In the book trade, story has an exact meaning, and it is a very simple, elemental thing:
A STORY is a narrative about a person -- the PRINCIPAL character -- who desperately wants something, the GOAL. The goal is difficult to attain, and for the duration of the novel, the principal devotes their efforts to attaining it. The principal fails repeatedly to attain the goal, until she either attains it, or is so destroyed that she has to stop trying.

A novel starts, at most, a little before the principal starts acting on their goal, and ends, at most, a little after the resolution. The cliche advice to "kill your darlings" started off as shorthand for "no matter how much you love a scene, if it does not serve the story, it has to go."
A clear story can be summed up in one sentence.

* Bob wants to become the king of London's gangsters.
* Mary wants a harmonious family home.
* Luke Skywalker wants to save the Space Princess.

If it's anything more detailed, it's not clear.

The story won't work if the goal is straight-forward, or the principal is not absolutely motivated to attain it. or if it's not big enough to encompass in some way the other characters and their subplots.

The psychological motivation for the principal's will to attain her goal is the story's DRIVE. The drive has to be strong enough that the principal is willing to make major sacrifices in pursuit of the goal.
The principal doesn't necessarily have to be the MAIN PROTAGONIST, the character whose head we ride in more than any other during the book. When the principal is also the main protagonist, it is usual to refer to her as the HERO. But the principal can also be an ally of the protagonist (_Moby Dick_), or the antagonist (_Rebecca_), or even a minor character operating off the page (_The Magus_).
The way to identify the principal is straight-forward: if her drive was not stirring things up, the other characters would just go about their lives as circumstances dictated.

A novel needs one clear CORE STORY that pulls the narrative along. Without one, it will founder, and be immensely difficult to publish.

Usually, this core is one single story. This means one principal character driving events, and everything else that the other characters do being somehow part of their ongoing efforts. Sometimes, the core story is a BRAID -- two or three stories, each with their own character, woven together. Each story in the braid needs to share very similar goals, very similar drives, or both. The looser the braid, the weaker the novel. The most common example is a protagonist and antagonist who are both seeking the same goal, one which cannot be shared, and who are driven to strive for it for similar -- but morally distinct -- reasons.

Do note that PLOT is not story. Plot is the path that the story pulls the characters down. It can be utterly twisty and turny, yet be generated by a perfectly simple story -- "Miss Wonderley wants the Maltese Falcon", for example.

In addition to the core story, there are usually one or more smaller stories, each driven by their own principals. There are typically -- and not very helpfully -- called SUBPLOTS. They occur at the same time as the core story. To be the most effective, they need to be a different slant on the drive, or to force the principal into dilemmas surrounding the drive.
In other words, subplots should provide alternate formulations of the THEME, or different answers to it. The theme is almost always the principal's drive, stated as an ethical question. "Does power justify the means used to take it?" "Can any family be purely loving?" "Can one person make a difference?"

The story, as formulated, is barely visible in most finished books. But, like the spine, everything hangs off it, and without it, becomes a horrible, misshapen mess.

By Tim Dedopulos (Missed Part 1? It´s here.)

SELF-PUBLISHING

Note that by self-pub, I also include almost all small and electronic presses. They don’t have any reputation that the industry (newspapers, industry magazines, fantasy websites, readers, etc) cares about, and they don’t have money for frontage. So functionally it’s indistinguishable from just splurging your work onto Amazon yourself. You might get some editing and a cover, but you won't get all the money.

There is one golden rule of self-publishing:
**If you build it, they WILL NOT come.**
Self-publishing comes in three _and only three_ flavours.

(1) You write a book, put it up there, tell all your friends, tell them to tell their friends, and sell ten copies ever. It makes absolutely no difference if it’s blindingly brilliant or semi-literate ravings. Sorry. This is most small pressed.

Even the most amazing thing just thrown out onto Amazon will die in the dark, cold and alone.
(2) You write a book, send out review copies to blogs and book magazines, spend at least an hour every day trying to get pre-orders, do a cover reveal, maybe do a blog-tour (don’t do a blog-tour! They're crap!), release with as much noise as you can, spend an hour every day afterwards talking it up on social media, schmoozing, being funny on twitter, nagging people to go buy it on facebook, chatting on Reddit, doing podcasts, etc. This is the best small presses.

IF it is both good enough to win major awards (forget it for this, they only go to trad pub stuff, but _if_ it’s that good) and you’re very lucky, you might sell a few thousand copies over a year.
Getting noticed and picked up for a trad deal here isn't technically impossible, but you might as well just delete your novel and buy that lottery ticket instead if that's your plan.
If the book isn't both absolutely amazing and very lucky though, you'll do beer-money, a few hundred copies in the first year, and maybe a dozen a year after that.

(3) You write three or more books before publishing anything. Yes, really. You do a lot of research on web-based book marketing. You learn all the secrets of terms like reader magnet, funnel book, list-building, mailshots, webinar, the algorithm, keyword competition, and much more. Then you spend a month or two planning a proper strategy. THEN you think about publishing.

Do NOT try to do this via a small press. You need complete personal control to make this work.
This is the stuff that sells small-press and indy books successfully. The *ONLY* stuff, I promise. Being excellent won't help much, but then again being mediocre won't harm much either.
If you want to actually make more than beer money with self-publishing, then your sole path is by marketing hard. But holy hell, you can make a lot.

Now this stuff is outside my core expertise. I write almost entirely for trad publishers. (It’s not a sane way to try to earn a living, particularly not in non-fiction, where I’m currently ghettoed.) I’m not able to help much with this step. I have some places you can go to start your digging, though.

Bookworks has an August 2016 article titled “Offer your reader free samples – how to use funnel books”, and Your First 10K Readers has a useful article titled “What are reader magnets”.

Additionally, David Gaughran’s books and blog are very useful beginning primers.
Google will take you to these places very easily.

I do actually know the outline version of marketing techniques to publishing a book series and not sink, though. It's below. It's much more about marketing than writing, but it works very well indeed. Don’t just go by what I have to say – please, please, research every step – but broadly speaking:

* Finish at least three novels in a series. Seriously. If you haven’t done that, GET BACK TO WORK! They should be in the 60-70k word count range.

* Set up an email list.

* Read several successful series of indy-pub novels in your genre.

* At both start and end of eBook 1 (at least), have "sign up for my email and get a free ebook" pages. Have a look at some other ebooks to see how various people place and phrase this page. Look for top kindle sellers in your genre.

* Publish eBook 1 and make it available for free, probably via smashwords. Have a normal-price paper copy for people who want to indulge.

* KEEP WRITING. You need more content. You will always need more content. Yes, these books are content. Get used to that. You need to aim at one book every two months maximum. Yes, that means you can’t spend time polishing them to perfection. That’s not the goal. The indy mantra has to be “Feck it, it’ll do.” Some authors outsource the writing entirely using places like freelancer-dot-com. They get barely acceptable trash back, but barely acceptable still has 'acceptable' in the name.

* Use 'free ebook promotion' sites to drive people to your free book. (See also Lead Magnets, Webinars, etc.) Find things people want, and get an email signup from them in return for Book 1 and access to the thing they want. Know your target audience's interests. If you can't narrow your audience down to a clear, identifiable demographic ("But everyone will like this!") then you've already failed.

* Send fun, light-hearted stuff targeted at your audience’s interest to your mailing list once a fortnight or so. Talk about interesting bits of world background, or write little bits of extra story, or just generally be interesting and witty. Sign up to several successful indy authors already in your genre and read their mailings avidly.

* Have a FB page for your book series, and another for yourself. Pen names are fine. Don’t worry about doing much with it. Have a website with pages for your series and your self. Give initial chapters. Link to the free Amazon book. Don’t worry about keeping a blog up to date too much. Have a twitter feed, and DON’T tweet book links. Twitter is a psychotic cocktail party, act accordingly. Remember about audience interest? Tweet about that stuff.

* Wait for Amazon to price-match (you can't set a 0 price there directly, you have to get as many people as you can to report a lower price to Amazon directly. It can take a while. Months, sometimes.)
* After and ONLY after it's free, publish Book 2 and 3, again both e and print. Set ebook 2 at $2.99, later books at $4.99.

* When someone signs up, give them an electronic copy of either Book 2, or (better) a novella set just off the same branch.

* Each book is nothing more than an advert for the next book, and that's how you have to think of it.

* Have "Book X+1 is Wonderful, here's the beautiful cover and a ripping bit of hook text" pages in each book X, after the email sign-up pages in each book.

* Start teasing later books in the series (or a new series) a month or two after you’ve hit at least a few hundred with your growing list, to whip up interest with them. Publish after a month or six weeks of teasing. If you haven’t hit 300+ list members, get back to your magnets. They’re the only thing between your and oblivion.

* To get higher in Amazon rankings, you need a good whack of pre-orders, and then several days of high purchase rates. That's getting into dark arts territory – split list testing, tiered promotions, bundling, rolling time pressures, etc. Gaughran has some strats, but this is a serious research topic all on its own.

* Expect a fairly constant “funnel-through” – the percentage of people who progress from 1>2, from 2>3, etc. The proportion of people going from 1 to 2 will be much the same as the proportion from 2 to 3, and from 3 to 4. Calculate returns accordingly, and work out if it’s worth writing 4. Some series just need to die after Book 2 or 3 if the funnel-through is too low. Others can rattle on for 8 or 10 books very profitably.

Some genres are better than others, and by better, I mean faster to build in, and more profitable to sell to. Romance is by far and away the strongest. Fantasy, military sci-fi, paranormal YA, erotica, thrillers, and mysteries are all fairly solid. Below that, things start tapering off. But again, do your research.
Romance and erotica need female pen-names (unless it's M/M, which needs male pen-names), and military SF should have male pen-names. The other genres are less rigid.

The deep goal with this style of self-pub is to get a mailing list big enough that you can be confident at least a thousand people will buy your stuff when you release it. Around 25,000 is a solid mailing list size. That takes time and work to build, a few months to a few years depending on your genre and how good your funnels and newsletters are.

The good news is that it’s entirely possible, even now, to earn spectacular amounts of money this way.
I know several authors making **$100,000 a month reliably** using this system. That's in romance, of course. But even second-tier genres can get up to $10k+ a month with sufficient marketing talent and effort.

It’s a lot of work – expect about 50% churning out words and 50% on your funnels, mailing list posts, relationship-building, price-adjustment, promotion planning, and so on.

Be clear. Self-publishing is a MARKETING job, not a writing job. Yes, you need the books as well, but the main thrust is selling the damn things. But if you do your research, and constantly test, and constantly promote correctly, and write even semi-well, you can make a great living from the comfort of your own pyjamas.

by Tim Dedopulos

Tim talks about the pluses and minuses of traditional publishing and self-publishing, especially if you hope to make a living from it. Today's post: Traditional Publishing. (This post first appeared on Fifteen Minutes With a Fiction Editor.)

TRADITIONAL PUBLISHING

By ‘trad’, I don’t mean a small press, or an internet-based publisher. Those count as self-pub for the purposes of this stuff. I mean one of the big guys who buys shelf-space in mortar bookshops. (It’s called ‘frontage’, and you either pay it, or most mortar stores don’t stock you at all. Just how it is.)
Trad publishing is much like it ever was, only even more crap. To get a trad deal, you need a polished, strong book in a marketable genre. If the book concept could possibly faze a coke-addled sales cretin, it’s vanishingly unlikely to win a deal. Reality check: things that “haven’t been done before” have _all_ been tried before. They didn’t work then. Chances are they don’t work now. Publishers definitely don’t take chances nowadays.

You really want an agent. Most publishers ignore anything unagented now. It saves on paying slush-readers. Occasionally, they open to all subs; those submissions get substantially worse deals than agented deals get. You want that agent. To actually get an agent, you need that strong book in that marketable genre, and it needs to be at least semi-polished. You also need a good – concise – letter.
Agents are very, very overworked and get a vast flood of lunatic, unsellable dreck every morning. They look for any excuse to stop reading your letter or manuscript. Your job is to make sure there are no excuses, so they grudgingly have to read to the end.

OK, you get an agent. She takes your book around, and let’s assume she sells it so someone. The publisher will pay you a small advance (more than you’d get without her though, generally enough to cover her cut), and tell you to talk it up on your social media.

They’re going to want to make changes – more to prove that they’re in charge than to actually improve things – and unless the changes are flat-out insane, bite your tongue and do them. If you seem 'difficult', the publisher will drop you like a stone. If they are flat-out insane, shriek at your agent about how vile life is, and let her sort it out. That’s a big chunk of what you’re paying her for.
Sometimes the changes _are_ flat-out insane. There’s plenty of bad editors running book lines.
Once the insides are finalized, they’ll cover it and splat it out there, and hope to sell enough to pay costs. If it does, they’ll take another from you. and if it doesn’t, they won’t. It probably will. They don’t take books unlikely to go into profit any more.

Unless you’re either lottery-win lucky, super-fascinating in the life history department, or young and pretty, you’re not going to get either a marketing budget or a huge advance (which, honestly, is entirely just a marketing stunt). You’re going to get $5k, maybe $10k. Marketing will boil down to “send off comps and press releases to the usual suspects”. Unless your book is both world-beating in quality and also very, very lucky to hit just the right zeitgeist note, there’s almost no chance you’ll earn out your advance. You’ll get a bit more again later if the agent sells it into other territories, or sells adaptation rights to visual media. If so, that may pay for the 20-25% the agent took of your initial advance.

Either way, the bad news is that it’s overwhelmingly likely the advance and some rights is all you’ll ever get. (Get those sunset clauses in there, girls and boys.)

The good news is that you do absolutely nothing but write books, you can most likely keep on selling them, and if your agent is halfway competent the advances will creep up until eventually, you can make a living if you can turn out say two or three books a year under a couple of pen-names. This will most likely take several years of not being able to make a living.

If you do some social media engagement and fan-base wooing, it’ll go better, plus you’ll actually build a fan base. This is very useful.

Next Week: Part 2 - Self-Publishing

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Editor where serious writers get free advice from us, discuss their work, air complaints, share tips and tricks and more.

As publishers, we see a lot of manuscripts. Many of these are sent to us in the hope they'll be something we would want to publish. A great number of them aren't really ready to be submitted. We thought we would give some insight into things that could prevent your manuscript from being read by the publishers or agents you send it out to. As a general rule, remember that the person you are sending your story to is overworked and stressed, and is looking for any possible excuse to tick your work off the to-do list and stop reading. So your job, as the submitting writer, is to make sure there's no excuse to give up on the manuscript.

First, a note. At the press we run, we try to give new writers a fair chance. We have even taken stories that needed an awful lot of hand-holding and work to make publishable. So when we decide not to read something past the first few pages, it's not because we're closed-minded. It's because writing decent stories is not as easy as it looks.

With that said, here are the most common problems that put us off of manuscripts at a very early stage. Fix these, and you'll greatly increase your manuscript's chances with any agent or publisher.

1. Content is not what was asked for --  Usually when we call for stories or manuscripts, we're fairly specific about what we're looking for. If a book or story comes in for a specific call and it's not exactly what we've asked for, we won't read it, and your name will go in the back of our minds with a 'can't follow even simple instructions' label.

As an example, in a recent call for cosmic and supernatural horror stories for an anthology, someone sent us a story about how tough immigrants have it. Tragic, and we sympathized very much, but it was nothing we could use. In fact, that story didn't even loosely fit into any category we publish, so it was clear that the author had just seen the word 'submissions', and pressed send. That level of thoughtlessness indicates an unprofessional writer.

So before you submit, make sure that your book is of a genre that the agent or publisher wants to work on. If not, they really won't take it, even if it's superb. Publishing is very niche-driven. Agents and publishers have certain areas of knowledge and expertise, and make contacts that are specific to their market. A science fiction publisher isn't going to publish a historical romance. Books are hard to sell, and a publisher survives, at least in part, by developing a reputation with fans of a certain style or genre. Likewise agents develop certain publishing industry contacts, and know how and where to sell certain genres. So it's a very easy 'no' if you send them anything else, no matter how good.

2. Disastrous formatting -- The first thing anyone will see about your manuscript is the formatting. Even before they read the first word, they'll notice whether it's tidy, whether you have followed standard conventions, whether you have sent them a Word compatible document or something else, whether you've used a readable font. If you haven't done your best to follow the instructions given on their website for how they like their submissions -- or followed fairly standard procedure if there aren't any guidelines -- then chances are your manuscript will not be read.

We've received numerous manuscripts where the writers decided to put sections in a flouncy, nearly-unreadable font in order to show the character was... I'm not really sure what, honestly. Possibly a witch, or an alien, or someone with really weird hand-writing? But the story is not happening on the page. What's written on your pages is the equivalent of the physical piece of film that was fed into a projector to be played on a screen. In this example, the screen is the reader's mind. You don't want your reader focused on the physical strip of film, but on the story playing on the screen.

Basically, you don't want anything about the formatting to distract from the story. If your story requires strange formatting to succeed, an agent or publisher will assume it doesn't actually work. Yes, we know about House of Leaves. HoL didn't need that formatting, it was just as incredible without it, and besides, you're not Mark Danielewski, and even if you are (Hi, Mark!), is this the year 2000? No. No, it isn't.

3. Unpopular content -- There are certain kinds of content that make it less likely your manuscript will be published. Socially-transgressive themes are the main type. Examples of such things at the moment include misogyny, racism and rape. These are just unpopular, and publishers have enough problems already without offending book buyers, 70% of whom are women. There are cases where these elements do make it through, but even when they're plot-critical and handled sympathetically, they still make publishers more reluctant.

A second major class of unpopular content comes from story themes that have been overused in recent times. Vampires, teen dystopias, and zombies became so common for a period of time that readers got bored with them. Publishers immediately stopped publishing books about them. Reader tastes move on constantly, and something new and interestingly different usually comes into sight. If an agent sees that your story is about a now-dead theme, they won't read it. No matter how good it is, it's not going to get picked up.

4. Point of view problems -- The point of view that a story is written in is a basic element of the story. Every word on the page has to come via a character's mind, whether consciously or unconsciously. Someone is telling the story. That mind colors the facts and events with its own feelings and interests. Get viewpoint wrong, and your reader will be unsettled at best (and quite possibly utterly confused) and will abandon your work.

In general, try to stick to first person or third person viewpoints (and also in general, don't mix the two in the same book). In either voice, the reader gets (at most) the inside of just the viewpoint character's head, and then the things that the viewpoint character can realistically perceive. First person is good for identification and immediacy, but it assumes the viewpoint character came out OK enough to relate their story (i.e. they didn't die or go insane, etc.). Third person is better for introspection, and for building tension, but it slightly less personal. Second person is incredibly difficult to do well -- readers don't really like being told what they're thinking or doing -- and omniscient, well, that's a whole other can of worms.

Many inexperienced writers think it's easier to write an omniscient narrator, one who can see the thoughts and histories of all the characters, and knows everything that happens everywhere. This narrator becomes a separate character in their own right. The trouble then is that the book is this unknown narrator reciting the story to the reader, as if both were in a lounge together with mugs of tea.

But readers get absorbed in a story when they identify with the main character enough to get interested in (and concerned for) the character, and in omniscient, the narrator is the main character. Well, the narrator's not in any danger or pain. In fact they're fine, somewhere comfy, telling the story, and the reader knows nothing about them, not even a name. It makes identification -- and absorption -- very hard indeed, and keeps the characters distant and uninvolving. That makes the text boring. 

On top of that, most successful stories are written from the point of view of one single character in any given section, whether in first person or third person. Switch around willy-nilly, and you confuse the reader.

Point of view problems in ostensibly third-person or first-person text may manifest as confusing shifts between different characters from sentence to sentence or paragraph to paragraph. These leave the reader unsure of whose head they are in, and diminish involvement and absorption. But there are also a raft of subtler issues: bits of information the viewpoint character wouldn't know, or things they definitely wouldn't think of at that time, or even when they refer to another person in an inappropriate way. For example, if your character addresses an unfamiliar police officer as "Detective Anderson" in speech, but the character is referred to as "Molly" in description, it'll unsettle your reader.

Occasional subtle point of view issues probably won't get a book rejected, but endemic or major problems certainly will.

5. Summary and Exposition -- Writers are endlessly instructed to "Show, not tell." But this aphorism is almost totally useless as anything other than a reminder. It explains nothing. Isn't all writing telling, given that it's made of words and not pictures? Summary and exposition need to remain limited in fiction. They just aren't engaging.

Summary is a way of quickly conveying events that are necessary to acknowledge, but not interesting enough to write out beat by beat. For example, "The next day, ..." Vital, yes. But only for stuff that isn't important but has to be conveyed. If it's worth writing in summary, always check it's not worth expanding out to actual experience.

Exposition is there to provide information that the characters know, and the reader needs to know but doesn't. Readers are smart, and like figuring things out, so much less is needed than many writers assume. It's common for inexperienced writers to want to explain character histories and descriptions and cool world features, all in great detail. That's understandable -- this stuff takes a lot of time to figure out, and the writer absolutely has to know it all. It's vital. But it's almost all irrelevant to the story. Putting it on the page is like making the reader sit through a four-hour slideshow of your holiday photos. If the characters don't care passionately about it, the reader won't either -- and when the characters do care, it'll come up naturally, without being tediously pointed out.

This holds true whether your information is history or physical description. Very few people pause in the middle of their day to tell themselves what they're wearing, or how old they are, or what color their hair is. If it matters, it'll come up, and if it doesn't come up, it doesn't matter. If it has to be there, remember Graham Linehan's vital maxim, "Exposition is ammunition." If you absolutely have to convey it, turn it into an insult or stinging tease from another character, and make it snappy.

Exposition, extended summaries, and flashbacks (a sub-type of exposition) all kill the pace stone dead. Imagine an action movie where the screen freezes in the middle of a thrilling feat of lethally dangerous acrobatic climbing so that the hero can turn to camera and tell you all about a messy divorce the previous year and how nothing has been quite the same since. It would be disastrous! If you need to delve repeatedly into the past, perhaps you've started your story in the wrong place. A story starts at a particular point for a reason, after all -- because the stuff before it isn't entirely relevant. If you start in media res, in the middle of the action, and then go flashing back to the past, you don't just kill all your initial interest, you annoy the reader on top of it. It's much better, if you absolutely have to add the historical context, to start a bit earlier and write forward.

Moving forwards builds momentum and draws the reader on. Looking backwards drags the reader out of the moment. Think about what it's like when you observe something going on around you. You might look briefly at the wall or the sofa as you pass, but your attention is on what you're doing. The focus of a story is action, and your characters need to think and speak like actual human beings. In a way, a mirror scene is a kindness. Because when your character looks in a mirror and lists their features out -- an act very nearly no real people ever do -- then most agents and publishers will know they don't need to bother reading a word further.

These are certainly not all the issues that will stop an agent or publisher in her tracks, but they are the problems that seem to come up most often. If you can get past these initial hurdles, there are a number of other common issues, but those are more complex, and each one deserves a post of its own.

When you decide to write a book, you may know exactly why you want to do it. Perhaps you just want to see if you can. Maybe you love reading and you wonder, what would I write if I wrote a book? Would it be any good? Would it be as good as my favorites or could it be even better?

Maybe you hope for a modicum of fame. Maybe you hope to make a bit of money from it. Surely writing is still one of the ways you an earn a living? Maybe you want to hang out with your favorite authors as colleagues instead of just fans.

Maybe you want to be remembered after you've fled this mortal coil. Maybe you just have a story in your head that's driving you batty and you need to get it out of there.

Whatever your reason, it can be helpful to think about what it is you want from your writing. It's hard to judge whether you've been successful if you don't know what success means for you.

Tell us in the comments what you hope to get from writing a book.

Q: I had a free critique from you some time ago. It was really helpful. I'm wondering why you guys don't use a mailing list or newsletter like others do?


A: The truth is, we don't want clients who have to be talked into working with us. We do monthly free critiques as a service, but most of our clients come to us via word of mouth. As a result, the clients we do work with have specific goals in mind. They want to get published traditionally and haven't had any luck on their own. Or they want to self-publish but they don't feel their work is ready. They want to make it better and learn how to do this themselves in the future.


We're both ethically against the constant spamming that we all have to deal with. We feel it lessens the quality of services. You know what we do. We're good at it. That either works for you or it doesn't. We see no value in filling up your inbox with 'helpful' marketing materials.

Great first sentences are tough to come up with. That's why we'd like to dedicate this contest to examining the first sentence of your novel.

Here's the total deal:

In an email with the subject line: FIRST SENTENCE CONTEST, send us the opening line of your novel.

Format of email: Opening sentence, genre, finished or unfinished novel, brief synopsis (think back of a book) if you can come up with one easily. That's it. Send to flourishediting at gmail.com. Remember the correct subject line, or it might get lost in our inbox.

Does it have to be a finished novel? Well, we have no real way of knowing, but if it's a sentence you made up out of context, it may or may not be good. So please have at least half the novel written before you send the sentence.

Any genre of fiction; memoir is also acceptable.

Top three entries will receive a free critique of their first chapter and we will post the top three first sentences here with authors' names.

We will also post a list of reasons why the sentences submitted were most commonly eliminated. This information will be anonymous and without actual sentences, but may be helpful to you as you hone your manuscripts.

DEADLINE: January 30th. Sentences will be judged by February 7th. Rewards will be awarded by February 14th.

Send us your sentences!

The title of editor can apply to a person performing a number of different tasks. Acquisitions editors seek out stories and novels for publication. Copy editors make corrections to text, varying from fixing typos to cutting out unnecessary or confusing language. A proofreader simply looks for any small flaws in a final text. (Strictly speaking, a proofreader compares the publisher's final layouts to the printer's proof pages, to make sure the printers got everything correct.)

So what do we do here at Flourish?

We address the issues in a manuscript that weaken your story, novel, or non-fiction manuscript. Our primary job is not to find typos. Depending on what service we agree on, we'll make notes on your manuscript that will help you understand how to resolve the most significant issues in the writing on a line, paragraph, scene, and story basis. These could be flaws in logic, inconsistencies of fact, or incorrect usage of words. There might be issues with the organization of a paragraph -- or of a whole series of events. Fiction traps we commonly encounter include characterization errors, scene structure, and overuse of exposition, also known as summary narration. We deal with every aspect of the writing, from pacing, tension, purple prose, appropriateness of tone, and unclear tense, to genre requirements, plot structure, and more.

What an editor doesn't do is totally rewrite your story to make it "correct". An editor marks up your text to point out areas that need work, and provides all the guidance you need to fix the problems that exist. Small edits might be made in red for you to agree or disagree with, of course. The difference between an unedited manuscript and an edited manuscript can be quite startling.

We do all this while trying to maintain the author's voice. It's all about making you shine, after all. If there isn't a clear authorial voice at the beginning, then often by the time we're finished, in collaboration with the author, it will have become clear.

In other words, what we do is what the story editors at large publishing houses do, except that those editors only work with writers they've already agreed to publish. We can help all writers who want to become professional develop the chops to achieve that goal. In the short run, the work we do with you will help you improve your story. In the long run, it will make you a better writer. Of course, that requires you to do some work yourself.

Many of our clients have gone on to get published. Several have signed contracts with small presses. One was published by Harlequin, and her novel has been nominated for an award. Harlequin Teen wanted another client's novel, but she had already sold it elsewhere before they got back to her.

The thing is, we really care how you do. We want what you want. That is, we want you to be happy with the finished piece and we hope that readers and publishers, if you decide to submit to them, will like it too.

by Salome Jones

This week Elmore Leonard passed away. He was 87. It was a great loss to literature. Mr. Leonard, who lived in Detroit for his entire life, was a fine writer of pulp fiction.

His ten rules for writing have been passed around on various websites including social media these last few days, and one of the rules inspired this post.

I want to talk about Rule 6: 'Never use the words ''suddenly'' or ''all hell broke loose.'''

Mr. Leonard says in his notes that this rule doesn't require explanation, yet this or something very like it has required explanation to my writing students more times than I can count.

At this moment, I just want to talk about my own use of the word 'suddenly' in the context of its use elsewhere. This isn't intended as an argument for peppering your prose with time adverbs. But rules always have a tendency to be over-applied by some. It seems prudent to determine the spirit of the rule and where it might differ from its letter.

I'm going to be a heretic now (please forgive me, Elmore Leonard) and say that you may use the word suddenly on occasion. Fire will not rain down on you from the sky. Your lodgings will not crumble to dust. Your readership won't abandon ship in spite of all the sharks clearly visible in the dark waters of not reading your book. Your lover* won't kick you out of bed (*possibly excepting a purist like Damien G. Walter).

On rediscovering Mr. Leonard's rules, I began thinking about the word 'suddenly'. I was sure I'd seen it in the book I've been working on most recently. I often edit it out of my clients' work, but what about my own work? When might I feel justified at leaving it in and... well, was I justified?

I did a search for the word in the two books I'm working on. One of them is a collective novel, written by a lot of people. I didn't have total control over whether suddenly was used. I found it. A lot of it. I started to look at each instance in terms of why it was there and whether it could be removed. Two thirds of the time, I felt I could take it out without any change in meaning. It struck me that in those cases 'suddenly' was actually redundant. The very statement of the event clearly showed the sudden nature of its occurrence.

The other third of cases were more difficult. What this rule doesn't say specifically, but must mean, is that you can't just pull out suddenly and replace it with another adverb or adverbial phrase. That would be the same problem only slightly disguised. No, instead, you'd need to rewrite the sentence so that the suddenness became apparent.

For example: 'He was walking along the edge of the street, taking care not to step on any of the tiny frogs, when a loud bleeeeeeep startled him.'

You can probably see where someone might want to put 'suddenly' (probably right after 'when') but you can also see as easily that the sentence would be weighted down with the word.

Now, I'm going to take a piece of my own text and show you an example of suddenly that's not so easily replaced. And these are the ones I sit on the fence with. It's all about THE FEELS. Realizations, the way feelings and new knowledge dawn on us, the way with the flick of some invisible emotional trigger, we change an opinion or come to a decision. This is where a rare suddenly, to me, can save a boatload of trying to explain.

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I stopped talking when I saw the girl who’d opened it. She looked about nineteen. She had long red hair, and she was wearing a miniscule pair of lime green underpants and a scooped out, nearly transparent white muscle shirt that barely covered her breasts.

I stood there with my mouth slightly open, sorting my thoughts into two piles. Wrong apartment? Or WTF, Brown?

Before I could manage a coherent sentence, the girl said, “Brown told me to catch you before you yelled ‘Open up, police.’”

“Um…” I laughed through my nose. “Okay. Can I come in?”

The girl stepped aside just as Brown came out of the hallway into the living room. He had something pink and shimmery draped over his shoulder and a sequined bra hung around his neck by one shoulder strap.

“Did I happen to mention I was doing a shoot today?” he said. His arms were full of other frilly and brightly colored bits of almost nothing. He dropped the armload of clothes into a chair and untangled the bra and what turned out to be a see-through pink robe trimmed in feathers from around himself, adding them to the pile.

“Not that I remember. But no worries.” I closed the door, but kept standing in front of it with my coat on and my briefcase in my hand.

“Cassandra’s in there picking out her shoes. You should go in and see what you can find that fits.”

I snorted. “Who are you talking to now?”

“Jade,” Brown said.

“Me.” The girl put her hand up.

“Oh.” The entire situation suddenly seemed hilarious to me and I felt a huge grin spread across my face.
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So you see the suddenly in there. Last sentence. This one takes a bit of stepping back. Actually as I looked at it, I decided the first part of that sentence could go. So now it will just read, "Oh." I felt a huge grin spread across my face.

But in some instances it's not so easy to resolve. I'd argue, as is my usual argument, that if you have to write a really convoluted sentence to get across what you can with one word, it's probably better to use the one word. The caveat that goes with this is, you might have to try hard to succeed in some cases, or before giving it up.

You'll be missed, Mr. Leonard.