Writing to be Published: 2.1 /3

Your book - is it publishing ready? If not, how can you make it so?

Nov 29, 2023

(Edited. This is now free for everyone. I will explain the new voluntary subscriber system in a post soon.)

For the three sections of Part One, see here. In those posts, I encouraged you to look at what type of writer you are and want to be, what you already know and don’t know about the process of writing and publishing, the different sorts of publishing and how to be prepared for rejections - and even to embrace them! If you’ve read and absorbed all that, you are publishing ready.

Today we will start looking at your book and whether it’s likely to be something publishers want, and, if not, how to make it so. We’ll look at what publishers want, bandwagons and trends and the vital importance of having a hook. In a later post, we’ll do some work on actual hooks, as they are so important (and fun!)

But what about your book?

It might seem strange that it’s taken me this long to start talking about your actual book. After all, isn’t that the most important thing? It is indeed. Everything on your publishing journey begins and ends with your book. However, your book does not arise from a vacuum and it will not be published in a vacuum. And your understanding of both yourself as a writer and of how you have to work within the publishing world that exists, not the one you wish existed, is what will make your publication journey smoother and surer. (I must warn you that there is nothing smooth or sure about this.)

Since your book needs to be accepted by a publisher and since you are not allowed to bribe or coerce them, it is useful to consider the important question: What do publishers want? (Agents want what publishers want, so we don’t have to consider that separately.)

When I was reading through some of the things I said years ago in Write to be Published, I was struck by how the advice I’d give hasn’t changed. Therefore, it seems sensible simply to give you some very slightly shortened sections from the book. Here goes.

What do publishers want?

No publisher is only looking for one thing; and two publishers will often be looking for different things. Ask them what they want and you will hear answers along the lines of, “a great read”, “something that really grips me”, “superb writing”, or “a fresh voice, something different, but, um, not too different.” For you, this feels too vague and unhelpful. It is, however, worth bearing in mind because it does highlight the subjective aspects of the process of acceptance. And rejection.

They need to make money, at least enough to cover costs and return a little something to their shareholders. So, when they make their decisions, they are working out – using their understanding of the needs and strengths of their own company, along with their best guesses and gut instinct – whether your book is likely to sell if they take it on. So, when they are trying to see whether your book fits the “what do I want?” question, they are combining subjectivity with objectivity. And two publishers might easily reach two different conclusions and yet both be right – for them.

Here are some other answers to the question, “What do publishers want?”

They just want something to Love

Whoever takes your book must love it. I mean love. Not just think it’s fairly goodish. Not just know that it is decently written and follows the rules of its genre. The editor will have to argue for your book in front of a meeting of sales and marketing people – see The Decision Process in the next part of this series – people who haven’t read it and may never read it, and to persuade accountanty people to allocate a budget for it. The editor is not allowed to get it wrong too many times.

The editor is making a judgment about what other people are going to love, or can be persuaded to love, and that’s not easy if they don’t feel strongly about the book themselves. So, editors are looking to be bowled over. Or else to believe it is a book which so beautifully fits the zeitgeist and / or the conventions of a particular genre that they can feel confident about taking it to that meeting and arguing passionately for it as perfect for this publishing company.

Sometimes, with writing which is designed to fit a strict and specific formula, I’ll grant that the editor may not have to love it, but must still be 100% convinced that it fits the formula, and that it is a formula that this publisher handles. Examples would be a book that forms part of an existing series or one that has specific guidelines such as those published by Mills and Boon.

Discovering that you’ve written a book which publishers like but don’t love is one of the most frustrating things about trying to become published. I spent quite a long time in that position. I aim to show you some ways of breaking that barrier and finding the elusive ways of writing a better or more publishable book.

But not Jane Austen

The Jane Austen Delusion is the name I give to a perennial story that you’ll come across in even the more intelligent news reporting. It goes like this.

IGNORANT PUBLISHERS FAIL TO RECOGNISE JANE AUSTEN

Aspiring writer, Major “Ig” Noramus, 49, caused red faces in the offices of global publisher, Dreams Unlimited, when he submitted the first chapter of Jane Austen’s novel, Persuasion, disguised as a sample of his own work. When Dreams Unlimited senior editor, Frank Lee Wright, rejected Noramus’s work as being “not right for us” and added the comment that it was “unlikely to achieve critical acclaim”, the Major was shocked that the editor was unable to recognise a work of proven genius. Ig Noramus says he is now going to self-publish his own novel, a sci-fi-rom-com with elements of fantasy and horror, “because that way I can bring my talent to readers, by-passing the broken model that is traditional publishing.”

Major Noramus has failed to understand certain things:

A Jane Austen novel is not what publishers are looking for. They are looking for a book that has not been written before.
Each publisher focuses on certain sorts of books and it is up to each to choose which books to publish.
If a hitherto unseen Jane Austen title were discovered and published today, it would be published because JA wrote it and that would be why it would sell; if you wrote a book that was exactly like a book JA might have written, you would simply have been imitating JA, and since you are not JA you are of absolutely no interest whatsoever. It is logically possible that a modern market might exist for books written in JA’s precise style, but if that publisher doesn’t want to risk it or for any other reason chooses not to publish JA imitations, they are quite within their rights to turn it down.
Major Noramus was behaving foolishly. He thought that the rejecting publisher had rejected it through ignorance of the talent shown by JA; but the actual reason for rejection was the decision that the style and subject-matter was not likely to sell in today’s market. The Major proved nothing but his own name.

Same but different

Publishers want something that is sufficiently the same and yet sufficiently different. If the same, it must not be too the same, unless it’s supposed to fit a formula. If different, it must not be so different that people are confused or that their expectations are missed. Some publishers will take a risk with something experimental – though less so in difficult financial times – but most can’t, because it will be too hard to sell, unless a virtue can be made of its difference. It’s not easy to sell a book by saying to people, “You know how normally you read that sort of book? Well, this is not like that but we still think you’ll like it.”

This is where it comes down to knowing your genre (something else I’ll talk about later in this series) and knowing your readers. If you don’t understand your genre properly and haven’t read the most recent books within it, you simply won’t know if your book is too similar to another or if it is too avant-garde for the readers. In other words, you won’t know whether it’s a good fit. If you know your genre – and therefore its readers – well, you will be able to achieve the correct amount of sameness and difference. Otherwise you will be aiming for a target you can’t see. Unwise.

In non-fiction, the need for difference is crucial, more so than for sameness, as long as the book does have an obvious place to sit on the shelf. For example, suppose you are writing a book about surviving cancer. There are many books that tackle this important subject, so there will be an easy place to shelve and find your book; there are also many potential readers for it. But your book needs its special difference, its unique selling point, otherwise it won’t stand out amongst the competition. Without that specialness, it is much less likely to be taken by a publisher.

Band-wagons and trends?

The two things are not quite the same, but we can consider them together. A band-wagon is more specific than a trend; it also has both the potential to generate many sales and the potential to be highly transient. Vampires in books are an example of a band-wagon. A trend is vaguer, broader, less easy to pin down. Examples of trends might be “increasing violence in crime fiction” or “the appearance of older women in romantic fiction”. (That isn’t an actual trend as far as I know, but I can dream.)

Trying to jump onto a band-wagon is a waste of time, for one reason: even if your current work in progress were to be accepted as soon as you’d finished it, it won’t hit the shops for well over a year after that, by which time your band-wagon will have vanished in a cloud of dust. You will look derivative and everyone will yawn, even if you actually had your idea way before the wagon rolled into town.

As for trends, there’s more point in trying to join them, but it’s still not easy and is only necessary to an extent, and more in some genres than others. You don’t want to hit a trend that’s on its way out or that has evolved into something different – and, because of the same time-scale I mentioned above, this is quite possible. On the other hand, many trends hang around for ages and, if they’ve been successful, don’t entirely disappear. So, do keep up with trends and try to judge whether they are transient or sufficiently robust to follow.

What about predicting the next band-wagon or new trend? If you find anyone with that particular crystal ball, please tell me. To be honest, however, I really wouldn’t bother thinking about it. Just write a great story. That’s one trend that won’t go away.

In non-fiction the situation is a little different. Trends and band-wagons tend to be highly topical and therefore your main risk is that by the time your book is finished it’s not topical any more. Some publishers can bring out a non-fiction title extremely quickly, and they usually know who they want to write it. The hitherto unpublished writer has to move very quickly and cannily. Also, whereas you could have any number of novels tackling a particular subject – say, 9/11 – the number of non-fiction titles that the market can sustain is likely to be smaller. You will need to find a special angle for your non-fiction trend-based title.

So, while it’s worth being aware of trends and band-wagons, and more so for non-fiction, it’s not worth getting in a twist about them. That’s why people will tend to say, “Write what you want to write. Write from the heart.” That’s what I say, too, but with certain provisos, depending on how keen you are to be commercially successful, because the thing about hearts is that they tend to make emotional, rather than clever, decisions. Yes, write from the heart, but engage your head, too.

What if someone gets there first?

One of the heart-stopping moments in any writer’s life is hearing that another author is about to produce a book which sounds horribly similar to the one we are writing or planning. Our instinct is to believe that this is The End, and that we must now ditch the fabulous idea.

Calm down. It happens and it doesn’t usually matter, because your book will be different. Certainly, it is worth making every effort to ensure that your story is going to be as different as possible. Certainly, too, you would want to emphasize the differences when approaching an agent or publisher, and you certainly wouldn’t approach the same publisher. This is especially true for non-fiction.

But often, and particularly for fiction, these things matter much less than you would think. I have a true story to illustrate this, which I will tell you one day.

The fact that your concept sounds like an existing book says nothing about whether the story is going to be the same. It’s most unlikely to be the same in any important way. Clearly, however, it is theoretically possible that your idea might be too similar to something else. In which case, you may need to go to a very large forest, stand in the middle of it and scream loudly.

It’s also true that a publisher won’t want a book which is similar to one it already has or is about to publish. You can’t be expected to know what any publisher is about to publish, so this will be bad luck on your part if you send yours to the same place.

So, if you discover that something terribly similar has been done or is about to come out, my advice is to stay calm, think about whether your idea could be altered to have a different slant, and perhaps wait a while. Your idea could have its day later and in a different, perhaps better form. But before that, do consider that the other book might not be half as similar as you fear.

The Vital Importance of Hooks

A hook is a way of describing your book in a concise and enticing way. It is crucial to your ability to catch a publishing deal. The agent will use it to hook an editor and the editor will use it to persuade the other decision-makers in the company – usually the sales and marketing people; the sales team will hook the booksellers, the booksellers will hook potential customers. At every point, each has only a very few seconds in which to snare the listener.

There’s another reason why you need to be able to describe your hook quickly and fluently: every now and then, someone will ask, usually without warning, “So, what’s this book you’re writing, then?” If it’s a friend, you can get away with a creative air of secrecy, tapping the side of your nose and claiming that an artiste cannot reveal anything at such a delicate stage. But imagine that you’ve bumped into Mr Hot-Shot Agent and he asks you what your book is about. It’s not much good if you blush and stutter, “Well, it’s kind of um, difficult to explain, but it’s sort of about a man and a woman and they, well, fall in love, but it’s much more interesting than it sounds…” Watch your potential publishing deal float out of the window.

Good hooks make the listener think, “Wow! I must have that book!” They perform the same function as the blurb on the back of a book, but are ideally even shorter. In fact, the best way to think of it is to imagine that you’re writing the blurb for the back cover but that you need to halve the length. Spend time honing your hook to the essence, so that you can say it in fewer than ten seconds. Your listener might then ask a question; this means you probably did a good job and you’re allowed to expand a little. If Mr Hot-Shot Agent’s eyes glaze over, you need to worry. Do learn to detect the early signs of glazing over and never ignore them. It mean your hook is bent in all the wrong places.

In practice – and you certainly should practise – you will sometimes have more and sometimes less time in which to explain your book. So you really need several versions of the hook, from the six word one to something like a couple of lines. The shortest one is sometimes called a strap-line: those few words printed beneath the title and never longer than half a line. It gives the potential reader an intense flavour of the book and it really must zing.

It’s never too early to think about your hook. I usually work on mine before I’ve even begun to write the book. This has two benefits: it helps me focus on the essence of my book while I’m writing it. And it will roll off my tongue when I am suddenly asked to pitch it.

Later on, you will need your hook on many occasions. You will learn which versions work best as you gauge reactions. You may even begin to bore yourself with it. This is a good sign, because then you will probably make it even shorter.

High-concept books

A high-concept book is, essentially, one with an extra-sharp hook. It is easy to sell because the idea has wow factor and is easy to explain very quickly. The wow factor often comes from a sense of, “Why didn’t I think of that? That’s going to sell in shedloads.”

Sometimes, in a high-concept book, the premise will sound unbelievable, which is part of the sit-up-and-notice factor. Snakes on a Plane is a film with a high-concept idea – you feel drawn to see it just to discover how such a wacky idea could be a film. In a high-concept book the stakes are often extra high, at least for the main character(s) if not for the whole world. Your main character needing to lose weight in time to fit into a holiday bikini is not high stakes. The end of the world being nigh, or a man needing to save his son’s life, are very high stakes, for the world and for the man and his son respectively.

Below are some books which might be classed as high-concept. In each case, the essence is easy to explain briefly; there is a sit-up-and-notice factor and there are high stakes; and each was very successful in terms of both critical acclaim and sales. (Note, however, that you often have high-concept without critical acclaim. High-concept is about commercial potential; literary merit is secondary and inessential.)

The Life of Pi by Yann Martel – boy ship-wrecked on powerless boat with dying zebra, hyena and tiger called Richard Parker.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon – an autistic savant with a fear of yellow finds a dead dog and sets out to solve its killing.

The Road by Cormac MacCarthy – a man will do anything to avoid having to kill his young son, as they flee across America in the horrifying aftermath of global warming.

Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton – a theme park uses the DNA of dinosaurs and brings them to life in a theme park, with terrifying and chaotic consequences.

Do note, however, that your book does not have to be high-concept in order to be taken by a publisher, so don’t go hunting high-concept at the expense of good writing. In fact, if every book were high-concept, reading would become a nightmare of over-excitement. It’s just that if you happen to come up with such an idea, it may very well fit the “what publishers want” category.

Are you thinking about your book?

Have I given you some things to think about? Excellent! Any new worries you have are good news, too: worrying about your book is how you will make it even better. Lying awake in the small hours is the sign of a writer with a challenge worth overcoming and it’s quite common for problems to be solved in the dreams that follow.

In the next part of Part Two, I’ll talk about genres (including rules and why you need to follow them unless you want to be hit by a car) and length. Then I’ll get to other aspects of “writing the right book”. And in Part Three I’ll cover everything about actually pitching it to publishers and/or agents. All of Part Two and most of Part Three will be for paid subscribers only.

Stay with me so I can help you on your writing journey.

Do ask me questions, too. You can ask below or you can email me and I’ll try to answer on this blog.

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