Your novel needs a sexy concept

Sure, a classic plot line may make a novel perfectly readable, but it won't necessarily be enough to make people pick (or click) it. (The seven main story plots in literature, as summarised in The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories by Christopher Booker, are overcoming the monster, rags to riches, the quest, voyage and return, comedy, tragedy, and rebirth). A bestseller needs a winning concept. Consider this:

Think of your book's sales blurb. Or what would be on the movie poster? Sarah Lotz signed a six-figure deal with UK publishers Hodder and Stoughton for her novel The Three and another book. The Three's tagline reads, 'Four simultaneous plane crashes. Three child survivors. A religious fanatic who insists the three are harbingers of the apocalypse. What if he's right?'

Daydream about a fascinating world. British author Sally Green signed up for a creative writing course a few years ago, and hit on a concept which led to a bidding war for her first novel, a supernatural young adult thriller about witches living in contemporary Britain. Twilight producers acquired the film rights to her trilogy. 'I became obsessed,' she told Woman and Home. 'I wrote and wrote, and spent 24 hours a day thinking about it: I was weeding, I was cooking but, in my head, I was living this story, which was about witches and set in the same witchy world that became the setting for my book Half Bad.'

Gather the ingredients. Susan Hill, author of The Woman in Black (now a film, in which Daniel Ratcliffe starred after his stint as Harry Potter), told the UK press how she'd been reading ghost stories and wondering why there were so few full-length ones. 'I wanted to see if I could do it and began listing what seemed essential ingredients: a ghost, human, not monstrous; haunted places, especially a house; mists, a thin, moaning wind and, for me, ancient churches and graveyards which are traditional settings.' Characters appeared: 'I did not really have a plot at this stage, but one morning the woman in black arrived in my mind. Within six weeks, using pen and paper, The Woman in Black wrote itself, as if by magic'.

Look out for unusual objects. Jessie Burton's debut novel The Miniaturist is set in 17th century Amsterdam, in which a wealthy merchant who refuses to sleep with his young wife, Petronella Oortman, buys her a miniature version of their townhouse as a wedding gift. Soon, it becomes clear that the characters' lives are being influenced by the movements of their replicas within the cabinet. An actual cabinet in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, once owned by a Petronella Oortman, sparked the concept for the mystery novel.

Find the cocktail that excites you. Brainstorm a list of all the topics you like to think and write about, anything from chocolate to taxidermy. Keep a file or box into which you regularly throw magazine clippings and notes, such as that riveting story you overheard at the hairdresser and jotted down for its plot material potential. Then close the lid, put it away, and let it simmer.

Listen to your body. It'll signal you when The Concept arrives. In an interview with Oprah Winfrey, Joanne Rowling recalled the moment she hit on the Harry Potter concept: 'I wrote compulsively but I'd never really found the right thing. And then I was on a train – I was 25 – and it came: boy doesn't know he's a wizard, goes to wizarding school, bang, bang, bang! And that was it. I don't think I've ever felt so excited.'

Catriona Ross is the creator of The Peacock Book Project: write the novel of your dreams (www.peacockproject.net). Her books are available in the Kindle Store: Little Diamond Eye, The Presence of Peacocks or How to Find Love and Write a Novel, The Love Book, Writing for Magazines: Absolutely Everything You Need to Know, and The Happy Life Handbook.

10 Expert Tips on Designing a Book Cover

Award-winning illustrator and designer Joey Hi-Fi (yes, it's a stage name) was interviewed on radio about the secrets of book cover design. The creator of the cover art for Blackbirds by Chuck Wendig and Lauren Beukes' Zoo City and Moxyland shared this advice:

Make sure your cover stands out on the shelf. Your book is competing with every other title in its genre, and looks count.  

The cover should reflect the book as far as possible: its mood, plot and genre. If you use a book designer, ask him or her to read the synopsis and first few chapters (or, ideally, the whole book) before starting.

Use a photograph. Unless you're a photographer yourself, commission a talented photographer friend to shoot your cover. (Or try istockphoto.com for royalty-free and low-priced photos.) It's best to own the rights to your cover image/s, as reusage will be free for international editions.

An eye-catching cover can be created simply with typefaces and colour or an illustration. If you go this more arty route, commission a professional designer or a friend with good design skills.

Design with the best-case scenario in mind. A cover can add to the keepsake value of a book; ensure yours is good-looking enough to be used in a hardcover collector's edition, for example.

For an e-book edition, your cover image should meet the requirements for the Kindle screen: JPEG or TIFF format, 2820 pixels on the shortest side and 4500 pixels on the longest side for best quality; maximum image file size 5MB. Minimum dimensions for covers are 625 x 1000 pixels.

Don't neglect the spine and back cover. Your book may be stacked on a book store shelf with only its spine visible; some prospective buyers turn straight to the back cover to size up a book.

Feed into current trends in your genre. New South African science fiction, for instance, has its own edgy look. If you're writing in a new genre, establish a look that reflects your book's tone and content.

But don't blend in! It's worth being boldly creative. Joey's Blackbirds cover won The Ranting Dragon's Cover Battle for 2012 (cue free publicity).

Find a signature style. The 'look and feel' should be consistent across all your books' covers, reflecting your brand as an author. Consistency is vital in a series of books (consider the stark, instantly recognisable Fifty Shades of Grey covers.)

Catriona Ross is the creator of The Peacock Book Project: write the novel of your dreams (www.peacockproject.net). Her books are available in the Kindle Store: Little Diamond Eye, The Presence of Peacocks or How to Find Love and Write a Novel, The Love Book, Writing for Magazines: Absolutely Everything You Need to Know, and The Happy Life Handbook.

5 writing tips from novelists Alex Smith and Maire Fisher

It was exactly the sort of event I love: two authors in conversation in a coffee shop on a balmy weekday evening. Alex Smith, author of the young adult novel Devilskein & Dearlove, and Maire Fisher, author of Birdseye, dispensed writing wisdom:

The inspiration for a novel can come from anywhere – a moment, a name, an intriguing item. For Alex, her interest in antique keys was a catalyst: 'I knew my heroine ended up with a bunch of keys, and that meant she'd opened a series of doors.' For Maire, a fellow guest at a braai mentioned a relative called 'Ma Bess' and Maire decided to use this gutsy name for a character.

Fit your writing into your schedule. No matter how busy you are, you can find a gap to write. Alex wrote a commissioned novella between the hours of two and four in the morning when her toddler son was a baby! But these days, she writes when he's napping and after 8pm when he's in bed.

Let your story evolve. Have a general idea of where the story's going, but be prepared to change course. Allow your story and characters to take on a life of their own and develop naturally. Maire replaced her elderly narrator with a young girl, Bird: 'I realised she was trying to come out and tell the story.' (So she lost 40,000 words of her manuscript, but the book is all the better for it).

Find a friendly 'first reader'. Show your first draft to one or two friends or relatives who love reading, both authors advise. Ask them specific questions, as these yield constructive criticism: for example, 'I'm not sure about the ending. How do you think I could improve it?'  

The main thing is to enjoy the process. The writing of your first draft is the truly fun, creative, anything-goes part, they agreed. When you feel that 'urgency to get the story down', go with it. Write.

Read the novel that teaches you the art of novel-writing: The Presence of Peacocks or How to Find Love and Write a Novel is available in the Kindle store.

Work your diary – you might find a book in it

Writing fiction is a gloriously self-indulgent activity. (Well, the first draft anyway). Why? It allows you to gather the moods, places, characters, issues and items that intrigue you most, and write them into a world you can share with others. All the other stuff you can just ignore. (Well, until an editor has had a look at your manuscript). And one of the easiest starting points is a journal or diary.

John Berendt, author of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, offers this practical advice: 'Keep a diary, but don't just list all the things you did during the day. Pick one incident and write it up as a brief vignette. Give it color, include quotes and dialogue, shape it like a story with a beginning, middle and end – as if it were a short story or an episode in a novel. It's great practice. Do this while figuring out what you want to write a book about. The book may even emerge from within this running diary.'

This overlaps a little with the 'morning pages' advocated by Julia Cameron, author of The Artist's Way, as a way for burnt-out writers, artists and other creatives to rediscover their inspiration and sense of purpose. She recommends filling three A4 pages with handwriting – just stream of consciousness: thoughts, worries, weirdness – first thing each morning, to release them from your headspace. The idea is that you once you've written about how you're going to sort out your blocked drain, for example, your mind is free to pursue higher thoughts.

A useful exercise, after 12 weeks of morning pages, is to take a highlighter and go through them to mark recurrent ideas: these trends show you what keeps coming up for you. For me, buying an easel kept surfacing in my morning pages. What was stopping me from buying one and starting to paint again? They're expensive, duh. And if I bought an easel I'd actually have to, er, paint. But I bought one, finally. Then I wrote a novel.

I've also written in a journal every couple of days since the age of ten. Occasionally I dip into one. Doing this a few years ago, I saw some trends emerge and started writing a list of the things I realised I enjoyed writing about: Cape Dutch houses, farms, history, politics, human rights, self-development, books, sensuality, sumptuous meals, opera, wit, offbeat moments in everyday life, chocolate, lists… In fact, I decided to create a whole fictionalised world around those things I love and write about naturally: The Presence of Peacocks or How to Find Love and Write a Novel was the result.

In your diary, you might just find yourself as an author.  

5 tips to get your novel written

Now that we're over halfway through November – NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month – how's your word count looking? While NaNoWriMo enthusiasts try to crank out 1,667 words for 30 days straight, completing a first draft by 30 November, I prefer writing rather more sedately. I'm at the 55,000 mark on my new novel and it's taken me some months to get there, but my plan works and it doesn't require me to press pause on the rest of my life for a month. Here's how.

1. Set aside two writing sessions a week

Just two. For two afternoons a week, I commit to sitting at my screen for at least an hour, opening up my manuscript and typing something. That's it. I write fiction because I find it fun, creative and relaxing, so I allow myself to spend an hour writing whatever part of the book I feel like. But I try to make an extra half-hour to an hour available, in case I get on a literary roll and want to write more. I aim to write 1,000 words at a session but usually write more.

2. Switch off distractions

This really, really works. The time when I'm working on my book is sacred, so before I start, I crawl down behind my desk to unplug my internet cable, then switch my cellphone onto flight mode. People, it's frigging miraculous what you can achieve in an undisturbed hour. A single email or social media check-in can bomb an idea, derail a train of thought, vaporise that mood that could have been the beginning of an amazing scene. Try using a tool such as Freedom to lock yourself out of the internet for pre-set durations, say 90 minutes.

3. Leave judging and editing your first draft till later

Whether what you've written is good or not isn't relevant at this point. Write first; edit later. Your book won't be perfect now, and parts of it may be downright laughable, but it's important to get the story down while you feel that rush of inspiration. Editing and judgement can kill the excitement you need to make it to the finish line of your first draft. As my writing buddy (and fellow swimming-class parent) Byron agrees, unexpected things happen when you're writing. In his case, a sinister character appeared, seemingly out of nowhere. 'I just went with it,' he told me. His book needed this character to the balance the others, he now feels. Half the thrill of writing lies in the unplanned developments that happen while you're writing. Don't think, 'I didn't plan this so it's wrong and it's not going to work.' Leave it in; relook it later.

4. Don't talk about your book too much

Avoid revealing too much about your story to those who ask. Hone a one-sentence description or elevator pitch to give them enough to satisfy them. Don't go into details or they'll give you their opinion, which may ruin the magic for you. It's vital that, while writing your first draft, you stay true to your vision. Once you're happy with your completed first draft, get feedback from trusted friends or colleagues who love reading novels and whose opinion you value, or from a professional editor. But don't open yourself up to criticism too soon, or someone's offhand comment may make you divert completely from the shining idea you really want to pursue.

5. Save your work after every session

I learnt this the hard way. Rewriting a large chunk of my mystery novel Little Diamond Eye that had come to me as if channelled (you know?), three days later, was not nearly as fun as it had been the first time around... Make backups each time you write. Save your work in two different places, ideally emailing the latest version to yourself on gmail.

Let me know how it goes, and share your own tips for getting your novel written, on The Peacock Book Project's Facebook page: www.facebook.com/peacockproject 

Catriona Ross is a journalist and author. Find her books in the Kindle Store: Little Diamond Eye, The Presence of Peacocks or How to Find Love and Write a Novel, The Love Book, Writing for Magazines: Absolutely Everything You Need to Know, and The Happy Life Handbook.