Reading for the market

A couple of weeks back, I talked about how important it was to gear your book for the market. I don’t mean – and never mean – that you shouldn’t write from a place of passion and love. You should! You should! But you need to write from a place of passion, love … and market wisdom.

Now, a few of you wrote back to say, essentially, “Hey great, Harry. In that little story of yours, you told me how you sat with your agent and drank tea and ate ginger biscuits and had the market explained to you by a pro agent with thirty years’ experience of selling. What about those of us who don’t have an agent, YOU DIAMOND-ENCRUSTED NINCOMPOOP?”

And, OK, that’s a fair question. I was going to answer it last week, in fact, except that I suddenly decided I needed to tell you all about the oldest texts in existence. (My reasoning for that change of tack? Absolutely none. Sorry.)

Anyway, here goes:

How to understand the market for your book if you don’t have an agent

If you don’t have an agent, you are mostly cut off from the chatter that accompanies the sale of manuscripts to editors. Not entirely, of course, you can pick up snippets from Twitter, or from Publishers Weekly or the Bookseller. But the fact is that even publishing editors understand the market less well than agents, simply because they understand the appetites of their own firm, but don’t know what other firms are buying. Agents have those ‘What’s hot, and what’s not?’ conversations every week, with every firm, so their feel is second to none.

And when I say you need to write from love and passion, I do mean it. So let’s say you have quite a dark comedy about (I dunno) a blind woman looking for love. Then you read that the big new thing in publisher land is Up Lit, and everyone wants books that are sunny, not dark.

What do you do? Simply turn your book on its head and write something wholly different from what you first intended? No.

Similarly, indie authors have a lot of data-tools available to them, that purport to guide them on what books they should write. Those tools say things like, Regency Romance is saturated, but YA dystopia looks hot. And the data is probably right. But again: if writing regency romance is what you want to do, why would you jump into YA dystopia just because a stupid data tool tells you to do it?

So you go with your passion, but intelligently.

That means, with your blind-woman / dark comedy novel, you’re going to search out similar books. You’d think about things like:

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine. (Yes: woman is in search for love. No: she’s not blind. Yes: she has some significant emotional challenges. Yes: the comedy engages with some quite dark subjects.) 

Nathan Filer / Shock of the Fall. (Central character is a guy not a woman. But yes, plenty of comic moments. Yes, examines life from inside a disability.)

Anthony Doerr / All the Light We Cannot See. (No, not a comedy. Yes, directly about blindness.)

And so on.

As you can see from my comments, none of those novels perfectly reflect the one you want to write – which is good, not bad – but you can also see that your novel lives inside that company. You can feel the family relationships.

And then?

Nothing. You don’t copy. You don’t draw stupid conclusions. (‘Hmm. Anthony Doerr’s novel brought Nazis into the story about blindness, and we all know that Nazis are storytelling gold, so maybe I need to reset my story from contemporary London to, um, 1942 Munich.’)

Rather, you just read the novels that are in your zone.

Yes, you read some classics. You read some non-fiction. (So, for example, if your book deals with blindness, you read autobiographical work by Borges, and Lusseyran, and others.) But mostly, and most importantly, you read novels that:

1.    Have come out in the last 3-5 years

2.    Are, broadly speaking, in your zone

3.    Have done well commercially and (ideally) also critically.

That’s it. Then you write the book you want to write, but you do so with your mind and imagination formed by the current state of literature.

So, for example, Anthony Doerr’s heroine trains her senses by mastering complex puzzles, built for her by her locksmith father. If you used that trope, or something similar, it would feel a little flat. Over familiar. Stale. If on the other hand, you’ve imbibed that book, and loved it, your mind will likely spring to some other way of tackling that same issue. Some natural progression from Doerr’s own approach.

That’s all you need. Simply supplying your mind with the right feedstock will work.

So yes: a couple of weeks back, I told you how I got one of my books market-ready through a conversation with my agent. But I didn’t tell you how the Fiona Griffiths series came to be born. Then, I decided I wanted to turn to crime, but had lost touch with the modern crime market. So I went out and bought – everything. Two dozen novels, two dozen authors. All contemporary writers. Most of them big-selling. British, Irish Scandinavian, American. A wild medley of approaches. Literary and commercial. Series and one-off. First person and third person. Dark and gentle. Funny and grim. Police procedurals and everything else. And so on.

Then, I didn’t use that knowledge in any mechanical way. I just absorbed it and wrote what I wanted to write. But the knowledge changed what I wanted to write.

And lo and behold, I wrote the most timely book I’ve probably ever written. So I was putting the finishing touches to my first Fiona novel, when Girl with the Dragon Tattoo became huge. It was when Claire Danes (as Carrie) was storming a small screen near you with Homeland. And so on. My book wasn’t a copy of any of those things. Indeed, it had been written before I had any knowledge of them. But I was pushed by the exact same zeitgeist and ended up in (my version of) the exact same place.

Result: a novel that hit the spot with readers and was sold, quickly and easily, to publishers all over the world and which was also adapted, fast and easily, for TV too.

You can do the same. And quite likely, if you look at your bookshelves, you’ll find you’ve already done it.

That’s all from me. I am off to remove a pumpkin from my son’s head.

But what about you? Have you tried the approach I’ve recommended here? Did it work? Do you have other suggestions? Let’s all have a Heated Debate …