't realise I needed the series name, but I do - without a name, there's no hashtag and without a hashtag no one (including me) can keep track of what the vampires are up to in the twitterverse.

For the time being, they will go by the hashtag #thosevampires, which sets them up for the awkward transfer of name and hashtag later. But better a name-change than anonymity, and even vampires need to be on twitter.
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How to speak publisher - B is for Blog tour

2011-04-13T08:31:00.000+01:00

Coming soon to this blog.... Mary Hoffman talking about her new novel David, published in July.

That's a blog tour in action.

Publishers used to pay for (some of) their authors to go on book tours. In these straitened times, book tours are out except for the very big names, and many writers instead do a blog tour. It's free, it's easy, you can do it from home; you don't sit for hours in a bookshop waiting to sign books people don't want to buy, your luggage doesn't get lost and you don't spend sleepless nights in dingy hotels. What's not to like?

A blog tour is simply a series of guest posts on other people's blogs. The blogs should be relevant, of course. If you've written a young adult dystopic novel, you won't want to guest on a blog about sparkly mermaid stories (unless the initial catastrophe in your novel involves sparkly mermaids, I suppose). Your post should be relevant to the blog in some way, too. If the blog is about getting published, maybe post about how you first got published, or the genesis of the new book, for example.

The idea of a blog tour is to introduce your writing to new readers, so try to think outside the usual round of blogs followed by the same people - mix and match. Review blogs are obviously a good idea, but what about teachers' blogs, or blogs related to the subject of your book? If you've written a story about hockey players or Vikings (or hockey-playing Vikings), perhaps find blogs about those and ask if you can do a guest post on researching and writing about the topic.

A blog tour has a planned itinerary - the list of blogs you will visit - and often a banner or badge the host blogger puts on their blog. The banner or itinerary can link to other blogs in the tour. This promotes your other posts and also promotes the host blog.

Many authors organise their own blog tours, as they're often a lot more tech savvy than their editors and publicists. The author is usually better placed to know which blogs will make the best venues, too. Unless your publicist (if you have one) is particularly on-the-ball, you might just like to tell them what you're doing so that they can publicise it through the usual channels, but get on with it yourself. If you aren't up to the image processing needed to make a banner, you could ask the publisher to do that. Or ask me. Hmm. I could set up a blog-tour banner business now there's no money in writing....
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How to speak publisher - B is for Black plate

2011-03-30T11:32:00.001+01:00

The black plate is not what you eat your dinner from if you are either super-stylish or have been naughty. It's all to do with printing. Yes, you do need to know about printing, even if it does all happen in some mysterious way in India, China or eastern Europe.

If you never write picture books or any others that have any colour in, you don't really need to read this. If your books are novels, printed entirely in black, you're let off - you can go now. Otherwise...

A colour book is printed using four colours of ink: cyan, magenta, yellow and black (key), which gives us the letters CMYK. Each colour is separately printed from a printing plate with the parts of the page image that will be in that colour. Extra colours are made by overprinting the four basic colours in different proportions. When you did art at school you learned that all colours can be made from the primary colours red, yellow and blue, didn't you? Well, cyan is blueish and magenta is reddish, but this is about speaking publisher, it's not about optics so you'll just have to take my word for it that it works.

It's expensive to print a page four times (one for each colour). When a publisher produces a coedition of your book in a foreign language, they obviously need to reprint all the text, but they don't generally change the pictures. This means they only need to reprint the black bits - as long as all the text is black. They can print any number of copies of the book using the cyan, magenta and yellow inks and have a pile of pages with no text but lots of pictures. They can then pick a batch of these pages and print the text in black in English. And they can pick another batch and print the text in black in French, or German, or Spanish or any other language. But they can only do this if ALL the text is on the black plate - the printing plate used to produce the black image. (If you want to know more about plates you'll have to wait until we get to O is for Offset litho - sorry.)

This is why you can't have pictures with coloured text in, or (usually) use colour to make bits of the text stand out. And if your book uses photos, it's why the publisher won't be keen to use photos that include text (like posters) or screenshots. Text in photos won't be translated with the text of the book, and will be intrusive in coeditions. So - to look professional, don't ask for text in colour and don't include text in illustrations which would need to be redrawn for a coedition.
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How to speak publisher - B is for bind-up

2011-03-18T09:29:00.000Z

A bind-up, though it sounds like some interesting minor S&M practice, is a bundling of several books into a single binding. If you have published several books in a series or on a similar theme, and some time has passed and sales are starting to flag, the publisher might propose a bind-up. Go for it! All the little books will be gathered together and forced to be friends with each other in a single volume. There will probably be a new cover design, the books will be given a new, updated look, and the aim will be to attract new readers who were possibly not even born at the time the originals were published. Remember - foetuses don't read. The picture shows the bind-up of Kath Langrish's hugely successful Troll trilogy, revised and reissued in a single volume, (March 2011).

A bind-up is a way of making extra money out of a bunch of books that have slipped from view. Bookshops don't often stock many books that have been around for a few years, unless they are classics, steady sellers, or by major figures who always attract a lot of readers. Don't expect to see a bunch of Jacqueline Wilson novels appearing in a bind-up, for instance - they are always in stock and sell anyway - though I think there has been a Tracy Beaker bind-up.... A bind-up is money for old rope. You don't have to do much, and the publisher doesn't have to invest much, and it's a lot less aggro than writing and publishing a new book.

And here's the opposite of a bind-up.... Lucy Coats has extracted 12 slim volumes from her Atticus the Storyteller, each dealing with a separate Greek myth. The slim volumes have bright, colourful covers, they are easier to carry around and hold in small hands than the original and are less daunting to unconfident readers.

So bind-up or bind-down, there is potential for rebadging books and gathering new readers either way.

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World Book Night - good or bad?

2011-02-27T12:01:00.001Z

World Book Night is almost upon us. In case it's escaped your notice, 20,000 people have been recruited to give away a million books (48 copies each of 25 titles). It's the idea of Jamie Byng of Canongate books, supported and lauded by the likes of the BBC and various publishing industry bodies. It's been dissed as well as welcomed.

What are the arguments in favour and against?

In favour: it gives publicity to books; it will boost reading and that must be good for everyone in publishing and for libraries; it's a nice night out.

Against: it gives people the idea that books are of no value as they are given away; it cheats bookshops and authors of income; it's just a publicity binge for Byng.

Let's look at the 'against's first:

It gives people the idea that books are of no value as they are given away

'If you’re a punter and there is a charity shop full of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie that were given away aren’t you going to wonder why Muriel Spark’s other books are being sold at £8.99 in the bookshop up the road?' Bookseller Vanessa Robertson on State of Independents.

Well, no. If I go into Oxfam and there is a jumper from M&S for £5, I am not going to be surprised that other jumpers that are actually in M&S are £20 - I'm not that stupid. We are talking about people who can read, remember.

People are used to paying for things sometimes and getting them free at other times. Books are free in libraries and, hey, we approve of libraries. Films are free on TV, or you can pay for a DVD (or video on demand) so that you can choose the film you want at the time you want to watch it. As a member of the public, you can't choose which book you get on WBN, just as you can't ask ITV to broadcast the latest James Bond movie tomorrow because you fancy watching it. Public firework displays are often free, and others cost - people go to both. And they buy fireworks. Condoms are often given away, yet there's huge money in selling condoms. This is not a complicated model for the evolved human to grasp. We can deal with it. Don't be so patronising. (Actually, publishers are very big on giving away all kinds of crud - go to the London Book Fair and see how many unnecessary tote bags you can collect, how many glasses of wine you can drink, how many sweets and pens and stupid little fluffy blobs you can pick up.)

If you go into an expensive food shop, you can get free samples of things you're not sure about trying. Walk into Hotel Chocolat. Ten to one there's a bint with a tray of free chocolates. Why? To encourage you to try it. In fact, it is ONLY things of some value that are worth giving away.

It cheats bookshops and authors of income

'The authors whose books have been chosen are superstars, but most authors have under £7,000 average annual earnings and some major retailers are treating their books like loss leaders.'

Bookseller Andrew Bentley-Steed, The Guardian

I am a writer and depend on my income from writing. I am not a superstar (though I earn a good deal more than £7,000), but I'm not fussed about any possible loss of income. If a person was going to spend £9 on a book, they still have £9 if they get a free book, and so they can buy another book. It's possible to read more than one book in a lifetime. Or even a week. I know, I know... the publicity budget is being wasted on this when it could go on promoting the books of mid-list authors (like me). But it wouldn't, would it? It would go on fluffy blobs and launch parties for high-profile authors, just like it does now.

I have books that are discounted - we all do. But sour grapes about other people who earn more just makes you look mean, it doesn't sell your books. In fact, those who stand to lose most from this are probably the distributors. I haven't heard any complaints from them. If all the books were from a single writer who got a 5% royalty on cover price, they would get £50,000. In fact, it won't be anywhere near that much. It's not much spread amongst all the writers in the country. They can have my £1 or £2 on this experiment. Is the real grumble from writers that someone is introduced to a book by (say) Sarah Waters and may then buy more books by her rather than perhaps buy books by A.N.Other writer? Free publicity for Sarah Waters. Let's all be resentful. Well, no, actually I don't want to be resentful. Good for her. We don't resent writers whose works are set GCSE texts, do we? Or maybe I just haven't caught up with all the things I'm supposed to resent...

It's a publicity binge for Byng

It probably is. But it was his idea. People have an idea, they get publicity. That's how the world works. So what? We're smart enough to see through it, and the public has never heard of Byng and doesn't give a damn who he is.

And now the arguments for:

It gives publicity to books
There has been a lot of publicity. But that is strictly speaking publicity for the event rather than for books and reading - I haven't seen any encouragement to continue reading after finishing your free book. Why are the books not being printed with an extra page of 'If you like this, you may also like...' recommendations? Why are all bookshops not stocking up on other books by the featured authors and making big displays of them? Why are libraries not doing the same? Is it because they are too busy whingeing? This is a publicity opportunity wasted, not an example of great publicity for books. (I suppose they might still do that before Saturday...)

It will boost reading and that must be good for everyone in publishing and for libraries

'Giving away a million free books sounds like a lot, but in the context of the 250m we sell across the trade each year, it's absolutely nothing. I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation and it works out at just three or four books for each independent bookshop. I don't think there's any independent that wouldn't give away that number if it encourages book-lovers.'

Bookseller Nic Bottomley, The Guardian

Well, it might if there were appropriate publicity (see above). The big problem is whether the books will go to people who might not otherwise read or whether they will just go to middle-class readers who are already buying books (most likely). How patronising is it to seek out someone you think unlikely to be reading and give them a book? How likely are you to be punched? Of course, giving books to people with the money to buy more books is much more effective as a marketing strategy than giving them to people with no disposable income. So Byng and the booksellers will probably be happier if we give our copies away outside Waitrose than in the homeless shelter.

There are many claims that it's not going to work. Vanessa again:

'A [projected] surge [in book-buying] which is unproven, unresearched and [ungrammatical bit follows, to the effect that it's based on Byng's gut instinct]... I’m not a fan of market research ... but surely before the booktrade gives away £9 million of stock there should have been some sort of research? I’m finding it hard to see how the instincts of Jamie’s intestines should be grounds for this sort of giveaway.'

Hello? It's an experiment - sometimes they work, and sometimes they don't. Other things aren't working to pull publishing out of the doldrums, so why not try something innovative?

It's a nice night out

Depending on how you plan to give/receive your books, it could well be. Some people are using it to promote themselves and their own causes, making a splash and an event of it. It will be interesting to see how many of the books actually do get given away, though. Some people might just find it all too much aggro in the end. How many will even be picked up from their delivery points? Will we ever know?

So - good or bad? Personally, I think it's a flawed plan but worth a try. It's a nice thing, to get a free book. It's a way of saying 'Books are great, look! Read this book I like!' We are mired in recession, it's still winter, we're miserable and it's a cheerful thing to do. It might not do any good, but I don't honestly think it's going to do any great harm. Grudging and grumbling are not nice ways to spend your time. Loosen up and make someone smile. There are some words for all this: generosity, philanthropy, hope, optimism, goodwill, enthusiasm for books. Whatever Byng's motives in setting it up, those are mine in giving away books on Saturday. I won't be able to do what I had originally planned (personal, family reasons) but I will still give the books away, and I hope everyone who gets one will read it, and enjoy it, and read one of the other books I will recommend on my personal sheet of 'if you liked this, you might also like...' recommendations that I will slip in.

Happy giving, happy reading or happy grouching, everyone.

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A small tale of twitter

2011-02-19T07:34:00.001Z

Yesterday, for complex domestic reasons, I found myself on a train to London with no book to read. Luckily I had a notebook, so didn't have to resort to running amok in the carriage for amusement, but I didn't want to face the journey home bookless. There wouldn't be much time as I was getting to King's Cross at 17:06 and had to be at the Coliseum at 17:30, but reckoned I could just about rush into Foyles at St Pancras and buy a book as long as I knew exactly what I was looking for and where to find it. I'd seen the trailer for Small Blue Thing linked from Nosy Crow's website and thought I'd read that, but couldn't remember who wrote it (sorry, Sue!). So I tweeted Kate at NosyCrow. I had these replies:

From @NosyCrow:
@annerooney Small Blue Thing written by S C Ransom (@scransom). Hope you find it.

From Foyles:
@annerooney S. C. Ransom - We've got stock in all our shops apart from One New Change.

From @scransom:
@annerooney Hi Anne, I hope @nosycrow got back to you in time! Small Blue Thing is my novel. I hope you managed to find it OK.

This is my original tweet:
@Nosycrow Who wrote small blue thing? want to buy in foyles but will have to dash in and out so need to know where to look

So twitter and websites/trailers sell books :-)

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Ten techy, publishing-y things I didn't do a decade ago

2011-02-15T07:34:00.000Z

I've not been here - apologies. It's not you, it's me. My small bint is unwell and life is chaos. I'm not even sending out invoices, so life will be poverty-hobbled as well as chaotic soon.

Here is some light relief because I'm not thinking about speaking publisher or any of that.

Ten techy, publishing-y things I have done in the last five years that I couldn't or wouldn't have done a decade ago:

1. Write a picture book text on my phone
2. Write part of a book on my phone and submit it to an editor as text messages from Eurostar
3. Check what time it is by typing 'what time is it' into Google [OK, that's more lazy than anything to do with publishing - that's an extra!]
4. Pitch to a publisher on twitter
5. Pitch to a publisher on Facebook
6. Argue about ebook and app rights
7. Write a proposal for a picture book app
8. Work on a book trailer for YouTube
9. Refuse to submit hard copy of a manuscript
10. Send a PDF along with the Word document of a manuscript to show which special characters and symbols are used where
11. [because 3 was a cheat] Read a book on my phone/iPad.

Which things do you do now that you didn't do a decade ago? Please tell me!

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How to speak publisher - B is for Bad debt

2011-01-25T06:42:00.000Z

OK, this is not a phrase your publisher will use to you but one you may, sooner or later, use to your publisher. As in - 'I am going to take you to the small claims court before writing this off as a bad debt.' I hope not, but it gets increasingly likely as the financial situation worsens or stays the same, especially if you work with small publishers.

A bad debt is a debt you have decided is never going to be paid. You have tried all the means you can think of to reclaim the money your publisher owes you and nothing has worked. You have sent an invoice, you have sent a statement, and another statement [tick]. You have emailed them politely, you have emailed them less politely [tick]. You may have phoned them [no tick: I don't phone - there's no record you ever spoke to anyone so they can deny anything they agreed]. You may have cursed them with plagues of boils and cockroaches [tick]. You may have threatened them with court action [tick]. You may have actually taken them to court [tick - though not in current case, yet]. And you may have given up.

At the point where you give up, they become a bad debt. You don't tell them that - then there would be no chance of getting the money. And who knows, if things improve for them they may eventually pay you as most publishers are honest and decent but some are unlucky or inefficient.

Once you have decided it's a bad debt, you can put it in your accounts as such. If you don't, you will have to pay income tax on the money even though you aren't going to get it. This applies to the UK: when you submit your tax return, the income you declare for your freelance earnings from writing (and anything else you do) is calculated by adding up the value of the invoices you've sent out, minus the expenses you're claiming. It's not calculated on the money that's actually come in. You need to enter the bad debt under 'bad debt provision' and exclude it from your figure for the year. If you sent out the invoice in the previous tax year, you may have already paid tax on it - but you can still reclaim it in the next tax year. If you're not sure what to do, phone the tax office. If you ever do get the money, you'll have to pay the tax, of course.

*If you're a member of the Society of Authors, which you should be, they will help you to chase late payments.
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How to speak publisher - B is for Bleed

2011-01-19T06:44:00.000Z

While we're on the not-a-vampire trend we may as well do bleed, which also sounds vampiric but is not.

Bleed is what allows pictures to go right to the edge of the page - the picture 'bleeds' off the page, continuing into the paper that is trimmed off when making the physical pages. If the picture were positioned so that it went just up to the edge of the page and no further, it would rarely come out quite right. It requires too much precision, and if the page trimming were out by even a fraction of a millimetre, you'd see - and be irritated by - a tiny sliver of white paper at the outside edge of the picture.

The area around the actual page (trim area) into which the picture bleeds is the bleed margin. The bleed margin is typically about 3-5mm each side. When you see your page proofs, they will have crop marks in the corners. The pages will be cut to these crop marks. If you draw a line between the crop marks, you will see that some of the colour printing (if there is any) may fall outside the lines you've drawn. This excluded border is the bleed margin.

This really only matters to you if you are an illustrator. If you write only novels that have no illustrations, you'll only be able to spot the bleed margin on the proof of the cover and none of this will have mattered very much to you... But it's useful to know the term so that you don't look like an unprofessional ignoramus if your publisher mentions it.

If you're an illustrator, and the illustrations will bleed at one more edges of the page, you need to make sure everything important happens in the part of the picture that will be used - so not in the bleed margins. Only background should fall into the bleed margin, not a character's foot, or the end of their cape, or the monster's tentacles. Tentacles bleed if cut off, remember.

How to speak publisher - B is for Blad

2011-01-12T08:54:00.000Z

No, it's not a vampire. A blad is a dummy or partial book produced for publicity purposes ahead of publication. Blad = Book Layout And Design. Typically, it has the front and back cover and a sample of inside pages. It's most useful for illustrated non-fiction as it can give buyers (industry buyers, distributors, foreign rights dudes) a good idea of what the book will be like. It may be stapled or spiral bound. The blad can be produced before the book has been completely written, but then there is an obligation to deliver the whole book in the style and design used in the blads.

Blads are, I suspect, an irritation to editors. Although it focuses the mind on getting the design sorted, the blad can become a project in its own right and use time and resources that should be devoted to getting the book finished and produced. Maybe editors don't think like that - but as a writer, I've sometimes had to put the book on hold in order to work on the blad, which somehow appears unannounced in the schedule demanding immediate attention. On the other hand, an attractive blad makes me enthusiastic about finishing the book, so it has its uses even for the writer. Seeing the blad is a little trial run for the thrill of seeing the book, and a useful spur when the going gets tough, or just dreary.

Not all books get a blad, and not all publishers use the word 'blad' even if they produce one. I rarely see blads for my books these days, which might mean there aren't any or it might mean I just don't see them. If a book is one of a series, there's likely to a blad for one title and just AIs (advance information sheets) for the other titles. Oops, I don't think we had an 'A' entry for AIs. Will add one!

The best blads I've had were produced by Dorling Kindersley. They were so luscious I felt we didn't really need to bother with the book. (But we did.)

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How to speak publisher - B is for Bologna

2011-01-07T14:40:00.000Z

Sorry there was such a long Christmas break. It wasn't laziness, or even shopping, it was deadline crisis. The deadline was 4 Jan, which is a really Christmas-slaying deadline, and the book included a lot of quantum mechanics, which is a pretty Christmas-slaying topic. I was still editing at 10pm on the plane back from Africa on 3 Jan. Ah yes, a little bit of skiving in Africa.... And a little bit of research, but not for the same book.

But back to work.

Bologna is a delightful old city in Italy, but as far as publishers are concerned, Bologna is an event, a state of mind and a place that contains (a) their hotel (b) the conference halls where the International Children's Book Fair takes place each spring (c) the bars on Via Independenza where large quantities of gin can be consumed at low prices and (d) restaurants that are always full.

Bologna is also a euphemism or an excuse. It can mean 'I can't be arsed to look at your book' or 'I am too busy to talk to you' or it can mean 'please go away and forget you ever sent me that book'. You will find it used in phrases such as 'In the run-up to Bologna...', and 'When I get back from Bologna...', and 'Since Bologna...' The 'run-up to Bologna' starts in mid-November, as soon as the dust from Frankfurt is off the editor's feet. 'Since Bologna' lasts until June when the run-up to Frankfurt starts. I heard 'there's no time before Bologna' at a publisher's Christmas party last December. I think that's a record. (Bologna 2011 is in late March - three and a half months after the Christmas party.)

The Bologna International Children's Book Fair brings together publishers of children's books from around the world. There are so many that they lie 'thick as leaves that strow the brooks in Valambrosa'. Oh, no - sorry - that's the demons in Hell, isn't it? There are so many that they pack several halls and it's impossible to work round them all in a day. There is an illustrator's wall, where aspirant and established illustrators showcase their work, and there are publishers' stands (organised into the different halls by country) that stretch away to infinity.

Bologna is primarily for rights selling - that is, publishers buying and selling foreign rights to books already in print or in the process of being published. Don't go there as a writer hoping to hawk your unsold books around a bunch of publishers - it's not going to happen. If you really, really want to see a publisher at Bologna (perhaps because you don't live in the same country as they do) make an appointment before you go. If you just turn up on the stand, you're likely to get short shrift. There may not even be any editorial staff there, as some publishers consider editorial staff a bit of a liability and best left behind to push commas around and strop at authors. (During Bologna, editors left behind say 'I can't do anything about that, as everyone is in Bologna.')

I used to go to Bologna every other year. Then it moved to a time I couldn't manage (in school term time) and I haven't been since. I used to go and talk to publishers I already worked with. Actually, I went to drink copious quantities of gin and prosecco with publishers I already worked with. And to walk around and around the city looking for a restaurant that was not already full of publishing types.

Bologna is very depressing, in my experience. There are two outcomes:

1. Oh God, look at all these wonderful books, why does the world need any more? I'd better think of another job.

2. Oh God, look at all these terribly boring books, they're all the same. Is no-one publishing anything interesting any more? I'd better think of another job.

Still, if you want to go, here are some tips:

There is no such thing as a good flight to Bologna. I used to get the train from Venice. It's a nice train ride, and you can stay in Venice for a few days before/after.
Book early - especially hotels. Although it's easier to find a publisher to sleep with than to publish your books, you can't guarantee you will find one the night you need him/her and you don't want to be left with nowhere at all.
There is usually a long queue for the loos - don't wait until you are desperate.
There are never enough cafes/tables; take a picnic.
Don't think you can claim to be Italian and stand in the Italian-only queue to get in (it's cheaper). Unless you are fluent and have no accent (ie you are actually Italian), they rumble you. You do your little bit in Italian, they look you in the eye and say 'You're not really Italian, are you?'
It always rains; take an umbrella.
The bus back to Bologna railway station at the end of the day is very busy. Leave a bit early if you don't want to queue for ages. In the rain. Without the umbrella you forgot.
If you intend to eat out in the evening, book a table.
Take a map of the city. The back streets are dark and when you are completely gin-fuddled at midnight it can be hard to find your way back to your hotel.
Don't forget you can claim your trip to Bologna back against tax. Keep all your receipts.

I might go to Bologna this year, if I can get my Big Bint to look after my Small Bint for a few days. So if you're going, drop me a line and we can drink prosecco or gin in a bar on Independenza.

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How to speak publisher - A is for Amends

2010-12-28T17:50:00.000Z

Making amends is what we do when we've done something wrong, such as forget a partner's birthday, throw away our child's favourite broken object or sulk all through a dinner date. Making amends to a book is the same - you screwed up first time round, now you fix it. Amends is publisher-speak for amendments, which we usually think of as corrections. The connotations of 'making amends', though, gives the short form considerable emotional potency. Luckily, the phrase is usually 'doing amends'. You may see them called 'author corrections', too.

Amends are not the same as edits. They are generally a non-fiction phenomenon, for in non-fiction things can actually be wrong. In fiction, there are inconsistencies, implausible bits, lapses in continuity, but it's hard actually to be wrong as it's all a bunch of lies anyway. Non-fiction is not supposed to be a bunch of lies. Strangely, the term is extended to mean other editorial matters besies correcting errors of fact. Amends can included restructuring chapters, cutting material the editor doesn't like or adding material the editor would like if it were there. Making amends is your penance for being a less-than-perfect writer. Don't argue, just do it.

It doesn't start with A... a plea for the EMA

2010-12-10T10:01:00.000Z

This is not very publishingy, and it's entirely a UK-oriented post. Sorry! Back to authorly strops soon ;-)

There has - rightly - been a lot of fuss about the increase in student fees. But there has been a lot less about the abolition of the EMA - Education Maintenance Allowance. This pays £30 a week to students from poor backgrounds who want to stay on at sixth form. If you live in a city, where the sixth form college is within striking distance from your home, this might seem (as some have called it) bribing kids to stay in education. It's not. It's an essential life-line for kids who otherwise couldn't afford to stay on. For a student who lives in a more rural area, where there isn't a sixth form within cycling distance, the EMA is a passport to A levels and perhaps (if they still dare go) to university. It pays the bus fare or the train fare without which the student couldn't get to college (there is no free transport after year 11, and no half fares).

My younger daughter will be starting sixth form in September. She has friends who are already in sixth form who depend on the EMA. She has a friend who is in her year, who lives out in the fens, who won't be able to afford the £25 a week it will cost her to get into the city to attend sixth form. So no A levels, then. Because she's poor. My daughter won't get/need EMA but even here, in a relatively wealthy area, she can name people who will be forced to leave education just because they are poor. And what? Live on benefit? How is that an improvement, even for the bean-counters?

These kids are our readers. They are the same kids who depend on libraries because they can't buy many books. They are the generation we have devoted our working lives to and for all the inspiration and passion we have tried to encourage in them, their future is to be snatched away. They won't need to worry about whether the university fees cap is £6000 or £9000 because they're not even going to get near the application form for university.

When the figures for university applications from students from poorer backgrounds come out in a few years, you can be pretty sure they will be shown as a percentage of kids from poorer backgrounds in sixth forms. So guess what? The figures won't look too bad, the ConDems will be vindicated in their claim that it didn't put off poorer students from applying. But it will be because poorer students don't have A levels. Please spread the word, write to your MP, make sure people are aware that our very poorest children are being excluded from university one step back, with A levels (or diplomas, or the IB).

And here is a post that explains why the figures don't add up and EMA is more effective than the alternatives.
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How to speak publisher - A is for Apps

2010-11-24T06:30:00.000Z

If you are not very tekkie, talk of apps, Kindle, e-books and enhanced e-books may have you quaking in your sophisticated writerly boots (or Uggs, depending on your style). We'll get to the others eventually but they don't start with A so be patient. Don't worry - it's not that scary.

An app is not an e-book. If your publisher brings out a Kindle edition of your book, that is not an app. If your publisher produces a pdf of your book, that is not an app (and it's probably not a publisher either - pdfs are for pirate copies and to give to printers, they are not for public consumption these days. How 1990s.)

App is short for application. If you have a sophisticated phone (a 'smart phone') like an iPhone or an Android phone (the Google phone software that competes with Apple), you can use apps on it. If you have an iPad you will use apps on it - you have to, it doesn't do anything else! From now on I'm going to call these iThings and mean all of them. You might have apps to help you find your way when you get lost, apps to play games, apps to make stupid noises... I even have an app to turn my iPad into a spirit level because I couldn't find the real spirit level when I was putting up a towel rail. It's not much use day to day, except perhaps as a sobreity test.

Now, you can get book apps and you can get apps to read books. These are not the same thing. An example of an app to read books is the Kindle software which you can install on your iThing . You can then get books from the Kindle store on Amazon and they will be electronically schlurped into the Kindle app so that you can read them on your iThing. These books look rather like a printed book, and are effectively a printed book that is just read on a screen. There are a few things you can't do with a printed book, such as change the size of the print, and a lot of things you can't do with a Kindle book that you can do with a real book, such as squash wasps. But the model is 'let's make a book you can read on an iThing' and that's all. Nothing extra. Oh, and you can install the Kindle reader on your computer if you don't have an iThing.

Now we get to the point. An app that is a book is free-standing. You don't open it in Kindle or any other bit of software as it is itself a bit of software. So you can think of a Kindle book as being like a Word document and you need Word (or in this case the Kindle reader) to open it. But a proper book app runs on its own. It's like playing Minesweeper or Halo III or Solitaire - it doesn't need any other software. Some other analogies: a Kindle book is like a virus (has to exist in a living cell); an app is like a bacterium (can survive on its own). A Kindle book is like an airline passenger (not going anywhere without a plane); an app is like a pedestrian (self-propelling). A Kindle book is a tapeworm; an app is an earthworm. Got it?

While a Kindle book emulates a real book, an app is something altogether different. It can and should provide a lot more than just some text. There may be pictures, video, sound, animation, and interactivity of various types. ('Interactivty' means you can do things, like drag stuff around the screen or tap on it to make things happen.) The books that work best as apps are generally picture books and illustrated non-fiction. The flashy add-ons help to engage a small child and draw them in to explore the book and develop their reading, or to add extra information of types that can't be put across on the printed page. You want to see how a spider scuttles, hear the noise of the space shuttle taking off or watch a schematic animation of the movement of a piston? An app can do that, but the printed page can't. A lift the flap book is delightful - but if the monster scuttles from under the stone and hides somewhere else when you 'lift' the stone, the game can go on. In marketing speak, apps add to the reading experience. This can be valuable - or it can be insulting and a pain, but no-one made you buy the app.

Apps of novels are a different matter. The joy of reading a novel is using your own imagination to create the parts the author has left out. Yes, it might be useful to hear the piece of music described, or to see the historic monument visited. But I don't want to see someone else's idea of what the characters look like or to hear their voices (ie an actor's voice) or see the inside of the rooms or the path they walk down. Those are my contribution to the novel, they occupy the space the writer has left for my creativity and I don't want them invaded by someone else's ideas. It's like seeing a film of a novel - it's very hard to get the new interpretation out of your head. So I won't be buying apps of any novels in the near future. But that's a personal choice.

As a writer, why should you care about apps? Well, you need to be careful which rights you sell and what they mean. Most publishers want electronic rights to your books when you sign a contract these days. These can be limited in various ways - eg the publisher has the rights for two years and if publisher doesn't exploit them they revert to you. Electronic rights do not automatically cover apps rights, which should be a subsidiary right (like TV, merchandising and film rights). You should endeavour to get apps rights specifically excluded from the deal, as most publishers are not doing anything at all with these rights in most books. You don't want, really, to tie your rights to a heavy stone and chuck them in the canal.

If your book is to come out as an app (and you didn't write it with that in mind), there will be a lot of extra work for you to do. Or there should be. There should be consultation on images and sound, a request for extra material from you, and so on. You will need to negotiate payment for this, and the royalty you expect from the app. Here you are in uncharted territory, or at least the lawless wild west of publishing. Many writers feel they should get a higher royalty for e-books than paper books (in reality this depends on the format, and whether the book already exists in paper format, in which case conversion is cheap). Apps are different. A good app costs more to produce than a paper book. But a bad app is cheap to produce. If all the app does is read out the story and show some static pictures or very simple animations, it doesn't cost any more to produce than a full-colour paper book. If it has lots of interactivity, animation, sound, multi-threading (ie you can use the 'pages' in different orders) and other bells and whistles, it will cost a lot to produce. It's open season - negotiate strenuously.

But be aware that if you get an all-singing, all-dancing app, the publisher will have a lot of costs to recoup. Another problem for publishers is that apps are platform-specific. This means that if an app has been made for Apple i-Things it won't run on Android i-Things. An app made for Android iThings won't run on Apple iThings and it won't even run on most Android iThings as there is little consistency between the devices. You could think of it as being like different language versions - if your book is printed in English, it's not going to be much use to someone who only speaks Arabic. But it's a bit more complex and the app has to be rebuilt to run on different platforms, then tested all over again... it's a costly process.

This means that for all the shouting about apps, they're not actually making anyone very much money yet. Publishers think they have to do it, but most publishers have little experience of software development and don't have a clue just how many worms are in the can they're opening. There will be casualties... One problem, especially for small publishers who are having to depend on freelance app designers, is that software people don't live by the same rules as publishers. They are hard to manage. They are likely to take a dislike to a publisher or project or become bored and dump them. Which they can - they finish the current app and go off to Africa for six months because it's more fun to see elephants than to animate imaginary elephants. It's not going to be an easy ride.

To see some apps in action, if you don't have an iThing, look on YouTube for reviews and demos. Here's a (rather frantic) demo of the famous Alice app, which was the first really to exploit the (Apple) platform but is actually designed to show off what can be done rather than add anything for target-age readers. And here is a review of Dr Seuss's Cat in the Hat. This is an underspecified app - it does pretty much nothing except read the text aloud and annotate the pictures with some useful words. And here is one that does as it really should and makes creative use of the technology in a way appropriate and enhancing for the readers: Oliver Jeffers' The Heart and the Bottle. The picture at the top of the page is from Feridun Oral's Red Apple published by Winged Chariot. Their apps offer the text in a range of languages - that's a good (if obvious) use of the technology.

How to speak publisher - A is for Acquisitions

2010-11-15T08:46:00.000Z

It's not usually enough to persuade an editor that your book is the best thing (s)he has ever seen - the editor generally has to sell the book in-house. You don't get a contract unless the editor can persuade those who hold the purse-strings that your book is pretty damn good, and one of the best of those they have to choose from. This happens (you hope) first at an editorial team meeting and then at the acquisitions meeting. (There are exceptions; in a few publishing houses, editors have the authority to sign a book for their list without negotiating with other departments. This is how things used to be in the Good Old Days, but it's increasingly rare. These editors often wear tweed jackets with leather elbow patches. Check your editor's wardrobe to see if this is likely to happen in your case.)

If your editor likes your book or proposal she (it's usually she) will probably discuss it with other editors at a team or editorial meeting, or maybe just informally with one or two colleagues. She does this largely to get feedback and suggestions, to test her championing of your book and make sure she's not going to make a total fool of herself (for example, championing something that everyone else turned down from the slush pile if you have stupidly submitted to more than one editor at the same publishing house). Not all books go through this stage. If she still likes it, she will book a slot to present your book at an acquisitions meeting.

Publishers hold regular acquisitions meetings, but how regularly varies from one publisher to another - it may be as often as weekly, or as infrequently as every two months. At the meeting, your book will be discussed not just by editorial staff, but by representatives of sales and marketing and design, and by the publisher or associate publisher. Your editor is your book's champion at this meeting. Your book is competing with other books for the available publishing slots and budgets.

Your editor will prepare an acquisition proposal that outlines her vision for your book, why she loves it, why it will sell, a description of it (content, style, genre and also physical aspects such as page extent, dimensions, binding, illustrations, etc), and a profit and loss account or detailed budget proposal for it. She will also give an account of you, the author (and any proposed illustrator). This will cover your biography, credentials as a writer, any notable points that will help sell the book (you are very young, beautiful and photogenic, very famous, very traumatised, exceptionally ugly with freak-photo value, or press-worthy in some other regard), previous sales history (your Nielsen BookScan record comes in here) and perhaps reviews of your previous books. She will outline the terms she intends to offer you (which may well be standard) and any other relevant aspects of the contract, such as subsidiary rights, say when she wants to publish and how many copies will make up the first print run. And, of course, your manuscript or proposal will be sent round for everyone to read. Knowing all this will go on should feed into your next proposal and what you tell your editor about yourself. Sell insidiously, start early. Don't ever tell your editor you are too lazy to do X or your first book bombed (they'll probably find out the latter, but maybe not).

At some acquisitions meetings, most books are approved. At others, only a few are approved. It will depend on how many gaps there are in the list, how much money is available, and how good the other proposals or manuscripts are. But even in straitened times, publishers have to acquire some books or they will have nothing to publish. Then they cease to be publishers.

There are three possible outcomes from an acquisitions meeting: they take your book (hooray!); they reject your book; they send the editor off to do more work on the book/proposal before deciding one way or the other. Obviously, your favoured outcome is the first. The second means you can go off and sell your book to someone else (let's put a positive spin on this!). The third means you may have to do some more work with the editor.

The need for a book proposal to go to an acquisitions meeting explains some of the delay between you sending your manuscript and getting a contract. Your editor will have to wait until there is an acquisitions meeting with a slot for her to present your book and draft the proposal. Meetings can be cancelled, or run out of time, and then your book may have to wait until the next meeting. It may be bounced back for more work and have to wait for another slot. It's a business, not a personal put-down machine. Don't worry about it. Write something else while you wait.

Bleaargh

2010-11-10T19:38:00.001Z

Sorry to be silent for so long, folks. I went to visit Big Bint 10 days ago and caught a horrible bug. And I'm STILL ill. Being ill when you're self-employed is pretty disastrous. No-one pays for days you take off, and the work still has to be done by the agreed deadline, so it's all piling up and getting worse and worse :-(

NaNoEdMo, anyone?

2010-11-02T13:12:00.000Z

Unless you've been living in a bag, you can't have failed to notice that it's NaNoWriMo time (the new name for November). I don't do NaNoWriMo - I once tried a spring equivalent, and gave up after 10 days as it just doesn't suit the way I write. Not even that particular project, which had a very experimental structure and premise and could in theory have been written in any order. And if I can't make it work with that, I'm not going to be able to make it work at all, I reckon.

However, inspired by the comments (esp sheilamcperry) on the Crabbit One's blog on why she doesn't do NaNoWriMo, I'm going to try to NaNoEdMo - edit the novel I should have delivered at the end of the summer, in the course of November. Luckily, I've made a start already, so I don't have to sort out quite all 70,000 words during the month. But it is a complex novel with a lot of historical research to check and a lot of emotional baggage weighing it down. So would anyone like to NaNoEdMo with me? It would be nice to have that solidarity and encouragement to keep me on track that the NaNoWriMo'ers have.

(Of course, the only reason it's difficult to edit this novel in a month is that I'm supposed to be doing other things. Such as the last 30,000 words of The Story of Physics, my RLF fellowship at the University of Essex, running BookJam, and getting today's Thrale's event off the ground. And sending an app outline to a publisher, and doing editorial changes to the book on Turing, and waiting to hear from the acquisitions meeting about a picture book, and writing several book reviews and guest blog posts, and doing last month's invoicing and, and.... living. Oh yes, that's the thing writers never have time for. Maybe NaNoLiveMo would be more appropriate.)

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How to speak publisher - A is for Author

2010-10-27T08:05:00.000+01:00

That's you. Don't look around for the real author, you're the real author if you have a contract with a publisher who's paying for your book. Now you have to behave like one, because if you don't believe you're a real author, you can be sure as hell no one else will. Act professionally and you will be treated like a professional. Do a 'what, poor little me?' act and you'll shoot your authorial career in the foot before you've left the starting block.

Acting professionally means not being precious about your work; not keeping important information from your publisher or agent; not making excuses for failing to write, or failing to write the right thing; not missing deadlines, writing over the agreed length, or deviating wildly from the agreed synopsis. Oh, that's all very negative. Let's reprhase: being professional means remaining open to suggestions and criticism that might improve your work (no, it's not perfect, whatever you think); sharing any important information with your publisher and agent; writing what you have promised to write by the agreed deadline and in the agreed or standard format. There - that's not so hard, is it?

'Oh, but I can't,' you wail. 'I have a cold, I need to take my son/daughter to swimming lessons, I'm depressed because I'm getting a divorce, I can't work out how to change the margins in Word, I got distracted into reading a blog about how to be a writer....' You know what? It doesn't matter. Anything that would not prevent you going to a paid employment should not prevent you fulfilling your contractual obligations to your publisher. This is your job now - that's why they're paying you. Of these excuses, only one counts - 'I'm depressed because I'm getting a divorce'. And that is covered under keeping your publisher or agent informed of vital information.

If there is a real catastrophe that prevents you meeting your deadline, say so. Apologise, explain, tell them what you are doing to remedy the situation, and suggest a solution. Even if the solution is 'tear up the contract'. If you come clean, and don't screw up their schedules, they will respect your professionalism and sign you again in the future. If you keep quiet and don't deliver - acting unprofessionally - they will, quite rightly, stop respecting you and be wary of working with you in the future. If you have an agent, you can be slightly more emotional and let him/her smooth things diplomatically with your publisher. But remember your agent can also dump you if you turn out to be more trouble than you're worth. Your agent is not your friend (remember?), so you should act professionally with him/her, too.

As an author, you might think your job is to write things. Sadly, it's not that straightforward. To be a successful author you will also need - almost certainly - to do at least some of the following: book signings, school visits, conferences, festivals, interviews, blogging, tweeting, Facebooking, radio, TV, reviewing... general profile-raising stuff. You don't have to do all of them. I don't do school visits (which is quite a big one for a children's author) or radio. I've never been asked to do TV, but I wouldn't be keen to do that either. This stuff all takes a lot of time and much of it doesn't earn any immediate money. But many publishers take a dim view of authors who won't do any of this. Some demand their authors have a website and a promotional Facebook page (not the same as your personal Facebook page - we'll come to that in F.)

If you hate all this stuff, pick the bits you hate least. I've always had a good excuse not to do school visits - my own children and single-parenthood means I have to be back home by the time school ends, not halfway across the country trying to get home. But all the electronic bits can be done from the snug comfort of my own writing room, so I do those. And I like them because I'm a geek. If you're a natural performer, you might hugely prefer school visits to perfecting your website - fine; go for it!

And, lastly - don't beat yourself up about not writing while you are doing these other things. They ARE part of your work as a writer. Within reason - spending all day on twitter and Facebook is beyond the demands of publicity management and if your internal Alistair Campbell is encouraging you to do that, fire him.
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How to speak publisher - A is for ARC

2010-10-20T09:46:00.000+01:00

And ARC is for Advance Reading Copy (also advance copy). This is essentially a bound proof - a copy of the book that is not in its final form and may still contain errors. It may have a different or unfinished cover. Advance reading copies are sent out to groups of people who might have some useful input to the book, and to people whom the publisher hopes will provide a nice comment that can be printed on the jacket or back cover (a 'puff'). It may be used in marketing the book (eg showing it to potential foreign distributors or film scouts), or it may be given to lawyers preparing to defend the book against defamation cases, or to the person doing the book's website so that they know a bit about the book and don't produce total tosh (if they can be persuaded to read it, of course).

If you are sent an ARC of someone else's book, it's probably so that you can provide a puff (unless you are a film scout, web designer or lawyer). If you don't like the book, don't feel obliged to provide anything. A note to the editor politely saying that you've read the book but don't feel able to provide a quote is fine, or send it back saying you don't currently have time to read it. You don't need to give a reason. In the interests of protecting the author's feelings - especially if it's someone you already know, but you can never tell when you might come to know another author - don't say the book is shite. Authors are sensitive souls. Then again, my favourite response from someone sent a copy of my book for comment is 'unfortunately, this work is completely useless'. The publishers didn't put it on the jacket, though I have a sneaking suspicion that it might have been quite a selling point if they had.

ARCs of your own books give you something to gloat over and show off to your friends a few months before real copies arrive. They're not the same as review copies, which are usually the same as the copies that will go on sale, just delivered early. For a 'big' book, though, ARCs may be sent out to reviewers to whip up some pre-publication frenzy.

Some book collectors consider ARCs the 'real' books and like to keep them. If you live somewhere infested with writers and reviewers, you'll find lots of ARCs in charity and secondhand bookshops. There is some cachet attached to having advance reading copies of certain books, usually literary novels. But for a big-name author's new title up to 5,000 ARCs may be printed (yes, I know - more copies than the real print run of some books!)

If you want to produce something that might be of value to your descendants - if you're lucky enough to become famous and stay famous after your death - you can annotate an ARC of your book with insightful (or rude) commentary and corrections, then put it away carefully to accrue value and spiders.
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How to speak publisher - A is for Agent

2010-10-19T06:15:00.000+01:00

Health warning: this is not about how to find an agent. If you want to know how to find an agent, go elsewhere. You could do worse than start with the crabbit old bat's blog. If you want to know whether you should look for an agent, look here. This is about what an agent is, or should be, and how your relationship with your agent should work.

An agent is your representative in the publishing world. They will help you to sell your work for the best - or most appropriate - deal and will speak up for you and your work at opportune moments. At inopportune moments, they will stay discreetly silent.

Your agent is not your best friend and not your life-partner (usually). Your agent is neither your servant nor your boss, but your business partner. You and your agent should work in symbiosis. Yet many writers live in terror of their agent, fearing their agent will leave them, or will not give them the attention they need and deserve, will spend too long with other authors, will like other authors' work better, will go off them, will no longer love their work.... Remember, it is a one-to-one relationship for you, but a one-to-many relationship for your agent - just like your relationship with your doctor, hairdresser, child's teacher, or the mosquito that just bit you.

What the agent should bring to the relationship is a detailed knowledge of the market for the type of book you are writing or want to write. So if you want to write young adult fantasy, an agent who specialises in romance novels or non-fiction is not going to be much help. Your agent should know which editors are in the market for your type of book, which lists they are running at the moment, and what they are likely to be buying. Your agent should know if an editor has just signed a very public deal for a book too like yours for it to be worth approaching them with yours - and should know who will want a title to compete with that blockbuster. Having the wrong agent is worse than having no agent as they will send your book to inappropriate editors and give you a bad name while not actually getting you any money. Worse, they'll sell your book short, getting a poorer deal than another agent could have secured.

A good agent knows the publishing world and what can and can't be done in it. Your agent may handle foreign rights for you, or have an arrangement with another agency that will do this. Your agent will check your contracts and argue about anything that should be argued about. Your agent will invoice your publishers, and chase the publisher's accounts department when they don't pay the invoice. Your agent should promote you as and when appropriate, give editorial guidance on your work, and have an overview of your career and how to manage it. An agent will rarely be interested in representing someone they consider a one-book wonder, unless that book is truly wonderful and likely to make a lot of money.

An agent will give you honest advice: if your book is unsaleable, they will tell you. If the book is redeemable, they may be able to tell you how to fix it. If it's just a duff book, they should tell you that, too. If your agent thinks book after book is irredeemable, you might like to get a second opinion - maybe you have a duff agent, or maybe your style has changed and no longer suits your agent. Or maybe you just can't write and need to try a different career.

You should be able to trust your agent's judgment - their judgment of your book and its place in the market, their judgment of whether you are being offered a good and realistic deal and their judgment of what is best for your long-term career. But if you think your agent is wrong, you must speak out. Don't make assumptions that they don't value you, don't harbour resentments - ask them to explain what they are doing. And if you still don't like it, it's time to move on. You haven't committed to your agent for life, for better or worse, richer or poorer. There is a termination clause in your contract, remember? You can give notice - probably three months - that you no longer want them to represent you. The books they already represent are likely to stay with them, but it's up to you what you do with future books once you have terminated the contract. It's wise, though, to end your relationship amicably. Don't hurl abuse at them and list their shortcomings. Remember that agents talk to one another and if you abuse one, another is less likely to take you on.

Trust is a two-way street, and your agent needs to be able to trust you, too. You need to meet deadlines, deliver what you have promised and be honest. Don't let your agent line up lots of events or work for you when you know you won't be able to deliver. You need to tell your agent when you are too miserable to write, when you are bereaved, sick, injured, moving house, getting divorced or preoccupied with your day job. They know you are human and will respect your professionalism - but if you don't tell them, you will erode their trust and damage your working relationship.

Don't expect too much. Remember that your agent, though he or she loves books, is in the business to make a living, not because they have blind faith in you (though they should have faith in you) or is incensed that books like yours are not 'given a chance'. Your agent has other clients, other demands on their time and possibly cannot dedicate as much time to you as you would like. Don't be like a needy husband/wife who expects every waking moment of their partner's time - you're going to be disappointed.

Remember that your agent makes 15% of your income. If you can't live on your income from writing, your agent certainly can't. Think about it. If you make £50,000 before tax and expenses from writing, your agent makes £7,500 from you (if all your work goes through your agent). Your agent will need, say, eight or ten writers earning as much as you in order to survive. So that means you can have perhaps half a day of your agent's time each week. But then the agent also needs to read their slush pile, go to book fairs, read the trade press, meet publishers and other agents, go to launch parties, keep up with digital developments, read books.... and that has to be shared amongst everyone's time. You're down to a couple of hours a week. If your writing earns less than £7,500 for your agent, you're going to get proportionally less time. If your agent doesn't stick roughly to this pattern, they're going to go bust. They'll make an exception for something they think is a guaranteed bestseller, but that's a very rare beast, and of course they're looking at your long-term prospects so will make some investment in you, but being an agent is a business, it's not an act of benevolence.

What a real agent absolutely will not do is charge you any money to read your work, make editorial suggestions or meet with you. If an agent tries to do this, they're not an agent, they're a cowboy. Walk away. Don't hand over any money. An agent's income is the percentage of your earnings that they keep. Some agents say they will charge you for photocopying or buying copies of your books for promotional purposes, but these are out-of-pocket expenses connected with promoting you. This doesn't make them a cowboy. More often, there's a clause to this effect in the contract, but the agent never actually does charge you anything for photocopies or promotional copies.

There are big agents and small agents. Your agent may be one of many in a large agency, and this can be useful as they are likely to have expert departments to deal with things such as foreign rights, TV and film rights, and so on. They also have a lot of clout in the publishing world. The downside is that they will have much bigger fish than you in their pond and you might feel neglected. A small agent may be a one-(wo)man band, or one of two or three agents in a quaint, dusty, book-lined office in Soho (that's my agent's dusty Soho office in the photo). They may have less detailed knowledge, may not handle foreign rights themselves, and have fewer fingers to have in pies, but at the same time you'll be a larger fish in their pond and get more of their time and attention.

Having an agent is not absolutely compulsory and there are some types of writer who rarely have agents. Many poets don't have an agent, and most writers of children's non-fiction don't have agents, for instance. Academic writers don't usually have agents. These types of writing don't earn much per title and so an agent won't be interested in representing them. Nor should you be interested in giving away 15% of very little when an agent won't get you a better deal. Children's non-fiction is often written for a flat fee and, indeed, having an agent can put some editors off signing you - they don't want the aggro of dealing with someone who will try to argue about what is a standard deal; it's simpler just to employ another, unagented, writer.

For many other types of writer, though, an agent opens doors and secures better deals and is a great source of support and advice. But still the wrong agent is worse than no agent, so choose carefully. You must like them, as well as them liking you. Don't just sign up because you are pitifully grateful that anyone likes your work. If your work is genuinely good, someone else will like it, too.

A is for accident

2010-10-17T10:07:00.000+01:00

which is why there hasn't been a post since Monday. Sorry! Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible with A is for Agent.

How to speak publisher - A is for Advance

2010-10-12T06:50:00.000+01:00

'We have proofs of the blads for Frankfurt, but the bleed's wrong.'

Publishing is a foreign country. They say things differently there.

You can get by in PublisherLand by speaking English very loudly and slowly. But if you want to get off the beaten track and explore the hinterland, make friends with the natives and be treated as more than a tourist, it's worth learning the language. By the end of this (occasional, sporadic) series, you'll be able to negotiate the gutter and confront blads and bleeds without believing you need garlic, a crucifix and a sharpened stake.

A is for Advance

The advance is the money the publishers pays you - guess when? - in advance: before you have completed the book, or at least before it's published. An advance is a payment against the royalties your book is expected to earn. Some authors/celebrities command large advances and this makes the press jump up and down shouting about greedy millionaire authors, but they are a tiny minority. Usually, the advance is calculated to be approximately equal to the royalties the publisher would expect you to make from the first printing (or hardback and subsequent paperback printing) of the book. This isn't as straightforward as it sounds. If your book sells for £14 and you get 7.5% royalty, and there is a print-run of 2,000 copies, that doesn't mean you will earn £2,100. Some copies will be sold at a large discount, and your income may well be calculated on nett receipts rather than cover price.

The advance is often paid in two or three stages. Typical points of payment are on signing the contract, on delivering the manuscript of the book, and on publication (or sometimes on passing of page proofs). The advance may be for more than one book. So if you are lucky or well established you might get £50,000 for two books. It sounds a lot, but it isn't. Each book may take you a year to write. There will be research expenses as well as living expenses. If you have an agent, he or she will take 15% + VAT of that £50,000 (= £8,812.50). That leaves you a little under £42,000 before tax to pay for your expenses and living, or around £20,000 a year pre-tax income - well below the national average wage. Don't forget to set aside the tax you will have to pay - the tax people won't be sympathetic if you spend all the advance and can't pay the tax. Not many authors get an advance of £50,000 straight off. You're more likely to get something like £2,000 or even less. It all depends on how much the publisher expects your book to earn. If you have written an academic book, you are unlikely to get any advance at all, and you quite possibly won't even get any royalty on the first print run. But if you're written an academic book, you probably have a paid academic job and need the publication for your CV so it's a slightly different case.

If the book earns out the advance, that means that you have earned back in royalties all the money the publisher has paid you in advance. After this point, you will start to get royalty payments. Hurray!

You don't have to repay the advance if it's not earned out. You only have to repay the advance if you don't deliver the book, or if the book you deliver is so bad, or so far from the agreed synopsis, that the publisher feels it's not publishable.

Some authors and agents are very keen to negotiate as large an advance as possible. There are two main reasons: one is that it's nice to have lots of money; the other is that if the publisher has invested a lot in the book, it should be keen to recoup the investment and so will, the thinking goes, be more likely to try very hard to sell your book, give it a large marketing budget and push it. There is a big drawback, though. If your book doesn't earn out the advance, especially if it falls well short of it, your next book is blighted. If you're lucky, you'll get a smaller advance. If you're unlucky, you won't sell it at all. No-one wants to throw good money after bad.

Over there

2010-10-09T15:55:00.001+01:00

Blogging over on Awfully Big Blog Adventure today, on how UK libraries are in danger of eroding goodwill amongst writers.

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How to read a publishing contract (27)

2010-09-30T11:38:00.001+01:00

And so we come to the last clause of the contract:

27. English law

This Agreement shall be deemed to be a contract made in England and shall be construed and applied in all respects in accordance with English law and the parties hereto submit and agree to the jurisdiction of the English courts.

Obviously you only get this clause if you're in England. Or not so obviously.... I've had it in a contract with a publisher based in India and one in Scotland. If you and the publisher really are in England, you can't argue with this clause - you just are subject to English jurisdiction. And they have bigger sticks than you do.

OK, so now you understand everything, and you've argued about anything you don't like or didn't agree with. You might have argued about some extra things, just for practice - that's fine, I approve. If it has gone well, the editor/legal department will have removed clauses you don't like (such as waiving your moral rights) and will have reworded clauses as necessary (such as limiting the rights you are selling or licensing). If you have difficulty getting the publishers to change the contract, send the contract to the Society of Authors (if you are in the UK). If you're a member, their contract advice is free; if you're not a member, there is a small charge.

And if you're happy with it? Or at least willing to accept it? Take your favourite pen, sign it (initial every page if they want you to, have someone witness your signature if they specify that) and send it back.

Now you can open the champagne - congratulations!
Oh - and don't forget you have to write the book. I'm not here to tell you how to do that. Go and see that crabbit bat Nicola Morgan or someone.

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Banned!

2010-09-27T10:51:00.000+01:00

This week (25th September - 2nd October) is Banned Books Week, organised by the American Civil Liberties Union to raise awareness of the banning of largely innocent books by belt-thumping Americans who (on the whole) live in Texas. I am particularly aware of it this year, partly because I've been writing about censorship and children's books for The New Humanist, and partly because I'm one of the 17 writers to have had a book banned this year. The full list is here. Oh, and the whole of Time-Life Magazine. I'm rather pleased with my 'banned' status as I like being the polar opposite of a bunch of ignorant, anti-intellectual, fundamentalist fools (and wasn't the Bible full of violence last time I looked?) - but at the same time, I don't approve of book bans.

The reasons given for banning this most recent set of books include sexual content or nudity, political objections and 'violence or horror'. My book was banned for 'violence or horror', which came as something of a surprise - perhaps they didn't get beyond the cover. Let's take a look inside. It's called Zombies on the Loose, and it's a simple book for reluctant readers. It shows what lies behind the zombies seen in movies, revealing the history of belief in the undead and the science behind the real people who have been zombified and used as slave labour. It's a light-hearted educational book that uses teenagers' enthusiasm for zombie movies as a way in to teaching something about a different culture. I'm not sure which bit the banners object to. Perhaps it's the first spread, that gives a typical account of a movie zombie. Or maybe it's the true story of a woman thought to be a zombie in Haiti. Or the true account of a man who was enslaved by a bokor, a witch-doctor believed capable or turning people into zombies. Or the instructions for turning someone into a 'zombie' (entranced slave) and keeping them in that state (not detailed enough for a reader to do it).

I'm in illustrious company. Previously and currently banned authors include Shakespeare, Harper Lee, J.D.Salinger, J.K.Rowling, Roald Dahl, and Judy Blume. Step outside the classroom, and we can add James Joyce, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, William Golding, John Steinbeck, Arthur Miller and Chaucer to the list - with plenty of others.

It goes without saying that only fear motivates book bans. After all if the views held by the censors were self-evident truths, no-one would be swayed by reading something that showed a different view, would they?

Take a stand against censorship by supporting Banned Books Week, perhaps by borrowing and reading one of the banned books that will be featured in library displays this week. Here are some useful links:

The books banned this year

The reasons those books were banned

A longer list of banned books, over the years

Some ridiculous reasons given for banning books

An eloquent argument against banning books on sensitive subjects, and a brave personal testament from children's author Lucy Coats.

How to read a publishing contract (26)

2010-09-26T08:22:00.000+01:00

Only two clauses to go, and they're about being stroppy, so perhaps we'll do them both at once. W00t- stroppy-fest!

26. Arbitration

If any differences shall arise between the Author and the Publishers touching the meaning of this Agreement or the rights and liabilities of the parties thereto, the same shall be referred to the arbitration of two persons (one to be named by each party) or their mutually agreed umpire, in accordance with the provisions of the Arbitration Act 1950, or any amending or substitute statute for the time being in force.

This means if you disagree about agreeing you have to agree on how to stop disagreeing. That's no better, is it? It means your understanding of the contract is not the same as theirs, and you discover this because you argue about something, can each pick someone to argue for you - like a court case but cheaper. Don't pick your partner/neighbour/best friend. Pick someone who knows what they're talking about. (Of course, if your partner/neighbour/best friend is a lawyer specialising in publishing law, use them anyway.) You could ask the Society of Authors to represent you in the fight. Note that it will not be a physical fight, so someone big, strong, fat as sumo wrestler or trained in martial arts is not necessarily the best choice - unless things go badly wrong, or they also happen to know about publishing law. In which case, please send me their email address.

I'm not sure who might be a 'mutually agreed umpire', but I suppose depending on the nature of the dispute you might agree on a lawyer who is not representing either side. But lawyers are expensive - make sure you don't stand to lose more than you could gain if you follow the legal route. If it's a small and naive publisher you might get the to agree to go to the Society of Authors as umpire, but that word 'Authors' in the name might alert them to the possibility that the Society might take your part.

What to disagree about (if you're looking for a chance to use this clause)? It suggests the meaning of the contract, the rights and liabilities. Rights are the most likely cause of dispute as new rights emerge from nowhere without warning, rather like the discredited spontaneous generation of worms from mud. If you signed a contract in 1995, app rights were not even a glimmer in your publisher's eye so you might now argue about those. In 2020, are you going to be arguing about holographic rights? The best way to avoid this is to withhold all non-specified and future rights from the agreement, or at the very least put a time limit on them - if additional rights are not exploited in a year they revert, for example. You don't want the publisher holding on to rights they are not going to use when you could exploit them. But now we're going back through the contract to the rights clauses, so perhaps you should take another look at those to make sure you won't need this arbitration clause.

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How to read a publishing contract (25)

2010-09-20T08:52:00.000+01:00

This contract is begging to go back in the contracts file. It really hasn't enjoyed its excoriation, it clearly thought it could hide all its secrets. Well, it can't. Mwahhaha. I'm not sure there are any secrets left.

25. Notices may be sent by pre-paid post addressed to the address of the party to be served stated herein or last known to the party serving the notice, and, if so sent, shall be deemed to have arrived in due course of post.

WTF? I hear you think. Quite - this is as arsy a bit of legal gobbledegook as you're likely to come across. It means you and the publisher can write to each other using the postal service and the normal assumption will be that the letters will arrive at their destination fairly promptly. So - you may use the last address you have for the publisher, and they may use the last address they have for you. It's easy to check a publisher's address as it will be online. It's less easy for the publisher to check your address because you aren't stupid enough to have your address online, are you? This means it's important to keep your publisher informed of any and all changes of address. All your publishers, that is. If the publisher(s) deal with your agent, this isn't quite as important, but it is still good practice to do so. What if your agent retires or dies, or you part company? Yes, they should inform your publisher (not of their own death, obviously) but you don't really want to rely on them to do so.

in due course of post = next day or so for first class letters, a bit longer for second class letters at the moment. But this can change in certain circumstances - such as during a postal strike, or at some point in the future when the postal service is routinely worse than it is now. The clause means the normal state of the post prevailing at the time you send the letter.

Of course, we don't really send letters to our publishers using the postal service. Apart from sending back contracts, I don't think I've sent an envelope to a publisher for years. It is important to keep your publisher informed of your email address, as that is the usual method of communication. The best solution is never to change your email address - I feel a post about email addresses coming on. If you use the email address given to you by your ISP, you'll lose it when you change ISP. It's much better to register your own domain. Yes, we'll do a post on email addresses and domain names. (Some people use the phone - if you do that, make sure your publisher knows your phone number. I spend half my time trying to get publishers to forget my phone number as I hate phone calls.)

That's it for notices. There are two clauses left, and they are not very interesting. Not selling this, am I? At least they're short.

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How to read a publishing contract (24)

2010-09-16T09:35:00.000+01:00

The end is nigh - think I'll put that on a board and walk up and down Oxford Street. Oh, it's been done already. Today's clause is about ends - the end of the contract. And we're near the end of the contract series, too. Phew.

24. Termination of Contract

Should the Publishers (save with the Author's consent) at anytime by themselves or anyone acting on their behalf wilfully fail to fulfil or comply with any of the provisions of this Agreement within 1 (one) month after written notice from the Author to rectify such failure, or should the Publishers go into liquidation, other than voluntary liquidation for purposes of reconstruction, this Agreement shall thereupon determine and the Author shall be free to license any other person to print and publish the Work, without prejudice to the rights of the Publishers and any third party in respect of any agreement properly entered into by the Publishers hereunder with any such party.

OK, this looks hard, but don't panic.

Should the Publishers ... wilfully fail to fulfil or comply with any of the provisions of this Agreement - essentially, this means 'if we don't publish your book'. The key word is wilfully. If they just can't be arsed to publish the book, if they prevaricate and faff about and publish other books that they think might sell better, you can give them notice (ie tell the to stop faffing about and publish it). If they don't do something about it within a month you can terminate the agreement. Don't expect printed books in a month, but a scheduled publication date, perhaps even some PDFs to check might be realistic. If the failure is not wilful - if they have no money, if they have been closed down by a flu pandemic, if the printer has screwed up, if the editorial assistant has absconded with the files - you have to let them get their house in order. What are the chances of a publisher admitting it has wilfully failed to publish your book? Quite.

If the publisher goes into liquidation the contract is over. That's good. But it can't be voluntary liquidation. That's not so good, as there are (some, small) publishers that make a habit of going into voluntary liquidation every so often to clear out all those pesky debts and dodgy commissions. They seem to treat it as a kind of colonic irrigation, to be repeated every couple of years when they can feel all those bad debts and dud books beginning to clog up their corporate gut. You won't be able to fish your book out of the nasty slurry that comes out of this exercise. Yuk. You probably don't want to touch it anyway.

determine = terminate. No, I don't know why they don't just say 'end' or 'terminate'. Maybe someone else knows?

So if they go bust or fuck up on purpose you get the book back and you can sell it to someone else. Yippee!

This clause is rather brief. You will often also find here a reference to the work going out of print and the rights reverting (returning) to you in that case. Usually, if the publisher doesn't produce or plan a reprint within a certain specified interval you can tell them to produce one. If they don't, you get the book back and can publish it with someone else, or self-publish it, or put it on a website, or whatever you like. This is called reversion of rights - all rights in the work return to you, like homing pigeons. (This is not generally the case with flat-fee books which were considered work for hire. You've sold all the rights, not licensed them, so you don't get them back.) Even so, it's not easy to re-sell a book that has been previously published and gone out of print; don't hold your breath. You might just want to stick the pigeons back in their loft and leave them there.

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How to read a publishing contract (23)

2010-09-09T09:11:00.000+01:00

Today's clause is a miserable one to be contemplating when your book is new and shiny - indeed, is still a twinkle in the publisher's eye. It's like taking out a pension plan for your newborn, or even planning its place in the family crypt, or adding it to the family tree with its birth date and an ominous hyphen which the death date will one day follow. This clause is about remainders - the remains of your book after its demise.

23: Remainders

The Publishers may sell part or the whole of the residue of any edition at a reduced price or as a remainder at the best prices such remainder stock will fetch, the Author having first been given the option of purchasing some or all of such copies at the remainder price, such option to be exercised within 14 (fourteen) days of notice being given to the Author at their latest known address of the Publisher's intention to remainder the work.

Remainders are copies of the book which the publisher cannot sell. Originally, a book was remaindered when bookshops no longer ordered it to keep in stock. Now, of course, a book may sell through Amazon or the publisher's website in a steady trickle, or even occasional drips, and there is no clear point at which the book is no longer selling.

In the best possible case, your book will never go out of print, and will continue to sell even after your death. More realistically, your book will sell for a while and then it will drop from public view, or be superseded by a more up-to-date book. If you are lucky, the print run will sell out and there won't be piles of unsold stock to worry about. These days, a publisher may move your title to POD (print on demand) if the print run sells out but there is still a very small demand for the book. (Whether you should accept a POD edition as in print is a moot point, and one we will deal with on another day.) In the worst case, sales will drop off while the publisher still has a substantial stock of the books. Then they will try to recoup some of the money tied up in the stock, and being wasted on storage, by remaindering the book. This means they will sell it to anyone who will take it at a knock-down price. This clause says they must first offer the remainders to you, at the same price as someone else is prepared to pay. Whether you should take them is a separate issue, and not one for today. Pride (hurt) will tempt you to buy them, but think about what you might do with them first.

Now, the publisher will give you 14 days in which to recover from the shock of being remaindered and then say how many you want to buy. If you are in the habit of going away for more than 13 days at a time, you might miss your chance. I'd suggest that you ask for the publisher either to give you a bit more time, or to contact you at your last know real address AND last known email address. We would hope, of course, that the publisher knows where you live as they are sending you royalty cheques. If you have an agent, ask them to contact your agent, too. I know it's not nice to do this now, and might feel like negotiating a pre-nuptial agreement, but it's only a few moments of pain and may save you substantial disappointment later.

Once you have the remaindered copies, it's up to you what you do with them. You can sell them yourself if you can be bothered. If you do school visits or readings, this might be a very real possibility.

And finally.... being remaindered is not the worst thing that can happen to your book. I remember hearing the following conversation between two authors a few years ago. No names, I'll call them A and B:

A: Hello, B, how are you?
B: A bit glum. My book is remaindered in Galloway and Porter [a now-defunct bookshop in Cambridge].
A: Oh, I'm sorry to hear that. [pause] I wish mine had been remaindered.
B: Why?
A: It was pulped.

Yes, if the publisher thinks they can't shift your book however low the price, they will have it pulped - literally, turned into paper pulp. They have to pay for this, so they only do it if your book is so unsuccessful they can't even give it away and have to pay someone to take it away. You could ask that the publisher adds a clause to say they will give you the remainders if they are planning to pulp them - but that might suggest you lack confidence in your book, so I'd suggest you leave that request until they offer you the remainders for money.

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How to read a publishing contract (22)

2010-09-06T13:36:00.000+01:00

OK, I'm only doing this clause because I'm supposed to be writing a book. A book for which I have a contract, have signed the contract and have spent half the advance. Ho hum. I have written precisely 385 words of this book and am already falling prey to displacement activities.

Today's clause applies to a book that is well and truly written and has been out there for a while and is likely to carry on selling. Not the current book, then.

21. Revision of the Work

The Author agrees to revise the Work for each new edition when requested in writing by the Publishers to do so and from time to time to supply any new matter that may be needful to keep the Work up to date, and such revisions, editions or changes shall be deemed as being part of the original Work. In the event of the Author neglecting or being unable to revise the Work or supply new matter where needful, the Publishers may procure some other person to revise the Work or supply new matter.

This is a sneaky clause. It means you have to make changes to your book, with no mention of extra money, whenever the publisher tells you to do so. Some non-fiction books need constant updating to remain current - others might occasionally need an unexpected change. (You wrote about the solar system when Pluto was a planet? Unlucky - take out all that stuff about Pluto and fill the pages with something else.)

If you're writing a work of fiction, this clause probably won't apply to you and may not be present (but I have copied it from a fiction contract, so don't assume it won't be there). I can see cases in which it might conceivably affect a work of fiction. Suppose you'd written a nice picture book in 1938 about a kind little boy called Adolf Hitler. Sales might drop off after a while, and the publisher might like to reissue it with the character differently named.

If you are writing the book for a flat fee, you must get this clause changed to say that you will make changes for a fee to be agreed at the time. It is completely unreasonable for the publishers to expect you to make changes forever under the terms of the original contract with no more money. And it's not in your interests. If you don't make the changes, the book goes out of print. So what? You weren't getting any more money from it anyway. Now you can write the replacement book for more money.

This version of the clause doesn't make any mention of money, so you might want to clarify what will happen if you think it will affect your book. If they employ someone else to do the changes, will your royalty be reduced? Will they try to recoup the cost from you? Will the other person's name be on the title page as well as yours? (You will have to share the PLR in that case.) I'd do this in addition to adding the bit about making the changes for an agreed fee. After all, you don' t know when they will turn up and ask for changes. It could be immediately after a family tragedy, or it could be the morning you sign a 25-book deal and won't have a spare moment for nine years. Though, of course, you can always get spare moments by skiving the task you are supposed to be doing...

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How to read a publishing contract (21)

2010-09-04T10:36:00.000+01:00

Copyright keeps cropping in this contract - it's a bit of an obsession with publishers, rather like food is with chefs. This one is about other people infringing your copyright.

20. Infringement of Copyright

If at any time during the continuance of this Agreement the copyright of the Work in the reasonable opinion of the Publishers be infringed, and the Author after receiving written notice of such infringement from the Publishers refuses or neglects to take proceedings in respect of the infringement, the Publishers shall be entitled to take proceedings in the joint names of the Publishers and the Author upon giving the Author sufficient and reasonable security to indemnify the Author against any liability for costs, and in this event any sum received by way of damages shall belong to the Publishers. If the Author is willing to take proceedings and the Publishers desire to be joined with the Author as a party thereto and agree to share the costs, then if any sum is recovered by way of damages and costs such sum shall be applied in payment of the cost incurred and the balance shall be divided equally between the Author and the Publishers. The provisions of this clause are intended to apply only in the case of an infringement of the copyright in the Work affecting the interest in the same granted to the Publishers under this Agreement.

Let's untangle this. In plain English it means:

if the publisher spots copyright infringement, they will suggest you take legal action to stop it
if you don't want to, the publisher will take action - you won't have to pay anything, but neither will you get any of the money the publisher may get from the case
if you and the publisher act together against a copyright infringement (and win), first costs will be covered and then any money left over will be split between you.

The very last bit of the clause means the publisher is only interested in anything that affects their interest in the book. So if someone translates the book into Spanish and sells it, but your publisher doesn't have foreign rights, they don't care. It's then up to you to pursue the Spanish pirate on your own.

the Author after receiving written notice of such infringement from the Publishers - In my experience, I'm the one who spots copyright infringement - usually in the form of pirate digital versions of the book - and tells the publisher, so the first bit of this clause rather misrepresents the publisher as a vigilant guardian of rights when in fact they are either blithely unaware of what is happening or turning a blind eye because they can't be arsed to pursue it. That's not a criticism - I fall into the category of 'can't be arsed to pursue it', too.

If the Author is willing to take proceedings and the Publishers desire to be joined with the Author as a party thereto and agree to share the costs - the publisher will only want to act with you against copyright infringement if they think there is a good chance of winning enough money for it to be worthwhile. If the publisher doesn't want to join in, think carefully about whether you want to pursue it. I would say 'get very good legal advice' but that will cost you (perhaps more than you stand to gain). The Society of Authors might be your best port of call.

If the infringement is in the form of an illegal download of your book, which is by far the most likely form, you can issue a take-down notice. This involves telling the pirate that they are infringing your copyright and you want the material removed within 24 hours. We'll look at take-down notices another day. It is not, in my view, worth spending any money on trying to enforce this. If the download is popular it will spring up in dozens of other places within days or even hours. Give in gracefully and be glad your book is popular.

If you are Dan Brown and someone has ripped off your book to make either a more dire book or a moderately good book, you probably will want to pursue the infringer. But if you're Dan Brown, you can afford to. Remember, too, that a high-profile law suit will give publicity to your book (good) to the infringing book (bad) and to your litiginous nature (bad).

If you are suing JKRowling for stealing your idea about wizards, you are a loser in all regards. Give up now. The only possible reason for doing this is to get a bit of publicity and then drop the case before it costs anything. You might get a few sales from the curious, but it's scant recompense for looking a total plonker in the publishing world.

One you might like to look out for if you are minded to pursue copyright infringers, and you've written a non-fiction book that is essentially a collection of facts, is other books, websites or applications that use your collection. The copyright in a collection of facts does not depend on the words used to express the facts, so if someone has copied your book of 1001 boring facts about cars and made a website of it, you can sue them (if you like - I'd prefer to ask for a link to the book on Amazon). I think we'll have a post on copyright in facts at some future point as it's a strange case.

Should you argue with this clause? Personally, I wouldn't bother UNLESS you don't keep copyright in the book anyway. If you have sold copyright (as you might in a licensed character book or some children's non-fiction, for instance) then infringement of copyright is of no interest to you and you don't want to waste your time on it. You won't get any money back, no matter what, so why even read the email from the publisher telling you PiratesRUs of Uzbekistan has copied your book?
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This book is disgusting (competition!)

2010-09-02T09:22:00.000+01:00

Time for a competition - hurrah! My lovely editor at Barrington Stoke has sent me extra copies of Grim, Gross and Grisly to give away to my very tolerant blog-readers and twits. Be sure you want to win before you enter... the book is disgusting. The strap is 'Disgusting facts about people' and it contains horrible details about humans, what they've done to their bodies and things that happen to them. I would like to say it came with a free sick-bag, but budgets are tight and the publishers wouldn't do that, so bring your own bucket.

So how do you win this horrible tome? You need to prove you can stomach it by sending me your own disgusting fact. I'll extend it a bit and say it can be about humans OR animals. Either put your disgusting fact in the comments here, or stick it on twitter with the hash tag #grimgrossgrisly and my name (@annerooney) so I can find it easily, or put them on my Facebook author page. Most horrible facts win! The number of prizes depends on how many facts you all send in, so start trawling for grossery now.

Judging is entirely subjective, and facts taken from any of my previous books do NOT qualify.

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I did my Facebook page

2010-08-29T16:54:00.001+01:00

At last. In fact, I did it more than a year ago, but didn't finish it so I didn't publish it. But today the need to find an excuse not to get on with work was so extreme I did that instead. Now there's no excuse, and I'll really have to do some work....

Oh, if you want to see it, it's here. Please Like it (if you do like it) as I need enough Likers before I can claim a name for it.

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How not to do it - worst query letter ever?

2010-08-27T08:18:00.000+01:00

Just because you've written a good-enough submission to a publisher once (or more) doesn't mean you'll get it right every time, and doesn't mean it's easy the next time.

For great advice on writing a query letter (US term), read this post by Ann Crispin of Writer Beware. But if you want an example of what not to do, look below.

The following was reported to me last night by a friend, publishing director of a very large publishing company which, you need to know, does not publish any fiction. The letter, with typos corrected, said:

To whom it may concern

I can't write very well but I thought I'd like to write a novel. I've decided to make my novel about pirates, but I don't know anything about pirates. Could you please send me some information about pirates, their lifestyle, what they do, so I can write my novel?

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How to read a publishing contract (20)

2010-08-27T07:38:00.000+01:00

Stroppy Author's stroppy tour is over. After stropping at the health authorities in CrowAshire, and then at the NHS, I believe my Big Bint will be OK and we can all settle down and get back to normal (though I've forgotten what normal is, and whether it's desirable). At least we can get back to work. Thank you for those who sent good wishes or gave more tangible help during the summer crisis - I'll book you a ringside seat for the autumn crisis, as crises seem to be coming with seasonal regularity.

Now back to the publishing contract. It's a clause from la-la land (which I think has been rebranded TellyTubbyTopia and have an R in a circle after it) - this is never going to happen!

20. Overpayment [yes, that's right]

Any overpayments made by the Publishers to the Author in respect of the Work or any other of the Author's works may be deducted from any sums due to the Author from the Publishers in respect of the Work or any other Work, but an unearned advance shall not be deemed an overpayment unless the Author has failed to deliver the complete Work.

This means that if the publishers send you too much money [pause for hollow laugh] they can claim it back from other money they owe you either for the same book or for another book. It's not worth stopping to say 'what if I've spent it? it was your error' because it's so unlikelyt that a publisher will ever pay you too much. And as long as the clause does, like this, say they will claw it back from other money they owe you, it's not going to be too hard. You don't want them demanding you send it back directly, though. If you have to argue about this last issue, you can point out that it is entirely within their power not to overpay you.

Perhaps the most likely type of overpayment is wrongly calculated royalties. Unless it's an error in the maths (unlikely, as they are calculated by computer), that's very hard for you to check. But I've never been overpaid by a publisher and I've had around 130 publishing contracts. Slightly fewer, I suppose, as series are often covered by one contract. But most contracts cover many payments, so that evens out.

It is important that they do not count a too-optimistic advance to be an overpayment. The advance is based on their judgment of likely sales. You shouldn't have to pay for their poor judgment. In fact, there are authors - and agents - who seem to think the whole point of publishing is to trick publishers into making bad judgments about the likely sale of a book and so securing an implausibly large advance and laughing all the way to the bank. It's nice to have a large advance, but it backfires if the publisher realises you are not even as good as sliced bread and makes it your last advance.

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Grim, Gross and Grisly

2010-08-20T11:48:00.000+01:00

Grim, Gross and Grisly is published today and there will be a competition to win copies.

I'll post a gross, grim or grisly fact each day on twitter (follow @annerooney to see them) and then there will be a contest for the most yukky human fact posted as a comment here or with the tag #grimgrossgrisly on twitter. Not sure how many prizes yet - depends how many I can prise (ho ho) out of the lovely publishers. If you can't wait that long, it's £6.99 from Barrington Stoke (or Amazon, Foyles, Waterstones, of course).

Story of Maths in Korean

2010-08-04T10:49:00.001+01:00

Doesn't this look great?
Story of Maths in Korean :-)

Off on holiday in CrowAshire, so no contractual clauses for a while....

Mythic interview

2010-07-30T12:28:00.000+01:00

I'm playing away today, doing the Mythic Interview over at Lucy Coats' Scribble City Central. So if you want to know why I painted one of Big Bint's friends green or have a soft spot for the naughty Biblical raven who couldn't be arsed, come and join us.

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How to read a publishing contract (19)

2010-07-27T16:21:00.000+01:00

You've done well if you've stuck it out this long - there are only 27 clauses so the end is in sight! This is a dreary one, and not really required since the point is already covered by UK law:

19. Value Added Tax

The Publishers require details of the Author's Value Added Tax registration number where applicable. Where the Author fails to provide a Value Added Tax registration number the Publishers cannot pay Value Added Tax on any sums under the terms of this Agreement.

Well, durrr. If you are VAT registered, you already know you have to provide a proper VAT invoice, stating your VAT number, date and tax point, bla bla.

Don't panic about whether you are or should be VAT registered. If you are, you already know. It's not like Income Tax that just sneaks up on you as soon as you have any money. You have to jump through hoops to get VAT registered. You only need to register for VAT if your turnover (not income) goes above £70,000 in a year. You can choose to register with a lower turnover, but if your turnover is very far below Customs and Excise might not want you to. (There used to be a quarterly limit, too, but that is no longer the case.) You can deregister if your turnover drops below £68,000 but there is not point in constantly registering and deregistering if you are hovering around the threshold. We'll do benefits and disadvantages of VAT registration another day - for now, you just need to know if you are VAT registered.

There is nothing to strop about in this clause as UK law already insists you provide your VAT number, so just accept this one and move on...

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Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible

2010-07-25T14:56:00.000+01:00

But for now I am in a data desert. After four days at Goddard's in Surrey last week, I've come back to find Virgin very reluctant to deliver any electrons to my house, or take away the electrons I have used. This puny update comes to you via the free wifi in Starbucks - or free in exchange for buying lunch.

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How to read a publishing contract (18)

2010-07-19T11:50:00.000+01:00

This is about checking up on your publisher. Does anyone ever do this? I've no idea. But just in case you want to...

18. Examination of Publishers' [sic] Records

The Author or the Author's authorised representative shall have the right upon written request to examine the records of account of the Publishers insofar as they relate to the sales and receipts in respect of the Work, which examination shall be at the cost of the Author unless errors exceeding £10 (ten pounds) to the Author's disadvantage shall be found, in which case the cost shall be paid by the Publishers.

This means that if you think they are fiddling your royalties, or are incompetent, you can look at their records relating to your book for £10. If you are right, and they owe you more than £10, you don't have to pay the money. This clause doesn't actually say they will pay what they owe you, I but I assume they will. Now, if the publisher *is* fiddling the royalties, they are hardly going to leave a paper trail you can pick up so this won't do you any good. Perhaps I am being naive, but I think worrying that the publisher is withholding royalties ranks along with the 'will they steal my idea?' terror that besets unpublished writers. It must cost more to fiddle the accounts than to pay the royalties due, surely? If they have got them wrong because they are incompetent - well, checking the records might do you some good. It might at least show you it's time to find another publisher.

Incompetence is the more likely reason for the royalty statement being wrong. Usually, if you query a royalty payment and ask them to check, they will do so. It's not really necessary to go this £10 route. I think this is a rather boring clause (unless you are totally paranoid) that gives little potential for a fight.

Notice that it is specifically for 'the Work' - ie the current book. If you publish a lot with the same publisher, I'd argue you want to be able to look at the records for all your books for the same £10.

The Society of Authors does random spot checks on royalties and I suspect that keeps publishers on their toes anyway. Personally, I'd rather write another book than bother with faffing around in someone else's accounts. It's bad enough faffing around in my own accounts. I suppose now I've said that, all my publishers will start fiddling my royalties with impunity, confident that I am never going to check...