HIGH CONCEPT BOOKS

What is high-concept?
Essentially, a book with an extra-strong hook. A high-concept novel is one which is easy to sell because the idea has wow factor and is easy to explain very quickly. The wow factor often comes from a sense of, “Why didn’t I think of that? That’s going to sell in shedloads. Damn it.” 

Sometimes, in a high-concept book, the premise will sound unbelievable, which is part of

LUCK AND IDEAS

I've been thinking about luck a lot recently. Partly because my new novel, Wasted, is about huge and unpredictable effects of tiny “lucky” chances on our lives, and because, luckily, it's gaining wonderful reviews and feedback. And partly ...

Hang on a sec - did I say "luckily"? Why do we talk about luck so loosely? Doesn't a book get good reviews because people liked it? Unless I bribed the

WHEN AN IDEA IS NOT A BOOK

The most common question people ask writers is, "Where do you get your ideas?" For a long time I struggled with finding a helpful and polite answer to this question. (Before you say it: I know, I struggle to be polite at the best of times.) My instinct, depending on how crabbit I was feeling at the time, would either have been, "From my head, duh!" or, "Oh, I don't know, really - they just sort

MORE ON OTHER WRITERS GETTING THERE FIRST

To be honest, this is really an excuse for showing you this fabulous video, which I came across via Jonathan Pinnock's comment beneath my recent post about writers having the same / similar ideas and whether this matters.

Have a gander, and then I'll reveal why it's relevant.



Fab, eh?

And now, if you go here, you'll see why it was relevant to my recent post.

Done that? Wasn't it

NO! SOMEONE GOT THERE FIRST!

You might call this a horror story: The Terrifying Spectre of Someone Getting There First.One of the heart-stopping moments in any writer's life - for unpublished as well as published bods - is when one hears that another author is about to produce a book which sounds horribly, terrifyingly, teeth-gnashingly similar to the one we are writing or planning or dreaming of. Our instinct is to believe