Submission Planning 1: Agents

The time has come to start thinking about sending my latest project out into the world. It’s time to make my submission plan and think about the various routes to publication. There are so many options available to authors these days, but also so many pitfalls.

My preferred route is to find an agent to represent me. Agents are invaluable. They have the best contacts, know the right editors to submit to and will negotiate the best deal for you. So my first line of attack will be to submit to agents.

Of course this requires research, and I’ve found a few useful ways to track down agents to put on my submission list. Here are a few of them.

• Agents who represent my favourite authors. Most authors will include this information on their websites, plus this has the advantage of giving you an easy way to personalise your submission letter.

• Agents on twitter. Twitter is a really useful resource for this. Lots of agents tweet and it’s worth checking out their profile because they often state if they are building their lists or are looking for a particular genre.

• Agents in the Bookseller. Keep an eye on the Bookseller for announcements about new agents or agencies. Agents move around a lot and a young hungry agent with a reputable agency who is actively building their list goes straight to the top of mine.

• Recommendations – if you are acquainted with an author ask them who their agent is. They’ll be happy to tell you, especially if their agent is a good one.

• Writers and Artists Handbook – really rather an obvious one but included for completeness.

• Online listings – there are a number of these resources, such as agent hunter or query tracker but some do require a membership fee and the focus tends to be rather more US based. Still, they can be a good starting point.

But wherever you find your potential agents please please please check them out thoroughly before submitting. Here are a few things to check for.

• Sales record: Is the agent a deal maker? You should be able to find information on recent deals either on their websites or in the Book Trade literarture. If they don’t have any deals under their belt then maybe they don’t have the right contacts and if so how are they going to sell your book?

• Clients: Who are their clinets? Have you heard of them? Check out their books. Even ask them about their agents.

• Experience. Be wary of the agent who pops up out of nowhere and who doesn’t provide any information of where they previously worked in the industry.

• Fees. Never pay any fees to an agent at all! No reputable agent these days charges a reading fee.

• Affiliation of professional organisations. For example in the UK check to see if they are a member of the Association of Author’s Agents. No necessarily a red flag but a good indicator.

Remember, a bad agent is worse than no agent and sadly there are scammers out there who would happily part you from your money. But if you’ve written a saleable book and you’ve done your research then you should be fine. I hope we all find the agent of our dreams.

The Second Person

I’m not talking about my mysterious alter ego here (I’ll save that for another day) – I’m talking about Point of View. I want to talk about something I’ve been experimenting with recently which is using different voices and perspectives. My Yeovil Prizewinning story, A Legend of Flight, was the result of this sort of experimentation and one of the other things I’ve been experimenting with recently is writing using the Second Person POV.

I’m sure most of my blog readers know what I’m talking about, even if they haven’t tried the second person themselves, but just in case you are scratching your head and wondering what on earth I’m blethering on about – a brief recap.

The main types of POV:

• First Person (I). Becoming increasingly popular, particularly in YA. Generally lends itself to a single POV work. Multiple First Person POVs can work but you need to keep the character voices distinct.

• Second Person (You). Occasionally seen in short stories or as a minor POV character in a novel.

• Third Person (He/She). The most commonly used particularly for multi-character POVs.

• Omniscient. The God like viewpoint. The narrator describes a scene as if looking down on it from above.

So, back to writing in the second person. It tends not to be used very much and that is for a very good reason – it’s tricky to get right, very intense, and difficult to sustain for a long time. Hard on the reader as well as the writer. As a result if you come across it at all it will be in the form of a short story or as short sections of a longer novel. For example in Complicity Ian Banks uses it very effectively to give us the murderer’s POV.

But what do you gain from using the second person? Here are a few of the benefits.

• Intensity – the second person is very powerful, the reader is immediately immersed – they effectively become the character in your book.

• Ambiguity – there’s a certain ambiguity to a character written in the second person. They could be male or female, young or old. They take on some of the characteristics of the reader. This makes second person an effective tool for certain types of story. For example it works well in crime when writing a scene from the killer’s POV.

• Accusatory – the use of the word ‘you’ can feel very accusatory for the reader and this can, again, be utilised for good effect.

• Uneasy – one of the effects of writing in second person it that it is uncomfortable for the reader. They are being forced into the head of a character they may not like or feel at ease with. Add to this the intensity, ambiguity and accusatory nature of this POV and the reader’s sense of unease is only heightened.

Not all stories lend themselves to the second person, but I do think it’s worth giving it a try, if only to expand your writing armoury. It’s not at all easy to do well. My first efforts came across as clunky and difficult to read. For a while I wrestled with it. People who read it didn’t like it. But after a while I started to get the hang of it. It no longer seems to jar. So I’ll share with you my top tip for writing in the second person:

Try to avoid the use of the word YOU as much as possible.

This applies particularly to the start of sentences. A succession starting with ‘You’ quickly becomes grating. Try turning your sentences around so that the word ‘You’ comes in the middle. The flow will be greatly improved. You words will cease to jar.

What are you waiting for? Give it a go

Making Time to Write

How many times have we heard, or maybe even uttered, those words “I’d love to write a book, I just don’t have the time”.

Well I’ll let you into a secret – I don’t have the time either. I have a day job, I have a family. This year I have two teenagers sitting important exams, I’ve joined a running club and I’ve been helping my mother move house. Some days when everyone else is using the computer and I have a million and one other things to do it feels as if the whole world is conspiring to stop me writing.

Yet, somehow, the novel I started back in September has managed to creep up to 71K words out of a target length of 80K. It’s the longest thing I’ve ever written and the end is in sight, the finale looming.

Since I know I’m not the only person compelled to write who is also pushed for time I thought I would share a few tips with you that have helped me get this novel written.

1. Get a smart phone and use it for all you social networking and procrastinating. That way when you do get the chance to sit down and write you write.
2. Have a plan – I find an outline helps a lot. Mine is organic and changes as I go along, but it means that when I do get a chance to write I know exactly what happens next.
3. Don’t edit – get that first draft down, editing can come later. I know some people prefer to make each section perfect before moving on to the next bit but chances are that section will never be perfect. Finish that first draft and then you will have something to work with.
4. Don’t worry if the words feel stilted or don’t flow, keep pressing on, you can come back and fix it later.
5. Try to find writing slots of about an hour. I can generally manage a thousand words in an hour but if you can only manage to find half hour slots that’s fine. Then make sure you spend that time slot writing.
6. Don’t worry about finding a regular slot, although if you can so much the better, but if you have to fit it in here and there between everything else then so be it.
7. Keep a tally of your word count. It’s satisfying watching it creep up and seeing how 500 words added here or there can start to make a difference.
8. Thinking time is just as important as writing time, so take any opportunity, to give yourself space to think and play over your next scene in your head. That way when you get the chance to sit down and write the scene is all ready to go.
9. Stay focussed on one project. It’s so easy to get seduced by that shiny new idea but if you keep hopping from project to project you’ll never get anything finished. 
10. Finally enjoy it. Writing should be fun, a creative release.

So remember. “I don’t have the time,” is NOT an excuse – and this applies to all things in life – not just writing!

Trying Something New

It’s too easy to get into a writing rut – to stay in your comfort zone. But sometimes you need to step out of that zone, to push the boundaries and to try something new.

That is what I am doing.

When I started out I wrote mainly Science Fiction and Weird fiction short stories, and achieved modest success, placing them in anthologies and magazines. It was satisfying and rewarding. I could have settled into that rut and stayed there. But I didn’t. I wanted to write novels, and so I tried my hand at writing for a younger audience.

The culmination of this venture was RED ROCK, my YA Cli-Fi thriller. And for a while I felt I’d found my niche. But RED ROCK hasn’t sold particularly well – at least not by publisher standards – (they expect sales of around 10K for a book to be considered a success) – and the subsequent MG and YA novels that I have written have all been politely declined.

I know in my heart that they’re better books, but this is a business. Publishers are looking for something shiny and new, and by that I mean debuts. What nobody tells you is that once you’ve had one book deal it becomes so much harder to get another, especially if your sales aren’t huge. There are no second chances in this game.

I’m not prepared to accept that. I do have an idea for another kids’ book, but I’m not going to write it. Not just yet.

I’m stepping out of my comfort zone and writing something new. Something different. And I’m not just talking about switching genres – (adult psychological thriller) – I’m talking about voice.

I’ve been experimenting with different points of view, mixing the first, second and third person, the present and past tense. Each can be approached in a different way, and the more things I try the more I start to see what works and what doesn’t. It’s fun being experimental, and I’m accumulating a number of interesting flash pieces that I may well post on this blog at some time in the future, to illustrate a few of the techniques I’ve been trying out.

The new novel is coming on well, and I’ve started to test it out on my critique group. And as for that kids’ book idea – I may well write it one day – but if I do it won’t be like anything else out there! And it won’t be like anything I’ve written before!