GUARDIAN MASTERCLASS
I attended the Guardian Masterclass on Getting Your Book Published last week (15th and 16th June) and thought it was absolutely brilliant. A big thank you to all the tutors:  Liesel Schwarz, Catherine Ryan Howard, Dreda Say Mitchell, Kelly Glencorse, Hellie Ogden, Tory Lyne-Perkis and particularly Danuta Kean, who programmed the weekend. They were all complete stars.

After two very enjoyable and information packed days I have learned what an agent is looking for, how to write a pitch letter and how to write a winning synopsis, amongst many other things. I now feel both far better equipped and confident that I can secure an agent this time around. When I think back to my original attempt at gaining representation a couple of years ago I have to laugh. I made so many schoolboy errors with my pitch letter and synopsis there is little wonder I didn’t get anywhere. I also made a fatal error in timing by submitting my work just before the London Book Fair which I can now see is completely ridiculous. What the fuck was I thinking?

Over the course of the last week I have literally not stopped working. Godman has been given another polish (still finding typos which is a bit painful), I have rewritten the synopsis and I am currently reworking my pitch letter. In the next few weeks I will begin to resubmit Godman to prospective agents. Hopefully, this time with better results.

The course has also made me appreciate the importance of social media and to this end I have finally joined Twitter. You can find me @johnelliswriter Follow me and I will follow you if you ask me to.

Following on from my previous post, Godman is now available on Scribd. Here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/81965011/God-Man

The idea behind giving Godman away free was to build as large a readership for my work as possible. I'm quite pleased with the number of downloads I've had on Feedbooks so far (810 and counting at the time of writing) bearing in mind the dark nature of the work and the fact that it's my first book. However, I'm learning about this e-publishing thing as I go along, and I've since become aware of several other sites that host e-books besides Feedbooks. Not wanting to put all my eggs in one basket I've decided to put Godman out on a few of these other sites as well. To this end I published Godman on Smashwords yesterday and it is available here:  http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/132980

A novel has many things influencing it. From the personality and experiences of the author, through to the books he’s read, the films he’s seen and the music he listens to. To give you a greater idea of what Godman is all about, here are various lists of what I consider to be my main influences.

FILMS
Films that have had an influence on Godman:

Clean, shaven (Lodge Kerrigan)
I Stand Alone (Gaspar Noe)
One Hour Photo (Mark Romanek)
Peeping Tom (Michael Powell)
Schramm (Jorg Buttgereit)
Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese)

BOOKS
Authors who have influenced both me and Godman to varying degrees:

Paul Auster
Charles Bukowski
Albert Camus
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Michel Houellbecq
Chuck Palahniuk
Paul Schrader
Irvine Welsh

MUSIC
I always listen to music when I’m writing. This is the music I was listening to whilst writing Godman:

13 (Blur)
Kid A (Radiohead)
Mezzanine (Massive Attack)
OK Computer (Radiohead)
Songs in the Key of X (Various)
Taxi Driver OST (Bernard Herrmann)

GOD’S WRATH MADE FLESH.
Godman is the dark tale of forty-five year old ex-con and born again Christian Clive Walker following his release from prison after serving a twenty-five years sentence for rape. When his delusions and paranoia make a return to society problematic, Clive convinces himself his last chance of salvation lies in helping a young drug addict and prostitute, Mary. Can Clive help Mary get off drugs and redeem them both, or will he yield to temptation and condemn them both to hell? With influences as diverse as Taxi Driver and Notes From the Underground, Godman is a story of loneliness, isolation and contemporary urban angst.
　
It’s been a long and arduous journey getting Godman ready for publication. In another life I was an independent film maker and Godman began life about ten years ago as an unrealised screenplay. Now if you know anything about film making you’ll know that getting funding is the hardest part. After wasting over two years of my life trying to get another project off the ground I became so disillusioned with all the bullshit that I quit film making for good, and thought that was that as far as Godman was concerned.

However, I’m a creative being by nature and still needed an outlet for my creativitity. With this in mind I decided to try my hand at writing a novel instead, something I’d hankered after for years. Not knowing how to go about achieving this aim I started thinking about Godman again. I wrongly believed that since Godman was a finished screenplay it would be a relatively easy task to adapt it into a novel, and my initial wholly unrealistic estimate was that it would take me only three months to complete the task. How wrong can you be? Two years and a lot of effort later, Godman is finally ready for publication.

Now the hard work begins. I knew that Godman was a niche project and will never appeal to a mass audience. I also knew that nobody knows me from Adam, so the chances of anybody actually wanting to buy my book were slim. So with this in mind the obvious answer appeared to be to make the book available as a free e-book and try to build a name for myself. I have to give credit to Cory Doctorow for this, who points out that the worst thing for a new author is obscurity.

Godman is now available in various e-book formats absolutely free from feedbooks. Just click on the link at the top of the page. I hope you enjoy my blood sweat and tears.