“My play was a complete success. The audience was a failure.”
—Ashleigh Brilliant

I’ve read many books, ideas, proposals. A small, but shining few are good, and there is a significant trait that define them as such. The authors know who their audience is, and they write for that audience. Knowing your core audience is essential.

I am the first to admit how deeply personal putting words to paper is for me. It has always been subject to my interests, my thoughts, my ideas, my passions. I write because it fulfills me.

Most authors don’t write for money or fame (or “fortune and glory,” as pulp fiction screen star Indiana Jones would have put it), but because they have a honest love of what they do.

But the authors who find success (as household names or finding a niche of readers who love their work), they realize that writing a book is about creating something that will find an audience, and moreso, something that finds the right audience. It’s about what the audience will love.

It’s not blasphemy or insensitivity, it’s truth. If a writer doesn’t know who wants to read their work, they won’t find an audience. But knowing your audience isn’t the easiest task. There are many considerations, including:

• genre (what type of book is it? Fiction, nonfiction, memoir, sci-fi/fantasy, women’s fiction, popular science?)
• subject (light fare or dark? Happy marriages or abuse? New theories or battling disease?)
• length (short, long or in-between?)
• language (poetic or straightforward, child’s POV or adult’s, fact-filled or completely imaginative?)
• current trends (what is selling? What’s popular at the moment?)
• marketability (can you get this book to your core audience?)

Others arise as well, depending the answers to the above questions.

As an author, it is part of your job to find the answers to these questions, to understand about your core audience. It isn’t enough to write a good book that you think people will like. You have all the fodder you need to know what people like. What’s selling, being talked about, winning awards, popular in social media, or circling through book clubs? (What is most important to you will of course depend on who you’re trying to reach).

I’m not suggesting that your writing becomes impersonal, because that will alienate an audience as surely as will a book they’re not interested in reading. It’s about finding a balance, about shaping your work as you write it and molding it to the needs of your readers while still creating something that you love.

It won’t work every time. Not every idea is meant to be embraced by your readers, as popular and niche writers alike know well. At times, you will always fail to connect. Some writers feel the need to blame the audience, but it is not their failure for having preferences. It just means re-learning your audience, and writing something new.

While you write, the consideration should be that your book is for other people. It’s hard to remember that at times, in the heat of writing, lost in another world. But it is a core component of authorship. You mean very little as an author without a reader—and in the end, why write if you cannot share it with the world?

We all remember the good lines. No, not good. The really killer ones. The ones you don’t ever forget, because they’ve done for your soul what delicious food does for your belly. Best of times and worst of times, one ring to rule them all, Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo kind of lines.

Then there are the killer lines that I’m talking about. The comments or turns-of-phrase or sentences that are hackneyed clichés or pointless ramblings, useless facts or simply don’t make any sense. Whether in your query letter, marketing materials, biography or synopsis, these five killer lines will mutilate your chances of being published. Or being taken seriously: continue reading

Every manuscript begins with inspiration. But it’s a shifty, tempestuous thing, prone to short, violent fits and followed by long, terrible droughts. That when inspiration comes it is generally a messy regurgitation of all the weird, odd, unique little epiphanies you’ve subconsciously gathered—to be a little visceral—is par for the course. And when they all start to gurgle up at once you just have to find the nearest toilet bowl and hunch over until it’s all out and done.

Was that a little too gross of a metaphor?

What I mean is that after your first draft, what sits there on the page is oftentimes a jumbled heap of good ideas surrounded by loads of bad writing. You cannot write a perfect first draft. Ever. Just doesn’t happen. And the last thing you want to do is send your first attempt to an agent or a publisher. We’re simply too busy to sift through the muck and wait for your good ideas uncover themselves. We don’t have the time or the patience (as much as we wish we did) to constantly go mining for diamonds in the rough.

What you’ve got is about five pages. Five. The first five pages (and this is double-spaced, size twelve, Times New Roman or Courier, one inch margin, tabbed indent pages) are what it takes for the person reading your manuscript to decide if it’s worth pursuing at all. You might be lucky and get ten pages, or you might be unlucky and get two. But it’s best to assume that if you don’t hook us in at five pages, then your manuscript isn’t where it needs to be.

But be not afraid, for I’m not here to scare you off. I’m here to help you shape your jumbled heap (from the first five pages to the last) into something pretty. And all in five deceptively simple (but really not-so-terrifyingly massive) steps: continue reading

Shakespeare died today.

I mean, 393 years ago today. You know. I just thought it might have more impact if I started this post on that sort of stark tone. Like Albert Camus in The Stranger. But I think he might have done it better. Well, Matthew Ward did it better, when he translated L’Etranger’s iconic opening sentence as “Maman died today.”

I have a sort of problem with writing, in that I tend to emulate the writer who I’ve most recently read. On the one hand, it gives me an ever-changing tone (both writing and speaking) that is by measures repulsive and refreshing. On the other, I need only read any book by an author in a genre I am trying to write, and I am suddenly and quite magically able to write like them. Doesn’t matter if it’s Stephen King or Shakespeare. I’m not sure if that’s quite how a muse is supposed to work. But it is one of the ways that it has worked for me as an individual and a writer. Would-be writer. Will-be writer.

That being said, this post is on finding your muse. I can’t offer much worldly advice, to be honest. I’m not a published author (other than by virtue of these blog posts). But I’m thoroughly convinced that whether or not you choose to admit or even recognize it, writers have muses—forces behind their work that empower and strengthen their writing. The trick, then, is to discover which one (or ones) do that for you. To that end, I’ve offered a list of ten questions and statements that might inspire you to find a muse of your own, or recognize one that you might unconsciously already have. All in honor of our dear, departed Shakespeare, whose spirit lingers still.

1. When you want to understand the nature of dying, death, and life beyond death on a cold, rainy night while you’re curled up on the couch, what book do you turn to?
2. You have one of those days where you wish you were still in school so you could learn something, anything that doesn’t have to do with pop culture and celebrities—so you decide to pick up a book by this author.
3. The world is a big, bright, beautiful place today. You know just the person to express the  world’s music and art and color and love and peace (and all that jazz).
4. You’re really into escapism right now, and you’re in the mood for (a) the grim, dystopian future world that our society might become, or (b) a big, fat tome of fantasy in another world altogether, where pointy ears generally means you’re a Fay. Which do you choose, and by what author?
5. Writing can be inspired by images: landscape photography, fashion sketches, comic book drawings, ancient sculpture or graffiti art. You find a coffee-book table with one of these subjects that’s heavy enough to give any potential attackers a concussion. Whose art does it feature?
6. When was the last time Hollywood made a scary movie that kept you up late at night, terrified that it was coming to get you if you turned out the lights or opened the closet? You pick up a book by this author instead.
7. “She Blinded Me with Science!” isn’t just a classic eighties hit by Thomas Dolby. It’s become the mantra you incessantly hum in your head when you dive into a book like this author’s.
8. Maybe you were never into poetry and a Shakespearean sonnet puts unpleasant thoughts in  your head, but you do remember that one haunting or funny or silly or weird poem that stayed in your head far beyond the first time you read it. Who wrote that poem?
9. Ah, childhood. It’s so wasted on children! Remember that series you read and re-read and begged your parents to buy for you in its shiny boxed set? The one you’re planning on sharing with your kids or nieces and nephews (once they put down that video game controller…)?
10. Silence is golden. Sometimes. But sometimes a little music is all you need to get you started. You’re browsing iTunes or Pandora or a good old-fashioned radio station until you find the perfect music by this artist.

Feel free to share with us who your muses are, or give us and our readers a few ideas to help find them. And in honor of Shakespeare, a personal muse of mine:

“The remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he is really very good—in spite of all the people who say he is very good.” — Robert Graves

Fingers poised with painful precision above the keyboard. Eyes squinting, lines furrowing between arched eyebrows. Mouth pursed. Head cocked. The occasional twitch, fingers buried in hair and the frustrated sigh.

Writer’s block.

It’s not that I don’t have ideas, because Lord knows I have ideas. A plethora of squirming ideas wriggling about, waiting to be plucked and put to the hook, bait for a story to swallow it whole. (Gruesome but truthful.) The problem is their lack of substance. I might have a few scribbles in my notebook after an hour of brainstorming and they all mostly come down to a story about a so-and-so, who faces so-and-so challenge to reach so-and-so goal. It’s formulaic, stale, overdone, and about as gripping as watching a dying earthworm crawl along the sidewalk. I want to cultivate my ideas because they’re precious to me, but in truth, so few of them move beyond that first, stagnant concept.

A professor of mine once said that when you are writing, you should jot down the first four ideas that come into your head for your story. And then you should immediately cross out the first three, because they’re clichéd, hackneyed crap. What you want to create is beyond the surface. You don’t want a “concept,” you want a high concept. Something universal but fresh, an interesting twist, a compelling new confection. Which some might argue is difficult, given that many scholars, critics etc. have decided there are only seven story ideas in the whole world.

Except that there are fourteen. Depending on whose side you’re on… continue reading

A book’s title is important. It’s a crucial summary of the essence of the content inside, and one of the key ways a book pitches itself to browsers when it’s all alone on the bookstore shelf. Get the title wrong and a book is crippled from the outset. And there are all sorts of mistakes to be made in titling: genre-inappropriate titles, overly clever titles that don’t reflect what the book’s about, titles with strange formatting or cute intentional misspellings that make the book not show up in online search results.

If you’re trying to title your book and getting frustrated, you’re in good company. For instance, George Orwell almost called his dystopian masterpiece The Last Man in Europe instead of 1984. Bo-ring. And Moby-Dick was named after a real-life whale named “Mocha Dick.” It’s a good think Melville changed it up—can you imagine the cleverly named Starbucks menu items? (Starbucks got its name in part from Captain Ahab’s first mate in the novel.)

Those two title tidbits came from a website we recently came across called, quite appropriately, How Books Got Their Titles. Author Gary Dexter gives anecdotes and insights into well-known titles and how they were derived. Some—like Married Love as the title of a sex manual that very well could have been accused of obscenity upon its 1918 release—artfully spin the book’s presentation to appeal to its target audience while accurately representing the content inside. Read through these and perhaps you’ll gain a little inspiration for your own titling endeavor.

Dexter’s full-length book on the topic is called Why Not Catch-21?

Tip #2: Get the price right.

Oh, the headache of self-publishing. You want to realize your dream and publish your book, but you have The Industry to contend with, you have the cost of production, and you have to worry about wholesalers and distributors, and Amazon . . . and the list goes on.  After all that time, energy, and money, it seems only natural that you’d want to earn back your costs through the price of your book.  $22.95 sounds like a fair price for your paperback fiction after all you’ve put into this book, right?

Sorry, but wrong.  continue reading

Very actionable advice on gathering author blurbs via PW’s “Ask a Publicist” feature.