How Proust can change you into a best-selling author

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Marketing, Proust, Social Media, Writing Magazine

It seems that self-promotion is now part and parcel of being a writer, whether self or traditionally published. But where should the line be drawn?

Discovering that Marcel Proust, the creator of the iconic In Search of Lost Time, cunningly wrote a critic’s review citing the first volume Swann’s Way as a ‘little masterpiece … almost too luminous for the eye’ will hardly shock anyone in the business today. Proust was just ahead of his time.

Authors are bombarded with advice on how to promote their books, especially on social media. While it isn’t ever suggested that posting fake reviews of their own work is a good idea, the advice to authors is relentless, even ruthless, enough. There is no room for shrinking violets in this game.

Readers certainly like to be informed about a new book by an author but they may well begin to feel annoyed and manipulated if the chasing is too hard-boiled. Like ‘an insane cuckoo clock’ was the expression describing it that caught my eye when researching the subject on the internet. Is this what marketing on social media can turn into? The last thing many writers feel like being part of.

But I can feel Proust egging me on. Maybe not to write a lyrical review about a ‘little masterpiece’ of my own, but to point to a couple of prize-winning short stories in ninevoices’ writings. Maggie Davies’ Till Death Do Us Part won a Henshaw Press competition and Tanya van Hasselt’s Marshmallow Truth won the subscribers ‘Changes’ competition in Writing Magazine. Whilst the writing style in the latter story is nothing like that of my two self-published novels, it was both fun and fulfilling to try something new. Thank you Writing Magazine for this encouragement. 

Synopsis and blurb writing: is escape possible?

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blurbs, Marketing, self-publishing, synopsis

Writers struggling to write a synopsis for their novel are not short of advice. There is almost too much of it, and most of it repeats the same things. Yet we still turn to it, always hoping for that vital crutch which will somehow give us the magic touch and get the beastly time-consuming thing done.

Writing a synopsis is especially annoying because it’s not for the author – it’s for the agent, publisher or the competition judge. It’s all made worse by them each wanting something different: one page or five, single-spaced or double-spaced, the ending specified or not. And we are always going to feel that somehow our synopsis does not do justice to the novel we have written.

But the agony – if that is what it is – may have  its uses. Having to give a clear, short account of the premise, story and principal characters could help us spot weaknesses which we were previously blissfully unaware of – such as unnecessary characters, lack of tension, a flat ending. Uncomfortable moments for any author. Time for a bit of tweaking to the manuscript.

One of the joys of self-publishing is escaping the slog of writing a synopsis. But it’s only trading one thing for another. A traditional publishing firm will have experts in-house to write that vital marketing tool, the blurb. The self-published author is on her own.

There is only room for a few pungent sentences on the back of a novel. The blurb must give an instant and unequivocal explanation to the person who has picked up the book and turned it over. What kind of novel is this, what’s it about, and what’s in it for me?

This is when a blurb seems even more daunting to write than a synopsis. It’s the permanent, public face of the novel, not something that’ll happily disappear into a publishing firm’s recycling bin. Go into any bookshop and scan the blurbs of new novels, super-charged with superlatives and best-seller promise. They are sometimes rather alike but they do sound as though they have been written by an extremely talented marketing person. It’s very tempting to wish that person would do the job for us.

But perhaps the blurb we write for ourselves will be more true to our own novel, because it will convey the unique flavour of our voice, the individual way we use language. This may not dazzle the casual reader, and it may even repel some, but it will capture something that can be lost in professional blurb writing and marketing expertise, what can best be described as tone. Something that makes our book different from the rest.

 

 

 

 

Marketing is no fun

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All Desires Known, Marketing

“So what’s it all about then?”

The polite enquiry from people who haven’t read my novel All Desires Known. A nasty moment when my mind becomes a blank sky, thoughts disappearing like migrating birds. A faltering explanation which gives the wrong impression and might be about a different book altogether. My novel is boring. I am a bore.

Ridiculous to be floored by the question. If you’ve written and published a novel of course you know what it’s about. But it’s about lots of things and you aren’t any good at soundbites.

There’s no excuse. “Sum up your novel’s unique selling point in a single sentence” – anybody who’s attended a creative writing class or read a writers’ magazine will be familiar with that little exercise. Can it really be done?

I only know it needs to be. Here’s what I wanted to say to my questioners.

The contradictory and confused impulses of the human heart; the claustrophobic world of public schools; false allegations of abuse; the devastating nature of teenage mental illness; and over it all, the power of art to reveal and redeem.  Do we have a right to be happy at the expense of other people? How far should sacrifice be taken? It’s a question that the three main protagonists of All Desires Known have to face.

Psychiatrists get a bad press. They’re usually presented as creepy, sinister or plain barking. The hero of All Desires Known, Dr Lewis Auerbach, a Jewish expert on childhood psychosis, reverses the trend. He’s a good man, he’s giving his life to helping children with mental illness, he thinks he can stick to the rules he’s set himself. He’s got his life organised into two tight compartments…

Nor is Martin Darrow, the exemplary chaplain at Wharton public school, any more successful at knowing himself – and to what depths he might sink. There’s a lot of hot air talked about forgiveness, especially by the Church. It’s easy enough to preach. And where is God in the whole homosexual debate?

It’s hardly surprising that the heroine, portrait painter Nell Garwood, is attracted to these two men. Like them, she has made wrong choices in the past, misread herself and other people, not least her indulgently generous husband Alastair.

People are not what they seem, cries Nell, halfway through the novel. No, they aren’t, we’re all getting it wrong about each other most of the time. In All Desires Known, characters comment on each other, but they’re all prejudiced in one way or another, so are they reliable narrators? The reader must work it out, but there must always be uncertainty, because people and life will always be half-finished and messy.

How can this be summed up into a handy soundbite selling sentence? Writing a novel is easy compared with marketing it.