“I entered the manuscript for The Book of Love in the 2008 Hachette/QWC Manuscript Development Program. You could submit as many manuscripts as you liked, so I also entered another.  One got through, the other didn’t. Why?

The Hachette publisher later told me that, although the characters were strong, ‘she knew what was going to happen’ in the unsuccessful manuscript. I put that manuscript away and got on with developing and publishing The Book of Love.

I recently revisited the unsuccessful manuscript and I can see a lot of problems. It reads as a string of scenes, one scene meanders on to the next with no tension building within each scene, within each chapter or within the story overall. The characters are predictable in every respect and, while this manuscript had its fans among friends and beta readers, it’s so far from being publishable it may not be worth the effort of developing it.”

READ MORE: Knowing A Good Novel Manuscript From A Bad One, by Phillipa Fioretti | Writing Novels in Australia.