Dear Madman

Recently I attended my third ASA Literary Speed Dating pitching event. This great initiative by the Australian Society of Authors brings writers face to face with publishers and agents to pitch their work. For $27 or so per pitch you get three minutes to sell your book to trade publishers or agents. YAY! These opportunities are the best way to get your work noticed by the publishers or agents you’re aiming for, and I highly recommend you give it a go once your MS is ready. Here’s more info on LITERARY SPEED DATING. Next sessions are in July.

But you don’t need to do the Speed Dating to pitch. You can still submit your pitch online to most trade publishers or agents through their slush piles, or directly to any publishing contacts you may have, if they’re happy for you to do so.

Here are a few Australian publishers accepting direct submissions right now – no agent needed.

PAN MACMILLAN AUSTRALIA Open for submissions

HACHETTE AUSTRALIA – ONLY ACCEPTING Children’s, YA and non-fiction (As at end April 2023)

UQP looking for Literary fiction, non-fiction and Stories for the Future

ALLEN AND UNWIN – Friday Pitch! Submit your pitch on a Friday!

TEXT PUBLISHING – 6 months wait here

PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE AUSTRALIA Currently closed for submissions but opening up for children’s books in August.

You don’t need to limit your pitching to Australian publishers either – my first two books were published by a small UK press – so do your research and find a publisher that feels like the right fit for your book. Follow their submission guidelines to a tee.

A general rule I follow when submitting is to AIM HIGH – GO FOR GOLD! Start with the big guns – those dream publishers or agents. If you don’t hear back or get a rejection (gird your loins – you’ll be facing a few of these. All badges of honour!!) then send out your next round of pitches to smaller trade presses, and so on, until you’re left with hybrid publishers or independent publishing. Independent publishing isn’t tricky and is very empowering. All you need is a good book designer to do the interior and cover for you and a printer to create the books. And now with the ASA DISTRIBUTION SERVICE for Independent Authors our books also make it to bookstores. Plus of course, make sure it’s been properly edited! Essential. There’s no use having the fanciest cover in the world if your story doesn’t make sense.

So onto – THE PITCH.

If you are pitching in person or in an email you only have a bare minimum of space and time, so it’s essential you cover all the most important elements quickly. We want our pitches working perfectly to hook the interest of our targeted publishers.

OPENING

Start with the TITLE of your book, the GENRE you’re writing, the WORD COUNT and the LOGLINE ( a sentence or two that gives the essence of your story in a nutshell – think of the movie descriptions on movie streaming apps) plus some COMPARATIVE TITLES (these are important as they automatically give the reader an idea of the flavour of your work). You can also include your target audience – Eg Women readers from 30 to 50 or in my case Readers of true crime searching for more depth and meaning.

Here are my opening paragraphs:

TITLE Shadowman is GENRE literary true crime (88 000 words WORD COUNT) based on a tragedy that has haunted my family for generations. Think Garner’s search for meaning This House of Grief meets Schmidt’s first person murderer narrator in See What I Have Done. COMPARATIVES

In 1911 my great grandfather, Bill Williams, unwittingly hired a dangerously disturbed man with a history of violent crimes against girls to work on the family farm, endangering the lives of his wife and four young daughters. LOGLINE

LOGLINES

The logline needs to identify the protagonist, why they are of interest, their main story goal, and what is at stake if they fail to achieve it.

Here’s a simple template to help you write your logline

An ADJECTIVE, CONTRASTING ADJECTIVE OCCUPATION (describe the character through contrasting traits and their job if relevant) must DO SOMETHING OR STRUGGLE AGAINST SOMETHING or else RISK – WHAT IS AT STAKE?

SYNOPSIS

After the logline you need a greater explanation of your plot in a paragraph long synopsis. This is tricky! How do you take 80 000 words and shrink it to one paragraph? For a pitch synopsis you don’t need to include the ending so you can leave the reader with a hook. You need to include at least a couple of actions that the protagonist takes in pursuit of their goal and show the tension and stakes rising. If you can, inject some of the tone or style of your book. Eg, if you’re writing a comedy make it funny, a thriller? – make it suspenseful.

Here’s my SYNOPSIS

The farmhand, Joseph Throsby, suffered horrific ongoing abuse in an orphanage as a child and this combined with untreated epilepsy has resulted in a vulnerable but violent man who has only recently been released from jail. Rejected by his family and the community and desperate to create a new life for himself, he gives a false name to secure the job, but when he accidentally reveals his true identity, Williams fires him, setting in motion a chain of events that leads to murder. Not long afterwards, Throsby attacks the eldest Williams girl, Grace, in her bed. She bravely fights him off and Throsby is imprisoned, but only for six months. In court, he swears his vengeance. True to his word, as soon as he’s released, he returns to the farm and lies in wait where Grace always takes the cows out. That day however, she sends her younger sister in her place.

After we’ve got the main gist of the story across, we then need to add another paragraph about ourselves as writers. This can be the trickiest part! How to not sound like a wanker?!!

Here is where we show off about any previous publications or prizes or courses we’ve done, any manuscript development we’ve undertaken or professional edits of the work etc. MOST IMPORTANTLY though is to state why you are so passionate about this topic you had to write a whole book about it! You can also make a note about HOW you have written it, to give the publisher an idea of the style and tone of the book.

Here’s my WHY ME, WHY NOW or ABOUT THE AUTHOR section.

The story is told in 3 interwoven sections, the first-person colloquial voice of the murderer, the omniscient voice of the Williams family, and the contemporary voice of the writer herself, reflecting on the echoes of violent crime and her attempts to break the family curse.

I’ve been writing and publishing for over 20 years. My first book Thrill Seekers was shortlisted for the 2012 NSW Premiers Awards and since then I’ve published another 4 titles as both author and editor. I teach Creative Writing at UQ and to adult survivors of institutional abuse whose experiences have informed Shadowman. This MS has undergone multiple drafts with support from a Varuna Residency award and an ASA mentorship award.

That’s it for your elevator pitch! Keep it as short as possible – under 300 words if you can. Remember to leave time for questions if the pitch is in person and to research where you submit your pitch. There’s no use submitting a rural romance to a military history publisher or vice versa.

So, what do you think of my pitch? I was very lucky to get requests for materials from both an agent and publisher. Now comes step 2 – THE WAIT! Please cross your fingers for me, a little luck can go a long, long way in this crazy business. And when we finally get our chance let’s all party by the light of the moon!

I hope you’ll find this article helpful when you write your pitch. If you’d like me to give it the once over just drop me a line!

GOOD LUCK PITCHING!

Lots of love

Edwina xx

I don’t know about you, but I have a bottom drawer full of old manuscripts. Actually, I have a whole chest full. The first novel I ever wrote, “A Lesson in Darkness” will never see the light of day, it was my real training ground. It’s never even had a second draft. But I have three other projects that were precious book babies at some point but then, because of rejections real or imagined, became too hard to look at and were relegated to the bottom drawer.

What I’ve learnt over my twenty years of writing practice is never ever to give up on a piece of writing. Short pieces that were rejected for years, even decades, suddenly find the prefect home in better places than I’d ever dreamed of. “Mrs Sunshine” had done the rounds of many literary journals and competitions and then finally found a place in Best Australian Stories 2014. Other stories too, battle worn and bruised have risen to be published and paid for.

Even Thrill Seekers was resurrected from the dead after Barbara Mobbs, my then agent, told me to forget about it, put it in the bottom drawer and move on, after it was rejected by only one publisher. I wasn’t going to give up on it that easily. I submitted it to a worldwide call out and scored a contract with Ransom Publishing UK. It then went on to be shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Awards. It wouldn’t have, if I’d taken Barbara’s advice and let it perish unseen.

It takes courage to resurrect old writing, especially when it’s done the rounds a few times and faced a lot of rejection. “Remember,” I have to tell myself, “rejection doesn’t mean the work is bad, only that it hasn’t found the right home, or the right shape yet.”

I am not short on courage. I feel the fear and do things anyway. You have to be a risk taker to be a writer. But reviving “Dear Madman” and starting to work on it again after a break of some years has taken all my strength. When a book has been rejected, it’s not just the book that’s bruised, but the writer (actually, the book probably feels okay!). Sometimes you’ll have a loving spouse to drag the manuscript out of the rubbish bin, as Stephen King’s wife famously did for Carrie, his first breakthrough hit. But sometimes you have to be your own loving friend and do the same.

I have been working on “Dear Madman” on and off for over ten years. Yes, that long. This project is dear to, and deep inside, my heart. It began life as a memoir about the murder of my maternal grandmother’s sister as a child in the Lockyer Valley in 1912 but then evolved into a novel. The characters demanded it. I couldn’t shut them up. Besides, I felt the story was best portrayed as I saw it playing out in my mind – in scenes. I thought it worked well, but publishers didn’t agree. My agent at that time, Zeitgeist Media Group, were tireless in their efforts but couldn’t get it over the line. The rejection of this manuscript broke my heart. I started to believe it was cursed. That I was. And that’s never a good idea.

Recently, I attended Kris Olsson’s Memoir Bootcamp at the QLD Writers Centre with more recent memoir projects on my mind. However, once I started doing some of the preliminary exercises, I knew that the ghost of “Dear Madman” had called me there. Kris inspired me to take another look, to redo it as the memoir I’d originally intended, keeping the novelistic scenes if I wanted. That was weeks ago.

It took those weeks for me to gird my loins in order to tackle what seemed like a monumental task, the most difficult puzzle of my writing career. How to do it? The question loomed in my mind larger than the book itself. “Just do it!” I told myself like a sportswear commercial. “Feel the fear and do it anyway.”

I dug up the old files, the original memoir strand of 24 000 words, journal extracts from the time of my researching and writing, and the novel it all morphed into. Then I started fresh. I opened a new document and called it, “Dear Madman 2022” (I know, I know, we’re not there yet, but I’ll still be working on it then I know). Most importantly I added ROUGH DRAFT in very big letters. “Just muck around with it and play,” I intoned like a mantra.

So I played. I’m still playing. Anything goes. I’m shoving bits in, weaving things together. Writing new bits, writing about the process. Talking to the reader as if they know how tricky it is to braid these disparate strands. And guess what? It’s fun! I’m enjoying myself. After the first few days of timidity and self-criticism, noticing where I’d overwritten and made things worse, I’ve reached a stage where I’ve regained my creative confidence and my belief in the project. YAY! It’s all a huge schmozzle right now, but I have faith that it is becoming more like it is intended to be. It’s finding it’s shape at last and I’m enjoying the challenge.

And, quite literally, I’m resurrecting the dead as I write, or at least giving them another life on the page. Through writing, I’ve given that little murdered girl the chance to laugh and play with her sisters one more time.

If you have stories or novels or memoirs clogging up that bottom drawer, especially those that hurt to look at, especially them, dig them out and expose them to the air. Gird your loins, put on your grown-up pants, and tell yourself you’re just going to play and see what happens. Start a new document and dive right on in. Anything and everything goes. You can do no wrong.

Repeat after me, “I am confident and capable in my creative work.” You can do it! Who knows? You may even have fun.

What projects have you buried that deserve a second chance at life? What projects have you resurrected? Any success stories out there? I’d love to hear them!

Lots of love,

Edwina xx

Edwina Shaw

WRITER / EDITOR / MENTOR / THE HEALING POWER OF STORY

PERFECTING YOUR PITCH!

RESURRECTING THE DEAD – Opening the Bottom Drawer

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