I've had this brilliant idea....

I saw Chris Riddell for lunch the day before yesterday.  It's always great to see Chris.  He is always so generous and enthusiastic.

Inevitably, there comes a point where we talk about what we've just done, what we are doing now, and what we are about to do - or hope to do.  We talk about ideas.  We both come from a background in cartooning and so I think we both find generating ideas one of the easier parts of the job.

Ideas fall into a number of categories for me.  There are the ones I'm happy to share and there are ones I want to keep to myself for a while.  There are ones I want to try out on someone just to see a reaction, and there are ones I feel nervous about.  The ones I feel nervous about are probably the best ones - they are the ones I care about.

It's tricky talking to other writers about ideas in any case.  Writers find it hard not to take the idea and run with it.  If I mention an idea to Chris he always, without fail, goes off at a complete tangent to the book I intend to write.

But one thing I have learned over the years, is that ideas are as much of a distraction as they are a recipe for success.  It is good to have ideas.  Of course it is.  I'd rather have lots than none.  But ideas are seductive.

The trouble is, an idea is not a book, any more than an idea is a painting or a building.  I have dozens of ideas at any given time.  And that's not counting the ones that I have jotted down in past notebooks or have filed away on my computer.

Any one of these ideas may become my next book, in theory - but in reality many of those ideas will never get further than a sentence or two.  Now some of that is down to the fact that I have far more ideas than I can ever convert to finished books, but it is also because many of those ideas, whilst appearing to be great ideas when said quickly, simply won't support the weight of a book.

Ideas have to be tested.  Even in the plot-dominated world of children's books, a successful novel still has to be about so much more.  It has to be about character for one thing.  And whilst you might have a great idea for a character, that character has to come alive in the writing.

Because any idea could be given to a dozen different writers or artists and each one would take it somewhere different.

Ideas can be beautiful things when they are still in your head or in your notebook, but just saying them out loud can sometimes be enough to unmask them as impostors.  Sometimes they last longer.  These are the worst kind - the kind that lead you on for weeks, up and down mountains until you end up trapped in a jungle or alone on a deserted beach, sobbing quietly to yourself.  Metaphorically, I mean.  Apart from the sobbing bit.

Be wary of ideas.  Appreciate them for what they are.  Work on the basis that you are always going to come up with more and don't cache them for later.  The great thing about a book like Philip Pullman's Northern Lights or Philip Reeve's Mortal Engines, is that they are stuffed full of great ideas.

There is no shortcut to the doing bit of a book.  Sooner or later you need to get writing and see what happens.  Most writers I know - me included - hate writing synopses.  One of the reasons I think we hate them is because we know that a synopsis might kill an idea that we had been cradling for months.

Having said all that, you need to be careful with ideas too.  Don't mention the good ones too early.  Don't send them out ill-formed.  Don't think that voicing an idea casually will trick people into liking it. There are no casual conversations about books with editors or agents.  If you care about an idea, treat it with respect.

And don't ask people what they think of your idea until you know what you think.

What's been going on?

I have been fairly busy in the last few weeks, one way and another.

I queued up with an expectant gaggle of other painters to submit my two works for consideration by the selection committee for the the Royal Academy Summer Show.  I dithered about what to put in, and the paint was barely dry before I bubble-wrapped them and took them down on the train.  Above are two (poor) mobile phone shots of the paintings.

Having got in last year, I will feel doubly disappointed if I'm not chosen this year.  It is such a thrill to see your work on those walls.  I went to see the Manet show while I was there and exhibiting in the same space used for Manet is quite exciting.  We hear in May.  Fingers crossed.

I was lucky enough to be asked to sit in a seminar panel at the London Book Fair with Matt Haig (who chaired it ) and Brenda Gardner from Piccadilly Press.  The event was entitled Writing Outside of the Box, and was meant to be about attitudes to genre-writing in children's publishing.  But to be honest, the debate wandered about a little.  We needed to have a clearer point of focus and panellists with more divergent views.  Perhaps we should have had a marketing person, or someone from retail or a writer for adults - someone to add another point of view.  It needed a fight, basically.

I had a chance to see friends and fellow authors like Anne Rooney and Teri Terry.  I saw my agent Philippa Milnes-Smith for lunch and finally meet Maurice Lyon, my editor at Bloomsbury.  Maurice has been covering Ellie Fountain's maternity leave and I was beginning to think I wouldn't get to see him before she returned.  He turned out to be every bit as nice a chap as I had been told to expect.

I bumped into old (in the sense of previous) editors:  Sarah Odedina, who is now at the helm at Hot Key, and Annie Eaton from Random House who published my very first book, Dog Magic! under the Young Corgi imprint at Transworld.  I actually felt like a knew quite a lot of people there.  Maybe I've been around too long.

The London Book Fair is a rather airless hangar full of stands with books on shelves and groups of people sitting around in rapt conversation.  I went upstairs out of curiosity and saw the translation rights area, laid out like a huge exam room or Soviet era interrogation centre.  It was a little bit scary.

I came back to the fair a couple of days later for a Booktrust reception.  Booktrust is such a wonderful organisation and it was good to hear their news, put faces to email address and chat to the likes of Wendy Cooling, Sarah Macintyre and Babette Cole.

On the work front I have been working through the proofs of The Dead Men Stood Together.  I have been reading through them aloud.  I do this at the first draft stage, before I send it in to my publisher, and I do it again at the proof stage.  It may seem like an affectation but it is very practical.

Whilst not all books are designed to be read aloud, all books are read aloud, in effect.  They are read aloud (if you see what I mean) in the reader's head.  It may not seem important for sentences to sound right, but it is.  If they sound right, they probably are right.

Even if it wasn't, reading the words aloud is the surest way I know of catching any mistakes - particularly in punctuation.  Commas that need to be full stops, sentences that need a missing comma - it all becomes much clearer when you read aloud, as, of course, do any repetitions or confusions.  I had 'scene' and 'seen' in the same sentence, for instance.  It looked fine on the written page, but read aloud it was just plain odd.

Helen Szirtes and Isabel Ford, who together have worked on every one of my Bloomsbury books, have both read through the proofs and the next thing will be for us all to compare notes before it goes off to the printers.  It is a book I am very proud of.  It is published in September.  More news nearer the time, of course. . .

As I have said many times, writers are rarely working on one book.  As well as being at the proof stage with The Dead Men Stood Together, having had my idea approved by Bloomsbury, I am now writing Marley's Ghost, a story linked to Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol.  That book will be published next year and will form a trilogy of books based on works that had a particular impact on me when young:  Mister Creecher/Frankenstein, The Dead Men Stood Together/The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Marley's Ghost/A Christmas Carol.

Some rules for writing.

1. Don't pretend there are rules for writing.  At best there are rules for your writing, but even then, they are probably just rules for writing the book you have just finished.
2. Don't think that writing fiction makes you a guru.  Just because you can tell a story doesn't qualify you to pepper the internet with platitudes and aphorisms and lists.
3. Don't take credit for your book jacket unless you did it yourself.  The designer doesn't take credit for your prose.
4. Don't bang on about what a terrible job it is to be a writer.  You sound like an idiot.  Many of your readers would sell their souls to get a book published, or to even have written something worth publishing.
5. Write every book as though it were your last.  Otherwise it might be.
6. Don't take pleasure in bad books.  A bad book doesn't make your book any better.  
7. Don't dismiss bad reviews because they are bad.  Not all bad reviews are wrong.
8. Don't set limits on your achievements.  
9. Don't set yourself goals.  Goals are just another kind of limitation.
10. Be jealous of the achievements of others, but don't resent them.  It's not personal.  They aren't selling books to spite you.  They don't know who you are.
11. Don't be a jerk.  
12. Don't listen to other writers.  They lie for a living.
13. Believe in yourself, but stop well short of worship.
14. Don't tell complete strangers how many words you've written that day.  The postman doesn't tell you how many letters he's delivered.  No one cares.
15. Don't tell everyone you work every day including Christmas Day and think anyone is going to believe you.
16. Don't go on about how J K Rowling isn't a very good writer, because it gets on my nerves (see 10).
17. Don't make an enemy of your editor or your agent.
18. Don't wear your lack of sales as a badge of pride.  Low sales do not necessarily mean that your work is an under-appreciated work of genius.
19. Trust your own judgement.  But not too much (see 11).
20. Listen to other writers.  They tell the truth for a living.

The undead book

I've just had a royalty statement for a book I wrote some years ago.  It is called Witch Hunt and was published by Hodder.  It is a piece of narrative non-fiction about the Salem witch trials.  It is, I firmly believe, a very good book.  It is also out of print.

Royalty statements are a bit of a mystery to everyone outside the publishing industry and, to be honest, they can be pretty confusing even if you see them every six months.  They are the kind of documents that seems designed to make the information they contain as hard to ingest as possible.

The writer of a book receives a share of the sale price, agreed on contract.  Royalty statements are sent to writers from their publisher and detail the sales of books and the money due - if any - to the writer.

I say 'if any' because royalty statements can just as easily show a negative figure as a positive one.  This is because when the writer signs a contract with their publisher, they will almost certainly be paid an 'advance'.  This advance - the amount of which varies from publisher to publisher, writer to writer - will have to be 'earned out' before the writer will receive any royalties.

The bigger the advance, the harder it is to pay off.  But because a writer cannot control the sales of a book - although they can obviously help, by attending events, promoting themselves online an so on - most writers (and their agents) will want to try and get the best advance they can.

However, most writers will also want to 'earn out' their advance.  Not just because they want to earn royalties, but because if you don't pay off that advance, you will be in a weaker position the next time you negotiate with your publisher.  But more than that - books that don't earn out their advance drag behind you like the links on Jacob Marley's chains.

Good writers don't just churn books out (and yes I am saying I am a good writer).  We have to balance our artistic needs with the requirement to pay bills, but mostly, I have a real emotional commitment to anything I write.

When a book does not sell it hurts.  I mean it really hurts.  It may be a disappointment to your publisher, but it is often far more than just a financial disappointment to the author.  When a book that you put your heart and soul into does not sell, it can be really upsetting - and unsettling.

A book generally has a limited window of opportunity to sell - or two, if it has a hardback release initially.  In a perfect world, there will be a sales and marketing budget behind your hardback book and it will appear on tabletops in Waterstones and get reviewed in a couple of national papers and those (hopefully positive) reviews will decorate the jacket of your paperback.  Maybe you'll be nominated for an award.  Or even win one.

Your book needs to sell whilst this wind is in its sails.  It needs your other books to sell too.  You need to elbow yourself some room on the shelves.  The book's life - or half-life - will be extended on Amazon, and maybe it will get another chance if your next book sells well.  But maybe it will - gulp - go out of print.

Meanwhile those royalty statements keep coming, reminding you of that failure, telling you exactly how little a dent you have made in that advance.  Its a pain that cannot be cured, because the book, if it out of print, cannot sell any more copies.  I think many writers feel guilty about this.  They feel as though they have let the publisher down.  They feel they've let themselves down.  But that's not necessarily the case.

We all want to believe that quality will out, but experience tells us this is not the case.  We see it in our own work, and we see it in the work of others.  Good books (movies, plays, whatever) do not always do well.  Bad books (movies, plays, whatever) often do very well indeed.  Part of this is explained by the subjectivity of the term 'good', I should add.

So what do I think went wrong with Witch Hunt?  I'll start with what I think is right with it.  I think it's well written (well I would say that., wouldn't I) and was well edited by Anne Clark (who is now an agent).  The subject matter is a strong one - there is a perennial interest in witches and in the Salem witch trial.  It also links to the Communist witch hunt of the 1950s and to Arthur Miller's The Crucible.

What, in retrospect, may not have worked was the idea of narrative non-fiction.  It is a very successful genre in books for adults, but is perhaps confusing for children's booksellers.  The cover - which I actually quite like - is designed to look like fiction, I think, but the girl's face effectively rules out boy readers.  It could have been a bit less tasteful too.

Add to that the fact that the budgets for educational books are relatively small, and it becomes harder to promote the book.  It did get reviewed and had a couple of really nice ones as I remember.  But the fact remains that a book like this has a very small chance to get noticed before it sinks - as this one sadly did.  I remember seeing it in only one bookshop - and when I did, it was in the fiction section.

It is humbling to accept, that the success of your book may have as much, if not more, to do with the quality of the cover, the publicity, or of the sales or marketing budget, than about the quality of the prose.  But unless the audience know its there, the book cannot sell.  It is really as simple as that.  And so the writer can feel the book did not sell because the publisher did not back it with sufficient zeal.  The writer can grow bitter.  But who is to tell where the blame - if that's even the right word - lays.  There is always the possibility - however unlikely it seems - that the book you wrote, the book you loved and devoted so many hours to, was actually a bit dull, a bit derivative - not very good.

These undead books that come back to haunt us are reminders of something that went wrong in the mix of writing, editing, design, sales, marketing, publicity, but unfortunately they don't tell us which specific aspect failed.  As dispiriting as it may be to have a book that refused to sell, as a writer all you can really do is put it down to experience and go on and write the very best book you can - every time.

Crying over unsold books is the silliest of all writerly self-indulgences.  Let it go.

And the loser is....

I had a very good morning in Tooting yesterday at the Wandsworth FAB book awards, marred only by the fact that I didn't win.  Alexander Gordon Smith was the only other author there of the seven who were shortlisted.  We looked on nervously as the books were listed in ascending order, breathing a sigh of relief when ours did not appear in seventh place (he finished second and I finished third, by the way).  Blood Read Road by Moira Young was the winner.

It was fascinating as always to talk to the young people who came along to the event and to hear a little about why they had enjoyed Mister Creecher (they were far too polite to tell me if they hadn't enjoyed it) and to get a chance to ask them about what they liked to read and why.

What was really heartening for me was the fact that they talked about Mister Creecher they really picked up on the friendship aspect of the book.  The possibilities and limitations of Billy's relationship to Creecher were at the heart of all my thinking when I was writing that book.

In many ways I saw both characters as teenagers.  Although Creecher is a giant physically, he is a boy emotionally and psychologically.  He has been rejected by his 'father' and is looking for love, just as Billy, hurt and scarred by his life, is also looking for love.  They want love but neither know how to give it.  Both are wary and suspicious.

I think the relationships between teenage boys can be complicated even without such damaged individuals.  Teenage boys are very conscious of their maleness and are hyper-sensitive to how they are perceived by others.  Boys are full of questions they dare not ask for fear of revealing their ignorance and appearing to be inexperienced - which they are, most of the time.

Neither Billy nor Creecher know as much as they pretend to.  None of their experience is of any use to them in gaining the lives they dream of having.  Their friendship is a dangerous one, shot through with lies and suspicion and resentment.

Portuguese ships

A couple of Portuguese editions of Tales of Terror from the Black Ship turned up in the post yesterday.

And the winner is. . .

I am delighted to be able to tell you that Mister Creecher has won the BASH 2013 yesterday!

BASH stands for Book Award St Helen's and is voted on by the young people of St Helen's, Merseyside.  I was in very good company on the shortlist and I am very proud and pleased that Mister Creecher was voted the winner.

I want to thank all those voters and the organisers of the award.  I was sadly unable to attend the ceremony due to other commitments, but maybe I'll get a chance to come up there and meet some of those involved before too long.