About telling the truth

Last weekend (23rd November, 2013) I was in Winchester speaking at the Lighting the Spark conference organised by SCBWI - the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators (UK bit). In case you haven't come across it, SCBWI is an excellent and supportive organisation run by and for writers and illustrators, both published and unpublished.

I'd been looking forward to going to the conference for months. As it approached, and problems at home multiplied, I kept all digits crossed, but finally got there. And then - after a a lovely evening with Crabbit Nicola Morgan and OUP designer/illustrator Lily Trotter, I got food poisoning. Aaargh. All looked in jeopardy. But Nicola and the wonderful and kind Kathryn Evans found me a dungeon to lurk in until five minutes before my slot and I got through. We had a lively session, thanks to the great audience, but I was only about 10% sparkle and I'm very sorry if I disappointed anyone who felt they had squandered their mid-morning slot on me. At least Lily didn't disappoint.

Lily and I were talking together about writing and illustrating for the education market and non-fiction. There seems to be a massive misconception that these two are the same thing. I wanted to use part of our session to help straighten that out, but in the event only touched on that. We decided instead to have a massive conversation with the audience, a Q&A session, which was much more fun. But in case you actually wanted to know what non-fiction covers, I'll put here what I didn't say there.

(I'm going to illustrate this post with my own books simply because I don't need permission to use the illustrations and I already have the covers on my computer. Please don't think I want you to buy them, or think they are better than other books. There are no links to buy - this is not a promotional post.)  

Types of non-fiction

Like all writing you want to sell, if you write non-fiction you need to identify your market and write for it. There are, roughly, four types of market for non-fiction. (I'm talking about books here. There are lots of markets for articles and other stuff, too.) You can write for:

Proper educational markets - academic books and text books.You'll find these books in classrooms and in school and university libraries. If you can find a school library.

Some text books are used for home-schooling, or for people providing extra work/tuition at home. I don't generally write these at all. Many are written by teachers with expertise in how the subject is taught. Although it is very easy to develop expertise in a subject, expertise in how it is taught really only comes from teaching it. That's how you find out which methods work and which bits people find hard. There are also open learning books, which are course books for people who don't have face-to-face tutorial support. It's quite a specialist area, and as most of it is now delivered online it's not a market that's generally reached through traditional publishers. The exception is teaching English as a foreign language, which is pretty much dominated by one or two big publishers.

Academic books are not for children. I have written them, but only in my area of academic expertise. If you have a PhD/academic teaching experience, you might be able to write academic books. But you won't get any worthwhile money from it, so you might not want to.

 Schools and libraries - books that are not used as teaching texts, but often support areas of the curriculum or provide extra information about topics and subjects a child might be introduced to in school. You'll find these books in libraries, school libraries, and sometimes in bookshops. If you want to write these, you'll have to get to grips with the National Curriculum and various bits of the US state curricula, but they are not specifically curriculum-coverage books.




 
Trade - general non-fiction which is not linked to the curriculum or school subjects. These are usually on topics children are interested in but don't have to learn - ballet, vehicles, spies, crafts, dinosaurs, space.. that kind of thing. it also includes some types of novelty book - such as origami instructions with packs of paper, or pop-up non-fiction books. You'll find these books in normal high-street bookshops. If you can find a high-street bookshop.

Mass market - often cheaply produced in large print runs, and entirely uneducational - such as joke books, books of random facts, books about sport and games. This includes puzzle and quiz books and some types of novelty title.They are often sold in discount bookshops and through organisations such as Book People.






And finally... educational books are not only non-fiction. There are educational books that are stories. They can be:

Stories written specifcally to be part of reading schemes or as graded or levelled books. You'll need to understand about reading levels, sometimes write to a brief, and take account of things that are and are not allowed to make the texts acceptable to a wide range of children. Many are based around school or home environments, or involve pets or other animals. They will have to fit in with a list or series so that teachers know what to expect and can plot each child's progress.

 Stories for reluctant or slow readers. This is my favourite market, but it's very challenging. You need to come up with plots, characters and themes appropriate to older children, then present them in accessible language and with simple syntax but without ever being patronising. It's a special skill - if you want to write flowery description and slowly unfurling plots, this is not for you.

Retellings of classics or traditional tales. What it says on the tin. Some people don't approve of these as they say - quite rightly - that the point of a book is not just its story. But some children are drawn to read the full text later because they liked a retelling. These are not a chance for being imaginative. You need to distill the essence of the story and (as long as the publisher allows it) a feel for the style of the original, and know where to cut (no room for a full Dickensian cast).



Of course, there's loads of other things to say about writing non-fiction/educational books. But I have to go and write about dinosaurs and maths, so they will have to wait for another day.

Don't be a rhinovirus

I don't usually do this - write a post that just directs you to go and read something else - but I'll make an exception for this one because anyone who writes

"My field of expertise is complaining, not answers. I know there’s no point in demanding that businesspeople pay artists for their work, any more than there is in politely asking stink bugs or rhinoviruses to quit it already. It’s their job to be rapacious and shameless."

deserves it. Tim Kreider, writing in the New York Times on why writers should (almost) always refuse to write for free. With the added bonus of a template 'No' email you can use to turn down such 'offers of exposure' as the offending people consider them. (Not as shouty as the Harlan Ellison video.)

You're not my market... (probably)

I wonder if I'm doing this book thing all wrong. I'm at least not doing it the same way as everyone else. This thought was prompted by two things. One was Nicola Morgan's blog post on why she is no longer going to buy postcards to promote books. The other was a little dispute on a Facebook page for a writers' group. Oh, and a question in Book Witch's income survey (which you must look at if you haven't seen it yet) about how many review copies authors send out themselves.

The dispute followed a spate of self-published writers posting buy-my-book spam to the page. I remarked that I don't buy books because the author recommends them, and I don't buy self-published (e or otherwise) children's books at all. The predictable response followed - I'm a snob, I'm behind the times, I'm missing out on lots of good books, we can't believe there are still people like you.... Interesting, isn't it? The assumption is that I don't buy them because I don't expect them to be good, or I'm some kind of Luddite.

But that's not it at all. One reason that I buy and read children's books is because I write them and I need to know the state of the market. I enjoy them too, of course, but my market research reading is well, to research the market. Other reading time I often read books that aren't for children - for variety.

There is no room in my market-research book budget for self-published children's books because I need to know what mainstream publishers are publishing - what has already been done, who is publishing which type of books, and so on. I don't need to know what self-publishers are doing. If anything, their only value in terms of market research is to show me what mainstream publishers are not publishing. (I know not all self-published books have been rejected by mainstream publishers.) If a self-published book is very successful, that shows me what readers are buying. But I'm not selling to readers. I will say that again because you probably don't believe it.

I'm not selling to readers. I'm selling to publishers.

I'm not selling books. I'm selling manuscripts that are the raw material of books that still need input from editors, designers and layout artists. And sometimes illustrators. Publishers and bookshops sell books to readers. I sell manuscripts to publishers. You don't see Rio Tinto selling lumps of metal to the public, do you? No, they sell to - eg - cutlery-makers and those cutlery-makers sell spoons to the public. Selling the books is the publisher's job, not mine. I know a lot of people will disagree with that. So no, I don't send out review copies at my own expense; I don't print cards and bookmarks with my own money; I don't even promote my books on this blog - which was originally anonymous, and so would have been useless as a promotional tool. That's not to say I won't do any promotion at all for my favourite books. But I won't spend money on promotion because - as Nicola Morgan points out - it just doesn't pay.

(I'm not suggesting other writers aren't selling to the public or are doing the wrong thing. This is just my position, and it works for the type of books I write and the type of relationship I have with publishers.)

Peeping over the parapet

I've not been here for a while. Not because I don't like this blog any more, or my dear readers, but because I haven't had time. I know, you've heard all that before. But here's a little post on what you should and shouldn't have time for when things get tricky.

Things you can definitely ignore:
Dust bunnies and dead flies on the windowsill
twitter
Spam asking you to send free books to yet another worthy cause
Reading other people's blogs, including this one
All online groups of any kind, even the seemingly relevant writery ones

A few years ago, everyone was banging on about if you have a blog you have to blog every day, or at least every other day. Personally, I've never agreed with that. That model might apply if your blog is primarily a leisure-interest type of blog rather than a professional-skills type of blog. But I don't imagine there are readers out there checking every day to see if there's a new post n this blog. Most of my readers are writers and have better things to do. I think you should blog when you have something to say that's worth hearing and otherwise shut up and do something else.

But sometimes you can have things that should be said and still not have the time to say them properly. For various reasons, that's been the case here for the last few months. Not regular, run-of-the-mill, I-have-lots-of-work-and-a-family-to-care-for reasons, but compelling out-of-the-ordinary reasons. Something has to give way when time is short. As I already never watch TV, there was no opportunity to recoup a few hours a day in the way most people could if they needed to.

The one thing that can't slip is writing - at least, the writing that is already commissioned and has a deadline. The novel my agent wants but for which there is no contract is on a back burner so far back it's fallen down between the cooker and the wall. But blog posts - who will notice if there isn't one for a few weeks? No one pays me to write a blog. I write it because I like to engage with you lovely people out there and hear your views, and because feel strongly that those of us with some knowledge of how publishing works from the writer's side of the fence shoud help other writers by sharing.

We've all met people who say 'I'd write a book if I had the time.' Well, it's not their job to write books, so they can say that, just as I can say I'd grow more vegetables if I had the time. It would be nice, but it's not necessary - I can carry on buying vegetables from Waitrose. But if I don't keep on writing, I can't buy anything from Waitrose. So that's the thing that can't slip. If I were a surgeon, I wouldn't stop doing surgery because my child was ill, or I was having trouble with the builders, or the house was a real mess and could do with a thorough clean. So I'll lurk behind the parapet and do things that have to be done.

These are my parapet priorities:

1. Keep self and child alive - enough shopping and cooking, caring and cossetting to keep us functional and resaonably happy.
2. Meet writing deadlines. And do the writing to a high standard. Not only is it unprofessional to let standards slip, cutting corners is a false economy as the editor will just come back for changes later and be less likely to commission more books. I've worked for years and years to get this reputation and I'm not going to let it slide now.
3. Talk to editors - warning them there might be problems lets them make contingency plans. Actually, when times are difficult I try to get stuff in early - because I know I can't leave it until the last minute in case there's a crisis. I think my longest-standing editors know that if I'm delivering early, things are tricky.
4. Keep responding to enquiries and commissions. I'll need more books to write later and so the time that goes into lining up later work can't be skipped.
5. Commitments to other people - sys admining blogs I have agreed to sys admin, preparation for conferences I've agreed to speak at, turning up to things (according to how important my turning up is to anyone else, not to how much I want to go). Responding to email/messages comes into that category, too. If you don't have time to respond, at least set up a polite autoresponse - it takes seconds.
6. Facebook, blog, twitter, etc - I've not been on twitter more than a couple of times in three months. I don't think my absence from twitter will be noticed. I dip in and out of Facebook as it's my main way of keeping in touch with friends, but I've done nothing with my professional pages as they really don't matter. No one cares that much.

Perhaps that's the point. Regarding most publicity, no one cares (except you) whether you do your publicity/profiling stuff or not. A big book launch is an exception, but the day-to-day 'don't forget me' stuff - it can slide. You can pick it up later. Write a book rather than a blog post. Oh. On that note - I have a few books to write.

Back below the parapet...

Vampires forever

I don't usually link from here to my posts on ABBA, but this one is less ABBAy than usual - my theory about vampires...

And it's a slight excuse for my absence. The real reason has been summer school and now builders. But soon. I'll write something soon.