Our First Jericho Soapbox!
Hi everyone!
We are delighted to post the very first Jericho Soapbox written by Blakeney. She has gotten on her Soapbox to write all about the current fiction market. #jerichosoapbox
If you would like to be considered for JW Soapbox, please email a pitch for a 1000-2000 word piece to community@jerichowriters.com
Fiction: What Everyone Wants
When people begin to read a book, they are looking for distraction. There are two ways in which they can achieve this: with narrative that takes them away completely from their own environment into situations that they are never likely to experience themselves, or through a feeling of involvement and identification with a plot’s strong characters and their situations: an environment of criminal intrigue or fantasy versus life in Acacia Avenue.
Personally-involving fiction is unlikely to come from the first of those categories and complete escapism into another world won’t be derived from the second. The trouble is, there’s too much prominence in the escapism category and not enough in the other. This may tempt some writers to write to the trendier detective or thriller market, when their style or inclination are more suited to other categories. A continued lack of acceptance might suggest that, if you’re having no luck, you could benefit from trying another genre.
It isn’t unknown for a writer to study what is selling well and produce a book that has the same ingredients. This doesn’t require an effort at originality on their part but may achieve a bestseller. A few years ago, I bought a best-selling paperback with a first sentence that was almost an exact copy of that famous opening from Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. I don’t know how the author got away with that. I also detected strong echoes of Mansfield Park and Upstairs Downstairs in the plot. She had obviously looked at other popular work and had put the same ingredients together to create a bestseller. Originality was obviously too arduous. Surely, most writers would gain no real satisfaction from writing in that way.
Consider television soap operas. One of the reasons that they are so popular is that they are about ordinary people leading ordinary lives. Transfer this idea to the author/reader sphere and that same degree of identification will probably result in a similar success. Of course, soap opera plots can be ridiculous and far-fetched but the written version needn’t go that far or be just a representation of tedious everyday life. It can be enlivened with incidents of personal crisis and memorable characters. This is what writers of this kind of fiction try to achieve. Personal involvement is thereby maintained, enabling readers to care more about the characters than they would in the other kind of fiction.
The trouble is, this market is less prominent and tends to be more literary – a genre that, by all accounts, agents in general find more difficult to accept and sell. There are exceptions but it would be fascinating to see the results of a national survey on just what people want from fiction. My guess is, the results would be surprising and would probably lead to a shift in the market – or at least, more balance.
To state the obvious, agents and publishers want something they can sell. They are reluctant to take chances, which must sometimes lead to closed minds on their parts. I often wonder how new genres ever appear – and they do, occasionally. Speculative, dystopian, and narrative non-fiction are examples from recent years. Even so, I have a suspicion that some agents’ attitudes are especially negative in relation to the writers who approach them. There was an agent who used to be quoted in The Writers’ And Artists’ Yearbook as saying that, when her agency received submissions, they were looking for reasons to reject. There’d be no point in applying to them, then – and I never have.
I once made an initial enquiry to an agent, as specified, and received a reply from an assistant. She made the mistake of using the “forward” facility, with the result that I saw the reply she’d received from the agent: “Ask her to send it but I don’t hold out much hope”. I should have sent a reply-to-all that said; “In that case, I won’t bother” but I regret to say I sent the submission anyway. The point is, hers was probably an example of an attitude that’s common among agents – probably not all – but that kind of negativity towards the writers from whom they make their living isn’t exactly encouraging.
Writers may not be able to self-publish or may not wish to and it all adds to the near-impossibility of ever achieving traditional publication, especially when you add “celebrity novelists” to the mix. They are asked to write their novels. They don’t have to go through the usual submission process, as the rest of us do. They don’t have to storm the barricade with the odds against them. Publication is just given to them but publishers are limited in the number of new titles they can produce each year so what that does is take up publishing space that could otherwise be filled by genuine writers.
Despite the odds, we writers are a resilient lot. I, for one, am about to start the first draft of my next novel, despite an age of rejection. I know that I’ll be one of many.
This is a really thought provoking piece, Blakeney. I wish I had the answers, but of course I don’t, and I wonder if anyone has. As a reader (we’re all readers aren’t we), I select books from authors I have read before, there are a handful I will buy from, every book they write, but mostly now I buy new and debut books, or authors I have heard about on Twitter (and through Jericho).
Sadly though, I doubt that most readers are writers and they won’t go on Twitter, or belong to Jericho, therefore what do they buy? What they know, or what is carefully selected by the publishing houses to promote to them. Therefore in a way I see the dilemma from an agent/publisher point of view, they find something that sells and want to stick to similar. How many thrillers like Gone Girl, how many up lit stories like Eleanor, etc? If you want to write something ‘different’ or cross genre, you may not find an agent. They are risk averse. How many rejections have we all got saying something like “not really for me” or “this wouldn’t suit my list”. I could paper a room with them. The more I find out about publishing, to be honest, the more of an imposter I feel. I am not a literary writer, or a celeb, so what do I write? Well, damn it, what I want to write, and I listen to the characters who talk to. me.
It’s very hard, Blakeney, to work out what anyone wants. Look at supermarket shelves and Waterstones etc, and take out the big names, the established authors, and you have a few debuts. The ones who are exceptionally good, and have been well publicised. I have read some great self pub books on Amazon, equally the best unpublished book I’ve read this year was for a beta read on here (I won’t name them) but the story was amazing, and I would BUY that book if anyone published it. How though, does everyone break through?
I got nowhere with agents, so submitted to an indie publisher who took me on. I won’t get loads of money, no advance, and I have to do most if not all the marketing. But hey, if a few people read it, for me that is the reason I write, to tell someone’s story and hope it resonates with them, and they understand why the characters do what they do. Even like them a bit if I’m lucky. Would an agent have taken a risk on my book (defies genre and is on subjects perhaps a bit unsettling for some), well they didn’t. But I won’t give up, and nor should you. The people I feel sorry for, as you say, are the general public who are denied great stories because everything must be mainstream and safe. Like you, I would love to see a survey. But again, that would depend massively on what the questions were. Who would decide on what they were? Reading fellow author’s best of the year lists on Twitter right now, I could bankrupt myself. I could in every bookshop. But I know, as do you, there are readers out there willing to try more diverse and unusual books which WHS don’t stock. Everyone I know personally, who asks about my book – I give them the outline and then ask them what they like, what type of book and then suggest they go into Waterstones or an indie and ask the booksellers for recommendations. That would be a start.
Thanks again for getting up on the Soapbox.
Thanks for this, Blakeney, I’m sure that this prompts lots of nodding heads amongst us! It does sometimes beggar belief when a none-too-original novel gets picked up by a major publisher and becomes a big seller. And I think it does make us a little wary of being too ‘innovative’, let’s say, in what we do, as we’ll risk pushing ourselves outside of the boxes that sell. I’m sure that agents are looking for original works, ones that will be the next big breakthrough that lesser writers will copy in their droves, but I think more than anything they are looking for writers who are in command of their stories and storytelling. I’ve no idea what I actually mean by this, as I’ve no idea what those magic ingredients are, but I think agents just know it when they see it and this makes it very difficult for us to aspire to ‘it’. I’ve always assumed that a good book gets written when the writer has had years of practice, years of rejections, years of scraping ideas and starting again, years of just doing it. I haven’t had those years and, having started late, I probably won’t live long enough now to get them under my belt! But I think this game – or whatever you call it – takes a lot of time. Even those ‘debut’ authors we hear about that have their first novel picked up right off the bat – just how ‘first’ is that novel? Or how ‘debut’ is that writer? I’ll bet in many cases they have been at it for years, and the rest.
I don’t believe that I (yet) have the skill or talent (which I do believe can be developed with hard work) to attract and agent, but it won’t stop me trying. The conundrum I find myself in is that, thinking it would be a cold day in hell that I would get a trad publisher, I self-published my first novel. Just to see what the response would be because, as you say, we write stories for people to read, it’s only half the fun if no one ever reads them! Around 800 people have bought it or downloaded it and that has resulted in only c.50 ratings and a handful of reviews. Mostly they are positive, a few ‘one’ and ‘two’ stars in there, but you can expect that. So now I have a novel out there that a prospective agent could see and think ‘she’s hardly selling in the tens of thousands’ – there’s the one reason they would need to reject me, right there. I’d have to take it down before I submitted and pretend I’d never self-published – but then that would surely have been a good thing to tell an agent about, to show my commitment to a career in writing?
It is a true minefield and I feel your pain! I hope I haven’t taken this off topic, I guess I’m just trying to say that it can feel a little like you’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t. But like you I will keep trying! And aim to stay positive. Keep writing what you love to write, its the reason we all do it and it’s a real bonus if any of us can make a career out of it. Good luck!
My debut is actually the first full length book I’ve written. It’s around the 13th version, but it is the first. Only taken me seven years 😀
I usually read 100 books a year – I’ve slowed down considerably now I don’t use public transport to get to work. I currently belong to 3 reading groups (including the JW one) and have belonged to several more in the past. I run 1 group now and have run others and I know how hard it is to find books that we all want to read. I’ll read lit fic, reading group fic, women’s fic, crime, classics (mainly British/European plus some American), though not much fantasy, speculative, or romance etc. I love non-fiction, memoir, other narrative as well as biography, history, politics, and the rest, plus self help or other instructive books. I belong to 2 libraries but generally borrow from them using Overdrive or Libby apps on my phone. Then there’s kindle, though not Unlimited. If there’s nothing else, I’ll read the back of the cereal packet. It rarely happens – I’ve at least 500 unread books on my shelves already.
Given all of that, my aim is merely to write, as well as I can, something I’d like to read and hope a few others might like it too.
Any agent I target has to have something about them that makes me think we could get along. And if they don’t agree, their loss. I have had many rejections, some quite ‘good’ in the past, and am out once more seeking representation.
So yes, it’s a lottery. But please try not to let your disillusionment show when you contact agents. They will feel it in the words you use and that would be a pity.