Tag Archives: Writing Craft

Dystopias, reality, and getting crabbit about labels

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[This article was posted on my Substack in May, please do go check that out to stay up to date with my latest articles and news]

So a wee while ago I was asked a question at an event that very nearly launched me into a TED talk of an answer. We were out of time so I had to restrain myself, but I figured it would make a good article in which no-one is waving frantically at me from the sidelines begging me to shut up!

The question was something like this: You said you don’t call We Are All Ghosts In The Forest a dystopia, but several of your books have dystopic themes so why don’t you call them that?

Which is a fair question. I had said earlier in the event that although Ghosts is often marketed and reviewed as a dystopia, I personally resist that label. And yes, the questionner was right that several of my books – Ghosts, The Salt Oracle, This Is Our Undoing, even Mother Sea (although we’ll come back to that) – have elements of socio-political or environmental settings that are pretty dark and dystopic.

Possibly a dystopic gas cloud wasteland, possibly Iceland

Dystopian fiction

First off, for the sake of clarity – what is dystopian fiction?

It’s generally framed as a story that takes place in a society that is in some way repressive, cruel, unjust or otherwise plain ol’ nasty – a kind of worst case scenario of humanity as a society. It’s often worked in combination with environmental extremes that the system is a reaction to, and it’s often, but not always, propagandised as utopian. Or it is presented in contrast to some utopian other – the past, another country, another planet etc.

‘Dystopia’ is a genre label that’s had some pretty impressive waves in popularity, isn’t it? There have been times, around the Hunger Games era for example, when it was riding pretty high. Going back further, I remember reading A LOT of post-nuclear apocalyptic dystopias when I was a young kid growing up in the tail end of the cold war. They’ve been around for a long time, and range from commercial to the more literary examples like A Handmaid’s Tale or The Road. It’s one of those genres that never entirely drops off the popularity lists at all, but it’s … taking a wee bit of a back seat at the moment, from what I can gather. People, I think, are largely either looking for pure comfort, or for more ‘working through the disaster’ than ‘living in the aftermath of the disaster’ narratives, for very understandable reasons.

However, that slight popularity downturn is not why I avoid the label. I mean, I write quiet, genre-blending books, I clearly am no good at writing to market so I don’t worry about the trendiness of labels either.

Why I love but (kind of) avoid the label

My resistance to ‘Dystopia’ as a label is that for most (not all, but most) fiction in this genre, while it is generally accepted that the dystopia will hold echoes of the real world, it is framed very much as a fictional futuristic, often apocalyptic world. An omg can you imagine? How terrible that would be. And yet the elements of worldbuilding that make it dystopic are actually real things that exist today in the real world for many people individually and as societies.

  • Oppressive totalitarian government? tick (check, if you’re weird)
  • Violent persecution based on your identity? tick
  • Profound injustice through corporate exploitation and corruption? tick
  • Vast wealth hoarding built on a brutalised underclass? tick
  • Even – An underclass struggling in a devastated landscape while the powerful buffer themselves from the disaster they unleashed? tick.

None of these are fiction. We all know that. And yet put them into a book and it gets labelled ‘Science fiction’. It gets labelled ‘Dystopia’. As if it is some entirely imaginary horror. When it isn’t. It is the daily lived experience of fellow humans right now today as you are reading this.

Can you tell I Feel A Way about this by the way my sentences have. got. very. short??

I do get it. I do. We explore the things that upset us by fictionalising them, because fiction allows us to parameterise and navigate our fears or horrors or heartbreak in a safe way. And exploring the very real brutalities of the world in fictionalised ways is a powerful tool for enabling us as a society to process our emotions enough to act on them.

So yes, Dystopia as a genre is one I vehemently think we need – I think it deals with big topics in accessible, captivating, mind-opening ways, and that’s amazing. I love this genre. And too, many Dystopia books are so distantly connected to real world issues that they lose that uncomfortable overlap. The Hunger Games, for example. Yes, you can trace elements back to real things from the Roman Games to Communist Russia and beyond, and Collins herself lays inspiration at the feet of the social media distraction engine burying genocide beneath cosmetics ads and clickbait. But the overall concept of the society and games themselves are disconnected enough, in my mind, to not raise quite the same adjacency discomfort in me.*

*Edited to add that yes, I read that news article from the US (in May, fortunately that madcap idea seems to have vanished), about an unhinged proposition to run ‘challenges’ for asylum seekers to win asylum. Yes, that might make this point no longer true.

The dystopic elements in my books, however, are nothing original. They are dystopias that are sadly, horribly real. I mean, Mother Sea isn’t even speculative – it’s straight up contemporary fiction (albeit on an imagined island). This Is Our Undoing simply extrapolated out from fragments of history and current news in Europe around the time of the Brexit vote. Ghosts … well, it’s fascinating to me that living without advanced technology is enough to earn the label Dystopia, to be honest. Its wider regional unrest and climate instability are both very real things, but those aside, I see the more egalitarian, community-based, slower life in Ghosts as less dystopic than the late-stage capitalism we’re currently living in in the west, modern healthcare (and digital ghosts!) notwithstanding.

One of the greatest wonders of SFFH as a genre space has always been its ability (not always utilised, but sometimes) to challenge the status quo and cast light on things the powers that be would like us to ignore. To ask the questions we should be asking of where we are headed and whether that’s what we actually want. Dystopias are a rich vein to draw from in that pursuit, and alongside the fully imaginary scenarios, real world injustices absolutely deserve to be visible and interrogated on the page – whether directly or in more fantastical or futuristic analogies.

But if we use the Dystopia label as a way to catharsise our discomfort and reframe reality as a safe make-believe, then we are letting ourselves and our readers down. We are inserting a safe deniability into the reading experience. And what could be about creating empathy and connection then instead buffers the reader from having to have uncomfortable thoughts about the systems they exist within.

So no, I don’t consider my books dystopian fiction. Because those very elements that people point at in applying that label are among the least fictional bits of my books. Digital ghosts are very fictional (sadly), communities living off the land without technology, modern healthcare or political stability? Not exactly a wild leap into the imaginary. I don’t think readers have to see the resonance between imaged and real world when they read dystopias, and I don’t think that resonance has to be central to the story. I personally know it’s there though, so I personally shy away from framing it as entirely futuristic worst-case fiction.

Possibly a dystopic arid wasteland, possibly Madagascar

But…

But labels aren’t really about the meaning of a book, in most instances. They’re about the cogs within marketing that let a book sell.

I sound crabbit as all hell about this, don’t I? Honestly in real life, I have almost certainly used #dystopia to help market my books, and I am just shrugging and rolling with it when other people call them that. I promise I am not roaming the publishing world battering people with this rant. Books need to find their readers, and that involves playing the marketing game in whatever way helps, so labels are gonna label. And there’s very little to be gained by getting het up about it.

Dystopia as a marketing label tells readers instantly that a book is going to be set in some futuristic society that carries dark echoes of a recognisably contemporary one. And that’s all it needs to do at that level.

Do I think we should treat it with the same caution we use when calling things ‘Utopias’? Yeah, I kinda do. Because just like utopias, dystopias are not a simple thing to unpick. But the marketing engine needs simple labels more than it needs authorly caveats and squickiness, and honestly it’s not the job of marketing teams to make sure the real world resonance is there. That’s my job as a writer.

More than that, it’s our jobs as readers. To read with compassion not just for the fictional characters on the page but for the real world roots that the story world might contain. To resist the urge to comfortably shelve dystopic injustices under ‘make believe’ in our minds. To read just a little bit deeper.

I might grimace faintly when someone calls my books Dystopias, but if that label helps people pick them up, then I hope I’ve done my job well enough that those readers (as well as simply enjoying the story) connect to the real world echoes in my imagined darkness.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk. 😀 I feel much better for having got that off my chest!

Introducing The Salt Oracle

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Well, my loves, I promised a proper introduction to my next book, and ta da! Here finally it is! Along with a deep dive into how I navigated a challenging developmental edit process, which I hope will prove useful/comforting to you if you ever face similar.

[This article was published on my Substack in early April and forms a part of a regular ‘Diary’ series of posts diving into the publishing process for my individual books].

As you may have gathered from the last newsletter, The Salt Oracle is coming out in November this year, and is set in the same post-internet digital ghosts future as We Are All Ghosts In The Forest, but is another stand alone. Because of my appalling series staying power (or lack thereof) I am rather loving the rise of same world standalones at the moment and am delighted to have accidentally fallen in line with a kind-of trend. For the one and perhaps only time in my publishing life!

These Diary posts are usually a wee behind the scenes perk for my paying subscribers but I figure as this is by way of an introduction, I’ll keep this one public. As well as telling you a wee bit about the book and where it’s at, I thought it also might be interesting to talk about the developmental editing round I recently finished on this beasty. Because, let me tell you, it was tricky. And, well, difficult publishing things are generally useful publishing things to share, right? So strap in…

The book

This book is my take on Dark Academia, set on a floating college fortress in the Baltic Sea where her mentor’s murder thrusts a quiet researcher onto a path towards discovering the secrets behind the strange, deadly Oracle child that the college guards so carefully.

If We Are All Ghosts In The Forest was built on the folklore of forests, then The Salt Oracle is built on the folklore of the sea. It’s about our relationship with the sea, as much as it is my character’s relationship with the college she loves, and it’s full of darkness and terrible choices, and perhaps, just perhaps a whole lot of love too.

The cover for this book, as revealed in the last article, is to die for, and might in fact be my favourite book cover to date. Although let’s be honest, I have been really, really lucky with all my covers so far.

The Edit Letter

I’ve written before about dealing with the Edit Letter for We Are All Ghosts In The Forest (and Edit Letters in general), but to paraphrase, the Edit Letter is the foundation of editorial input on a manuscript from your editor (or agent, although those notes are often less formal). It tends to be a breakdown of big overarching issues, and then smaller more specific areas to address. Sometimes with a by-chapter breakdown and/or marked up manuscript.

My Ghosts edits were extremely light, but I knew Salt Oracle would be a different kettle of fish because it was significantly less polished when I sent it to my editor. That’s fairly normal for a contract book – you’re likely to be working to tighter deadlines and with less agent input before your editor sees it, so they are generally not scared off by a rougher second book.

But the edits I got for Salt Oracle were by some margin the most comprehensive edits I’ve yet received – 19 whole pages of overarching issues and by-chapter breakdown – and there were a few things in the mix there that meant they initially really knocked me for six:

  • I came away from reading the Edit Letter convinced my editor hated the book.
  • The edits were, for very valid reasons, later than anticipated so I felt very pressed for time.
  • The edits asked for changes that would shift the feel of the book’s setting significantly, and I wasn’t convinced it would work.
  • I was told I needed to cut my book’s length by over 20%. From 126k to 100k words.

Now, that first one can be put down to an over-sensitive author being over-sensitive. But it actually raised an interesting nuance to publishing that I think is worth talking about, hence its inclusion.

I got these edits just before Christmas 2024, and spent much of Christmas in a bit of a blue funk. I’m used to needing a few solid sulking days after getting an edit in, so at first this didn’t much bother me. I expected solutions to form in my mind, and the doubts and worries to morph into enthusiasm, because they had done before. But they didn’t.

I planned out my edits. The doubts and fears didn’t pass.

I started the edits. They still didn’t pass. In fact, if anything they were getting worse.

So around about New Year, I stopped and really looked at why I was reacting so negatively to the edits and what I could do about it. That, more than the details of the edit letter itself, is what I wanted to talk about here, as that’s what might prove useful to others if they too find themselves stuck.

Did my editor hate the book?

My editor had offered a call from the outset, but I usually prefer to just check in by email if I get stuck on anything particular and otherwise sort things out myself. Come early January, I realised I needed to talk some things through, and we jumped on a call. This call addressed a few things, but most importantly this first question.

And of course, no, she didn’t hate the book. She loved much about it, and the characters, the dilemmas and the messages of the book had struck home perfectly. Which was nice.

Something we talked about on the call though was the difference between an edit letter on an acquired book and an edit letter on a contract book. Because I realised that at what will be Book Six in my career, this was my first time with a contract book, and so my first time working with an editor on a book they hadn’t fallen in love with enough to fight for through acquisitions.

When an editor acquires your book, you know beyond doubt that they love it. So when they send an edit letter, you know it’s coming from a place of absolutely being on Team This Book.

Conversely when you have just yeeted a book at your editor that they maybe saw a rough pitch of over a year ago … you do not start with that same assurance.

It sounds a small detail. But when you are facing pages and pages of ‘this needs fixing’, not knowing whether there’s a preceeding ‘I love this but-’ matters. It’s hard processing pages of criticism, so you want to know whether the feeling behind them was ‘this is great, but let’s make it better’, or ‘ye gods why have I been cursed with this’.

This was, I think, a useful lesson for both of us in openness and taking the time to make sure we both know what the other is thinking. It made me incredibly grateful to have a relationship with my editor that makes these conversations easy and positive.

Time pressures

Again, on the call and follow up emails this was a source of anxiety that my editor was able to almost entirely remove.

We shifted the delivery deadline from mid-February to early March, with the knowledge that I could shift it further if need be without it impacting the publication date (which was my biggest worry). Shifting too much further would start to impact our ability to get ARCs out to reviewers though, as well, frankly, as bleeding into time I’d scheduled for other projects. So I didn’t want the deadline to slide too much. But it was very reassuring to know I wasn’t at risk of losing my late 2025 publishing slot.

Edits that don’t feel ‘right’

There were two overarching ‘structure’ changes my editor requested. One was to cut out the wider state-level politics to keep the threats surrounding the College more direct and tangible. The other was to cut the number of characters by some way, as it currently felt too confusing with many of them mentioned too briefly to stick in the mind.

The state-level politics was a fairly easy fix, although the College still needed external connections, otherwise how was it funded? So I’ve not been able to cut all ties to the wider world, and instead have replaced state politics with the politics of appeasing multiple contractors and a university main office. At the outset therfore, I wasn’t sure this background change would really improve the book materially.

The character cull was trickier. I had intended the College to feel like a busy, multifaceted research organisation, full of disparate teams all with their internecine rivalries and my main character isolated within it all. Cutting a lot of characters would fundamentally shift the nature of the College from busy academic institution to small research outpost. More of a remote field station than a center of learning. That’s quite the vibe change, and I wasn’t sure I liked it – I felt it was important that the College look successful For Reasons.

But my approach to edits I’m unsure of is generally to try them and then decide, so that’s what I did. After making sure I had back up copies of the book!

Now it’s done, I think shifting the College’s management structure from political to contractual has simplified and tightened things in a way that works nicely. The move from busy to small I also think now works well – I have leaned into the idea of the College being half-empty due to the umm… attrition rate (!), and the echoing spaces and survivorship atmosphere add some vibes to the book that I wasn’t initially looking for but that I think are pretty cool. And yes, it’s easier to keep track of the characters now too. So although at first I was really hesitant about these edits, guess what? My editor was right? Curses.

Cutting word counts

Perhaps, now I’m out the other end of this edit, this was the trickiest issue of them all. You see, although a good amount of tightening and cleaning up of the prose was definitely needed, the main driver behind the 20% wordcount cut was actually the high price of paper and printing at the moment.

It is, it turns out, one thing to make any number of edits that are intended to make your book better. It’s a whole other thing to make edits to your book that are primarily about making it cheaper. I worried that in cutting words which didn’t strictly need it, I was stripping my book of some of its nuance, its subtlety, its beauty. And as I wrote about recently, I like that stuff! So that editing pass felt rather soulless, if I’m honest, which was a shock – editing is something I generally enjoy and that gets me excited about the book.

I absolutely understand the requirement. Publishing margins for independent presses are under very real pressure from printing costs alongside other factors. So I don’t resent the expectation, although I will endeavour not to be in this position in future (by having those conversations at the contract stage, I imagine, so I’m not caught unawares).

Fortunately having read the shorter version, it does still have nuance and subtlety and beauty. The book’s themes still feel vibrant and strong, perhaps more so for the (relatively) pared back prose matching the vibes. Plus, the cuts have helped me sort out several plot tangles and hone the pacing. It is still, vitally, the book I wanted to write and a story I am very proud of. Honestly, being forced to cut so much whilst not losing the feel of the book has probably been a useful experience for someone like me, who does love a long sentence.

But where I was able to put to rest all my other worries about this book and its edits, this one remained. It wasn’t until I got comments and line edits back from my editor last week that I knew I’d nailed the challenge – my editor was delighted and my line edits took me less than two days. *cue celebratory dancing*

An in-progress editing screenshot from Scrivener showing three different edit passes as different coloured text. This let me keep track of what I had changed & why.

The actual editing process

Just a quick note here, in case anyone is wondering how I went about such a big edit. The answer is I broke it up into five separate edit passes dealing with different things each time. I dealt with all the actual editorial changes on the first three passes, then did a Big Cut pass where I focused purely on cutting words, then finally did a kindle read-through to catch errors, smooth out over-edited bits, and generally reassure myself that it still worked and I still liked it.

It does and I do. Fortunately.

So, there it is, the next book in all its complicated glory. I love it, and I hope you will too when it reaches you. But man, this one has put me through my paces. It’s been a valuable learning curve though – both in terms of my process, and in being able to continue loving a book through all its permutations.

Thank you for reading and I wish you all a relaxing weekend.

Tip Jar

Interiority, quiet stories and ‘tv brain’

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I crawled out of the editing cave recently to ramble about interiority. Please blame any incoherence on my brain currently resembling overcooked spaghetti.

A wee while ago I read two fascinating articles on Substack.

The first was by Kern Carter, who interogated a few extremely successful books and posed the question – have we lost trust in readers? They were talking about a trend in modern books towards explicitly stating the themes of the book in often heavy-handed ways, rather than trusting the story (and the reader) do the work of building that theme more subtly.

The second article was by the ever thoughtful Lincoln Michel where he proposed that the move away from interiority in fiction, and towards ‘describing a video’ narrative style stems from our inundation with the visual medium for story telling – basically that we are approaching prose as if we are narrating a movie, and thus losing the very thing that makes prose unique (the ability to experience a narrator’s emotional landscape) by replacing it with a poor replica of the thing that makes visual media unique (scenic immediacy).

Both these articles are very worthwhile reads, and seem to be approaching overlapping questions from different angles – is the way we tell stories changing? And why might we be moving towards surface-level narration, where everything from scenery and action to emotions and themes is spelled out to the reader, and nuanced interiority is minimal to non-existent?

This question I think feeds into an internal conversation I’ve been having with myself for some time, about why my books get consistently called ‘quiet’ when they involve death, heartbreak, trauma and threat. To be clear, I don’t object to my books being labelled ‘quiet’ at all, if that’s how they feel to readers then that’s perfectly fine – some readers will enjoy that, some won’t, them’s the breaks etc. It just all feels interconnected to me – a move in fiction towards books that focus on external narration, where everything must be described as if through a camera. And where there isn’t the page time – or the trust in readers – for exploring nuance or emotional complexity or for layering subtext.

[Obvious caveat – these are sweeping generalisations, #notallbooks, and this isn’t even necessarily a criticism of craft. Readers clearly enjoy these books, so they are fulfilling their purpose perfectly well]

But what might be driving a movement away from interiority and subtlety, and towards ‘tv narration’ and thematic heavy handedness? I think there might be a couple of things at play.

TV brain

I find it hard to judge the truth of Michel’s proposed ‘tv brain’ because I personally watch very, very little tv/film (for health reasons, not some moral aesthetic). But it makes a lot of sense. If the vast majority of the storytelling we expose ourselves to relies exclusively on camera angles and dialogue to tell us what’s happening, then it follows that our sense of how storytelling works will be shaped by that. When I think of my favourite scenes in books, I tend to think of a moment of deep emotion for the narrator character – often in an externally quiet scene. Frodo and Sam before the eagles come, Elizabeth reading Darcy’s letter, Lady Macbeth sleepwalking and guilt-ridden. Where-as when I think of favourite moments in films, they are often about the visuals – the beacons being lit, the lake scene (!), the witches on the moor…

I think approaching scene descriptions in terms of camera angles can be really interesting, but only if that camera angle is connected to your character’s inner self. If you are just panning around in Michel’s cited ‘reaction shot’, or describing things because you, the writer, can picture them, then there’s little depth to that. Conversely how your character choses to describe a scene, whose reactions they pay attention to, what all those things make them feel? That’s interesting.

From how I read Michel’s piece, I got the impression he was talking of more plot-forward books, where the character lens is not being applied to the author’s ‘camera’ and is never turned on the character themselves. Which definitely fits with some of my reading in those genre-spaces, where the narrative, even in first person, feels rather … anonymous. I’ve heard several writers say their books come to them as movies playing in their minds that they then simply transcribe. Which sounds a fascinating process, to be honest, but also suggests that it would be very easy to forgo interiority entirely if for them, the characters are figures in front of a camera, not minds that they have to navigate through.

Academia brain

Now, like I say, I got the impression that Michel was talking about books that fit into more plot-forward genres. Where-as ‘academia brain’ is what I think might be happening in the case of the books Carter cites – which sit in more book club/literary spaces.

The thing with people who (learn to) write in academic settings – whether that’s an MA course, one of the big creative writing courses like the Faber Academy, or with people who are themselves academics – is that I think the academic structure breeds a certain defensiveness into your writing. (Confession: I have not attended any such course, but I have been an academic albeit in science, so I am at least nominally familiar with the kind of environment we’re talking about. I’ve also been part of several critique groups, some more formal than others, and I think the same theory applies to them although to a far lesser degree.)

Imagine it – you sit down to write a scene that carries some important thematic or emotional weight in your story, and you write it knowing that it’s getting critiqued next week in a room full of peers and superiors. You know these isolated segments of prose are going to be scrutinised and questioned, in depth, and that you might need to have responses to explain or justify what you’ve written.

Don’t get me wrong, critique can be a wonderful thing, and learning the craft of writing can’t really happen without it, in one form or another. So I’m absolutely not saying critique in itself is bad. But I do think that if you write with critique hanging over you, especially critique connected to grades and qualifications, then you are going to write defensively.

You are going to write to a set of rules that you can point at to justify your choices – whether that’s a clear plot structure, or adherence to staples like ‘show don’t tell’, or ‘every word must earn its place’. You are also, and I think this is the important bit, going to distance yourself emotionally from your writing. You have to, right? It’s going to get torn apart on Monday – you can’t pick yourself up from that week after week if you are bleeding onto the page.

So what you end up with are books written in what I call, perhaps unfairly, the ‘MA voice’. This is technically brilliant writing. It’s beautifully structured and crafted from the plot to the sentence level, observed with detail and thought. But it also makes absolutely sure its ‘message’ is clearly stated (so no-one misses it in critique). And through out all of this, it holds itself apart from both the characters and the readers – it often stays, to get technical, at the same Psychic Distance the entire time, regardless of whether the narrator is brewing tea or dying. It reads like a summer noon – everything is wonderfully, vividly lit and exactly where you’d expect it to be; but there are no shadows, no uncertainty, no depth.

I have read and adored many, many an ‘MA voice’ book, but equally often (and even during those beloved books) I have wanted to holler Psychic Distance, for the love of cheese at the author. Which I think is the same as hollering take some risks, or let me figure this out myself, or (in full Alan Rickman Sherrif of Nottingham voice) make it hurt more.

Popcorn brain

A third thing that might be happening is centred around what we call ‘Booktok Books’ – commercial, plot-driven books in very specific subgenres, that rely heavily in both marketing and writing on a series of popular tropes. I’m most familiar with the portion of the romantasy world that sits here, with its obsession for ‘touch him and die’, ‘only one bed’, ‘enemies to lovers’ and so on. But I know there are equivalencies within other super popular subgenres too. These books not only lean heavily into tropes, but also into character archetypes – the kickass female lead, the misfit outsider, the broody villain, the cinnamon roll, the chaotic disaster.

The popularity of these books (and much of commercial fiction) lies in the fact that they are ‘popcorn books’ – they are familar, easy, fun and moreish. You know exactly what you’re getting with these books and they ask very little of you other than your enjoyment. The worlds, the plot, the psychological arcs of these characters fit neatly into known patterns so the writer doesn’t need to spend time deepening them – they can instead crack on with the fun stuff – which in this subset of romantasy is essentially the tropes and the banter.

Again – no criticism. I love me a popcorn book sometimes, they’re a lot of fun, and many of them are doing what they set out to do extremely well. But these books need to keep plot happening, so they move through any emotionality with the speed of a bullet train. Here, look, some trauma. Excellent, let’s get back to the stabbing/kissing/both.

And thus, in a different market space and for different reasons to the above, you end up in a very similar place regarding emotional nuance and interiority – as in, there isn’t much of either.

So, goodbye interiority, huh?

Well, obviously, again, #notallbooks. But yes, I do feel like there’s a bit of a move away from allowing space to really inhabit a character’s mind. And as I’ve explored above, that’s crucially happening across the literary spectrum. You could argue that the very commercial fiction has never particularly cared to inhabit its characters, only to use them as vehicles for an exciting plot. I think that’s doing a disservice to commercial fiction, to be honest. But that this same shift to surface-level narration is also evident in more literary books suggests it’s a wider tide change.

Why though?

Is it, as is always pointed at, shrinking attention spans? Are we too distracted and busy to want to know a character’s thinking, so we just want to see what they do next and be neatly told why?

Is it writer self-defense? The defensiveness I suggest above could easily be creeping into influencing ever-more-online authors, ever-more-exposed to bad reviews, career vulnerability, and the pressure to appeal to the latest marketing trend.

Is it publisher conservatism? Books that move a little slower, or try something a bit unexpected, are probably harder to market than a book that fits exactly into the mould of dozens of other successful books. Books that don’t explicitly spell out their themes are probably harder to market than a book that thrusts its core theme at you with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer.

…I’m gonna go with d) all of the above please Alice.

BUT

Interiority is good! Strange and unexpected and subtle are good!

Look at Orbital – recent winner of the Booker Prize. It might not be everyone’s cup of tea but it was a very well crafted and pretty much entirely introspective, quiet story.

How about Nghi Vo’s Singing Hills Cycle books – none of them complying with modern conflict centred plot structures and yet all of them powerful and lovely, and laden with award recognition.

Noticeable perhaps that these books achieved, at least initially, greater award recognition than commercial success. But they and others like them prove that there is a readership out there for books that trust the reader to care about the characters’ minds, not just their bodies. And I think giving readers books that take the time to explore nuance and complexity is vital – always, but perhaps more than ever now, in an age where powerful factions would like to strip public debate of all nuance in order to make us easier to silence. Perhaps more than ever now, in an age where we as a society and as individuals are facing choices that have no simple answers. We need fiction that isn’t afraid to get into the weeds of our tangled minds. Fiction that refuses to skim over the surface of the dark things, refuses to provide neatly wrapped and reductive answers to hard questions.

Well, would you believe it this has ended up being longer than I planned. Yet again.

So to try to draw my own muddled conclusion from all this. I think it’s worth thinking about what we ask of the books we read, and what they ask of us. And I think it’s worth celebrating the books that take the time to play in the shadows.

Thank you for reading and if you enjoyed this, please subscribe below to receive these posts in your inbox. Or if you want these articles a bit earlier, plus additional behind the scenes publishing diaries, please consider subscribing to my Substack here.

A year in review, a year in anticipation

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A year of writing – the numbers and why they don’t matter.

Welcome to 2025! (late but don’t judge, we have approximately 16 milliseconds of daylight this time of year, I’m 90% dozy bear)

Being as I talk the talk about resilience and not falling into the traps of comparanoia or shifting goalposts, I figure I ought to walk the walk with a wee review post about where I am and how I feel about that.

First though, a lil book sale treat – my publishers for We Are All Ghosts In The Forest are running a 99p ebook sale for firsts-in-series from now until the 18th Jan. Which means you can snag a copy of Ghosts for a bargain price if you’re quick (and maybe some other excellent books too?). Click here to shop!

Now then. Down to business.

The year in review

What are the stats for 2024?

I published 1 novella – The Last To Drown, 1 novel – We Are All Ghosts In The Forest, and 1 short story – Mhairi Aird in the Nova Scotia 2 anthology.

I was longlisted for 2 awards (BSFA and Kavya Prize for Mother Sea), shortlisted for 1 award (Kavya Prize for The Last To Drown) and won 1 award (the Society of Authors ADCI Prize for Mother Sea).

I left one agent and signed with another.

I attended two festivals/conventions, took part in oh god I don’t know … a whole bunch of events.

I wrote & revised 1 novella, fully revised 2 novels, and got a 3rd novel through copyedits & proofs. And I wrote 85k of a 4th novel. Totaling about 120k written, 340k edited.

I signed no new publishing contracts, got no new books out on submission, and (lol) received no further parts of my advance because of delays to edits. So my writing income last year was solely from royalties on my previous books, the short story sale, and writing-adjacent work like workshops and this Substack (thank you!).

The year in anticipation

What’s on the programme for 2025?

I will be publishing 1 novel (The Salt Oracle).

I will finish & revise the current wip. Edit/copyedit/proof The Salt Oracle, and edit 1 further novel & 1 novella.

I should be going on submission with that 1 novel and 1 novella.

I will be at two festivals/conventions (Cymera Festival & World Fantasy Con), plus a bunch of other events & podcasts tbc.

How’s about the wishlist for 2025?

That I sell both submissions to good people for good deals.

That I maybe get some foreign rights sold.

That I get all or most of another book drafted.

That The Last To Drown and We Are All Ghosts In The Forest maybe get an award listing or two.

What does it all even mean though?

So how do these stats look to you? Busy? Easy? Perhaps wildly ambitious, perhaps laughably unambitious? It will depend on your viewpoint, right? Your own current ‘normals’. And that’s sort of why I have listed them all out – to say that they don’t really matter.

The number of words I write, the number of events I do, the number of awards listings (especially those omg) or trade reviews or sales … those make for some nice neat numbers but do they mean anything to me, the writer alone (plus cats) at my laptop? They’re all to varying degrees out of my control after all – even how much I get to write is influenced by other people’s editorial timelines, the amount of publicity interest in my newest book, and my health. So when I look back at 2024 or look forward to 2025, what can I take from these lists that really truly intrinsically reflects on me and my writing?

I’ve been mulling over this because as I saw everyone posting their ‘my writing year’ type posts I got increasingly squinty eyed about how good that sort of framing actually is. It’s nice to look at concrete things and pat yourself on the pat, or set a particular aim and work towards it. It can also be really helpful to track these things so you can appraise your relationship with writing/publishing and make any necessary changes. So no shade on tracking these stats at all – I do it all myself, hence being able to reel off the lists above without much thought. And my god, we should celebrate our wins at any opportunity, shouldn’t we? Smell the roses every time, because publishing is a hell of a briar patch.

I came up with two reasons though, why I think these particular roses – these lists of achievements – can sometimes be … maybe not unhelpful, but an incomplete picture.

Reason one is simply the comparanoia of it all. Have you looked at other people’s statistics and Had Sads because yours don’t match up? Or looked at your own previous years and Had Sads because you’ve dropped off in some area or another? Yeah, me too. But if we measure our success or productivity or writerly brownie points by fixed metrics – words written or events held or contracts signed – we are holding ourself to metrics that are (at least partly) out of our control. Which aint all that healthy, folks.

The second reason is that I want to think my creativity matters more to me than my output. I mean yes, I need the output to, you know, have books to sell and hence a hope of a career. So of course words written/books sold/awards won matters. If I look back at 2024 though, while I am extremely proud of the high points on that list, I am perhaps most proud of something that’s not on the list at all – the way in which I’ve pushed my craft.

As I think I’ve talked about a few times, I like to feel that I am trying something new-to-me with everything I write – challenging myself to always be growing as a writer. And honestly, I am really excited by the things I’ve done in Novella2 (which I wrote about here) and the current wip. They are both in their own way taking risks I’ve not been brave enough to take until now, and I think I’m pulling it off. Which is so incredibly cool, I can’t even tell you.

Everything else I did last year, from the simple number of hours I got to write to the joy of winning an award, was connected to other people & other factors. My craft though? That win is wholly and entirely my own.

Which means that whatever those other people & other factors are doing in 2025, I can hold one ambition entirely independent of all that uncertainty – challenging my craft in a new way. If I can succeed in that one thing, then that’s something to be proud of and excited by even if some of my statistics look worse compared to 2024. (They will – I’m not going to get two books out in 2025, let alone a bonus short story, so from the get-go I’m a man down, so to speak).

Depending on other things (lol, see?), my next projects may be pushing me in really, really structural ways, or in attempting a new subgenre, or maybe something that’s going to be so tricksy narratively… I am excited by all these ideas, but I’ve honestly no idea which one will be next on the drafting board.

So do I have a point? Yes!

It is that listing your achievements and ambitions can be really fun, a useful gauge, and an opportunity to take stock and celebrate your awesomeness. But that the most important metric of you as a writer, far more than the subjective whimsy of publishing successes, is whether you are finding joy in your art. (Or catharsis. Or hope. Or freedom.) (Or revenge)

So my gorgeous creatures, may 2025 bring you publishing joys but may it also bring you wonder and courage in your writing. If you want to stay up to date with my blog posts please consider subscribing to my Substack as that’s where I’m most active.

Publication day waffle

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The book, the backstory, the question, and my hopes.

I have grown a habit without plan or forethought, of posting on/around each new book’s publication with my thoughts on what that particular book means to me and where it came from. For Mother Sea, that post was an explanation of the content warnings for the book, for The Last To Drown it was about the experience of writing chronic pain and the craft of novella writing.

With the publication of We Are All Ghosts In The Forest this week, I have been attacked by a fit of the pensives again and wanted to do the same for this book. Because the weird thing about publishing multiple books is that each one somehow means something unique to you. It’s important to you in an entirely different way to your previous (and likely next) books. Which when I type it, sounds perfectly reasonable, but I don’t know – I think a part of me was under the impression that publishing books would become … not rote because obviously each book is unique, but that the act of publication at least would become familiar and comfortable. Like wearing different outfits every day but then slipping into the same coat to go out.

And yes, there are aspects of the publication hullabaloo that feel very different (mostly less fraught) than they did the first time round simply because we’ve been here before. But Ghosts does have its own new territory to break, both personally and professionally, and I guess that’s where I’m gonna go with this publication day (weekend) waffle. Alongside a lot of shiny promo graphics that my fab publicity person sent me & I can’t resist using!

Buy Ghosts here

Craft, learning and lockdown.

One of my writer hopes is that each new book I embark on will teach me something new about writing. It’ll push me in a slightly different direction – whether that’s in genre or subject matter, form or voice – so that with every project I am challenging myself to grow as a writer. I aspire to be braver at this, if I’m honest with you, to be bolder in leaping into things I’m not sure I can pull off, more fearless (or unhinged, your choice) in being willing to tear something down that’s merely ‘good enough’ and rebuild something better from the ruins.

However, that’s for the future. For Ghosts, I look at it and think that the best lesson I learned from it is to trust in the small flashes of wonder more. To not get stalled on ‘yes but how does that work’ until the editing, to leap merrily into a half-arsed shiny idea without the comfort of the usual planning I do. I don’t think I’ll ever be someone who regularly writes without a good map (of character psychology and setting at least), because that stage does feel important and enriching to me. But I think there’s real value in knowing you aren’t tied to that planning. That sometimes, when the wind and the tides are right, you just have to leap aboard, hoist sail, and see what happens.

Which is how Ghosts materialised. At least the initial shape and opening chapters.

See, the thing is, I started writing Ghosts in March 2020.

Mmm hmm. That March 2020. I had a child two terms into their first year of secondary school, just forming new friendship groups, just adjusting to this new world … then suddenly at home, isolated, with their education, friendships and world reduced to pixels.

[See where the idea of the ghosts came from? More on this below…]

Homeschooling in that first lockdown was … not brilliantly structured, so even though I had it undoubtedly easier than parents with younger children, I was still rarely getting more than 20 mins of uninterrupted time. And the vast majority of my attention, emotion, and organising capacity was being used up on my child, which left exactly zero capacity for me to do intelligent, thoughtful things like plan and research and worldbuild.

When I sat down to write Ghosts, I had the opening image in my mind – of a woman returning to a remote village with a stranger boy – in my mind and nothing else.

Two paragraphs in, I mentioned a ghost. The line is ‘There were three people on the street, two of them real’. I wrote that, thought huh, so we’ve got ghosts then, and carried on. By the end of the first chapter – and the appearance of a certain image-shifting cat – I’d realised the ghosts were the remains of the internet, that the village was in Estonia, and that Stefan, the boy, was non-verbal. All my worldbuilding, character development, and plotting began then, and it was a patchwork ad hoc affair that later required a lot (so much) patching up and weaving in of broken threads.

Without the particular circumstances of lockdown and homeschooling, I’d never have written a book with such wild absence of planning. I quite probably won’t again. But thanks to that experience, and to Ghosts as a final product being something I’m quite proud of, my relationship with planning has evolved significantly. I still spend a good amount of time exploring the imagery and layers of the book’s core theme, because that’s the lodestone upon which everything else is built. And I do still plan, but it’s much less ‘I need to know everything before I can start’ and much more ‘I need to know enough not to get too tangled while I’m finding my feet in the opening chapters.’ It’s less character arc graphs, and more floorplans! (I’ve discovered a bit of a love for floorplans with Salt Oracle and the current wip both being largely in one big, complicated building)

Is this growth? Not really. I mean, there’s no wrong or right way to do this, so my approach adjusting doesn’t mean it’s better. But I do feel like this particular change, for me, is about confidence. I trust my instincts more, I trust those flashes of wonder to guide me well; I trust that if I make an unholy mess I can (grumpily) unpick and restitch it. Let’s be honest, I will also always love a graph, but this new more relaxed approach to tackling new projects might just give me the freedom to be bolder in the next project, and the next…

Ghosts and loneliness

There’s always one question that comes up again and again with each book that gets published. One particular theme or issue that stands out enough with enough people to become a feature of most interviews or informal chats about that book. For The Last To Drown it was about the experience of writing chronic pain. For Mother Sea it was questions about the importance of climate fiction.

For Ghosts I think one is already emerging, and it’s going to be ‘Where did you get the idea for these ghosts?’. The easy answer is that scene above – me watching my child struggle through the loneliness of a life reduced to four walls and pixels on a screen. The strange thing is that lockdown wasn’t isolating for me, in fact with both my husband and daughter suddenly in the house all day every day, I lost the peace and solitude I actually relied on quite heavily to manage my chronic pain. Being housebound apart from occasional short trips out? Well, hi, welcome to my world, please tidy up after yourself. BUT it was a horrible experience for my daughter, at an awful point in her life, and watching that was heartbreaking.

The chain of thought from that to a world haunted by fragments of our digital detritus, by our online echoes, is fairly obvious. And then the rest of the world in Ghosts had to be built up around that central concept.

So if anyone reading this was wondering, there’s the answer to that particular question. Where did the ghosts come from? Loneliness and lockdown. Homeschooling, society’s fragility and resilience; most of all the search for connection.

Growth, ladders and doing the daunting things

Ghosts represents something more prosaic to me too. This is the first book in my Solaris contract, and my first book with a publisher that has Big 5 distribution and main player reach within the SFF world. All three of my publishers have been/are amazing, and in my opinion punch above their weight with the quality of their lists, but Solaris are a step into a bigger room for me, if you like.

So Ghosts feels a lot like the next rung in the ladder of my career. It’s exciting. I’m hopefully going to be reaching new audiences with this book, hopefully gaining new readers who’ll stick around for future books. I’m doing more events for Ghosts’ launch than I’ve done for all my previous books’ launches combined! And with some brilliant author friends! My fabulous marketing/publicity goddesses are helping me reach new venues and platforms too. If the reception to Ghosts is positive, that in turn will pave the way for other opportunities (foreign rights sales for Ghosts, further book deals etc).

This is all wonderful new ground to be breaking. I am extremely fond of, and proud of, Ghosts, and am excited to have it out in the world finding people it resonates with. It’s also, not gonna lie, just a teensy bit daunting. I say this because I’m leery of doing the Instagram ‘Everything is intensely wonderful actually’ thing. Several events plus travel in a month is going to be a physical test, but I’m interested to see how I cope and how quickly I recover. It’s good data for the future! There’s also the fear, of course, that no-one will show up to my events, or that everyone will hate the book and hunt me down to tell me so, or, or, or… But those are normal, unavoidable fears to have and I have an ace in my back pocket…

…I have readers. I may not have many compared to other authors, but there are amazing, strange, beautiful people who have come with me from book to book, frequently cheered me on, voted for me, recommended me to others. These readers have trusted me each time I’ve veered off in a new direction. So I trust them in turn. I trust that they’ll read Ghosts and find something worthwhile in it. And that’s kind of all that matters. Yes, I hope I reach new readers as Ghosts takes the stage. Yes, I hope it opens new doors for me and my career. But I hope even more that the readers who’ve supported me thus far will enjoy this next step on my bookish travels.

Buy Ghosts here

Thank you for reading & supporting this blog. I’ll be back soon on my Substack with less ‘please buy my book’ and more about what makes a good book event, parting ways with your agent, and more…

Literary versus genre

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These two terms and their meanings are something I’ve found myself talking about a fair number of times in interviews, because my writing spans both speculative and literary spaces and has been marketed as both straight SFF and straight literary. Being as I have Opinions, I figured I’d share them with you!

[I shared this post on my Substack a few months ago – to keep up to date with the newest posts, as well as publishing diaries and occasional short fiction, please consider subscribing to my page there]

‘Literary’ is generally used to refer to fiction that prioritises prose style and internal character development over external plot. It also is used (inaccurately) as a marker for books that don’t contain the obvious ‘genre’ ingredients of, say: a detective solving a crime, dragons, a historic setting, romance as the main plot etc.

I say inaccurately, because the writer’s approach to prose, and the contents of the story are clearly two different things. ‘Literary’ is one end of a scale that goes through odd terms like ‘book club’ & ‘accessible’ right the way to ‘commercial’ – which is prose written to focus on the external plot and not the internal.

The contents of the story on the other hand are what determine ‘genre’. Whether that’s mystery or romance, thriller, space opera, family epic or domestic noir – they are all labels that tell you something about the waypoints you’re likely to encounter in the story.

But a book can be both a thriller, and literary. It can be both a historic mystery and commercial. The spectrum of literary-to-commercial exists within each genre. Think Wolf Hall to The Duke And I, or The Fifth Season to The Kaiju Preservation Society. There are some books whose genre is hard to pinpoint – mainly because ‘mid-life crisis’ isn’t an acceptable label apparently so they get lumped into ‘contemporary fiction’ ‘literary fiction’ or ugh ‘women’s fiction’.

We all kinda know this, right? So it annoys me that ‘literary’ is often treated as something separate from (and better than) ‘genre’. When it isn’t (on both counts).

But the truth is that these are all really just marketing terms for booksellers to use to inform & direct readers, which is the main purpose of any genre labels after all. Bookshelves are two dimensional spaces (functionally), and a book has to sit somewhere.

So rather than fight the entire functioning of bookselling, my issue instead is with how the term ‘literary’ is wielded. It comes with a certain stamp of ‘quality’ that generally attracts more trade review inches and award nods. Literary = better, right?

Hmm. But literary also has undertones of older white men writing opaque deconstructions of the agony of being an older white man. It carries associations with ‘The Classics’ and establishment standards of what makes good writing. Which, let’s be honest, is another way of saying literary = western-centric narratives by people who are white, middle/upper class, cis/het/allo, able-bodied and male.

It is a familiar joke among writers that a woman writing about a mid-life crisis is writing ‘women’s fiction’ (ugh) but a man writing about a mid-life crisis is writing ‘literary fiction’. It’s a joke because it’s true. Anyone who doesn’t fit the dominant paradigm sees their stories pigeonholed first by their own identity and only second by the content of the book itself. Which sucks, let’s be honest.

I think perceptions are changing. More non-western voices are appearing on the big literary prize lists, translation prizes are gaining greater profile, and women are consistently more equitably represented on prize lists than they were 20 yrs ago. There’s still progress to be made – we need more global south voices, we need women and other marginalised writers to receive the same respectful language in reviews as men get, but it feels like the default image of a literary author as a narcissistic tweed & cognac toting silver fox is happily on the wane.

Until it’s firmly gone though, establishment preconceptions about what makes a novel literary will continue to act as a form of gatekeeping – sending a message to working class, BIPOC, disabled, queer & women writers that ‘oh honey no, you don’t belong here.’

So when my writing is referred to as literary, a small part of me winces. Because I know some people are put off by the term – it is what ‘that kind of person’ reads (and probably pontificates about). And I’m not gonna lie – the snobbery around the term is alive and kicking in some literary circles, which has been eye opening as I moved from largely SFF events in my first two years as an author to largely literary ones this year.

HOWEVER I think the huge popularity of books that span the literary and genre spaces is helping to erode that elitism bit by bit. Writers like Natasha Pulley, Bridget Collins, Sarah Moss, Martin MacInnes, Sequoia Nagamatsu etc are all challenging the clarity of the dividing lines. I wish some of these authors would embrace their genre audience more, but that’s complicated by SFF conventions not paying authors (and in fact expecting authors to pay to attend, but that’s a whole other post). And also by marketing decisions to set these books in the ‘Fiction’ departments, not the ‘SFF’ ones.

Genre divisions – and reductive marketing labels – aren’t going anywhere. We all know the comfort of picking up a book and knowing exactly what to expect from it – we want the familiarity of a cozy murder mystery or a historic romance sometimes, I definitely do. But I think many of us are also hungry for stories that take us in unexpected directions, that meld genres and challenge our assumptions. That inhabit a familiar world but add a twist of magic.

Likewise many of us love books that are both beautiful to read, and take place in space; or thoughtfully explore grief whilst also solving a murder.

‘Genre-blending’ fiction is on the rise, for good reason, but I think for it to reach its full audience, we need to rid ourselves of the boundary lines between ‘literary’ and ‘genre’. I would pay good money to never again be asked about moving between literary and SFF as if the two were separate islands in a sea of lava!

So in a bid to erase some lines, what’s your fav read that melds genres? Or that leans heavily into literary forms within a genre space? I love Natasha Pulley’s The Kingdoms – a mix of historic suspense and timey wimey alt history. Also can’t go without mentioning the timeless Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. A deeply thoughtful exploration of agency and humanity wrapped up in a terrifying dystopian SF.

The Worst Word In Publishing

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Synopses!

Oh, we hates them, don’t we? They’re undeniably the foulest creation ever, designed to strip all sparkle and joy from your story (and from you).

[This blog was first published on my Substack in November last year. To stay up to date with my latest posts please consider subscribing there, but however you found me, thank you for reading!]

I thought I’d escaped the need for synopses when I signed with my agent but (sobs quietly) turns out there is never an escape. It is doom/synopses all the way down…

…I’ve been writing synopses recently, can you tell?

For those who haven’t encountered this beast, it’s a plot summary of your book that provides all the main events in a pragmatic, spoilery ‘this happens and then this happens…’ breakdown.You need one when you are querying agents (usually around 300-500 words) and sometimes you need one when your agent is submitting your book to editors & foreign rights folks (usually longer, anything up to ~1,500 words).

They are entirely functional things – serving to prove to agents that your plot works, and to give editors and other publishing staff a quick summary of your book so they can talk about it (because lmty foreign rights sub-agents, marketing/publicity staff, they may well not have time to read your book along with the dozens of others they’re representing).

You’d think that being so dry and straightforward they’d be at least easy to write, if not exactly fun. And I’ll admit the longer ones I’ve been writing this week are definitely less challenging to put together than the 300 word ones I used to create when I was querying. But it’s surprisingly hard to pare down your 100,000 word intricately woven plot to its bones whilst still have it both make coherent sense, AND more importantly, sound enticing.

This happened and then this happened is not an inherently juicy way to narrate a story, turns out.

So! Aside from bemoaning their horribleness, what advice do I have for anyone else having to face this particular hurdle? I’m going to recommend two very different approaches – try them (or don’t, if you have any sense!) and let me know how you get on.

Writing up:

This is the method I’ve always used to produce my 300 word query synopses. I think it lends itself well to producing shorter synopses and has the added advantage of producing a short pitch as well, which is super handy for querying writers to have.

Step 1. Write down any words that come to your mind when you think of your book. Could be the themes, the tropes, the main character, the setting, emotions, objects, big events. Anything at all, just a bunch of single words that capture something of your book.

Step 2. Circle around ten of the most important ones in terms of the plot, character & setting of your book.

Step 3. Using those ten(ish) words, write a short paragraph (ideally 3 sentences but don’t kill yourself in the attempt) that tells us:

a)      something enticing about the main character (yes, really do try to stick to one here, even if you’ve multiple Points of View. Sorry) – not just ‘a woman’ but ‘the world’s first female astronaut’. Not just ‘a teenage boy’ but ‘a boy who’s afraid of cats’. Idk, just some small detail that is both relevant to the challenges they’re about to face, but also makes them instantly more than a cardboard cut out.

b)     Perhaps something about the world, particularly if it’s historic fiction or SFF.

c)      What your main character’s aim is in the story – what’s the thing they need to achieve. A successful moonlanding, saving the local cat sanctuary from redevelopment by evil corporations…

d)     What challenges they’ll face – the mysogyny of the crew, engine failures; his own fear and the apathy of locals.

e)     What’s at stake – what is their motivation for battling to overcome these challenges? Fame, getting to not die on a rock in space? Getting to fulfil his gran’s wish or win the attention of the boy/girl/nonbinary of his dreams?

These few sentences will give you a rough draft of a short pitch for your book. It summarises the point of your book, basically, the reason why someone might want to read it. A character we want to get to know and a problem we are intrigued by. Not all books fit neatly into this kind of plot equation but most will, even if it’s kinda painful to be so reductive.

The good news is now you’ve done the hardest bit. You’ve plucked out the beating heart of your book, now you get to give it back a few major arteries, maybe a rib or two.

Step 4. Look at your book and make a note of the major turning points in your plot that demarcate the really significant moments. Note down how your most important secondary characters (or other Point of View characters) shape these major plot points, or have their own significant events that tie into the main plot. Don’t get too sidetracked by subplots, or by sequences of events that can be summarised as ‘tensions escalate’ or ‘a series of mishaps’ or whatever.

Step 5. Now flesh out your 3 sentence pitch, by adding in your plot points from Step 4. AND THE CLIMAX EVENT. Include spoilers. Editors/agents need to know that you’ve stuck the landing, so to speak. So give them the specifics, not just ‘X must solve the mystery before disaster strikes’. That sort of hooky line is for the pitch, not the synopsis.

Ta da! You have yourself a synopsis.

Step 6. Edit it for clarity. Keep sentences on the short side and light on descriptive flourishes. This isn’t the place to demonstrate your lyricism. Clear, concise and well structured are better than super voicey.

exhausted face

Chapter by chapter:

This is the method I’ve been using this time around – to create synopses on the longer side (1.2 & 1.5k words). It’s useful in that there’s a lot less thinking involved lol, and less agonising over what plot points to include. But it does go long, so it’s probably not ideal for those in the querying trenches needing pithier synopses.

Step 1. Go through your book and for every chapter, note down the main events (both external and internal/emotional)

Step 2. Circle the events that are most important. There may be a fair few that aren’t vital in explaining the plot progression – that’s okay, small plot details and quieter chapters are not illegal.

Step 3. Write up a point by point summary of your circled point events. Keep your paragraphs short – one per couple of chapters might work well. Make sure you’re tying the various plot threads together. As this version is longer, more of your subplots and secondary characters are likely to make it onto the page, so make sure you’re threading them in well, rather than just mentioning them once and then forgetting them. (if you only need to mention them once, perhaps avoid doing so at all). Again include spoilers for the ending. Unlike with the shorter synopsis, you’ll have space here to include the resolution after the climax too.

Step 4. Umm, yeah this method is a lot simpler. Ta da! You have yourself a long synopsis.

Hope that helps! Happy writing & may all your synopses be magically written by elves while you are sleeping.

Next time on the blog I’ll be talking about the messy, kinda gatekeepery divide between ‘literary’ and ‘genre’ because as a writer who crosses that divide, hoo boy do I have Opinions!

Adventures in Substack

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Hi folks. Thank you so much for reading my (irregular) blogs on this page, it’s been a joy. I have been toying with ideas about how to connect better with readers though, and have decided to give Substack a go. It feels like a more natural home for the blog, giving me the freedom to add more content whilst also reaching a wider audience.

Join my Substack here

I will be blogging more regularly there – posting fortnightly blogs on writing craft, the publishing industry & inspiration, as well as occasionally sharing short speculative fiction.

Partly to allow me to share slightly more sensitive work, and partly in an attempt to be able to afford chocolate, I have a paid subscriber tier in addition to the above, where I will be providing sneak peeks of unpublished work, and a diary of my books’ journeys through writing to publication & beyond – shedding light on some of the lesser talked about aspects of the publication process.

My paid subscribers will also be able to join me twice yearly for online writing workshops, although I plan (health depending, you know how it is) to run online Q&A sessions open to all at regular intervals as well.

It’s a new venture for me and a little bit daunting, if I’m entirely honest, but I really hope you’ll come join me over there & help me build a wee community of good people.

Thank you,

Lorraine

Join my Substack here

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Book Sales Aren’t On You (and lots of statistical nerdery)

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I wrote a version of this blog a while ago, after some discourse about authors needing to promote their books on GoodReads because the ‘Want To Read’ count is apparently used by publishing to Make Decisions. I didn’t post it then, because I needed (ironically) to focus on my latest book release and then the moment kinda passed. But I figured the subject would come around again, as it was only the latest in a constant cycle of ‘Authors Have To Do X Otherwise Their Book Will Fail’.

And lo! This week a fascinating episode of the brave podcast The Publishing Rodeo interviewed a researcher on YA book marketing – Dr Kerry Spencer Pray.

Now, my initial blog was a slightly ranty exposition about author-led marketing. And you’re still getting the bulk of the rant because it was a good one & I’m not wasting it. But first I’d like to explore my reaction to that podcast and Dr Spencer Pray’s research (so far as I understand it from the podcast and these slides) a wee bit.

The thing is, I’m a statistical ecologist by training, and we are way more ridiculous about statistical analyses than pretty much any other field except maybe medicine. We have to be, because ecological systems are MESSY AS HELL so we* have pretty much led the field in statistical modelling that can handle the inherent chaos, correlates, and contamination of ecological systems. (*not me, I just followed along) This means that while I am FASCINATED by Dr Spencer Pray’s research, and think it is deeply important and there should be A TONNE more of it please … I am DOING A NERD and have some caveats that I think need bearing in mind.

I’m not detracting from her work, but I have watched the reaction to the podcast episode with a slightly leery eye because people are reading certainty into a very uncertain dataset and extrapolating outwards in ways that I think are both understandable and perhaps not helpful. It’s that reaction that I’m responding to here, not the work itself which was hampered by an incredibly opaque industry.

If you’re not interested in statistical pedantry, you can skip to the original blog below & the TL:DR is that while I am grateful this study exists, I think folks need to not get too carried away with the results. Fellow pedants, enjoy…

In brief, Dr Spencer Pray’s research was carried out on a random sample of 475 YA books, comparing an estimate of sales (from multiple secondary data sources as actual sales data weren’t available) to 250-300 potential drivers via simple correlations. The factors that appeared to correlate to estimated sales were all kinda related to book marketing rather than the book itself. These then were all amalgamated into one ‘marketing’ variable that showed a strong correlation strength against estimated sales. They used this to produce a scoring system and a minimum marketing viability threshold. Everyone is, understandably, fascinated by this, and depressed and/or validated by the finding that the biggest single correlate to estimated sales was an index of advance size (which was considered a proxy for marketing spend).

So the take home message was that the only real way to ensure your book sells is to get more marketing.

Which fits very well with my original blog post ranty rant (see below). And with other soft and hard data on the subject.

But the ‘marketing’ factors that correlated with estimated sales were: advance size, author ‘fame’, ‘carryover’ (links to other famous things), book cover appeal, author twitter following & starred reviews in key outlets.

And this is where I think some caveats are needed.

See, no data set is perfectly controlled, so all statistical analyses come with bias and uncertainty. The challenge in analysis is to account for sources of bias, and accurately quantify your uncertainty so that you can tell whether a pattern is ‘real’ or a product of chaos/bias/errors… and then not to weep when non-statisticians ignore all your error margins and treat the result as rock-solid and black&white.

So to try to explore the uncertainties in this study, stand by for some intense nerdery…

One issue is about statistical power. If you test almost as many correlates as you have samples, your experimental ‘power’ (reliability of the results you get) is extremely low, because your chance of producing correlations entirely randomly is pretty high. So while these correlations may well be genuine, they may also be pure chance just because so many were tested. Spencer Pray and her colleagues might have accounted for power issues with methods like bootstrapping & model selection processes, in which case this becomes less of an issue, but I can’t see any mention of this being done.

Another complication was the unavailability of accurate advance figures – Spencer Pray had to use the deal categories of ‘nice’, ‘very nice’ etc in Publishers Marketplace announcements instead. This means that the majority of data lay in the lowest bracket – ‘nice’, which is anything from $1-49,999. (Indicatively, Jess V Aragon’s spreadsheet of PM data had ‘nice’ for 55% of deals where size class was given, the other 45% spread over 4 other classes) So there’s a lot of data kinda merged into one category, and the fewer samples in the highest bracket (7% in ‘major’) would have disproportionate influence. This doesn’t negate the findings, but it does mean that the findings might not apply within the advance brackets – i.e. just because a $100K advance improves sales over a $45k one, that doesn’t mean a $45k advance is any better or worse than a $10k one because both those advances were lumped into one group. It might be true, but we don’t know.

Likewise, as Dr Spencer Pray says, some of these correlates are clearly connected to one another (fame and twitter following, fame and advance size, advance size and starred reviews etc). This makes it hard to be sure whether they are genuinely independently influencing with sales, or just kinda shadowing another variable. For example, author fame might show a positive correlation to sales only because it is also correlated with advance size – if you accounted for advance size (& marketing spend), fame might not be enough alone to shift books. It is possible to tease these connected variables apart statistically, but it’s not straightforward and has not yet been done, so far as I can tell. Grouping cross-correlated variables together to create an amalgamated ‘marketing’ variable is then tricksy because you run the risk of a falsely inflated correlation strength – you’re effectively double counting, if you see what I mean. So the end result – and that tantalising minimum marketing threshold produced from it – are less certain than they initially appear.

And lastly, and non-nerdily, this study was exclusively YA, (and largely from the YA world pre-shift to BookTok). People are assuming it’s directly applicable to adult fiction, and to the present day, but I think that’s a stretch. I’d LOVE VERY MUCH to see a study on adult fiction categories, and I predict there’d be the same headline take home message, but the individual correlates … Hmm, I’m not sure because:

  1. The YA community is more firmly online, and more actively on Twitter, than pretty much any other genre. Here’s a brilliant recent article by Nicole Brinkley about exactly that. So it does not follow that because twitter platforms might matter in YA sales, they also will for other genres. And let’s not even get into the Twitter-going-down-in-flames issue, but suffice to say it does not stand as a reliable marketing platform any more.
  2. Aspects like carryover, and (one of the secondary trends) ‘books that inspire yearning’ feel genre-specific to me. The peak crazes for things like post-Twilight vampires happen less markedly outside of YA. Greek myth retellings is probably the strongest contender in adult fic, but although there are definite trends in genre tastes, I’d expect carryover to be a weaker factor in areas like thrillers, epic fantasy, space operas etc.
  3. Author fame … this included things like winning major awards which, well it would be nice to think these lead to greater sales, wouldn’t it? But what about in genres generally neglected by these awards – romance, for example? So, again, it might apply outwith YA fic, but we don’t know.
  4. OTOH I’d guess the importance of book covers applies across ages/genres. Although I’d be interested in whether it’s a weaker influence in genres with tighter cover formulas, like historical romances or murder mysteries.

So essentially, while I think the overall message is probably reliable – that marketing is the only semi-reliable driver of sales, the specifics are much less certain.

Why am I bothering to critique a study that I am genuinely glad exists? It’s not to undermine the work that went into it, in the face of an uncooperative industry. I nearly didn’t post this because I don’t want to pick holes just for the sake of it. And I actually think the study’s headline message is incredibly empowering for authors. But authors feel so much pressure to do everything we possibly can to sell our books, and we are so desperate to know what to do and how to do it, that I worry people will latch onto the specific findings of this study and run with them. If I can hit 3000 Twitter followers then I’ll get another point on the viability index. If I win an award or sell at auction, I’m safe. If I make my book more hopeful & yearny it’ll sell. Etc. I know – I listened to that podcast, looked at my Twitter platform and briefly felt The Sads.

Which brings me back to my original blogpost and my rant about marketing expectations placed on authors.

The rant is not really even about me. I’ve been published to date with two indie publishers and both, within the limits of their reach, have championed my books wonderfully, worked with me on marketing, and been fully supportive of my spoonie limitations. So why am I ranting? Because I care about my friends, and the wider writing community. Because as a tranche of recent reports shows, there are mental health costs to being published. And this systemic lack of support for authors also hits marginalised creatives hardest, thus perpetuating inequalities within publishing. I get annoyed because I’m old enough and cranky enough to draw lines in the sand, but not everyone has that privilege so I’m allowed to be cranky on their behalf.

(Another caveat – this is absolutely NOT about self-publishing, which is an entirely different kettle of fish.)

So why does this messaging of ‘You must do X’ or ‘If only I do Y’ arise all the time?  

  1. It is our attempt to feel some degree of control in the face of these largely-unfathomable vagaries of book sales. We don’t know what will help move the needle so we try everything, and we believe people who holler convincingly about THIS IS THE WAY, whether that’s BookTok or newsletters or whatever. We obviously want our books to do well, so we seek out ways to help them that are within our reach.

That’s understandable, and I think finding enjoyable ways to promote your book is truly valuable. It lets you share your excitement with your social circles, and also means you feel … if not control, then at least that you’ve done your bit.

But the constantly shifting sands of exactly what you ‘need’ to be doing results in authors juggling half a dozen social media platforms, second-guessing trends and obsessing over everything. Which is exhausting, takes away from writing time, and breeds a sense of failure when you inevitably can’t keep up.

AND

  1. Bluntly, it is … comfortable for publishers if authors believe we must do all this work to help our books sell. If we are convinced book sales hinge on us making enough TikTok videos or getting enough Twitter followers, then we’re not asking them ‘Wait, what are you doing to move the needle?’

Now, to be fair, I think most of this pressure actually comes from other authors for the reason above (and bleeds over from the self-pub community, which like I said VERY DIFFERENT FISH). But there is also some upholding of it by the publishing industry, which I wish would stop.

Maybe it will, now that Dr Spencer Pray’s research has provoked so much conversation. Here’s hoping.

I’m not really talking about small publishers here, for whom the balance is a little different. However hard these publishers work (and like I said I’ve been lucky) they have less reach and so an author’s online contribution might have a relatively significant effect.

But for the bigger publishers? Different story.

For example, that GoodReads thing we were told to panic about? The books reaching 30,000+ ‘Want To Read’ adds, particularly for debuts, are almost universally where the publisher has paid for large giveaways of 50-100 books. Every giveaway entry is an automatic ‘add’ which bulks up the numbers enormously, then GoodReads uses this bulked-up number to pick ‘Most Anticipated Books’ lists and the hype machine is safely in motion. All paid for by the publisher.

BookTok? It is mostly a space for reviewers, and mostly for a very particular form of book (and there’s a WHOLE DEBATE to be had about the impact that has had on diversity rep and on acquisitions within publishers). It’s almost entirely not a space for writers trying to hustle for their own books. The best route to getting traction on Booktok is for publishers to send fancy book packages to a lot of popular reviewers and hope for the best. See how that’s absolutely not in our control? Yeah.

I could go on, but the particular instances aren’t really the point because there’s always something new being sung about anyway.

The point is we shouldn’t put the weight of book sales responsibility onto the people with the least power and lowest pay in the entire structure.

Big publishing is a business, and it’s a business that is currently squeezing the lower/medium staff tiers and cutting author pay. So sadly your marketing team, even if they love your book and want to champion it, likely don’t have the time or funds. But publishing is also, largely, full of Good People who don’t want to tell you your book is on Marketing Tier 4. So instead you’ll be told (either directly, or via online messaging) to post more on social media posts, or set up a newsletter, or, or, or. … I worry that this Spencer Pray study will get weaponised into ‘well, if you had more twitter followers’ or ‘you’re just not famous enough, sorry’.

I get it. Publishing houses should staff their publicity & marketing teams better, and pay them more. I’m not blaming anyone on the ground for the way the business is run. But I also hate seeing authors running ourselves ragged trying to guess at marketing strategies we aren’t equipped for, grasping at straws, and feeling responsible for things that are entirely out of our hands. Namely, how many copies of our books sell.

This is one reason I’m so grateful for Dr Spencer Pray’s work. It counters that pressure with hard data. Which many see as bleak, but I actually find incredibly freeing. It’s really not on us, my loves. It’s on them.

So other than ranting, do I have anything useful to say? Well, maybe.

  • I strongly recommend that you, dear fellow exhausted author, take a long look at all the things being touted as THE WAY TO SELL BOOKS, and decide whether it’s something you enjoy doing or can do very, very, very easily. If the answer to either or both those questions is ‘no’ then can I suggest you run the other way?

It is worth doing something – things that help you feel celebrated by your community, and potentially help connect with readers. Posting on Twitter might sell a copy or two or three, just like sending out newsletters might sell a few copies of your second book. And those few sales are great, I’m not dissing them. But think about how many hours you spent making Canva graphics or writing newsletters, and how much you’ll earn from the two copies it might sell, and the tradeoff isn’t very shiny. You need to be writing your next book too, remember, not just flogging this one.

So my advice is to pick the reader engagement methods that you a) like doing and b) don’t swallow up too much time & energy; and you get good at those. Try new stuff, sure, but don’t feel like you have to do anything at all.

  • At time of contract negotiations, talk with your agent about your marketing aspirations & the strategies you think the book needs to succeed. Make marketing part of the initial editor call, as well as the contract back-and-forth (that you’ll be on the margins of anyway). Ask for a marketing plan – they’re hardly set in stone, but it can’t hurt to have a framework.
  • Later on, communicate with your marketing & publicity team(s). Ask them what they’re doing and how you can best fit in with that. It’s good to know, and good to remind them that you’re there. But remember that their answers are shaped by their workloads – and might leave more responsibility with you than is proportionate to your power. If they ask you to do things you don’t feel able to do, talk it through with your agent to see whether it’s worth trying to fit it in, or pushing back. I’m a spoonie, protecting my health is vital because otherwise I break, so I’m pretty clear about that from the outset and I draw lines if I need to.
  • Remember that sales figures are largely unrelated to the quality of your book too. Dr Spencer Pray’s study supports this. (Is this depressing? Who cares – write the best book you can out of spite) Just like prizes, sales figures come down to a room of people deciding which books to support and which not to. Books that get the massive hype machine and sell millions are quite possibly great, but equally great books will sell a tiny fraction of those numbers because they were yeeted into the world with a cover reveal, two blurbs, and the author destroying their sanity on social media.
  • Stick a post-it note up somewhere saying ‘Sales Figures Are Not On You’ and look at it every week. Twice a day around publication.
  • Once more for the ones at the back, only do what you enjoy. If we are going to survive this authoring thing long term we need to hold tight to our love of it. We need to guard our mental wellbeing like mama bears. That means not spreading ourselves too thin. You have to look after yourself. No-one else carries that responsibility, because everyone other than us is running the business that our art is built on. So do what you enjoy and remember whose job it isn’t to sell books.

Rant and empowering mantras over. I hope this has been useful and hasn’t annoyed publishing professionals, or Dr Spencer Pray too much! I hate seeing writers battered by expectations to perform online; and I love seeing data analyses but I also hate our writerly instincts to read too much into absolutely everything. Without tearing the whole edifice down and starting again, publishing is going to continue to be a hard road, but we can make it gentler by being kinder to ourselves. And that starts with guarding our time and remembering to forgive ourselves the things beyond our power.

Mother Sea Island Tour

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In the lead up to Mother Sea’s publication I did a wee countdown series of social media posts visiting various islands that inspired the island in Mother Sea. It was mostly an excuse to post lots of photos and rave about lovely places, and I figure I ought to pull it all together here just in case. (In case of what, I don’t know … the fiery death of Twitter? the need to prove ownership of the photos? validation that all my effort pulling it together was worth it? … Probably that last one tbh)

Anyway, below is a slightly expanded-upon tour of the islands behind the island…

One – Iceland

Not much in common with the tropical island in Mother Sea you say? Well, no. But this place has A Lot to teach the writer about colour palettes, I think. The deceptively monochrome black sand and white glaciers and searingly blue sea are an incredible reminder that less can be more! Also in this country there is no escaping the power of an unquiet land & the persistence of folklore.

Fav folklore – The Jólakötturinn – a giant cat that eats folk who weren’t gifted new clothes at Yule

Fav experience – The northern lights. I have no photos but omg, it was all the things and more.

Two – Tierra del Fuego

Staying in higher latitudes but at the other end of the planet, the beauty of these southern islands blew me away. It’s undeniably antarctic in weather and wildlife but all my preconceived notions of that were undone by flower-strewn islands, by hummingbirds & parrots right alongside penguins & sealions. Also, partcularly relevant to Mother Sea, heartbreaking histories of colonial genocide & the loss of language & culture.

Fav folklore – Teiyin from the Yahgan ppl. A shapeshifter god, protector of children & elderly, enforcer of altruism.

Fav experience – Following in Darwin’s footsteps – I read This Ship of Darkness while I was there for extra cross-temporal-bonding! Also, steamer ducks. So round.

Least fav – my 1st ever sunburn. I did not know it *hurt*! What?

Three – Shetland (and Orkney)

Closer to home, Shetland in particular, but also Orkney, taught me that political borders don’t always mean an awful lot. That dialects and folklore follow their own paths across the sea and old trade routes still shape island identity now, regardless of what the maps say. They also taught me that teeny tiny planes are the best, and I’d probably not survive a Shetland winter.

Fav folklore – The Sea Mither (spot the #MotherSea connection!) who wrestles the dangerous Teran to calm the seas.

Fav experience – Standing in the old broch on Mousa, listening to storm petrels purr in the stones around me. And getting dive-bombed by Bonxies on Orkney mainland!

Four – The Mediterranean

Kinda cheating lumping this whole region (and the Canary Islands) into one, but doing each island individually would turn this into a book, and also there are some common strands despite the distinctive feel of each place. I love the Mediterranean garrigue ecozone. It’s so stark & distinctive & surprising. I have a huge soft-spot for cyprus stands and stone pines, and ancient olive groves. But these islands are also fascinating for studying farming’s adaptations to a hard climate, the way humans have shaped the very land & how fragile that balance is. Especially as tourism threatens rural economics, communities, water resources & conservation.

Fav mythology – The Minoan rock tombs on Crete & Lycian cliff tombs in Turkiye appear in Mother Sea. Caves & bats – what’s not to love?

Fav experience – Cretan orchids. Omg, if you’re remotely into flowers, the orchid species crowding the hillsides will give you heart failure.

Five – Seychelles

The right ocean at last! These are the closest islands to my fictitious one in Mother Sea, so a lot of the flora & fauna are similar. Seychelles taught me a hard lesson on coral reef damage & restoration, but a beautiful one on Creole language & culture. It also taught me to look beyond the glossy curated tropical paradise images for the murkier truth about the impossible value:cost trade-off of tourism on places and communities like these.

Fav folklore – An eejit Brit in 1800’s decided the coco de mer was the original forbidden fruit because it looks like a bum! And therefore that the Seychelles was the lost garden of Eden. I mean, it’s a definite paradise in some ways, but also, lol.

Fav experience – Meeting giant tortoises? Or giant fruit bats squabbling in the tree above us as we ate our dinner in the dark (hint: Mother Sea may contain bats)

Six – Madagascar

Along with France & South Asia, this is the other origin of my community in Mother Sea, so hints of Malagasy culture fed into the book. This country is a biologist’s dream and heartbreak all in one – the most mindblowing evolutionary wonders alongside some of the most heart-rending poverty and worst habitat destruction I’ve ever seen. For Mother Sea though it gave me ‘tsingy’ landscape (limestone karst) & baobab forests, pirogues & feminism & day geckoes.

Fav folklore – I was told once that bats hang upside down to show their arse to god as revenge for an offence. I cannot remember what the offence was but I love this so much.

Fav experience – An aye-aye there-&-gone in the dark, indri singing in the dawn, being unutterably lucky.

Seven – The Outer Hebrides

Finally to the place where Mother Sea began – with the history of St. Kilda & it’s abandonment. That tale of population decline, of grief and a terrible communal turning-inward because of that grief was the seed that everything else in Mother Sea grew around. And the islands of North & South Uist, Benbecula, Eriskay and Barra were also there to teach me so much about island communities, the persistence of faith, carving a living from the liminal shore.

Fav folklore – The Blue Men of the Minch. They’re blue, they shout poetry slam challenges at ship captains, they raise storms. I love them.

Fav experience – Just the startling, stunning bays – white sand and turquoise water and the steep, watchful dunes. The ruined silhouettes of churches and manor houses on lonely islets, the ghosts of brochs haunting the lochans.

Thank you for coming with me around the world! There are a couple of dozen more islands I read about, stalked online, talked to people about and dreamed of, that all fed into Mother Sea in other ways. But these are (some of) the ones I’ve lived in and loved, and left pieces of myself behind in.