-- Karen Traviss Science Fiction and Fantasy Author --

Here's a list of the questions I get asked most often. I'll add to this from time to time. Some of the answers are old blog entries, some are links, and some have been written specifically for this page.

I don't understand book lengths. How can books have the same number of pages but have different word counts?

Is it true you don't read fiction? How can you write if you don't read books?

How do I get in to writing Star Wars and other franchise fiction?

Did you base the Mandalorians on the Spartans?

Okay, who the hell are you?

Why do you bother to write this Star Wars stuff when you're a "serious" author?

How come there's a Verpine in Hard Contact? (My rant on how continuity works in the real world of publishing, and why writers run out of patience with obsessive fans.)

Have you done any interviews lately?

Do you do anything remotely interesting except write?

Have you written anything about SF/F?

What's with the rats?

Who does the art?

Why do the wess'har think the way they do?

How do you write characters?

Why do the wess'har dislike humans so much?

How should a writer deal with editors?

NEW: Why do you bother to write this Star Wars stuff when you're a "serious" author?

Why I write Star Wars fiction

I realise that there are some who are surprised that I voluntarily write fiction for the Star Wars franchise. That's a shame. If only they'd open their minds, chill out a bit and find out a little more about the GFFA, I think the world would be a happier place. Why does a serious, respectable SF writer like me take the Lucas shilling as well as writing her own books? Let me tell you...

1. The money's good. The cheques are on time.

2. The Lucas and Del Rey teams I work with are the nicest, funniest people imaginable. If you usually work alone, as a novelist does, it's great to be part of a top-notch team. And I get to work with artists, too. It's a dream.

3. Star Wars fans are the best, no contest. They're my second family. (God bless you, folks, and thank you.)

4. I had to become a better writer very fast just to handle Star Wars. It's a professional challenge on a scale I'd never imagined - plotting through tough continuity, picking up existing characters, having to grapple with genuinely difficult philosophical ideas. You think I'm joking? Ask me at a con some day.

5. I sell an awful lot of books. Star Wars made me a best-selling author.

6. Writing Star Wars is the most fun I have ever had, each and every day - and I didn't know a damn thing about the SW universe before March 2004. It pushes my creativity beyond its limits. I get paid to play.

7. Hell, I'm nobody. Then - out of the blue - I get to be part of, and add to, a creative icon that's embedded in our global culture. Remember, who writes, remains - and who writes Star Wars will probably remain even longer.

8. Lucas and Del Rey let me write "hard SF" Star Wars. They don't dumb me down, crimp my style or limit me. I can get serious ideas across to hundreds of thousands of readers while I'm entertaining them. Hmmm....do I want to do that, or a critically-acclaimed book that'll be read by five professors? Don't rush me...

9. I can actually see the pleasure and entertainment I give to people. I'm a storyteller. I need my audience. Star Wars gave me the biggest, best audience I could wish for.

10. Star Wars was the making of me in so many, many ways. It's a privilege to be part of it.

Thank you, George. Here's to another 30 years

And now a word from the Continuity Department

Continuity. I tried to stay away from it, but it grabbed me again. We fell to discussing this issue on the media tie-in writers mailing list, a large group of authors who cover everything from CSI, Monk, Buffy, The OC and Alias to B5, Trek and Star Wars. We juggle games, novels, comics, TV, movies...you name it. It makes your nose bleed. And it ain't easy.

Many of us shared tales about glitches in continuity, largely beyond our control, that earned us angry letters and e-mails from fans. When you're busting a gut at the keyboard for 16 hours a day, as many of us do, then the suggestion that we don't give a damn or can't be bothered to check facts is actually pretty annoying.

I'll stand up here and say that SW fandom is almost universally very laid back about the whole continuity issue and understands it exceptionally well. It's a running gag between writers and fans a lot of the time, which is fun. I'll just say the words Verpine shatter gun and I'll get a nod and a wink from fans, and more on that later.

But for anyone who hasn't sat back and considered what continuity really means, here's my take on it, and why you can never, ever, make it perfect. My colleague jedi_haiku has blogged eloquently on why listening to the notes makes you unable to hear the symphony, but I'm not musical, so I have to make sense of this in my robotic way by synthesis of data.

It's all about causality.

In the real world, events trigger other events. Weather changes: a crop fails. A crop fails, and a civilisation falls. A civilisation falls, and another has the room to grow. And so on. Every action causes and is linked inextricably to the fabric of reality. And - as far as we can perceive - time is linear. Everything happens in order because - again, as far as we can perceive - that's the only way it can happen at all.

Given time and technology, historians and archaeologists can look back and dig and examine and discover, and piece that chain - or rather three-dimensional web - together. And they still get it wrong, and have to revise their ideas, although they do spit and bitch about that at times. It will, eventually, make sense - because it has happened, and has only been able to happen because other events took place.

Cut now to the artificial world of the shared universe.

There is no causality. Even the most painstaking construction can't recreate the infinitely complex interaction of reality, and so things happen that you have to ret-con - that's author-speak for retroactive continuity, i.e. adding bits to the past because something has happened in the present or future.

And this is why I cut Dr. Who a bit of slack as a Time Lord, because it's a right bastard some days to manage a universe. And here's why, using SW as an example.

1. Fiction time is not linear.

The GFFA timeline covers millennia. One day we can be writing 2000 years before Yavin, the next 40 years after. And all points in between. There is no real history to be uncovered, because it never happened - except as how we create it on the fly each day.

2. Reality (or God) is one author working alone.

There are hundreds of creatives building the GFFA every day, from comics to games to books to movies to...thousands of individual pieces of the puzzle. Despite Herculean efforts by full-time content managers, tiny glitches creep in: and there are always gaps. Events are not tied together by reality, by causality, and so there is no inevitable force that stops us doing what can't happen. We only have our memories, our brains and our databases to tie it up as logically as we can. And we have to do that every bloody hour. I might write a chapter today that will send my colleagues scurrying around to knit those "facts" into something they're creating. And they don't even know I've written it yet.

3. Mistakes happen.

God might be omniscient and omnipotent, but we ain't. That is all.

4. Fiction has to make sense, but reality can do as it likes.

I bore people senseless with this. Reality can be illogical. Fiction has to have its own internal logic, and reality can get in the way of that, as any would-be writer who has tried to incorporate a real event into their work finds out very fast. The edges don't join up with the rest of the story.

5. Ret-conning is not evil or weak or dishonest.

Historians and archaeologists and even scientists ret-con all the time. (Or good ones do, at least.) As new data becomes available, they revise their theories. They accept there are gaps in knowledge. And so must we grunts creating in the fiction universe, except our goalposts are always shifting. As long as we admit to it, and do our best to make it as sensible as we can, then it's part of the process of fiction every bit as much as it is the real world. Sometimes it's to correct errors, but mostly it's because there was no information about a topic at all and we had to fill the gap. Discovery, folks: just like history.

6. Fans don't know it all either.

Actually, there are gaps in the fictional universe, just as there are in your knowledge of the real world. Fans do have encyclopaedic knowledge, but like authors, they don't ever have the complete picture, and none of us ever can. So just because something hasn't been mentioned by a certain date in the timeline, it doesn't mean it doesn't exist before then.

The only time I ever got annoyed with a fan was when they said that LFL was sloppy about continuity. No, you're wrong, mate, and if you saw some of the stuff that I see about other franchises across all genres, you'd realise just how lovingly and carefully Lucasfulm manages it.

So...rant over. And I'm glad I don't work on tie-ins to a weekly TV series, which is continuity plate spinning on a cosmic scale.

So, back to the subject of Verpine shatter guns...and stop giggling. I shall have the last word on this if it kills me.

The fact that they're first mentioned a long way down a game timeline doesn't mean they didn't exist before. And this is why we will continue to use them prior to that date.

To build guns that good, the Verpine must have been making them for quite a while. Like any manufacturer, they make various models. Verpine is almost certainly a loose description, like 9mm or Heckler and Kock, and you know how many variations there are on those and how long they've been making them. And, as Verps are pretty rare trade secrets of some badass mercs and heavies, there ain't an Argos catalogue for them.

So I have no problem with being allowed to use a Verp in a book decades before they're mentioned in a game timeline. Because I can explain very logically why it can be so, and their existence doesn't conflict with any other existing continuity. In fact, it makes better sense, especially to someone like me who's spent a long time reporting on defence procurement and the evolution of kit and ordnance.

So there. I shall have my Verp. And, as it can punch a hole through anything except enhanced Katarn Mk II armour (yes, I added that, too...) then don't push me, man...it might go off.

I love this job.

wess'har basics

On to the main question: why do the wess'har behave the way they do? A buddy at Lucas asked me if I actually liked the wess'har in City of Pearl.

I do like them, but I don't always agree with them. Well, I don't always agree with any of my characters, if at all. They do their own thing, which is why they work as characters and bounce off each other - or collide. The gulf between human logic and wess'har logic becomes even more apparent in The World Before.

I found I could either think wess'har, and it made sense, or think human, and that made sense, but I couldn't cross between the two at what looked like the same point on the road. Which, I suppose, is what aliens are all about - not just funny foreheads and tentacles. They really don't think like us.

When I built the wess'har, I started from their original niche in their environment and the evolutionary set-up was one where the co-operative and symbiotic species had the survival edge on the competitive ones at a critical point in the history of Eqbas Vorhi. I wanted to look at ways that a species could become intelligent (by our common definition, which you probably already know I think is bollocks) and technologically advanced without going through a phase of exploiting other species that didn't want to be exploited.

The wess'har evolved alongside the ussissi: the ussissi were burrowing animals, and the proto-wess'har lived in their tunnels. While the ussissi unearthed tubers and stuff they couldn't eat, the wess'har could, and in turn they provided the muscle to protect the ussissi from predators. Hence their mindsets: the ussissi are still instinctive companion animals, able to work with other species, and the wess'har are prone to pitching in on someone else's behalf and aren't really sure when to give up and say, "Okay, tosser, you asked for it - you're on your own now."

The wess'har take on culpability is confusing but it has its own logic, and personally I don't agree with it, being a great believer in the Burke adage. But they don't care what you think, only what you do: something has to happen before they'll act on it. They're reactive in many ways, which is possibly why they've developed two modes of behaviour - as Frankland says in Crossing The Line, they're "chilled or punching".

They have elaborate and involuntary scent signals, too, so everyone knows what their neighbour is feeling and there was never any evolutionary advantage for them in deception, nor any point in warning behaviour to avoid a fight. They always got by on muscle. So, no concept of warning, deception or escalation, but a reliance on force, and you have a species that look rather like human psychopaths by our standards. Even the dominance hormone emitted by the alpha females isn't a warning signal but a practical demonstration that the individual ought to be listened to because they have more of the aggressively protective instinct - jask - to win against external threats.

And it's also why they're not good at compromise, because they have no real concept of rubbing along: it's either a full partnership or it isn't. They avoid what they can't co-operate with. If the unco-operable insist on advancing, then all that's left is confrontation.

At each major evolutionary point, wess'har took the opposite path to humans. One key area was how the wess'har pass on their genes. They reproduce sexually, which is one route, but some years back I was taken with the idea of horizontal transmission as practised by some bacteria: and that means, basically, that they can swap genes with other individuals by contact, and not hang around to see what turns out in offspring. That was a key idea for me: it gave them a radically different reproductive strategy to humans, and made the wess'har genome much more malleable.

Wess'har are predisposed to seek to swap genes with each other, hence the scene in Crossing The Line where Mestin is wondering what mates Nevyan will choose and what genetic qualities her line might benefit from. Effectively, they're genetically engineering themselves the whole time through what we would think of as copulation - oursan - except oursan is quite separate from their reproductive system. The more numerous males gestate, so the females need only to be able to conceive and then protect their investment by defending their harem of males and their offspring.

Sharing their genes during their lifetime emphasises their tendency to co-operation and consensus, because they have a visible genetic stake in their whole community. But when they meet an exploitative species that's built on looking for an individual edge - i.e. the monkey boys from Earth - then it's ai caramba time. It's destined to end in tears.

How do you write characters?

I had an e-mail asking about characterisation and what I thought made believable characters. Whole books get written on creating characters, and as I'm not being paid to do that here my mercenary hack spirit whispers in my ear that I should pick one aspect that I think gets neglected and stick to that.

What follows is my personal view and I know it clashes completely with some received wisdom on writing. But it works for me, and that's the most you can claim for any technique.

I write very tight third person POV. My aim is to get the reader to sit behind the character's eyes, so anything that jerks them out of the head of that character can destroy the whole scene. Getting dialogue and action consistent with the character is pretty obvious, but it's easy to forget the bit in between - the narrative - is an integral part of voice. Not only is it easy to forget, but there are also people who tell you that you shouldn't do it.

I've read very strong opinions that matching dialogue and narrative is "ugly" and that editors don't like it because it reminds the reader that the character is a puppet. Personally, I think that's crap. I "match" all the time; it's how I wrote City of Pearl and my other books. For me, it's the gulf between dialogue and narrative that makes me think the character is a puppet, because all I can hear is that overseeing authorial voice, and it gets on my nerves. I resent it.

In tight third person POV, the narrative is really the character's internal dialogue and I believe it has to mirror their speech, their attitudes and their experience. A peasant farmer won't be pondering the harsh reality of his existence in terms of Nietzsche: he'll have a farming analogy that corresponds to becoming stronger by surviving adversity. And even a highly educated, stunningly articulate character won't be using elaborate language in their thoughts when they find they're in the path of an oncoming train. So the thoughts - the narrative - have to fit the mind they come from.

Many of my characters are ordinary working men and women with modest educations, so I reflect that equally in their dialogue and their narrative. In View of a Remote Country, my protag Evan was a semi-literate labourer who longed for education: as he acquired that education, his dialogue, his attitudes and the language he used in narrative changed between the opening of the story and the end. View was a story I wrote at Clarion when we were asked to try something uncomfortable and unfamiliar, and I decided to try using a character who had a poor command of English, which denied me all my usual language techniques and forced me to see the world through his eyes. Looking back, that was one of the most useful exercises I ever did.

Some readers will find it hard to read, because it doesn't match their own language skills. It feels "dumbed down" to them. But for me, a character who thinks in terms and language outside their experience isn't a character: what I'm hearing is the author, and personally I don't like any back-seat driver telling me what to think when I read. I want to feel what it is to be that character by being in their head, not the author's.

Mileages, as ever, will vary. Many people want to hear the authorial voice and a universal narrative style. I don't. The closest I've come to that is to opt for a reportage approach, because I don't want the style overpowering the content. I believe that if readers notice how I write before they hear what I'm saying, I've failed in my role as a storyteller.

Part of the joy of writing is to go to new places, and there's no more alien territory than another person's mind. For me, matching dialogue and narrative is an integral part of that.

Why do the wess'har dislike humans so much?

Monkey Boys 1: Everyone Else 0

Okay, the £100K in used random notes wasn't left in the phone booth as I specified, so you get day two of the FAQ. This is an explanation of why humans don't look so hot as role models in my fiction. This story goes back a while.

Some years ago my ex-husband - hereinafter referred to as H2, to distinguish him from H1 - was very unhappy about a SF novel where the aliens were the threat and the gallant humans (and their sidekicky but inferior alien allies) blew the Bad Aliens to Kingdom Come. H2, who was both a prolific SF reader and a man of science, had drunk his fill of this ethos and was spitting nails about it. "Why are humans always the good guys?" he ranted. "It's institutional xenophobia. Crap."

Hmm, I thought, wiping the foam from the kitchen table. If I ever write SF (and I had no plans to do so then) maybe I could ask that very question...

So I did.

I've had comments that the humans in CoP and CTL - even the good guys, murky as they are - are extreme cases, and that most humans aren't grasping or competitive. Well, of course the human cast of the wess'har wars are extreme: extreme people are the ones who actually do things, and leave everything behind on a one-way ticket, and take huge risks, and shape events. That's why they got on the ship to start with. Normal, undriven people tend to say things like, "I don't think I feel like invading a small Third World nation today, dear. I'll just pop down to Sainsbury's and get some tea bags."

But pretty well all life on Earth is competitive, although not as visibly to urban humans. It's the way species are built and we're probably among the most competitive, although plants are bloody scary. This isn't a value judgement. Put aside the notions of morality, and what's good and what's bad, and just look at it neutrally. We've clawed our way to the top of the food chain because we can manipulate our environment in various ways, and so we can move into lots of different niches. When we move in, other species have to move out, or become those that depend in part on us. And that's all I mean by competitive. Every time we as individuals do something that disadvantages other species because our needs matter more, then we're indulging in competition. (By the way, used any disposable chopsticks lately? You might not even know when you're doing it.)

So, spurred on by H2's diatribe against this certain novel (and I forget the title) I've tried to turn the issue inside out. It's a journalistic device most hacks are familiar with: take a widely held belief that is almost invisible through lack of challenge and ask, "So...is this guy really a saint?"

The whole concept of alienness is frequently debated in SF. Just how alien can you make an alien and still make them intelligible to readers? The answer is that if they're that alien, you can't. Novels are explorations of the human condition, read solely by humans (as far as we know) and so they need common reference points. You take it as far as you can, and in my case that means a perspective that doesn't assume humans are the good guys, or that their lives count more than anyone else's.

This is, in most human cultures, anathema. It strikes me not only as a competitive view - Monkey Boys first, which makes sense in evolutionary terms - but as something that has its roots in Western religion. Since H2's rant, I've made a point of seeking out people who would describe themselves as data rational - usually people with a science or business background - and asking them if they think humans are special and why.

The interesting thing is that apart from the obvious biological imperative to look after your own kind (and we don't do that very well) their arguments have boiled down to one that's quite emotional and would be called soul by those people more up-front about their beliefs. Culture and language are frequently cited as making us more worthy, but none of that is a reason: it's what we like about ourselves. It's wholly subjective. There's no intrinsic worth in either - let alone an unbreakable definition - other than the ones that humans place upon them. We seem to make sure that those definitions exclude rather than include.

It's all unexpectedly fluffy and, oddly, I've heard it more frequently from men than from women. (That could simply be because more men end up in the data-rational professions). None has been able to give me a list of real hard facts to support their view - just feelings. Okay, they're entitled to those, but the data rational - and I'd be in that category - can be highly subjective: ironically, the most common dismissal they have of people who don't agree with them is that they're being emotional. It's not universal - Peter Watts covered the species issue brilliantly in his blog some time back - but it's a definite pattern.

But we don't have as many hard facts at our disposal as we like to think.

So that's why - eventually - I took that fascinating paradox and used it as one of the bases for City of Pearl. If you're going to look at humans from the outside, it seemed a pretty good place to start. Some people are disturbed by that: once you start questioning the most basic tenets of our existence, you have to wonder what you're left with. Some people aren't: they either take it as read that aliens would see us a lot less lovingly than we see ourselves, or they actively enjoy seeing the universal order questioned.

To the wess'har, we're just another variety of meatbag driven by chemicals and genes. It isn't finding that we're not alone that Earth's big culture shock: it's experiencing what it really means to be just another animal. This is what I mean in the recurring theme that I use of lines - where we place the barrier between what's us, and so is treated one way, and what's not us, and can be treated another.

In the end, the question of whether humans - or individual characters - are "good" or "bad" is just that, a question. You have to reach your own conclusions when you read the books. There's no easy answer in CoP or CTL, as several reviewers have observed. And there aren't any messages or subliminal tricks in there either - I'm just continuing to ask questions that often don't get asked, and that can be uncomfortable.

And as you can see, even ex-husbands prove useful in the fullness of time.

Removing obstacles

I was indulging in a spot of elephant-boxing* with an editor chum about writing, and he said, "You think writers get all the garbage? Let me tell you..."

Well, no, I don't think writers get the messy end of the brush every time. Not at all. I've edited non-fiction, so I know how irksome writers can be. So, in the interests of balance, I knocked up a list of dos and don'ts when dealing with editors. They were compiled with the help of Editor Chum, my own bitter memories and a few anonymous contributors.

None of this is rocket science - nothing in writing is - but as it gets ignored every day perhaps it looks too simplistic. Trust me: it's true. I pass it on for what it's worth, and if it seems brutal in places, my apologies. (And remember it applies as much to non-fiction as it does to fiction.)

* Elephant boxing - no pachyderms were harmed in this activity. It's competitive anecdotes - if you've got an elephant, the elephant boxer will have a box to put it in. The police equivalent of the navy's black-catting.

I'm told that being editor-centred is all very well as long as you have a good editor. As in any other walk of life, some editors will not be saints or geniuses, and some will even flout the rules of engagement they expect writers to obey. But most are nice, competent, normal human beings who are drawing their salaries because they have a pretty shrewd idea of what works. And - let's be pragmatic - they're in front of you and they're paid for. As Voltaire said, this is no time to make new enemies. And even if one failing won't trash your career, being a writer that editors like to work with pays dividends in the long run.

So, how not to be the Writer from Hell. Hint: number 4 really is the big one.

1. Get their name right.

This is just good manners. It doesn't take much effort to find out who you ought to be submitting your work to, and how they spell their name, but people still don't do it. Everyone likes their name spelled right. And if you're not capable of finding out basic information, it says bad things about your competence and commitment at a subconscious level.

From an editor: "I don't bat an eye when I reject something addressed to Dear Editor, or To Whom It May Concern. If they can't figure out who I am - my name and title is on the web site - then they're not smart enough to survive."

Ouch. That editor rejects 99 out of every 100 manuscripts. It's not an unusual rate.

2. Learn to use your tools.

I don't want to put copyeditors out of a job, but let's try to meet them halfway - learn to spell and punctuate to a reasonable standard, or use a spellchecker (virtual or human) that can. Personally, this one infuriates me: only five year olds can get away with being charmingly creative and badly-spelled. If you've come through the education system and you don't have genuine literacy problems - and some authors have been best-sellers despite those - then you don't have an excuse.

There will always be small detail and debates over whether this word or that is acceptable in the Chicago Manual of Style or Webster's Collegiate. But general gross sloppiness is never a gray area. You tie up editing time and you're sending out a signal that you're unprofessional.

3. Turn in a mansucript that's easy to read.

Editors see a lot of manuscripts. They also do most of their MS reading in their spare time, bless them, and they're not paid a lot in the first place. If you had to tackle a pile of MSS that were high enough to be a table, what would you want them to look like? Nice and clean and legible, in the standard style, or in 8pt ornate font, single spaced, and generally a pain to read?

Make the editor's life easier and turn in clean-looking, physically readable copy. Put an editor in the right frame of mind before they start reading what you've written. It's just good manners. You might think your work is so good that editors will overlook font and clarity, but why risk it? The vast majority of MSS end up rejected, so remove as many reasons to dump your work as you can.

4. Deadlines matter. And this carries 50% of the marks - maybe 75% - so if you only follow one piece of advice, make it this one.

Fiction editors might not rip your head off if you miss deadlines (unlike news editors) but whatever your excuse or genuine reason, you're a pain in the arse if your work is late. Other people are waiting on your work to show up so they can get on with the production process, and that might also impact other writers, and it might even cost serious money.

It's basic courtesy and professionalism to turn in work on time. If you want to write for money, then accept the disciplines and don't commit to deadlines you can't meet. Nobody held a gun to your head and made you submit a novel (or short, or feature, or whatever): so it's up to you to behave like a pro.

Okay, stuff happens that conspires against you. That's unfortunate, but it's your problem. Journalists who miss deadlines end up unemployed, so we tend to treat them as sacred, and - as one editor chum put it - if our house was on fire, we'd meet a deadline before we put that fire out. So don't get a reputation as a flakey, disorganised writer: it might cost you dearly one day.

Missing deadlines without warning is even worse, because it's rude and unforgivably sloppy. If you have a crisis you simply can't work around, then let your editor know as soon as you have the first inkling that the schedule might slip.

5. When an editor asks you for a response, do it now.

Now that the majority of editor-writer interaction can take place by e-mail, there's no reason why you can't answer right away. Okay, some editors spring things on you, but there's no harm at the outset in asking them when they anticipate getting revisions/ comments/ copyedits back to you and letting them know about constraints on your schedule.

But there's no excuse for sitting on approvals or questions for a few days, and certainly not a few weeks. You're not the only person in this process. You're holding things up. Turn round stuff fast, and editors (and everyone else in the production process) will love you for it.

Oh, and be easy to contact. Nothing is more annoying than someone who contacts you and then you can't get back to them because they've set up or defaulted their spam filter or whatever to bounce you. I know of at least one would-be author who now won't be one any time soon because an editor couldn't contact him.

6. Don't hassle them - especially about things they don't have control over.

Editors aren't sitting around filing their nails or perfecting their golf swing. They're busy. A polite enquiry is one thing, but getting on their case won't help you - even if you're in the right and they really have held on to something a lot longer than they said they would. Of course, if you're someone who makes sure you get stuff done on time, then you at least have some moral high ground, even though it would be churlish to exploit that.

Now, this next bit really grips my editor chum something chronic. By all means suggest - once - what might be a great image for the cover, but then shut up about it: and don't get into fights about titles. The purpose of both cover and title is packaging - to sell the book. And don't ask for a lot of PR support and book tours, because you won't get it. Have realistic expectations: your editor can't change the economic reality of publishing, and bleating to them about it just puts pressure on someone who can't yield. None of us enjoys being put in that position.

7. Be courteous.

Please and thank you go a long way. Publishing is always a buyers' market, so don't cut your own throat by being an ill-mannered jerk. A couple of tips from the world of public relations: they might not remember what you said, but they'll always remember how you made them feel - and never demand as a right what you can ask for as a favour. (The latter was a wonderful insight from Maggie Burton, an excellent production assistant who I worked with in my TV days.)

A herogram to the editor's boss - via you or your agent - when you're particularly happy is nice. They have career aspirations too, remember. But don't overdo the chummy bit: bombarding your editor with non-work mail is more than they have time for. If you develop a social friendship with them in time, all well and good, but they're your editor, not your best mate.

8. Listen to an editor's advice.

No writer knows it all, even though some really do believe they need no editor. Wood and trees, folks: you can be too close to a book. (And if you're writing for the hard old non-fiction world of newspapers and magazines, the editor isn't even going to ask you - they'll edit, full stop. Get over it.) If you care about writing exactly what you want more than selling books - and I admit there's a valid case for this - then commercial fiction might not be the best outlet for your writing.

Fiction editors know their field and they see your book cold. If something strikes them as being worth a comment, listen to it, because the chances are that they'll spot what readers will spot. You can always decline the suggestion, but they're not saying it to keep themselves busy: they have a point, and their motive is to get the best possible book on the shelves and sell it by the shitload. They're not trying to crimp your literary genius or dumb you down.

I know there are people who think their editor's judgement is flawed. I don't know how to advise on that, other than to stet the bits they suggest you change and see what happens. All I know is that the fiction editors I work with are very sparing in their comments and I bloody well listen.

There. My karma feels better already.