A LESSON IN CONFIDENCE

I was at the London Book Fair this week. I blagged my way in with a badge that declared me to be a 'Self-Employed' student writer at Imogen Clark at Home. No one seemed to care and when I looked at the badges of those around me, they all seem to have similarly unconvincing rings to them.

It was fun wandering round Olympia looking at stand after stand of glossy books and dreaming. I picked up leaflets and stashed them deep in my bag for consumption on the way home.

The most useful part of the day was a seminar, rather cringingly titled 'The Write Stuff' at which ten pre-selected would-be authors got to pitch their books to a panel of agents. The place was full - I had to perch precariously on the edge of a bench throughout - but it was fascinating.

Each author had three minutes to sell themselves and their book (which the agents had had an extract of beforehand.) The authors seemed to be split into various types. First, there were the ones with a bad idea. Not many, fortunately. We skipped over them.

Next came the authors with a great story idea but, when analysed by the agents, seemed to be missing something or was coming from the wrong angle. This was really interesting. It is difficult to see what is wrong with your concept until someone points it out to you but when these agents spoke the flaw was immediately obvious, if not to the authors themselves then certainly to us as audience members.

The third category were those that were so pleased with themselves that it was difficult to concentrate on what they were actually saying. There were a fair few of these. I squirmed in my chair at their excruciating self-confidence. There was something inherently unlikeable about their attitude to their own talent. The lady sitting next to me clearly felt the same as she smirked behind her hand. And yet something inside me was impressed by their self-belief, their ability to stand there and tell anyone who would listen (and a few who wouldn't) that what they had produced was better than the rest.

As I sat on the train later, flicking through my spoils, I began to think about them. They have what I lack - an ability to put themselves out there, to tell everyone that what they have done is the best thing that you have ever read. Whether they believe that to be true is a different matter (although I think this bunch really did believe it.)

I'm going to have to dig very deep if I'm going to compete on their terms. I feel sick at the thought.

PS However, I am very glad to say that the winer was a very quiet, unassuming chap who just let his writing speak for itself. Maybe there is hope....

THE PROS AND CONS OF SELF PUBLISHING

It's like a labyrinth. You think you've found your way through and then you take a wrong turn and you're lost again.

What am I talking about?

Getting published.

Honestly, writing the flipping novels is the easy bit. Deciding what to do with them is proving far more troublesome.

Yesterday I went to an event where a bunch of Literary Agents talked to a room of aspiring writers about how to get bag yourself an agent. They told us how important it is to have someone fighting your corner, about the deals that they have won for their clients. It all sounded great.

Then they told us what to put in our pitch letter, how to write a blurb, what to put in a synopsis. The sound of scratching pens filled the room as everyone made notes frantically.

Then questions.

'So how many unsolicited submissions do you get a week?'

'About 200 a week which I have to read in my spare time as I am too busy servicing my existing clients during the day.'

'When was the last time you took on a new writer?'

'Hmmm. Let me think.... Eighteen months ago? Two years maybe?'

It's hardly encouraging is it? I'd say my chances of being picked up that way are ludicrously small. My books are not bestsellers. You're never going to trip over a pile of them on the way to catch your plane. They are mildly compelling, would pass a train journey pleasantly enough but they are never going to win the Man Booker.

And even if you get a fabled agent to represent you, they still have to convince the publisher....

So you could go the other way, publish it yourself. It's all out there waiting for you at the click of a mouse. Simple steps to creating your own ebooks and paper books. Loads of people do it, some of them very successfully.

But this brings me back to the question that has been whirling round my mind for the last five years.

How do you know if your stuff is good enough to publish? I can't bear the idea of publishing myself and risking the whiff of desperation seeping into my pages. If my work isn't ready yet, I'll just keep writing until it is. There's no rush. But at the same time what if it's not bad.....?

I don't know what to do. Do I spend months and months trying to hook an agent or do I have a go by myself but forever wonder if I'm on a self-indulgent frolic? It shouldn't matter. It doesn't seem to matter to millions of self-publishers across the globe. But it really matters to me....

If anyone out there knows anything about any of this please get in touch with a comment below. I can't just keep writing novels and shutting them in a drawer!

OPEN SUBMISSIONS

I have released my baby into the big bad world... well, the first 50 pages of it.

Someone kindly told me that Tinder Press, which publishes some of the people that I like to read, is holding an Open Submission period for the first two weeks of March. As long as your book is complete and you're not agented, you can send them the first fifty pages with a synopsis and a short biography. So I did....

Sounds easy doesn't it? Write an email, attach documents, click send. We do it every day of our lives. But it's not easy. It's scary and nerve-wracking and fantastically time-consuming. I could spend forever tinkering with my manuscript, altering, editing, seeing errors that I've missed. I doubt what I've done. I wonder why I'm bothering. I hope I won't hear them laughing from here. But ultimately I just have to let it go.

Then there's the synopsis. Have I made the story sound interesting? Will it catch the imagination, make them read my words? Everyone says writing a good synopsis is very tricky but they don't tell you how to do it. I did my best.

Even the biography was hard! I'm a housewife with no track record and almost no understanding of the industry. Please read my stuff!

The chances of anything coming of it are incredibly small. I can't imagine how many thousands of submissions they will get. But I have to start somewhere and apart from making my heart race and my palms clammy, how wrong can it go?

Watch this space.

FIRST THINGS FIRST.

On Monday I decide to venture into the unchartered waters of the self publishing world.
On Tuesday I spend inordinate amounts of time discovering things on the internet.
On Wednesday I feel totally overwhelmed by the whole thing. Aargh. How can this be so complicated?!!!

So, on the basis that a list calms the troubled mind, I've decided to make myself one. I shall start at the beginning......


1. The manuscript.

I'm going to work with my current project to start with for no other reason than I can remember what happens in it. It's currently out with trusted friends for feedback and an editor friend of mine has very kindly said she'll take a look. After that, I intend to send it out to a consultancy for comment. I am hoping that this will tell me what's wrong with it so that I can build it into something that I can work with. Or I can just start again....

2. The website.

I have a very basic blogger blog. (This is it!) When I did the Beyond Belief experiment (where I blogged a manuscript chapter by chapter and asked for feedback) I tried to do it via Wordpress but had to give up because I couldn't work out how to do what I wanted.  This bit is really hard for me. Words I can do. Technology is a whole different story.

3. The social media.

Facebook is my thing but my page is very much limited to my personal friends. My blog has a public page but if I am going to shift my blog/website to somewhere else then I probably need to do that before I start trying to increase my followers. This frightens the life out of me and fills me with hideous self-doubt. All other forms of social media are a mystery.

4.  The publishing format.

Here I really have no clue. I have friends who have published on Amazon and Createspace. I have also heard that Lulu is good. I have no idea. Do I want paper, ebook, both? I need a strategy before I can even decide which way to look. Research is required.

5. The information overload.

There is not much I can do about this. I think I just have to set a little time aside each day to read other people's blogs, webpages, etc and discover what I can. Discipline is required. I do not have vast chunks of time to sink into endless surfing or there'll be no time to write. I think I should find a course/conference to help me focus my research. And I'll have to talk to people.....maybe just digitally to start with!

I'm a bit scared. It feels like I'm sneaking into silicon valley through a service vent armed only with a pencil. But hey, the only way is up, isn't it?

Imogen.

DAY ONE....

I'm going to have to raise my game.

I've been thinking about it and if I'm serious about this whole writing business, then I need to embrace more than just writing the books. In fact, it's starting to feel like writing the books is the easy part!

I have a dream etc, etc.... Mine is to get a book picked up a real publishing house and to have it published. This is what I've been working towards since 2009 and it's still what I want. But I'm also beginning to have a bit of a rethink.

It used to be called 'Vanity' publishing didn't it? Can't get a book accepted? Then do it yourself! Simple. Now this is all fine and dandy but there's probably a reason why no one wanted your book in the first place. Hence my traditional route dream. When I publish something I want it to be proud of it and that includes making sure that it's of a sufficiently high standard so that people like me might want to read it.

But things hare changing. People who can write really well now publish independently. In fact many of them choose to do it this way and do it very successfully. In fact, I read that the big 5 publishing houses now account for only 16% of the ebook sales on Amazon.

So maybe I should try to learn something about it. After all, it's all out there in the blogosphere to be absorbed. Mind you, we are talking a VERY STEEP LEARNING CURVE. Yes I've had my blog for nearly six years (longer than many) and had the presence of mind to acquire my domain names early on (well, my clever husband did) but that's all. I am severely off the pace in every way.

But I can catch up. I can learn a little bit at a time. And to make sure that I don't give up, I'm going to take what's left of my diminishing (and I like to call loyal) group of readers with me. (That's you!)

I've decided to use this blog to record how I get on, from rebuilding my website, to finalizing my manuscript, from choosing a cover to ultimately getting something out there to be read. So, if this journey interests you then stick around. Tell your friends!!

Right then.  We begin here. I have a very basic blog with almost no features and five first draft manuscripts.

Hold on to your hats......please.

Imogen.

PS Please post any ideas in the comments box. All help very gratefully received x

A NEW IDEA

It's there, tantalisingly close. So close that I can almost taste it on my lips, reach out and run my fingers down its spine, hold it close and feel its heart beat. Almost...but not quite.

My next book is coming. I can feel it. A kernel of a seed of a half-formed idea is burrowing its way into my subconscious. I know that it's there. It's sending out little pulses of electricity that make my stomach flip over. I keep getting tiny rushes of adrenaline. They have nowhere to go and they die almost as soon as they are born but they are there nonetheless. It's unsettling. I feel as if I am on a cliff edge and yet I'm not entirely sure which way the danger lies.

But it's so new that I can't catch hold of it. It's like a wisp of smoke, curling around me. I can see it. I can smell it but when I put a hand out to catch it, it disappears into the air and is gone leaving nothing but the unnerving feeling that I have missed something important. It has no form other than the barest outline. It is the ghost of an plot.

I love this bit. I have an idea. I toss it around in my head. I have no clue as to whether it will work, how it will look, if it can possibly be sustained for 85, 000 words. It may have no legs, an idea for a short story and nothing more. It has no characters to populate it, no form or structure at all. And yet my mind keeps coming back to it, worrying it, chasing it. It's a bit like when you did something that wasn't quite right. You can't help thinking about it, going over it in your head, justifying it to yourself. I pick away at the edges like a scab that you've promised yourself you won't touch but can't resist. I must be patient.

It needs time. I must try to ignore it and let it do its own thing. It will either grow a little into something that I can pick up gingerly and enclose in my palm until it is strong enough to breath on its own or it will die and be forgotten along with all the other embryonic ideas that never quite make it.

I shall start to write in June. Whether it will be this story remains to be seen..... Oh but it's exciting waiting to find out.

THE NEXT STEP

Draft 1 of The Book with No Name is complete. In fact, I completed it a few weeks ago. Then I printed it out - all 248 A4 pages after which it sat on the corner of my desk, a reassuringly sizeable pile, for a few days. I looked at it fondly. I patted it on the head like a faithful dog. I might even have stroked it. Then I packed it up in a box and got on with my much neglected Christmas preparations.

Now Christmas is over and I must open the box.

I must open the box.

I really must.

The trouble is, I know what comes next. I should do. This the fifth time that I've been through it. The next stage is the structural edit. This is where I'm supposed to go through my manuscript looking for the things that scream epic fail at me. I should ditch characters and scenes that take the reader nowhere, cut those sections that I wrote because I had to write something, find plot strands that started vigorously enough but then ran out of steam before they reached their destination. All this falls to the second rewrite.

And the reason why I'm putting off starting this important task?

Well, it's simple really.  I can't do it. I don't know how. At the risk of sounding smug, my first drafts are pretty coherent. The story, at least, is generally sound with no loose ends or unlikely coincidences to move things along. I can never see the structural issues. Let's face it. If I knew what was wrong with it, I wouldn't have written it like that in the first place. I just can't see beyond where I am.

So, instead, my second draft turns in to an exercise of titivation. I correct my appalling spelling, swap sentences round, add the odd metaphor. And at the end of this exercise I end up with exactly the same thing, only tidier.

This stage is then, I have discovered, where my writer's block hits. I clearly lack the vision to turn a reasonable story into a good book and despite spending two years on creative writing courses, I know no more about how to do it than I did in 2010 when I reached this point with the first one. But if I'm ever going to get any further, I have to master this next, impossible stage.

So, this morning I have coffee, I have new pens, I have peace and quiet ( at least in the short term.) I am going to open the box and begin to do more than just correct my spelling. Or at least, I'm going to try.