What Next? Life After The Hook

By Nick Cross

Photo by Clare Helen Welsh

If you weren’t at the SCBWI British Isles conference last month, you might be asking yourself: “What is The Hook and why should I care about it?” Well, it’s a kind of X Factor/Dragon’s Den for children’s writers and illustrators. A bunch of attention-starved, approval-hungry lunatics stood onstage in front of four agents and 200 of their peers, and spent five minutes each pitching the hell out of their books. The whole crazy enterprise was ably coordinated by Zoë Cookson, with her presentational partner-in-crime Kate Mallinder.

Zoë and Kate

Anyway, I did it. I managed to get up on stage without falling over, kept pretty much to time and successfully synchronised my pitch with a complex animated slide deck. But (spoiler alert) I didn’t win - that honour fell to Catherine Whitmore and her excellent pitch for Too Big for Her Boots.

I could lie about it, but the truth is I was disappointed not to win. Desperately disappointed. I didn’t flounce off in a huff, but I did want to be alone in my defeat. I left the conference quietly and walked down the hill to central Winchester, the voice of my inner critic ringing in my ears.

I truly believe that these moments, the moments when we’re at our lowest ebb, are the ones where we really get to choose between winning and losing. I put in my headphones, put on my favourite music and by the time I was back at the hotel twenty minutes later I had a plan. Instead of sitting around my room, stewing in my own juices, I went out, got a coffee and spent the next hour doing some final edits to my book. That hour reminded me why my book is awesome and why my faith in it is well-placed. I got back on the horse.

No, no! That was a metaphor, you idiot!

The irony of doing something like The Hook, is that the five minutes when I was onstage pitching was genuinely the easiest part of the whole process. What the audience couldn’t see were the months of preparation that led up to that moment.

I first had the idea of entering The Hook back in February. I remember mentioning it in conversation at the Undiscovered Voices 2018 launch party, and again a couple of months later when I met Jan Carr (the original creator of The Hook) at a book launch. Jan cautioned me that even getting selected was tough, with the number of entrants increasing yearly. I took that information on board and began to evolve a plan about how I might deliver my pitch, sketching out ways to introduce the world of the novel. Even then, I knew that I wanted to do something ambitious with my slides, to maximise the visual opportunities afforded to me as a writer/illustrator.



In tandem, I was working on the book all through the year, writing and rewriting, designing and redesigning. Ideas for the novel and ideas for the pitch intertwined, in the same way that the writing and illustrating processes informed each other. I knew that the timing was right for me to be finished by November, or perhaps the deadline made sure that happened. Either way, I was itching to reveal the book to the world, but it seemed to be a long time before applications to The Hook opened.

Luckily, the previous year’s conference website was still live, so I was able to get all the entry details in advance. The length of the extract I needed to submit seemed incredibly short (600 words) and when I looked at my large format illustrated layouts I realised that would be less than three pages of content. So I made a smaller format (A5) version with six pages, especially for The Hook.

I was so ready that once the competition opened, I submitted everything a month before the closing date! But I still had to wait as long as everyone else to find out if I’d made it through. I was pretty confident, but I also knew that if I didn’t get selected, I wouldn’t have to tell anyone about it. Of course, I was selected (by a super-secret panel of Scoobies) and pretty soon everyone knew about it!

After the months of planning, I had just two weeks to finalise my slides. In theory, I had a further week after that to hone my pitch, but in practice the two were so interlinked that my pitch needed to be ready at the same time. I’ve calculated that I spent about thirty hours making the slides, which is an insane amount of time for a five minute presentation. Although I endeavoured to reuse as many of the graphics and illustrations from the book as I could, there was probably 50% new material that I had to create. And let’s not even talk about trying to make the animations work in PowerPoint!

But we shouldn’t forget that no-one was forcing me do all this work. And indeed, the number of slides presented had absolutely no correlation with who won the competition. But these kinds of opportunities don’t come along very often, and I wanted to embrace this one. Despite the work involved, I really enjoyed creating the presentation because I was able to tell a story visually in a very different medium, a bit like making a short film.

Here I am mid-pitch (photo by Marie Basting)

OK, I seem to have spent a lot of time talking about the period leading up to The Hook, thereby completely ignoring the title of this post! What has happened since?

One immediate side effect was praise. This doesn’t sound like a bad thing, but I’ve always struggled with taking compliments. I tend to deflect them by diminishing myself in some way. I got a lot of compliments in the hours and days after The Hook, some of them from people for whom the theme of my novel had genuinely touched a chord. And I managed not to respond with something like: “Shame it wasn't good enough to win though.” I just said “Thanks.” And that, for me, was real progress!

The “final” edits I needed to do on the book turned out to be more extensive than I expected, which necessitated another two weeks of writing and proofing. In parallel, I worked on reformatting the layout of the book based on a design review I’d had before the conference (but hadn’t had the time or headspace to put into practice). At last, it was all ready to submit, but I suddenly realised I had no synopsis.

If you're a sensitive writer type, you may want to stop reading. Because I'm about to make a SHOCKING CONFESSION.







Are you sure?







Last chance.







OK, here goes...

I love writing synopses!

I know that goes against all that is good and holy, but there you have it. I find the synopsis far, far easier than writing the actual book. Part of this may be because, by the time I get to it, I’ve been over and over the book hundreds of times in my head. Anyway, I polished off the synopsis in my lunch hour - one page, 660 words, job done.

So, was I finally ready to submit? You might think that, but what I decided I really needed to do was make a book dummy. This was using the skills I had newly learnt at this year’s SCBWI conference, involving several hours of printing, gluing and sticking. As a displacement activity, it was a good one, and the end result looks pretty awesome. I especially liked writing the back cover blurb and seeing the book as a real object, which makes it so much more tangible than pixels on a screen.

With all that done, the inevitable couldn’t be avoided any longer. I have started submitting to agents, or as I like to think of it, putting my baby into an email-shaped spaceship and launching it into the cold dark void of indifference (you know, like Jor-El in Superman).

Superman and Superdad (photo by marakma)

If I sound a tad conflicted about the process, it's because trying to get an agent and publisher was never part of my plan for this book. Burned by my previous experiences with the industry, I resolved that this book would be just for me - entirely self-published and what did it matter if I only sold 50 copies? To that end, I turned away from the market and just wrote whatever the hell I wanted, in the way I wanted to do it. And yet, here I am, neurotically chasing approval all over again. What happened?

Well, for one thing, people really seem to be engaging with the concept of my book, and the way it’s presented. If everyone had shrugged at my pitch, I might have retreated into my burrow for six months and finished the book just for me. But suddenly, people want to see this thing published, and I feel some responsibility to make that happen. Plus, it fits with my new mantra of trying to embrace whatever opportunities come along.

So, I will roll the dice with some carefully selected agents, and in the meantime I’ll continue illustrating and preparing the book for self-publication. Unlike my novel, the future is unwritten.

Nick.

---

Nick Cross is a children's writer/illustrator and Undiscovered Voices winner. He received a SCBWI Magazine Merit Award, for his short story The Last Typewriter.
Nick is also the Blog Network Editor for SCBWI Words & Pictures magazine. His Blog Break column appears fortnightly on W&P.

How not to choke as a writer

by Paula Harrison

A children’s writer encounters many obstacles on the way to publication - learning their craft, understanding the children’s book market, finding an agent and publisher who love their writing. Before reaching publication, many of us believe that once we find that Golden Ticket marked You Have Got a Publisher, the journey is over and we will simply float away on a fluffy cloud into a blissful published heaven.

Stats from the Slushpile: A Decade of Dreaming

By Nick Cross

Hello again, slush fans. As anyone who's seen my Museum of Me series will attest, I like to keep hold of stuff from my past and inflict it upon share it with my loyal readers. Now that I've been writing seriously for a decade (actually slightly more, but 10 & 3/4 years didn't sound as good) it felt like time to take stock of my journey so far.
And what a journey it hasn't been. Well, not in the way I expected when I started out. For much of the time, I was driven by the conviction that my current book would soon be published, and I'd be on my way to fame and fortune. I was desperate but not entirely deluded, and got damn close on several occasions. Yet, my route to actual publication (and a smidgeon of critical acclaim) has come via a magazine, which wasn't a medium I'd even considered when starting out.

In writing this blog post, I also realised how many unresolved "issues" I have with the publishing industry and my position within it as an author (my position as an employee is thankfully much more settled). I thought this would be an easier post to write than my piece on stepping outside your comfort zone, but it was much, much harder. The reality of being on the slushpile is something that confronts all of us in the modern publishing world, where books go in and out of print constantly. It's a harsh environment, with sudden, glorious highs and some sickening lows that make you want to jack it all in and do something sensible with your life.

And yet, I'm still here, still writing and contemplating yet another jump into the world of submissions, false hope and form rejections. So, in tribute to that heroic and inadvisable urge, I present some infographics to chart each book from my decade of dreaming:

(Click images to enlarge)

The New Janice Powley was my first attempt at a novel and (so far) my only YA. I didn't know much about writing a book, so I just sort of wrote scenes as they came into my head, hoping to stitch them together later. This turned out to be a considerable job, as when I started to type up my hand-written first draft, I discovered I'd written more than 140,000 words! Over many months, with the help of a friend who was a trainee editor, I whittled it down to 80,000 and (mostly) got it to make sense.

In hindsight, getting two full manuscript reads of a book that, nowadays, would be little more than 99p Kindle fodder was an amazing achievement. But of course, I didn't see it like that - I wanted to be published, dammit!

Back from the Dead (a zombie horror comedy) was my golden ticket - the book that was going to get me out of obscurity and onto the bestseller lists, allowing me to give up my job (which at the time I hated) and settle into life as a full-time writer. Clearly, none of those things happened, and there's a part of me that still blames myself for blowing my big chance (however unwarranted that criticism is).

After I won a place in Undiscovered Voices 2010, a lot of things happened in quick succession: I got an agent! I rewrote 80% of the book! I got a publisher interested! I rewrote half the book again! I became clinically depressed from all the stress and expectation I was piling upon myself! I had the worst year of my life!

Be careful what you wish for.

The zombies had died a death, but my agent wanted us to strike again while the iron was hot. Even though I was still horribly messed-up and depressed-down, I launched into a new children's novel. The setting for Die Laughing - a world in which no-one could laugh or be happy, for fear of sudden, violent death - closely mirrored my daily life, where I had become gripped by the fear that I was about to die (a common symptom of depression, apparently). Thus, Die Laughing became my magnum opus and possibly the last book I would ever write.

To be fair to my agent, I'm not sure how much of my mental state was visible in my emails to her, as I apologised at monthly intervals for missing my deadlines for delivery of the first draft. The irony being that, when I finally did finish it, she took her own sweet time to decide that she hated it and would not represent it unless I made significant (and in my opinion disastrous) changes.

Feeling confused and betrayed, I terminated our arrangement, wrote another draft on my own terms and sent it out to some editors who'd expressed an interest. But my confidence in the book had long departed.

SuperNewman and MegaBeth (a riot of slapstick superhero silliness with a bittersweet subtext about mental illness) marked the point where I got serious again. No more would I be weighed down by the fear of rejection - this book was going out to as many people as possible. But I didn't want to just go through the Writers' and Artists' Yearbook and send blanket queries to everyone, no matter how inappropriate - I would select the recipients carefully and tailor the submissions. As anyone who's done this knows, it's a lot of work! I also kept ever more detailed statistics, which you can see reflected in the infographic.

The average time taken to reply to an initial submission works out at 5.4 weeks, which was less than I'd imagined. Actually, most agents replied within a month, and there were just a couple who took a really long time, which dragged down the averages.

The rewrite story looks very similar to the one I experienced on Back from the Dead, but it wasn't really. Yes, the book still got rejected at the end of it, but unlike the fear and loathing last time, reworking SuperNewman and MegaBeth was one of the best writing experiences of my life. In just six weeks I took the book down from 45,000 to 15,000 words, replacing one of the main characters and keeping only the most awesome parts of the original story. There was something very freeing about that.

* * *

Consider all this, then, as an exorcism of the last ten years - the blog post I had to write before I could finally move on. The past is long gone and the future again twinkles with hope and expectation. Meanwhile, in the present, I'm taking every step to make sure my latest book doesn't disappear without a fight. A decade on from when I started, the options available to me as an author have increased dramatically, and there are all sorts of alternative funding and publishing methods available if the traditional gatekeepers aren't interested. It's time to stop dreaming and take my fate into my own hands.

Nick.

---

Nick Cross is a children's writer, Undiscovered Voices winner and Blog Network Editor for SCBWI Words & Pictures Magazine.
Nick's writing is published in Stew Magazine, and he's recently received the SCBWI Magazine Merit Award, for his short story The Last Typewriter.

My advice to authors in these hard times: don't go wide, GO DEEP

One quick check of my blog reader before I go to Costa Coffee to avoid Facebook and I find this link to a nice piece about how the recession is going to make it even tougher to sell books.

The author Novella Carpenter is in nail-biting mode, awaiting the release of her book Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer in June 2009.

Holiday book sales were abysmal, and most of the major publishing houses have announced job losses in recent months. One publishing behemoth, HarperCollins, lost 75 percent of its operating income during the first six months of 2008. Over all, the publishing industry has struggled as bookstore sales -- and the economy -- have slowed drastically.

My agent told me the other day that things were not as bad as that yet in the UK, but what's going to stop me being miserable anyway?

The point of Carpenter's article is that authors will just have to work that much harder to promote their books (though we can't all be as good at it as John Green). One editor told her:

"The best advice for today, and really in any financial climate, is to be fanatical and motivated to promote your book ... Do as many events as possible. Become a shameless self-promoter."

Note: Carpenter in fact forgot to mention the title of her book in the article. I had to check out her website. And when I checked out her website, her upcoming book wasn't even promoted on the front page. When you clicked on Publications, the book was listed but there was no link to any promotional page or synopsis whatsoever (and the listing on Amazon doesn't tell us anything either). She's obviously a nice person who ain't shameless. I think we should all pre-order her book.

A writer friend asked me yesterday if she should Twitter as well as Facebook to get her name out there.

I found myself giving the same advice I offered to a client for whom I designed a website.

The client wanted to know if they were doing enough to get their site listed by search engines. Someone had told her she should stick a long list of key words into her code to make sure her site could be found.

My advice: when you are trying to market yourself, don't go wide, go deep.

If you are a children's author writing about aliens, you don't want someone searching for "book" to find you. You want someone searching for "children's book about aliens". It's the quality of the traffic that counts, not the number. You don't want to be found by just anyone. You want people who are actually likely to reach into their wallets.

If you are trying to use social networking sites to raise your profile, sure, set up an account with Facebook, Bebo, MySpace and what have you. But it's better to have one social network that really works for you than half a dozen that don't. It's the quality of the network, not the quantity (ie. You don't want to friend 3,000 people who will never buy your book) ...

The caveat is that social networking is not just about marketing. And if you'd like to have a go at Twitter, or blogging, or other kinds of social networking , don't let me stop you. But do it because you want to have some fun not just because you're looking for a database to market to.

And of course, we must not forget, as one bookseller reminded Carpenter in the article: "the most important thing is to write an awesome book. That's the biggest hurdle. Just write an awesome book."

***

Last night I watched Millions again, the story by Frank Cottrell Boyce about a boy who finds a millions of pounds in a holdall by a railway. I had forgotten that it was directed by Danny Boyle, pre-Slumdog. Later, I read this interview of Boyle talking about what sold the script to him —

Basically, page seven where the kid first uses the excuse of his mum's death to gain an advantage - it's a killer moment. You'd think you would examine scripts and weigh them up, but you don't in fact. You read the American ones and they're good and very impressive, but basically when you have a giddy moment like that in a script, that's it.

— it's the scene where the boys tell a shopkeeper, "Me mam's dead" and the shopkeeper immediately hands over some free sweets.

Made me think of rejections. Have you ever received a rejection from an editor or an agent with the words "I liked your book. But I don't love it."

That means your killer moment didn't slay them enough.

Today I resolve to make my killer scene more killer than it is.

The Great Thing About Rejection

This from one of my favourite agent bloggers, the Denver-based Kristin Nelson of the Nelson Literary Agency:

Considering that 90% of the population wants to write a novel but never have the guts to go for it, being in the game is a huge thing. Even though it sucks, rejections are a badge of honor. A rite of passage for when the publishing day finally arrives. Every published writer has a story of a rejection.

You can’t tell a good keynote speech without it! More

Yes that's Hugh Grant starring in the Barbara Cartland film The Lady and the Highwayman. No, it's got nothing to do with anything.

So Rejection is good. It's ammo for that bright, sunshiny day when you deliver the keynote at a writers' conference. Keep a file, paper your walls with them (but use blue tack as you'll need to take them down to wave around during your speech).

Isn't it a long, long process though?

Writing the novel takes ages. Then sending it out and getting rejections takes years. Then maybe you get the agent. And then the agent sends it out and it STILL takes ages.

The longest stage has to be the period between writing it and getting the agent/publisher.

This is not just because it's a tough competitive market yada yada yada.

It's also because it takes a long time for a creative person to develop eyes that see.


When I wrote my first novel, I immediately stuffed it in an envelope and sent it to friends to read. The objective? Not to get critiques but to gain praise. It is a normal part of the creative process to really really think your first crappy effort is art.

One friend bought me a coffee at a Costa and gently pointed out that I'd sent it out with, not only hundreds of typos but non sequiturs, unbelievable plot twists, ridiculous coincidences, and a hopelessly ambitious structure that would give even the most accomplished editor a bad migraine.

It took me months to sit down and start writing again. I had to come to terms with the fact that it would be YEARS before I had anything publishable. (And yes, that was years ago)

But how to EXPEDITE the process?

Joining SCBWI - attending conferences and learning about the craft/trade - was a step in the right direction.

Finding a critique group that fit - not just no-hopers like myself but critiquers who know their stuff - helped too.

If you find it hard to take criticism from your peers, then you can go to professional editors like Cornerstones run by Helen Corner who, when asked if getting published is a tall order, replies:

"It's doable."

Cornerstones also runs workshops like this one on September 29. I was listening to their promotional mp3 (you can download and listen to it yourself with your media player at this link) and thought Helen's tale of rejecting potential gems in the slushpile when she worked at Penguin particularly poignant:

Part of my job was to process the unsolicited pile which are books sent by authors and not by agents. Penguin at the time had an automatic rejection policy, as do most publishers these days and quite often when I was going through my meter-high piles .... I would think what if the author had started in chapter two instead of chapter one, or developed the character more quickly, or written in a more show not tell way ... (Writers) really do need professional feedback and they should make it part of their writer learning curve to know how to look at what they'd written and to know not to submit to an agent or publisher unless they really are presenting the best writing that they possible can.

Which brings me neatly to an inspiring line from author Liz Rettig's often hilarious tips for writers on her website:

Expect rejections. There are many reasons for rejections only one of which is that your writing is rubbish.

Publication: No Immunity to Disappointment

I've become a real fan of Radio 4's wonderful obituaries programme, Last Word. The obituary page has always been a good place to discover undiscovered writers - it is where many a journalist has a chance to show off writing style that is otherwise blunted by dry and dusty news reporting.

Ground-breaking writers like Gay Talese (inventor of New Journalism) cut their teeth on obituaries.

Anyway. I've been away on holiday and the news of Pauline Baines' death on 1 August finally reached me via the Last Word programme (listen to the programme 8 August 2008, the item is in the last quarter of the broadcast).

Like everyone else, I had assumed that Pauline Baynes, who illustrated the books of both Tolkien' and C.S. Lewis, had long ago passed away.

Authors and illustrators alike will enjoy this blog tribute from her friend Brian Sibley (author of Shadowlands: the True Story of C.S. Lewis and Joy Davidson) which is full of wonderful anecdote about Baynes and the exclusive circle to which she was privy:

"Met C S Lewis. Came home. Made rock cakes." That's how Pauline's diary recorded one of the two meetings she had with the author who's work she so memorably embellished. It tells you exactly how she viewed her contribution to books that, for millions, of us were seminal childhood reading.

Brian Sibley was also interviewed for the Last Word piece and captures the importance of Baynes to the C.S. Lewis canon:

He (C.S. Lewis) often said that The Lion The Witch and The Wardrobe had begun as pictures in his mind ... an image of a faun with an umbrella in a snowy wood, carrying a pile of parcels. Which is why when I look at The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe now, I see that image that CS Lewis must have seen in his head, but of course what I'm actually seeing is the interpretation of it by Pauline Baynes.

However, in this business we're in, producing iconic work does not guarantee immunity from rejection. Her friend, novelist Charlotte Cory, recalls:

She laughed a lot about the fact that every day in the post she got letters from aspiring young illustrators asking her for help when she also got letters rejecting her work from publishers.

Repeat after me ... it's not the arriving, it's the travelling that counts ...

Having said that, author Tom Bullough's story in yesterday's FT Weekend was heartbreaking to the extreme.

I wrote a piece last March about the author who got the agent, got the publisher, got the first book of the trilogy out ... then got dumped. Well, Tom Bullough, got the book deal (The Claude Glass is the story of a friendship between two children from very different backgrounds) then got on the shortlist for the Wales Book of the Year Award, was announced as the winner, was about to step onto the stage ... when the compere suddenly said it was all a mistake.

I set off towards the stage, a TV camera following me. I got to the foot of the stage, but there seemed to be some sort of strange hesitancy. I think I even said something like, “Do you want me to come up there or what?” Thomas then said he’d made a mistake. I hadn’t won.

I must have frozen for a couple of seconds. I’d gone from euphoria to absolute heartbreak.

Tom fears that he will be remembered for the awards fiasco and not for the book which he spent four years writing. This must have been soul destroying. I am sure all of us who continue to live with rejection sympathise with Tom - this book, good enough to be published, quality enough to enter the shortlist of three, deserves better.

Try not to staple your heart to your manuscript

Rejection scene from Why Writers Need Agents

There has been a sad slew of rejection news on one of the message boards I subscribe to.

And as usual, the rejectees are staring at the rejection letters, analyzing every little turn of phrase, and asking themselves, what does it mean?

I recently found this 2004 post from a blogger who calls herself Slushkiller ( she's slushpile reader) which makes some very useful notes about rejection herewith (I paraphrase):

1. Editors do not use different sized stationery to rate you on how badly your ms sucked.

2. When an editor says your ms is 'didactic, too wordy, and too lengthy' she isn't trying to hurt your feelings, she is telling you how to fix it.

3. An editor doesn't say nice things lightly.

Read the whole post here. It's long, but it's worth it

The Slushkiller post was a response to the website RejectionCollection.com, where writers can post rejection letters and say how they felt about them.

The best advice I've read about rejection letters comes from the Editorial Anonymous blog in a piece titled The Eight Rules of Rejection. I've quoted it before but it's always worth saying some things twice:

Most rejection letters mean nothing. Nothing. (Except that you can cross that publisher/agent off the list.) You need to internalize this fact however you can. Chant it in the bathtub. Write it backwards on your forehead. Listen to a tapeloop of it while you sleep. No matter what the editor/agent says, no matter what words they use, rejection letters mean nothing.

So cheer up. It's not personal. Laugh. Watch that video again. Write for the sake of writing. Everything else is a bonus.

(P.S. The write for the sake of writing quote came from author Julia Golding in the latest British SCBWI newsletter but since she's so far published 12 novels without even breaking into sweat, I couldn't quote her outright for fear of sending some people into a suicidal spin.)

Why Writers Need Agents

It was half term last week. We didn't manage to go away because the teenagers had exams coming. Bored children took root in my shed. Here is the result.