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After the business of Build Your Book Month, we're back with another top selection of member events. This month we’re zooming in on two essentials: writing and editing. Learn how to write beautiful sentences, take editorial feedback, hear from the brain behind ‘Eats, Shoots and Leaves’, and much more!
SEE ALL UPCOMING EVENTS
Member events coming up in November:
Member ‘Ask Us Anything’ Zoom event
Thursday 4 November, 16.00 GMT | 12.00 EDT
Join us for our second ‘Ask Us Anything’ event taking place on ZOOM! This is a great opportunity to get to know fellow members from around the world and say ‘hello’ via webcam. Please note there is a 100 participant limit on this session.
Passcode: JWmember
Demystifying the Editorial Process with Laurel Sills
Friday 5 November, 19.00 GMT | 15:00 EDT
What exactly does an editor do? What is the difference between a copyedit and a proofread? Here we will break the whole editorial process down so that you can feel confident in what to expect, what services to consider if you are self-publishing, and what your publisher may provide within a publishing house.
Reschedule: Twitter for Authors with Julie Owen-Moylan
Monday 8 November, 19.00 GMT | 14:00 EST
Are you clueless about Twitter? Discover the dos and the dont’s of successful tweeting so that you have fun with it and feel more comfortable. Find out how to build a following and connect with like-minded people while using Twitter as a valuable part of your author platform.
Simon & Schuster Digital – Partnership Event
Thursday 11 November, 19.00 GMT | 14:00 EST
Are you ready to submit your book? Are you frantically trying to whip it into shape? Join us in conversation with Simon & Schuster’s editorial team to learn what they’re looking for in advance of our One Day open submission partnership.
Eats, Shoots and Leaves Live with Lynne Truss
Monday 15 November, 19.00 GMT | 14:00 EST
Join us for an in conversation event with grammar expert and writer of all things from sport journalism to crime fiction and more, Lynne Truss. You’re likely to remember Truss’s seminal book on punctuation, Eats, Shoots and Leaves, well this is your chance to ask the author your burning questions, for writing advice and to tackle those niggling punctuation issues. Come armed with questions!
Crafting Beautiful Sentences with Anna Bailey
Wednesday 17 November, 19.00 GMT | 14:00 EST
So much of improving as a writer comes from reading. Choose an author whose prose you really admire – pick a short scene of theirs and write something similar with your own characters, paying attention to the language the author uses and considering why it works in the context.
Tidy Up Your Prose with Benjamin Dreyer
Tuesday 23 November, 19.00 GMT | 14:00 EST
A copy editor is a writer’s best friend and every writer should be lucky to have a copy editor like Benjamin Dreyer, Copy Chief at Penguin Random House, on their side. Join Benjamin and Jericho’s Drew Broussard for a conversation about what a copy editor does and some tips and tricks for how to tidy up your prose!
Making Prose Poetic with Sam Riviere
Friday 26 November, 19.00 GMT | 14:00 EST
Prose and poetry are delightful forms in and of themselves, but there’s magic to be found in blending them together. Join poet and author Sam Riviere and Jericho’s Drew Broussard for a conversation about writing poetry, writing prose, and how tapping your poetic sensibilities can elevate your language and change your writing.
REGISTER FOR THESE EVENTS
We can't wait to see you at the events this month! Follow us on social media (links below) for event reminders closer to the time. Don’t worry if you miss a session as you can watch back on replay at any time. As always, we're available to contact at info@jerichowriters.com. See you soon!
The Jericho Writers Team
Copyright © 2020 Jericho Writers, All rights reserved.
Jericho Writers
4 Acer Walk
Oxford OX2 6EX
United Kingdom
UK: +44 (0) 345 459 9560 US: +1 (646)-974-9060
Giants eating hobbits – and the right publisher for you
In America, Hachette (the world’s #2 consumer publisher) is spending $240 million on a good-sized independent, Workman. In France, the two largest corporate publishers are merging. Globally, Penguin Random House (PRH) is buying Simon & Schuster, its #5 competitor.
A US investment banker, commenting on these changes, said it’s ‘all about market share.’ His implication: that the big will continue to eat the small, and the small – lacking the resources of their bigger brethren – will struggle to maximise the potential of their books and their authors.
Well, that’s one view. Here’s another:
Markus Dohle, CEO of PRH, says: ‘I’m not worried about consolidation. It is the smallness of publishing that matters. It’s one book at a time. There is no scale.’
Now, you’re entitled to be cynical about that. If a giant, whose diet is largely composed of hobbits, gnomes, halflings, and other small fry, tells you that size doesn’t matter, you probably want to nod politely then run as fast as you can into your burrow.
At the same time, you’re not a publisher. You are an emerging author and the thing you really want to know is: What kind of publisher do I personally need?
And look: that’s a good question, and I’ll try to answer it, but I don’t know your exact situation. So whatever I say in the rest of this email needs to be supplemented with your own knowledge, your own wisdom. That said …
When size matters
Let’s say, like me, you write police procedurals. There’s clearly a mass market for that fiction. It’s the sort of thing which can potentially sell a ton on Amazon, but also fill the shelves of supermarkets and specialist bookstores too.
Let’s just assume, for now, that you want to sell a lot of books and you want to be present in print as well as digital (we’ll talk more about the digital-first option in a moment.) In that case, yes, you want a Big 5 firm or any independent that can muster the firepower needed to compete.
To give you an example: when I sold the first of the Fiona Griffiths books, the leading offers I received (in the UK, that is) came from Hachette, a giant, and from Faber, a first-class independent, with global revenues roughly 1% of Hachette’s.
Put like that, Faber doesn’t sound like a real competitor, except that the tiny little company has published no fewer than thirteen Nobel laureates, a fistful of Booker winners, and plenty more besides. It’s an outstanding publisher – just smaller. I was flattered to get an offer from them.
What’s more, the key question for anyone with real ambition in commercial fiction – or any non-fiction with a chance of making mass sales – is simply this: does the putative publisher have the financial resources to compete in the mass market?
So let’s say Faber had persuaded a handful of supermarkets to go big on the book. To make that work, they’d have needed a hardback print run of 30,000 or more books (many more if you’re looking at big sales in North America), plus a ton of promo spend … and the whole deal would be done on a ‘sale or return’ basis. That is, if the books sold worse than expected, Faber would have had to take them all back and pulp them.
Really small publishers just can’t take that financial risk: the cost, if the venture went wrong, could be crippling. So, if you want to play in the mass market – genre fiction, bookclub fiction, any non-fiction with front-of-store sales potential (eg: The Tipping Point or Educated or A Brief History of Time) – you must pick a publisher that has the ambition to gamble big and the resources to do so. Faber (with $30 million in annual revenues) was comfortably big enough to take those risks.
Below the $10-15 million revenue figure, you need to get a lot more cautious. If you pick a micro-publisher, they can still publish in print, but they can’t afford to enter Supermarket World. Media attention tends to chase books that are already selling well, so your total potential sales will be much lower than if you picked a publisher with more heft.
In short, when it comes to any mass market book, there comes a cut off point below which size really does matter. You don’t have to be on the Penguin Random House scale to win big, but you do have to be able to spend properly in support of your book.
When size doesn’t matter: digital
If you don’t care about the whole print market, then digital-first publication is unquestionably an option to take seriously. The current model for such publishing was pioneered (brilliantly) by Bookouture, a UK-based outfit that has since been eaten up – but also left well alone – by Hachette.
That model, now widely copied, is this:
Advances are minimal or non-existent.
E-book royalties are excellent.
The pace of publishing tends to be frenetic.
Books are published as e-books, as audiobooks, and as online-print. (So you can get a hard-copy of your book, but not from any bricks-and-mortar street retailer.)
Brilliant use of social media, digital ads, mailing lists and the like
Cover designs, blurb, subtitles, metadata, and pricing will all be flexible, not fixed. So if a particular cover doesn’t achieve the sales needed, it’ll just be switched out for a different one.
If a book sells in huge volumes digitally, there’ll be partnerships available with print-led publishers. For nearly all digital-first authors, however, the vast bulk of sales and readers will be via digital formats.
You can be a huge author on digital platforms and still have near-zero name recognition from traditional media outlets, literary festivals, prize awards and the like. That makes no sense at all, but…
Any ambitious genre author should take any digital first publisher seriously. Financial heft really doesn’t matter – digital publishing is cheap.
It’s not just cheap, it’s also brilliantly democratic. Bookouture still allocates the exact same marketing budget to all its debut authors. If a book does well, its budget is upped. If a book does badly (and some clever tweaking can’t fix it), then that book will be left without further support.
In the end, it’s readers, mediated by Amazon, who decide what books to support. That’s how it should be. The one thing you do want to check is the company’s sales record. Have they built big authors? Do they have a credible plan for you? If the answer to both questions is yes, you don’t need to worry about scale.
When size doesn’t matter: self-pub
And if size doesn’t matter in terms of digital publishing, it certainly doesn’t matter in terms of self-publishing.
Indie authors need to allow proper budget for the book itself (editing and copy editing; those things are no longer optional.) They also need to buy a proper cover (for, say, $300-500.)
Thereafter, a marketing budget of as little as $500 will still do something. If you have a few books already published, and a mailing list established, you might want to throw an ad budget of (say) $1500-5000 at a launch, but those sums are within the reach of many authors, especially if there is real income coming in each month already. (I’d never recommend a $5000 launch budget for a debut novel, though. Start small, build big.)
In short, quite small amounts of money will allow you to build a real platform as a self-pub author. If you write plenty and write well and are professional in the way you publish, there’s nothing to stop you building a six- or seven-figure career. Plenty of indie authors have.
When size doesn’t matter: niche non-fiction
If you’re writing niche non-fiction - The Big Book of Dressage Exercises, The Complete Beginners Guide to Knitting, How to Tame Lions Without Losing a Leg - you aren’t going to appear on supermarket shelves and you’re never going to ride high on Amazon bestseller lists either.
That book on dressage exercises is a real book. When I checked, it was (not surprisingly) #1 for the search “Dressage books” but came a mediocre #83 in “Animal and Equestrian Sports” and only just made the top 50,000 on the overall Amazon bestseller list.
This is where Markus Dohle is right. It’s one book at a time and all publishing is small.
If you’re writing that kind of book, then simply pick the publisher with the most passion for your book. An equestrian publisher will know what to do with a book on dressage.
Niche non-fiction will never sell a lot in any one month, but if you’ve written a book that hovers, more or less permanently, around the 50,000 mark on Amazon, you have a little goose that will go on laying eggs for a long time to come. I’ve written books like that and, over ten years or so, they pay out very nicely.
When size doesn’t matter: literary fiction
Challenging literary fiction will almost never sell a lot, but passionate attention from a team skilled and experienced at selling small, difficult books will do fine. A big corporate publisher has budgets and profit expectations to deal with, so small, hard books are seldom taken on in the first place.
One of the striking ways that the publishing landscape has changed in recent years is the way that micro-publishers have scored huge successes with literary novels: winning prizes and, occasionally, hitting bestseller lists too. At times that success has stretched a company beyond its breaking point, so a book has moved from the original publisher to a larger one. But that’s good. That’s still success.
But have we had any fun?
And in the end, you shouldn’t make a choice only on the basis of probable sales and total advances.
It’s also about where you feel the passion and the energy and the chemistry. A couple of times in my career, I’ve made a decision based on the chemistry I felt with the people making offers. That matters. You’ll spend the money, but the memories stay with you.
That’s it from me. My children and I have built the biggest squirrel obstacle course in North West Oxfordshire. The squirrels love it.
Till soon.
Harry
PS: Scurry up a fence post, along a narrow twelve-foot pole, through a pair of tunnels, along a wooden swing, across a rope-bridge, to a see-saw that moves as you scurry, then leap from the end of the see-saw to a bird-table. Do all that, my friend, and you’ll have earned your nuts – and the right to comment on this post here:
https://community.jerichowriters.com/page/view-post?id=406
If you just want to reply, well, heck, just reply. You won’t earn a pecan, though.
PPS: It's November next week, which means it's also Book Club time. On Monday at 19:00 GMT we'll have the brilliant Lucie McKnight Hardy with us talking about her spooky coming-of-age tale, Water Shall Refuse Them. Oh, and it's completely free to attend. You can find the Zoom link and all that goodness here.
Jericho Writers
4 Acer Walk
Oxford OX2 6EX
United Kingdom
UK: +44 (0) 345 459 9560 US: +1 (646)-974-9060
Which literary agent is your perfect match?
AgentMatch takeover special
This week’s newsletter has been written by the team that leads AgentMatch here at Jericho Writers – on the back of having just updated all agent listings across the platform. Below, find out how to make the most of this element of your membership, as well as events this week, new video courses and opportunities.
Having trouble with links? View this newsletter in your browser: https://community.jerichowriters.com/page/view-post?id=405
VIDEO COURSE: Introduction to Self-Publishing (Member exclusive)
This new, eight-module video course will lead you through the process of considering self-publishing, with downloadable worksheets and a Community group. This is already getting rave reviews, so do check it out!
TAKE THE COURSE
This week on Jericho Writers:
MEMBER EVENTS: Ten Steps to Creating Compelling Characters (Member exclusive)
We end a brilliant Build Your Book month with Ten Steps to Creating Compelling Characters, taught by Cesca Major tomorrow. Remember, you an also catch up on all events this month on replay using the same link below, and register for November’s webinars too.
REGISTER NOW
MEMBER EVENTS: Member ZOOM – Ask us Anything
Thanks to those who joined for our first ZOOM event last month! As it was an absolute delight, we’re back on November 4 for another chance to see and speak to your fellow members. There is a 100 participant limit – do pop a reminder in your diary!
REGISTER NOW
SPOTLIGHT ON: Samar Hammam, Rocking Chair Books
"I’d love to receive more humour. I love to laugh! I also find that it can be effective in exposing and coping with horror, like a funny book dealing with climate change."
READ THE INTERVIEW ON AGENTMATCH
SUCCESS STORY: Amanda Berriman – How I Got My Agent
One of our earliest and dearest clients writes about the importance of never giving up. Amanda is also raising money for her son’s neuroblastoma treatment and we can't think of a more worthy fundraiser to include in a newsletter. #TeamPeter.
READ NOW
Finding Your Perfect Agent
Finding an agent is a milestone in any writer’s career. It’s a journey filled with ups and downs: rejections, standard responses, silence, requests, more rejections, and for some, eventually, success.
With AgentMatch, a database of 1,200+ US and UK agent profiles, our aim is to make that journey just that little bit easier. Plus, it's 100% included in your membership.
How to use AgentMatch: the basics
Use the search filters (genre, country, submission status, etc) to work through your list of potential agents. You can even save your search for later and come back to it when you’re ready.
Be selective and keep it simple when choosing your genre. If your novel crosses over between genres search your main genre first. Then review each agent profile for interest in your second genre.
Make the most of the interviews and bespoke profiles. Read the interviews, follow the interesting links, deep-dive into their social media, familiarise yourself with both their client list and favourite authors.
Double check submission requirements. The world of agents moves quickly, so always check submission requirements on the agency’s website before sending in your work.
Why research?
Typically, an agent receives over 30 submissions a day (and that’s on a slow day!), so ask yourself: what would set my query apart from the rest? Use the research we’ve collated and the information from our interviews to tailor your letter. Show that you take the representation of your work seriously by researching each agent fully. (And don’t forget to include some comparable titles too – it shows you know the market and you know exactly where your book should sit).
How do you know if you’re a perfect match?
As well as using AgentMatch to find an agent that is interested in your work, you need to see if this is an agent that you could work with.
The agent-author relationship is one of the most important relationships for any author. You need to find someone you can work alongside and feel comfortable exchanging ideas with. So, do your research:
Do they represent books and authors you look up to?
Is their client list too similar to your work?
Do they have a good reputation?
Book in a 1-2-1 and pitch your book directly to an agent; what was their feedback?
Most of all, you’re looking for an agent that you can see yourself working alongside - someone who can support you when you need reassurance and challenge you when they think your work needs improvement.
Spotlight On
We make it our mission to get to know agents so that we can help you decide if this is someone you’d want representing you. In our Spotlight On features, we sit down with agents to ask them the questions you need to know. So, sit back, make yourself a cup of tea and get stuck in.
Oh, and if there’s a question you’re dying to ask or an agent you’d love to see an interview with, get in touch by replying to this or leave a note on Community and give us your wish list of agents and we’ll see who we can sit down with.
As I said, finding an agent is one of the most challenging steps an author will face. So, gauge the responses you receive and if after submitting to, say, 12 - 15 agents you haven’t received a request for your full manuscript, then take another look at your submission pack. Ask someone to beta read your chapters and give them specific points you’d like feedback on: what did you think of the main character? How did you find a particular scene? Did it move quickly enough for you? Did you want to read on?
Or better yet, try and book in a 1-2-1 with an agent of your choice and get live feedback before you start the sending your submission out for real.
Above all, if you are querying agents and in the middle of an inbox full of standard responses, rejections, or just plain silence, don’t forget that you write because you love to write.
You’ve got this. And if you need a hand, then you’ve got us to help.
Rachael
As always, happy writing and remember, you can contact our customer service team on +44 (0) 345 459 9560* or info@jerichowriters.com for any writing-related advice.
*or if you're in the US, give us a call on +1 (646)-974-9060
Resources for querying authors:
Masterclasses:
How to Use AgentMatch
Agents – Jericho Writers
Free resources:
How to Write a Great Query Letter (with Hints + Tips)
How to Write a Novel Synopsis (with an Example)
Getting Rejected By Literary Agents? Here’s What To Do Next
P.S. Coming soon to an AgentMatch near you…
Canadian and Australian agencies. Yes, that’s right, you heard it here first. The team are currently hard at work: lost in researching, building profiles, and booking interviews with Canadian and Australian agents. Plus, some BIG announcements for 2022.
Jericho Writers
4 Acer Walk
Oxford OX2 6EX
United Kingdom
UK: +44 (0) 345 459 9560 US: +1 (646)-974-9060
Why a book is not a movie
Oh, movies, movies. It’s so easy to get seduced by the damn things. There’s the lure of cash for one thing, the sweet unlimited cash of Fount Hollywood. But the seduction I’m thinking of is the way that examples from movies can pull sideways at our writing.
They pull at it when it comes to dialogue.
We imagine Clint Eastwood growling, “You’ve got to ask yourself, ‘Do I feel lucky?’ Well, do ya, punk?”
We imagine a bloke in a mask breathing, “No, I am your father” to a certain Mr Skywalker.
We think of the iconic, “I’ll have what she’s having,” from When Harry Met Sally.
But we feel the pull at other levels too. There’s the level of scene:
The climax of some Bond movie, the ‘You had me at hello’ scene in Jerry Maguire, the courtroom drama of Twelve Angry Men.
And the level of story architecture itself.
There’s a whole mini-industry that adapts the logic of the three-act structure of movies to the needs of the novel – and an industry which, by the way, generally argues that it’s teaching Universal Truth, rather than one option amongst many.
And look. I watch movies. I like movies. I like Clint Eastwood waving a .44 Magnum as well as anyone. If Renee Zellweger goes all wobbly-kneed at a romantic speech from Tom Cruise, well, heck, I’ll happily go all wobbly-kneed with her (albeit in a very manly, restrained British way, of course.)
And of course, learning is learning. If movies inspire something useful, then good. The source doesn’t matter; the learning does.
But I just want to wave a red flag of doubt around any idea that there might be easy, natural or inevitable parallels between books and movies.
I picked the “Do I feel lucky” quote from an American Film Institute list of the most memorable movie quotes of all time. Here are some of the other 100 quotes on their list:
La-dee-da, la-dee-da (Annie Hall).
What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate (Cool Hand Luke).
The stuff that dreams are made of (The Maltese Falcon).
Is it safe? (Marathon Man)
There’s no place like home (Wizard of Oz).
After all, tomorrow is another day (Gone with the Wind).
What’s striking about these examples is how utterly unmemorable they are when taken out of context. The only one of those quotes with a glimmer of writerliness is the one from The Maltese Falcon, and that is a direct (mis)quote of Shakespeare.
The fact is that if you put dialogue on a page and imagine that Tom Cruise or Meryl Streep is speaking it, you are quite likely deceiving yourself that the dialogue is a lot better than it is. The last two quotes on the list above are simply clichés. It’s not that the writing is good there, it’s that the movie around them was good. The actual dialogue, as often as not, is bland in the extreme.
What’s more, movie dialogue is fantastically compressed, compared with the stuff you and I put on the page. If you take a scene from one of your books and lay it out using scriptwriting software, you’ll be shocked at how baggy your dialogue suddenly looks.
My books typically run to about 120,000 words. A movie script of the same thing might run to something closer to 12,000 words. That’s not just prose that’s being thrown overboard, it’s most of the dialogue too. The extreme compression of screen dialogue explains why people walk off abruptly, hang up the phone without saying goodbye, make dinner dates without sorting out places and times. None of that means that movie dialogue is bad – just that movies have their own rules. You need to play by the rules that apply to you. They’re different.
Much the same sort of thinking applies to scene-construction too. Novel scenes and sequences will typically run to much greater length than those on screen. What’s more, screen-sequences can be sustained by magnificent panoramas and beautiful humans. Books can’t use special effects in quite the same way and you probably can’t afford Nicole Kidman.
On the other hand, you can do what no movie director can properly do: you can directly access the interior world of the person experiencing the scene. My best ‘action’ scenes involving Fiona Griffiths have all been quite slo-mo affairs: Fiona slowly freezing on a Welsh mountain, Fiona stuck underground, Fiona slowly enjoying an unusual medieval religious practice … None of these things happened fast and that was kind of the point. The slowness of the scene allowed me to spend real time inside Fiona’s brain and it was the interiority of the experience – not its cinematic quality – that gave those scenes their energy. If I’d tried to jazz those scenes up to meet Bond-style action standards, I’d have lost everything that made them special in the first place.
The same kind of warnings apply when it comes to plotting.
And look: you can use three-act plotting structures to help you with your novel. I know pro authors who do that, and are helped by it. (If you’re going to copy them, I recommend Save the Cat by Blake Snyder which is probably the best of those books.)
But when those books claim, as they all do, that the three-act structure is somehow hewn by angels from a tree grown in the Garden of Eden, just remember that they’re talking nonsense.
Yes, it’s true that Hollywood venerates screenplays written in that mould, so they tend to acquire, develop and produce films that largely follow the formula. But for one thing, a lot of screenplays that supposedly follow the formula don’t look especially formulaic to me. Chinatown is often spoken of as the best screenplay ever, but if you actually read it, you notice more or less constant story-pressure, not just the beats you’re told to notice. It’s like eating a steak while being told all the time what a wonderful fish it is.
And for another thing – duh! – books aren’t movies.
Books can get away with very little story (On Chesil Beach, by Ian McEwan), with tonnes of story (any big, epic novel), or with is-this-even-a-story? (Lincoln in the Bardo, by George Saunders.) The idea that book plots have to map onto movie plots is just bananas. So much so, in fact, you’d have to assume the idea is generated by someone who’s never actually read very many books.
Indeed, if you do want to map books to screen, then it makes far more sense to look at the small screen not the big one.
The BBC’s iconic (Colin Firth in a wet shirt) production of Pride and Prejudice extended to six hour-long episodes. Their 2016 production of War and Peace ran to eight hours. With that much greater running time – equating to three, four or even five feature films – the novelist’s vision can express itself. Dialogue can play out, wrinkles of character can be explored, the pressure of story can move in a less artificial cycle than the (oftentimes predictable) three act one.
Oh yes, and since we’re in the business of shattering illusions and breaking hearts, I may as well tell you that Fount Hollywood spews much less cash out to writers than you might think. Certainly, if you write a book that is already a big bestseller, then Hollywood will chuck cash at you. But if yours is a relatively unknown work and someone wants to adapt it, then the money in question is more like ‘sensibly priced car’ than ‘Hollywood villa complete with infinity pool’. It’s nice to have, of course, but probably not life-altering.
That’s it from me.
I have an apple in front of me. Do you think I should eat it? I’m thinking yes.
Till soon.
Harry
PS: Some people read this email and think they might want to comment on it. But you’ve got to ask yourself, ‘Do I feel lucky?’ Well, do ya, punk?
The bold, or foolhardy, can comment here:
https://community.jerichowriters.com/page/view-post?id=403
If you’d like to reply, or just teach me an interesting and little-known card-trick, then reply. I like a good card-trick.
PPS: I do not love NaNoWriMo. I do not love anything about it. But I also don’t like Halloween and I’m in a minority there too. So I will say that if you are a lover of carved pumpkins and writing 50,000 words in a month, we have a free event – open to everyone, whether members or not – on NaNoWriMo. Details here.
I shall not attend. I am going to spend November writing a single beautiful sentence – s l o w l y.
PPPS: If you are a Jericho member, then we have more free deliciousness for you. We have a brand new, and astonishingly strong, self-publishing course taught by the mighty Gwyn GB (who also writes as Gwyn Garfield-Bennett.) More information is available here. The course has its own community page so users can upload exercises, give feedback, ask questions and pool knowledge.
As one user said: “I've watched the whole of this course over the past two days and, boy, what a course it is! As the title implies, it's an introduction yet at the same time it covers every step in the self-publishing process with crystal clarity. I now realise why my first two self-published thrillers failed so dramatically despite the significant input I had from professional editors.
This course has given me a new lease of life.” That, m’boy, is what we aim to do. We’re delighted.
PPPPS. But we hate giving our members just one good free thing when we could give them loads. So we’ve also launched another course – also free to members – by Becky Hunter. Becky has been an editor with Penguin Random House and Hachette. She also works as a publicist and has written a couple of novels of her own (both published by Hachette.) Becky’s course is called How To Write a Novel in 6 Weeks and is available, free, to Jericho members. More information here.
Jericho Writers
4 Acer Walk
Oxford OX2 6EX
United Kingdom
UK: +44 (0) 345 459 9560 US: +1 (646)-974-9060
Is self-publishing for you?
Another new Video Course has landed in your membership!
What an exciting month it’s been, with back-to-back Build Your Book events, a new Write A Novel in Six Weeks video course and now – another brand new, interactive video course offering an introduction to the world of independent publishing.
Having trouble with links? View this newsletter in your browser: https://community.jerichowriters.com/page/view-post?id=402
VIDEO COURSE: Introduction to Self-Publishing (Member exclusive)
NEW! Hot off the press, this eight-module video course will lead you through the process of self-publishing, from considering whether it’s the right path for you, all the way to setting up that first book. This is an interactive video course with downloadable worksheets and a Community group, taught by indie bestseller, Gwyn GB.
TAKE THE COURSE
This week on Jericho Writers:
MEMBER EVENTS: Five live events this week! (Member exclusive)
Today we have Go Big, Build A World with Benjamin Percy; on 21st we have Debi Alper on dialogue; followed by Jen Silverman on Scripting Dialogue on 22nd; Writing Direct Speech in Children’s Books with Zoe Antoniades is on 23rd (see below) and our open NaNoWriMo prep event is on Monday 25th. Phew!
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MEMBER EVENTS: Call for children’s book submissions (Build Your Book)
If you’re hoping to pop along to the Writing Direct Speech in Children’s books with Zoe Antoniades on 23 October, you’re invited to submit a scene between two characters where a problem or conflict occurs and they try to solve it, for Zoe to workshop in the session. Email it direct to Zoe at zoe@invisiblevoices.org.
MENTORING – Bespoke guidance from award-winning authors (10% discount)
This service combines online mentoring and editorial feedback - but it's much more than an online writing class. This way of working ensures you meet with your mentor at every vital juncture in your development. We’ve added some fabulous new mentors recently – do check them out.
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BURSARY: Win a free place on the Self-Edit Your Novel tutored course
This life-changing tutored course is sold out into 2023, but applications are now open for under-represented writers to receive a fully-funded place on January’s course. I really urge you to apply for this one! Deadline 20 December 2021.
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BLOG: How to Control Your Self-Publishing Costs
If your interest is piqued by today’s topic, you might also be wondering about the more practical elements of self-publishing. From learning to self-edit effectively to using automated layout programs, here's a list of everything you can do to keep your costs down as a self-published author.
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SUCCESS STORY: Julia Stone
Jericho Writers member Julia Stone’s debut novel was published in August with Orion Dash. We had a fascinating chat with her about using her background in psychology as a springboard into her writing and other creative pursuits. We loved this one and hope you will too.
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Is self-publishing for you?
Almost every week, a writer drops us a line to ask, ‘is self-publishing right for me?’
It’s a fair question. On one hand, taking control of your own publishing sounds ideal. More royalties, more control, and you don’t need to wait around to get your book in front of readers. But on the other hand, indie publishing can be extremely technical and feel a little like learning a whole new language.
Gwyn GB has done an outstanding job creating an eight-week video course that will help us answer this question. The first module particularly asks us to think about what it is we want from writing, publishing and our careers, and then helps us match that against our options. The brilliant thing about this course is that it doesn’t just ask us to watch, but to engage, apply it to our own work, and start having a go at it.
Everyone has to start somewhere, and if you’re thinking about taking those first steps into self-publishing, I really recommend starting here. Having specific tasks to complete that walk you through the process of setting a book up step-by-step makes the world of self-publishing a little more manageable somehow. What’s more, for members it is 100% included in the price of your membership, with a blossoming Community peer support group to boot.
As for the answer to the question: is self-publishing for you? Unfortunately, no one else can answer that for you. But this video course will give you the information and tools you need to consider all your options and help you along the route you do choose. (And hey – if you can’t choose – just pick one for now. You can always switch, change your mind, or do both!)
If you’d like to check out the Introduction to Self-Publishing video course, it’s now live in your membership with all other video courses. Enjoy!
As always, happy writing and remember, you can contact our customer service team on +44 (0) 345 459 9560* or info@jerichowriters.com for any writing-related advice.
Sarah J
Author | Jericho Writers
*or if you're in the US, give us a call on +1 (646)-974-9060
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UNWC 2020-2021 Anthology
We're ever so proud to say that our anthology of work from last year's Ultimate Novel Writing Course students is now live, and has already earned EIGHT full manuscript requests from agents! We can't wait to see where this fabulous bunch are headed in their careers.
One-to-one sessions (10% discount available)
We still have slots left to chat to top literary agents from the UK and US. Each agent or book doctor will read your work in advance of this fifteen-minute call and is a great way to beat the slushpile. You can even choose your preferred agent and date/time.
Developmental Editing (10% discount available)
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Jericho Writers
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Sweet clarity
Last week I talked about a scene in which an author (Delia Owens) switched seamlessly, and delightfully, between two different characters. So the scene started with Kya, dipped into Tate’s perspective, moved back to Kya, stayed with her for a while, then moved – decisively and perfectly – to Tate, before drifting back to Kya.
OK, that’s clear. But I got a number of responses which asked about the validity of various different point of view (POV) arrangements through the course of a book.
And look: there’s a short answer to that question, a long answer to that question, and a wide answer too.
The short answer is: anything goes. Don’t worry about it.
The long answer is: anything goes.
You can have a first-person, single point-of-view structure that endures, not simply through a single book, but through an entire series. My Fiona Griffiths series doesn’t have one single page – not one single paragraph – that isn’t narrated by her, and strictly from her point of view.
You can also have a third-person, single point-of-view structure. That’s a bit less common (because part of the power of third-person lies in the way it liberates the author to enter multiple heads), but it’s common enough. It’s certainly absolutely fine as a technique.
Then you can have books that alternate points of view, often between two halves of a couple (The Time Traveler’s Wife, say) or a sort of couple (All The Light We Cannot See).
Or you can have books that play with a limited, but larger, cast of characters. My first novel worked with three brothers (George, Matthew, Zack) and one sister (Josephine) who played a somewhat lesser role in the story. There wasn’t a strict alternation between those three-and-a-half viewpoints, but there was an approximate one. Readers knew that if they had just finished a George chapter, the next one would probably be either Matthew or Zack, except that every now and then Josephine claimed a space.
Or you can have books that play with a really huge cast of characters. There was a fantastic example, a while back, Maynard and Jennica, by Rudolph Delson. Some big geopolitical thrillers work with huge numbers of characters. (Hello, Tom Clancy.) Some highly literary work does the same.
It all works. The only real constraint on the number of characters is that the more characters you play with, the reader inevitably has a weaker bond with them. Authors have, broadly speaking, three options to deal with that problem:
1. Have the secondary points of view focus relentlessly on the characters you want the reader to care about. So in Maynard and Jennica, the two main characters are the pair in the title. Their points of view claim the greatest page space. The book is clearly about them – and the huge number of secondary characters end up talking almost entirely about those two. In other words, the secondary characters’ role is to keep shining multiple lights on the central pair.
2. You place the emphasis on grand external events more than any character’s inner journey. That works well for the huge geo-political thriller and perhaps some epic fantasy. It works less well in most other genres.
3. You’re a highly literary author and you’re too grand to care about whether your readers bond with your characters. You're just there to collect the prize money and the adulation of the little people.
I don’t really recommend the third of those choices. The other two are fine.
And finally, the wide answer is: anything goes.
Whatever the specific issue – points of view, timelines, first / third person, tense or really anything else – the thing that readers need most is clarity. So give them clarity. Once they have that, they’ll be happy to sit with you on whatever journey you care to take them on.
Dual timelines give another good example of this wider answer.
So take Where the Crawdads Sing, again. There are two timelines in the book that end up meeting. That could feel messy, but it never does, because the rhythm is established early and communicated clearly. The book’s structure is roughly:
A) 1950 – 1969: Kya’s childhood and coming-of-age. In this part of the book, time flows quite quickly. Chapters can jump whole years at a time.
B) 1969: a murder investigation into the death of a local man. Here time flows more slowly. Chapters trace the evolving police investigation with, often, mere days between chapters
C) The timelines come together. We understand why Kya is under investigation and, finally, accused of the crime. We see what happens in the courtroom and what happens thereafter.
Because Owens’s plan is clear from the outset (and because each chapter is clearly labelled with a date), the reader accepts it without demur.
In the Crawdads case, the two timelines merge, but they don’t have to. In AS Byatt’s Possession, a hundred years separates the protagonists, so no merging is possible. But again: so long as the author has a clear structure for the book, and so long as that plan is plain to the reader, there’s no difficulty.
And, to bundle this email up, tie it off, and make it ready for shipping, here’s an answer that is simultaneously short, long and wide:
Make a clear plan. Stick to it. Communicate it to the reader. Do those things with purpose and clarity and – anything goes.
Easy, huh?
Till soon.
Harry
PS: This email is in danger of going extinct. Please view it below. Feel free to comment, just don’t poke your fingers between the bars: https://community.jerichowriters.com/page/view-post?id=400
If you want to reply to this email, stare hard at the button marked “Reply” and see if a solution suggests itself.
PPS: Getting emails from us is great, of course, but there are times you may need more. Whatever it is that you need, we can probably help. We offer:
Editorial feedback. This is the gold-standard way to improve your manuscript. If we could only offer one service, this would be the one. Learn more.
Copy editing and all that. This is probably a service you don’t need, unless you’re planning to self-publish. But if you do need it, you may as well do it right. More here.
Coaching/mentoring. If you want to work one-to-one with a classy, experienced author, we can offer that too. Ideal for people who want direction and support as they write. More here.
Direct feedback from agents. It’s pretty annoying sending stuff out to agents and never getting any detailed response in return. So just book a one-to-one call with an agent to get direct feedback on your work. More here.
Courses, short and long. We offer a ton of courses too. And they’re really good. And they’re usually sold out. Sorry. But we’ll bake some more for you and tell you soon. More on courses.
Jericho Writers
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Are you ready for NaNoWriMo?
Build your book and get ready to write on 1 November
If you’re planning on writing your novel in a month for NaNoWriMo, this week is a brilliant time to start seriously prepping. We have events to help you build characters and find their voices, and a new video course with a blossoming peer support community to help you hone your idea. We also have opportunities aplenty to get further feedback on your work, for those a little further down the line.
Having trouble with links? View this newsletter in your browser: https://community.jerichowriters.com/page/view-post?id=398
VIDEO COURSE: Write a Novel in Six Weeks (Member exclusive)
This exciting new video course has just landed in your membership. Take modules on the essentials of novel writing from editor and author, Becky Hunter, PLUS put your learning into action with downloadable worksheets, and make use of the Community group specifically for the course, for that all-important peer feedback.
TAKE THE COURSE
This week on Jericho Writers:
MEMBER EVENTS: Build your characters this week
Join us for The Science of Writing Characters with Kira-Anne Pelican on Friday 15 October, and my YA pal Yasmin Rahman on Monday 18 October for Developing Characters when Writing Multiple POVs.
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BURSARY: Win a free place on the Self-Edit Your Novel tutored course
This life-changing tutored course is sold out into 2023, but applications are now open for under-represented writers to receive a fully-funded place on January’s course. I really urge you to apply for this one! Deadline 20 December 2021.
APPLY NOW
ONE-TO-ONES: Chat with a literary agent about your work (10% discount for members)
Book a fifteen-minute phone call with literary agents from across the globe at a time that suits you. They’ll look at your work and give you crucial feedback before you start submitting - you may even find that your work is just what they've been looking for!
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BLOG: Membership walkthrough week 5: Expert member Advice
In the final blog in this series, Kaile from our brilliant Writer Support Team reveals how you can make the most of the help available from our expert team as part of your membership – including free feedback on your query letter!
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SPOTLIGHT ON: Jen Nadol
This week's literary agent interview is with the brilliant Jen Nadol from The Unter Agency, who says: "Being responsive and available to clients is a top priority because I know first-hand that waiting is agony when your heart’s work is on the line." Check out the full interview on Jen's AgentMatch profile.
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SUCCESS STORY: Steffanie Edward
If you need another reason to apply for our bursary, look no further. Steffanie was our first bursary recipient in 2018, and went on to land a two-book deal with Bookouture. Our interview with her was a total delight.
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Five things you need to do before 1 November
I firmly believe that everyone should give NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) a try at least once in their life. It's a brilliant way to push yourself to write 50,000 words quickly, and to join a community of writers all attempting to do the same.
Ahead of our special open NaNoWriMo prep event on 25 October (do invite your non-member friends to this one, too!) I thought I’d share five things we should be doing right now to ensure we’re ready to start writing come 1 November.
1) Plan your novel in more detail than you think necessary. I’ve always been a lazy pre-plotter. Unfortunately, during NaNoWriMo, you don’t have time to stop and think about where your novel is going. You just WRITE. This is brilliant for getting words down, but I do recommend having a clear idea of where you are going before you start.
2) Be clear on your theme. Whenever I hit a wall in my draft, I find I can always find the way through it by coming back to the theme. What am I trying to say? What could happen now that will bring it back to that? Be clear on it now (and there might be more than one!) and keep it ready.
3) Get to know your characters inside-out. You’re about to spend a lot of time with them, so spend the next couple of weeks completing character exercises and understanding why they do the things they do. You might find they write the novel for you.
4) Choose your fonts NOW. I don’t know about you, but I spend an inordinate amount of time carefully setting up my document with the right font, headings and title page before I start writing. If you do this too – get it out the way now, so you can begin the actual writing part on 1 November.
5) Say hello to your new community. You’ll be writing 1,667 words a day, so you can pretty much say goodbye to your social life. With that though, comes a whole new community of writers who are also embarking on the same immense challenge. There will be ups; there will be downs. Find the right people to do it with, and it’ll make all of it at least quite fun.
Want to know more about NaNoWriMo? Drop into our event with NaNo veterans Elizabeth Haynes and Rachael Herron on 25 October – guaranteed to be a blast!
As always, happy writing and remember, you can contact our customer service team on +44 (0) 345 459 9560* or info@jerichowriters.com for any writing-related advice.
Sarah J
Author | Jericho Writers
*or if you're in the US, give us a call on +1 (646)-974-9060
Plus, don’t miss:
Manuscript Assessment Service (10% discount available)
Give your manuscript that extra sparkle by having it professionally assessed by an editor. They’ll give you a full report – a detailed roadmap to success. Prices vary based on word count.
Mentoring (10% discount available)
Get expert one-to-one help as you write and edit your manuscript with your choice of award-winning mentors. Available in flexible chunks of 10, 20 and 30 hours.
Developmental Editing (10% discount available)
If you want all the rigour offered by a Big-Five publishing house, but without the contracts and confusion, we’ve got you covered. A developmental edit offers you in-text comments throughout your manuscript offering in-depth feedback on your work, and a sixty-minute conversation with your editor to get that manuscript in perfect shape before you start submitting.
Jericho Writers
4 Acer Walk
Oxford OX2 6EX
United Kingdom
UK: +44 (0) 345 459 9560 US: +1 (646)-974-9060
One scene, two heads
Oh ye people, last week I was in Devon on a beach. The wind blew, the rain rained, but my four kids – none of whom had seen the sea before – were wild with joy. Me too. I can’t say I come back rested, but I come back knackered in a different way. In the world of parenting, that’s a win.
While I was away, I read a book that’s been on my TBR list awhile: Where the Crawdads Sing, by Delia Owen. The book ends up as a well-executed courtroom thriller, but the heart of the book is a coming-of-age story set in the marshlands of North Carolina with, as its heroine, the semi-feral Catherine ‘Kya’ Clark.
It’s an excellent book, with enough good writing and character depth to give a basically commercial novel some real swagger. But one scene in particular struck me, because it was such a deft example of head-hopping.
I’ll look at that scene in a moment, but first, a quick refresher on the normal guidelines:
In general, the advice given to new writers is to limit yourself to one point of view per scene or, in nearly all cases, one point of view (POV) per chapter. The reason is that passages such as this one feel clashingly awful:
Peter Piper felt his heart racing. He’d never have a better moment than this. He crept towards the dark shelves at the back of the shop. The place smelled of molasses and candied lemon and boiled sugar, all his favourite things. He had just reached the shelf, when -
‘Stop, thief,’ roared Old Mother Hubbard. She was so angry, she wanted to take a swing at him. The little villain!
The problem here is simple.
We start with Peter Piper. We, the reader, are committed to him. We’re with him, creeping through the dark shop, feeling both excitement and fear. If the writing until this point has been decent, we’ll be fully invested in Peter and his delinquent quest.
Only then, without warning, we’re pulled out of the young man’s head and plunged into OM Hubbard’s interior world. She has her emotions too, but how can we commit to her inner landscape, if two seconds before we were fully committed to Peter’s?
The answer is that we can’t. I’ve published maybe one and a half million words of fiction and I should think I’ve broken the “1 point of view / 1 chapter” rule maybe on only four or five occasions in all that time.
And yet – I have broken the rule. And did so consciously. And did so because the story demanded it.
The reasoning behind those exceptions is fascinating and somehow uplifting. We’ll get into that in a second, but first of all an example.
Here’s Delia Owen breaking the rule and doing so with ease, grace and purpose. I’ve edited the passage somewhat for length. The whole thing runs to about two pages. The text itself is in italics. My comments are square bracketed and in bold.
She [Kya] walked into the trees without looking, and there, leaning against the stump, was the feather boy. She recognized him as Tate, who had shown her the way home through the marsh when she was a little girl. Tate who, for years, she had watched from a distance … He was calm, smiled wide, his whole face beaming …
[This passage is all Kya’s POV. We are given a description of her interior knowledge – matching this young man up with his ten-year-old predecessor. We are given a physical description of Tate entirely from Kya’s eyes.]
She halted, shaken by the sudden break in the unwritten rules. That was the fun of it, a game where they didn’t have to talk or even be seen. Heat rose in her face.
[Still Kya. Their game involved exchanges of gifts at a distance, but it’s Kya’s perspective on that game we’re hearing about, not Tate’s.]
Tate couldn’t help staring. She must be thirteen or fourteen, he thought. But even at that age, she had the most striking face he’d ever seen. Her large eyes nearly black, her nose slender over shapely lips, painted her in an exotic light …
[Bam! We’ve jumped straight into Tate’s head, and now we’re seeing Kya through his eyes, just as we saw him through hers.]
Her impulse, as always, was to run. But there was another sensation. A fullness she hadn’t felt for years …
[Back to Kya. More of her deep inner world. Then there’s a bit of dialogue, and a modest amount of action. She tells him she can’t read. He, without shaming her, explains what was in the notes he’d been leaving. Then …]
Kya hung her head and said, ‘Thank you for the [feathers]; that was mighty fine of you.’
[Neutral. No particular POV. This could be written by a neutral observer simply conveying external data.]
Tate noticed that while her face and body showed early inklings and foothills of womanhood, her mannerisms and turns of phrase were somewhat childlike, in contrast to the village girls whose mannerisms – overdoing their makeup, cussing and smoking – outranked their foothills.
[Not a great sentence, I think. The inklings, foothills and outranking end up delivering a rather muddled image. But look: now we’ve got to Tate’s innermost thoughts – and we’ve got there without any sense of clashing gears or abrupt switching. The scene finishes by switching back to Kya and Tate’s simple, astonishing offer, ‘You know, I could teach you to read.’]
I think there are several things to pick out from this.
First, notice that the sequence moves like this:
1. We start with Kya’s interior thoughts and relatively neutral action descriptions that aren’t heavily stamped with any particular POV.
2. We see him through her eyes; then – within a sentence or two – we see her through his eyes. That’s intimate and interior, yes, but not deeply interior. We’re still just recording how someone looks.
3. There’s a bit of dialogue in which she makes herself vulnerable (revealing she can’t read) and in which he responds with kindness (he doesn’t judge her.)
4. She hangs her head – an act of submission or yielding – and says a proper thank you. We’ve read 100 pages by this point, and this is the most yielding Kya has ever been.
5. We go straight into Tate’s innermost, innermost thoughts about her.
In other words, the passage initially touches each point of view in turn, but quite gently – noting physical descriptions only, not plunging far into each separate soul.
That first exchange of perspectives is followed by what is effectively a little trial of love (‘Do you mind that I’m illiterate?’) and honour (‘Not at all.’)
That exchange, and her acknowledgement of it, allows the leap to complete intimacy, and access to Tate’s innermost thoughts. In other words, the passage ends up claiming full access to both inner worlds, and does so in a way that feels beautiful and right, rather than clashing and false.
The tiptoe approach to that full intimacy is a critical part of what makes it all work.
Second, the scene starts and finishes with Kya’s point of view. That matters. I don’t think you can easily enter a scene with person X and leave it with person Y. There are probably exceptions here, but they don’t immediately leap to mind.
Third, these two, Kya and Tate, are going to become lovers. You already know (100 pages into a 370 page book) that this is the critical first scene in a love story.
That’s no coincidence, because if you want biggest single qualification to the “1 point of view / 1 chapter” rule it’s simply this: “except where the two people are deeply, deeply intimate.” Usually that will be between two lovers, but it could certainly be between a parent and a child. I once head-hopped in a critical scene between two brothers. If the intimacy is there, the head-hopping can feel natural.
And – fourth – you may as well add this qualification too: “and except where the scene involves breaking into a higher level of intimacy than the pair had before.” This scene is a perfect example of it. It’s not that Tate and Kya are intimate. They’re not. In a way, this is their first true meeting. But they are breaking through into a wholly new level of intimacy. (And for Kya, a somewhat dangerous one.)
The dual-perspective trick both generates that sense of intimacy and is the crowning proof of the intimacy achieved. It’s a beautiful thing to feel and even more beautiful to write.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that you won’t write many such scenes. They’re sweet, because they’re rare.
(Incidentally, I bet there are other examples of head-hopping scenes that don’t fit this model, but I couldn’t think of any while writing this. If you have good examples of well-written head-hopping, then do drop me a line and tell me about them.)
Meantime, I’m going to go and shake Old Devonian sand out of my beach shorts and clear the car of broken crab shells. Is it possible I still smell of seaweed?
Till soon.
Harry
PS: You may, with perfect propriety, comment on this email right here: https://community.jerichowriters.com/page/view-post?id=395
There will be no droids angrily shrieking at you if you reply to this email. Au contraire, a highly paid droid, cased in polished mahogany and murmuring in French-accented hexadecimal, will speak to you of wild roses and the sweet lands to the south. And you never know, I might even reply too.
PPS: How many American states are named after presidents? One. How many states are named after European monarchs? Seven. Strange but true. I love things like that.
PPPS: You know, JW membership is really great and we probably don’t tell you enough what it offers. It gives you:
Access to more than a hundred live, online events every year. You just join from your computer, easy as pie.
Those events include everything on offer in the Summer Festival of Writing, Getting Published Month, Self-Publishing Month, Build Your Book month and more.
Access to all our masterclasses. That includes replays of past events, as well as loads of other material you can’t get anywhere else. There are way over 400 hours of such workshops, covering every topic that matters to you, and including many of the world’s top experts in the relevant fields.
Access to lavish and comprehensive video courses on every topic that matters to you. We add new courses whenever we think we can fill a gap.
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Access to personal, expert advice when you need it.
Access to the entire supportive community around Jericho Writers.
You can become an annual member for £195 (approx. USD 265). This is the best value option.
Or you can become a monthly member for £30 a month (approx. USD 40). You can cancel any time, so this option comes with minimal risk.
I mean, obviously you don’t have to do any of that – Shakespeare never did, right? – but I’ll eat my vaguely seaweedy hat if JW membership doesn’t help you become a better writer.
Jericho Writers
4 Acer Walk
Oxford OX2 6EX
United Kingdom
UK: +44 (0) 345 459 9560 US: +1 (646)-974-9060
How to write a novel in six weeks
A new interactive video course for members
Do we have an exciting newsletter for you this week! It’s October, which means Summer Festival 2021 replays have officially arrived in your membership; Build Your Book Month is underway and new one-to-one appointments with literary agents have opened. If that’s not enough, we’re also happy to launch a brand-new video course for members called ‘Write a Novel in Six Weeks’. There’s something particularly special about this course too – read on for more...
Having trouble with links? View this newsletter in your browser: https://community.jerichowriters.com/page/view-post?id=393
VIDEO COURSE: Write a Novel in Six Weeks (Member exclusive)
NEW! This video course has just landed in your membership, featuring modules on the essentials of novel writing from editor and author, Becky Hunter. This special video course also includes downloadable worksheets, so you can put your learning into action, and its own Community group, for that all-important peer feedback.
TAKE THE COURSE
This week on Jericho Writers:
MEMBER EVENTS: Build Your Book Month is go!
Join us for ‘Like Talking, but better’ with Kevin Barry tomorrow; our BETA test ZOOM event on Thursday 7; ‘Plotting for People who Hate Plotting’ on Friday 8; and ‘Tiling your Writing Like a Mosaic‘ with S. Qiouyi Lu on Sunday 10. Phew!
REGISTER NOW
MASTERCLASSES: Summer Festival of Writing replays are now in your membership
38 new masterclasses have just been added to your membership from the Summer Festival of Writing! Find these categorised alongside your other 400+ video masterclasses, or use the search to explore. Highlights include Mark Dawson, a digital-first panel, Psychic Distance with Debi Alper and Film & TV deals.
WATCH NOW
ONE-TO-ONES: New one-to-one appointments with literary agents have landed (10% discount for members)
Warning: these always sell out fast! Book a fifteen-minute phone call with literary agents from across the globe at a time that suits you. They’ll look at your work and give you crucial feedback to get that manuscript shiny and polished.
BOOK NOW
BLOG: Membership walkthrough week 3: AgentMatch
Learn more about the literary agent search engine that everyone is talking about (and that you have full access to as a member of Jericho Writers).
READ NOW
SUCCESS STORY: Wiz Wharton
We first met Wiz when she was longlisted for Friday Night Live 2020, and can’t wait to see her debut ‘Ghost Girl, Banana’ as Hodder’s major summer launch in 2023! In this interview, she talks about finding a writing community and gives brilliant advice to writers working on their first draft.
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How to Write a Novel in Six Weeks
One of the great things about my job is that I get to watch all the content that goes into the Jericho Writers membership. This week, I’ve had the pleasure of being the first one to test out the new ‘Write a Novel in Six Weeks’ course. This course combines video tutorials with exercises and peer feedback, so you can get all the great stuff you usually get from a writing course, but minus the price tag.
This has been a real timely watch for me as I embark on my ninth (9th!) book. There are some things about writing that you always need reminding of – no matter how far along in that process you are. So here are six things I learned whilst completing our brand-new member course:
1. Ideas are everywhere. From the news to the people around you – actively listening will help inspiration strike.
2. The inciting incident changes everything. Spending time thinking about the setup and beginning of change helps make your opening stronger, as well as helping to lay a solid plot foundation for the rest of the novel.
3. Your character needs to change. If you have more than one character, then they all need to have something at stake in the story.
4. The three-act structure can help plotters and pantsers! Not everyone finds plotting helpful, but the three-act structure can help all writers nail those main story beats.
5. Get in late and get out early to maintain tension. Start in the action and leave readers wanting more to get the most of out your scenes.
6. Be clear on point of view before putting pen to paper. Learn about the different narrative types and ensure you stick to just one before writing – you'll thank yourself later.
It’s particularly nice to implement all of this learning with exercises and I’m looking forward to seeing the work of those who share in the Community. Although this course doesn’t have to be taken over six weeks, I do recommend giving yourself the time and space to complete these exercises, as well as keeping momentum with them as much as you can.
Want to take the course yourself? Begin at any time, here.
As always, happy writing and remember, you can contact our customer service team on +44 (0) 345 459 9560* or info@jerichowriters.com for any writing-related advice.
Sarah J
Author | Jericho Writers
*or if you're in the US, give us a call on +1 (646)-974-9060
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Jericho Writers
4 Acer Walk
Oxford OX2 6EX
United Kingdom
UK: +44 (0) 345 459 9560 US: +1 (646)-974-9060
It’s heaven in Devon
I’m on holiday and not by my computer, so this email is a Cheat, a Lie and a Fraud. It’s like the fake moon landings, the CIA-created Kennedy assassination and the so-called “death” of Elvis, but in sneaky, digital form.
So, instead of a proper new email, here are reminders of nine emails from the last year or so – my personal favourites.
Nine Odd Things
One of my favourites from recent weeks. It talks about all the things that are strange in this little industry of ours. Clue: when I started writing the email originally, it was entitled Three Odd Things. Turns out, when I sat down to think about it, there was a lot more oddness than that :(
Image of the week: cauliflower.
Read more.
White Chairs, Green Terraces
This email got more comments on the community than anything else this year. Gotta include it for that reason, but also the email and your responses illustrate brilliantly (i) how pernickety and hard writing is and (ii) how big things end up climbing on board little ones.
Image of the week: white chairs and green terraces.
Read more.
Be happy
A good news email – reasons to be positive about publishing. Also: a reminder of the happy day when eleven English pig’s-bladder kickers did better pig’s-bladder kicking than eleven Vikings.
Image of the week: a pig’s bladder, sort of.
Read more.
Finding the red thread
When you sign a 2-book deal with a publisher, you can’t just drift, waiting for inspiration to strike. You have to, in effect, industrialise the process – make it controllable and repeatable. This email suggests some techniques for doing just that.
Image of the week: moss – obviously.
Read more.
Passion, the market, and you
Why you have to write what you love. And why you have to write for the market. And why those things are not in conflict.
Image of the week: mince pies.
Read more.
Building it bad to build it right
This subject is a quirky personal favourite of mine. It’s all about terrible sentences that work brilliantly because they’re terrible. It’s not really a subject you need to master as a writer – or ever show any interest in at all – but … well, it tickles me and always has.
Image of the week: a brick wall.
Read more.
A song from the tightrope
This email started with a single thought, this one: “Creative writers and, really, creators of almost any sort, are often asked to perform their best work without any kind of support.” I’d forgotten it was Friday and bashed that email out quickly and thinking it was probably not much good. The response I got from you lot told me different.
Image of the week: a tightrope, what else?
Read more.
Finding Freedom
Another recent favourite that I enjoyed writing & struck a chord with many of you. It’s all about what metaphors are for – in prose rather than poetry – and how you can grope your way to finding the right image at the right time.
Image of the week: Romeo & Juliet.
Read more.
A jewelled missile
An important idea in this email, I think. It’s about how you can expand your writing by using relatively uncommon – but extremely well-known – words (like ‘jewelled’ and ‘missile’ in fact.) It’s a really easy technique to get your head around and the impact on your writing can be really profound.
Image of the week: a hummingbird.
Read more.
That’s it from me. Or that’s it from my digital avatar. Me, I’m swimming happily in a sea that is at least several degrees above freezing. When I get back to Oxfordshire, I will find that the combination of sea-swimming and wind-chill will have shrunk me to the size of a field mouse.
Squeak, squeak.
Till soon.
Harry
PS: If you want to comment on this email – but why? why? – you can do so here: https://community.jerichowriters.com/page/view-post?id=389
And if you reply, an angry (but cheap) droid whom I have asked to look after my inbox for the week will shred your email while screaming hexadecimal-encoded obscenities. Save your thoughts for next week, my friend.
PPS: And remember, remember: it’s now, officially, Build Your Book month. Details here.
Everything is free and exclusive to Jericho members. Anyone signing up as an annual member now, will get: Build Your Book month, Getting Published month, Self-Publishing month, the entire Summer Festival, hundreds of masterclasses, some terrific video courses, and the power of AgentMatch all for free.
Jericho Writers
4 Acer Walk
Oxford OX2 6EX
United Kingdom
UK: +44 (0) 345 459 9560 US: +1 (646)-974-9060
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