{"id":6706,"date":"2022-01-21T14:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-01-21T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/townhouse\/articles\/what-do-you-want\/"},"modified":"2022-01-21T14:00:00","modified_gmt":"2022-01-21T14:00:00","slug":"what-do-you-want","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/what-do-you-want\/","title":{"rendered":"What do you want?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>One of the challenges that assails self-published writers is the sense that everything is important. You should have a mailing list \u2013 you should have a highly engaged Facebook page \u2013 you should tweet \u2013 you should be on LinkedIn or Pinterest \u2013 you should write more books \u2013 you should advertise better \u2013 you should set up promos \u2013 and much more besides.<\/p>\n<p>That sense of obligation can get into your head, and not in a good way. One of the ways you can spot a newbie self-pub author is that their email footer is often desperately cluttered. Follow me on Twitter! Like me on Facebook! Buy my book! Join my list! Come to my birthday party! Try this recipe!<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s like a blizzard of calls to action, as a result of which any normal reader is inclined to take no action whatever. It just feels overwhelming \u2026 and a very little bit needy. (Which is OK: we forgive all authors pretty much everything. We\u2019ve committed every sin in the book ourselves.)<\/p>\n<p>But the issue is a general one and it\u2019s not limited to self-pub authors.<\/p>\n<p>The question, time and again, is simple: what do you want from this?<\/p>\n<p><strong>For example: what do you want from your book?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Consider the concept of your book itself. It\u2019s not that uncommon for us to get people asking us for help finding an agent for their book, which is presented as a mixture of:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>A stunning true-life story about the writer\u2019s adventures in \u2013 wherever<\/li>\n<li>Eight lengthy chapters about an abusive childhood<\/li>\n<li>Two dozen poems that are very personal to the author \u2026 and are often, not always, unreadable by anyone else.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Now, I hope it\u2019s blisteringly obvious that there is no market whatsoever for such a book. The stunning true-life story could be publishable and, yes, there is a market, of sorts, for poetry. But once you throw all these things into a great book-pie together, there\u2019s just a mess.<\/p>\n<p>With manuscripts like these, the author invariably has a wildly mixed set of motivations. They want a strong commercial publisher for the adventure part of the memoir. They want emotional release in relation to the childhood trauma. They want some kind of private, aesthetic joy in seeing their poems in print.<\/p>\n<p>But no one cares. Publishers want books they can sell. Books like these are unsaleable.<\/p>\n<p>I speak from experience here. Perhaps the most remarkable project we\u2019ve ever worked on was published as <a class=\"bx-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.co.uk\/West-End-Girls-Barbara-Tate-ebook\/dp\/B003XNTU16\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer noopener\"><em>West End Girls<\/em><\/a> by Barbara Tate. To sell that book, we needed to cut a 165,000 word manuscript down to 90,000 words \u2013 work that we did in-house because the book\u2019s 80-something author was no longer able to handle work on that scale. But all we really brought to bear was simple clarity of purpose. We just found Barbara\u2019s story and released it. The book went on to be a Top 10 bestseller \u2013 it\u2019s phenomenal.<\/p>\n<p>The same basic question brings clarity time and again. For example:<\/p>\n<p><strong>What do you want from your book cover?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The answer ought to be simple: you want it to sell the book. But very often, writers think, \u2018Yes, but I have this vision of a lighthouse on the cover and my Uncle Neil used to do a lot on Photoshop and putting a text on a cover can\u2019t be that hard, and I really want the cover to express my vision of the work, so \u2026\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The result? Almost always a hopeless cover.<\/p>\n<p>A pro designer doesn\u2019t think that way. They know almost nothing about your book, bar the genre, a one-page outline and perhaps a list of possible visuals. So they\u2019ll work with that \u2013 and with a single goal in mind: sales.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s not unusual to come across a book whose cover connects almost not at all with the content. But who cares? Once the sale is made, the cover has largely done its job.<\/p>\n<p>A friend of mine was presented with a draft book cover by her Big 5 publisher. The cover was awesome, but it had nothing, literally nothing, to do with the book. So she said yes to the cover and rewrote one scene in the book to accommodate the image introduced by the cover art. Bingo!<\/p>\n<p><strong>What do you want from your Amazon page?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>You want your Amazon page to sell your book. Or, to break things down a little further, you want your Amazon page to at least induce the \u201cLook Inside\u201d click, then you want the \u201cLook Inside\u201d material to induce the buy.<\/p>\n<p>So your blurb needs to induce the buy. Your title does. Your subtitle does. Your pricing does. And you need to induce the buy in people who don\u2019t know who you are, who are giving your book page about seven seconds consideration, who don\u2019t like wasting their cash, and who are only a click or two away from Lee Child \/ EL James \/ Harlan Coben or whoever else.<\/p>\n<p>That means a tightly worded blurb. A clear reason to buy. A mood and offer that\u2019s closely united with the promise made by the cover. It also means ditching any verbiage that\u2019s about you and what you want to tell the world.<\/p>\n<p><strong>What do you want from your agent query letter?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>You want the agent to turn \u2013 with interest \u2013 to your manuscript. That\u2019s all.<\/p>\n<p>So keep the letter short. Make the purpose of the book \u2013 its USP, its hook, its soul \u2013 clear. Say a sentence or two about you. Then get out.<\/p>\n<p>You\u2019re not making friends with the agent. You\u2019re not even looking to impress the agent. You just want them to turn to your manuscript.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Clarity. Sales &#8211; and writing.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Again and again, you will find that to make a good choice, you need to prune your motivations to just one. And in nearly every case, that motivation needs to be \u2018I want to sell more books\u2019.<\/p>\n<p>That\u2019s not because I\u2019m vastly greedy, but because selling books is hard. Making a career is hard. Finding readers is hard. Unless you prioritise those things, relentlessly, you may not get into print at all.<\/p>\n<p>And of course, there is one vast area where of course you should bring multiple, complex and layered motivations \u2013 namely, when it actually comes to writing your book. Yes, you should think about what readers want, but in a funny way, you shouldn\u2019t think about that too much. In crafting the basic concept for the manuscript, you have to consider your market very closely. But thereafter, just write the best book you can.<\/p>\n<p>Take my Fiona Griffiths work, for example. In terms of genre, it\u2019s contemporary police procedural and I pretty much follow all the rules of my genre. But thereafter, it\u2019s all about me and my taste. I like humour, so there\u2019s humour. I care about prose style, so my writing is carefully (and unusually) styled. I evolved quite an unusual central character, because I liked writing about her. I certainly didn\u2019t run some kind of spreadsheet on what fictional police detectives ought to be like.<\/p>\n<p>That\u2019s more or less it from me for this week. I will just say, however, that if you are serious about self-publishing, we are offering what may be one of the most amazing courses ever developed. It\u2019s hands-on, practical and with loads of feedback from Debbie Young, someone who knows self-pub so well, she practically invented it. More <a class=\"bx-link\" href=\"http:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/creative-writing-courses\/simply-self-publish-course\/\" rel=\"nofollow\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One of the challenges that assails self-published writers is the sense that everything is important. You should have a mailing list \u2013 you should have a highly engaged Facebook page \u2013 you should tweet \u2013 you should be on LinkedIn or Pinterest \u2013 you should write more books \u2013 you should advertise better \u2013 you<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29292],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6706","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-harrys-friday-email"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.2 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Jericho Writers<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/what-do-you-want\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_GB\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"What do you want? &#8211; Jericho Writers\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"One of the challenges that assails self-published writers is the sense that everything is important. 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I've published trad &amp; self-pub. Love both. Best known for my Fiona Griffiths crime series. Oh yes, and I'm the capo di tutti capi at Jericho Writers.","url":"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/author\/harryjericho\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6706","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/32"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6706"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6706\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6706"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6706"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6706"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}