Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Chapter 2: How did Emma White navigate her journey to publication?
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and welcome to our show, The Shit No One Tells You About Writing. I'm best-selling author Bianca Murray and I'm joined by Cece Lira of Wendy Sherman Associates and Carly Waters of PS Literary. Hi, everyone. Welcome to today's author's episode. Today's guest is a research lawyer living in Toronto. Venom Lake is her debut novel. It's my pleasure to welcome Emma White.
Emma, welcome back to the show. Thank you so much, Bianca. I am so happy to be here. It's so wonderful to have you here because it feels like a full circle moment. And we will discuss that shortly. For those of you who are not watching on YouTube, I'm showing the cover of the book, Venom Lake, very arresting cover.
And I'm going to read you the flap copy just that you have context for what we are talking about. On a weekend getaway for their true crime book club, four women retreat to the Soul Cottage on isolated Snakebite Island. But what was supposed to be a fun weekend of getting trashed on Rosé and talking serial killers takes a dark turn when a member of the group is found dead on the shore.
murdered by one of her supposed friends. Under the surface, there's turbulence in the group, blackmail, affairs and addiction, financial misconduct, a missing husband. All the women are hiding dangerous secrets, but how far are they willing to go to keep them? The murder creates a dilemma for the three surviving book club members.
Report the death and have their own lives shredded by an investigation? or use their true crime knowledge to stage their friend's disappearance on the lake. The consequences of their decision will ripple outwards, creating new risks and threatening to unravel their entire net of lies. Dun, dun, dun.
Okay, Emma, so you were one of the first querying authors that we had on Books for Talks back in like 2021, I think it was.
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Chapter 3: What strategies did Emma use to prepare for Pitch Fest?
Because as anyone who's been in the query trenches knows, you feel like you're screaming into the void sometimes. You're just sending things out, no response. You almost just want that written rejection so you know. And so what Pitchfest offered was an opportunity to face-to-face do a pitch to literary agents and to some editors with some of the smaller independent publishers.
Just before you proceed with that, take us through the mechanics. Did you have to pay like per pitch, per agent or editor? Was it paid for? Could you pitch to as many people as you liked? Did you have to handpick five? What was that process like?
Great question. So PitchFest was an add-on you paid for at the conference. And then I believe it was either a two or three hour period of time where all of these agents were set up at tables and you could pitch as many as you could in that time frame. And so I pitched nonstop and didn't take a break. And I reached 12 people. So that gives you an idea. There are several hundred people there.
There was a good number of literary agents and editors there. But there were lineups at each desk. Some agents had huge lines. You kind of had to make a decision. Do I want to spend 45 minutes maybe pitching this this person or should I spread out my chances, pitch more people? So I had a, I'd made a short list, a long list. I had my, my people in mind. I had to pivot on the day.
Some agents were there who I didn't know were going to be there. And some agents had long lines. So it was kind of an in the moment decision. And the idea was that you were supposed to spend about three minutes. So you had to have a really tight oral pitch and to leave enough time that they maybe could ask you some questions, express interest.
Usually that ended up being, I would say, about five minutes because it really was up to the agent or the editor to stop the person from talking and people get talking and want to keep talking about their book. So it was It was a very intense time, but it was so exciting to have real in-person, immediate feedback to a pitch.
And so I can talk a little bit about what that was like or... Well, yeah, I want to actually focus on that because I think a lot of people, when they go into these face-to-face pitches, kind of freeze up. The nerves get the better of them. I think they... think that they don't have to sort of put together a tight query like they would in writing because they're sitting face to face.
And so they tend to sort of ramble and go off on tangents or perhaps fawn over the agent or editor and be like, oh my God, love your work, whatever. So take us through preparing for that to make sure that once you're sitting in front of them, you can just go, go, go, go, go without Well, there's always going to be nerves, but I always say if you don't have nerves, there's not much at stake.
But sometimes you can harness your nerves to be your absolute best. So take us through how you prep for it and what you said.
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Chapter 4: What is the significance of pacing in Emma's writing?
It's going to be a bit repetitive from the jacket copy, but the difference is kind of in the, in the intro. So I've just sit down. Agent, so nice to meet you. Get right into it. My debut novel, Venom Lake, is a multi-POV psychological thriller complete at 75,000 words.
Venom Lake features a toxic friend group reminiscent of May Cobb's The Hunting Wives and contains a true crime podcast element similar to Lisa Jewell's None of This is True. On a retreat for her true crime book club, Marta and her girlfriends are the only people on Snakebite Island.
But what was supposed to be a fun weekend of getting trashed on Rosé and talking serial killers takes a dark turn when Marta finds one of the women dead on the shore, murdered by one of her supposed friends. Under the surface, there's turbulence in the group. Blackmail, affairs and addiction, financial misconduct, a missing husband.
Everyone is hiding dangerous secrets, but how far are they willing to go to keep them? The murder creates a dilemma for the three surviving book club members, report the death and have their own lives shredded by an investigation, or use their true crime knowledge to stage their friend's disappearance on the lake.
Under duress and against her better judgment, Marta agrees to help conceal the crime. But she comes to regret her decision as the effects of the cover-up ripple outwards, creating new risks and threatening to unravel their net of lies. That's the pitch.
That's incredible. And you know, you've got a good pitch when most of it makes its way onto the flap copy. Let's be honest, because most times publishers completely rewrite that. So, okay. So who was the agent who expressed interest with them more than one? How did that happen?
So I had a really successful and was very lucky at Pitchfest. I did get six full requests, three partial requests, and then three requests for letter in 10 pages. So that was really encouraging. And then ultimately, it was kind of a nice story because I'd gone all the way to New York. I'm from Toronto. I live in Toronto. And the Pitchfest had actually lots of agents there in person.
They also had a Zoom room for agents, a Zoom room. So agents who couldn't be there in person would be on Zoom. And it was the same format, put on the earphones, talk to them for three minutes. My agent who I signed with is Carolyn Ford from Transatlantic Agency based in Toronto. So I went all the way to New York to meet my Toronto-based agent over Zoom and we had a nice laugh about that.
That's hilarious. But again, you know, we now in our sub stack on Tuesdays have got a segment called Meet Your Dream Agent. And a lot of them are saying where they get their clients from. Is it from pitches? Is it from conferences? Is it the slash file? And it's so interesting to see each of them in terms of their breakdowns.
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Chapter 5: How did Emma handle multiple points of view in her novel?
Amazing. So for those of you of our listeners who are going to do these pitch events, remember to have that in your back pocket in case you get asked that and then don't fumble on that. So, I mean, that's four years, three manuscripts. I think you said like 90 rejections. Yes. Were both of those other manuscripts thrillers as well, Emma? Have you maintained genre?
Absolutely. Psychological thrillers, all three of them. And it's the genre I am most passionate about. At this point, at least, can't imagine in writing any other genre. I was playing with different formats, different, you know, is it multi-POV, single-POV, structure, linear, non-linear, before I kind of found my stride with this one.
Did you find that you learned anything from the rejections, those 90-something rejections? Because again, we're saying that agents do not have the time to give personalized feedback. Most of the time, they're just like, thank you, but no. Was there anything that you got during those 90 rejections that helped you?
Or was it just a case of by book three, you'd learned some things and you were a better writer or perhaps an amalgamation? Amalgamation, I think, is the best way to put it.
On, I think, a few of the full requests I received for the first and second manuscript, because I actually didn't query the third manuscript traditionally. I purely took it to Pitchfest and did the oral pitch. But the rejections I accumulated were on the first two manuscripts. And the through line, which I think was helpful, was pacing. And
in any kind of nonlinear or dual timeline, everything needing to be equally compelling. And so that was something for me to really pay attention to with manuscript three was in the first two manuscripts, pacing had been an issue and not having equal interest in either both characters or in both timelines.
So trying to have a more even handed approach, but I find pacing, it's very hard or keeping, keeping things even extremely challenging. So still something I'm working on today.
Yeah. Pacing intention. And a lot of people think it's just for thrillers. It's not, it's for, for pretty much any kind of genre. Okay. So before I move on to our next question, we just can have a break for a word from our sponsor.
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Chapter 6: What lessons did Emma learn from her rejections?
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Okay. So then after you signed with Carolyn, how much editing did you do between the two of you before going out on submission?
So we did one round of edits. I signed with her in June of 2024 and early July. She came back to me with her notes. So there were a few things that she thought could be strengthened before we went out. I worked on those over the summer and we took it out in early September. So it was one substantive round.
And then we wanted to wait till the beginning of fall when it was people are back from vacation. And so then we went out on 7 September and very, very fortunate sold it a few weeks later to HarperCollins Canada in October 2024.
That's amazing. Normally that wait is the worst. I mean, I know some authors who finally got a yes, something like seven or eight months after it went out to editors. So, I mean, that's always excruciating. So I'm glad you didn't have to go through that. And then after that, with your HarperCollins editor, were there further extensive edits? What happened there? Yes, we did.
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Chapter 7: What was Emma's experience with the editing process?
Why? Why doesn't anyone want to buy this on on the US side of things? Because we just kept getting rejections in the US and didn't sell it there until late 2025. So a very different experience is selling it in different places.
I mean, what I loved about the book is it's clearly based in Toronto, right? It's Canada. So, you know, were the Americans wanting the setting to be changed at all or no?
I didn't get any setting feedback, but I can imagine that that may have been a part of it. I think what's interesting as well is that it's going to be published under a different name in the UK and in the US. Oh, what did they... So they... They are calling it the Wives of Murder Club. And so to me, I also read that as I think we have a big lake culture in Canada.
I think, you know, being on an isolated island on a wild lake is maybe a more familiar setting. And so this was not something that was going to resonate with UK or American audiences as much. Perhaps I'm speculating. This was never told to me explicitly. But I think that could be tied to as well with it being a very set in Canada story. And so the appeal may be being stronger at home.
Yeah, we've got so many amazing Canadian authors who are basing stories in Canada, which is wonderful. And so it's great to see more and more stories set here as opposed to, you know, as being forced to set them somewhere else. So talking about the book itself, it's really, really tough to write a multi-POV characters when the characters, for example, are similar?
Because here you've got all women, sort of similar ages. So speak a bit about how you differentiated them in the reader's mind, because that's something that a lot of emerging authors struggle with.
So there are, like you said, they're all women, and it's mainly three. We have three main characters. One character gets one chapter, a fourth, but we're largely in the hands of three of them. And Part of the fun for me, and the big reason why I like writing psychological thrillers, is because I think people are fascinating. Character is fascinating. And I'm a pantser. I'm not a plotter.
I write by trying to get into these characters' minds and figuring out what they would do. I actually didn't know. I knew there was going to be four of them. I knew one of them was going to be murdered. I didn't actually know who had killed her while I was writing it up to a certain point because I wanted to give them each motive. I wanted to make it possible that anyone could have done it.
And so what I had fun with when writing this was each character had I would just kind of play as her. And so how would she react in this situation? They're going to this event. They're interpreting this event very differently. What's this one focused on? What's that one focused on? And so I think that helped me develop what hopefully comes across as a unique voice for each character.
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Chapter 8: What advice does Emma have for aspiring authors?
So again, like, can you give us, your approach to that to ensure that the reader was never bored, that even though it's the same event, they're getting completely different information in terms of plot, motives, characterization.
That's a really good question. I think that that was something I had to work on, certainly with editing, because I think when I wrote the first draft, it was very messy. And I think it was probably a bit too repetitive, because I was feeling out how each character would have experienced different events. I think that part of it was trying to segment different events.
So sometimes picking up in the same scene, but just like a minute later than what we've already kind of experienced through a different character's eyes. So we're still right with them in that scene. But we're, you know, we're moving it forward.
And then for the I think it's the especially the first three chapters, we have all three women experienced their first meeting of their of their true crime book club. And it is trying not to repeat any of the details I've given from the previous character's perspectives and really dive into the interiority of the character who's experiencing it.
And that's a great place, I think, to drop those curiosity seeds. She's not thinking about actually what's happening at this book club meeting. She's thinking about what she experienced that afternoon. So while we're actually at the same event, we're getting completely different information from her because what's happening at the meeting is just kind of,
A spark to make her think about the things she's actually worried about.
Right. Excellent. Excellent advice there. Let's talk about the podcast sort of interstitials. You have a transcripts from a podcast. Was that there all along in the beginning? Was that something that came with the rewrites?
The podcast was there from the beginning, but it appeared in a very different way. So when I initially wrote it, I had the podcast starting in the latter half of the book.
So actually, after they get back from the cottage and everything that happens there, then I picked up the podcast because I needed a way to kind of convey information a bit more objectively that wasn't coming from any of these three characters. And one of the great
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