10 Tips for Working from Home

There is no doubt that the latest pandemic has caused huge upheaval to our personal and working lives. Many hundreds of thousands of people face the unfamiliar prospect of working from home for weeks or even months to come. Most of our ghostwriters have been working this way for years, so we have come together to provide you with a few tips that will hopefully help you settle into this new way of working:

1. 1. Rise and shine
      Set your alarm for the same time every morning and try and keep a regular bedtime. Whether you’re a night owl or an early riser, keeping a regular wake-up and bedtime will help you to settle into your new routine more quickly.

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10 Tips for Writing Your First Novel

As I have recently discovered, writing a novel is not for the fainthearted. For starters, there’s the exhausting process of living and breathing your characters, plots and storylines, only to realise how unfeasible everything looks when it stares back at you on the page in unforgiving black and white. Writing fiction is never going to be easy, but the following 10 tips might just help you hang on to your sanity.

1. Don’t squirrel yourself away

Tempting though it may be to hide yourself away from the world with just your keyboard for company, too much time focused on your novel without a break is more likely to stunt your creativity. Read more “10 Tips for Writing Your First Novel” →

Blurred Lines: Intimacy in Ghosting and Editing

Our guest blogger this week is the wonderful Gillian Stern. Gillian is a ghostwriter – mostly of memoir – commissioned by Penguin, Hodder, Orion, Bloomsbury and W&N, among others. 

I have a new secret. I think about him all the time. I imagine his thoughts and responses. When I am not with him I talk to him in my mind. I record our conversations and listen to his voice before I go to sleep, at the gym, on the bus. I read his messages to me and the ones on social media and then I read into them. He has a special ringtone on my WhatsApp, on text. I don’t talk about him to anyone.

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Are you sitting on a story? Ghostwriting fiction

Our guest blogger this week, the inimitable Ben Jeapes, has had several fine novels professionally published under his own name, and has ghostwritten many more – sometimes a single book, sometimes a whole series – on behalf of various clients. www.benjeapes.com

Terry Pratchett once hinted that bookshops holding celebrity author signings shouldn’t pass comment if the author spends an inordinate amount of time reading their own book as: “It may be the first time they’ve seen it.”

Is anyone really surprised to learn that celebrities might not have penned their own novel?

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‘Narrative non-fiction’ – the rise of the non-celeb memoir…

Susan Feldstein is one half of literary agency The Feldstein Agency based out of Northern Ireland, which she runs with her husband Paul. In this week’s blog, Susan talks about the rise of the ‘narrative non-fiction’ market and how writers no longer need to have celeb status to get published.

Paul, my partner in our boutique literary agency on the north-east coast of Ireland, has worked in publishing on both sides of the Atlantic for more than 40 years, and in that time has had ample opportunity to observe the many quirks of the industry. One of his many observations about publishers concerns what he refers to as ‘the lemming effect’ –  the way in which, once publishers spot a ‘breakout’ (for which, read ‘surprise’) bestseller or trend in the market, their collective impulse is to jump onto the bandwagon, and to keep on jumping in large numbers until the wheels come off from sheer overload. Read more “‘Narrative non-fiction’ – the rise of the non-celeb memoir . . .” →