Tuesday 21 November 2017

Scott Pack at The Writer's Summit: Crafting to Sell

On of the best talks at The Writer's Summit was by Scott Pack (@meandmybigmouth), the energetic and amusing associate editor of Unbound and editor-at-large of Eye Books and formerly head buyer for Waterstones. Any errors in content are mine alone!

He began by inviting us to imagine a grand entrance onto the stage for him with lights, fireworks and fanfares- which The Writer's Summit's budget couldn't run to. It was an entertaining riff and you could see the audience relax and engage. By a strange coincidence the end of the Writer's Summit was indeed serendipitously marked by fireworks bursting into the sky over Waterloo.

He began with a short history lesson. When the Net Book Agreement existed (a British fixed price book agreement between publishers and booksellers)- from 1900 until the mid 90's- bookshops flourished, as it was a level playing field. Most of the audience were old enough to remember Ottakar's, Dillon's, Borders, Books Etc gracing the high streets up and down the country. Now the NBA is no more, fewer bookshops exist for browsing and people often discover books online. You can read the first few pages of most books on Amazon for free.

And that is precisely why a killer opening is so important.

Here are his top ten tips:

1. Write a great first line. He gave us `The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.' This is from `The Go Between' by L.P Hartley (1953) Also `It was the day my grandmother exploded.' from Iain Banks' `Crow Road' (1992). To this I would add my own personal favourite `It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.' from Anthony Burgess' `Earthly Powers' (1980).

2. Make the reader care. Right from the first ten pages. Think of the emotions you want the reader to feel about the people you are writing about. If you give the reader an interesting character who is relatable or striking, then we do care.

3. Dialogue is your friend. It is not an info dump. Exposition and back story are your enemies. Think about the way different people speak and how to progress the plot through dialogue.

4. Introduce conflict. You need to lure the reader in, a trail of breadcrumbs to make them want to read on. He spoke of the importance of cliffhangers- certainly within the first 10% of the book, since a Kindle sample is precisely that. He spoke of a book called `Cliffhanger' which begins with an excellent premise. (Not the action adventure by Jacqueline Wilson.) A husband and wife have a terrible argument and she goes storming off into the night. He follows her out into the pouring rain and finally spots her figure standing near the edge of a cliff. In a moment of madness he pushes her off the cliff. He returns home, paralysed with remorse, only to find his wife warm and dry inside the house.

5. Start as late in the story as you can. This was a particularly interesting point and one I hadn't considered before. I think I may have missed the next few minutes as I immediately started considering this idea in relation to my own books.

6. Make something happen (while avoiding adverbs). He even mentioned doing adverb sit ups (to make you cut them out of your prose, whenever you come across one).

7. Steal from the best. Look at the first 10 pages of a book you love and see what they've done and how they've pulled the reader in. He suggested actually typing up these first ten pages as a way of physically learning how other writers work. And then deleting it all, of course.

9. Don't follow all the rules.

10. Be yourself. Getting published has a lot to do with luck and timing. It's all very subjective. A good book will find its audience.



Wednesday 15 November 2017

The Writer's Summit, Part Two


 
The next speaker at The Writer's Summit was the energetic and engaging Sam Missingham, founder of @lounge_books, a home for book lovers (lounge-books.com). The title of her talk was `7 Habits of Highly Effective Authors', key tips on promotion and marketing, building your author platform and more.

We writers need a whole list of attributes: persistence, belief in yourself, determination, belief in your talents, a strong work ethic, commitment, enthusiasm, resilience, optimism and bravery. I felt like adding a few adjectives of my own: `dogged' persistence, `reckless' optimism, `crazed' determination…

Basically, however you get published, whether you choose the traditional route or go for digital self publishing, you have to be the CEO of your own writing career. No one can afford to sit back and think that your books will sell themselves or that publishing houses have anything other than miniscule marketing budgets for all but the big names. This means you need to be active, engaged, skilled and a hustler!

Where are your readers? You should have an account with goodreads, `find and share the books you love', which has 35 million people registered. You also need to be active on Twitter and Facebook, have a website- she recommended using WordPress.com-  and create a newsletter, so that you can attract `cheerleaders for your work'. She cited the author Clare Mackintosh, whose debut novel `I Let You Go' won the Theakston's Old Peculiar Crime Novel of the Year award, as someone who writes a brilliant newsletter.

KEEP YOURSELF INFORMED: Basically, she advocated signing up for everything, including BookBub, a free service which helps you discover books you'll love with great deals and recommendations. Foyles also does particularly good emails, as does The Bookseller.

Copy any good ideas on authors' websites and make them better. She showed us Neil Gaiman's impressive page (author of `American Gods'). She particularly recommended The Creative Penn (Joanna Penn), which is a site with blogs, podcasts, courses and her own fiction and non fiction books- totally professional and very impressive. She also mentioned Writer's Digest, an American magazine aimed at beginning and established writers with interviews, tips and helpful articles about self publishing etc.

With regards to Twitter she recommended following Joanne Harris (@Joannechocolat) and Marian Keyes (@MarianKeyes) in particular, as they have a huge following and use Twitter brilliantly. When using Twitter, you should express your own views, respond to others, share your writing and your hobbies, be generous to other authors, share humour and add value. Hashtags are important.

Who writes the same kind of books as you do? Everyone following them could also follow you, so see who they follow. Who follows your local bookshop? Follow those people. You should be spending at least half an hour a day on Twitter.

Look at bloggers and influencers (blog tours), join author associations as they often have events and the Alliance of Independent Authors gives good advice on self publishing. Go to festivals, events, awards.

I began to feel quite exhausted just listening to her, hadn't quite realised how much time you have to invest and despaired a little, as did several members of the audience, as to how you were supposed to do all this and write and have a full time job to pay the bills!

HUSTLING: she suggested speaking at an event, talking to your local bookseller, emailing an editor. What's the worst that can happen? (I could think of a whole list of debacles!) You should collaborate as much as possible, like Killer Women have or The Prime Writers, an authors' collective, of writers who published their first book over the age of 40.

If you blog, you can do what she called micro blogging (I confess my ignorance of this term), where you post excerpts of your book and ask the reader what they think of a particular character or plot twist, so you can get valuable feedback. Another option is using wattpad, a free online storytelling community where people can post articles, stories or poems.

 By the end of this excellent talk, I was desperate for caffeine and more hours in the day!

Monday 13 November 2017

The Writer's Summit, Part One

Back in early October I bought a ticket for The Writer's Summit, `brought to you by The London Book Fair and Writer's Digest', held at the Coin Street conference centre, near Waterloo. Its aim was to provide new writers with the insights and advice needed about the numerous publishing options available today.

On Saturday I got up at 5 am and took a horribly early train from Cambridge, as the doors for this one day event opened at 8.45. It was an eco building, which apparently meant only two toilet cubicles existed for women on the third floor, where the summit was being held and no communal basins or mirrors. There was quite a queue at 9 am and I was transported back to school discos as a woman walked up and down said queue asking everyone if they had a mirror, as she couldn't put her makeup on blind.

The chair for the event was James Woollam, the managing director of F & W Media and Writer's Digest UK, who introduced this inaugural summit with great charm. The first speaker was Alison Flood, the book reporter for the Guardian, who was engaging and enthusiastic, but threw hundreds of statistics at us and my pen just couldn't keep up:

The good news is that print books have shown resilience in the past 18 months, whereas e book sales are the lowest since 2011. The bad news is that since 2005 five hundred independent bookshops have closed.

George Saunders, whose novel `Lincoln in the Bardo' was the winner of the Man Booker Prize 2017, was allegedly selling only one or two copies a week until he was shortlisted. I say allegedly because my pen - or maybe my ears- seemed resistant to what she was saying. I believe she stated that even once he'd won the prize, his sales were only around the 3,500 mark.

What are people reading then, if not literary fiction? Sales of thrillers, children's books and non fiction have shown a healthy increase, apparently.

Digital self publishing has really taken off, which was what this conference was addressing. Should you go the traditional route or should you self publish? Definitely not the latter, if you write literary fiction, seemed to be the consensus. You are condemned to poor sales in all corners of the market.

As opposed to the long lead time in the traditional publishing market, Kindle Direct Publishing says it takes only 5 minutes to publish a book. You can also earn up to 70% royalties in a host of countries including the UK and the US.  

Alison Flood said she felt that both parts of the market were here to stay and that traditional editors were now looking at the Amazon charts, where the bestsellers were often self-published, in order to understand what the reading public wants. As a result, the snobbery of what used to be called `vanity publishing' has started to fade and many literary prizes are now open to non traditionally published books, as well. For example, `The Wake' by Paul Kingsnorth was longlisted for the 2014 Man Booker prize and won the 2015 Book of the Year Award. It was published by Unbound, a crowdfunding publisher.

Tomorrow's blog will cover Sam Missingham's talk on `7 Habits of Highly Effective Authors'