The publisher takes a larger cut from the revenue because they are taking a bigger risk, financially. They should pay for the editing, the cover design, the formatting, the printing (for print versions), the marketing etc. Unless they sell a load of copies, they won’t make their money back.

  Different publishers have different ‘cultures’ when it comes to how they interact with authors. Before you sign a contract, always talk to one or two authors who write for that publisher. Contact them privately (email, DM on Twitter etc) - most authors are happy to advise. Be professional in your approach. Do not repeat things told to you in confidence. Get more than one opinion.

  If you have an agent, they will check the terms of the contract you sign with the publisher. They should also actively seek out suitable publishers and negotiate better terms (better royalty rate, narrower rights in the licence, bigger advance etc). If you don’t have an agent, both the Society of Authors and the Alliance of Independent Authors have contract vetting services available for their members. This is worth the joining fee. Please get your contracts checked before you sign!

  A lot of the larger publishers won’t take submissions unless you go through an agent. A lot of smaller publishers will have certain ‘open submissions’ windows or twitter/Facebook pitch events (Keep an eye on hashtags like #CarinaPitch and ##PitchCB).

  Independent or ‘indie’ publishing

  Indie publishing or ‘self publishing’ is new and thriving. In this case, you are effectively a small business that manages all of the steps in the publishing journey. You pay for the editing, the cover design, the formatting, the marketing up front in the hope that you will make your money back eventually. Because there is no middle man, all the net royalties (all retailers take a portion of the money!) will come to you. You can make more money per book sold. To give you an idea - for ebooks, a 99p ebook sold on Amazon will bring in 35p. A 1.99 ebook will bring in £1.39.

  Self publishing is hard work. You have to market the book yourself and sometimes, that can be really difficult. On the other hand, if you like the sense of control ... you get to control all aspects.

  Vanity publishing

  Vanity publishing is not the same as self publishing. This is when you pay a company to publish your book. They will publish your book, and be listed as the publisher. They are not obliged to market your book. Because you, the author, are paying the company, it is not a traditional publishing deal. Because you are paying them on their terms, rather than yours, and they (not you) are listed as the publisher, it’s not self publishing.

  There are a lot of companies who offer vanity publishing, but dress it up as a traditional publishing deal. If at any point a publisher asks you to pay towards the production of your book, or their contract forces you to buy a certain amount of stock - be wary. Better still, run away.

  Vanity publishing is a good option if you just want to see the book published and aren’t worried about making any money from it. If, for example, you want to get a load of books made up to commemorate an event, then this might be an option.

  There are companies who offer a full service for self publishers - so you buy their services, specifying what you want. The Alliance of Independent Authors has a list of such firms that have been vetted for reliability.

  Once again, if you’re thinking of signing a contract with one of these companies, ask around. Talk to authors who already work with them and see what their experience was like.

  Hybrid publishing

  You can do a combination of the above pathways. For example, you could have some books that are published by a traditional publisher and some that you independently publish yourself.

  A lot of people do.

  Chapter 10: Conclusions

  Read a lot. Write a lot. Submit.

  Keep at it and eventually you’ll crack it.

  The most important thing - have fun! If you don’t enjoy writing comedy, it’s going to be very hard to be funny.

  Bonus section: The basics of story writing

  Oh hello. You’re still here. (Quick, put the biscuits away. Tidy up). Ahem.

  We promised you a bonus section at the back about story writing. These are compiled from a variety of articles we’ve both written for various magazines and blogs. We both do manuscript critiques and mentoring, so we’ve tried to address the questions that come up most often. You might find a few repeated examples, but hey, why let a perfectly good example go to waste? And sorry about the crumbs. You’ve caught us on a bad day.

  1 Starting your novel - some words of advice

  "Gosh", people sometimes say to me, often from a considerable distance because I have a look in my eye that suggests I might throw things at them if they come closer, "I'd really like to write a book!" Then they look at my ragged clothes and my unheated, damp house and add, "A successful one though." And then, cautiously, sometimes poking me with a stick, "Can you give me some advice?"

  So I thought I'd use this opportunity to give that advice, without the poor souls having to come any closer to me. Can't really help with the 'successful' bit, but I can tell you about how to go about starting ...

  1. Make sure you are writing for the right reasons. Don't think you will write a book because it's a good way of getting famous, making lots of money or easy. If you think it's a good, easy way of being famous and making lots of money, then writing a book is not for you. Why not try being a contestant on a game show? It will give you your desired effect with less humiliation than writing a book.

  2. Make sure you have a Big Enough Idea. That interesting thing that happened to you once won't even fill a chapter, trust me. Your characters have to grow and change and develop over the course of a novel, and dropping an ice cream won't do that. Unless your character is the Incredible Hulk, of course, Because I imagine dropping his ice cream would make the Hulk grow and change quite a lot.

  3. Have a vague idea of which genre you are writing in and read up on those genres. For example, romance (my genre) has certain conventions. Like having a happy ending, where the couple get together. Now, you can break that convention, but it will mean your book will veer into become 'women's fiction', or worse, fall somewhere in between the two, and publishers may shake their heads and mutter, and, as a first time author, you don't want to give a publisher the chance to shake their head and mutter. Know Your Genre.

  Trust me, romance and the happy ending does not have to mean 'fluffy' books. But work with the conventions.

  4. Write. And, whilst writing, ask yourself if everything you are putting in that book is necessary. Remember what I said about characters growing and changing (and possibly ripping their trousers, if they are the Hulk)? Well, every word must either move your story on or develop your characters. No lengthy discussions about dresses, please.

  5. Finish it. Doesn't matter if you hate it by the time you get to the end, we all hate every word we've written once we get to the end. But the road to Writing a Novel is paved with unfinished first chapters, you need to stick with it and keep going. It will feel like pulling teeth and you will pray for death around about 50,000 words, but Keep Going. We will talk about making something readable out of what you've written, later. For now, just finish the damn book.

  When you've written these words, you have my permission to go and eat a lot of chocolate. Or biscuits. Or cake ... look, just go and eat everything you can see. It's fine. You're a writer now, it's what we do...

  2 Characters

  Building a hero

  Do you have a constant procession of imaginary people walking through your life?

  Annoying, isn't it? When you start to feel that they are better than your real friends (well, of course they are, they do everything they are told!), more amenable, probably richer and better looking too, unless your real friends are - I dunno - the Beckhams or something. Because imaginary people have to be like real people, only more so.

  Now I'm here to talk about heroes in books, particularly in romantic fiction (because those are the books wot I write, and therefore I have a vague idea what goes into them).

  The men can't just be normal men; ok most of the time, bit crap at helping with the housework, fairly clueless when you are upset but basically decent. No. They have to have hair of ebony, eyes like liquid chocolate, muscles that fill their clothes out and generally they smell of something luscious and exotic, like lemons and cold air. They are always empathic, touchy-feely, as full of hugs as a HobNob is full of crunch. They are, not to put too fine a point on it, sickening. If they have a flaw it will be one that makes them that little bit more attractive - they will be devoted to the memory of their dead wife, or single-minded in their pursuit of the life that they want (and the heroine).

  If they have a physical flaw, like a scar or a missing limb, it will have been sustained rescuing orphans from a house fire, being caught in crossfire whilst serving in a military unit somewhere troubled or saving a puppy from a runaway vehicle. It won't, for example, have been sustained falling downstairs while catastrophically drunk. Because your average hero doesn't get drunk, unless he's drinking to forget his (equally picturesque) sorrows. He doesn't overdo it at a party, walk into a lampost, sustaining a nasty cut to the forehead which scars in an unpleasantly puckered way, and then spend the rest of his night with his head down the toilet. No! For he is a Romance Hero...

  When you come to Build Yourself a Man (can I recommend putting the eyeballs in last?) consider not just the muscles, they way his thighs bulge in his jeans, his sparkling eyes, the way he loves his mother, his dog and his job and how fabulous he is at everything he does. Consider, instead, making sure that he feels real to your reader. Even readers who are reading for the pure escapism and want their heroes to be billionaire sex-gods with biceps of iron, designer suits and an orphaned niece who needs bringing up, want a hint of believability in this man. They want to think that they just might run into him (or his poorer, slightly less muscly and dressed in Top Man younger brother) down their High Street on a Saturday night. They need a thread of believability running through their general Weave of Perfection.

  Give him something he's bad at. Whilst a man being good at something is ineffably sexy, a man who isn't afraid to admit his imperfections is just as sexy. Show him making mistakes (and putting them right). Yes, he can be attractive, but he has to feel attainable.

  Building a heroine

  Not literally. I mean, Doctor Frankenstein has pretty much cornered that market and look how it turned out for him...

  So. You need a heroine for your Rom Com and the likelihood is that your reading audience is female, so they are going to identify like mad with this woman. She’s your ‘placeholder’ in the book (the person the reader puts themselves into in the story), so she’s got to be someone your reader can like, sympathise with, shout at and, basically be for the duration of your story.

  Who is this woman?

  When I’m coming up with likely heroines to carry my books, I start out with something I call ‘if this, then this’. It’s just a way of making sure that your character is well-rounded and feels real. It goes a bit like this:

  Heroine wears glasses.

  That’s just a throwaway description, right? Okay, so let’s take it back a bit. She’s painfully short sighted (which may give rise to some comedy situations later), so you’ve decided that she will wear glasses that she can lose at some opportune moment.

  But. To your heroine (who doesn’t, remember, know that she’s in a book), wearing glasses is a very real part of her life. Short sightedness won’t have just happened overnight, she probably wore glasses at school. Remember school? How if you didn’t look exactly like whatever the image of perfection was when you were there (when I was at school it was Cleopatra, I’m that old) then you were bullied? The extent of the bullying depended generally on your friendship group and their resilience. So, the chances are, your heroine was bullied at school and called Speccy-Four-Eyes or similar.

  How will that have affected her? Has it made her shy? Scared to meet new people? Or the converse, has it made her bolshy, noisy, the first person to point out her own imperfections and maybe make a joke about them? If she’s shy, how does that affect her ability to talk to men (your hero)? If she’s scared to meet new people, then how does your hero come into her orbit? If she’s bolshy and noisy, does that put him off her at first? Does he see through her bluster and want to get to know her better or does he decide that she’s a bit too much to take?

  It doesn’t have to be wearing glasses. Your heroine might be a willowy red-head with model-girl looks (she will have been called ‘beanpole’ and ‘ginge’ at school, of course), but maybe she has a limp from a tragic accident when she was younger. But that limp won’t be purely cosmetic, not just something to detract from her otherwise flawless beauty – it will be something that stops her running upstairs to a ringing phone. Stops her walking miles across country when her car breaks down. She has to think about shoes in terms of practicality, not prettiness. It actually affects her life.

  In other words, make your heroine a complete person. She’s more than the sum of her parts. And while we’re on the subject of parts – please, please do not have your heroine think about herself in terms like ‘I tossed my glossy blonde ringlets over my shoulder, slipped into the size eight jeans that made my legs look even longer and dusted just a touch of unnecessary make up over my flawless skin and sparkling green eyes’. All right, I may have slightly overdone this for emphasis, but it makes the point. Who thinks about themselves like this? If it’s someone you know in real life, I suggest you get them help, because they are going to soliloquy themselves to death one day, in lonely physical perfection. In my experience, the only person to think of a woman like this, is a man. Maybe you are a man – I rule nothing out – but you are writing a woman that your readers want to be, remember, not to date or, as is more likely, dislike intensely. Keep her real. She doesn’t have to be insecure about herself, but she’s still unlikely to think about how wonderful she is, as in my example above. And, for the love of all that is holy, she will not, ever, at any time, think about how big her boobs are. Unless she’s thinking that they are too big to fit into any nice clothes, or too small to properly fill a bikini. For most women, boobs are annoying, and almost always the wrong size. Men writing women, take note.

  Okay, now you’ve got your heroine and she’s nicely imperfect, but friendly and approachable to your reader. She doesn’t have to be nice all the time, but if she’s bitchy or unpleasant then make sure that you show exactly why she is that way. Your reader wants to either be her, or be her best friend, and anything that puts them off will distance them from your book (which is something you do not want).

  Now, the point of a Romance is not only to get your hero and heroine together, but to watch them grow and change as people as a result of being together. So you need some form of character arc for your heroine. Remember, she must finish the book as a different person to the one who started the book (not literally, obviously, that would make it Science Fiction and there, I’m afraid, I am not qualified to comment). She needs to have sufficient background and motivation to learn more about herself and become a better person throughout your story. So, when you dream up your heroine, do make sure that you’ve got someone who’s got enough backstory to make this possible. She doesn’t have to be an orphaned street urchin from the slums of Birmingham struggling to overcome the death of her disabled brother at the hands of their depraved uncle who tried to sell them into sexual slavery, despite her disfiguring scars, to fund his life threatening Werthers Original addiction. That’s an awful lot of backstory, and also possibly a Saga, rather than a Rom Com. Throw an extra generation in there and you’ve got ten books’ worth of material. I’m not saying you can’t deal with dark material in your heroine’s past (I daren’t, I’ve written disabled heroines and ones with tragically horrible pasts), but a little goes a long way. Plus your heroine has to believably overcome her past to forge a new, and happier, future with your hero, so. You know. Light hand with the abuse, and all that.

  While I’m here, just a word about TSTL heroines. This stands for ‘Too Stupid To Live’ and is a common curse that strikes heroines in romances. Your heroine starts out as a strong, independent-minded woman with a career, her own home, and very nice shoes and ends up as a simpering mess, swooning on the manly chest of your hero, who is busy saving her from a life of debauchery and asking customers if they want fries with that. She makes stupid mistakes, or doesn’t ask the right questions, simply because the story dictates it. She is the equivalent of the horror film character who doesn’t turn on the lights when entering the spooky basement. Remember that meeting the hero should enhance your heroine’s life, but it’s not the be all and end all of it; she’s a strong and independent-minded woman at the end of the book, and has only changed for the better as a result of our hero. Also remember to show us that she’s strong and independent, not just tell us. There’s nothing worse than being told how good a heroine is at her job, only to then have pages and pages of said heroine simpering girlily (yes, it is a word. Because I said so) and swooning and/or crying a lot.

  She doesn’t know she’s in a book. If she does something daft, explain why she does it. Show her realising how daft it was. Show how she grows in experience or self-knowledge as a result.

  Show how the hero enhances her life, rather than taking it over. And, incidentally, show her enhancing his life too. The reader should believe that this relationship is going to last beyond the last page of the book – it doesn’t have to be Happy Ever After, but they should be able to believe that it is, at least, a Happy For Now. Your heroine ends the book in a better place than she was when it started, and has become a better person for knowing your hero. As they close the book after the last page, you want your reader to sigh and think ‘what a lovely couple. I wish I knew them in real life,’ not ‘I give it six months before she’s killed him with a pencil.’

 

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