Tag: opensubs

Hard to believe it’s two years since I put together my submission for Abaddon’s open subs call. I still recall the thinking that went on after a friend pointed the opportunity out to me. What kind of story to go for. Did I want to pitch an idea for an existing world or come up with an original idea that would hopefully form the basis of a new world for Abaddon? In the end, as is often the case for writers, the final decision included an element of pragmatism.

The idea of writing for an existing universe has a lot of appeal. Much of the world building has already been done for you. The downside is that if your story isn’t picked up, then it isn’t like you can run with it yourself because you’d run straight into big walls of copyright! This is fine, and I’ve pitched things before that I couldn’t do on my own, but there’s a certain sadness to coming up with a great story and knowing you probably won’t be able to write it (and make no mistake when I was coming up with my pitch I was convinced I wouldn’t be chosen.) The one exception to this was the Tomes of the Dead series, because there was no real shared universe beyond them being zombie stories, so even early on I was definitely veering in that direction.

I gave a lot of thought to the idea of coming up with a wholly original story/world. On the one hand there was so much potential, there was no guidance given as to just what kind of new world they wanted (I guess they weren’t quite sure themselves) so I could do anything. Of course the difficulty with having a completely blank canvas is that it can be overwhelming. I didn’t discount it, but I think I knew fairly early on that Tomes of the Dead might be my best bet, and having read Colin’s alien invasion tale set in a garden centre I’m glad I did because I could never have come up with anything that brilliantly off the wall.

Of course knowing I wanted to write a zombie story was only half the battle. I still needed to come up with an idea. I’m still very happy with The Lazarus Conundrum, especially in comparison to some ideas I tossed around. Suffice to say I doubt my police procedural featuring a grizzled cop and his undead partner fighting off an alien invasion would have impressed David Moore and I probably wouldn’t be able to call myself an Abaddon author now!

I wish everyone entering this time the best of luck. My only advice is to polish your idea and especially your pitch as much as you can before you send it in. Having a great idea is one thing, selling that great idea in a limited number of words is something else entirely.

It’s Open Submissions Month, and I have no doubt many of you are frantically typing as we speak. And here is the seventh and last editorial blog for you submitter-types. Let’s talk elevator pitches!

I’ve delivered a talk to the first-years on Buckinghamshire New University’s “Writing for Publication” course the past two years, giving a breakdown on the whole industry and the process from commissioning to retail sales. in this talk I spend nearly a half my allotted time on the elevator pitch. Yeah, it’s that big a deal.

Why “elevator”? Supposedly coined by Ilene Rosenzweig and Michael Caruso of Vanity Fair, it refers to a chance meeting with an editor (see also: producer, director, executive) in a lift, where the forced seclusion of a thirty-second trip gives you an unrivalled opportunity to press your idea on them… if you can get the gist of it across in time. This does happen! I’ve heard pitches over cigarette breaks and while waiting to pay for a pint, and no doubt will again.

More generally, it’s the skill of condensing and presenting your story persuasively and quickly, to cut away the flesh, find the hard core of the story and pare it down to its simplest, most compelling form. It’s an invaluable marketing skill and a hard-won discipline, and it tells us a lot about you and your story – because you can’t do this unless you really know what it’s about, and if you don’t know what the story’s about, it’s likely that’ll be reflected in the finished work.

But how do you do it?

#1. CUT IT ALL AWAY

For starters, be brutal. Your story is something rich and wonderful, full of nuance, detail and complexity, and right now we don’t need most of it. Find the most basic thread of the story and focus on that. At its heart, Cass Khaw’s Rupert Wong, Cannibal Chef is a murder mystery; Pat Kelleher’s No Man’s World trilogy is a survival story. This doesn’t tell you everything, but it gives your pitch a framework.

Neil Gaiman was once challenged to summarise the whole story arc of his The Sandman, a sprawling metanarrative with scores of characters, running for thousands of pages of comics over seven years, in 25 words. He did it in fifteen: “The Lord of Dreams learns that one must change or die, and makes his decision.” You don’t have to be quite that savage (we’ve given you a hundred words!), but this is where you start.

#2. DON’T BE COY

Okay, rehearse this phrase. It’s not a blurb. It’s a very similar discipline, but there are some key differences, and the first one is, we want the spoiler.

Think about it: a blurb’s job isn’t to tell you what the story’s about, but how it begins. It gives you the setup, maybe condenses the first couple chapters, but it doesn’t tell you how it unfolds, because the reader wants to enjoy the surprise. But when we editors are reading your pitch, we want to know what makes it a good story, and the ending should be part of that – or if it isn’t, then that’s a pretty distressing sign for your book.

#3. SELL IT TO US

Or “Don’t Be Coy, Part Two.” Basically, your pitch should tell us two things: what your story’s about (in its most reduced form, as above), and how it’s different from every other story just like it. Remember back to the Subversion blog? This is what I’m talking about. If your story inverts a trope, spell that out in the pitch. If the protagonist is original, diverse or just frickin’ cool, tell us exactly how. It’s how your story stands out that’s going to convince us, and it’s in your elevator pitch that you have the best opportunity to explain how it stands out.

And there you go. Seven little blogs, seven little snippets of advice and wisdom, seven points of view that others will no doubt tear apart, because we publishing types love to argue. I hope I’ve helped a little.

Now, what are you still doing here? Go, write! You’ve got a submission to send in!

The Open Door route seemed easier in a way. Engaging with an established market, slotting into a particular mind-set, following an already charted course, sort of thing.

I’d found the Abaddon Books line very appealing since the first releases back in 2006. Admired the general pulpy vibe, the passion and energy, the fact that everything was just ever so slightly brighter and more off kilter than you might have been expecting. Abaddon Books made even the rotting corpses of the risen dead seem fresh and new again.

Traditionally you’re writing for yourself and just guessing what might appeal to agents and editors down the line, but in this case there was at least a general direction to head in. A sort of inkling of the kind of thing they want to see within the pre-existing Abaddon series. Or at least there would have been if I’d gone with my first submission-candidate which involved Nazis and Egyptian magic, with a view to adding to the Tomes of the Dead line-up. Think Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, but with more zombies.

I had second thoughts of course. And you should never be afraid to do that as a writer. Think again.

Sometimes ideas spring forth fully realised, sometimes bits and pieces gather like the accretion disk around a stellar mass and eventually a more solid form emerges. In the case of my eventual pitch to Abaddon, I’d come up with a mostly-joking title years before and somehow, slow and sure, it grew from that seed into an actual plot with a beginning, middle and end.

More than that, it had given me the notion for a whole new Abaddon shared world, on the theme of invasions of all kinds; aliens, demons, monsters, Vikings, whatever, the possibilities were limitless…

As someone famous may have said, few submissions survive first contact with the Editor, and Abaddon didn’t so much rein in my initial concept as give it a sharper focus – alien invasions – with the overall title Invaders from Beyond.

I still have high hopes for that Nazis versus the Pyramids of Death caper, though.

Maybe next time.

Okay,  the Open Submissions month is going strong now, so let’s talk about this little line in the guidelines: “we’re really, really interested in wider representation.”

The world is changing, and very much for the better. There are more women, more people of colour, more LGBTQ+ people, more disabled people and more people in every other marginal group you can think of in our public spheres, creating, telling their stories, shining new and different lights on the world. And our community is embracing that, in awards lists and anthology tables of contents; hell, not one, but two of the most-tipped writers for genre awards in 2017 are transgender. There are hiccups in places – and God knows there’s resistance, in some corners – but the world’s growing richer.

But there’s a ways to go yet. Although women account for maybe two thirds of books sold, they write only about a third of titles; and writers of colour are still desperately underrepresented, to say nothing of other marginalised groups. Genre publishing can be better.

And there are limits to what we as publishers can do! You can only publish what you’re given, and the experience of our peers across the industry, in both direct submissions and open doors, is that most of the pitches come from a pretty narrow sample of society. That’s a totally fair reply! But it’s not enough to say, “Well, marginalised people need to submit more.” If you feel like the doors are closed to you, you’re less likely to knock.

And we appreciate the arguments about “finding the best,” and about not publishing to a “diversity quota.” But to talk about “the best” as though it were something objectively measurable is pretty silly – everyone has their own preferences, and in general the best five or ten percent of any given batch of submissions are all about equally brilliant – and anyway, you don’t need to publish to a quota.

You just need to look.

Seek and ye shall find! We talk to people at conventions, we follow new writers on Twitter, we read anthologies, we look for more diverse voices. They don’t get an automatic in – nobody should get that – but if you just look for the writers, show them the way to your door, encourage them to submit, give them your time, you’ll have those submissions you were looking for.

And you know what? It pays off. Writers from marginalised groups are less likely to take a punt on half-finished pitches and unpolished manuscripts; when you feel like the door’s closed, you make extra sure to have your very best foot forward when it does open. We’ve found actively pursuing diversity disproportionately brings in dedicated, talented, professional creators.

Abaddon wants in on the diversity party. We have done for a while. And while we’re not there yet, we’re trying – around half our titles in 2016 were by women, including two women of colour – and we plan to try harder.

Does this mean you shouldn’t send in to our Open Subs if you’re a white dude? Not at all! You should absolutely submit, and will be judged on your merit like everyone else. But we want diverse voices to know that yes, they’re welcome too, and no, it’s not just to tick a box, and when it comes to the crunch no-one’s going to question how “commercial” or “accessible” they are when it comes time to trim the final shortlist.

Next (and final) Open Subs blog: the Elevator Pitch!

In writing about my experience pitching Dead Stop for the 2012 opens submission window in I have begun to write one account, completely re-written it, realised what I was writing was far too long, and then started over with this version.

This reflects the submission process itself – I came up with an idea, I wrote a synopsis that reflected all the detail I would need to write the final novella, and then I created a copy and started to cut it down into what was required for a proposal, rewriting it to fit the stringent requirements of the submission process in terms of synopsis, chapter breakdown and writing sample.

I wasn’t just tightening for length, but for impact: that short synopsis was the tightest, punchiest pitch for a complex high concept I could manage; the breakdown wasn’t just a blueprint for the story I would write but an excitable retelling of it to hook in the editors; and the sample itself wasn’t just a chunk of story but also a showcase of the high concept, the characters, the tone and my own ability to write it.

It was a lot of work, but it worked.  

Not without reason, social media tends to get a bad rap these days. This, though, is an instance where it really came into its own. I’m Facebook friends with Jonathan Green, author of the Pax Britannia series and many other things. (Not that I’ve ever actually met him – I was just a fan boy. Heck, I still am). Jonathan happened to mention in a posting that Abaddon Books was having an Open Submissions round.

Obviously it was way too good a chance to miss. As a big admirer of Abaddon’s very distinctive output – particularly Jonathan’s work and Pat Kelleher’s sublime No Man’s World sequence – I was compelled to give it a go. Over the years I’d had some success with various writing competitions and initiatives (and lots and lots of failures but I’ll come back to that).

I came up with several ideas that I thought would fit the ‘intelligent pulp’ feel that characterises Abaddon’s books. Once I’d chosen the best one, I spent a lot of time honing it. Then I had cold feet and thought hang on, this idea isn’t working, and went back to one of the other ideas. I then honed that idea instead, before realising that – wait a minute – the original idea I’d honed was much preferable, it just needed reworking. And honing. Again.

In short, I spent an awful lot of time finding something that worked and that I felt happy about entering. Of course, that happiness dissipated as soon as I’d submitted it. I spent many anxious weeks thinking my idea sucked, that I should have gone with the other one. And then David Moore’s email came through.

He’d rejected it. But it was a lovely rejection – and believe me, I know a nice rejection when I see one. David wrote me a really thoughtful, generous email in which he said how much he liked it but that he liked something else just that little bit more. I thanked him but then –and this is completely out of character for me – cheekily asked if I could pitch something else. And David, the gent he is, said okay, would I like to pitch for our Afterblight series? (Don’t count on that as a strategy, by the way. If you’re rejected, chances are you really are rejected).

So I went back to the other ideas. One of them was a Western-style adventure built around the character of Ned Kelly but set in Melbourne. It occurred to me that the Afterblight series hadn’t touched upon Australia, and therefore this idea might be something I could rework for this particular storyworld.  And that’s how my psychotic anti-hero Dead Kelly emerged, blinking in the post-apocalyptic light.

In short, then, if you’re thinking about giving it a go, treat it really seriously. Treat it like a professional writing gig, which is what it is. Choose your best idea. Then choose a better best idea. Rewrite it. Throw it away. Pick out the bin. Love it, hate it, all that stuff. And yes, it’s a lot of work, but it might be worth it.

And even if David doesn’t choose it, the experience will have been vital to you. Remember all those failures I mentioned? They’re essential, all part of the process of getting you nearer to being a professional writer. It’s a cliché, but when you’re sipping piña coladas with JK Rowling and George RR Martin (which constitutes a typical evening out for me these days) you’ll thank me.

Hey all,

Okay, here’s Blog #5 for our Open Submissions Month. This time I’ll have a crack at that pesky sample chapter…

And as before, some of this applies to any submissions channels you might go to in future.

READ THE GUIDELINES

Okay, go back to the blog on the synopsis and read the bit about the guidelines again, but twice this time.

Got it? It’s, like, extra important for the sample.

POLISH

One of the most dismaying things to find, when you open a fresh submission manuscript, is a wall of really basic errors: typos, bad punctuation, word repetition. Don’t be this writer. Once you’ve written your sub, check it. Check it again. Get a friend to check it. Run a spellcheck (but remember that it’s no substitute for a human being).

We’re not going to be dicks about it. It doesn’t have to be perfect – hell, no book is perfect, even after all the rounds of edits and proofreads – but it does have to look like you took some effort. A handful of errors on a page is reasonable; a handful of errors in a paragraph is more of a problem.

Think of it as a job application (which it totally is!). When the job you’re applying for is “writer,” the one thing an employer wants to see on your application is proof you can write to a professional standard.

SHOWCASE

Look at what’s in the sample. Does it give us a good idea of what the book’s going to be like? If your book’s going to have a distinctive voice, is that voice evident in the sample? If there’s going to be a lot of action in the book, is there a bit of action in the sample? (This is super-important; a lot of otherwise great writers really struggle with action, so we’ll be looking for it.) Are you giving us a feel for the personalities of the characters?

Now, it may be that in the story you’ve planned, this stuff won’t all turn up in the first chapter. Fine; give us a later chapter. But in that case, tell us about that decision in your covering email. If your sample isn’t the beginning of the story, we’ll inevitably worry about why you don’t have confidence in the beginning. This is more important than you might think; at some point, a member of the public’s going to pick up this book, and whether they read past the first few pages depends a lot on how much those first few pages grab them. That’s why a lot of books start in media res (that’s fancy Latin for “in the middle of the action”), and only get to the worldbuilding and backstory after the first scene.

That said, we totally want you to strut your stuff, and if you think a later chapter’s the best way to do that, then go for it and tell us why.

And that’s it, really! This is the biggie; it’s where we can tell if you can write. As I mentioned in the Why They Won blog, we’ve commissioned people whose pitches we didn’t like, because the writing sample was strong enough that we invited them to pitch again. Make sure you shine!

Next up: Diversity.

I finally joined Twitter in 2012, late to the party as ever, because I wanted to keep up with what was going on in the world of comics. 

By a happy coincidence, that was exactly the right time to learn that 2000 AD’s publisher Rebellion were looking for novella subs for their Abaddon Books line.  I’d written some young adult horror novels when I was younger and wanted to expand into writing for adults, so it seemed like the perfect opportunity to take a punt.

I checked out Abaddon’s existing series to see what kind of stories were in my wheelhouse that might also be in theirs.  They warned up-front that it would be an uphill battle to pitch a new series rather than write in an existing world, which I cheerfully ignored.  The horror-ish, urban fantasy-ish stories they published weren’t entirely my jam – I lack the zombie appreciation gene, and I’m not too big on gods and mythology – so I figured I’d try to pitch something that their line was missing: a grounded urban fantasy where magic was real, but there were no monsters, only human beings and the dangers they created. 

That led me to the idea of shapeshifters who weren’t typical werewolves, but transformed using skins – and the police department in charge of regulating those shapeshifting skins, and all other kinds of ritual magic.

And that – after much frantic scribbling of magic- and police-related terms to come up with a good name – was how the Ritual Crime Unit was born.

 

I wrote my first novel at the age of twelve.

It had unicorns. And soulgems. And my best friends reinterpreted through as human girls freshly emerged from a portal. And the kind of ambiguously handsome, ambiguously nice guy that prepubescent Cass thought she was meant to date, one day.

I actually finished the thing. Three hundred words of fiction, an entire year’s worth of everyday events translated to fantasy. I’m not going to demean twelve-year-old Cass by saying it was terrible. But it was certainly not something publishable. (My mother disagreed. She tried to bribe printers with RM5000 to put the damn things in stores. I love you, mom.)

The years passed. I ended up a programmer, thanks to a combination of pragmatism and parental insistence. Then, I became a journalist. And then, I became a writer – or at least, I sheepishly waddled up to the idea.

I had no clue what I was doing.

(I still don’t have any clue what I was doing.)

At some point while I was haphazardly submitting stories to slush piles everywhere, dazzled and deeply perplexed by the world, Abaddon Books opened up their submissions queue. They wanted pitches for their various licenses including Gods & Monsters, which I fucking loved. I’d read Chuck Wendig’s Unclean Spirits and I’d devoured Stephen Blackmoore. I remember excitedly discussing both with anyone who’d pay me more than a few minutes of attention. American Gods, I said. Except grittier, gorier, fiercer. I loved the series.

So, when the opportunity came, I leapt. I knew exactly what I wanted. I wanted to tell the story of non-Western pantheons. I wanted to show people Malaysia in all of its glamour, all of its weirdness, all of its multi-cultural textures. I wanted desperately to turn the lens of that universe onto Southeast Asia.

And I wrote.

And I wrote.

And I wrote.

And when I was done, I had friends (Stephen S. Power, I’ll never stop being grateful to you) look over the finished product before sending it to Abaddon Books, fully expecting to be rejected, but hoping against hope that the publishers would fall in love with my mythpunk interpretation of the land I was born to.

Spoiler: they did.

Work-for-hire is not what you’d traditionally expect of publishing. It is a sum paid upon delivery with no royalties. A decent sum, to be fair, especially for a relatively small division of a larger outfit. But nothing that’d really fill the well of your dreams.

But if you’re thinking about trying out for this open submissions period, especially if you’ve never published anything before, you should. You really, really should. It won’t change your fortunes overnight, but it’d show you how publishing works, give you a book to curl your (virtual) fingers around, give you a rock when you’re floating around in the sea of ‘I cannot do this, why did anyone say I could do this.’

And you’ll need that in those early days of publishing, assuming you plan to keep going. (I hope you do, reader. I need more people to rejectomance with.) If you get through those rounds, if Abaddon Books comes back to you with that email, I promise you it’s going to be great.

Hey all,

As we spelled out in the submissions guidelines, the main reason this is a Work For Hire gig is the potential to invite other writers to play in your world.

We don’t do this with all our properties – Toby Venables’ Hunter of Sherwood trilogy, for instance, and E. E. Richardson’s Ritual Crime Unit stories – and we don’t necessarily need your submission to be suitable for sharing, but we’ve had enormous fun expanding and enriching our universes before, and we’re likely to do it again. Heck, Tomes of the Dead and The Afterblight Chronicles have racked up a dozen authors each!

So you’ve decided that’s you. You were gonna pitch for the open subs month anyway, but actually, you really want your project to inspire us to bring in other writers. I mean, there’s a certain satisfaction in knowing you’re laying the groundwork for other people’s work, further down the line, right? Eric Brown, writing about his work on Weird Space for Abaddon X, asked “Who wouldn’t, given the opportunity, want to play God?”

How do you pitch a story for a shared world? Well, let’s see.

MAKE IT BIG…

The most important thing is scope. When we read the pitch, we should be thinking, “This is cool! But what about the other stories?” There should be worlds left to explore. The setting should feel vast, and nuanced, and believable; like something that exists in its own right, beyond serving as a backdrop for your plot.

Your UK-centric alt-history should leave us wanting to know what’s been happening in the US, or Europe – or Africa and Southeast Asia, for that matter. Your epic fantasy war between satyrs and dwarves may hint at the greater role the satyr nation plays in the fay courts – and the crucial importance of dwarvish trade to the Fay Empress. Your Mars-based police procedural could allude to the widely-corrupt, privately-run justice systems of smaller colonies.

…BUT LEAVE LOTS OF ROOM

But give us the space to dream in. Don’t pin the world down too much; set themes and a tone, sketch a few details and create a framework, but we don’t need to know every detail of every corner of the world. Give your future collaborators breathing room.

Everything in moderation, of course; the parts you need for your story you can detail as finely as you need. And if there’s a corner of the sandpit you want to fence off and say, for instance, “I don’t mind how you use the warrior-rabbit-folk, as long as you don’t make them some sort of tonedeaf Asian pastiche,” then we can totally talk about that when we put together a world bible.

MAKE IT DISTINCTIVE…

There’s always a temptation to make shared worlds kind of bland, precisely to offer the sort of blank canvas we’re talking about; but that’s no good.

First off, who wants bland anyway? We need readers to want to buy this! Secondly, it risks tonal confusion. If you write a grittily realistic drama, we’re unlikely to want a future contributor to add a slapstick farce to the same world; the setting should steer stories to fit in it. But third and most importantly, it needs enough to hang future books off. Gods and Monsters is a fairly generic gods-live-among-us world (with some curious features, like the Usurper and the Chroniclers), but there’s a spirit of punky revolt to it that fires up the neurons of our contributors and helps the series hang together.

Find the heart of your world; the thing that, blank canvas aside, informs everything in the setting and gives future books as yet undreamed-of a uniting feel.

…BUT NOT TOO CONSTRICTIVE

Okay, does this feel like I’m repeating myself? It’s sort of the same advice on two different fronts. Whatever it is about your setting that will inspire readers to buy books and future writers to want to pitch in – its voice and tone, a hook in the history, a quirk in the culture – don’t make it so tight everyone has to clone your book to fit in.

The Afterblight Chronicles has a unifying setting (a global plague that targeted blood types), themes (duty, faith vs reason) and voice (sort of angry/principled), but Spurrier’s bleakly brutal road movie, Andrews’ defiant coming-of-age story and Kane’s dynastic saga all hang together within the setting perfectly comfortably.

And that’s it, I guess. It’s one of those middle-of-the-road “balance in all things” sort of answers, but hopefully it’s provided food for thought.

Next up is the Sample…