The Novelwriter's Toolkit

by Caroline Taggart

  •Is the book being published at the right price? Some subject areas are very sensitive to price and format (that is, whether they are hardback or paperback and how big they are). First novels have a better chance as paperback originals as these tend to be cheaper than hardbacks and the customer is not taking so much of a risk. Supermarkets – which are an increasingly important sales channel – don’t generally take fiction in hardback (unless it is written by a celebrity), but might take a chance on an inexpensive first novel.

  •How wide is the book’s appeal? The book buyer can judge this from the blurb on the back of a paperback or the jacket of a hardback, and also from any extra sales material the publisher has produced (proof copies, sample chapters etc.). This might seem obvious, but the more mainstream the book is, the more sales channels there are for the publisher to sell it to.

  In the book trade, pretty much everything is pigeon-holed or likened to existing books – always successful ones, obviously – to help create a positive image in the buyers’ minds. While this sounds bandwagonish, it really does help if it’s immediately clear to the book buyer who is going to buy a particular book. Remember that this poor soul is seeing information about new titles all day every day and may have only a matter of seconds to absorb the information about each one. That’s why there so many ‘John Grisham mixed with Robert Harris’ soundbites to place a title in the market. The book may bear only the slightest resemblance to either of those authors, but it tells the buyer on which shelf the book will go in his shop.

  Publicity and Promotion

  I’ve left these till last because they are so massively important and can fall under so many different headings. But it is important for novice authors to understand how they can help (or hinder) the sales of their book. In no particular order (and depending very much on the nature of the book):

  •Is it likely to be reviewed? Unlikely with a first novel, but it does happen and can make a big difference.

  •Is the book, or the author, controversial in any way at all? This is usually a guarantee of publicity.

  •Is the author promotable? This can be a euphemism for attractive or funny, but it can also mean well connected. Publicity really does drive sales and who you know can be incredibly helpful in gaining newspaper or magazine features and reviews. If you know or are related to a celebrity there are slots in national newspapers like ‘when we met’ that are a good chance to plug your book. TV is the holy grail here and an appearance on BBC Breakfast is guaranteed to get the tills ringing. Some of the bigger authors spend weeks on publicity junkets – a necessary evil that can make a huge difference to sales. Lesser ‘names’ can help by having their own website and/or blog, and by making use of social-networking media. Publicity, publicity, publicity cannot be stressed enough.

  •Is the book likely to sell on after it ceases to be new? Books promoted in chains tend to have a limited time on the tables at the front of the shop, but if they sell, they are likely to remain there longer, thus getting the opportunity to keep doing well. Most people are fairly time starved and often don’t make it beyond the front of the shop, so will a book sell when it makes the move back to its ‘home’ section? Again, publicity is the key – if customers have read or heard about a book, they are more likely to come into a bookshop and ask about it, even if it isn’t prominently displayed.

  •Is it likely to sell better at certain times of year? For some titles, publishing at the right time is crucial to give them their best shot of being successful. Paperback fiction tends to sell most during the summer months to coincide with holiday reading.

  •Lastly and maybe most importantly, is the publisher putting marketing money behind the book? Tube or bus billboard ads, proof copies, meet-and-greet dinners, postcards – the list is endless. Is the publisher putting aside money for bookshop or internet promotions, which are increasingly expensive but can be very influential? High-street chains and web-based bookselling sites charge anything £50 to £25,000 for varying levels of promotion, so it’s important to discover if there is money set aside for this type of thing. The amount of money spent usually dictates the number of copies a bookseller will buy and can have a big effect on sales.

  Many of these are questions over which you as the author have no control; with others you can help enormously by working as part of a team and helping your publisher to make your book a success. So here is a final thought. As an author, it’s always good to be nice to salespeople in your publisher’s office and to booksellers. The book industry, like many others, is a small world. Get a reputation for being difficult or rude and you could find your book does not even make it out of the stock room. Make it clear that you appreciate other people’s efforts and we’ll pull out all the stops for you.

  IT’LL PROBABLY NEVER HAPPEN, BUT …

  A Few Legal Issues

  Caroline Taggart

  At first glance a publisher’s contract can look pretty daunting. Some run to 20 pages and include things that seem irrelevant (how likely is it that a literary first novel is going to be made into a strip cartoon?), but it is irresponsible not to understand it and take it seriously. Even if an agent negotiates the deal for you, it is your name on the contract, not theirs, and you are the one who will be liable if things go badly wrong.

  Delivery and Acceptance

  The first thing that might go wrong is that you fail to deliver what you have promised. The contract will detail the nature of the work – provisional title, approximately how many words it is and, if it hasn’t been completed yet, when it is to be delivered. Few publishers will cancel a contract if you are a week or so late, but you should always keep them informed. More importantly, the contract will specify that the work must be of a professional and publishable standard and that it must be along the lines of the material they have already seen. If what you deliver doesn’t meet these standards, the publisher may decline to publish and all your hard work will have been in vain.

  Advance and Royalties

  Once your work is accepted by a publisher, you should be offered an advance against royalties. The royalty may be a percentage of the book’s published price or it may be based on the publisher’s receipts, and the percentages will vary according to a number of factors: you will be offered a lower rate, for example, on books sold at a high discount for export or to a supermarket or Amazon. Some publishers offer a flat fee – which means that if the book is successful you have no share in the profits – so your agent will resist this if at all possible. If you are acting for yourself, this might be more difficult and you have to decide whether you are prepared to risk losing the deal in order to be properly paid. If you are a member of the Society of Authors (and you should consider joining, especially if you don’t have an agent), they can help you.

  An advance is a lump sum in advance of anything you may earn on sales of your book and you then have to ‘earn it out’ before you receive anything more. Say you are paid an advance of £5000 on a book that is going to sell for £10 and you are paid a royalty of 10 per cent of the cover price. That means that for every copy sold at a full royalty rate, you earn £1 (10 per cent of £10). In order to earn out, therefore, you have to sell 5000 copies (5000 x £1 = £5000, the amount of the advance). Once you sell the 5001st copy, you start to make money. In real life, books are often sold at other than the full royalty rate (the high discounts already mentioned) and there may be other sources of income such as the sale of an extract to a newspaper, but that is the principle.

  The good news is that this advance is non-refundable. If the book in our example fails to sell 5000 copies, you have what is called an ‘unearned balance’ in the publisher’s accounts but that is the publisher’s problem. It may make them less likely to buy another book from you but at least you don’t have to pay anything back.

  What About E-Books?

  The question of who has the right to licence e-books and on what terms is, at the time of writing, the hot potato in the publishing world. Arguments
for ‘free access to all information’ run directly counter to the concept of intellectual property – and authors’ ability to make a living from their work. Keep up to date at www.thebookseller.com or www.societyofauthors.org.

  Warranty

  As author, you have to assure the publisher that your book has not previously been published in the territories covered by the agreement, that it is not an infringement of any existing copyright or licence, that it is not libellous, blasphemous or obscene, that anything purporting to be a fact is true and, if it contains recipes or formulae, that they are not likely to poison anyone or blow anyone up. This is not a clause to be taken lightly. Which brings us to …

  Libel, Plagiarism and Breach of Copyright

  In signing this warranty, you have taken on certain responsibilities throughout the life of your book (even if the contract with this particular publisher is terminated and even if, for whatever reason, you assign the copyright to the publisher or anyone else). Imagine if someone bought the book in a charity shop 20 years from now, thought they recognized themselves and decided to sue. Ignorance of the law is no excuse so, if you are in any doubt at all, warn your editor of your concerns and if needs be, seek professional advice.

  Libel

  It is your responsibility to ensure that you have not defamed any living person who is identifiable from what you have written (libel laws do not protect the dead). It is possible to libel someone – or something, such as a company or an institution, even if you change their name and even if you are writing about them in a novel – if their real identity is recognizable. Avoid expensive legal fees by being aware of the risks, doing your research thoroughly and keeping detailed and accurate records of your sources of information.

  Plagiarism

  There is no copyright in ideas but if you steal (or appear to steal) someone else’s ideas, you can be sued for plagiarism. A few years ago the well-publicized case revolving round The Da Vinci Code cost the losing parties huge sums of money and you don’t want to go there.

  Plagiarism is a difficult area because we all consciously or unconsciously absorb ideas and even turns of phrase from everything we read and hear, but you can help your own cause by remembering the cynical maxim that taking ideas from one source is plagiarism, taking them from a number of sources is research. Don’t base too much of your book on a single source and if you want to quote someone else’s work acknowledge the fact.

  Copyright

  Copyright is a complicated business but what it boils down to is that a creative work is the property of the person who created it and cannot be used by anyone else without their permission. For written work, under British and European law, copyright lasts for 70 years after the end of the year in which the author dies, so anyone who died in 1941 will come out of copyright on 1 January 2012 (good news for those who want to quote Virginia Woolf or James Joyce).

  The law of copyright protects ‘a substantial part’ of a written work. If you want to quote a couple of lines from a 500-page history book, you would probably not be in breach of copyright (though you should always acknowledge your source); two lines of a haiku, a limerick or even a sonnet might actually involve fewer words but could still be considered ‘a substantial part,’ simply because the ‘whole’ is so much smaller.

  If quoting a substantial passage from a copyright work is essential to your novel, you must seek permission. Your first approach should be to the publisher of the work in question, who may then refer you to the author’s agent or estate, or to the author himself. The right to grant permission to quote from a song probably lies with the music publisher: unless you are an industry insider, Google is as good a place as any to start tracking them down. You will probably have to pay a fee, which will vary according to the length of the passage you want to quote, the fame of the author and the policy or whim of the copyright holder.

  Dealing with copyright issues can be frustrating, so leave yourself plenty of time. You may find that the UK publisher can grant UK and Commonwealth rights only, so if the contract for your book covers the entire English-speaking world you will need to go to the US publisher too. Your urgent request may be the recipient’s boring piece of admin and they may not reply for weeks. Or at all.

  Disclaimers

  You often see on the imprint page of a book (or at the end of the acknowledgements) a statement to the effect that ‘the author and publishers have made every effort to trace copyright holders; they apologize in advance for any omissions and will be pleased to make due acknowledgement in any future editions of this book’. Would this stand up in court? It might. If there is any doubt, you and your editor should jointly make a decision as to whether or not to include the material. Your parents’ wedding photo is probably OK; the lyric of a recent pop song whose copyright holder you can’t trace (or who hasn’t bothered to reply to your request) is more dodgy ground. It may break your heart to leave it out, but this might be preferable to breaking the bank because of a legal claim.

  A lot of this article may sound like scaremongering and indeed the vast majority of the things I have told you to be careful about will never happen. But publishing contracts are founded in common sense and aim to protect the interests of everyone concerned. Read yours carefully, make sure you understand it and are prepared to commit to it, sign it and get on with the exciting business of publishing your book.

  THE PUBLISHING PROCESS

  How Your Manuscript is Turned Into a Book

  Caroline Taggart

  Congratulations. You’ve written your book and you’ve got a publisher. An enormous amount of the hard work that goes into being a published author is behind you. An enormous amount. But not all of it. Not understanding the publishing process is a cause of woe for a lot of first-time authors, so here is a rough guide to what happens after you have delivered your manuscript.

  Editing

  You and your book will be assigned to an editor who will steer you through the production process and be your main point of contact with the company. At least one person is now going to read your book very closely and ask you questions and make comments about it. There are likely to be two levels of queries and they may come from two different people. Broadly speaking:

  •A commissioning editor, senior editor or project editor cares about the structure and content of the book. She will tell you that the action takes too long to get going and you should drop Chapter 2 altogether, that Chapter 4 would be better if it came after Chapter 7, or that your hero simply isn’t romantic enough. So you may be asked to add, subtract, rewrite or shuffle. (With fiction this is likely to happen before they offer to publish, but even so you should be prepared for further suggestions.)

  •A copy editor, line editor or desk editor (who in many cases will be a freelancer employed on a project-by-project basis) cares about consistency, spelling, grammar, punctuation and repetition. Her job is to notice that you spell ‘organisation’ with an s but ‘realize’ with a z, or that you have told that anecdote about your heroine’s first day at work three times. A lot of this will seem like nitpicking, but that is what a copy editor is paid for. Good publishers believe in ‘getting it right’ and that includes putting the apostrophes in the right place and not saying ‘imply’ when you mean ‘infer’.

  •Either or both of these will care about factual accuracy, copyright issues and potential libel problems. Copyright and libel are dealt with in more detail on pages 92–93. Accuracy, of course, means ‘getting it right’ again, and it’s just as important in historical novels as it would be in non-fiction. If you are old enough to remember the 1960s film El Cid, you probably know that at one point the 11th-century heroine, played by Sophia Loren, is seen wearing a dress with a zip, a device that was patented in 1851. It may well be the only thing you know about the film – a sad reflection on what was probably several years’ work for hundreds of people. Don’t let that sort of carelessness spoil your own opus.

  How you deal with editorial queries is a matter of give
and take. Obviously, the more personal your book, the more sensitive you are going to feel but remember that it is in the editor’s interests to make you look good by making the book as good as it can possibly be. If she says a section is boring (she may phrase it differently but you will know what she means), look at it again. Is there anything you can take out? Can you add to it to make it more appealing? If you really want to dig your heels in, consider giving way on some other point that is less important to you.

  The Jacket/Cover

  While you and your editor are busy getting the text right, the salespeople are starting to think about selling the book, and to that end they will prepare a jacket (for a hardback) or cover (for a paperback) many months in advance of publication. Your contract will probably say that you will be consulted about jacket/cover design, but consulting means just that: the publisher has the final say and publishers vary enormously in their attitude to author input.

  If they produce something you don’t like or weren’t expecting, try to be objective about it. You should certainly point out if they have got the concept of the book wrong e.g. if it is aimed at teenagers and the cover is more likely to appeal to seven-year-olds, or if you have written a work of literary fiction and they have made it look like a thriller. But otherwise, imagine that you are a book buyer for a large chain store, seeing a million covers a day and spending perhaps ten seconds considering each one. Would this cover attract you and make you want to stock the book in your shops? Put a colour print-out of the cover on a shelf or mantelpiece, with a couple of other books alongside it, and look at it from the other side of the room. Does it leap out at you? Can you read the words? Does it make you want to pick it up? If so, it is doing its job.