Yes, I’m offering nine free ideas for popular fiction novels (and a couple of longer book blurbs). The only catch – they’re ideas that never made the cut. My deleted scenes so to speak. But if you want to write successful popular fiction and catch the eye of a great agent, read on. I’m a firm believer in learning from mistakes (especially my own!).

I recently gave a six week workshop on writing. On the last day we talked about book proposals, and how to ‘sell’ your book to an agent. I explained that a book (and I was talking about popular fiction here, but it goes for pretty much any fiction) must have a very strong, original story and brilliant characters to make an agent sit up and take notice.

Exactly how strong and original, they asked? How about a sweet story that’s nicely written, will that cut it? Absolutely not! I told them. It has to be brilliant.

To illustrate this I pulled out some of my old ideas that never made it – because the plot or the premise or the characters weren’t strong enough. It seemed to help them understand, so I’ve copied some of them …

The good news is that every writer can do a lot to market and promote their own book.

The secret – and yes, there is a secret but like most things it’s this – hard work, organisation and determination. A lot of work can be done behind the scenes months before your book reaches the bookshop shelves.

When I started out in books, I had no experience in marketing or publicity, I just used my head, so what I did, you can do too.

But before that some general points.

First things first, don’t worry about any of this unless you have written a book worth promoting. Put your time and energy into the writing first and foremost.

1/ Marketing – Marketing means promoting your book to the market and in the marketplace, ie the shops. It means getting information about your book to the relevant buyers and booksellers, backing up that information with display material – such as posters and bookmarks. And keeping the bookshops informed of any publicity you have lined up for the book.

In general, your publisher should be on top of the marketing, but if they don’t intend to do posters or bookmarks – say for example …