How to read

Yes, yes. I know. Many people on this mailing list can already read. Some of you read quite well. I’ve even met some of you who can read competently without even moving your lips. Wowser.

(Though, by the way, reading silently arrived quite late. People knew how to do it, of course, but it wasn’t really socially normal, even in a monastery, until the fifteenth century or so. Before that, monks were positively encouraged to speak the texts they were reading. Monastery libraries were often built so as to give monks what were effectively sound booths, so they could read aloud without disturbing their neighbours.)

Anyhoo –

Reading.

Once you set out on the path to authorship, reading needs to stop being something you do only for fun. You are also now seeking to build your capacity as an author.

Specifically, as an author, you are seeking to develop the blueprint (a manuscript) that a publisher will turn into a product (a book) for sale to a very wide market of readers. You need to make damn sure that your blueprint will appeal, in volume, to that end market.

But how do you know? How you do you know what will sell?

You can’t rely on your own personal taste, because that’s far too spongy as a basis for predicting the tastes of others. I don’t like most of the books my 11-13 year old kids read. An awful lot of them are too violent, too morally thin, too fast, too brash.

But that doesn’t give me the licence to go ahead and write a modern-day Famous Five, with lashings of pop and an absence of real jeopardy. That book might be nice to write, but it wouldn’t sell.

There are two groups of people who most understand what sells. They are agents and editors.

Agents spend their entire time pitching manuscripts to editors, and making sales, and getting rejections, and getting feedback. Editors are on the other side of the fence and, yes, have sales data and marketing teams to keep them informed. That said, they sit inside their own publishing house, so don’t have the 360 degrees of visibility that agents have.

Both these groups have insight not just into what sold last month, but into what will sell eighteen months from now. The bestseller lists might tell you, for instance, that paranormal romance is still a thing, but it might tell you that at a point where agents and editors have already understood that market to be in decline.

Now, I imagine that I’m on reasonably solid ground in guessing that you are not an agent or a commissioning editor at a leading publishing house. That means you are cut off from the main source of information about what sells.

But you’re not totally cut off.

For one thing, you can literally book a one-to-one feedback session with an agent and ask directly for a sense of whether and how your book fits into the market. (Info here.)

For another, you can and should read.

As a reader, personally, I am eclectic and often prefer to read great fiction of the past than whatever publishers are wanting to push at me now. But that, especially in your early days as wannabe-author, is not the right approach.

You need to read whatever’s selling in your genre, or has sold heavily in the past few years. You need to read all that greedily, extensively, and laying your personal taste to one side.

That means, for me, if I wanted to write fiction for the 10-12 market, I’d have to grapple with all those books I hate. Percy Jackson (yuk.) Warrior Cats (worse.) Endless series about teens slaying each other or combating evil … by means of very extensive jeopardy and violence.

I don’t have to write those books, but I do have to know them, because in the end I have to write a book in the overlap between “Books I want to write” and “Books that sell well today.”

I’m not asking you to lay your personal values or tastes to one side. I can’t see that there’s any purpose at all in becoming a writer if you dispense with those things. But I am asking you not to send your brain on holiday. You are writing a book, because you want people to read it. So understand what sells. Find an area within that sales space that fits you and your passions.

The first, most important thing here is to know your genre as it stands today.

But I do also think that an eclectic reading approach supports that deep genre-knowledge.

If, let’s say, you find really interesting themes in adult psychological thrillers that haven’t been properly explored for kids, then finding a way to bring that theme into an age-suitable kids book would be a tremendously interesting idea for publishers. The idea would feel deeply alive. It would live in that fantastic space where you could write a book that felt like the next brilliant idea, not a copy of the last one.

And again, I’ve said it before in these genre-themed emails, but you do need to be alert to genre, even if you don’t live in a nice, neat category. If you’re writing contemporary female-led fiction, with a comic tone but a serious issue to consider, then that’s your genre. You need to know every damn book that is being sold in that area, whether British or American or in translation.

So.

Read. Read lots. Read intelligently.

And, just maybe, learn to read without moving your lips.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / Buy me buy me buy me

This week, our theme is going to be whether your book fits its intended market. We’re going to test that by comparing your book to other, recent big sellers in your niche. So your mission, should you choose to accept it is to give us:

• A definition of your genre or niche. That could be as simple as ‘adult crime fiction’ or as complicated as the ‘contemporary female-led …’ example I gave a moment ago. Simple or complex define your niche
• Title & elevator pitch of your book
• Title & elevator pitches of 2-3 recent bestsellers in your area

Do you think your book fits? Does it feel fresh or copycat? Give your views, but, as ever, invite opinions from others.

When you’re ready, post it here in Townhouse (our free online writing community).

Til soon.

Harry