Unconventional Writing
Publishing loves its buckets. In children's books, there are several buckets that you need to fit into, with word count guidelines and all of that.
Books that don't lend themselves easily to categorization can be a really difficult sell, especially when you are a debut and you are trying to do something a little bit different. You need to absolutely make sure that it makes sense for the story that you're telling. You're not doing it as a gimmick. It absolutely cannot be told any other way. So, if you can 100% say that about your story, that makes me a little bit more confident that you will be successful in getting people enthusiastic about it.
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transcript for unconventional writing
Hello, this is Mary Kole with Good Story Company. We are going to discuss unconventional writing in this video.
So, a couple of definitions first. What would unconventional writing mean? I'm thinking “Infinite Jest,” I'm thinking all of these books that sort of don't fit necessarily—like a Murakami—like, they don't fit a very neat category or a neat bucket that publishing wants to put them into.
Publishing loves its buckets. In children's books, there are several buckets that you need to fit into, with word count guidelines and all of that. But when we get into adult publishing, meaning non-children, there are buckets as well. We have our tropes. We have our thriller. We have our mystery suspense. We have our romance. We have our erotica tropes. We have books that fit into various categories because when you think about being at Barnes & Noble or, you know, at Amazon and seeing the online categories or the in-person categories, how books are shelved in a bookstore, which is where they are able to connect to readers, we see the thriller shelf. We see the nonfiction business shelf. We see the nonfiction finance shelf. All of these books sort of like to belong in a specific place because that is how we've developed a system for getting them to readers, you know. If you are looking for travel books, let's say... You know, in these COVID times, it's a little dicey to think about travel but we will travel again one day. So, maybe, let's say you're going to France, and you are looking for a book, like a Lonely Planet guide to France. While a whole bookstore with 100,000, 200,000 books is not gonna be helpful, you are looking to really zero in on a specific bucket. You go to the travel reference section or the travel resources section, and there it is. You found what you're looking for.
Now, books that don't lend themselves easily to categorization can be a really difficult sell, especially when you are a debut and you are trying to do something a little bit different, trying to do something innovative but also trying to get people on your team. Because in order to get published in the traditional system or by a smaller medium publisher, you need to get people over on to your side with whatever you've written. And if it breaks boundaries, this can be a little bit more of a difficult proposition because in publishing like I was just saying, we like our buckets. We like our categories. We like our BISAC codes. We like drilling down and really sort of categorizing the books because then, everything is easier. You're more easily able to connect with readers. And when that reader picks up that book, they have a set of expectations. That's where tropes come into place. So, if it's a historical romance, we kind of have a couple of ideas. And our historical romance fans, when they pick up your historical romance, they're going to have their expectations more or less met. Whether they like the characters, or the writing, or the historical setting, you know, those become a matter of taste. But they know that when they see a historical romance, sort of, their mind starts sort of categorizing the experience that they're about to have as well.
So, humans, we like categories. They help us make sense of the world. Math is a system of categories. Science is a system of categories. The Dewey Decimal System is a system of categories. So, we like our categories and publishing is very much a reflection of that idea.
Now, what happens when you have written something that doesn't fit a category? Well, there are different ways of not fitting into a category. So, for example, you can write a 500-page picture book. Picture books are usually 30 to 40 pages. You can absolutely do anything, but will you be able to get that over the hump and convince an agent partner, a publishing partner that this makes a worthwhile opportunity to break a category and break it in a really interesting way.
Now, I'm thinking of an interactive picture book, not like a lift a flap, but I remember when we were having all of these interesting conversations about e-books. We were sort of writing that first wave of e-books in publishing. This was about 10, 12 years ago. And Chronicle Books published the picture book by Hervé Tullet, "Press Here." And "Press Here" was an interactive, kind of like tablet-like book, but it was very much a book. So, what would happen is you would tell the child, you know, the text would say, you know, "Press here. Touch this dot," and "See what happens." You would have to turn the page, and then an explosion of color would happen as a result of you pressing, right? So, it was very much having a conversation with, you know, tablets, and e-books, and interactivity that was available due to technology, but it was kind of bringing it back into book form. So that was a really interesting sort of reaction to what was happening in the world. It was an innovative, you know... It was a category-breaking picture book. It was not an interactive picture book, but it was written as an interactive picture book, and that was a risk that really paid off. I think a lot of readers love it. It's a favorite in my house still, even all of these years after it was published, and even though my kids have tablets.
And so, that was kind of a calculated category buster that worked out well because it captured something in the zeitgeist of what was happening. It was timely. It forced the reader to sort of step out of there, you know. I'm gonna have a picture book story that's read to me, and I'm going to sort of consume it. It sort of pushed a little bit of a boundary there and it really paid off well. But this was a known creator. This was a calculated risk. This was an existing relationship for the publisher.
And so, I wonder, if as a debut, would that idea...if that would have flown quite as well. That is something that I really want to dig into with this video is how do you category bust, or mix categories, or sort of go off-road entirely if you're a debut.
So as a debut, if you have a book that is taken like a calculated risk, whether it's in storytelling, point of view, you're using second person to tell the story, for example, you're using like 13 different points of view, all of these things that a lot of writing teachers like myself, I will admit it, I sit here, and I say, "You know, this is the range of normal for word count." I say, "These are kind of the expectations when you want to do X, Y, or Z." If you have written a book that has broken the rules, how likely are you to be able to sort of get it over that transom and get an agent on board, get a publisher on board. Well, all of that has to do with the book and the execution.
Now, the one thing that I would say is if you are making a genre-busting, category-busting choice, an interesting storytelling choice, you need to absolutely make sure that it makes sense for the story that you're telling. You're not doing it as a gimmick. You're not doing it just for the fun of it. You're not doing it to see if it will fly. It absolutely cannot be told any other way. And this is an asset. So, if you can 100% say that about your story, that makes me a little bit more confident that you will be successful in getting a team behind the story, getting people enthusiastic about it.
Now, that being said, the publisher convincing is a very difficult element of the equation because the editor might love it. They might think it's absolutely valid, has artistic merit, all of these things, but then they have to convince their entire publishing board. The pub board has to convince the sales and marketing people, and the sales and marketing people are thinking back to that Barnes & Noble because those are their customers. They're thinking, "Barnes & Noble is gonna tell me, they don't know how to shelf this thing. We're probably gonna have to spend extra money to put it on an endcap or put it on a table, where it will get noticed." Because the thing is when a book breaks boundaries and readers don't really know what category it's in, they don't know how to ask for it. They don't know to ask for it. And so, there's sort of a buying, decision-making chain problem that you're gonna run into if you have just this object that nobody knows what to do with. So that is something that is definitely a consideration that agents are making, that publishers are making because agents want to sell. That's their job. Their job is to sell stuff. So, to convince them to take something on that's gonna be more difficult to sell, it absolutely has to have flawless execution for whatever the choice is that you're making.
I'm gonna continue this conversation over in Good Story Learning, our membership site. So if you want to dig a little bit deeper into this topic, please join me there. My name is Mary Kole with Good Story Company. Here's to a good story.
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