Your heart, money and the industry

First:

Last week I spoke these words: “I shall grow a monstrous, ‘Come on now chaps’, airman’s moustache and I shall be seen at all times to be smoking a briar pipe, even in bed.”

I spoke them, and I meant them, and I begged forgiveness for past failures.

But –

I had not quite realised the issues that would arise when I joined Briar pipe + large moustache + flammable bed clothes.

I have been forced to give up both pipe and moustache by my family. We are, for now camping in the garden, while the blaze dies down.

And –

Look, I’m quite a commercially oriented writer. I’ve written in multiple different genres (including different types of non-fiction) and I’ve always wanted to get published and get paid a decent crust for doing so. Partly, yes, that’s because I want to earn money and support my family … and to do so without having a Proper Job. (I had one of those once. Shudder.)

But also, if you’re a writer, you want readers and you’re a lot more likely to have those if you have a good publisher properly behind your book and throwing some proper spondulicks at its success.

There are plenty of self-publishers who look at these things quite analytically. They use tools like Publisher Rocket to discover the niches where buyers are most greedily buying and where authors have not yet properly caught up. They look for tropes that are popular in one genre and import them over to a neighbouring genre, in the hope of getting the same kind of success there.

And, OK. I don’t have a quarrel with anyone who writes books and sells them, but I also just don’t believe that most writers ought to take that kind of approach.

So really, my own rules for choosing a writing project are twofold.

The first is: write with your heart.

If I’m not genuinely impelled by a project, I won’t do it. (I’ve had one partial exception to that rule, when I had to write a book to fulfil a contract. The publisher wanted a book that I wasn’t keen on, but I wrote it anyway. The book was OK, ruined by bad editing, steamrollered by bad publishing, and died horribly.)

Writers are generally a little nuts, so the things we want to write about are generally a little nuts. I’ve written a (modern) police procedural about relics of King Arthur. I wrote another about medieval religious practices. I wrote a romance that stretched from the Russian Revolution to the Berlin Airlift.

And – nuts is good. You just have to love the stuff you’re writing about.

Partly that’s because you’re going to be spending a lot of time there. But also there are qualities which won’t get into your book except through love. The best books (mostly, not always) are infused with a kind of humanity and love. One of the reasons why JK Rowling has done so well is that her writing is funny and her voice is warm. Of course, kids want to read about wizards. But of course, they want to spend time with a funny, warm, loving human. You don’t get that feel from a book unless it’s written with love.

At the same time, I take plenty of care with my second rule: write for the industry.

If a book isn’t going to make any money, I won’t write it. (Again with one exception, currently not published, twenty-five years in the writing, which I wrote just because I loved doing it. I may yet seek a publisher for it.)

Mostly though, I understand what the industry wants and tamp the things that I want to write about into the kind of shape that will work for a publisher.

That sounds like a compromise, but it isn’t really. I can’t think of any time I’ve done that where the commercial pull on the book hasn’t improved it. Books get better for being propulsively readable – and what the industry calls for above all is a book that demands to be read.

And, because my moods and tastes vary, the kind of writing I’ve done has varied too. (Little teaser: I have a book in front of an agent now that’s in a totally different genre to anything I’ve written before. I’ll tell you more some other time.)

Personally, I’ve found a genre-wandering approach to a career both natural and positive. I doubt if any really good writer can only write one sort of book well. Quite the opposite: writing is writing. A good crime writer can probably write good rom-coms, or kids’ book, or a memoir.

So be free. Go where the wind blows. Write with your heart, and be ruthlessly commercial, both at the same time.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / The Ultimate Start Lesson Two / Why do you write?

Two FFs this week. For those of you following the Ultimate Start course, it’s:

Identify what the hook of your novel is and share in the forum along with your 500 word opening taking into account what you have learned so far. Before posting check for any energy or intrigue drops. Post to the forum, then read and comment on the thoughts of at least two of your fellow writers. Can you learn anything from their observations? When your ready post to the forum here.

And for the rest of us, a different sort of FF.

Just: why do you write what you write? What drew you to your current project? Where’s the passion in it?

But also, a niggly question that I do want an answer to: would your current project be better if it was more commercial? Are there things you’re doing which you know a publisher would be likely to object to? Or are you genuinely trying to write something that you think a publisher could love?

We do often see manuscripts that are clearly passion projects, but also clearly not quite doing what a publisher would want. Is yours one? Tell me. When your ready post to the forum here.

Til soon.

Harry