Books That Sell
This is a conversation for a little bit more of an advanced writer. I'm going to talk about the components of what goes into a book that is likely to sell, is likely to attract agents, publishers, eventually readers, right, which is what we want. I’m going to continue the conversation more of this video in Good Story Learning, which is our membership site with monthly updates, conversations with editors, writers, a lot of content. So I hope you'll join me over there to continue this discussion.
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transcript for books that sell
My name is Mary Kole. This is Good Story Company. And today, we are talking about books that sell. This is a conversation for a little bit more advanced of a writer. I'm going to talk about the components of what goes into a book that is likely to sell, is likely to attract agents, publishers, eventually readers, right, which is what we want. Or if you're cutting right to self-publishing, the kinds of books that attract readers. We're going to talk a little bit about this topic and then I'm going to continue the conversation more of this video in Good Story Learning, which is our membership site with monthly updates, conversations with editors, writers, a lot of content. So I hope you'll join me over there to continue this discussion.
So what makes the book that sells? Number one is the idea, the premise. A lot of mistakes that are made with books, with manuscripts that are sort of turned into 300-page manuscripts happen at the premise level. A lot of those mistakes can be that the premise is too narrow. There's not enough of a story. The stakes aren't high enough. The story that you're telling doesn't matter enough to the character, and therefore, it's not going to matter enough to the reader. So I would spend a lot of time on your premise specifically. One of the things that we've been doing, I teach a small group writing workshop called Story Mastermind, and we do these outline intensives, where we spend six weeks with a group of writers just on their outline. We talk about premise a lot from the very beginning. Because if you don't have that premise ironed out, you are not going to...
So, basically, you make the mistakes in the 10-page outline so that you don't make the mistakes in the 300-page novel. And a lot of the questions that we ask about the premise for the writers that do come into this outline intensive, "Who is the character? What is the plot in the world? And how do they all fit together in a way that matters to character, and therefore, to the reader?" We talk about the mission statement of the story. "What is the story about? What is it about to you? What is it about to the character to the world? And what's it going to be about to readers?" That's the number one thing that a lot of writers when they set out to write a novel they don't really think about is, "Why does this matter to the reader? Why would this matter to anybody picking this up? Why would this matter to an agent? Why would this matter to a publisher? What is it saying about the world at large, something universal that we can express through character, we can express through story?"
The premise also to be commercial in the way that I think a lot of people want is that the premise has to be larger than life. It doesn't just have to be like the end of the world. That can sometimes be too large in a way that renders the story unbelievable. So it's actually tough to pull off a premise that's that high stakes. But this idea of letting readers into a world that they wouldn't really have experience with. And I'm thinking of "The Sun Is Also a Star." It is I would say a young adult/new adult novel that's told from two points of view of these kids who kind of meet and fall in love. Spoiler alert, they don't end up together but their love, their sort of short bursts of intense love, it changes both of them. And it kind of leaves the window open for the future.
And the high-stakes element of that is the girl character is about to be deported. They have sort of worked their way through the bureaucratic process. They've come over from, I believe it's Jamaica. They've run out of the democratic process and the bureaucratic process to sort of become legal residents and so they are being deported. And so as she's doing a last-chance appeal to fight this decision to stop her family from being deported, she meets this guy. It is absolutely the wrong time. And they have this very short kind of intense burst that brings up a lot of feelings and changes for the both of them.
And so it's through this kind of time pressure, high-stakes, high-concept element that the story really moves forward through time. There's a very specific reason for the story happening as it does when it does with the type of pressure and emotional stakes that the story has. And otherwise, it would just be, you know, two unlikely teens falling in love and I don't know if it would have done as well. It was adapted into a movie. I don't know if it would have done as well if there hadn't been kind of multicultural elements. We are seeing a lot of kind of big push in publishing for diversity representing diverse creators, giving platform and voices to people who are not neurotypical, for example, who come from different places, who have different sexualities, and sexual expressions and gender expressions, and all of this stuff. Like we are really looking to represent the wide diversity of our world on the page now. That comes from the identity of the creator. It also comes from the identity of various characters and the way in which identity factors into your plot.
So that is definitely something to play with it if it is available to you from your life experience or if you're able to do comprehensive research. If you are trying to write a character from a background that you do not share, I have a great video on this YouTube channel that is an interview with Erin Entrada Kelly about that topic. She talks about kind of writing outside your lane. So that is a great ingredient to work in a high-concept premise, whether it's this ticking clock, this larger than life, exposing the reader to an area of life like immigration law, for example, that they've never had a chance to experience themselves, big time pressure, big stakes for the characters. Those are ingredients that go into books that sell and there there's something to be layered in. And that's something I want to talk about a little bit more with our Good Story Learning members. So if you would like to continue this discussion, join us over at Good Story Learning for the second part of this video. My name is Mary Kole. This is Good Story Company, and here's to a good story.
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