What Publishers Want

This morning I'm sifting through interviews with publishers and editors to see what gets them excited. Straight from the horses' mouth, as it were. And since that is a betting term, it's quite apt because everybody, whether publisher, author or reader, is taking a gamble on whether this book is going to prove a winner.

Publishers are looking to sell books. We're talking large numbers of sales that bring in a healthy profit. They're panning the slush pile for story-gold. So far, so obvious. When it comes to your novel submission, publishers are inundated with potential books in a given genre, all written to a certain standard. What makes yours stand out from the crowd? To take a bet on backing your book, publishers want to know that readers are going to be excited by it, will be recommending it to their friends, will be coming back for more. So what are those elusive qualities that drive a runaway success for a novel? In listening to industry professionals, I'm finding certain themes recur.

'Say what you want about some popular authors or creators: they know how to move someone. To get people to keep turning pages. Keep buying books. Keep telling friends about them.'

Dan Blank, founder of We Grow Media

http://writerunboxed.com/2016/11/25/what-agents-publishers-want-and-why/

So we all want that emotional hit when we've invested time in a novel – it has to get under our skin and, as Blank says, resonate. It stays with us afterwards, that emotional echo of a book we loved, even if it's disturbed or perplexed us. Personally I want a story that leaves me shell-shocked but not in an obvious, manipulative way. But there's that page-turning quality as well. A book that's made me hungry, that's kept me up at night because I can't sleep not knowing what's happened to that character I've grown to care about and worry about.

'All right, so I want an original voice. Now that’s different from an original story, because I really do believe that old saying that there’s only seven stories in the world — there might be more, hopefully there are. But, it’s not that you always have to completely come up with a new storyline, but you do have to have a new way of telling it. Your unique voice, as a writer, has to come through, and I have to engage with that voice. It has to draw on my emotions, one way or the other... it has to be something that is confident enough that it draws me in and it’s a really well-managed tool to tell the story. And stories are really important to me, so it has to have a story that I can think about while I’m doing the washing up. It has to linger in my head...'

 

Bernadette Foley, Editor & Publisher at Hachette, Australia.

https://www.writerscentre.com.au/blog/ep-37/

Foley touches here on another elusive quality: narrative voice. The voice of a book is its personality. It's a voice whispering in your ear – as intimate as radio, even more so because it's right in your head. And the narrative voice embodies the story. It grows out of the story, it's the only way to tell that particular story. As Foley says, 'well-managed tool to tell the story.' This might be the voice of a character-narrator or it might be the voice of a landscape of events or all of those. But when you hear it, it casts a spell and you're hooked.

'Because I’m only sent a chapter, and you can tell in a chapter, it’s essentially, maybe it’s what I’m looking for. I’m looking for either really good raw writing style, that I think will have a great story. Or if in my dreams, a manuscript arrives, or a chapter arrives, and the narrative voice is really distinctive, and the reader has, I just really want to keep on reading… So narrative voice is probably the most important for me...When you’re reading, observe the craft of how the person, how the author has set up a great narrative voice, how they’ve developed characters, whether the characters are likable... You know, just look at every aspect of the craft. How they’ve moved their plot along, the structure, and so on. So that’s my first thing. Read a lot, and read for the craft... Go back to your favourite novels and look at why they are so good.'

Louise Thurtell, Publisher at Allen & Unwin

https://www.writerscentre.com.au/blog/ep-161/ 

Thurtell hones in on the impact of narrative voice but she also advises writers to study the structure and pace of the novels they admire. It's that page-turning quality again we're looking for. A while back, I picked up the American classic novel Moby Dick. I knew that the subject matter really appealed to me. He's got whales, icebergs, the wild landscape of Newfoundland and its surrounding oceans, the story of men locked in a boat for years on end and an obsessive captain driven by a desire for revenge. Perfect book for a long winter read. When I read the opening page, the first person narrative leapt out and seized me. 'I could follow this narrator to the ends of the earth,' I wrote on Facebook. But then ten chapters in, we were still marooned ashore while the hero negotiated his way onto a whaling ship. I have to confess, I floundered, I ground to a halt. I will get back to Moby Dick, honest, I'll stock up on rations and hunker down for the duration. But as a reader in the 21^st century, like the rest of us, I'm looking for the storytelling to have that page-turning, can't-put-it-down quality. And as a novelist, that's a challenge I have to meet myself.

So here's a group of publishers in 2015, talking in The Guardian about books they did publish and why they were successful. You'll notice the same themes coming through:

'Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates takes the form of a letter from the author to his teenage son. Along with his powerful, personal and provocative history of race in America, Coates also shares his hopes and fears for his son’s future. Rarely are such “urgent” books written in such mesmerising prose.'

Hannah Griffiths, Publishing Director, Faber

'Drugs, dubstep, eco-terrorism, racial politics, failing marriages, birding, sex (in a canoe), the nuclear family: it’s all here. As the New York Times said: “You don’t read Nell Zink (The Wallcreeper) so much as step into the ring with her.” She is a total one-off, a wild voice out of nowhere which seems to have no precedent. We will be hearing much more from her over the coming years.'

Nicolas Pearson, Publishing Director, 4^th Estate

 

'Claire Fuller’s rich and humane Our Endless Numbered Days introduces us to Peggy, one of the most vivid child narrators I’ve encountered. Abducted by her survivalist father to live in a remote forest cabin, she seeks escape through music, nature and books. It is a dark and massively suspenseful story which abounds with references to fairytales.'

Juliet Annan, Publishing Director, Fig Tree/ Penguin

https://www.theguardian.com/books/ng-interactive/2015/dec/18/the-publishers-year-winners-and-losers

An urgent book in mesmerising prose, a one-off wild voice, a vivid child-narrator and massively suspenseful story. We'd all love to have written those books - but how? The Writers' Shed notes that precisely these qualities are often talked about but rarely taught. That's why the first Masterclass in our new series will address Narrative Drive & Narrative Voice. We hope to drill down to the techniques that can make your book stand out from the heap on the slush pile table. And have your readers celebrating the book they couldn't put away. To find out more, pop over to The Writers' Shed and take a look. You'll find other free resources there on the shelves too.

 

https://www.facebook.com/pg/TheWritersShed/events/?ref=page_internal

A Door into Story

If we could open the door into a writer's mind, what would that be like? Perhaps like pushing past those fur coats in the wardrobe and catching the icy blast of Narnia. Or squeezing down that dark rabbit hole into a disturbing surreal wonderland. Or like Salley Vickers' talk to Leicester Writers' Club last Thursday - where we rambled through a labyrinth lit by church frescoes and Renaissance paintings, following a cunningly laid thread that took us back and back. A clue literally means a ball of yarn to lead us through the maze and Vickers has been following her own clues into the dark to stunning effect as a writer.

I know other writers were equally fascinated by her reflections on the creative process - see Rosalind Adams' excellent summary on her blog. Vickers is not only a highly successful novelist and Booker prize judge but also a very experienced and engaging speaker on such topics. She has understood very well that the writer too is a story and she charmed us with an account of her first novel at the age of nine, called 'A Door into Time' (was it?). In this fable, four orphaned children are packed off to live with a reluctant uncle and in his garden see a tortoise and a shaft of sunlight hitting a sundial which opens the door into another time. She tells us this story (surely Narnia-influenced in its beginning) contains all the elements that recur in her grown-up novels.

This thread lead off down a side-shaft to an intriguing account of her first novel Miss Garnett's Angel. A bizarre series of coincidences across different decades led to the impulse to write this novel: 'the experience of something in my past dovetailed with something in the present and that's how all my novels begin'. But I will jump to the story of her novel The Other Side of You which particularly struck me. Vickers found herself drawn to writing in a male voice for this one and her protagonist turned out to be a psychoanalyst, a discipline Vickers herself has practised. So far so good. The man's problem is his patient Elizabeth, a woman set on committing suicide who will not 'open up' either to the psychoanalyst OR the author. Vickers is actually a third of the way into writing this book and knows NOTHING about this reticent woman.

At this point, Vickers goes on a speaking tour of Australia and this gives her the opportunity to attend a series of lectures about 'What Happens when Two People sit in a Room and Do Therapy?' Listening to this, she has the image of two people walking along a road together. And she finds herself thinking of a very old and haunting story - the Road to Emmaus - in which two grieving disciples walk along a road and find a third joins them. Of course they fail to recognise this third figure and it's only later at the inn, when he breaks bread, that they see who is on 'the other side of you' and he vanishes. Vickers has likened this apparition of the third reality to the healing process of therapy.

But to follow my clew - Vickers returned home with this insight and an unfinished novel. As she so often does at this point, she wandered into the National Gallery 'in a brown study' to pursue her thread. And found herself in front of Caravaggio's painting of 'The Road to Emmaus'. This painter turned out to be the missing piece and the silent woman's story now began to unlock. The novel gets finished - and is now waiting on my juicy 'To Read' pile.

And that is just one of the delightful and thought-provoking stories Vickers shared with us. Along the way, we mused on the Darwinesque survival of ancient stories like the Road to Emmaus and how they still chime in our consciousness. Or the connection between the visual arts and her inspiration for narratives. Or how an early love of poetry shapes her approach to editing prose - 'I always hear my books - the sound of the spoken voice is key to it'. I'm looking forward very much now to reading the novel but the threads of her talk will be leading me down sideways for many days to come, I think.

And before I close this rambling blog, can I thank the Abbey Park Over-50's Club for the welcome they gave me on Wednesday when I presented my own talk on 'The Science and Mythology of the Northern Lights'? All were entranced by stories of the aurora, my new mini-projector worked a treat and I was surprised by the gift of a sketch of me in action and a Caramac at the end. My compliments to the artist Kanti. Art and chocolate is always a winning combination!

Sand-marked Paperbacks

Zandvoort aan Zee takes beach-lounging to an industrial level with rows upon row of plastic sun-loungers and tractors that go out to 'clean the sand' in the morning. But if you get down there early, before the sun-worshippers have stirred, the silver-blue sea and honeyed sand are stunning; the shale underfoot of broken shells pleasingly crunchy. You can sit under the dunes and listen to a storm of tidal detonations that are pestle to the mortar of this shore. And after a mesmerising morning walk, treat yourself to a croissant breakfast at Cafe Neuf.

In between house-sitting a menagerie of pets this week, I enjoyed the cool of the garden and finished off a delicious collection of poems by Mark Goodwin, called Else. Goodwin's poems transport you into places you will never find on a map. They leave the reader land-wrecked in wordscapes, tangled in an undergrowth of sounds, senses, images. On the first page, I am already arrested:

'Silas Tarn's willow-agile feet pick
out a code of stones to step on; he moves
with the slime-ribbony
mood of a river ...'

Goodwin is in love with language and its many registers. The river's stones are 'synovially smooth as a newborn's joints' and Silas 'sweats hints of sea zawns'.
I find this word 'zawn' in a glossary of Climbers' terms, meaning: 'Small steep-sided channel of sea ...' It's a West Cornwall dialect word and so its usage reflects not only one of Goodwin's favourite locations but also his own passion for climbing. And the poet is very present here, his hurt knuckles, his 'puzzler boots', his father with the dead dog, his chef brother who loves fireworks, his own children from the womb onwards. I particularly liked 'Three Men, a Boy, & a Four Pound Trout' which takes us through the rhythm of a day's fishing;

'The bloodknot is neat and tightly tied
to a little grappling hook with barbs like

prongs from a shattered star.
And the spinner is the way a boy smiles

years as sunlight swirls through ...'

It's hard to pick out a clutch of lines that do this 8-part poem justice, as it is hard to single out poems in this rich hoard. But I am still entranced by certain images in the early poem, 'Summer Conundrums of Happiness', which tells us that 'happiness hides in ditches'. It evokes the sinister smells and 'spear-beaks' of the 'slow-hot uncoil of blurred summers' before delivering a killer line:

'how our wounds
are frilled with
fibres of being
glad.'

The gorgeous blue-moon cover with the gold birch leaf gives just the right hint of treasure excavated from the border of human and natural worlds.

And then, on an overnight visit to the beautiful city of Haarlem - but let me digress. I have to mention the Indonesian rijsstaffel we had at Wisma Hilda. We go there every year and without fail, this is died-and-gone-to-heaven food. In the morning we revisited other favourite haunts; the market in the medieval square, the spell-binding shafts of light and stained-glass colours in St Bavo's, the cobbled trails of side-streets. And in the bookshop, I snapped up a copy of Kate Atkinson's 'When Will there Be Good News?'. Atkinson made her name with literary fiction such as 'Behind the Scenes at the Museum' and her fiction became ever more playful with novels like 'Human Croquet'. But where I felt her characters got a little lost in the experimentation with form, in her latest series of detective novels, they are the beating heart of the story. And strong, page-turning stories these are. I devoured this one almost overnight, the perfect summer read for a long train journey or hotel room.

Most pleasing of all, on a five-day jaunt to the Low Lands, were the notes I jotted in the new lilac notebook. I got three short pieces written - they might be prose poems, or the raw material for poems. I'm just calling them 'snippets'. All being well, I'll have something to read at my next Leicester Writers' Club meeting. But first, there's a trip to York and then on to that magical seaside town, Whitby, on the North Yorkshire coast. There will be day-trippers and Cod + Chips; there will be Guided Ghost Walks and Dracula trails; there might be plastic rain hoods but there'll be no sun loungers, I'm sure of that.