Tag: opensubs

Here’s Blog #3 for our Open Submissions Month. This time I thought I’d look at the submission itself. Specifically, the synopsis; what it should look like, how you can make it engaging to us as we work through the stack.

And actually, some of this applies to any other submissions channels you might go to.

READ THE GUIDELINES 

So first of all, go back and check the guidelines now. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

Done? Okay.

Follow them. Follow the file type instruction, the email composition request, the word counts. This is true for any submission, to any market; there’s always some sort of guidelines, and you should always look them up and follow them scrupulously. We put them there for a reason – for convenience, for fairness, time concerns – and not following them can cause delays in what’s always a huge task.

It’s also about professionalism. If we can’t trust you to follow guidelines, we have to ask what we can trust you for, when time comes to exchange money and contracts…

…and it’s an advantage you can give yourself. Agents talk about rejecting as many as 90% of pitches just for not following the guidelines. Turn that on its head: just by following a handful of fairly straightforward rules openly published on an agent’s or publisher’s website, you’ve put yourself in the top 10%! For our part, we’re not mean enough to reject you out of hand, but if we’re picking between two equally promising pitches and one of them followed the rules, it’s pretty likely to have a bearing.

WHAT TO INCLUDE

The brief answer is: everything, but not too much of anything.

We’ve read your elevator pitch, and we know what your story’s about. Now we want the nitty-gritty; what happens in the story and how it gets there. In your pitch (which we’ll get to in a future blog), you’ll be picking out the highlights – what makes your story different and exciting – but here you’re blocking out the whole story, including incidental characters, backstory and flavour scenes. This should literally feel like the (highly-accelerated) experience of reading the book.

But be careful about lingering. We’re going to use this to gauge the pacing of the story; if half your synopsis is used up describing that one fight scene in the bathroom, we’re assuming half the final book’s going to take place in a toilet. You can add wordcount guides to each section to clarify this, but if it takes you a third of your synopsis to describe what’s intended to be a one-page scene, that’ll tend to raise questions.

HOW TO LAY IT OUT

The key word is “easy-to-read.” We’re still at the skimming stage here; we won’t really settle in and relax until we hit the prose sample. Think bullet points (literally, ideally) rather than paragraphs, and don’t get too florid in your bullet points, either.

People sometimes ask about grouping the synopsis into chapters, story arcs or plot beats, and the simple answer is, we don’t care. Structure your synopsis however you think best describes it, and makes it accessible to us. It’s best if the synopsis follows the story order, though; if you feel you have to pull scenes out of sequence to explain it, once again, that’ll raise questions.

This may all seem very reductionist and severe – not to mention lazy, on our part – but the overarching theme here is discipline. Your story should be organised in your head, with strong plot beats and a clear message, and the synopsis is your chance to show that off to best effect. If it’s not right in your head, we can’t be sure it’ll be right on the page.

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So there you go. Loose, rambling, undirected, overlooking key plot points – all these are terms that shouldn’t describe your synopsis. Tighten it till it squeaks and polish it till it gleams.

Good luck, and see you next week for Shared Worlds…

Writers, the Abaddon Open Subs Month is now officially open!

All throughout May we’ll be accepting your submissions – and we can’t wait to see what you’ve got.

You can find full details – including what we’re looking for, how to submit, and deadlines – right here. 

There are also a couple of blogs live from Abaddon editor David Thomas Moore that are well worth checking out:

• Why they won
• Subverting genre

But that’s not all! We’ve got blogs coming up covering all manner of helpful topics, and we’ll also be hearing from authors who sucessfully submitted to previous Open Subs Months.

Exciting times ahead! 

Hello!

Here, then, is the second of my little blogs for the Abaddon Open Submissions Month 2017, and I want to tackle one of the most important things about Abaddon Books: subversion.

Right from the outset, Abaddon has taken fairly traditional genre tropes and found ways to turn them on their heads, or use them to ask serious questions. Not always in huge, fundamental ways – and we’re not always the first to use a particular twist – but there’s always something in there that’s a little different from the usual.

The post-apocalyptic Afterblight Chronicles are explorations of authority, society and faith. Weird Space is about riotous space-smugglers and rebels… and weird, interdimensional Lovecraftesque horrors. The Tomes of the Dead series glory in this, dropping zombies on Napoleonic ships, in Medieval Welsh castles, as training aids for investment bankers, and as weird gumshoe-mercenary-shapeshifting-alien-bug-things.

As you saw previously, four of the five winning pitches in the last two open-subs months won primarily on the concept, generally because it was in some way subversive or challenging on a type. So how do you do subversion? What’s the sort of thing that’ll make us sit up and take notice, here at Abaddon Towers?

Glad you asked.

TWIST IT!

So the most obvious way to subvert a genre is to build something fairly traditional and change a part of it in some way. Malcolm Cross’s Orbital Decay is a whodunit on a tiny space station. The hero of Death Got No Mercy’s a sociopathic killer. Hungry Hearts is a zombie love triangle.

It’s an exercise in lateral thinking. How about a legal drama set in a world of superheroes (where the legalities of mind-reading, or the definition of “armed,” undergo fresh court challenges every week), or a military-SF told from the point of view of later generations trying to piece together how they lost?

MASH IT!

Okay, so mashups are kind of hokey these days, but there’s always scope to come up with something fun. Chuck Wendig’s Double Dead is vampires (well, a vampire) vs zombies; The Malory’s Knights of Albion series is Arthuriana meets gothic horror. Addison Gunn’s Extinction Biome is both military SF and CliFi.

The sky’s the limit, really! An alien invasion story set in the Renaissance? An espionage thriller set in a fairy court? How about a stone-age epic fantasy?

FLIP IT!

One of our favourite subversions is the straight-up reversal. Make the villain the hero, bring the dead to life, make the end the beginning… turn the story on its head. This is most evident in Toby Venables’ epic Hunter of Sherwood trilogy, in which Guy of Gisburne is an idealistic hero – agent of the shrewd, principled Prince John – trying to rescue Britain from the ravages of the psychotic Robin Hood.

What does this mean for you? What about a company of spaceship troopers desperately trying to protect Imperial workers and their families from the bloodthirsty ragtag of the so-called “rebellion”? What does the ancient and secret monster-hunting order do when the prophesied saviour is killed, like, as soon as she turns up?

REPRESENTATION AND INTERROGATION

Often, the story doesn’t have to be particularly new or different, if the character is. Foz Meadows’ Coral Bones examines The Tempest with a genderqueer Miranda; Cass Khaw’s Rupert Wong Cannibal Chef swung us with the writing and the character, but we certainly liked that it was a story about Malaysian mythology, with a Malaysian hero, written by a Malaysian writer. Una McCormack’s The Baba Yaga is a desperate flight from an evil government, with a pregnant hero.

What could you do along these lines? Give us a “chosen one” heroic fantasy narrative, where the hero lives with anxiety. How about a gay superspy, killing bad guys to rescue his abducted husband? Obviously, here, your own experiences are important, but odds are good you have something to draw on to tell a story, something that breaks with the norm and is still personal to you.

But most of all – and in a way, all of these approaches also do this – subversion is about asking (sometimes difficult) questions. Steampunk is guilty (much of the time) of glorifying imperialism; Pax Britannia shows us the darker, uglier side of that world. Scott K. Andrews’ School’s Out asks why, in a world no longer bound by the rule of law, kids would trust adults for a minute. Hillary Monahan’s Snake Eyes is about gender identity, and how it complicates family.

Pick a cliché and unpack it! How do orcs feel about their legacy as slaves? What sort of person gets non-therapeutic cybernetic implants, and what drives them to it? Why does the Dark Lord want to conquer the kingdom?

And there you go. Not by any means a comprehensive list, but some avenues for inspiration.

Good luck!

Next week: the Synopsis.

We did it in 2012 and again in 2015 and had a blast, so here we are again: Abaddon is looking for new authors! For the month of May 2017, we will be opening our doors to public submissions. Hooray!

WHAT ARE WE LOOKING FOR?

We’re after novellas (ca. 30,000 words) and full-length novels (ca. 90,000 words), for publication on a Work For Hire basis in 2018 and 2019. We don’t need a finished manuscript right away! Submission details are below.

WHAT GENRES DO WE ACCEPT?

Anything, really! Historically, we’ve preferred submissions to our existing shared worlds – that’s our model, after all – but since we’ve always received many more original worlds submissions than submissions to existing worlds, we’ve decided this time to throw open the doors for new stories. Take note of the Work For Hire terms, though!

We’ve published space opera, historical fantasy, steampunk, post-apocalypse, urban fantasy, zombie fiction and more. Our favourite things are unexpected or subversive, challenging the assumptions of existing genres and asking difficult questions.

And we’re really, really interested in wider representation. We’d love stories about women, POC, LGBTQ+ and disabled characters, especially told by writers with those backgrounds and experiences.

WHAT’S WORK FOR HIRE?

Work For Hire is a publishing model in which we buy out your work – publication, adaptation and licensing rights, for characters, setting and story – for a single upfront payment. You get a professional paycheque without waiting to earn out, and all rights in the work reside solely with Rebellion, sequels and all.

We do this for a number of reasons, but the main one is so we can use the setting further down the line, inviting other writers to play in the sandbox. It’s given us some of our favourite stories: Al Ewing’s El Sombra books, for instance, and Cassandra Khaw’s Rupert Wong stories.

WHAT DO WE NEED FROM YOU?

Please send an email to submissions@rebellion.co.uk including:

· Your name and contact details,
· 50-100 words introducing yourself, and
· a 50-100-word “elevator pitch.”

Attach a single .doc or .rtf file including:

· a bullet-pointed summary of the story (around 1000 words for a novella, 2000 words for a full-length novel), and
· the first few pages of your submission (again, 1000 words for a novella, 2000 words for a full-length novel).

Submissions are open from May 1 and close on May 31. Anything arriving past this deadline will not be accepted, so don’t miss it!

WHAT HAPPENS THEN?

Then we spend most of June looking at a pile of manuscripts, and gradually work our way through them to find the candidates we want to publish. Then we’ll contact you to talk contracts and, if it’s not yet written, discuss a delivery date that works around your schedule.

SO WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?

Get writing, and keep an eye on the Abaddon blog for updates, how-to blogs from authors, and insights from our editorial team. Good luck!