CERTIFYING THE DEATH OF YOUR BOOK

Recently I noticed that my blog has 222 followers (now increased, which slightly spoils the point but please don't go away). I noticed because it's a cute number but then it got me thinking. "Not for 222" is (apparently) the medical code for a hospital patient so close to death that he should not be resuscitated in the event of heart failure.

It got me wondering how a writer decides his beloved book is "not for 222". How many times can you allow it to be rejected? At what point do you decide there's no possibility of life? Is your unpublished book terminally unpublishable?

Strikes me there are two situations where you might have to make the dreaded 222 order on your book.

1. Your Work in Progress (WIP) is not progressing. It's stuck. What started with an appealing idea and hook has ground to a halt. You have begun to force the plot-line; you know that it all now hangs on an episode which doesn't completely ring true, even to you, but you're determined to make it fit and you pile in more and more things to force the reader to believe in your story. You're starting to bite your nails in your sleep. There are bits of your book that you love and you keep reading them aloud to yourself, marvelling at the gorgeousness of your talent, but you know in a secret and painful part of your heart that your book has been built on sand.
   
2. Your finished book has failed (and failed and failed and failed) to find an agent or publisher. Some have given glimmers of hope, which you have clutched at and possibly exaggerated in your mind; your friends and family love your book (duh) but no agent or publisher seems to care about that; your writing group keep telling you to carry on trying - they mop up your tears and tell you you are brilliant and that publishers don't know what they're talking about or are "only in it for the money". (Well, yes, actually, if you mean that they can't afford to make a loss on every book they take on and they do have to eat like the rest of us.)

In each of these cases, a brave decision must be made.

Situation One is an occupational hazard of writing. It's an often fatal illness that happens much more often to books written by inexperienced writers. As you become more experienced, you'll spot the symptoms earlier and treat the cause before it becomes terminal. I have just done this with an idea that I was utterly gripped by until I began to look ahead and think the plot through. I foresaw fundamental problems in motivation and development, so I killed my baby before I'd developed a relationship with it.

(Note: we talk about the importance of "killing our babies" in writing and it strikes me that killing babies is a lot easier than killing adults. Metaphorically, I hasten to add. If you let your book grow and invest huge amounts of time in it, it's much harder to let it go. Whereas, spectacularly unlike real babies, an idea being stillborn is just a pinprick, something you have to get used to. Apologies for the unpleasant analogy.)

Situation Two
"How many rejections should I accept before giving up?" I was recently asked after a talk on how to get published. It's not the first time I've been asked it. Obviously, there is no answer, or not in terms of a number. In theory, you could send it to every agent and publisher who takes that sort of book, which might only be 20 or it might be 100.

But there are two more useful questions you should ask:

1. How many rejections should I accept before doing some radical re-writing of my work?

Answer: not very many, frankly. IF you have submitted your book to the right people (ie you have researched carefully and only sent it to agents and publishers who handle this sort of work) and IF you have followed all the guidelines so far given in this blog and the submission guidelines of the agents and publishers you've approached, and IF your writing is good enough and IF your book is sellable, then it is likely either to have been accepted or to have attracted some specific feedback, even if not an acceptance yet. So, IF the feedback has alerted you to a problem, you should be re-writing now. IF the feedback has either been inconsistent or has suggested nothing, you should consider getting (perhaps paying for) a professional critique of your work. But be careful to research very carefully the "professionalism" of this critiquing ... (Future post topic.)

What do I mean by "not very many"? Well, you ask me for a figure and figures don't really figure in this game. But let's say, for the sake of argument, not more than ten. No, eight. Seven?

"Only seven? Or even ten?" I hear some of you say. Ah, I don't mean you'll only send it to 7-10 agents/publishers; I mean you'll only send it to that many before taking a long hard look at what you've written (another long hard look because of course you've already given it dozens of long hard looks - I mean a long, hard, critical and objective look). Somehow, you must get a good opinion as to what's wrong with your book which means that you haven't yet hooked anyone.

Thing is, if you send it to 25 and they all say "no way" and then you decide you could have written it better, that's 25 publishers you can't really send it to again when you've improved it ... Well, you can, but it's tricky and needs some careful handling.

But I said there were two more useful questions and the second one is even more useful:

2. What should I be doing while my book is out there being read by an agent / publisher / anyone?

And the answer to this is dead easy: you're a writer, aren't you? So you should be writing. You should be throwing yourself into your next idea. If you're not, you're no writer, just a one-book wannabe. And no agent or publisher wants a one-book wannabe. No reader wants a one-book wannabe.

So get writing. Be fickle - turn your back on your beautiful slaved-over book and fall into bed with a new lover.

When you do that, you learn several important things:

• that your first book may not be as good as you thought it was
• that you can fall in love again
• that the death of a book is not the end of you as a writer
• that being a writer is about striving to be better all the time and that this happens with practice
• that if your first book is not good enough you actually don't want it to be published
• that actually you can postpone the 222 decision and wait for new technology to come along (in the form of your new knowledge gleaned from writing the second book) which might cure the disease
  
• that if at some point you decide to slap a "not for 222" on your first book, this will be a positive moment in your career as a real writer. And that you will (I promise) get over your apparently tragic loss.

Don't get me wrong: it's tough, it hurts, and even grown men cry. But if you have another WIP, it's not so bad. And you will not regret it. Ever. I don't know a published writer who hasn't got unpublished work in a drawer. And I don't know a published writer who really wishes that that unpublished work was published. God, I'm glad mine wasn't.

And a happy corollary that comes from all this is that resurrection and reincarnation both exist in a writer's world: it can sometimes happen that an idea or a book that died can rise again, later, when you are grown as a writer, and become something so much better and stronger and more beautiful than it first was.

We have to love our books with a passion but sometimes we have to let them die; or leave them lying in bed while we look ahead to the next one to love. Call yourself fickle, call yourself callous - it doesn't matter as long as you are writing.

If you have more than one book in you, let's see it. If you don't, give yourself a 222.

TRUTH HURTS - SO UNLEASH YOUR HIDDEN MASOCHIST

For a writer, there are sensible ways to take feedback and there are foolish ways to take feedback.

I won't add (much) to the vitriol hurled from and at two writers who got themselves into the news this week as examples of extreme(ly bad) ways to take negative criticism. Alain de B and Alice H will make up their own minds how to react to the feedback to their feedback to the feedback (aka reviews) to which they took such exception. Published writers must learn that some people will hate their books and must work out which negative crits they respect and which they think are rubbish. And how best to react. (Answer: not.)

But what of unpublished authors? What of the feedback that you get, if you're lucky, when you send your precious oeuvre to agent or editor asking for an honest opinion? I know, you don't really want an honest opinion, unless the opinion is "Brilliant! How much do you want for it?" But the fact that so many unpublished authors react unpleasantly to the more unwelcome honest opinions is partly what stops many agents/editors from giving any feedback other than "Sorry, I don't have room on my list." I know agents who've been told to rot in hell after saying that a piece of work wasn't up to scratch. Why should they put up with that when they're not paid and not likely to be paid if offered work that's crap?

Thing is, if you send your oeuvre to an expert, someone you plan to trust with your work during publication, you must accept his/her honest expert opinion when you get it. That doesn't mean you crumple into a heap and blindly make every change suggested if you don't fully believe or understand it, but it does mean that you consider closely what they say and accept that they know what they're talking about. Otherwise, why did you approach them, you deluded idiot? (Crabbit old bat is back.)

The author who does not listen properly to feedback from trustworthy sources (i.e. agents with a track record, publishers with a track record, writers with a relevant track record, and select readers who actually know what they're talking about, and NOT your relatives, friends, pets or even most members of your writing critique group unless they fall into the first category) is a fool and does not deserve to be published. Thing is, if a publisher happens to be taken in by your inferior writing and actually publishes it, readers will not be so forgiving: trust me. They will rip you to shreds on Amazon and your book will die horribly, messily and painfully. And you will be gutted and quite possibly throw a hissy fit. (In private, please.)

The aspiring author who, on the other hand, behaves like Jen Campbell, bravely and open-mindedly laying herself bare (not literally) and allowing herself to receive feedback in public from a host of people she has never met but has decided to trust on the basis that if they read this blog they must kind of slightly know what they're talking about, deserves publication and success.

The aspiring author who does all this and then generously gives me chocolate, just because I allowed her to be publicly judged, deserves to be published thrice-fold (or more) and then to win all the prizes going. Jen, thank you so much for the gorgeous Coco chocolate, pictured below - you honestly shouldn't have, but I'm very glad you did!

Vanessa's bookshop now seems to be the depository of presents for me. In case any of you need to know, for any reason of a donatory nature, her shop can be found at 219 Bruntsfield Place, Edinburgh EH10, and delicious chocolatier Coco of Bruntsfield is conveniently close by. Vanessa is also opening a grown-up bookshop soon, and I am equally happy to receive chocolate or sparkly wine there too. I am sure Vanessa is quite delighted to look after things for me.

Jen, you're amazing, even without the chocolate - you are an example of how to take feedback properly, maturely and constructively. There's no reason why you should follow it all but I believe what you're doing is seeing your work through the eyes of others and you know much more clearly what you might do to make it gorgeously and perfectly publishable. When you get there, let me be the first to know and I will give you chocolate too.

I also take my hat off to others amongst you who have submitted work to the Submissions Spotlights, either for children or adults, and especially those who sent their work in even after seeing the intensity of the comments that Annie and Jen so wonderfully dealt with. Congrats to Annie too - her response to the feedback for her children's submission was also wonderful.

Meanwhile, I'll be doing another spotlight on July 13th or thereabouts, and I haven't completely decided which ones to pick so do keep your submissions coming. Please follow the same rules as before. I was really pleased with how it went - I learnt from it too.

Thank you all for being such excellently contributory blog readers. You are restoring my faith in unpublished authors: see, I confess that before I started this blog I thought most of you were completely hopeless nutcases and that, on top of that, if that were not enough, many of you were also deluded idiots. Nutcases and idiots among you are obviously keeping quiet, which is quite the best thing for you to do, letting the sane and potentially publishable have their voice and show good author behaviour. Having so many published authors, agents and editors reading this blog is also an enormous help - thanks, one and all.

I can't send you chocolate (otherwise, of course, I would) but I can show you Jen's chocolate and the lovely Coco bag.

ANTI-GUFF RANT POSTPONED BY PLEONASMS

The best laid plans, etc. There I was, all set to have a good old rant about the guff spouted by arts organisations, and along comes something from an arts organisation that is actually useful and to the point. My guff-detector was rendered silent.

Honestly. I was sent some info about a project or three by an organisation called Hi-Arts (Hi = Highlands & Islands - as in "of Scotland") and found myself quickly shunted onto their website, from which I seamlessly garnered some crystalline and - pause for astonishment: after all, this is public money we're talking about and usually that means it's headed drainwards - practical resources for writers. Not a whiff of waffle.

Depending on who you are, you will have different needs and interests, but surely all of you fall into one or more of these categories:

1. You want to know how to write a great covering letter and synopsis and you'd like a leading agent (Jenny Brown) to tell you how.
2. You're a Scottish author interested in having a FREE, anonymous and professional critique of your WIP. (Are you still there? I know, it's hard to take in without hitting your head on the ceiling. But you do have to be Scottishish ...)
3. You're trying to break into the children's writing world and want some fab advice from leading literary agents and general founts of all knowledge of the genre, Fraser Ross Associates.
   
4. You are a writer of any sort and want to make sure that you're not littering your writing with pleonasms and really want Allan Guthrie to explain it to you.
5. You don't know what a pleonasm is ....

Links to clear guidelines on all these things are to found here, on a single page. Yes, an arts org that doesn't hide its info deep in the recesses of a labyrinthine website designed to fool anyone with a normal brain and less than four years to find the right page.

It really is quite remarkable. And now I'm going to lie down in a darkened room and work out how I can justify a major rant about arts organisations. I will find a way. They will not defeat me.

And please don't analyse this post for all the pleonasms. This is a blog, not a literary novel, and besides, I'm self-publishing it and it's well-known that self-published work has a tendency to be less rigorously edited than other work ...