I Am Working On A Website!

I know, I know. As if I don't have enough trouble maintaining this blog without tearing my hair out, I now have a website.

There's not much in it right now, and it looks rather, well, dull. But over the next couple of weeks I'll be stuffing it chock-full of all sorts of publishing-related goodness, and will do my best to glue some sparkly stuff onto it so that it looks a lot nicer.

If anyone would like to volunteer their technical expertise to help me make it look just a little more interesting I'd be thrilled. It would stop me bunging up the internet with Copydex and glitter, too.

A Horror Story For Halloween

Over the years I’ve read lot of publishing-related horror stories. I’ve read about writers who cheated and were cheated, publishers who ran away with wives as well as money and rights, and literary agents who ended up in prison for their sins. But the one story which stands out for me is the one about a writer who in her attempts to get published managed to hook up with a dangerously clueless agent, an incompetent ghost-writer (who also happened to be an incompetent literary agent), a vanity publisher and a plagiarism charge. Along the way she attracted negative attention from just about every publishing- and writing-related website, offended many people including the high-profile writer whose work was plagiarised, had a few wiccan curses thrown around on her behalf, insisted none of it was her fault as she had high blood pressure, and provided me with one of the most absorbing demonstrations of How To Look Foolish On The Internet that I have ever encountered. I have to admire her dedication: but her determination to be published no matter what, and her refusal to even consider that she’d done anything wrong makes her attempts to be published a failure of quite epic proportions. I give you the story of Lanaia Lee.

Two years ago, a writer called Lanaia Lee sent her novel, Of Atlantis, to the Dear Author site for possible review. One of Dear Author’s readers duly began to read it… and wondered why the text seemed just a touch familiar. After not much digging at all, the reader realised that Lee’s opening chapter was almost word-for-word identical to the best-selling David Gemmell’s book, Dark Prince. Compare the two:

Lee: The golden-haired child sat alone, as he usually did, and wondered whether his Father would die today

Gemmell: The golden-haired child sat alone, as he usually did, and wondered whether his father would die that day

Dear Author reacted with typical style and published a fantastic blog post in place of its review: its now-infamous Top 10 Tips For Plagiarists. The post was quickly picked up by Making Light, and by Absolute Write, and slowly the story unfolded.

It turned out that Lanaia had paid a ghost-writer $400 a month for nearly two years to write her book for her, and that the ghost-writer had been responsible for the initial plagiarism. That ghost-writer was Christopher Hill, of the Hill and Hill Agency, a Scotland-based literary agent who had worked hard at making no sales at all.

For some time Hill had represented Lee but had failed to sell her books: with hindsight this is not surprising as although Hill reported in some depth to his author-clients, listing publishers’ comments and providing detailed lists of revisions which those publishers had apparently asked for, he never once made a sale. Many of his clients believed that they were on the brink of being published by major houses but shortly before the Lania Lee story broke one of his clients learned that the publishers who had, according to Hill, offered him a book deal, had never even heard of him, his book, or Hill. A little investigation revealed that this was true for all the writers Hill represented, most of whom believed they were about to be signed: at that point Hill claimed to have left the country, although I’ve been told that he actually remained at home in his Scottish bungalow throughout the whole fandango.

Meanwhile, back to Lee. Because she hadn’t committed the initial plagiarism by copying Gemmell’s work into “her” book, Lee insisted that she was not guilty of plagiarism. She left Gemmell’s chapter up on her website to showcase “her” work and when she was urged to take the work down she issued the following statement on her website intended for her (by now, many) critics:

I have erractic hypertension, you keep dogging me I could have another stroke, contact my agent and attorney, I’m sure no one wants mt blood on their hands. [sic]

And then Lee’s new literary agent stepped into the ring: one Cheryl Pillsbury, an author who had published one of her own books with XLibris, another with Outskirts Press, and two more with PublishAmerica. Those three publishers have more in common than just publishing Ms Pillbury’s books: they’re all vanity presses. Accounts of Pillsbury’s agenting sales vary: but all report a very low number, and all report sales only to vanity presses. Perhaps realising that she couldn’t make a living with such a paltry record Pillsbury began AG Press, the pay-to-play imprint which was going to package Lee’s book in order for it to be published by Roval Publishing which was, you’ve guessed it, another vanity press. With this grounding in publishing quaking beneath her, Pillsbury arrived at Making Light with her fists up, and commented,

For people who throw stones at glasses houses should be very cautious about speaking before they know the truth. Slander can cause a major lawsuit from the author and the publisher mentioned, because I will make sure they know about this and dear Jane will have nightmares in 10 fold. Yes, I'm Wicca.

I was just informed, the author has already set the motions for the lawsuit, be prepared. You were told by the lawyer not to post anything related to this issue, first amendement does not apply. I have made a copy of this site for proof, see you soon. Have a ducky day.

(The Jane who Pillsbury referred to there is from Dear Author.) While several online writing communities were outraged by Lee’s actions, Victoria Strauss took a kinder view. She had already written extensively about Christopher Hill and when the Lee story broke cover, Victoria wrote,

I find it completely plausible that the ripoff of Gemmell was Hill's work, not Lanaia's. It would be absolutely typical of Hill to do something like this to screw over a client--especially one who'd twigged to his scam.

Even today, Lanaia Lee is promoting that plagiarised book, Of Atlantis. A book she paid Hill thousands of dollars to write; which was represented by a fee-charging agent with a history of vanity publishing; which was published by fee-charging Roval Publishing. She is a wheelchair-bound stroke victim who has wasted thousands of dollars on this book and in the process has become infamous. I doubt, however, that she’s sold more than a few copies of “her” book.

See, I told you it was a horror story.

How To Test A Copy Editor

A good copy editor can significantly improve a book in all sorts of subtle and beautiful ways; a bad one can slash-and-burn their way through a manuscript and render it almost unreadable.

If you've ever considered hiring a copy editor to look at your work before you send it off to publishers or agents, here's a handy list of questions to ask before you trust them with your book. Read every word. Learn it off by heart. This is why professional editors are to be respected and adored.

How To Find A Good Literary Agent

A couple of weeks ago, a thread began at Absolute Write about a new and as-yet unproved agent. Said agent rocked up; questions were asked; a magnificent bun-fight ensued. After a few frustrating days the uproar moved to a part of Aboslute Write's forum which is not Google-cached (I doubt that the agent concerned realised how lucky he was with that); and it culminated in this particularly unprofessional tweet from him here.


This witty and concise livejournal post from Beth Bernobich provides a treasure-trove of linky background about the agent concerned: it's pretty safe to say that he has a history of being argumentative and confrontational online which doesn't bode well for how he might behave when negotiating a particularly difficult contract, or when dealing with editors who reject the books he represents; and I'm not convinced that a few years working in the book division of a product-licensing company is extensive enough experience, or is even appropriate, for anyone intending to embark on a career as a literary agent.


If you read through all the links supplied, you'll find plenty of reasons not to submit to the agent concerned: his lack of experience, his argumentative nature, and the extraordinarily bad advice he gave about children's books all count against him. But without all those things on a plate in front of them, how can writers avoid the agents who might not serve them best?


To paraphrase James McDonald, the job of a literary agent is not an entry-level position. If you're looking for a literary agent you'd be wise to avoid submitting to the new and unproved, no matter how well-behaved they are online. Wait a year and see how well they do: the bottom line is that a good literary agent will make sales to good publishers, at no up-front cost to the authors they represent.

I Think I'm Back

Many apologies for the long break in transmission.

Thanks to odd things happening with my blogger account, my ISP deciding I didn't really know who I was, and a particularly nasty troll, I've been unable to do anything with my blogs for a couple of weeks now.

I think I've got everything nearly back to normal: forgive me if you've commented over the last few weeks but your comment hasn't yet appeared, I'll be trawling through all comments and slowly approving them as I get time. I've lost a couple of weeks' worth of planned blog posts, so have some work ahead of me to get back on track: meanwhile, I appreciate your patience. I've been venting a little on Twitter if anyone's interested.

Now, where were we?

How I Got Published (Part II): Daniel Blythe

A little later than planned, here's the second part of Daniel Blythe's account of how he became a professional, published writer (you can read the first part here). Read and it and boggle.


No publisher, no new book on the horizon and a dearth of new ideas and enthusiasm – that's where I was when we left my publishing career in 2000, with a new baby taking up a lot of the spare time anyway. I was down, but didn't really have time to think about it.

During this time my agent tried, and failed, to sell my novel for 8-to-12-year-olds to every children's publisher in town. They just didn't want to know. I had no idea what I was doing wrong. It felt like when you get on a losing streak at Scrabble and just can't get back into that winning groove. I wanted to scream from the rooftops "I am PUBLISHED, for God's sake. Four novels! Count 'em! Do you think I am some newbie wannabe?" At one point (such was the state of my confidence) I remember saying to my agent, "You are *telling* them about my previous books, aren't you...?"

However. One of the publishers with whom my agent had made connections was David Shelley at Allison and Busby, and I started to talk to him about an 80s film book – which turned in to an 80s music book. Despite David being a few years younger than me we shared similar musical tastes and the book, a 500-page whopper, slowly took shape during 2001 and was published, first in hardback and then in paperback. It got extensively reviewed in regional papers up and down the country, got me lots of radio interest and even, thanks to an enterprising chap at BBC Leeds called John Ryan (who is now running BBC Radio Manchester) a co-presenting slot on an Eighties radio show. Suddenly, I was not only a non-fiction writer but also a DJ too!

Thanks to The Encyclopaedia of Classic 80's Pop, I had re-invented myself. More non-fiction followed – Dadlands: The Alternative Handbook for New Fathers for Wiley, about my experiences of fatherhood, and I Hate Christmas: A Manifesto for the Modern-day Scrooge for Allison and Busby. Both still get a bit of media interest to this day. My agent was doing a great job – putting me out there, matching me up with editors who liked my ideas. And now, a new novel finally came to fruition, in the form of a manuscript called Cruel Summer which I had been working on since 2003. Another 500-page whopper, it ended up being called This Is The Day (my agent suggested Cruel Summer was "a bit too Bananarama") and it was sold to Allison & Busby in 2006, appearing as a trade paperback in 2007 and – hooray! – this time, finally, a paperback a year later. A wine-and-nibbles launch at Blackwells helped shift a few copies, as did some more radio slots. Although the half-promised Richard and Judy appearance for I Hate Christmas hadn't materialized, I had good reason to be thankful to my new publishers.

Diversity, survival, eclecticism – these were my new watchwords. I started up a novel class for the Workers' Educational Association, still running to this day. A chance encounter with some Writers In Schools and a conference workshop by the inspirational Two Steves got me inspired to go into primary schools, delivering workshops and doing author "appearances". The paying gigs began to pile up. More non-fiction commissions came along – the latest being two books for Pen & Sword. My agent sold my idea for X Marks the Box: How to Make Politics Work for You, a political book for non-political people, to Icon Books – a small publisher in the Faber distribution network. That was written with the support of the Authors' Foundation, and will be out soon. And I successfully applied for an Arts Council award in 2008 to write my new children's book – which my agent still believes in, and is still trying to find a home for.

I also returned to the Doctor Who fold when the BBC's Creative Consultant, Justin Richards (himself a writer of hugely popular books for young people) invited me to write one of the Autumn 2009 books featuring David Tennant – last chance to write for the Tenth Doctor before he stands down! I jumped at the chance, and wrote Doctor Who: Autonomy in an intense 7-month period. The "Doctor Who" books are a very different proposition now – they are written by invitation, rather than the editors accepting unsolicited ideas. They are shorter and punchier than the chunky 90s novels and aimed at a younger readership. They have, of course, a huge publicity machine behind them, "Doctor Who" now being a massive, populist, multi-media success story (rather than the slightly embarrassing anachronism it was seen as in the early 1990s). And – somewhat less in the authors' favour – they now pay on the basis of a fixed fee, rather than an advance and royalties. So, not much wiggle-room for my agent to negotiate on. But it is a good fixed fee, and there is a bonus built in once the title sells over a certain number of copies. And, for goodness' sake, I needed the work, and I know I can write "Doctor Who" – I have been a fan since I first cowered behind a cushion at Davros in 1975.

So now, here I am – a working and teaching writer, an educator, an Author In Schools, a sometime radio presenter, and still a would-be children's writer. What have I learned from all this? That you need to diversify to survive, and never take anything for granted. That you just keep plugging away. And that if you have a good agent, hang on to them through thick and thin – this spring, I mark thirteen years with mine, and I'm hoping neither of us is going anywhere else in the foreseeable future.


My thanks to Dan for suggesting this series to me, and for kicking it off so very well. If any publishers are reading, Dan's two excellent children's books (both with good series potential) remain unpublished; and if any writers reading this have a good publication story to tell, I'd be very pleased to hear about it.

I May Be Some Time (Again)

Here's the thing. Remember that new computer which rescued me from having to undergo a complete internet withdrawal a couple of weeks ago? Well, it's slowly collapsing under the weight of its own short circuits, and so it looks like I'm going to actually have to buy a new computer now.

If I don't appear for a few days, then, don't worry. I'll be back. And mean while, here's an eye-watering new plagiarism story to keep you going. I can't understand why writers would do this but still it happens.

How I Got Published (Part I): Daniel Blythe

Daniel Blythe is one of those rare creatures: a writer who makes his living from his writing work. He's also a regular contributor to this blog, and can be found in the comments-streams on many of my posts. His latest book is Autonomy, and is a Doctor Who novelisation. Here's the story of his route into publication: I hope that it will be the first of many to appear here.


I've learned a few lessons from my years of being published – not all of them pleasant. They are:

1) Philip Pullman was absolutely right when he said that the three things you need are talent, luck and hard work, and that the only one you have any control over is the hard work.

2) You probably aren't ready to be published when you think you are.

3) Even after you have become published, most people in publishing will treat you like an annoyance, a lackey or an irrelevance. The fact that there would be no "publishing industry" without you and thousands like you is totally lost on them.

My breakthrough – after a couple of years of unpaid short stories in the small press and so on – came in 1992 when Peter Darvill-Evans of Virgin Books invited submissions for his range of original Doctor Who fiction, a new idea at the time. My proposal for The Dimension Riders was accepted in 1992 and the book came out in November 1993 in time for the 30th anniversary of Doctor Who. It was hugely exciting to see stacks (yes, really, stacks) of my books in bookshops – on shelves, on tables and even on the floor. And it was very satisfying to keep sneaking into these bookshops and moving them to even more prominent positions.

After that, I did a second book for Peter's successor at Virgin, Rebecca Levene, called Infinite Requiem, which sold pretty much the same – both books received a small advance (under £2k, as I recall) but did very well in royalties. Virgin knew what they were doing. They could afford to take on new, unknown writers and pay them peanuts, because it was the Doctor Who brand and Sylvester McCoy's face doing the selling. One more short story in a Virgin anthology and I moved on – very amicably. I tried them with a couple more ideas, I think, but nothing really gelled.

I was trying my "proper novels" with editors, and receiving often quite patronising responses. The fact that I was published – *published*! – and my books had sold tens of thousands of copies was met with an indifferent shrug from the Katies and the Melissas. But I'd been writing what became The Cut, and this helped me to get an agent. I queried ten, but the one I eventually found was young, keen, clever and seemed on my wavelength. We met up in London for a chat, and clicked. She took me on, read the first half of The Cut and seemed very enthusiastic about selling it. Over the course of the next few months, she tried several publishers and got the frustration of the "rave rejections" – i.e. "we love it, but..." Eventually it ended up on the desk of Tony Lacey at Penguin and it happened to be the sort of thing he was looking for. It was published as a Penguin paperback in 1998, and got decent bookshop exposure and went to a reprint. The advance was a mid-range four figures, but I was just happy to have anything. I had an agent, who had sold my novel to a big publisher. Things were up and running, and I was still only twenty-eight.

I'd like to say this started off a productive and long-running association with Penguin, but I'd be lying. They bought my next novel, Losing Faith – for about double the advance paid on The Cut – and then sneaked it out into the bookshops under cover of darkness, with about as much publicity as the Much Binding In The Marsh Fete gets. In fact, I'm sure the Much Binding Fete gets a lot more, as it would have a notice in the parish newsletter and a mention in the Binding Gazette. To everyone's feigned astonishment but mine, Losing Faith didn't do terribly well in trade paperback and Penguin declined a) the option on my next book and b) to do the B-format paperback of Losing Faith.

I am normally a mild-mannered person. But this is the only time I can recall actually screaming and swearing (most unprofessionally) down the phone at my agent. I literally could not understand how this had happened. It was in the contract that they would do the paperback. It was IN. THE. CONTRACT. So that was my lesson for 1999 – a publishing contract, when they want it to be, is not worth the paper it's written on. I'd been pinning a lot of hopes on the paperback – being told I was not having one really felt like being kicked while I was down.

I kept my agent. It wasn't her fault. (And where, after all, was I going to find another one? It would be like dumping a nice girlfriend just because she hadn't helped you not to lose your job.)

But it was my lowest point as a professional writer. I had assumed – naively – that once you were published, it opened doors. That you would no longer be ignored and treated like the least important cog in the machine. That the advances gradually crept up, sneaking towards "proper salary" level, until the big breakthrough novel on Book Five or Six, when it would all go mad. To say I'd had a major reality-check would be an understatement.

So there I was at the age of twenty-nine, feeling as if I was right back at the start again. Where did it all go wrong? Where would it go from here?

Luckily, an opportunity was just around the corner – one which would change my writing life for ever...


And no, it wasn't meeting me, as Daniel and I didn't become acquainted until much later on. You can read the second part of his story next Tuesday, and if you have your own story of publication which you'd like to see featured here, email it to me at "HPRW at tesco dot net". I'll look forward to hearing from you.

How I Got Published: Tell Your Story

I keep reading comments online which insist that you can only get a book deal if you have mysterious connections in the publishing business; and how it's absolutely impossible for new writers to get published at all.

The logic of these arguments is fundamentally flawed, and they're just not true; but how to convince people of that? It must sound so very reasonable if you're an unpublished writer floundering around in the wasteland of the slush-pile, or drowning in a sea of rejections. I can waffle on all I like about the alchemical mix of talent, market awareness, persistence and luck which it takes to get a book written and published well from this side of the publication fence; but unpublished writers don't want alchemy, they want real information, something more concrete and clear. They want a magic key which opens publishing's door for them: they want to see what transforms an unpublished writer into a published one.

Daniel Blythe, a writer who comments here regularly, has had a stroke of brilliance (again: he's good at that). He's suggested that I start to include in my blog writers' own accounts of how they got published.

So, tomorrow the first in what I hope will be a new series: Daniel Blythe will tell us how he first got published. His is a cracking story which shows just how talent, wit and hard work can make you very lucky indeed.

If you've been published and would like to contribute your own story, just email it to me (my address is over there, in the right-hand column) with "HPRW: How I Got Published" in the subject-line. I'm looking forward to reading your contributions, and will use as many of them as I can.

For Unpublished Writers Everywhere

I can understand your frustrations. I can understand your longings to be published. I can even understand you considering calling yourself "prepublished" in an ironic, post-modernist way.

But what ever you do, please don't actually do it. It's embarrassing, and will draw the attention of the Point And Laugh Brigade.

My thanks to Editorial Anonymous for making this clear.

Dashes And Ellipses

Better late than never, we are now celebrating National Punctuation Day while simultaneously giving me a chance to indulge in a couple of my favourite obsessions: nitpicking, and dashes (and don't get me started on semicolons or we'll have to extend the event to last all week). This post first appeared on my other blog, The Self-Publishing Review, which is why it already has a few comments attached to it.


Somewhere in one of my comments, Sally has asked me for some more information about dashes and ellipses. Do, therefore, please blame her for the following rather boring post.

It's difficult to give exact rules for the correct usage for either the dash or the ellipsis as much depends on house style: the most important rule to remember is to be consistent. Choose one way and stick to it throughout your work. Use a "find and replace" to locate all examples once you've finished, just to ensure your consistency. And once you've done that don't get into a lather about them, as so much depends on the editor or publisher you're working with.

For the ellipsis, the usual convention is that it has a space after, but not before, or between each individual dot; and that if one ends a sentence, then you add a full stop so you get four dots in a row, and that full stop will naturally necessitate that a capital letter follows. So we use ellipses like this in the middle of a sentence... and like this at the end.... Ellipses indicate a trailing off (for example, in speech), rather than an interruption or abrupt halt, for which you use a dash.

Some houses prefer no spaces at all on either side of their ellipses and some (although happily, these are in the minority as I think it looks awful) prefer a space either side. I'm not sure which one I think is worse.

Dashes are more tricky. House style dictates, as usual. First rule is to remember that they are NOT interchangeable with hyphens, and that you need to show the difference between dashes and hyphens, usually by using two hyphens without a space between them to indicate a dash.

Whether or not you use a space either side of your dashes, like this:

text -- text

or don't, like this:

text--text

is up to you and the dictates of your style guide. I usually default to the latter, with no spaces, as it's what is preferred by the Chicago manual, which is what most American publishers default to when they're unsure.

Then you have to consider em- and en-dashes: the en and em refers to how much room they should take up on the line. The choice here is, once again, mostly a matter of house style although strictly speaking there are specific situations when each one should be used. If I'm in any doubt I usually default to the em-dash throughout rather than the en, as it's easier to differentiate from hyphens and so leads to a clearer text.

Finally, I'd ask everyone to use as few dashes and ellipses as possible as otherwise your text is going to look like the punctuation-spider has been sick all over it. Not a pretty thing, and very distracting to the reader.

There. I just hope Sally is grateful. After all--she asked.

Moving From Self-Published To Mainstream Publication

If you've self-published then you've already tested your book, as a product, on the marketplace. If it failed to sell in any great numbers, then in the eyes of a lot of publishers, you’ve proved that it doesn't have the potential to sell in sufficient quantities for them to take it on. This might well be because you, as a publisher, don't have access to the same sales and marketing clout that the bigger publishers employ, but many of those big publishers aren’t interested in that: all they see is the numbers they find on Nielsen’s sales reports. As far as they’re concerned, your book hasn't sold well and so you've shown that it's an uncommercial product.

This probably means that those publishers miss out on a few books with real potential: but as publishers have so many titles to pick and choose from, it's no wonder they tend to dismiss books so easily.

Why Good Writing Gets Rejected

I have a reasonable amount of experience of the publishing world: I worked as a non-fiction editor for a book-packaging company which gave me direct experience of editing for some of the best publishing houses in the world. In the process, I learned a little about the publishing business; the differences between good and publishable; and the horrible truth about the slush pile.

I've had a reasonable amount of non-fiction published and so have seen that it is possible for complete unknowns to get themselves good publishing deals with a little bit of luck and a lot of hard work.

I've also had all of the novels I've written so far rejected. I've won all sorts of prizes for my fiction and have received only positive comments from agents and editors, so I know I'm competent: but what went wrong?

While I'll agree that my second novel is overlong and far too quiet, I still consider my first to be good-to-excellent—but, having worked in publishing for so many years, I can understand why it hasn't been published, despite a few very near misses: it would have been very difficult for the sales reps to sell it into bookshops.

Without my editorial experience I would be far less able to understand why that's so important; and without my non-fiction publications I might have gone on to conclude that it's impossible for a newcomer to get published. I'm lucky: I can see this from all sides and while I would dearly love to see my novels in print, I can understand why they are not.

I can only imagine how painful it must be for good writers without similar industry experience to understand why their excellent work has been rejected.

Vanity Publishing or Self-Publishing?

How can vanity publishers and self-publishers be distinguished from one another? And why is it important that we make this distinction?

When an author self-publishes then the copyright page of his book bears the name of his imprint; his publishing company—even if it publishes just one title—owns his ISBN and the publication rights to that book. As publisher he’ll know exactly how many copies of his book have been printed, where and when they have been sold, and who to. Consequently he remains in full control of both the production and distribution of his own books.

A vanity publisher, however, will usually have its imprint listed on the copyright page of each book it publishes, and will control most aspects of their production and printing; consequently, the author will not have authority in the publication of his own book, nor will he have immediate access to vital information about stock levels and sales records. While vanity publishers often masquerade as mainstream or self-publishing services, their books usually carry the name of their own imprint: and by definition, if the imprint doesn’t belong to the author, it’s impossible for them to have self-published the book.

If you're considering self-publishing your book then it's important that you understand this: otherwise you could end up making a very costly mistake, and losing your precious first rights to an unscrupulous vanity publisher.

I Might Be Some Time....

My computer is struggling again: it seems that my hard drive is failing.

I've got plans for a replacement, which shouldn't take me too long to arrange: what will cause problems, though, is updating all my drivers and the operating system: downloads take AGES on dial-up.

I'll get it done as soon as I can: but it might well be a few days before I'm properly back online. Meanwhile, enjoy the few posts I've already scheduled, and play nicely while I'm gone.