DCI Warren Jones Day!
Chronicling Ten Years At The Keyboard
According to the file creation date on the Word document that would become the first draft of the book that would eventually be published as The Last Straw, DCI Warren Jones came into being on Tuesday 12th April 2011 – exactly ten years ago today. So for this reason, I decided to bring forward this week’s #TuesdayTip and put together an article sharing some of that journey and what I’ve learned in those ten years.
For a quicker, more light-hearted read, you may want to check out my post on the HQ Stories blog, where I catalogue the 10 things I’ve learned in 10 years.
https://www.hqstories.co.uk/2021/04/08/ten-things-paul-gitsham-has-learnt-in-ten-years/Your debut novel probably won’t be the first book you have attempted to write.
An oft-quoted saying can be paraphrased as ‘the first million words don’t count’.
Whilst there are exceptions to every rule, most authors have at least one previous attempt locked away in a drawer somewhere. I have several. Some are literally in a drawer – I became quite the expert at purloining blank exercise books from school for my scribblings*, and these unfortunate attempts will never see the light of day. Neither will the three hidden on my hard drive.
Yet none of these were a waste of time. Writing is like any other skill. You need to practise, and whilst a million words seems like a lot, when you add up those abandoned manuscripts, the various short stories and essays I’ve written for creative writing classes, and my rambling missives on social media, I’ll bet it isn’t far off.
But, The Last Straw was the first novel I completed.
The key point I am making is do not despair at a perceived lack of progress. Your first finished book is just the visible point of a very big pyramid.
(*For the avoidance of doubt, I pilfered these exercise books when I was a pupil, not as a teacher twenty years later!)
Titles come and titles go.
The title of my first book was The Straw That Broke The Camel’s Back.
It was clever, fitted the story perfectly and highly original. It was also ridiculously long.
Take a look at the titles of a typical crime fiction novel and you’ll see why my publishers promptly renamed it The Last Straw. If nothing else, at least that fits on the cover!
Since then I have published a further ten titles – all of them follow the loose theme of a play on a well known phrase. I’d love to take credit for these titles, but really I can’t. Naming a book is an art form in its own right and only a few are mine. No Smoke Without Fire, Forgive Me Father, Blood Is Thicker Than Water and At First Glance are the only names that stuck. The rest have either been tweaked by my publisher or are entirely a product of their marketing department. Aside from a couple of times where I have fought my corner, I’ve generally been content to accept the wisdom of those more experienced than I.
And so do names!
I’ve written previous articles on how to name characters (TuesdayTips 31, 32 & 33). But don’t let that fool you. Since day one, I’ve found choosing the perfect name for characters almost impossible. When I started writing The Last Straw, the two lead characters’ names were place-holders – Smith and Jones. Fans of British comedy will know why that pairing was never going to be the final choice. As it happens, I became very attached to Warren Jones, but Tony Smith became Tony Sutton – a popular surname in Essex, the county from where he comes. Other characters in that manuscript changed in the final draft. With the benefit of hindsight, I would go back and tweak the names of a few of the series regulars – some are very similar to each other – but I’m stuck with them now, and I’ve grown to like them.
Finishing the book is just the start.
First of all, if you’ve just completed your first draft, congratulations! Seriously, give yourself a pat on the back.
My best friend, upon hearing that I had completed The Straw That Broke The Camel’s Back, told me I should be proud of myself. ‘Do you know how many people have started but never finished a novel’? And he was right. Probably hundreds of thousands of people have ideas for a book. Tens of thousands have tried to write it. Yet only a small number actually get to type The End.
Even if that’s the final step of your journey, you have accomplished something that many people attempt, but never quite manage.
But that first draft is just that. By the time I was ready to shyly ask some close friends and family to have a look at my book, it had gone through months of revisions. That first draft was completed at the beginning of November 2011 – a little over 6 1/2 months after I first started writing it, but it was the best part of a year before I bought my copy of the Writer & Artists Year Book and started submitting to agents and publishers.
Rejection, rejection, rejection.
Aside from a lucky few, almost all writers have a pile of rejection slips (or more likely unanswered emails) evidencing their attempts to get an agent and/or publisher. It’s not personal. There are a million reasons why you aren’t signed. The chances are good that it has nothing to do with your writing! Agents and publishers have very clear ideas about what they are looking for at any given time, and it can be something as simple as the fact that they have just signed a writer similar to yourself – if you’d submitted before them, they could have taken you on instead. Keep on plugging away!
Back in 2012, I was still a full-time school teacher and self-publishing was in its infancy. Many authors were starting to take advantage of the new opportunities offered by Kindle and forging very successful careers. Some are extremely well-respected today and have earned an impressive following. But many of the tools and services that exist now were not available, and I just didn’t have the time to do all the hard work that publishers do when it comes to editing and polishing a book, choosing a cover, typesetting, converting and uploading to Kindle, then marketing it etc.
It would have been a fascinating project to take on, but I wanted to spend my precious free hours writing more books and so traditional publishing was the best route for me. If I were starting today, perhaps I would have chosen differently, but I don’t dwell on that .
Publishing the first book gets in the way of writing the next one!
After finishing book 1, I was buzzing so much I promptly started on book 2. But that soon ground to a halt when my first beta readers gave their thoughts. There were months of work to be done on book 1 before I could start submitting it. The same thing happened with book 3; feedback from book 2 came in and I had to put that manuscript to one side. Nevertheless, by the time I finally got the call in summer 2013, from a new, digital-first publisher. I was half-way through book 3. They offered me a three-book deal. Now I had to juggle writing book 3 with editing books 1 and 2 again as my publisher sent them back for revisions and rewrites.
Some novelists only produce a handful of books during their career, with a gap of years between them. They finish a book, publish it, promote it and then start thinking about what to write next. For an ongoing series, momentum is the key to building a following. And so you find yourself stepping onto a treadmill; many writers I know are working on three books simultaneously: completing the edits for the upcoming book, writing the next in the series and planning the following book.
Publishers change.
The publishing industry is very dynamic. Personnel come and go constantly, accepting promotions within their organisation or moving to a different publishing house. The traditional concentration of the industry in central London can make such career changes quite easy. Even the publisher itself can change.
My original publisher was Carina UK (their logo can be seen on the original editions of my first four books). Carina was a digital-first imprint of Harlequin, a publishing house known primarily for its women-oriented fiction, including the famous romantic fiction imprint, Mills & Boon.
I vividly remember my only visit to their headquarters in Richmond. I was buzzed into the office and upon reaching the first floor was confronted by a sea of pink, a massive M&B logo and a room full of women.
“Anyone expecting a delivery?” was how my presence was announced by the receptionist.
“Actually, I’m an author,” I said.
Now, it’s a myth that all romance writers are women – I know quite a few male authors of romantic fiction, but they usually hide behind their initials or pen names, so I can forgive her assumption.
“I’m with Carina.”
“Ah, that makes sense,” she said, pointing towards a corner of the room that had been painted the distinctive blue that they still use today. Back then, I was one of only a handful of male authors, and even fewer crime writers, working for the fledgling imprint – something that changed rapidly over the coming years.
After my first four books were published, it was all change. Harlequin was bought by HarperCollins. The Carina UK imprint (which shared its name with a different imprint in the US) was renamed, along with the rest of Harlequin and became HQ Digital (later HQ Stories as they started to publish more physical books and audiobooks), retaining its distinctive blue branding. For obvious reasons, they kept Mills & Boon as it was, given its name recognition and heritage.
Since then, I have had many more books published with HQ and have had several editors over the years. It’s always sad when they move on, but change is a part of life, and I have always forged enjoyable and productive partnerships with their successors.
Covers aren’t as unique as you think.
One of the lovely traditions when releasing a new book is the cover reveal. I had mine for Out Of Sight just last week. If you are with a traditional publisher, then the chances are it will have been cooked up by the design team (or whoever they subcontract to). There’s no question that there are certain tropes within the genre. A recent joke doing the rounds on Facebook was asking if anyone knows who the woman in the red raincoat is that features on so many covers, since she probably needs counselling!
When choosing the cover, there is quite often some dialogue with the publisher, and you may be asked your opinion. For a series, there will be an attempt to unify the fonts, colour palette and layout to allow for a consistent branding. I have been very fortunate over the years, with my publisher completely changing the covers of my first four books after a few years to make a more distinctive look as the series expanded.
All well and good, but there is a little secret…
The original cover for my second book, No Smoke Without Fire, perfectly encapsulated a key scene in the book. I loved it. So imagine my horror when a few months later, I spotted the exact same cover image on a different book. The title and genre were different, but they’d even used similar fonts! I checked the publication date and it had been released about a month after mine. Plagiarism! I sent an urgent email to my publisher…
Well it turns out that generally speaking, they don’t have teams of photographers scouring the world for that perfect image… Instead they use a stock photo from a database and then modify it. Ten minutes with Google reverse image look-up revealed that the picture had been uploaded to one of the major stock image databases a couple of months before publication date – roughly about the time that our respective cover designers will have been choosing the perfect image…
Show me the money!
Everyone has heard of the six, seven or even eight figure advance. It usually helps if you are a celebrity. Unfortunately, the reality is different. Only a select few authors get to sign contracts for life-changing sums of money. In fact, surveys have shown that median income for writers is now far below that needed to live on if it is your sole source of income and it appears to be declining. And most of that income is derived not from advances, rather royalties on books sold.
I remember well the excitement and anticipation of my first royalty cheque. At the time, Harlequin paid its authors quarterly, so this cheque would be a bumper sum covering three whole months of sales.
£50.60 for 52 copies sold.
The following quarter was a breath-taking £217.60 as 242 copies landed on Kindles… Since then, things have picked up, and whilst sales will always be up and down, all my titles continue to sell. The annual release of a new book also renews interest in earlier entries in the series.
But you know what? Whilst I am grateful that I earn enough from writing that I have been able to reduce the hours in my day job to part-time, I couldn’t stop writing about Warren if I wanted to. Over the past ten years, he and his team have become like friends to me and no longer chronicling his adventures would leave a gaping hole in my life. All that being said, if Netflix are reading this, please don’t be shy, my email address is on the image at the top of he page…
And finally, whilst we are on the subject… Amazon Sales Rankings tell you nothing of any value! Obviously, a book in the top ten of the paid book chart is selling more copies than one languishing around the 500,000 mark. But the algorithm used to calculate your sales ranking each hour is a closely-guarded trade secret that takes into account everything from actual sales in the past hour to historic sales data over an unspecified period, the outside temperature and the colour of Jeff Bezo’s underwear last Tuesday. Unfortunately, because rankings are relative to other books, yours depends on others’ performance as much as yours. There are services that attempt to use the hourly changes in the rankings to calculate when sales occur, but Amazon deliberately makes it difficult for them to work accurately. I suspect this might be because authors publishing directly via Amazon have privileged access to real-time sales data, one of the key selling points for their services.
For a quicker, more light-hearted read, you may want to check out my post on the HQ Stories blog, where I catalogue the 10 things I’ve learned in 10 years.
https://www.hqstories.co.uk/2021/04/08/ten-things-paul-gitsham-has-learnt-in-ten-years/Your debut novel probably won’t be the first book you have attempted to write.
An oft-quoted saying can be paraphrased as ‘the first million words don’t count’.
Whilst there are exceptions to every rule, most authors have at least one previous attempt locked away in a drawer somewhere. I have several. Some are literally in a drawer – I became quite the expert at purloining blank exercise books from school for my scribblings*, and these unfortunate attempts will never see the light of day. Neither will the three hidden on my hard drive.
Yet none of these were a waste of time. Writing is like any other skill. You need to practise, and whilst a million words seems like a lot, when you add up those abandoned manuscripts, the various short stories and essays I’ve written for creative writing classes, and my rambling missives on social media, I’ll bet it isn’t far off.
But, The Last Straw was the first novel I completed.
The key point I am making is do not despair at a perceived lack of progress. Your first finished book is just the visible point of a very big pyramid.
(*For the avoidance of doubt, I pilfered these exercise books when I was a pupil, not as a teacher twenty years later!)
Titles come and titles go.
The title of my first book was The Straw That Broke The Camel’s Back.
It was clever, fitted the story perfectly and highly original. It was also ridiculously long.
Take a look at the titles of a typical crime fiction novel and you’ll see why my publishers promptly renamed it The Last Straw. If nothing else, at least that fits on the cover!
Since then I have published a further ten titles – all of them follow the loose theme of a play on a well known phrase. I’d love to take credit for these titles, but really I can’t. Naming a book is an art form in its own right and only a few are mine. No Smoke Without Fire, Forgive Me Father, Blood Is Thicker Than Water and At First Glance are the only names that stuck. The rest have either been tweaked by my publisher or are entirely a product of their marketing department. Aside from a couple of times where I have fought my corner, I’ve generally been content to accept the wisdom of those more experienced than I.
And so do names!
I’ve written previous articles on how to name characters (TuesdayTips 31, 32 & 33). But don’t let that fool you. Since day one, I’ve found choosing the perfect name for characters almost impossible. When I started writing The Last Straw, the two lead characters’ names were place-holders – Smith and Jones. Fans of British comedy will know why that pairing was never going to be the final choice. As it happens, I became very attached to Warren Jones, but Tony Smith became Tony Sutton – a popular surname in Essex, the county from where he comes. Other characters in that manuscript changed in the final draft. With the benefit of hindsight, I would go back and tweak the names of a few of the series regulars – some are very similar to each other – but I’m stuck with them now, and I’ve grown to like them.
Finishing the book is just the start.
First of all, if you’ve just completed your first draft, congratulations! Seriously, give yourself a pat on the back.
My best friend, upon hearing that I had completed The Straw That Broke The Camel’s Back, told me I should be proud of myself. ‘Do you know how many people have started but never finished a novel’? And he was right. Probably hundreds of thousands of people have ideas for a book. Tens of thousands have tried to write it. Yet only a small number actually get to type The End.
Even if that’s the final step of your journey, you have accomplished something that many people attempt, but never quite manage.
But that first draft is just that. By the time I was ready to shyly ask some close friends and family to have a look at my book, it had gone through months of revisions. That first draft was completed at the beginning of November 2011 – a little over 6 1/2 months after I first started writing it, but it was the best part of a year before I bought my copy of the Writer & Artists Year Book and started submitting to agents and publishers.
Rejection, rejection, rejection.
Aside from a lucky few, almost all writers have a pile of rejection slips (or more likely unanswered emails) evidencing their attempts to get an agent and/or publisher. It’s not personal. There are a million reasons why you aren’t signed. The chances are good that it has nothing to do with your writing! Agents and publishers have very clear ideas about what they are looking for at any given time, and it can be something as simple as the fact that they have just signed a writer similar to yourself – if you’d submitted before them, they could have taken you on instead. Keep on plugging away!
Back in 2012, I was still a full-time school teacher and self-publishing was in its infancy. Many authors were starting to take advantage of the new opportunities offered by Kindle and forging very successful careers. Some are extremely well-respected today and have earned an impressive following. But many of the tools and services that exist now were not available, and I just didn’t have the time to do all the hard work that publishers do when it comes to editing and polishing a book, choosing a cover, typesetting, converting and uploading to Kindle, then marketing it etc.
It would have been a fascinating project to take on, but I wanted to spend my precious free hours writing more books and so traditional publishing was the best route for me. If I were starting today, perhaps I would have chosen differently, but I don’t dwell on that .
Publishing the first book gets in the way of writing the next one!
After finishing book 1, I was buzzing so much I promptly started on book 2. But that soon ground to a halt when my first beta readers gave their thoughts. There were months of work to be done on book 1 before I could start submitting it. The same thing happened with book 3; feedback from book 2 came in and I had to put that manuscript to one side. Nevertheless, by the time I finally got the call in summer 2013, from a new, digital-first publisher. I was half-way through book 3. They offered me a three-book deal. Now I had to juggle writing book 3 with editing books 1 and 2 again as my publisher sent them back for revisions and rewrites.
Some novelists only produce a handful of books during their career, with a gap of years between them. They finish a book, publish it, promote it and then start thinking about what to write next. For an ongoing series, momentum is the key to building a following. And so you find yourself stepping onto a treadmill; many writers I know are working on three books simultaneously: completing the edits for the upcoming book, writing the next in the series and planning the following book.
Publishers change.
The publishing industry is very dynamic. Personnel come and go constantly, accepting promotions within their organisation or moving to a different publishing house. The traditional concentration of the industry in central London can make such career changes quite easy. Even the publisher itself can change.
My original publisher was Carina UK (their logo can be seen on the original editions of my first four books). Carina was a digital-first imprint of Harlequin, a publishing house known primarily for its women-oriented fiction, including the famous romantic fiction imprint, Mills & Boon.
I vividly remember my only visit to their headquarters in Richmond. I was buzzed into the office and upon reaching the first floor was confronted by a sea of pink, a massive M&B logo and a room full of women.
“Anyone expecting a delivery?” was how my presence was announced by the receptionist.
“Actually, I’m an author,” I said.
Now, it’s a myth that all romance writers are women – I know quite a few male authors of romantic fiction, but they usually hide behind their initials or pen names, so I can forgive her assumption.
“I’m with Carina.”
“Ah, that makes sense,” she said, pointing towards a corner of the room that had been painted the distinctive blue that they still use today. Back then, I was one of only a handful of male authors, and even fewer crime writers, working for the fledgling imprint – something that changed rapidly over the coming years.
After my first four books were published, it was all change. Harlequin was bought by HarperCollins. The Carina UK imprint (which shared its name with a different imprint in the US) was renamed, along with the rest of Harlequin and became HQ Digital (later HQ Stories as they started to publish more physical books and audiobooks), retaining its distinctive blue branding. For obvious reasons, they kept Mills & Boon as it was, given its name recognition and heritage.
Since then, I have had many more books published with HQ and have had several editors over the years. It’s always sad when they move on, but change is a part of life, and I have always forged enjoyable and productive partnerships with their successors.
Covers aren’t as unique as you think.
One of the lovely traditions when releasing a new book is the cover reveal. I had mine for Out Of Sight just last week. If you are with a traditional publisher, then the chances are it will have been cooked up by the design team (or whoever they subcontract to). There’s no question that there are certain tropes within the genre. A recent joke doing the rounds on Facebook was asking if anyone knows who the woman in the red raincoat is that features on so many covers, since she probably needs counselling!
When choosing the cover, there is quite often some dialogue with the publisher, and you may be asked your opinion. For a series, there will be an attempt to unify the fonts, colour palette and layout to allow for a consistent branding. I have been very fortunate over the years, with my publisher completely changing the covers of my first four books after a few years to make a more distinctive look as the series expanded.
All well and good, but there is a little secret…
The original cover for my second book, No Smoke Without Fire, perfectly encapsulated a key scene in the book. I loved it. So imagine my horror when a few months later, I spotted the exact same cover image on a different book. The title and genre were different, but they’d even used similar fonts! I checked the publication date and it had been released about a month after mine. Plagiarism! I sent an urgent email to my publisher…
Well it turns out that generally speaking, they don’t have teams of photographers scouring the world for that perfect image… Instead they use a stock photo from a database and then modify it. Ten minutes with Google reverse image look-up revealed that the picture had been uploaded to one of the major stock image databases a couple of months before publication date – roughly about the time that our respective cover designers will have been choosing the perfect image…
Show me the money!
Everyone has heard of the six, seven or even eight figure advance. It usually helps if you are a celebrity. Unfortunately, the reality is different. Only a select few authors get to sign contracts for life-changing sums of money. In fact, surveys have shown that median income for writers is now far below that needed to live on if it is your sole source of income and it appears to be declining. And most of that income is derived not from advances, rather royalties on books sold.
I remember well the excitement and anticipation of my first royalty cheque. At the time, Harlequin paid its authors quarterly, so this cheque would be a bumper sum covering three whole months of sales.
£50.60 for 52 copies sold.
The following quarter was a breath-taking £217.60 as 242 copies landed on Kindles… Since then, things have picked up, and whilst sales will always be up and down, all my titles continue to sell. The annual release of a new book also renews interest in earlier entries in the series.
But you know what? Whilst I am grateful that I earn enough from writing that I have been able to reduce the hours in my day job to part-time, I couldn’t stop writing about Warren if I wanted to. Over the past ten years, he and his team have become like friends to me and no longer chronicling his adventures would leave a gaping hole in my life. All that being said, if Netflix are reading this, please don’t be shy, my email address is on the image at the top of he page…
And finally, whilst we are on the subject… Amazon Sales Rankings tell you nothing of any value! Obviously, a book in the top ten of the paid book chart is selling more copies than one languishing around the 500,000 mark. But the algorithm used to calculate your sales ranking each hour is a closely-guarded trade secret that takes into account everything from actual sales in the past hour to historic sales data over an unspecified period, the outside temperature and the colour of Jeff Bezo’s underwear last Tuesday. Unfortunately, because rankings are relative to other books, yours depends on others’ performance as much as yours. There are services that attempt to use the hourly changes in the rankings to calculate when sales occur, but Amazon deliberately makes it difficult for them to work accurately. I suspect this might be because authors publishing directly via Amazon have privileged access to real-time sales data, one of the key selling points for their services.
So there you have it. Ten years since I started writing DCI Warren Jones and just over seven years since The Last Straw was published. A further ten novels and novellas have since been written, with the seventh full-length, Out of Sight, just a couple of months away, and more are in the pipeline.
Happy Warren Jones day!
