Keeping your pocket novel alive, part 1
- Ulverscroft Large Print books
Two weeks of fame and excitement, then disappearing into an eternity of oblivion. Has this been the fate of your My Weekly or People’s Friend pocket novel? The good news is that it doesn’t have to be that way and you can get your book back out there so many more people can appreciate it for years to come – and it’ll earn you some extra lovely pennies. Make sure you take advantage of other potential markets for your work.
Large Print Rights in a nutshell
Dear Lovely Person,
I recently had a pocket novel published by My Weekly. I understand that I can now submit it to you for consideration as a large print book. Please find the details below:
Secrets in the Sand by Jane Retallick
An exciting mystery romance set on the wild North Cornish coast
When Sarah Daniels moves to a sleepy Cornish village her neighbour, local handyman and champion surfer, Ben Trelawny is intrigued. He falls in love with her stunning looks and quirky ways but who is this woman who locks herself in her cottage and why is she so guarded? Just as Ben is starting to get past Sarah’s barriers, a national newspaper reporter arrives in the village. Sarah disappears, making a decision that puts both her life and future in jeopardy.
I enclose a copy of my pocket novel and look forward to your response.
Yours sincerely,
Me
4) Go to the post office and sit back and wait!
I sent my pocket novel to Ulverscroft. After eight weeks of stalking the postman and obsessively checking my email inbox, I emailed them to follow it up and got a quick reply, offering me a publication deal. To get one thing straight now, this is not a get-rich-quick scheme. However, it is a nice little way to boost the pay rate for your pocket novel and, despite an estimated publication date of the first quarter of 2012, I received a BACS payment within a week. Ulverscroft offered me a £400 one-off payment based on the following terms:
We would like to make an offer of £400 for world large print rights in this title. This would be a one-off payment for permission to print up to 1000 copies in softcover and we would publish within 18 months of contract, the contract period being five years from publication date. Our sale would be mainly into libraries in the UK, British Commonwealth and the USA, and you would receive four complimentary copies on publication.
The other important thing to remember is that the book is being sold to UK libraries. This means that you’re eligible for Public Lending Rights and that each year you are legally entitled to a payment from the government every time your book is borrowed. Again, this is going to be mere chocolate money (especially after Mr Tax Man has taken his share) but every copper counts so make sure as soon as your book is published, your name is on that register. You can find out more on their website here: http://www.plr.uk.com.
Getting your pocket novel considered for a large print book is so easy that anyone can do it. There’s no excuse to let your brilliantly-crafted and very hard work fizzle away to nothing. Keep sharing the love.
My first pocket novel! Secrets in the Sand
My first pocket novel goes on sale on
Thursday 12th May 2011!
It’s an exciting week for me as my first pocket novel goes on sale on Thursday 12th May in all major supermarkets and to subscribers of My Weekly Pocket Novels.
Here’s a taster of what you can look forward to:
Secrets in the Sand by Jane Retallick
An exciting mystery romance set on the wild North Cornish coast….
When Sarah Daniels moves to a small Cornish seaside village her next-door neighbour, local handyman and champion surfer, Ben Trelawny is intrigued. He falls in love with her stunning looks and quirky ways but their meetings are brief and abrupt. Who is this woman who locks herself away in her cottage, why is she getting mail addressed to a different person and what secret history is she trying to conceal?
Just as Ben thinks he is starting to get past Sarah’s barriers, a shocking event threatens to change their lives forever. When a national newspaper reporter turns up in the village, Sarah disappears, making a decision that puts both her life and future in jeopardy.
The story behind the story
People often ask me where my inspiration came from for this story. Obviously I can’t say anything that would give the plot away so I’ll have to talk about what made me pick up my pen and start writing!
I got caught up in the rush of adrenaline attached to a venture called National Novel Writing Month (http://www.nanowrimo.org) which encourages anyone, whether you are a wannabe writer, an amateur or a published author, to put pen to paper and write a 50,000 word novel in one month. Writers from all over the world register on the website then join one another in the quest for words-on-the-page, something which can be quite elusive when you are left to your own devices in writing isolation.
I’d been resisting the lure of National Novel Writing Month (or NaNo as it’s often shortened to) but on day 3, I decided to bash out a few words and see how it went. I didn’t have high expectations of myself so thought that writing anything longer than a short story would be an achievement for me.
I thought that 50,000 words would be a bit ambitious so decided to write a 30,000 word pocket novel instead as I’d been reading about these online then Maggie Seed, the editor of My Weekly Pocket Novels, was interviewed in the December 2010 issue of Writers’ Forum magazine, which conveniently dropped through my letterbox in late October. I was particularly inspired by this article and felt encouraged to give pocket novels a go, especially after reading a few and enjoying them immensely.
On the NaNo site, there was an thrilling chart so when you updated your word count each day, you could see how much you’d written and if you were on track to finish on time. It was quite addictive watching that little bar go up and seeing if you were beating the target-number-0f-words line or not! It wasn’t long before I was acting like I was totally dependent on my daily writing fix, finding it hard to stop for meals and bedtime, then going to sleep thinking about my plot and characters. Sometimes I had to write notes to myself to clear my brain enough for me to switch off. I was buzzing!
It was a grey and dreary month, the time of year where you want to be anywhere except stuck in the UK wearing three layers of clothing as standard and having the heating on all day. Without money to go on holiday, the next best thing was escaping to somewhere in my head. I have to say I had a great time spending most of November on a beautiful Cornish beach in the middle of summer.
I never thought things would get any further but I got some critiques from a writing forum I belong to, fiddled and changed a few bits of my draft and emailed my first three chapters to My Weekly at the end of January. Having just received two short story rejections, I was feeling a bit despondant about my ability to write. Four days later, I was asked to email the rest of my book to Maggie Seed and within 24 hours I had a firm acceptance!
The moral of the story (my real life one, not the one I wrote) is never give up. You never know what can happen if you try, and I’m a firm believer that you don’t fail unless you stop trying.
So, follow your dreams and never lose hope!
Motivation – what’s blocking yours?
- Where is motivation when you need it? Oh look, it’s that way!
Are you looking deep into the dregs of your tenth cup of coffee and wondering how your word count could only have grown by 500 words in five hours? What is it about word goals that put boulders in the paths of our imaginations and crush our writing muses to death?
Let’s think more about targets and goals. You know you really want to write that 80,000 word novel, 2,000 word short story or 1,500 word assignment that’s due in next week. You go to bed at night thinking about your characters or material that you know will be just perfect for the task in hand. You might even have plotted an outline and given yourself a road map to follow. Everything seems exciting and full of potential, like walking through the park in springtime and seeing all the new growth and flower buds waiting to burst into glorious blossom.
Next, you sit down with your computer. You might stare at a blank screen for ages, or write a few words. Then, the postman arrives, an email pops into your inbox that you simply have to reply to, you get the urge to bake a cake or clean the bathroom (even though you only did it yesterday. Oh, and the day before). Everything seems more achievable and appealing that getting those words on paper. In fact, why do you think I’m writing this blog instead of hammering on with the last 20,000 words of my next pocket novel?
Why do we do this? Why do we start a day with big plans then reach the end of it wondering where the time went and where the words are, because they definitely aren’t padding out our work and the frustrated hero and heroine are still waiting to overcome the problem that is stopping them from living happily ever after. In fact, if they wait for us to write the outcome for them, they might be living in emotional turmoil for a while yet.
In psychological terms, there are a number of ways of looking at the reasons for procrastination. We can look at what’s stopping us in the here-and-now by looking at the things we tell ourselves when we try to write. This might include, “I think this is rubbish.”, “I’ll never be a writer.”, “There’s too much competition so even if I was a good writer, I wouldn’t get published.” How we think then affects our mood as we can feel disillusioned, low, bored, overwhelmed or hopeless. This impacts on how we behave, such as finding 1001 distraction techniques. The end result is that these things bounce off each other to make our motivation drop to an even lower level.
Another way of examining difficulties with motivation is by thinking about our history. We can delve into our deepest and darkest corners to discover the things that we have been brainwashed into believing from birth about ourselves. You might have been the middle child with two bright siblings who made you feel that you were never as good as them at anything. You could have had (and perhaps still have) a mother or father who thinks your writing is just something you play at and is a waste of time unless you’re making money out of it. You might feel the pressure to always do well at everything you do and therefore you avoid reaching your goals so you don’t have to handle those feelings of failure that make you feel like you did when you missed out on passing your grade one piano exam by a few points.
We can also think about the dynamics in your family or relationships that might change if you devoted more time to your writing. Would your partner or kids have to fend for themselves? Would you lose some of your role as provider and nurturer? Would you feel guilty about ‘abandoning’ them for your own ‘selfish’ pleasures? You might worry about how people will react if you announce your desire to spend more time writing and less time with them. You might have learnt from a young age that you need to meet everyone else’s needs before your own.
If you actually started being successful at your writing, do you worry your partner would feel a bit peeved? Would the roles in the family change at all, even just a tiny bit? You might notice that people start to take you more seriously and make you feel a more valued member of the family, which can be good but could also feel threatening to a partner who might have low self-esteem themselves at times and who, unconsciously, might need you to be a rubbish writer so they can feel better about themselves.
At this point, you could have light bulbs pinging on all over the place, or you could be ignoring me and saying that it’s obvious that all you need is a good dose of self-discipline. Well, that’s exactly my point. If you repeatedly keep losing your motivation enough to read this far through my blog post and think disciplining yourself better is the answer to everything, then clearly you haven’t found your secret to success yet. If you did, you wouldn’t be reading this article and you’d be just about to publish your one hundredth book because you were producing a bestseller every few months.
Instead of beating yourself up for losing motivation, next time you have the desire to deviate from the writing task, perhaps you could jot down a few ideas about why you are heading for the kettle again instead of engaging in the work you know you love.
It isn’t so much that motivation isn’t there, it’s that many factors can stop us from reaching our destination that need addressing.
