Word Count 91: Comedy writing comp, how hardbacks are made, S&S ditch blurbs

Plus recording an audiobook, The Archers, more sexism on TV, my new comms strategy course and Fieldwork update.

Hi there,

January, the month that lasts one hundred weeks, is finally over and February looms before us, wet, blustery and cold. I desperately want to snuggle up on the sofa with a good book for the month, but lo, there are deadlines to be met.

Suw’s News: Fieldwork second first draft; comms strategy course

I have decided to invest in the Sitcom Mission Gold feedback package, which provides two rounds of feedback on the script I’m going to submit. This means I’ve got 20 days to write a draft of my 15 minute audio version of Fieldwork, get feedback from friends and colleagues, and do a second draft ready for submission. You might remember that last year I wrote a half hour TV script and got two rounds of notes on it from Dave Cohen, so I know I can do it, I just need to get on with it.

If you haven’t seen them already, there are two new updates on the Fieldwork site: My plan for 2025 and a look at why I chose bats to be a keystone species for my sitcom.

I am also now offering a new five week Write Your Own Communications Strategy course for small businesses and solopreneurs:

I will help you to set your comms goals, understand and segment your audience, decide which communications channels are appropriate and feasible for you to use, help you craft messages for each audience segment, and introduce you to the key tools you’ll need to carry out your strategy.

You can read more about it on my LinkedIn page, and sign up for more information, once I have enough people on board, via this form. This course isn’t specifically for authors, but it will be useful for anyone who’s running their own business, whether that’s a writing business or anything else.

Opportunity: David Nobbs 2025 comedy writing competition

The David Nobbs Memorial Trust comedy writing competition is offering a £1,000 prize plus mentoring to help the winner develop their career. Entrants mush have at least one broadcast comedy writing credit, but not be working full-time as a broadcast comedy writer. You will be required to submit the first 10 pages of a half-hour comedy radio or TV sitcom and the closing date is 3 Mar 2025.

What I’m watching: What’s it like to record an audio book?

I loved this little peek behind the curtains from author Jenny Draper, who talks about the experience of narrating the audiobook of her upcoming history title, Mavericks: Life stories and lessons of history's most extraordinary misfits.

What I’m watching: Inside the factory – Hardback books

If you want a longer peek behind the industry curtains, this episode of the BBC’s Inside the Factory is a fascinating look at how books are actually printed. It’s a very high tech process, with double-sided printing machines producing three million books every week.

Stop, Look, Listen: How The Archers sounds to people who do not listen to The Archers

People who read the Fieldwork pilot episode script from last year described it as a cross between Detectorists and The Archers. Having seen and loved the former, I thought I better start listening to the latter when a friend of mine reminded me of this hilarious skit by John Finnemore, which is as true now as it was ten years ago.

Good grief, really? More sexism in TV

Writer Katja Meier, who got onto “a leading scheme for female writers over the age of 40” was rightly appalled when production companies asked her to make her female protagonist 20 years younger.

Despite being backed by the UK arm of the Writers Lab programme, which has backers including Meryl Streep and Nicole Kidman, she was met with blank stares in multiple meetings when she argued that her target audience of women over 50 were underserved.

“In one pitch somebody told me: ‘Yeah, we don’t really believe that women over 50 are a valid audience’,” she says with a laugh. “And I was just like, ‘Are you fucking kidding me?’”

When I first started shopping Tag around, my magic realism fantasy script featuring a menopausal woman who becomes a reluctant sword-wielding heroine, I was told exactly the same thing. My middle-aged female protagonist was apparently neither “fresh” nor “original”. 🙄

Meier took the bit between her teeth and produced her pilot herself, and needs 50,000 viewers via indie streaming service Olyn to get the show made. And I started turning Tag into a novel, a project I still need to finish.

Sometimes, you just gotta DIY.

Tip-top Tip: Foreshadowing

Editor Tiffany Yates Martin runs through the different ways you can use foreshadowing to “heighten suspense and tension, increase momentum, raise a story’s stakes, deepen and develop characters, and pave in key plot developments to give the story more cohesion”.

Read this: Simon & Schuster ditching author blurbs

Simon & Schuster publisher Sean Manning has decided to stop requiring authors to get their books blurbed – ie get tiny snippets of praise from other authors.

While there has never been a formal mandatory policy in the eight years I’ve been with the Simon & Schuster imprint, it has been tacitly expected that authors—with the help of their agents and editors—do everything in their power to obtain blurbs to use on their book cover and in promotional material. I have always found this so weird.

In no other artistic industry is this common. How often does a blurb from a filmmaker appear on another filmmaker’s movie poster? A blurb from a musician on another musician’s album cover? A blurb from a game designer on another designer’s game box? The argument has always been that this is what makes the book business so special: the collegiality of authors and their willingness to support one another. I disagree. I believe the insistence on blurbs has become incredibly damaging to what should be our industry’s ultimate goal: producing books of the highest possible quality.

I’m delighted to see this practice coming to an end and hope that other publishers will do the same.

Obligatory cat picture

No type. Only fuss.

That’s it for this week! Hopefully by the time I send my next newsletter, I’ll have sent my Fieldwork script out to my collaborators and for some feedback from fellow writers!

All the best,

Suw