A good book idea vs a sellable book idea

AUTHORS NEED TO KNOW THIS

This is something that I didn’t understand till very recently. It took gaining then losing an agent, going through the publishing process, and finally securing an agent before I fully understood the difference. In this edition of Writers Are Superstars, you’ll learn some of the characteristics that make up a valuable/sellable book idea and how those differ from a good or even great idea.

A good book idea

I started writing the manuscript for Boys and Girls Screaming in July of 2018. I was pushing myself to finish a first draft by mid-August so I could pitch at a conference in New York. That gave me about six weeks, which is the fastest I’ve ever completed a first draft of any of my books.

In the original premise of Boys and Girls Screaming, a teenage girl named Ever gets completely overwhelmed and depressed and takes her own life. However, the main premise of the story was the aftermath of her suicide and how her friends and family were left to pick up the pieces of their own lives after such a sudden loss.

When I pitched this story to agents, I got five requests for the full manuscript. Needless to say that I was excited and already counting down the days until I signed with a dream publisher. But that never happened. After submitting my manuscript, none of the agents made an offer. I was devastated but nowhere near ready to give up.

I took a step back and started reading other books. Books that had won awards or were established as bestsellers. I also took a novel-writing course at a local college which lasted about 6 months. During that time, I realized where my manuscript went wrong.

These were my mistakes

When reflecting on what made my book a good idea and not a sellable idea, I came up with the following:

• My story was too complicated: The second half of the book, in particular, was too difficult to grasp. There wasn’t a clear plot or point to the story.

• The book didn’t have a clear audience: Some of the main characters were teenagers, but the mother also played a big role in the original manuscript which made the narrative feel more mature than I actually wanted.

• I killed the character that people would identify with the most: The most interesting character in the book died in the first third of the story.

A sellable book idea

When I took a step back and started reading other books, I focused on genres I typically don’t read much. I read thrillers/suspense and YA books. Why? Because there’s a simplicity to the storylines of those books that was absent from my own. In the books that I read, I’d read the synopsis first and immediately understand what I would be getting into when I turned the pages. I wanted that for my story.

There was also something about the pace of those books that was intriguing. They moved fast but the detail left clear images in my mind and I could always follow along with what was happening without much effort or rereading. I made note of all these things as I considered how to revise my own novel.

Once my novel-writing course was over and I felt like I read enough books, I knew what I had to do.

Here are the changes I made to my original manuscript

• I kept my main character alive: Instead of having her take her own life, I created drama around her.

• I simplified the plot: Instead of a more complicated narrative, I focused the plot on a simple storyline that anyone could follow.

• I wrote with a specific audience in mind: This was a new tactic for me, but I wrote Boys And Girls Screaming specifically for a YA audience. This made a huge difference in the creative choices I made.

• I developed characters that were just as interesting as the main character: This was important. I believe supporting characters need to be intriguing. I really made an effort to write my two main supporting characters with the same depth as my main character.

What I learned

After making those changes, I had one of my author friends read it over and her excitement and feedback gave me the confidence to start pitching. I was able to secure an agent a day after they read the full manuscript and a couple months later, I signed my first publishing deal.

What I took from this experience is a couple of things:

• Creativity is just one part of the equation when writing a novel. I wanted my book to be published and that meant creating a story that could sell. Publishing is a business just like any other, and every creative decision a publisher makes is also a financial decision.

• In no way did I sacrifice or even compromise my creativity. Boys and Girls Screaming is the most ambitious book I’ve written. Writing it stretched my imagination and challenged me in ways that my writing has never been challenged. I’m proud of it and just because I chose to structure it in a way that made it more commercial doesn’t change anything for me.

• I really did have to make a choice. To get my novel to the point I did, I deleted more than half of the original manuscript. To me, that’s just editing, but to others, that may feel extreme. As an author, I think one of our talents has to be the ability to judge our own work and decide on the expectations for that work. I wanted a novel that could be published and that was commercially viable. If those aren’t your goals, then you can make different decisions.

Listen, there are books with complicated storylines and unique structures that get published all the time. I’m not saying don’t write those books. What I'm saying is that there are ways to make a story more commercially appealing, and therefore more sellable, and I chose that path.

So far it’s worked out, and I wanted to share this so you are aware of the differences and can make informed choices when you write. Read this article again and then decide which parts of it make sense for you. There’s more than one way to get published.