Adam Croft's Blog, page 33

The many faces of crime fiction

One of the things I love about crime fiction is that it so often seems to offer an insight into the world that is slightly different to any other form of fiction. I think this is largely due to the nature of the beast: examining a crime demands that we look at things in a certain way, which is often different to how we normally view things.

I’m always interested to read what other people think about crime fiction, and in particular to see what kind of crime fiction they recommend – there’s always something new to discover. And, along these lines, this is a very interesting article that looks at European crime fiction.

We all know about the enduring popularity of Scandinavian crime fiction, but we also can’t forget the wonderful crime novels from elsewhere, including the Montalbano novels from Italy. The article looks at a whole range of crime fiction authors and characters, as well as the subjects some of their novels deal with and the insights we can gain into the experiences of different countries as a result – it’s a long read, but it’s definitely worth a look for any detective fans out there.

Why is the first edit always so hard?

It seems to me that there is a point in the process of writing any novel where you are essentially caught between two different worlds. You’ve finished writing your first draft, and have finished celebrating your achievement of writing a whole massive novel, but you’ve yet to start the editing process.

It can be a weird phase of novel writing; the lingering satisfaction of the full first draft is still there, but it’s starting to give way to slightly buzzy nerves as you begin to contemplate editing what you’ve done. I think this is a stage that catches many a first-time writer, and I’d wager that there are thousands of novels out there that are languishing in this stage – drafted, but not finished.

Re-gathering the initial momentum you usually experience at the beginning of writing a first draft for the long process of editing is always a challenge, and I think there are several good reasons why this is the case.

Admitting signs of weakness

One of the big reasons I think embarking on the first edit of a book is hard is because you have to admit to signs of weakness in your work. When you’re writing the first draft, you can largely ignore any plot holes or other issues that arise along the way. In fact, it’s usually a good thing to ignore them in favour of simply getting the words on the page.

At some point, however, you have to acknowledge the existence of those issues, and getting up the will to do something about them can be one of the hardest – although hopefully ultimately very rewarding – parts of writing a book.

Revisiting old pains

This links to the issue of revisiting old pains. There are always periods of writing any first draft that are significantly harder and more painful than others. These periods of writing always seem to occur in that awkward phase, once your initial enthusiasm has worn off but before the promise of the end is in sight. As a result, they are often bogged down in the middle of the book in the form of tangled, knotty plot problems.

They were painful to write the first time, and you know they’re going to be painful to straighten out in the edit. Alas, it has to be done…

The halfway house

That stage between drafting and editing is also something of a halfway house. It’s a transition between an incomplete book and a finished one, and there is always a slight fear that the finished book might turn out to be completely awful – something that can put off even the best of writers from taking the metaphorical scalpel to the novel patient.

Once we do manage to get over the fear, however, and get into the process of editing, it can be one of the very best bits about writing. It’s great to see half-formed ideas start to take shape and become something properly good, and it’s brilliantly rewarding once all of the major editing work is done.

So, no matter how difficult it might seem, making the leap from the first draft to the first edit is something we definitely have to learn how to do. How do you keep yourself focused and keen when it comes to the early editing stages?

The art of a good title

A title could be one word, or it could be ten. Whatever it is, it needs to be the ideal representative for your book. Not only does it need, in some way, to reflect the content that is contained within that book, it also needs to sound, well, good.

The art of a good title can be a tricky one to get right. Sometimes, a story you’re writing just conjures up a particular feeling or image that makes it easy to name. Other times, you might well go through dozens of different titles before finally settling on one – and you still might not be entirely happy with it.

I think part of the difficulty of finding a good title is the difficulty in defining what your story actually is in the first place. If you know exactly what you’re hoping to achieve with your writing and have a clear direction from the start, it stands to reason that it would be much easier to come up with a name than if you started with a vague idea and just hoped something concrete would eventually coalesce.

Of course, you could always come up with a title first and go from there. This is something I’m sure many of us are familiar with from school and all those ‘fun’ assignments to write an essay on “What I did with my Summer Holiday” or write a poem called “Autumn Leaves”. It isn’t always the best method and can lead to you forcing something to fit a title, but sometimes a clever, interesting title can act as a great starting point for something properly good.

Choosing a great title is also important because naming a book is slightly like naming a child. OK, it’s not really like that, but it can feel like it at the time. The title is the name your book will be known by forevermore, and if it turns out to be the wrong choice, it will bug you for the rest of your life. And, unlike with naming a child, there is no emergency change-the-name-by-deed-poll option available with books. It has to be right the first time.

However fraught with pitfalls the naming process might be, though, there is something immensely satisfying about landing on the perfect title for your book. It’s like things really start to fall into place after that point, no matter how much more work you still have to do. Your book has a name now. It’s a thing. You can talk about it and refer to it as something other than ‘the book’. You know what it is.

How do you go about choosing the perfect title for your novels?

The rise and rise of self-publishing

You may have seen in the papers last week an article with some quotes from yours truly. The other interesting thing about that article is the fact it details some of the latest statistics about the self-publishing industry, which essentially show that it is continuing to grow and that it is still an increasingly popular option for writers and readers alike.

For example, in 2011, there were around 250,000 self-publishing books released in the United States, and the number of independently published books has grown between 2006 and 2011 by 287%.

As you might expect, e-books make up a significant part of that figure, but self-published print books have also seen impressive growth over the past few years, showing that independent publishing is an increasingly accepted, positive option chosen by writers looking to publish their books.

Self-published authors have even hit the New York Times bestseller list – something that would have seemed impossible just a few short years ago.

These figures only relate to the US, but there has also been great growth in the UK independent publishing market, with 11% of all e-books bought in the six months to June 2012 being self-published.

What are your thoughts on the independent publishing boom?

Discrepancy over VAT on UK e-books

It has long been a bit of an anomaly that while print books don’t have VAT charged on top of the price, e-books do. There has been significant debate over the past few years about what should be done on this issue, and why e-books are charged VAT while their print cousins are exempt.

And now it seems there is another layer to be looked at. We all know that Amazon dominates the e-book market in the UK, and it is well-known that the company runs many of its operations out of Luxembourg, which has a 3% VAT rate compared to the UK’s 20%.

However, according to the Guardian, when Amazon is drawing up contracts with UK publishers, it does so from the base of the UK’s VAT rate of 20%. Because of its base in Luxembourg, Amazon only has to hand over 3% of the cost price in tax, meaning it makes more of a profit than it would otherwise do.

It’s something that publishers aren’t that thrilled about and it’s a little bit of a tricky issue to get your head round, but you can read more about the e-book VAT/publisher/Amazon issue here.

Penguin and Random House set to merge?

You will no doubt have read in the news this week that two of the biggest traditional publishers out there – Penguin and Random House – are involved in merger talks. At the moment, Random House is the biggest publisher in the UK, while the Pearson Group’s Penguin is the third largest. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that if the merger goes ahead, the resulting company will be pretty sizeable.

One of the main reasons for the proposed merger that have been discussed in the press is the fact that now organisations such as Amazon are so big, the publishers need to do something in order to stand up and compete with them. The idea is that they would have more clout when representing authors, although some worry that fewer publishing companies – no matter the size of the remaining ones – means that there will be fewer options available for authors looking to get published.

There is no agreement yet in the talks between the two publishers, but it is thought that if they do reach a deal, there might be issues for the competition regulators to look at because of the size of the market share the merged business would hold.

In some ways, it’s understandable that two of the biggest UK publishers are looking for ways to stand up to the large companies such as Amazon, especially when we consider the fact that Amazon significantly dominates the e-book retail market without too much competition. However, the traditional publishing industry is hardly awash with competition itself – merging to create one even bigger publishing company hardly seems likely to make a positive impact on that front.

It seems that in the never-ending quest to offer a good deal to readers while still providing good, solid opportunities for writers, there are still many questions to be answered. The Penguin-Random House merger might go some way to solving some of those questions, but there’s a chance it could well leave some other answers a little bit wanting.

You can read more about the merger talks here. And in the meantime, what do you think about the potential deal?

Could writing all the time be counterproductive?

Writers are often told to write every day, and there can be plenty of benefits from following that advice. However, could too much writing actually end up being counterproductive?

I think it could. After all, if all you’re doing is writing all the time, you won’t be doing any of that other stuff that is so crucial to creating a good, successful, high quality story. You know, like editing. And proofreading.

It’s not just a case of the other writing-associated activities missing out, though. If you’re writing all the time, you won’t be leaving any time to give yourself space, to go out and experience new things – things that could one day form the basis of a story.

We all have to get our writing ideas from somewhere, and most of us get them from the real world. We experience things and then they give us ideas that we want to write about. We read things in newspapers that inspire us. We take up hobbies and have social lives that give us opportunities to learn more about people and seek out interesting characters.

All of this helps our writing, and the irony is that writing less often could actually help us more in the long run.

What do you think?

4 tips for plotting a thriller

Plotting a crime novel is a very personal thing. All crime writers have their own way of going about things. Some like to jump straight in without too much forethought. Others plan meticulously and only put pen to paper once they know every single in and out of the plot. However you like to plot your crime novels, it’s probably a good idea to have at least some sense of plot and direction before you start to write.

With this in mind, here are a few tips for plotting a thriller.

Know where it’s going

Even if you don’t have a clue what’s going to happen in the bits in between, it’s hugely useful to know where you’re starting and where you’re (hopefully) going to end up. The start and the end of a crime novel can be the hardest (yet most fun) bits to write, and they need to be perfect. Plan them before you start to help give your book structure.

Know why the story is happening

Every crime thriller needs motive. That could be motive for murder, or motive for a character’s actions, but either way, it needs to be convincing. It’s something of a cliché to say that everything happens for a reason but in crime fiction, if you have something happen ‘just because’, it’s likely to end up falling somewhat flat.

Know what your strands are

Maybe your novel has one exciting, big plot strand. However, most crime novels tend to have multiple strands running through them. It makes things more interesting, but it can also lead to you getting into a bit of a tangle if you don’t fully know what’s what. When plotting your thriller, work out what the main strand is. Then work out what the other strands are, and how they all relate to each other. If it’s not straight in your mind, it will never make sense to the reader.

Know how it appears to the reader

As the writer, you should know what you want to do and how you want to do it. However, when you’re writing, it doesn’t always come across as you might have hoped. Make sure to think from the reader’s point of view when plotting your thriller. What would they think at this point in the plot, or after this character has done that, or that character has just performed that u-turn? What information does the reader have at any particular point? Does it all make sense once you get to the end?

What are your top tips for plotting a thriller?

Does everyone really have a book in them?

Much has been written about the notion ‘everyone has a book in them’. There are those who believe firmly that, yes, everyone does have a book in them – somewhere. There are also those who believe that the idea is nonsense, and that most people don’t have a book in them at all. In fact, they’d be lucky to squeeze out a short story.

It’s certainly true that regardless of what you think of the idea, most people won’t ever write a book. A lot of people talk about it, sure, but most of them don’t get around to it.

Plus there are those people who do manage to write books, but who might well have been better off not writing them. It all depends on how you look at it.

Perhaps the truth of it is that not everyone has a book in them. However, what we can’t deny is that everyone has a story in them. Whether that is their own life story or the product of their imagination, everyone has the capacity to produce some sort of narrative. That narrative might be non-fiction or fiction, it might be prose or poetry, a book or short story or novella, or a stream of consciousness, or a simple idea spoken out loud.

 

Everyone has something, and something that’s worth saying (or writing). It just so happens that it’s the ones who manage to write the books who currently get the glory.

What do you think – does everyone have a book in them, or is it all a myth?

4 lessons from self-publishing

I’ve looked before on this blog about what writers can learn from getting involved in independent publishing – new skills, new marketing techniques, a deeper appreciation of writing and so on. As a constantly evolving industry, there are always new lessons to learn, and old lessons to see in new ways. With this in mind, here are a few of the most important lessons a writer is likely to learn from independent publishing – but which they should always keep an open mind about all the same…

Professional cover design is worth it

There are books with author-created covers and books with professionally-created covers and, on the whole, it seems fair to say that those with professionally-created covers look much better than those that the author has designed.

In some ways, this is a more important lesson for those authors with some design ability than those without it; if you can’t design at all, you probably won’t ever entertain the idea of doing it yourself, whereas if you vaguely know your way around Photoshop, you might. And that might not be wise. There’s just something about professional book covers that really elevates the look of a book.

That said, if you’re able to create the perfect cover for your book yourself, go for it.

You don’t need to stick to the rules

One of the great lessons of self-publishing is that you don’t need to write what you think you should be writing. You can write what you want. In many ways, you can disregard the rules and be a lot freer with the whole creative process. You cut out a lot of the players typically found in the traditional publishing industry – the agents, the publishers, the marketers – and effectively take on the roles yourself. It can be hugely liberating.

Don’t think you have to do absolutely everything yourself, though. It’s fine to bring in other people to help improve the quality of your book – probably the most important rule of independent publishing, like traditional publishing, is that no matter what else you do, make sure you write the best book you can.

Don’t worry about setting low prices

When you’ve spent much of your life seeing books in the shops priced at £7.99 and upwards, it can be a bit of a learning curve when you first enter the world of independent publishing and low priced books. However, it’s an important lesson: you don’t need to price your book high. Actually, a high price might actually put off readers.

That doesn’t mean you should feel pressured to price your book insanely low if you genuinely don’t want to, but it does mean you might need to accept a trade off in terms of sales. It’s all about finding the right balance for your book: for some independently published books, the balance might be £2.99. For others it might be 99p.

Be confident in talking about yourself

Self-promotion is one of those things that often feel a bit odd at first. Parents tend to teach their children not to boast, but then you rock up in independent publishing where the only way to sell your book is to effectively market yourself and your writing, and it can be a challenge. However unused to promoting yourself you are, it’s something you need to adapt to.

Of course, you could choose to hire someone to do your promotion for you, or take your chances and not do any at all, but it’s highly likely that at some point, you’re going to need to talk about yourself. Start practising.

What do you think are the most important independent publishing lessons new writers need to learn?