YouWriteOn Book of the Year Award Winners

Can a slave decide the fate of an emperor?

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YouWriteOn member Doug Jackson's experience of developing his bestselling novel Caligula from national newspaper The Scotsman

" ... It's part of a two-book deal he signed for what was reported as "a good six-figure deal" – which, for a first-time novelist, is such a rare occurrence that in a country like Scotland it only happens about once a year

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When he began imagining the life of Rufus the elephant trainer, he did what most of us would have done: starting at the beginning with Rufus's childhood in Mauritania, telling the story of how he came to Rome in chains, how he got the job as keeper of the emperor's elephant, and how that in turn took him to Britain. Jackson finished that 140,000-word novel, The Emperor's Elephant, in a year. When he'd typed the last paragraph, he celebrated by opening a bottle of champagne. Soon he was writing another one.

He didn't, however, really know what to do with The Emperor's Elephant. He'd shown it to some friends, but that wasn't too much help: how objective could their criticism be? Then, a couple of years after he began writing, he made a key discovery. Surfing the web, he came across a site called youwriteon.com.

Why youwriteon.com matters is that it cuts through one of the biggest problems in publishing: that far too many people are writing far too many books for publishers with far too little time to read them. Tens of thousands of debut novels can languish on what publishers derogatorily term the "slush pile" for months – years even – without ever being read. Usually, unless they come with a recommendation from an agent, they never are.

Essentially, youwriteon.com is an electronic slush pile, full of stories by would-be writers. Unlike a real slush pile though, stories submitted to it actually get read. They don't just get read once, but potentially scores of times, by other wannabe writers. They, in turn, can only put their own stories on the site if they give an assessment – and a star-rating – to a story already there.

What this means in practice is that the best stories gradually rise to the top of the heap. And for the very best there's the reward that induced many writers to submit their stories to the English Arts Council-funded site in the first place: the chance of their work being critically assessed by an editor at a major London publishing house.

That's what happened to The Emperor's Elephant. And as Jackson told me about it, I became fascinated: this, I could see, was a publishing innovation that even many people in the industry hadn't latched on to. Because it's all done on the internet, and because restrained criticism seems to desert us in cyberspace, appraisals can be raw and often hurtful, but a good story can find itself propelled up the site's popularity chart by equally uncompromising raves.

Here, for the first time, Jackson found himself learning from other writers. So they thought his opening 10,000-word submission didn't live up the book's title, didn't get to the meat of the plot soon enough? Very well, he'd rewrite it and submit it again. The second time, it worked: he was rewarded with a trail of five-star reviews. The site's organisers put him in touch with Sarah O'Keefe, an editor with Orion, who read the whole novel.

O'Keefe liked it, but wanted still less of a linear structure and even more detailed plotting at the novel's core. It should not be just one book telling Rufus's life story, but at least two. For the first, he should concentrate on the Caligula years, showing how Rufus finds himself in a maze of conspiracies, unable to work out whom to trust.

If youwriteon.com had crystallised what the book should be about, O'Keefe's advice focused it further. Essentially, she was outlining a different book entirely . It had to remain a page-turner, but a more complex one: readers had not only to feel they were in Rome, but feel an edge of fear as Rufus found himself enmeshed in political intrigue against a psychopathic emperor, set to end in a grisly death.

By this stage, Jackson had acquired an agent, who set up an auction for the book – now called Caligula – with seven publishers. A pre-emptive bid by Simon Thorogood of Transworld won the book for them .."

The Top 10 Bestselling Scottish titles from Blackwell: week ending 21 February 2009