Novel Writing Masterclass: 14th April 2026, Winchester

/ Claire Fuller / Leave a comment
A class of creative writing students sit around a desk working on their novels.

with Lucy Atkins and Claire Fuller

 Tuesday 14th April 2026 in Winchester, Hampshire

Have you started writing a novel but now you’re confused? Unsure? Bogged down? Or just want to finish?

Join two bestselling authors for an expert-led one-day Novel Writing Masterclass in Winchester, Hampshire.

Following their successful, sold-out masterclass in 2025, Oxford University Creative Writing tutor and author, Lucy Atkins, and Costa Prize Winning author and creative writing teacher, Claire Fuller are once again teaching one-day novel writing masterclass.

What makes this Novel Writing Masterclass so unique? 

Creative writing courses can be, at best, underwhelming – at worst, downright misleading. This one-day masterclass is different.  Lucy and Claire not only have extensive experience teaching Creative Writing at the very highest level, they have a proven track record as published authors of bestselling, critically-acclaimed, award-winning novels.

In short, they know what makes a good book – and they know how to teach you!  

With ten published novels between them, they also understand how complex and difficult writing can be. This masterclass, which takes place in central Winchester, Hampshire, offers a unique opportunity to learn from and ask questions of two experienced writers and Creative Writing tutors. For this reason, places are strictly limited to 14.

Who is this Masterclass for? 

This day is aimed specifically at writers who have started writing a novel but not yet finished. 

You will learn to:

  • Understand how a plot that builds can move your writing forward
  • Create compelling characters
  • Analyse your first 30 pages and see what is and isn’t working
  • Master the all-important skill of self-editing 
  • Prepare your novel so that is is ready to send out to literary agents

You’ll leave inspired and energised with a toolbox of practical tips, strategies and ideas that you can apply to your own work. And perhaps most importantly, you’ll gain renewed enthusiasm, energy and a sense of creative direction. 

Buy Tickets

About Lucy
Lucy teaches on the Creative Writing Masters degree at the University of Oxford. She is the author of five novels, including the bestselling Magpie Lane, and most recently Windmill Hill, a summer book pick for both the Guardian and the Observer. Find Lucy’s ‘Talking About Writing’ sessions with Claire and other well-known authors on Instagram @lucyatkinswriter. 

About Claire
Claire is the author of five novels including the Costa Novel Prize-winning and Women’s Prize-shortlisted novel, Unsettled Ground. Her sixth novel, Hunger and Thirst, will be published in May 2026. She has taught creative writing for many years for various organisations including The Women’s Prize, Arvon, literary festivals and creative writing academies. Her teaching is said to be fun but also very practical, so that students leave with concrete methods for improving their own writing. Follow Claire on Instagram.

What previous Novel Writing Masterclass students said about the day

“I was particularly interested in the Plotting and Character modules and seeing these elements really being broken down. It was great to see the plot/shape of a novel being explained visually on the flipchart. It made me aware of how I should be approaching these areas in my own writing.“

“I just wanted to say a huge thank you for yesterday’s brilliant and inspiring workshop. You both put so much thought and energy and generosity (sharing your knowledge) into it.“

“Such a privilege to be able to learn so much from two authors I admire immensely, especially as I’m just setting out on this journey. You should both be very proud of how the day went and I really appreciate all the thought and work you put into creating the content. I thought you both worked really well together and split up the modules well so we weren’t listening to one voice for too long at a time.“

“A big thank you to you both for your time and the inspiration from the course.“

Further information

This intensive day is structured around mini workshops taught by both Claire and Lucy, each including writing exercises and time for discussion. There will be opportunities to put your questions to both tutors, and meet your fellow writers.

The price includes sustaining snacks, delicious cakes, hot drinks and a tasty lunch. 

The Arc is located in central Winchester only 10 minutes walk from the nearest large carpark (Tower Street), and also only 10 minutes walk from Winchester station. 

We look forward to welcoming you to our Masterclass! 

Buy Tickets

Bitter Orange Giveaway on Goodreads

/ Claire Fuller / Leave a comment

Goodreads is running a Giveaway for 100 ebooks of Bitter Orange for U.S. readers!

Follow this link and click on the Enter button: https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/424883-bitter-orange-a-novel

The Giveaway closes on 4th February.

In 1969 Frances Jellico arrives at Lyntons, a dilapidated English country house, to survey the follies in the garden. There, she meets Cara and Peter, and when she is in her bathroom in the attics of the house she finds a hole in her bathroom floor and she cannot resist spying on her new friends in their bathroom below. Frances has a story to tell, as does Cara, but you can’t believe everything either woman says.

Instagram Giveaway for a UK proof of Hunger and Thirst

/ Claire Fuller / Leave a comment

Over on Instagram, I’m running a Giveaway for a signed UK proof of my next novel, Hunger and Thirst, which will be published in May.

Hunger and Thirst is about Ursula, a reclusive sculptor, who in 1987 when she is 16 meets wild-child, Sue. Sue dares Ursula to kill someone and when she actually does, Ursula is haunted for the rest of her life.

The Giveaway closes at midnight 17th January 2026.

Enter here

Claire’s and Tim’s Top Books of 2025

/ Claire Fuller / 2 Comments

In 2025 I read about the same number of books as the previous year – 85 books, mostly contemporary or a novel from an author’s backlist, and I also made a promise to my friend Lizzy to read a ‘classic’ – this year, Pride and Prejudice. A couple of my top ten books came late in the year (A Sport and a Pastime and Heart the Lover, and one, The Infamous Gilberts (which isn’t published until 2026) jumping into my top three. I always feel a little sad for those books that are bumped off my ever developing list of ten favourites. Perhaps I should do a second post about almost made-its.

Two of the books in the picture are mock-ups. We listened to the audio book and forgot to buy the physical book. Can you spot which ones?

So, here are my and Tim’s favourite ten books of the year. We share a record-breaking three this year: Take What You Need by Idra Novey, Heart the Lover by Lily King, and Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry which we read over twelve months in our book group.

All of my and Tim’s books can be bought from my list on Bookshop.org.

Let me know if you’ve read any and which catch your eye.

You can see previous year’s lists here: 2024 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015.

Claire’s Top 3 (in no order)

The Infamous Gilberts by Angela Tomaski

My lovely, funny, frustrating father died in last March, and I’ve been clearing his flat. One thing I brought home to put on my own wall was a family tree. There is dust along the top of the frame that has been there for years and I cannot bear to wipe it off. Angela Tomaski gets this. She writes about loss, but in such a darkly funny, brilliant way, that I have fallen in love with The Infamous Gilberts.
Maximus, an enigmatic neighbour, takes us on a tour of Thornwalk, a dilapidated stately home, just before its contents are removed and it’s made into a hotel. Object by object he introduces us to the Gilbert siblings, Lydia, Hugo, Anabel, Jeremy, and Rosalind, and their morbidly amusing tragedies. It is an unusual narrative style, one I’ve never read before, but it is so worth sticking with. The chapter headings give a hint and flavour of the book: ‘A Small Pile of Mouldy Hay,’ ‘Some Very Small Socks’, and ‘The Greasy Window’. I was swept into the siblings’ lives, even while most of them are pretty awful human beings.
I laughed, and sniggered and underlined and yes, I cried at the end. Although it might have been dust in my eye.
Buy The Infamous Gilberts from Bookshop.org

Leaving by Roxana Robinson

Leaving by Roxana Robinson was one of three books recommended by author Huma Qureshi as part of my Books under the Radar series on my website and Instagram. I couldn’t possibly read all the books suggested in the series each week but this one caught my eye and I bought it and read it as soon as it arrived, and it completely absorbed me. It reminded me of the very best Sue Miller in that it is at the heart a family drama but with a lot to say about loyalty, love, and parental relationships with adult children.
Sarah and Warren meet each other again at sixty by chance. They were girlfriend and boyfriend when they were twenty or so, but split up and lost touch. Now they reconnect and start a relationship even though Warren is married. He decides to leave his wife for Sarah but this act has consequences far beyond anyone can imagine. The ending hit me really hard (don’t go into this book thinking it will be a light family drama) especially since almost this same scenario recently happened to someone close to me. Highly recommended, and very likely to be on my top reads of the year.
Buy Leaving from Bookshop.org

Take What You Need by Idra Novey

Take What You Need by Idra Novey was recommended to me by fellow author and friend, Judith Heneghan, and I loved it. In rural Pennsylvania, sculptor, Jean is mourning the estrangement of her step daughter, Leah, and remembering how four years ago their relationship broke apart. Jean is a sculptor in her sixties welding metal alone in the sitting room of her father’s old house, when a family move into the almost derelict house next door, where the water has been cut off. Jean starts a friendship with the young man of the family who helps her with her work. In alternate chapters we hear from Leah who is returning, to Jean’s house having learnt of her death – and is examining the prejudices she encounters and finally, her own.
Goodness, this is so good. Propulsive and with brilliant writing. It looks at the sexuality of older women, American poverty, sculpting, bias and expectations, motherhood – there is so much to think about, but without the story feeling overloaded. Highly recommended.
Buy Take What You Need from Bookshop.org

And Claire’s next 7

A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter

This is Salter’s third novel, written / set in the early – mid 1960s in rural France, and it is AMAZING. For its prose – descriptions of France and travelling by train and food and buildings. For its atmosphere – out of season France, a slow, languid feeling where nothing really happens. And for its characters and very graphic descriptions of sex.
An unnamed and unreliable American narrator goes to stay in his friends’ house in Autun, a small town in Burgundy. While he is there, summoning up courage to speak to a local woman, another American man – Philip Dean arrives in a Delage convertible, and decides to stay. Dean meets a local shopgirl, Anne-Marie and they start a relationship. From here on, the unnamed narrator imagines the time Dean and Anne-Marie spend together: their trips out for meals in the car, their overnight stays in hotels, their visits to her parents, and the sex they have. Soon Dean runs out of money, and although naive Anne-Marie is expecting marriage, something else happens that Salter cleverly foreshadows if you pay attention.
Buy A Sport and a Pastime from Bookshop.org

Castaway by Lucy Irvine

Who remembers this from the first time around? First published in 1983 it’s about the year that Lucy Irvine spent on an uninhabited island in the Torres Strait between New Guinea and Australia, with Gerald Kingsland who is twenty-five years older than her (she is 25). I think I read it in the 1980s (I took this copy from my dad’s shelves recently), and on this re-read I loved it.
On the island Lucy wants to be busy fishing, making a shelter, exploring, but Gerald either wants to lie in the shade or persuade Lucy to have sex. As they nearly starve and run out of water, instead of Gerald, Lucy falls in love with Tuin, the island. And her writing, about the sun, the interior and the sea, is incredibly sensual. She is also, it feels, very frank with her own frustrations, desires, and needs – and in fact some details that made me squint as I read – and the book opens up all sorts of interesting questions about couples, compromise, affection, and sexual needs. In the end, the couple are ‘saved’ by local islanders who bring their engines to Gerald to repair in return for food and water. Even this adds a complication, because it means Lucy can stay on the island but at what price?
It’s fascinating stuff and I’m still mulling it over.
Buy Castaway from Bookshop.org

The Adversary by Michael Crummey

This is the fourth Michael Crummey novel I’ve read, and like all the others I loved it. In the late 18th Century two siblings – the Widow Caines and Abe Strapp are fighting for commercial supremacy in Mockbeggar, a small town on the shore of Newfoundland. Abe is an awful man – a drunkard, a thief, a murderer, and you can only hope that the Widow Caines is better. She seems to treat her servants and the villagers better, but she has her own devastating schemes that are only shockingly revealed at the very end of the novel. There is weather and plague, and curses, and brilliant characters. In a weird way it reminded me of Lonesome Dove – in the way the POV shifts, in the language that they use, in how they both feel like a brilliant saga that you never want to end. Highly recommended.
Buy The Adversary from Bookshop.org

The Friend by Sigrid Nunez

Five big stars for The Friend by Sigrid Nunez. I chose this book for the book club I run at the Cabinet Rooms in Winchester. It was pretty divisive, with lots of people actively disliking it but I adored it. An unnamed narrator is a writer and creative writing teacher living in Manhattan when a close friend of hers – someone she had a brief affair with and is also a writer and teacher – kills himself. The narrator is persuaded by the man’s widow to look after his Great Dane, Apollo even though her apartment doesn’t allow pets. This rather slight story is interspersed with musings about creative writing teaching, loss, suicide, friendship and much more.
And it made a brilliant book club book even though many people hated it. There was so much to discuss and some of the things other members pointed out were brilliantly revealing.
Buy The Friend from Bookshop.org

You Like it Darker by Stephen King

Twelve creepy, weird and brilliant short stories. I had my favourites and they tended to be the longer ones: Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream (Danny dreams that he discovers a person, murdered and buried behind a gas station, when he visits he discovers his dream is true); Rattlesnakes (a man befriends his neighbour – a slightly mad but harmless woman who pushes a stroller around with, supposedly her dead twins in it); and Slide Inn Road (a family take a wrong turn in their car and are apprehended by two men who terrorise them). Plenty here to get your teeth into and keep you up at night.
Buy You Like it Darker from Bookshop.org

Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

An epic – in storytelling, in length and in writing ability. 843 gripping pages. I don’t really understand how McMurtry did it, kept all the storylines interesting, all the characters completely real, kept surprising me with who he killed off. And how he wrote the women who have so often been left out of, or relegated to inconsequential characters in Westerns.
In the late 1870s, Gus and Call, the owners of the Hat Creek Cattle Company decide to make a cattle drive north from their Texas home of Lonesome Dove to Montana, where they hear the grass is greener and there is plenty of land. They take with them an assorted bunch of cowboys – some teenagers, some experienced hands, some troublemakers – as well as a local prostitute, a cook and a couple of pigs.
Some men are lost, others are hanged, there are fights along the way with Indians, and the reuniting of a long lost love. I fell so hard for this book, and if I’m being truthful, Gus. Oh Gus. Sob, Sigh.
I read it split into about 10 chunks with my book club. It was universally loved.
Buy Lonesome Dove from Bookshop.org

Heart the Lover by Lily King

“A long tender farewell to youth”, as one character says in this intense, emotional, lovely book. The narrator (only named at the very end) has her first relationship at college, unsurprisingly there are issues, but through this man she starts a love affair with Yash, someone who will move in and out of her life with desire, and love, and pain. I don’t want to say too much about what happens, but there are mostly two parts: youth in college, and middle-age. I cried. You will cry too.
Buy Heart the Lover from Bookshop.org

Tim’s Top Reads of 2025

Tim’s Top 3 (in no order)

Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

What an epic! – I’ve never read a Western before but this is something else. Enthralling characters, blistering dialogue and storylines that are both brutal and tender. It’s very long, but when I got to page 843 I wanted to start all over again. I travelled every mile from Texas to Montana with the Hat Creek Cattle company. Everyone I’ve met who has also read it has felt the same way.
Buy Lonesome Dove from Bookshop.org

Back in the World by Tobias Wolff

Tobias Wolff’s short stories are amazing. I seem to have read some every year for the past 5 years, and keep coming back to them. Favourite one in this book is ‘Coming Attractions’ where a precocious teenage girl working late in a movie theatre makes prank calls to strangers, including a man named Mr. Love. She thinks she’s smart but in reality she’s lonely and abandoned. Top marks.

Flesh by David Szalay

Szalay has written a cracking, and Booker Prize winning worthy, tale of a man’s life – from Hungary to England, from poverty to money and from brutality to peace. It’s such great writing – where you find yourself rooting for István even though he can be a git. Every bit as good as ‘All that Man Is’ by the same author. Thoroughly recommended and surprisingly fun.
Buy Flesh from Bookshop.org

And Tim’s next 7

Click here to buy any of these from Bookshop.org

That’s it from us in 2025. I’d love to hear about your favourite reads of 2025.

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My novel, Hunger and Thirst will be published in May in the UK, and June in the US and Canada. Buy it from Bookshop.org in the UK. In the US, if you pre-order on 30th or 31st December 2025 from Barnes and Noble you can get 25% off if you are a Premium or Rewards member (free to join). Just type PREORDER25 at the checkout.

Top 30 Books of the Last Decade: A Must-Read List

/ Claire Fuller / Leave a comment

My favourite books of the last ten years

Every year my librarian husband and I each decide on our top ten reads of the year. This year’s list (2025) will take us into our eleventh year, so before we announce them I thought I’d look back on my 30 favourites from the past ten years. I usually read 80 – 100 books a year, both fiction and non-fiction, and from my top ten each year I pick my top three, apart from 2016 when apparently I found it too difficult, so I have retrospectively picked three from that group.

Famous and less well-known

Some of these books you’ll no doubt have heard of: Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout, Lessons by Ian McEwan, but others are likely to be less well known but still deserve your attention: Halibut on the Moon by David Vann, The Hare by Melanie Finn, and Hot Springs Drive by Lindsay Hunter.

Fiction and Non-fiction and the rest of the stats

There are four non-fiction books in my list: Dadland, After the Eclipse, The Journal of a Disappointed Man, and Maurice and Maralyn. There are 16 female authors and 14 male. The oldest was published in 1947: A View of the Harbour by Elizabeth Taylor. One author appears twice: Ian McEwan. There are 14 American authors, 9 British, 2 Canadian, 1 South African, 1 Italian, 1 German, and 1 New Zealand. There two books in translation. And I love them all.

The full list

Click on the year to be taken through to the page where I reviewed the books, to find out why it made my top three that year and what each is about:

  • 2015
  • The Past by Tessa Hadley
  • Sweetland by Michael Crummey
  • The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch
  • 2016
  • Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout
  • Idaho by Emily Ruskovich
  • Mothering Sunday by Graham Swift
  • 2017
  • Dadland by Keggie Carew
  • Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
  • My Absolute Darling by Gabriel Talent
  • 2018
  • The Innocent by Ian McEwan
  • The Wall by Marlen Haushofer
  • After the Eclipse by Sarah Perry
  • 2019
  • The Journal of a Disappointed Man by W.N.P Barbellion
  • Mrs Bridge by Evan S. Connell
  • Halibut on the Moon by David Vann
  • 2020
  • Writers and Lovers by Lily King
  • The Hare by Melanie Finn
  • Bear by Marian Engle
  • 2021
  • In a Strange Room by Damon Galgut
  • Snow, Dog, Foot by Claudio Morandini
  • Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam
  • 2022
  • The Swimmer by Chloe Lane
  • Burntcoat by Sarah Hall
  • A View of the Harbour by Elizabeth Taylor
  • 2023
  • Lessons by Ian McEwan
  • Hot Springs Drive by Lindsay Hunter
  • The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai
  • 2024
  • Maurice and Maralyn by Sophie Elmhirst (called A Marriage at Sea in the US)
  • North Wood by Daniel Mason
  • The Italian Teacher by Tom Rachman

2025 Books of the Year

You’ll have to wait until after Christmas to find out what my and my librarian’s books of this year are, but I can tell you there are some crackers.

Subscribe to my newsletter and you’ll be notified when I’ve posted our favourite books.

Have you read any on my list? I’d love to know your favourites.

Book titles: Bitter Orange

/ Claire Fuller / 6 Comments
US jacket of Bitter Orange with hyper-realistic green leaves and bright oranges

This is an edited article that first appeared on my website in 2019.

Archaeology

The titles of my books have always tended to evolve, and my third novel, Bitter Orange was no exception. Usually though, the early Word files are simply called, Book 1 or Book 4, or whichever it is. But this novel had a title from the beginning: Archaeology. I thought it was going to be about people digging things up, literally and metaphorically.

I keep a writing diary and on 22nd April 2016 (the novel was started on 23rd December 2015), I thought that Archaeology was too difficult a word to write. ‘Those three bloody vowels in a row are beginning to annoy me,’ I wrote. And on 30th August of that year, I added, ‘I’m thinking of changing the title to Blood Orange’.

Blood Orange

For the rest of the time I was writing it, the novel was called Blood Orange, and this was what it was called when I sent it to my literary agent, and when it was submitted to my publishers in the UK, the US, and Canada. And they bought it with that name. Blood Orange.

The story is about Frances, a woman who is commissioned to survey the follies in the gardens of an English country house in 1969. There she meets and becomes besotted by Cara and Peter and visits the orangery alongside the house which has (or had at the time of writing) a single blood DSCF8951orange tree, so enormous it has broken through the glass panes. Blood oranges are sweet, and the fruit are ripe at a certain time of year. Three blood oranges are picked from the tree and squeezed to make juice – a point integral to the plot.

Then, in July 2017, after the book was sold, my editor at Penguin told me that the sale of another book, a debut thriller by Harriet Tyce had just been announced in The Bookseller (the UK trade magazine for publishing), and it was also called Blood Orange.

Titles of books, or albums or anything else aren’t copyrighted, but it was quickly agreed that publishing books with the same title around the same time was not a good idea, and Harriet’s had been announced, and mine hadn’t. It was mine that would have to change.

Bitter Orange

Changing a title I’d been happy with for months if not years was a difficult thing to accept. I was angry – at no one in particular – for quite a while.

I had lots of conversations with my editors and agents and lots of suggestions were bounced back and forth. I went through the novel with a highlighter and I wrote lists of word combinations. It was Sarah Lutyens, one of the founders of my literary agents, Lutyens and Rubinstein who came up with Bitter Orange. I think she just emailed it to HoAme one day – two words that sounded perfect together.

Except, that a bitter orange (which is not eaten or juiced, but generally used to make marmalade), is a very different thing to a blood orange. I wrote to Patricia Oliver from Global Orange Groves who had been helping me with orange tree advice for the book. Bitter oranges fruit at different times to blood oranges, and the juice is barely drinkable. Anyone who writes will know that you make what might seem like a simple change in the text: blood to bitter, but the repercussions ripple on and on. If I needed my characters to try to drink the juice, someone needed to realise they needed sugar, then they had to get sugar, which meant someone had to go shopping, which meant someone had to leave the house when I needed them to remain there. I faced lots of niggly revising.

Bitter Orange is better

But once I’d sorted out the changes and had lived with the new title for a while, it seemed more suited than Blood Orange, which I think sounds very thriller-like, and Bitter Orange isn’t a thriller.

By the time the book was published in the UK, in the US, and Canada, I loved the title: Bitter Orange.

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What do you think about the title? Let me know

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Bitter Orange has been published in Germany, US, Canada, Greece, France, Spain, and Russia, and Turkey. It is available as a audio book and has recently been optioned for film. 

Buy a copy of Bitter Orange

From Editing to Publication: Proofs, ARCs, Quotes and Blurbs

/ Claire Fuller / 2 Comments

This is part of a series about the process, from my point of view, of how my sixth novel,
Hunger and Thirst moves from editing through to publication. Read my earlier posts about US Cover Design, structural and line edits, and copyedits.

“Atmospheric, psychologically vivid, and unputdownable” Alice Winn, author of In Memoriam

ARCs and Proofs

ARCs (Advanced Reader Copies) and Proofs are the US and UK words for the same thing: a physical or digital version of the book which is sent out to other authors for quotes and blurbs, and to book reviewers, event organisers, and booksellers. This version usually uses the text before the final proofread because of timing, so it often includes typos and sometimes bigger issues in the story, all of which will hopefully be resolved before the hardback is printed.

“I was enthralled, rapt, utterly unable to put this book down. Claire Fuller, a master of psychic suspense, has done it again” Lindsay Hunter, author of Hot Springs Drive

Blurbs and quotes

A blurb is the US term for a quote (the UK term) provided by another author which is usually put on the cover, and sometimes inside the finished version. I get my fair share of proofs sent to me asking for a quote for the cover, and I’m nearly always happy to receive them*, but I don’t always provide a quote, and never if I don’t like the book and don’t finish it.

“Harrowing and tender…the kind of book to clear a weekend for, the kind of resonant nightmare that lingers long after its end” Hayden Casey, author of A Harvest of Furies

Do we need them?

This year (2025) the perennial debate came round again about whether the industry needs blurbs; how time-consuming they are for authors (to read the book and write the blurb), and for editors to ask agents and other editors to ask their authors for blurbs. My UK editor estimated that asking for blurbs takes up 80% of her time!

“An absolute masterpiece. Utter absorbing, genuinely unsettling” Jennie Godfrey author of The List of Suspicious Things

Lots of readers say they never pay attention to blurbs on books, and choose what they’re going to read from reviews or what the book is about. But although blurbs might still be useful to some readers, they are helpful for when the publisher is trying to get a retailer to stock the book and help promote it. Retailers like Waterstones are pitched many many books by publishers’ sales teams or sent catalogues to pick which books they are going to stock, and quotes for these books help guide them. If your book has a quote from Stephen King, say, then they are very likely to take note.

Why I think writers should say yes to ARCs and proofs

Last week I was speaking to an editor at a large publisher and I asked whether one of her high-profile authors might be interested in a proof of Hunger and Thirst. The editor seemed embarrassed to have to tell me that this author has told her editor and agent to never send her any proofs and never ask if she wants any. Although she writes contemporary fiction, she apparently doesn’t read it. The number of books we’re sent can be overwhelming, I get that, and yet that author was a debut once, trying to find her space in the world of publishing with her editor asking already published authors for quotes. I feel there should be more paying-it-forward going on. Afterall, it’s easy to say yes to receiving a proof but adding the disclaimer that they might not have time to read it. Who knows, they might find a gem.

“A gothic chiller — haunting, artful, suspenseful, complex, and cinematic” William Landay, author of All that is Mine I Carry With Me.

*Which proofs I won’t accept

I don’t like receiving unsolicited physical proofs, if someone knows my address; I’d much rather be asked via email first because there are some genres which aren’t for me: most historical fiction, most comic novels, most science fiction and fantasy. I never accept digital proofs because I work on screens enough already. And I don’t accept self-published books.

“Gothic, disturbing, and mesmerisingly well-written, Hunger and Thirst is like nothing I’ve read before” Lucy Atkins, author of Windmill Hill

Netgalley

In the UK book bloggers, booksellers, librarians, and reviewers can request a digital proof of books they’d like to read, including Hunger and Thirst. You can sign up here, but please do note that the vetting of whether you’re accepted or not is up to my publisher.

From Editing to Publication: How a Book makes it onto Book Shop Shelves. US Cover Design

/ Claire Fuller / 3 Comments

Spot the difference between these two images. Answers below

This is the third part in a series about how my next book, Hunger and Thirst moves through the process of editing to arriving onto bookshop shelves. The first part covered structural and line edits with my UK and US editors at Fig Tree/ Penguin and Tin House / Zando, the second part looked at copyedits and the difference between UK and US editions, and in this part I’m going to look at the US cover. (I’ve seen the UK cover, and it’s very different, but I’m not allowed to officially show it yet.)

Readers ask me a lot about covers: how the process works, how involved I get, whether I get any say; I’ve even been asked whether I design them myself given my art background.

The process starts early with Masie Cochran, my editor at Tin House / Zando asking me to send her any book covers I’ve seen recently that I’ve loved. I don’t know how much these feed into her planning, but I like that it makes me feel like I have some influence! So, I sent her half a dozen, and then a few months later she says she has a cover, and attaches it to an email.

It is the most terrifying moment clicking open on that email. What if I don’t like it? Luckily, that’s never happened with any of my books from Tin House. They’ve all been designed by their in-house Art Director who is now Beth Steidle, and who designed this cover for Hunger and Thirst.

I showed the cover to my husband and I kept opening the email over the course of the next day and I only loved it more. But, I had some very small comments, which I fed back to Masie who passed them to Beth, and then a while later I was sent the revised version.

Did you spot the differences between the two pictures? The one on the left was the first one I was sent and the one on the right is the final cover.

  • I wasn’t sure about how the sculpture’s right leg lifts up on the left of the cover. It gave her a look of a mermaid, and so Beth removed that.
  • I wasn’t sure that the flies looked enough like flies, and I wasn’t sure about the fly in the words ‘a novel’. So Beth changed the flies, removed the fly within the words, and put another fly on the sculpture’s arm.
  • Beth made some changes of her own to the colours and density of the dots etc.

The cover was officially revealed on CrimeReads website, along with an extract from the beginning of the novel (which I edited to make it shorter but still work as a narrative). I also wrote a piece about why this cover works so well for the story:

The main character, Ursula is a reclusive and famous sculptor, and so while the figure on the cover might be one of her carvings, it could also be Ursula herself caught in a moment of turning away from the camera. The first line of the novel mentions a murder and a body, so I love how the red shape on the head implies this might even be the victim. One of the narrative strands is the dares teenagers set each other, and it’s very clever how the fonts bring to mind words scrawled in haste or even graffiti. Another theme is the perception of women’s bodies and in particular body hair, and I love how this striking image picks up on this, not only in the angle of the sculpture to the viewer and the beautiful heft of her, but also how the dots give a subtle indication of hair. And then finally, you see the flies, four of them perched there; an unsettling suggestion that something bad is coming.

What do you think of the US cover – send me a comment!

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