If you’re at the Hay festival today, don’t forget to catch Unbound Live (with our authors Katy Brand, Jessica Jones, George Chopping and Hardeep Singh Kohli) today at 2:30 in the Sky Arts Studio.

Anonymous asked: Dear Sir/Madam, I'm currently in the process of writing a fantasy novel, the first fifty or so pages are complete. I have outlined the structure of this book along with another two books to follow and I am really enjoying writing it now the storyline is building. I know that you probably hear this question on a daily basis but it would be great if you could give me a few tips on getting this book published or in line for publishing when it is completed? Many thanks, Paul.

Hi Paul,

In the future we hope to do a series of interviews with our authors and editors to give more in-depth advice on this kind of thing for aspiring authors such as yourself, so keep an eye out for that.

For now, a few basic tips:

• First, this is rather obvious, but given some of the submissions we receive it needs to be restated: always follow the submission guidelines. Read and re-read them carefully, whether for publishing houses or literary agents. Make sure that you have formatted your work correctly, and that the content of your story is in line with whatever the publisher or agent is looking for.
  
  
• The Writers’ & Artists’ Yearbook is always a great source of helpful information on getting books in any genre published, so if you haven’t got a copy yet, you should probably get one.
  
  
• The most important thing, of course, is the quality of your writing - which means that you should edit and re-edit (and re-edit again) as much as possible once you are finished.
  Give it to friends who love reading critically and try to consider their advice objectively (naturally, this will be extremely difficult to do).
  
  
• But since you are still in the process of writing the first draft, have fun with it! Difficult as it may be, try not to think too much about getting published, but rather, focus on making the book as great a book as you could wish to read.
  
  
• Furthermore, as a fantasy author, it would be a good idea to cut back on reading fantasy works for the period while you are writing, and focus on expanding your reading in a whole range of other genres. Assuming you have already read lots of fantasy and are comfortable with and clear on the genre, taking a step back for a short while could be a good move. This could help you to ensure that your writing doesn’t automatically emerge steeped in the tropes of the genre and instead is fresh/original/different.

www.unbound.co.uk

Author Jessica Jones, whose book, The Elegant Art of Falling Apart is being crowd-funded for UK publication with Unbound, has been featured in The Independent this week, where she discusses how her experience of being paralysed for a period at the age of 25 eventually led to her writing the book.

(You can click here to find out more about the process of “crowd-funding” a book for publication, and how you can get involved and support the publication of The Elegant Art of Falling Apart in return for anything from your name in the back of every copy of the book, a signed first edition hardback, photographic prints, a goody bag of natural beauty products (The Good Glamour Natural Beauty Bag) and even lunch with Jessica.)

Also, we’ve launched a Flash Fiction Writing Prize in celebration of Jessica and her book, and you can find out more about the competition and how to enter by clicking here.

Read on for an extract from The Independent’s piece:

1987 – I was twenty-five years old and holed up in the intensive care unit at the National Neurological Hospital in London, stricken from head to toe with Guillain-Barré Syndrome. Symptoms: total paralysis. Prognosis: uncertain.

Guillain Barré Syndrome is a bizarre illness. It attacks the myelin sheath that transmits messages along one’s peripheral nerves. One day my toes went numb. A week later I found myself in hospital, unable to move, breathe or speak. An unscratchable itch on my leg could propel me to the brink of insanity. Dust fell into my eyes and I couldn’t blink or wipe it away. I could not call out for assistance.

Upon learning of my perilous condition, my mother had dropped everything, packed a suitcase and flown from Sydney. Now she sat by my bedside for twelve hours a day, every day.

Each night mum grabbed a few hours sleep at her friends’ house; Chrissy and Ralph were devotees of an Indian guru by the name of Swamiji. When Swamiji heard of my situation he began to call my mother and tell her of his visions for me. ‘I see yellow,’ spake the guru. The next day mum arrived at the hospital laden with armfuls of daffodils and yellow tulips. She filled all the vases in the room with them. Two days later, Swamiji called again: ‘I see purple.’ Out went the daffodils, replaced by swathes of irises. Mum herself was dressed in a purple silk kimono that she’d borrowed from Chrissy. Then Swamiji made a personal appearance at the ICU, without shoes. Through his flowing grey beard he blew into my chakras. Matron tried to hustle him from the room but Swamiji resisted her. At that point Sister Mary entered the scene.

Sister Mary had been hospitalised for an acute attack of Multiple Sclerosis but was now on the bounce back. She busied herself by ambling from ward to ward with her walking stick, rescuing the souls of fellow patients. Some of those ingrates did not wish to be saved but in me she found a compliant mark. Being fully paralysed I didn’t have much choice in the matter.

Sister Mary visited most days and sprinkled my motionless body with Lourdes water that she kept in a plastic bottle. She left a specimen jar by my bed containing some small pieces of black stuff. ‘Relics of Padre Pio,’ Sister Mary said. Not being much of a Christian I didn’t cotton on to the significance of these. I was quite taken aback when I later learned that they were bits of the charred remains of a revered Catholic priest.

Click here to read the rest…

In celebration of Jessica Jones’ book The Elegant Art of Falling Apart being crowd funded for UK publication by Unbound, we have launched a free to enter flash fiction writing competition!

All short listed entries will be published on the Unbound blog.
First place: A beautiful signed flower portrait by Jessica Jones (worth £200-300)

Second place: A signed first-edition hardback of The Elegant Art of Falling Apart

Third place: £20 of Unbound credits

Click here to find out the rules and how to enter the competition.

Good luck!

Behind the scenes at the shoot for JF Derry’s upcoming Unbound book.

www.unbound.co.uk

Available now! : http://unbound.co.uk/books/how-to-have-an-almost-perfect-marriage

Lucy Farmer’s great review of last week’s Unbound Live event, in Intelligent Life :

On Tuesday night, Unbound Live took over Le Baron nightclub in London’s Mayfair for an evening of crowd-funded publishing. Billed as “a cross between a book slam and election hustings”, nine authors had 10 minutes each to pitch to an audience who could then pledge anything between £10 and £250 in support of the book. If enough money is pledged the author writes the book and Unbound publishes it. If not, the prospective book stays on the slush pile and pledgers get their money back (or the chance to re-pledge to another book). Pledgers keep up-to-date with their author’s progress on the Unbound website.

In a dark boudoir-like room the writers took to the mic in front of about 100 people. We heard pitches, for instance, from Pete Lawrence for his memoir about founding The Big Chill festival, from Kevin Parr for his novel about an obsessive bird-watcher who turns murderous, and from Robbie Hudson and John Finnemore, two comedians who got funding for a first book—a series of letters between two gay horses during the Napoleonic wars—and now want funding for a sequel.

By bringing authors and readers closer together Unbound throws a democratic punch at the big-money publishers who monopolise the book stores. For Unbound, the pledging system is a novel way of drumming up capital before shelling out to publish a book. And pledgers get to be financially and emotionally invested in a literary project. Every pledger gets a nod in the afterword and big investors get signed editions, goodie bags and lunch with the author.

Click here to read the rest of the review at Intelligent Life’s website.

A Box of Birds, a literary thriller about the brain and those who study it, is now launched on Unbound. You can pledge support for the book here.

Here’s what some other novelists have been saying about the book:

“It’s rare these days to read a writer who cares about ideas in the way that the great nineteenth-century novelists did. With A Box of Birds, Charles Fernyhough creates a thrilling plot and wonderfully constructed characters who are never overwhelmed by the twists of the story. The clash of philosophies at the heart of the novel—in which the certainties of neuroscience are unpicked by the mind’s need to tell a coherent story—is presented in such plausible terms that I should think any reader would instinctively align themselves and then be challenged by the other side of the question. This is both a serious novel and a great read.” SARA MAITLAND

“We have been waiting a long time for Charles Fernyhough to follow up his fine first novel The Auctioneer, and he has now done it in brilliant style with A Box Of Birds. Taking its title from Plato’s metaphor for memory, this is both a novel of ideas and a pacey thriller. The idea is a profound philosophical one: how can cells and chemicals produce our sense of consciousness? Fernyhough’s feisty heroine, neuroscientist Yvonne Churcher, takes us on a rollercoaster plot involving animal rights’ activists, lovers, geeks, entrepreneurs and a senile chimp. Exhilarating, thought-provoking and well worth the wait.” ANDREW CRUMEY

An early version of the first chapter of A Box of Birds was published in New Writing 14, selected and edited by Lavinia Greenlaw and Helon Habila. You can read the first chapter of the book at the Unbound site; if you become a supporter, you will be able to read more chapters in the Shed. The first two and a half chapters are currently posted.

There’s a great article in the Indpendent this week about Unbound’s collaboration with Big Chill founder Pete Lawrence on his new mini-festival concept to mark both our first year, and to celebrate the publication of Pete’s Unbound project, The Big Chill and Other Alfresco Stories. You can click here to find out more about the project, how you can get involved in the publication of the book and get a ticket to the festival.

See the Independent’s piece below or head over to their site for more…

 Fund a festival

The Big Chill, one of the staples of the summer season, has already been cancelled this year, felled by Olympics-itis. Stepping up to fill the hole are two new events from its co-founders. Pete Lawrence ran The Big Chill for 14 years with his ex-partner Katrina Larkin. He resigned in 2008, the brand was bought by Festival Republic in 2009 and Larkin resigned a year later. Now, Lawrence is back with Alfresco, a low-key festival for just 499 ticket-holders at a secret location in Warwickshire in June. Larkin’s offering is Nova, an arty festival with theatre, poetry and a real working pub, in Sussex in July. Lawrence aims to fund Alfresco using the proceeds from his memoir, The Big Chill and Other Alfresco Stories. Those wishing to be part of the “world’s first crowd-funded festival” can pledge support via the website of the crowd-sourcing publisher Unbound. £10 will buy an eBook and a thank you on the back page; £100 a signed first edition and a pass to Alfresco. Think of it as either a very expensive read, or a cheap weekend away.

Author Charles Fernyhough, who is publishing his second novel A Box of Birds with Unbound, explains how our crowd-funded publishing model actually works and why it’s good in a brilliant new blog post. You can read it below and head over to his blog Pieces of Light for more.

This crowd-funding business is new territory for all of us, so I thought I’d put together a few FAQs to help you decide.

This is one of those internet scams, isn’t it? Not at all. The people behind Unbound are highly respected in the literary and media worlds. They have a sound business model and have already brought established writers like Terry Jones and Tibor Fischer into print, with Kate Mosse and Jonathan Meades set to follow soon. They make lovely books and publicise them well, and I want mine to be one of them.

What are the risks, then? There aren’t any. You either get a beautiful book (and help a writer get back into doing what he loves most) or, if the project isn’t funded, you get a full refund.

Why are you self-publishing? I’m not. If I were self-publishing I would be paying for my book to be printed. (Here’s some more on how the Unbound model differs.) There are many reasons for taking the subscription-funding route, and one is that it gives me a chance to talk about why the book is important before it is actually published. (I’ve been doing that here and here.) There’s nothing particularly new in the subscription-funding model; it was big in the eighteenth century and Unbound are simply reviving it for the modern era.

What’s this about getting your name in the back of the book? When you pledge for a book, your name is recorded and entered into the subscription list, which will then be printed in the back of every edition that appears.

So can I change the name to make it a gift? Certainly. Once you have pledged, there’s a button on the right which allows you to change the name in the back of the book. Change this to the name of the gift recipient, and their name will be printed in the back of every edition of the novel. How’s that for literary immortality?

Am I going to get loads of junk mail? No. You have to register with an email address so that Unbound know who you are. They send a weekly newsletter, but you can easily opt out of that. That’s all.

It’s OK, I’ll just wait for the paperback. Er, no. There will be no paperback unless the project is funded. Help me to cross the finishing line and there will be a subsequent trade edition in partnership with Faber (due next year), with the potential for foreign editions and translations. Once the book is published by Unbound (in August, if I get funded on schedule), it will automatically be eligible for prizes and various other good things. But for that to happen, I need your support. You can do everything you need to do here. Thanks so much.

 
You can click here to watch Charles’ pitch video for the book, read an excerpt from, and find out how to support the publication of A Box of Birds.

Part of the reason for taking the crowd-funding route with A Box of Birds was the opportunity it promised for getting some conversations going around the themes of the book. One of the ways in which I think this novel is distinctive is in its portrayal of a philosophy of neuroscientific materialism. If you are steeped in a particular scientific view of how the brain works, how does that change your understanding of your own thoughts, feelings and actions? I have explored this fictionally through the story of a neuroscientist, Yvonne Churcher, and her reactions to some major challenges to her materialist views.

In search of just such a conversation, I got in touch with the acclaimed science writer Jonah Lehrer, who has written previously about the relationship between fiction and cognitive science (most notably in his immensely erudite Proust was a Neuroscientist). Jonah very generously offered to set up a Q&A in which we could discuss some of these themes of mutual interest. It was huge fun to do, and you can read the results (and a very interesting comment thread) here.

As the best discussions always do, the Q&A with Jonah also stimulated a lot of new thinking on my part. I had asked whether neuroscientific explanations of mind and behaviour will go on to influence the novel in the way that evolutionary and psychoanalytic theory did. What I didn’t explore was the idea that the latter have a particular power in accounting for motivations: helping the writer and reader to make sense of why people do what they do.

Explaining motives is of course a key task for the fiction writer. An author who presents actions without giving reasons for those actions is not going to keep the reader’s interest. It seems to be a basic fact of our psychology that we look for the causes behind behaviour, which we usually interpret in terms of the mental states that underlie action: those beliefs, desires, secrets and attitudes that drive a plot along.  

We know plenty about the neuroscience of motivation. A neuromaterialist character might conceivably make sense of an urge or a desire in terms of activation in the dopamine reward system. A central plot-thread in A Box of Birds is the idea of intracranial self-stimulation, which refers to stimulation of one’s own nervous system for various putative rewards. In a sexual encounter, Yvonne feels desire in her brain as well as in her body. I don’t believe that everyone thinks like this about lust, but I think it’s plausible that some people do, and it’s that space of understanding that I want to explore in this story.

Often, though, as I complained to Jonah, neuroscientific detail in fiction is an accompaniment of behaviour rather than a driver of it. Compare that to the situation with Darwinian and Freudian views of mind. Fiction writers have always dealt with people acting without knowing why, and they have often framed these unconscious motivations in evolutionary or psychodynamic terms. In Ian McEwan’s novel Enduring Love, for example, the protagonist Joe Rose reaches for an evo-psych interpretation of his feeling of fear at catching sight of his tormentor, Jed, in the reading room of the London Library. Joe is afraid because he has a mammalian nervous system, evolved to respond to threats, and here is another mammal promising to do him harm. At a different level of explanation, psychodynamic motives are everywhere in fiction: think, for example, of Paul’s Oedipal attraction to his mother in D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, or the depth psychology routinely dished out by TV medic Gregory House.

I’m not sure that neuroscience can—yet—match the power of these explanations for characters’ motives. It is of course a mistake to separate the neuroscientific entirely from the evolutionary, given that our nervous systems evolved under specific selective pressures. What I’m interested in is the kind of fiction where characters make sense of what they are doing in terms of what their brains are up to. The protagonist of Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn, for example, has Tourette’s syndrome. He blurts out obscenities because his brain makes him do it. But this is pathology, not ordinary experience. I want to know whether it’s possible to have a fiction of everyday life where brain is the driver of behaviour. In A Box of Birds, Yvonne understands herself differently because of what she knows about her own nervous system. And that, at several key points in the plot, affects how she goes on to act.

Like any fiction-makers, writers who want to take neuroscience seriously need to be aware of why their characters are acting like they are. It may be that we need to make more progress in understanding the brain science of motivation before we see neuro-explanations really getting established in fiction. But even then, those kinds of explanations may not satisfy us as readers. Yvonne’s perspective on her own experience changes as events unfold, drifting away from neuromaterialism towards something more like an old-fashioned notion of self. We need to know why characters do what they do, and those explanations need to be pitched at a level of explanation that makes sense to us. Neuroscientific knowledge may provide us with mechanisms, but to work in fiction it also needs to be an engine of behaviour.

 

- Charles Fernyhough

Justin Pollard, co-founder of Unbound, has responded to Anthony Horowitz’s speech on the publishing industry (published in The Guardian a couple of weeks ago) a piece of his own in The Independent, explaining how Unbound’s crowd-funding model differs from self-publishing.

At an event hosted by The Book People the other week, the author Anthony Horowitz gave a rather witty speech about the relationship between writers and their publishers. It was entertaining, and I agreed with much of it. Apart from the bit that really annoyed me.

Like him, I’m an author. But I’m also a publisher.

Yet his speech provoked a good deal of recognition, not schizophrenia. I agree with him that a publisher’s job is to deliver ‘story, character, style, originality, design, typography, literacy, good grammar, education, enlightenment’, that publishers aren’t (often) Luddites. That the challenge they face is a world which talks of ‘content’, not ‘books’ and which is undergoing the most fundamental change since the invention of the printing press. I also agree that authors and publishers often need fact checkers. Anthony Horowitz clearly does.

His argument all started to go a bit peculiar when he got to a part of the topic I know very well. He’s said it before, on the BBC when I and two other writers launched Unbound, our crowd-funding publishing company. And now he said it again: ‘I could,’ he said, ‘go it alone and self publish with Unbound, as Terry Jones did last year.’

Go it alone? Self-publish? A spot of research wouldn’t go amiss. Just a visit to our site would be a start.

Or he could have asked Terry Jones or Kate Mosse or, if he dared, the terrifying polymath Jonathan Meades what being published by Unbound actually involves? If he had, he would have learned that his notion of ‘things publishers do’ – i.e. making exactingly edited and imaginatively promoted books – are being performed here by people who have worked in ‘proper publishing’ for many decades.

Of course we don’t mind Anthony having a bit of a dig at us – he has every right to decided for himself if we can produce well crafted books, provided he’s read them. What is sad that is that he should feel the need to have a dig at our (and his fellow) authors. Does he really think that they need to self-publish?

Click here to head over to The Independent and read the rest…