Fingers crossed, please

Tags

blurb, BookBrunch, competitions, Faith Hope and Trickery, London Book Fair, Mslexia, sales, synopsis, The Selfies

Nothing daunted by previous failures – Mslexia, I’m looking at you – I have entered another competition.  This one is specifically for self-published books, which is an interesting development as several competitions explicitly exclude self-published works.  This competition is being sponsored by BookBrunch – “the daily online news service for the book industry” – and is called (wait for it) The Selfies.  I was in two minds about applying, as it costs £25 and takes a couple of hours to put together the application, but in the end I reasoned that I certainly wouldn’t be shortlisted if I didn’t enter (unassailable logic) and took the plunge.

As well as supplying the book itself – I’ve gone with “Faith, Hope and Trickery” because the competition is for adult fiction published in the last year – I also had to supply a synopsis.  I haven’t written a synopsis since I first hawked “Fatal Forgery” to publishers and agents, as the synopsis is basically a summary of the plot and is used to persuade publishers/agents to take you on.  It’s not the same as a blurb, which goes on the back cover or on sales websites to tempt readers; by contrast, the synopsis gives away the whole plot including the ending.

I also had to provide information about my marketing efforts and plans, and – deep breath – ‘fess up to my sales figures across both editions (paperback and e-book) to evidence (according to the competition website) “an effective and creative marketing and publicity strategy [and] great sales potential”.  We in the self-publishing community had a discussion about the significance of this question: would the judges simply choose the best-selling book?  Would they take into account that a book that had been published eleven months ago would have more sales than one published in November?  Are sales figures any indication of quality anyway?  I thought about fibbing, but in the end told the truth: 86.

At least the waiting period is mercifully short: the competition closes on 21 December 2018, the shortlist will be announced in late February and the winner revealed at the London Book Fair on 12 March 2019.  So as not to tempt fate, I have put a light, squiggly pencil line through the whole of that March week in my diary, with “LBF” written in the most casual way – you’d barely notice that I even care.

Sam chooses the quiet life, for now

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competitions, Mslexia, publication date, Samuel Plank, The Man in the Canary Waistcoat

I know I’ve been a bad blogger recently, and I apologise.  I’m trying to get a grip on the various calls on my time, and hope to see some improvement now that I have decided to cut down my work – my paid, day job as an anti-money laundering adviser – to four days a week from January 2018.

I have also set the publication date for “Plank 5” as Friday 9 March 2018, which means that I will start that scary countdown clock as soon as I have finished writing this post.

In other news, I heard this week that I have not been long-listed in the Mslexia Women’s Novel Competition 2017.  (You may remember that I asked your opinion on which Plank should be submitted, and you chose “The Man in the Canary Waistcoat”.)  Mslexia sent a very helpful (standard) rejection email explaining what they were looking for, which I thought might be useful to other writers out there, so here it is:

The one thing that really made the judges want to read on was a central character they believed in, who was unusual in some way, and – absolutely crucial, this – was embroiled in some kind of dilemma, quest or conflict.  Passive characters standing on the sidelines were less likely to engage our readers; however painful their internal lives may be, it’s vital that inner torment is expressed in action and plot of some kind.  If this applies to your novel, you might consider rethinking your main protagonist, to give them a more powerful personality, or simply to give them more to do!

As in previous years, there was a complaint about the use of prologues: ‘almost always an unnecessary device’ that often delays entry into the story.  This applied particularly to prologues set in a different time period, or featuring characters that didn’t appear in the main text.  When someone is reading a lot of manuscripts in one sitting, as literary agents and editors always must do, the need to be gripped immediately becomes especially urgent.  ‘My final selections tended to have a strong voice and plunged the reader straight into the story.’

Indeed all of our judges admitted regretfully that they had to pass over a great deal of exceptional writing because the pace was simply too slow.  In some cases this was because the writer spent too much time spelling out the details of the setting (in the historical and speculative fiction manuscripts especially); in others the dialogue was rather long-winded and repetitive.  And some marvellously creative texts seemed to meander or tail off, rather than propelling the action forwards.

Again as in previous years, many novels started either with the protagonist waking up, or with the words ‘It all began like this…’.  Nothing wrong with those beginnings in themselves, but anything that smacks of cliché is going be a turn-off for a professional assessing manuscripts as part of their job – and it’s such an easy thing to avoid.

It’s disappointing, of course, but as Sam would doubtless say, we’re not doing this for reward and recognition.  I hope he’s right!

A week of promotion

Tags

competitions, CreateSpace, Mslexia, plotting, pricing, promotion, The Man in the Canary Waistcoat, Twitter, WH Smith

Thanks to all who voted in the “which Plank should I submit to this competition” poll, and the winner (of the poll, not the competition!) is “The Man in the Canary Waistcoat”.  So this weekend I will be preparing the first five thousand-ish words of that for submission, and then it’s fingers crossed until winners are announced in February 2018.

In other news, I have been working in Guernsey all week and so have had little time for writing, but I have managed about 600 words.  I’m still struggling a little with the plot of “Plank 5”, in that I have the basic plot but want more complication – you know how I like to have several strands to the story.  But I am reasonably confident that the additional strands will reveal themselves as I go along – they always have in the past.

On the promotional side of things, I read recently in a magazine that Sophie Raworth (an English news-reader on the telly) has a book review blog.  She seems nice and approachable, and so I tweeted her to ask whether I could send her a copy of “Canary” – it’s set partly in Langham Place, now the home of the BBC, and I thought that might appeal.  I have not had a reply, which perhaps is not surprising.  But I do try!

I have also taken my book of newspaper columns – “Susan in the City” – into the Cambridge branch of WH Smith (a large chain of bookshop/stationer/newsagents), to see whether they would be interested in stocking it on their “local interest” shelf.  The manager seems keen – he said that the sale-or-return basis of my offer was crucial – but he still needs to put the case to head office.  I’m hoping to hear by the end of next week.  As regular readers will know, putting copies in physical bookshops actually costs me money (in other words, it costs me more to order the books from CreateSpace and have them shipped from the US than I make from the eventual sales) but I see it as a promotional move, to get the books being read and – hopefully – recommended.  Although, as with all my promotional efforts, it is all but impossible to assess the success of the approach!

Long face rather than long list

Tags

Fatal Forgery, financial crime, fraud, marketing, Mslexia, publicity, self-publishing, Susan Grossey

Being an only child, I am not a terribly competitive person.  (My multi-siblinged husband says that on the contrary, I am uber-competitive because I refuse to take part in contests, but that’s because I can rarely see the point of them.)  Anyhoo, the upshot is that competitions tend to pass me by.  But then, on 20 September 2013, I spotted an ad for the Mslexia Women’s Novel Competition 2013.  The date is significant, because the closing date for entries was 23 September, and I am a great believer in coincidence and things that are “meant to be”.

Many things about this competition were “meant to be”, it seemed.  It was for women (check) who had written a first novel (check) for adults (check) that had not been published through the traditional route (check).  There was an entry fee, which I reasoned would restrict it to serious contenders, and Mslexia has a reputation for fostering women writers of material not traditionally associated with women writers (i.e. not chicklit, and Plank is as far removed from chicklit as can be).  I just had to enter, so I printed the required number of pages and hared off to the post office.  The winner would be announced in February 2014, they said, and so I tucked away my warm excitement and enjoyed the thought of maybe, just maybe, getting somewhere.

And then earlier this week I had another look at the competition webpage, here.  And I saw that they had added a key sentence: “Those longlisted will be notified by post in November 2013.”  And I had heard nothing.  So I phoned to check that I had understood the process, and I had.  I hadn’t expected to win, but I had nurtured little hopes of getting onto the longlist – although I have no idea how long that list is.  So now I am waiting to see who was longlisted and who did win – and meanwhile Plank and I will focus on the future.