The Word Cloud - Writing Community - Help and advice for writers

Oh dear, the bothersome business of titles.

It's a strange thing, really. No one in the trade minds much what you put on the cover of your manuscript. Until a final decision is made by your publisher (and rubberstamped by you), all titles are effectively 'working titles' only. With subtitles (for non-fiction), it's the same deal. Only once has a book of mine worn the same title to the printers as it was wearing when it went to my agent for the first time.

Yet for all that a title is provisional, just as publishers are pitching to retailers, you're pitching to publishers. And titles matter. I've got a book proposal at the moment, which I want to call something like "STORY: Why smart people read bad books".

I think that sums up the promise of the book pretty neatly. And although the book does include a fair bit of popular science and smuggles in a bit of lit crit as well, the subtitle makes it feel like its own unique thing - not some mishmash of popular science and lit crit. (A mishmash, needless to say, which would never enjoy the happy suns of the 3-for-2 tables).

But is the subtitle too negative? After all, the book is also about why smart people read good books - why everyone reads books at all, and why story is so weirdly prevalent in our culture.

I ask, because I genuinely don't know. I thought my subtitle worked. I thought I'd cracked the secret of the commercial title/subtitle. My agent, however, reckons that the manuscript itself is good, but that the subtitle is too negative and fails to sell the book. Is he right? Maybe. He usually (drat the man!) is. But I'm crap on titles and I thought I had it. I think it's back to the drawing board time ...

A quick note of congrats first to WW client Hugh Hunter, whose Our Man in Orlando is coming out with Monday Books this autumn. Hooray for him - a huge achievement that - and well done too to Craig Taylor, his WW editorial guru. Champers all round.

But now to the main event. This blog does, I know, sometimes feel repetitive at the moment. I go on and on about change in the industry which has affected none of us directly yet, but which is about to cause upheaval on an unprecedented scale.

Over the last couple of days, I've had conversations with someone from an independent publisher and a senior figure at one of the big international publishers. The first person told me that they thought Waterstones - for so long a fixture on British high streets - may be gone completely in a few years time. The second person said to me that the emerging industry wouldn't have room for agents, publishers and retailers - at least one of those functions would disappear and she didn't know if publishers themselves would be left standing. She asked me what I thought would happen, and I said truthfully that I had no idea.

What is certain, however, is that these are interesting times. Some agents are starting to encroach on publishers' turf. Some publishers are looking again at taking unsolicited submissions - which is to say, they're looking at taking over functions traditionally handled by agents. And all this begs the questions, what are agents really for? What value added do they bring? What are publishers really for? And what is their value added?

In the past, those questions have been easy enough to answer. You need an agent, because you can't get a publisher otherwise. You need a publisher, because you don't get access to limited bricks-n-mortar shelfspace otherwise. In the new world, however, you may not need an agent to get a publisher and it may well be that physical bookshops become as rare and lovely as steam trains, in which case there's no limit on the amount of bookshelves available. The old answers, in short, are starting to collapse, and the most we can say for now is that the shape of the questions is becoming ever clearer.

And if this blog sounds a bit repetitive at times - well, so be it. We are in the midst of the biggest revolution in publishing since movable type and it's happening very fast indeed. The future is on its way and it knows where you live.

Oh, and just had an email saying that Caroline Clough, who came to the Festival of Writing this spring, has just won the Scottish Kelpies Prize for kids' writing, and her book is coming out with Floris Publishers. Monster congrats to her. We can't claim a whole bundle of credit for her success - she'd already submitted her work by the time she met Val Tyler at the Festival - but she tells me she did find Val's comments useful when it came to getting the MS ready for final publication, so more champers all round anyway. The book is called Red Fever and it's out this autumn.

A good, balanced and sensible view of the future of books is available here - the author is Andrew Franklin, the MD & Publisher of Profile Books. No silver space suits though ...

I blogged just recently about the challenge that writers have (myself very much included) in working out whether what they are writing is appropriate for the market. We have to write what we want to write, of course - the puzzle is how best to choose from all the things we might want to write about.

It so happens that I came across the following piece today, which recasts the challenge very successfully, I think. (The author, Nick Sayers, is now at Hodder, but he was at HarperCollins ten years back  ... and had the good sense to acquire my first three books. A thoroughly nice chap, to boot.)

Anyway, with the normal deep respect I have for other people's copyright, here are Nick's thoughts in full:

When I first started in this business as a young editor, in the days when all books were sold by sales representatives visiting each shop for an order, somebody gave me some good advice: think of that sales rep trying to explain each book to the bookseller, who is working at the till and answering the phone and looking out for shoplifters and filling out a tax form, and thinking that he doesn’t really need any new books because he has enough already, all at the same time.

 

However complicated and beautifully written and philosophically challenging your book might be, it’s not going to make an impression on that bookseller if the rep can’t get across what it’s about in a window of approximately twenty seconds. And the bookseller is going to think that if the rep can’t sell it to him, then he can’t sell it to the public.

 

 

Well, in the age of laptops and multiple retailers with central buying policies, it’s a long time since sales reps visited every shop to sell every book in that way, but I think the advice still holds good! If you can’t explain your book simply, or if that simple explanation doesn’t sound compelling, nobody else can do it any better. And you’ve got a problem.

 

It can be worth thinking about this before you start writing.

 

Nick Sayers

Publishing Director

May I just say that we've had the builders & decorators in recently? Although the Word Cloud part of the WW website hasn't changed, everything else is revamped and looking spiffing.

The changes include: new wallpapery background. New menu boxes. Loads of cartoons dug from the archives. A host of little fiddly changes to make things prettier. Content that's clearer and to the point. Oh, and it's now possible to pay for services directly from the website, which is an overdue change but makes us feel very grownup.

If anyone would like to tiptoe round our new abode - taking care not to bring muck in onto the carpets or put sticky fingerprints on the walls - then please be our guests. There will be a maid to take your coats and hats when you arrive. Canapes will be served in the drawing room.

While we would expect the general tenor of your comments to be gushingly positive, we may also be receptive to the odd bit of constructive criticism. Um ... do you like it?

One thing I'm thinking about increasingly, both as regards my own work and as regards the way we help Writers' Workshop clients, has to do with that crucial issue of hook.

An example: let's say a client comes to us for editorial help. We work with that person and, together, we get their MS in the best possible shape it can be. Let's say that, artistically speaking, the novel is fully realised. But what if the concept just ain't going to fire an acquisition committee meeting? Let's say the novel offers an intense 120,000 word account of the death of the author's mother. Or it is written in a clever, experimental but challenging style. Or it's yet another teen vampire novel with nothing remarkable to differentiate it from all the others.

Of course you can't comment on these things in general - you can only ever respond to a particular MS - but these things are going to be hard or perhaps even impossible to sell, no matter how well the author has realised their vision. That means (from an author's point of view) you need to be damn sure about your concept before you put pen to paper. From the WW's point of view, I think it means that we need to be extra careful in how we talk about the market to clients. (bearing in mind, as well, that these things change fast. After the first Stephanie Meyer novel, publishers were keen to get teen vampire authors signed up.)

There are certainly no easy answers here, and better communication from publishers would most certainly help. But the market - the single most important thing for an author to think about - is often the bit we think about least (and I've been as guitlty of this as anyone else). I think, at last, I'm getting a bit better at the art of writing stuff that's in tune with the market - but heaven help me if I weren't (with my agent now getting ready to sell my sixth novel and fourth non-fiction MS). For real newbies, I think the art is both vitally important and tough to acquire.

Memo to self: make sure that the WW does as well as it possibly can on this score. In the past, I think we may have at times have overemphasised technique. Technique certainly matters hugely; but the market matters jsut as much

OK, chaps, I need some advice.

My book, Stuff Matters, has had two reviews so far. One, a generally warm one, appeared in the Independent and was written by Hamish McRae, an experienced (and presumably somewhat pro-capitalist) financial journalist.

The other, a hostile one, appeared in the Guardian, and was written by Stuart Jeffries, a feature writer of long and broad experience.

Now I don't really mind hostile reviews all that much - Bad reviews are much better than no reviews, and my own opinion of my work tends to ride through good and bad feedback alike without much alteration. I've written some not-so-good books and some almost-quite-decent books, and I broadly trust myself to tell them apart.

But Stuart Jeffries' review was perplexing. He accuses me of being Reaganite, when really my entire book is a kind of anti-Reaganite text. My message wasn't coded or deeply buried, it was pretty much as explicit as you can get. I think the post-Reagan political consensus (hang your heads Bush, Clinton, Major, Blair) was shallow, vapid and intellectually indefensible. I say so, in pretty much those words. I try to work out what makes for a strong, vigorous creative capitalism and what goes to feed a rotten one.

It's probably really uncool to do so, but I added a comment to SJ's review to make this point. You can read both SJ's piece and my comment here. Having done it, I'm not sure if I should have done. It's more dignified, is it not, to maintain a priestly silence? On the other hand, does it make sense for me to leave unchallenged an interpretation of my book which is pretty much nonsense?

I don't know. What's done is done ... but the wise words of the Cloud will guide my future steps. I submit to your authority.

In the intro to his (mostly interesting) War against Cliche, Martin Amis writes:

"Gallingly … there is no means for distinguishing the excellent from the less excellent. The most muscular literary critics on earth have no equipment for establishing that

Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears

is a better line than

When all at once I saw a crowd

– and, if they did, they would have to begin by saying that the former contains a dead expletive (‘do’) brought in to sustain the metre."

Now what do we all think about that? I think he's just plain wrong. I think the difference is easy to hear, and easy to explain.

I won't say more just yet, because I want to hear your thoughts first, but I will say that the second line form Wordsworth is (IMHO) as pedestrian and dull as far too much of his writing. But let's get stuck in. Can we explain why the first line is excellent and the second one is anywhere from dull to OK? Let's give it a Word Cloudy go ...

Jennifer Belle reckoned her PR people weren't promoting her book right, so she did it herself. Brilliant result.

If you've self-published, though, do remember that successful PR needs (a) concentrated publicity, and (b) a strong retail platform. Without the latter, it's easy to spend money in search of the former, only for returns to be very disappointing. But I love Jennifer B's style. I'm already wondering how I could work with my detective story ...

I could blog yet again today about the digital wind which is raging at increasing pace through our industry: Barnes & Noble (the well known US bookstore chain) has just put itself up for sale, hoping to find a buyer in possession of a magic wand.

But instead, a word about the digital wind which is about to rip through our site ... causing some very slight rearrangements to the furniture. You know that "News" tab at the top of the site? I don't think anyone has ever used it, so instead we're going to start syndicating a whole lot of blogs from the most interesting literary world bloggers. (And yes, that certainly includes Emma and Debi.) I'll mention these again when we've got them properly online, and we'll go on adding excellent blogs when we come across them - and will always be open to suggestions of course.

And since change is in the air, what else should we be doing? We're not omnipotent, alas - many of the things we'd like to do, we just can't do given the functionality of the software we use. (So I'd love it, for example, if you could send bulletins to friends, or group leaders could send bulletins to their groups ... but we can't enable that function without also enabling global bulletins, which are simply an invitation to spammers.) But let us know. If we can tweak things to make you happier we will. What would you like to see? And which blogs would you like us to syndicate? If we can, we'll do it.