John Dickinson

So you’re writing a book, and you’re wondering if it might be published and earn you a lot of money. Fair enough. It’s a perfectly reasonable question. Let’s do some numbers.

Some years ago I did a stint as a manuscript reader for a publisher in London. In my time there I looked at 200 manuscripts. I passed twenty on to my bosses for a second opinion. Of those I thought six might be publishable. In the end they published one. They hadn’t been expecting me to find any.

So that’s one out of two hundred submitted. When I compared notes with my editor on this he thought that the ratio - at least in the UK - was nearer one in five hundred. I can’t adjust for the effect of one book being submitted a number of different publishers in succession (as Harry Potter was, and Watership Down and no doubt many other novels that went on to be very successful.) But let’s say the chances of acceptance are around one percent or below.

Depressing? Yes. But new authors do get published – even now. And lotteries do get won. So let’s say the book’s accepted. What are the chances of success (ie: big sales, household name, publisher clamouring for sequels and old life totally rotted up by celebrity)?

They’re better. But they’re still not great. A University of Bournemouth survey of professional authors in the UK found that 50% of earnings go to just 10% of us. So that’s say one in ten of us making the big time. The rest of us get by on sums that fluctuate from year to year but on average amount to about two-thirds of the UK average wage. That’s a useful second salary for a household (especially if you manage to do it part time) but not the path to riches.

The point is that there are far more of us wanting to write than the public want to read. Most readers enjoy reading more if they can talk about the book afterwards to someone else who has read it. And a reader is most likely to pick up a book by an author they haven’t read if someone else tells them it’s good. Today’s readers may well be far more diverse in their tastes than in the past. They will have more ways of chattering about more books. But the social need is, as it always has been, for small numbers of books that large numbers of people can talk about. Not the other way around.

And yes, quality is part of the social need, but only part of it. Beautifully written, intellectually challenging books only attract a minority. Anything that offers a good gossip or a nice, heart-warming dream will stake a far bigger claim on the reading public’s purse. Wail if you like, but that’s the truth.

I don’t think there’s any point blaming the industry for any of this. If publishers and booksellers get swept away by the advent of the e-book I think we’ll find that all these effects will persist, and will probably become even more marked. More of that another time, maybe.

Lily from Vancouver wants to write a book. She asked me how to do it. And here’s more or less what I said.

To start with you need an idea of what the book’s going to be about. This is the spark that gets you going. (I’ve talked about this before “The Golf Club and the Sponge”, so I won’t repeat myself. In any case, Lily’s already got her idea. Let’s go on.

The next thing you need, I’d say, is an outline of the basic story. There’s got to be a sequence of events that finishes with a satisfactory ending. This isn’t difficult, but you’ve got to have it. For example, ‘boy meets girl and after a lot of trouble they fall in love,’ is one. ‘Child that everyone laughs at finds special powers and saves the world’ is another. There’s actually a very small number of basic storylines and we use them again and again.

Next, you need to think about how you are going to keep your reader wanting to read on until they get to your ending. This is difficult, and I guess many of the successful writers just do it instinctively. You need an idea of what your reader is like - probably they’re someone quite like you - and what’s going to grab them. You might want a lot of suspense, or funny scenes. You might want a lot of fascinating characters. There will almost certainly need to be a central character whom the reader likes, finds interesting, and wants to come through. (Excellent books with unsympathetic central characters do get written, but it takes a special sort of writer to do them well and a special sort of reader to soldier through them and still enjoy the experience).

Now we need to start writing. This is also hard. The first few pages can often seem unsatisfactory. Don’t worry too much about it. You can come back and re-write them later. Just get going.

And above all, you need to keep writing. This is also hard. Try to write something every day, even if it’s only a few sentences. If you can’t write something every day, have a time or times in the week when you do write. Don’t let yourself put it off. Once you stop, you can stay stopped for weeks or months. It’s very hard to start again. Don’t let yourself lose confidence. Confidence is key to the writer. Have faith.

It’s been raining for three days. The wind blew heavily last night. This morning the children drove off for the first day of the autumn term. The author (who is very fond of his offspring) danced a little jig in the drive and came back into a house that was empty for the first time in six weeks.

Except for the cats, one of whom had been sick on the carpet.

Leave the cat-sick for the moment. Clear breakfast. Brush teeth, shave, make bed, hugging all the time the thought of four quiet morning hours, solid and serene, and nothing but the gentle chatter of the keyboard. After a summer of visits and visitors, excursions and distractions, at last a chance to do some real work!

Eight twenty-five. The bed’s made (as much as it ever is). It’s time to warm up the computer. Press switch, open blinds, let daylight in. Daylight reminds me that there is cat-sick still uncleaned on the carpet. Clean cat-sick. What next? Oh, the washing’s still sitting in the basket, damp and threatening to go mouldy. Can’t leave it like that. Start hanging up washing. Shirt, yes, Jeans, yes, sock, sock, odd sock – yes I know time’s beginning to creep by – sock, tee-shirt, sock, another odd sock – and the computer’s still humming patiently in the corner of the study. But what’s the point of starting something if I’m going to leave it unfinished? Sock, sock, sock. And the cats are beginning to look at me. It’s the sort of look that says, ‘We knew it’. I knew it too.

I knew this would happen, all through the long summer when I was telling myself that if only I could have a clear morning I could get such things done. It’s just ten minutes into the autumn term and already I’m shy of the keyboard. Regimented regime? Hah! And now I must admit that there were clear mornings in the summer – my family arranged them for me – but I found it convenient to use them for things other than writing. All creators are in some sense driven, I suppose. If we were not we would not be creators. It’s just that I seem to be driven by my ability to procrastinate.

And I’m sure I’m not alone. Ask any ten authors what it is they fear most and nine of them will probably say ‘Loss of inspiration’ or something like that. (The tenth will tell you that it’s the call from the agent or publisher who says ‘Look, this latest typescript of yours. I’m sorry, but…’ and yes, that’s true too.) There is something a bit frightening about a blank white screen. Looking at it, you feel a sense of enormous potential. And that potential includes the possibility of failure. A little mental battle has to be fought and won, each day, with that first touch of the keys. I’m catching up on six weeks of mental battle right now.

OK. The washing’s hung. And the blog’s done too. The novel – the real thing – is still waiting. It’s just a screen away. So, then…

Cup of tea?

I’ve been asked: ‘Do you write to a regimented regime?’

Yes, I write to a regime. The thing about writing is that it’s so flexible that if you DON’T make a time when you absolutely must write, it gets pushed to one side by everything else. I currently do 3 hours five mornings a week. That may not sound much but if you I’m actually drafting something up for the first time I find three hours of solid creative thought quite enough. Do I stick to my regime? Sort of. Mostly. See “The Discipline Thing” and “Holidays Are Allowed”.

However, all authors are different. I know some who work (in theory) all day and well into the night. I know some who work only when the fit takes them. When I had a full time job I would write in whatever snatches of time I could find in the evenings - fifteen minutes here and an hour there. That’s how The Cup of the World was written. It took about six years. Then when I was in Brussels working long hours as a diplomat, the only time I had to write was on the way to and from the office. I cycled to work, so the only way of writing was to dictate while I rode. (Not good for the concentration, I fear, but my automatic pilot kept me alive somehow.) I was using voice-recognition software but of course I was breathing rather heavily into the mike as I rode so the software was never really able to recognise my voice. I’m not recommending this method, but it shows you the lengths some authors will go to.

I went to my editor and asked ‘What shall I write next?’

It was, as he said to me kindly over a plateful of garlic prawns in Oxford, a bit of a silly question. It’s certainly a question to which wise editors might not offer a straight answer. He didn’t say why, but I can guess. There are two reasons.

1) No editor wants to give the impression that they are commissioning a work that they are not, in fact, commissioning.

2) An author is more likely to write his best by writing what he wants to write, rather than writing to order. That’s not to say his best will sell, but if you’ve got enough good authors writing their best then you’ve a fair chance that one or more of them will have a lucky strike. My editor has three best sellers on his list this year.

I know all that. I also know it’s a sign of weakness in an author even to ask the question. But authors are nervy creatures and we’re allowed to get the jitters. And I also know that out beyond the world of the editor there’s a legion of sales executives and booksellers who would answer ‘write a vampire novel’ without a second thought. Sales of vampire novels are propping up three whole publishing empires at the moment, my agent says. Yup. Vampires. Right.

As it happens, somewhere around the coffee stage, the suggestion that I might write a horror novel did creep into the conversation. And it wasn’t me that made it. And I could. Actually, I could see two quite different horror novels that I could write. They wouldn’t be the blood and guts type, no. Vampires, no. Not this time anyway. But people disappearing, things you half–see but don’t quite… Yes, I could go there.

After, that is, I’ve done some other things. Because I also spent a certain amount of time during this talk convincing myself (if not my editor) that the two ideas I already have in my head might be rather good ideas after all. And I mustn’t forget that I’ve sort-of promised myself that if I find a publisher for Keys of Cleary then there’s definitely going to be sequels. So that’s five or six books I now have tentatively on the project list. (There must have been something in those prawns. )

And the really difficult question is – which of them should I write first?

In the classic tough-guy movie, there’s always that moment when the hero’s car gets ambushed, a bus blocks his route, the roofs sprout machine-gunners and bullets fill the air. The hero faultlessly executes a handbrake turn, the tyres screech and he accelerates away in the opposite direction pursued by bad guys and an orchestra. The ensuing mayhem carries on for far longer than any real ambush ever would, leaving a trail of destruction across the city. And the film-producer’s budget will have taken some knocks too.

I suppose every walk of life has its equivalent. In the quiet world of the author it’s when you get the copy edited manuscript back and the copy editor has left flecks of vomit in the margin.

The copy editor doesn’t like my heroine. She really doesn’t like my heroine. And that’s a problem. Because things like this should all have been dealt with by now. Copy editing is supposed to be about whether you really want to use the same word three times on one page, or whether the hero should have turned left out of the door at this point because the last time he went this way he turned right. It’s the last check through before you go to printing. But when your copy-editor is herself an experienced editor – and moreover she’s a She and what she’s complaining about is your principal female character – that’s when you’re looking at bullet-holes in your windscreen.

And people have been murmuring to me for a while that maybe the heroine is a weak point in the story, and each time I go away and I think I’ve fixed her, and each time it turns out I haven’t. I think the problem has been that she’s supposed to chuck herself at the hero without really knowing how. So her scenes are a bit cringe-making, which is tough for anyone who wants to identify with her.

The deadline for production is only weeks away. I am already half-way through another novel. I have three options.

1) Ignore problem. All books have flaws. It’s only one reader’s reaction after all.
Er…

2) Snip away at problem. Remove the phrases that cause most offence. Heroine is just less emotional. (Actually, she would have less character all round.)

3) Emergency manoeuvre. Rewrite character completely. In three weeks.

I spent an uncomfortable half-morning not working. I did the shopping. I don’t remember where light dawned – it might have been in the car park at Waitrose. The answer isn’t to rewrite one character. It’s to rewrite two. Combine them. The second character in question is also one that some readers have been murmuring about, because he has interesting features but doesn’t get to play much of a role. Actually, if I do that, then I need to rewrite the hero a bit as well, because the heroine is now going be rather icy and self-sufficient, and the hero will have to be a bit more touchy-feely just for balance. All in all I’m looking at changes running through about a third of the novel. It is late, late, late to be doing this.

Telephone discussions. Copy-editor is supportive. Desk editor is content. (Really, it’s nice that they have so much faith, but I sometimes worry about how lightly these guys hold the reins!) I grip the wheel read: mouse. I grab the handbrake keyboard. Screech! And on the rare occasions that anyone makes films about authors the next three weeks pass in a series of short clips of author typing feverishly (yes), pacing to and fro (yes), clock showing three am (not on your life) while dramatic music thumps away in the background. (No. I can’t do serious work with music playing. It gives me brain overload.) Which is of course why there are so many more films about tough guys than there are about authors. It’s just so much more fun when you can see the action.

Even if the action would never happen like that.

I registered for the Google Rights settlement this morning. It was not a difficult decision.

The story so far is that Google has for some years been scanning and digitising large numbers of books without asking for permission from the copyright holders. A number of authors and publishers got together and sued and a deal has been reached. This has been a Big Event in the world of Intellectual Property Rights. Anyone else could be forgiven for not having noticed. In fact, I hadn’t noticed either. Until the letter from my agent dropped on the mat telling me to accept it or try suing Google myself.

Swallow hard. The settlement offers a writer like me the chance to get my rights over my books acknowledged and – maybe – collect small amounts of money if such ever arise. On the other hand even guys like Google are supposed to ask your permission before they drive their tanks over your lawn. They didn’t in the first place, and they’re still not asking now. The settlement says that writers will be assumed to have said yes unless they actively say no. So I’ve woken up to find caterpillar tracks all over the grass. Never mind that I was asleep when they did it. I want to grab my pitchfork and go after them.

Don’t do it, says the agent. Don’t do it, says a good friend who also happens to be a hot-shot IPR lawyer. A pitchfork against a tank battalion is about right: you’re a lone and not terribly well-known author and they’re, well, Google. You need huge resources to take them on. Anyway, they probably haven’t got as far as digitising your books yet, so don’t look so offended. Sign up, and dream that one day you’ll be in a position to regret that you did so.

Sign up I have. And since I can post-rationalise as well as anyone else, here’s a thought to go with it. It’s another way of getting the books out there. Sure, I’m in this business for money, but I’m also in it for the readership. Given a choice between a readership but no money and neither money nor readership I’ll take the readership every time. Google would say the same. When those books are out of print and have disappeared from the shelves, they’ll still be only a click or two away. That’s got to be a good thing. Capitalism does more good than harm in the end. It’s the way we persuade ourselves to make things happen.

As half term loomed, the work-daemon called me to his office in the upper reaches of my mind.

Half term is no excuse for laziness, he said. I agreed it wasn’t.

You can shut the door, he said. You can leave the world its own devices. I want to see you writing. I said I would.

Productivity is the key, he said. Rhythm. Discipline. Discipline, I said. Yes.

Last half term was a travesty, he snarled. And I nodded meekly. I would do better.

And?

Well Monday was Bank Holiday. Much-loved friends were staying. No work got done.

Tuesday I was taxi for daughter and friend who were shopping for their joint birthday party. Also I was shopping to replenish stores after much-loved friends had departed. There’s no reason why a trip to the supermarket, plus associated unpacking and putting away, should wipe out an entire working morning, but it did.

Can’t remember what happened to Tuesday afternoon. Must have been something important.

Wednesday I did get some words down. That was after being taxi for daughter and other friend who were going to joint birthday party. (Was saved from further depradations by friend’s parents, who valiantly took the job of trucking whole gaggle of friends into Bristol and back entirely on themselves. Both are office workers. It’s not only the work-from-home types who see their productivity suffer at half term.) Any way, writing got done. Ta-daah! It might have been a struggle finding that rhythm for so short a time after having done nothing for days, but I had thought what I wanted to say and for two pages I said it.

It was Wednesday evening that son came and asked me for gift-wrap. Gift-wrap? ‘For Mum’s birthday present,’ he said.

Now, I hadn’t forgotten Thursday was Pippa’s birthday. I am not that sort of husband. I am the sort of husband who knows very well when his wife’s birthday is and then forgets he has to do anything about it. Not only was there no gift-wrap in the house, there was no present from loving self either. Fortunately the taxi-run to pick up daughter was due. Pippa thought she was doing it but I claimed it, swung by B&Q in the last half-hour before it closed and secured nice new gardening gloves. On return with daughter found that daughter had not got her mother a present either. So Daughter got gardening gloves to give to Mother and Wife got an IOU from Loving Husband for a new mobile phone. At which she laughed. Pippa is wonderful and I don’t deserve her.

Thursday. Pippa’s birthday. No work got done.

So it’s Friday. Work-daemon is pacing his office, furiously chewing on his cigar (I don’t know why I let him smoke on the premises). Daughter is off. House is quiet. Son’s haircut is not due until the afternoon. Lawn is getting long, but its haircut can also wait till the afternoon. (Mem. Must do something about that mobile – but maybe the afternoon will have room for that too.) The week is lost but not all is lost. Some work of noble note may yet be done. The screen is open.

And I’ve remembered.

The in-laws are coming tomorrow.

I am to attend a careers fair at my old school in a fortnight’s time.  This will mean sitting at a small table in a large room, surrounded by other tables at which will be seated stockbrokers, bankers, wine importers, possibly some civil servants and the occasional engineer.  I shall have a sign marked “AUTHOR” and a small pile of my books, and I shall look around expectantly while the fresh-faced children of stockbrokers, bankers, wine importers and possibly civil servants mill around among the tables trying to imagine what they are going to do with the rest of their lives.

At least that’s how I approached it last time.  This year I’m going for some more aggressive marketing.  The first thing I’m going to do is hide that sign “AUTHOR” and replace it with one of my own, which will read:

I AM AN AUTHOR
I DO NOT BITE
I DO NOT ALWAYS TELL THE TRUTH

I reckon that will bring them running.

Then, for discussion, there will be a couple more signs.  One will read:

AUTHORS ARE:
-  Poor
-  Mad
-  Oppressed
-  Prone to Self Pity
Interested?  Ask HERE for details.

And a third will read: THE NOVEL YOU ARE WRITING MAY BE THE LAST EVER WRITTEN.  (That’s about the e-book and how story-telling may change in the future).

Now, I planned all this with the aid of half a bottle of wine, and maybe it shows. I am forced to admit that when I write these things down they look pretty negative about the profession I’m supposed to be pitching.  I may lose my nerve on the day and settle for the pile of books and expectant look.  But here’s a couple of reasons why I may not.

First, because I want to strike a different note, and I don’t want to be apologetic about it.  In that room of city professionals, I want to say ‘You don’t have to go for the respectable, high-salaried career.  You can shape your life into something quite different.  Let’s talk about what that might mean.’

And second, because when I do get someone who wants to write, they don’t need much persuading to give it a try. I’ll be happy to talk to them about writing and to encourage them in what they are doing.  But I don’t want to leave them with too many illusions.  When I say that authors are Poor/Mad/Oppressed - well, there’s a truth or two that maybe they should know before they set out on this path.

The Self Pity bit is, of course, pure hyperbole.

Actually I think bankers etc may also know about Self Pity at the moment

Look, I like the careers fair.  I like meeting these young people.  And once I get going I can’t help being positive about writing. My eyes will sparkle and I shall be aiming to make theirs sparkle too.  I shall say to them that (never mind the future of the novel) there were story-tellers long before there were stockbrokers and there will be story-tellers long after stockbrokers have been forgotten. It may be film, it may be song, it may be theatre.  It may be some medium we cannot yet imagine.  But people will always want stories.  After food gatherers and shelter-builders, ours is the most essential profession of all.

It’s going to be fun.  And I may get a word with that wine-importer too.

Just because you only work three hours a day - at home, what’s more - it doesn’t mean you don’t get to have holidays.  Holidays are Allowed.  Sometimes they are Enforced.  I am in the middle of a stop-go holiday that threatens to take all February.  The cause is Kids.

First there was the snow.  There wasn’t very much of it, by some standards, but there was more than  Gloucestershire was equipped to cope with.  Roads blocked, ice formed, cars skidded - and schools closed.  Even the gritty headmaster of no. 2 child’s school was forced to close in the end.  He was about the last head standing in all of the county.  (I have this mental image of him going down at the salute while he and his school were gently buried in drifts of - well, not of snow, but of e-mails from parents and teachers alike saying Sorry, they were not going to make it today Because.)  And now the snow has melted, it’s half term.  So for much of the last three weeks I have been sharing my workspace with two young teenagers for whom entertainment these days is only entertainment if it comes through a screen(1).  Family policy is no computers in bedrooms.  They stay in the shared spaces where we can all at least be a part of what each other is doing.   And there are just two computers.  And there are three of us.

In theory this is simple.  The order of precedence is Work, Homework, Communication and then Goofing Off.  So if I’m working I get one and the kids can rip each other’s eyeballs out about who gets the other.  In practice - well, the truth is I’ve become spoiled.  There was a time when I could work away in a busy office whatever the chatter around me.  I would then come home and write a few pages of novel in the fifteen minutes while Pippa was in the bath or whatever.  I could do it then, because that was the only way I was going to get it done.  Now I’m used to empty rooms, a quiet lane outside and hours of time for Deep Thought.  The very presence of others in the house is enough to distract me.  Ten times more so if I know that soon I’ll be getting another tirade about how unreasonable the sibling is being.   It makes me tremble to the very core of my sensitive writer’s soul.  Oh, for a hut at the bottom of the garden - and I’m going to move the boiler down there too.

But aha!  An opportunity!  Older teenager has organised with friends to take the day out.  The forces of Hades are halved at a stroke.  All that remains is to neutralise the younger.  And I think of the bathrooms, and a slow smile spreads across my face.  The bathrooms, yes, yes.  The surfaces are coated with hairs and soap scum, the toilets are - well, let’s not be too explicit.  Get him started on that and I’ll be at peace for hours!  With a parents’ cunning, I stalk and pounce.  Negotiations.  A threat.  A bribe.  The deal is done.  Off he goes.  And I can settle with a sigh, fingers poised over the keyboard, mind beginning to fumble for whatever it was I had planned to get done this week.  I’m between manuscripts, aren’t I?  So it must be…

Door opens.  He’s back, willing but implacable.

“How do I clean a bathroom?”

Another sigh, but not of contentment.  The Holiday continues.

(1) Books are an honourable exception.  The thing about a book is that you can read a few pages and then go back to whoever’s hogging the screen and complain that they are hogging the screen.  Somehow this makes the next few pages that bit more satisfying.