CLARENDON HOUSE PUBLICATIONS

All of the things discussed in this series - incompleteness, the Zeigarnik Effect, blurbs, pitches, cover designs and all the rest - why should you have to bother with them?   Aren’t they the province of publishers?   Don’t writers just write and then hand everything over to someone else to get it to readers?   That’s the way it used to be, and still is to some extent. Traditional publishing is still alive. Publishers are still in the business of creating books and selling th

True story: there I was, trapped under a five foot thick concrete beam, breathing in poisonous chlorine fumes, and receiving an electric shock…   Probably the worst physically hazardous situation I’ve ever been in, though the build-up to it is a little more prosaic.   In the 1980s, I was part of a volunteer organisation which operated out of an old six story building in downtown Sydney, Australia. For many years, they had had a rat problem: thousands upon thousands of these r

I once found myself within a foot or so of the famous ‘Discworld’ author, Terry Pratchett. Through a series of extraordinary events, I found myself trapped in a hotel during a Discworld convention: the entire building was swarming with people in wizard and witch costumes, chatting incomprehensibly with each other, behaving in that rather odd and distinctly uncomfortable way that people behave at such events, a kind of half-in, half-out of character 'performance', loud and sli

I was once fortunate enough to speak with Monty Roberts at one of his shows in the 1990s. Roberts is an American horse trainer who promotes his techniques of natural horsemanship through his Join-Up International organisation, believing that horses use a non-verbal language, which he terms ‘Equus’. Roberts' original best-seller, The Man Who Listens to Horses , (prompted, it is claimed by Queen Elizabeth after she had seen his horse training methods) marked the beginning of in

Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird  is a good example of how a narrative can be structured so that the reader can be both drawn into the story by a vulnerable character and yet guided through it by a narrator. Lee paints Scout as a naive and innocent young girl who at the beginning of the novel is just beginning school. Scout’s encounter with racism and brutality is told to us through the older and wiser Scout, the narrating voice who can interject at times to point the way o

After the blurb comes the pitch.   The ‘pitch’ is a fuller synopsis of your story. You’ll need this to talk to agents or publishers. You’ll need it to talk to yourself when you lose track of what you’re doing.   The pitch isn’t aimed at readers, particularly.   To put together a good pitch you need to understand at least some of the elements of the craft of writing. There are plenty of guides out there about how to write a pitch, and several of them use the terminology common

It’s hard to remember now what life was like fifty or so years ago: no computers (except for vast, bulky machines locked in vaults, with lights blinking and wheels whirring), no mobile phones (not even the brick-like, hand-wound things that came out a decade or so later), and of course no internet or social media. Messages had to be written out by hand; televisions had to be switched on and off using buttons and dials on the set itself; telephones belonged in kiosks placed ar

To sell your books, you need to make maximum use of the idea of incompleteness .   Firstly, you need to reduce your story or novel down to one sentence.   Try to craft a sentence which contains a contrast between a settled, ordered state and a messy, disordered alternative. You need to begin with familiarity and then swiftly introduce obstacles or threats to that familiarity.   A very basic one sentence pitch is:   ‘When a big threat of incompleteness happens to a particular