Write Know How

Real Life or imagination? Years ago, when I started on my writing journey, almost every book I read, or lecture I listened to, said: write what you know. Having led a normal and rather sheltered life I couldn’t think of anything exciting to write about. I failed at the first post. I could have written about my pet rabbit, who I spoiled by feeding it milk; bad, bad, bad. It was a while before I noticed he wasn’t eating his carrots, yet he was getting very fat. His nourishment was coming from the milk. Consequently, his teeth grew and eventually locked together. I had to take him to the vet to have them returned to their normal size! Or, I might have been inspired by my experience, as a very young girl, when, with friends, we pinched cabbages from a market garden and fed them to the donkeys in the field opposite – exhausted donkeys who were in need of a rest, having spent the long summer months giving children rides on the beach. Not exactly best seller material. To this day I still wait for the knock on the door from the police. Time passed and I continued to…

Eileen’s background is not what you’d call typical for a crime writer. She currently lives with her husband of 50+ years in rural Northumberland. She’s lived a varied and happy life, bringing up 2 children, moving around England from sleepy peaceful town to sleepy peaceful town, before upping sticks to move to Greece then Spain for a retirement in the sun. From a young age Eileen was captured by the drama and enjoyment a novel can bring, she remembers reading a James Bond novel to younger children when she was as young as 8, and her passion for a gripping yarn only grew from then. Some might say that a happy, quiet home life could mean a lack of ideas, of experiences. Not so the case for Eileen, her stories are filled with the twists and turns you might expect to hear from a criminal lawyer or a member of the Police, and the tales follow her characters all over the world. You can find her books on Amazon and on her website www.ebamford.com

As the first person to read new book submissions, I have to share one of THE MOST annoying and irritating faults that I see in too many manuscripts – namely the wanton refusal to take any notice of the advice that MS Word offers its users in every document. First, let’s remove the elephant in the room – MS Word does make mistakes – its suggestions are sometimes inane and frequently laughable – BUT – it does make you look at the words that confused it and it does offer an opportunity to rethink the sentence, so that it is clearer. Most of our authors use the Microsoft Office 365 Subscription service, so are using the latest version of Office 365 (around £6 to £8 a month for the whole suite / including Excel and PowerPoint which are both useful tools for marketing and advertising your work). I keep the editing tools turned on all the time, as I write, but you can still apply the tools after you have “finished”. Editor is the first button on the left, in the Review menu. I will now show you text “with obvious errors” that I have inserted into the document to…

If you are serious about writing and not confident using Microsoft Word, I would definitely recommend applying through your local Library to see if they have any free or cheap online courses that you are eligible to take. If you are confident about using Word, but are not familiar with some of the advanced options, such as Creating an Index, Creating/ Using Styles (very important for us, as publishers we use them for everything), or Creating a Contents List (and updating it), then you should look for an Intermediate / Advanced Course. You may even find help, online, that just fills in the gaps and brings you up to date with the latest versions of Microsoft Office. If you are an Advanced user, but unsure what advantages there are in using Styles – I would say that it adds less than three minutes to every Chapter you write,  if you use styles as you are writing your book – it takes several tedious hours to apply them afterwards.  You might find this link useful http://www.techhive.com/article/260668/10_microsoft_word_style_secrets.html Styles are used in nearly every book we publish – we may change the appearance of the style – making it unique for that book –…

Having despaired for many years over the increasing number of children who leave school unable to write basic English, I realise how easy it has been to blame teachers. When my own daughter, in 1967, told me that it didn’t matter about the incorrect spelling in her homework, I was shocked. Apparently, greater emphasis was being put on what the child was trying to say.  Fortunately, my daughter inherited my own love of the English language and enjoyed getting things right. I was lucky, having a father who also loved the spoken and written word. From the time I started speaking, he made sure  that my words were correctly used, in the correct order. He made it fun and explained rules of grammar as they cropped up, so, by the time I went from Infant to Elementary School, English Language classes held no terror for me; I actually enjoyed them. Teachers have my sympathy. They have to deal with increasingly large classes and I believe that if parents conversed more with very young children – even toddlers, and guided them into speaking correctly, their written work would improve at school. When the day comes that they decide to write books, the manuscripts…

How did it all start for me? Really it shouldn’t be too difficult to remember considering that my first attempt at writing fiction was only a few years ago. My style? It would have to be humorous, and modern, I decided. I would create a character: ‘Derek’, he would be called, and he would… As it turned out, the easy part was writing a story. Now, I know that sounds really big-headed but, what I mean is, the story was easy by comparison to the work I would face before the book reached publication, because my original submission of ‘Please… Call me Derek’ would undergo considerable scrutiny. I was lucky, compared to many a talented scribe who submits a ‘masterpiece’ and is rejected countless times. Having completed what you know is a ‘marvellous’ piece of writing, but which one publisher after another fails to appreciate, it is a wonderful feeling when at last someone cares enough to say “Yes, we’ll publish it”, and, doing it in the way I did, thankfully you find you are not being charged for the service. I supposed that I had been accepted because of my story and my writing style. I remember an early comment…

Colons and semicolons can be helpful when used correctly. Sadly, they are often sprinkled throughout MSS without any regard for sentence construction. I wish authors would use commas and full stops wherever they can. Only when these fail to convey the full meaning, and the need arises for a supporting phrase should they introduce semicolons or colons. A phrase that is an additional connecting thought to a sentence already written can be separated from it with either a semi colon, if it is itself a sentence, or a colon if it is not. For instance… She brought the clothes in from the washing line; they were dry. She brought the clothes in from the washing line: dry or not.

However common it is, these days, for journalists to start sentences with the word, ‘but’, it is not correct to do so and can be very irritating to the reader. Even if the word is mid-sentence, it is often overused, leaving the reader wondering if anything in the story is as it seems. Too often, people place commas before a ‘but’ instead of after it. Always consider how a sentence would read, when a clause is enclosed by commas, if everything between the commas were to be deleted. “He wanted to go out, but as it rained, he could not.” “He wanted to go out he could not.” In this case the comma should be after the ‘but’ as follows: “He wanted to go out but, as it rained, he could not.” “He wanted to go out but he could not.” … It still makes sense.

I get a cold draught up my spine when I am sent the first draft of a manuscript that has been titled ‘First Draught’ ! I’m sure everyone knows that spell-checks do not reject incorrectly used words as long as they are correctly spelled so, before submitting work to a publisher, it is a good idea to let friends read it – specifically asking them to look out for mistakes.

In the course of my research I have found that many publishers, especially the very large ones, do not take “unsolicited” manuscripts. I presume by this they mean one must have an agent. Yet there are also some publishers who will take manuscripts direct from a writer. In the case of the latter does the publisher also act as the agent ie: marketing the book, looking for ways to attract attention, looking for new markets for the book, acting as deal broker between author and publishing overseas/translations etc? In other words, how much does an agent differ from a publisher who takes manuscripts and publishes directly?

We are often asked why we are so ‘hung up’ on the small stuff – the spelling, presentation and grammar. There are several answers to this so I am sure our proof-readers will have a lot to say on the subject. Sneaking in first, perhaps I can start this discussion rolling with my main reason for believing that it is important for aspiring authors to look long and hard at their spelling. I receive a lot of manuscripts for consideration. Our readers have only so many hours in any day as do I, so when I am assessing whether a book is worth sending for further discussion, I am heavily influenced by how much correction a book will need. Chief amongst my concerns is how little effort the author has gone to before sending it to us… We will not publish any book that is not thoroughly checked for spelling and ‘typos’. If the author can’t be bothered at least to correct obvious mistakes, one wonders why we should care. When we have made allowances in the past it has cost us a lot of time (and therefore money) to edit spelling as well as grammar and readability! From discussions…

I went the Vanity Publishing route without knowing it! My publisher assured me they were not vanity publishers. They called it a partnership. If I paid them a five figure sum they would not only produce a very nice looking bound hardback book for me but also do all the marketing and be my agent for 2 years. They did the first with me as chief editor, proof reader and cover design art director. The second was the bare minimum and very basic – what could be called the standard package. The third is non existent. From my research post-publication, I have come across many many other people saying the same. Essentially that once you part with your money the vanity publisher (or “partnership” publisher) has no incentive to push your work any harder than they absolutely have to, which in many cases is not at all. I do not believe that Vanity Publishers offer any level of partnership whatsoever. It´s a one way deal. I would rather go the self publishing route, where I know what I´m paying for and what to expect and would be prepared for doing a lot of the leg work myself. But when you…

An area that has caused considerable angst for us, is what to call your book. You have sweated and teased your books for months, spending hundreds of hours honing the best possible book from your raw material only to fall at the final hurdle. I suppose I have thought about titles more than a little, as I have one very unhappy author who is upset over the title of a best seller. ’50 Shades of Grey’ was an unfortunate encroachment of our own Shades of Grey series, first written in 1995 and published by us since 2007. There is no spin-off advantage over any confusion of titles, Mai’s books do not contain much in the way of sexually explicit S & M passages and ’50 Shades of Grey’ does not  reflect Mai’s story telling ability, quality of English and superb grammar. From our perspective, we advise our authors to sit on Amazon or Google for an hour or so trying different titles and seeing how many times they have already been used, until they come up with a unique combination that fits their book. As I have suggested, this does not stop other people from taking your idea and copying it, but at least you have…

The most common typos in newly submitted manuscripts relate to spaces. When lines are not ‘justified’, words should have a single space between them. Words joined up or spaced too far apart indicate that the author has been careless in editing: not a promising sign. A manuscript that has not been thoroughly checked should never be sent out. The initial impression created is bad. As an editor, I glance through the story and if I think there might be merit in it, I point out the obvious errors and suggest that the author proofs the text again. Most writers are willing to cooperate and eventually their books are published. Of course, the process is slow, as it is seldom that authors find all their own mistakes on their first run-through. There are probably wrongly positioned quotation marks and grammatical errors. If too much reliance has been placed on ‘Word’ spell-check, there could well be words used in the wrong sense. This is where careful editing comes in – and the time it takes to produce the book can take months – or even a year.

Yes and no – there usually needs to be a gimmick to make it worth while – a general book is normally a huge topic requiring a specialist research and writing team that takes years to put together and consists of either easily verifiable info (in which case what was the point) – or hard to verify info (in which case is the publisher taking a risk publishing it). Reference books are always of interest to us – we are happy to look at them or discuss ideas – so don’t be too discouraged – but the subject area needs to be one that will have appeal to several different markets, or it won’t be commercially viable.

As publishers – we have no hard and fast rule on this – we just want the book to read easily and well and to take the reader smoothly from start to finish. What we have noticed, however, is that writers often find it easier to step back from their own story and conflicts to write as if the hero or heroine is someone else. It de-personalises some of the spoken comments in the book and distances them from some of the deeply emotional or personal parts. Our advice is write it the way that comes naturally to you and allows you the greatest creative freedom.

When Jean Collins wrote her book about South Kelsey, she included research that stemmed from her interviews with current residents as well as a lot of painstaking research in the archives of a great many institutions. By adding genealogical information as well, she personalised what could have been a very dry book. Her anecdotes lifted the historical interest, but it was the photos and the stories behind some of them that really ‘iced’ her book for us, as publishers. I was already persuaded to consider her book as one of general interest – but seeing the photos persuaded me that there was something that would have great appeal, beyond the straight forward historical value. If you are considering writing historical reference books – what key feature will make your book stand out from the rest? Is it about a previously unpublished subject? Is it a new slant? Will it have pictures never published before? Does it feature information that is presented in a unique and original fashion?

I have to say that I have yet to find any children´s books which better, or at the least equal, Enid Blyton. I have a compilation called “Tell Me a Story Book” from my childhood which my own 5 year old daughter loves. I have bought tons of other books in my search for a modern day equivalent but most seem so literal, basic and boring by comparison. I have come across one or two treasures but none that can match up to Ms Blyton´s imagination. Have we lost our ability to imagine into realms which are filled with magic, beauty, gentleness and wonder yet are also strung through with a reality which is grounded and simple and weaves their lessons into the story for the child to unravel over a number of tellings? Perhaps in this age of “more-better-next” we don´t return to stories over and over again, allowing the child to absorb, understand and get to know the characters and this is all too often reflected in the books I see. I am sure there are many wonderful children´s books out there which I have missed, I hope so and I hope to find them soon. Any recommendations…

In my experience, one of the biggest mistakes made by new authors is not understanding the difference between writing for children and writing for young adults. I started reading adult books when I was ten years old, primarily because I found teenage literature to be condescending. Ok, that was a long while ago and young adult fiction has come a long way since then, but not all new authors seem to have noticed. J K Rowling’s Harry Potter series demonstrated that good children’s literature can have appeal across the generations, but it is worrying how many new authors write for a genre that they haven’t read since they were young. The strongest advice I can offer is to go to your local library and ask them which are the most frequently borrowed books for the age group that you want to target. I am not suggesting that you copy these books, or their style, but the research will inform your own writing, because you will have a greater awareness of what appeals to your target audience. Writers tend to fall into two camps, those who have a life work that they have to express, regardless of its prospects and those…

The Admin for this website is Gaile Griffin Peers – U P Publications. In addition to publishing, editing and writing books, Gaile has also produced several online magazines. To find out more about her background in writing and publishing visit www.gaile.biz