What do you want?

One of the challenges that assails self-published writers is the sense that everything is important. You should have a mailing list – you should have a highly engaged Facebook page – you should tweet – you should be on LinkedIn or Pinterest – you should write more books – you should advertise better – you should set up promos – and much more besides.

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!

It’s 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 … and a very little bit needy. (Which is OK: we forgive all authors pretty much everything. We’ve committed every sin in the book ourselves.)

But the issue is a general one and it’s not limited to self-pub authors.

The question, time and again, is simple: what do you want from this?

For example: what do you want from your book?

Consider the concept of your book itself. It’s 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:

• A stunning true-life story about the writer’s adventures in – wherever
• Eight lengthy chapters about an abusive childhood
• Two dozen poems that are very personal to the author … and are often, not always, unreadable by anyone else.

Now, I hope it’s 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’s just a mess.

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.

But no one cares. Publishers want books they can sell. Books like these are unsaleable.

I speak from experience here. Perhaps the most remarkable project we’ve ever worked on was published as West End Girls by Barbara Tate. To sell that book, we needed to cut a 165,000 word manuscript down to 90,000 words – work that we did in-house because the book’s 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’s story and released it. The book went on to be a Top 10 bestseller – it’s phenomenal.

The same basic question brings clarity time and again. For example:

What do you want from your book cover?

The answer ought to be simple: you want it to sell the book. But very often, writers think, ‘Yes, 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’t be that hard, and I really want the cover to express my vision of the work, so …”

The result? Almost always a hopeless cover.

A pro designer doesn’t 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’ll work with that – and with a single goal in mind: sales.

It’s 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.

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!

What do you want from your Amazon page?

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 “Look Inside” click, then you want the “Look Inside” material to induce the buy. 

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’t know who you are, who are giving your book page about seven seconds consideration, who don’t like wasting their cash, and who are only a click or two away from Lee Child / EL James / Harlan Coben or whoever else.

That means a tightly worded blurb. A clear reason to buy. A mood and offer that’s closely united with the promise made by the cover. It also means ditching any verbiage that’s about you and what you want to tell the world.

What do you want from your agent query letter?

You want the agent to turn – with interest – to your manuscript. That’s all.

So keep the letter short. Make the purpose of the book – its USP, its hook, its soul – clear. Say a sentence or two about you. Then get out.

You’re not making friends with the agent. You’re not even looking to impress the agent. You just want them to turn to your manuscript.

Clarity. Sales – and writing.

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 ‘I want to sell more books’.

That’s not because I’m 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.

And of course, there is one vast area where of course you should bring multiple, complex and layered motivations – namely, when it actually comes to writing your book. Yes, you should think about what readers want, but in a funny way, you shouldn’t 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.

Take my Fiona Griffiths work, for example. In terms of genre, it’s contemporary police procedural and I pretty much follow all the rules of my genre. But thereafter, it’s all about me and my taste. I like humour, so there’s 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’t run some kind of spreadsheet on what fictional police detectives ought to be like.

That’s 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’s hands-on, practical and with loads of feedback from Debbie Young, someone who knows self-pub so well, she practically invented it. More here.