by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

Blue-footed booby

I had another post I was working on, but life got in the way. So I thought I’d rerun a column on discoverability. It seems apt in this age of AI. Has anything changed? Where we go:

Discoverability is becoming as rare as the blue-footed booby.

According to Bowker, the outfit that registers ISBN numbers, over a million self-published books were issued ISBNs last year.

That’s a one with six zeros after it.

And understand, this does not include traditionally-published books, nor all the ebook-only titles without ISBNs.

Which means there’s a whole lotta books out there, and more added every year. (Most of which are bad. See Sturgeon’s Law.)

Industry observer Mike Shatzkin added this:

I had reason to learn recently that Ingram has 16 million individual titles loaded in their Lightning Source database ready to be delivered as a bound book to you within 24 hours, if not sooner. So every book coming into the world today is competing against 16 million other books that you might buy.

That number — the number of individual book titles available to any consumer, bookstore, or library — has exploded in my working lifetime. As recently as 25 years ago, the potential titles available — in print and on a warehouse shelf ready to be ordered, or even to be backordered until a next printing — was numbered in the hundreds of thousands. So it has grown by 20 or 30 or 40 times. That’s between 2000 percent and 4000 percent in the last quarter century.

Of discoverability, agent Rachelle Gardner recently observed:

How can any single book stand out in that large of a field? It’s very difficult. The problem is known as discoverability and it means the odds are stacked against us when we want to bring readers’ attention to our books.

This is why the publisher needs your help—it’s important to find your audience, that specific group of people who will like your book. They need you engaging with your audience, connecting with them, doing your part to make them aware of you.

Even with all this work, it’s still hard to make your book discoverable. It’s not anyone’s fault. Publishers are not conspiring to make life difficult for you. They’re not being unreasonable by requiring authors to participate in marketing. It’s simply the situation we find ourselves in—there are too many books, so we all have to work so much harder to each one stand out to its unique audience.

One line that jumped out at me is: the publisher needs your help. It used to be the other way around. A writer needed a traditional publisher to get into bookstores. If there were some marketing dollars in the budget, the publisher might arrange to have the book placed on the New Release table at the front of the store.

But now, with bookstore space shrinking, and marketing push going almost exclusively to the A list, authors writing inside the walls of the Forbidden City are expected to do audience building themselves (which has some authors wondering why the publishing houses still take the same royalty split as when they did all the heavy lifting. But I digress).

So how do you build an audience these days? The old-fashioned way. You earn it. (Hat tip to John Houseman).

Book after book. And more than one or two titles. You don’t hit a stride until you have several books out there to go with a steady pace of future production.

Another agent, Steve Laube, also reflected on the Bowker publishing numbers, and offered this advice:

1. Write the very best book you can.
2. Build an audience who will support your work (i.e. platform).
3. Decide whether to self-publish (but only do it the right way) or go the traditional route (get an agent).
4. Figure out how to launch a book.

The fundamentals don’t change, do they? That’s why they’re called fundamentals. I’d modify the list a bit this way:

1. Write the very best books (plural) you can, at least one per year.
2. Keep learning and growing in the craft.
3. Decide what kind of writer you want to be. If self-publishing is on your mind, consider:
   1. Can you be sufficiently productive?
   2. Do you have the discipline to learn basic business practices?
   3. Are you willing to invest between $500 and $2,000 for cover design, editing, and proofreading for each book?

4. If traditional publishing is your goal, ask:
   1. Am I patient enough to wait up to 18 months for my book to come out?
   2. Will my agent fight for more author-friendly non-compete and reversion-of-rights clauses?
   3. Am I ready with a plan should my publisher drop me?

One word I do wish we’d get rid of is platform. For non-fiction a platform is desirable because there’s a built-in audience for a subject. But agents and publishers push this amorphous concept on unpublished fiction authors, which only adds to their stress and detracts from their writing time.

The best time for a fiction writer to build a platform is 2003. That’s when we weren’t so blog saturated that a new author might actually gain a following. That’s when we weren’t tossing away good writing time on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram (and, worse, thinking that the latter venues are good places to sell books!)

As I argued a couple of years ago, we need to get out of “discoverability thinking” and into “trustability thinking.”

You should be thinking that each new offering is an opportunity to prove to readers that you deliver the goods. As you do this, time after time, trust in you grows. Consumers buy more from businesses they trust. Readers are consumers and you are a business.

This applies whether you are traditional or indie, commercial or literary, tall or short.

Or have blue feet.

So … are you about to dive into the cold Atlantic of content, knowing full well how vast and choppy it is out there? Have you taken swimming lessons (studied craft and market)?  

Or are you already swimming?

How’s the water?

by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

As storytellers, what do we know?

We know that people love to escape into stories in order to get some relief from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, aka life.

And we know that to the extent we provide that escape, we increase our odds of making some lettuce at this gig. And we know (or should know) that the craft of writing fiction is not some straitjacket around your creative genius, but a prism though which we refract and unleash the power of story. (See “Story and Structure in Love.”)

These truths do not change.

Which is why I was curious to see what a book offering “photoplay” (i.e., screenwriting) advice had to say…a book published in 1916!

A-B-C of Motion Pictures by Robert E. Welsh offers a short history of the movies and the business of making them. It has a chapter called “Practical Hints on Photoplay Writing.” Let’s have a look.

[The writer] must be certain that he possesses the power of observation that enables him to see the germs of stories in the little incidents that would ordinarily be passed by with scarce a moment’s thought.

This is the power of “What if?” It’s a muscle of the mind that can, and should be, developed by every writer. I used to read the newspaper (remember those?) looking for “what ifs” and marking them with a felt-tip pen. I would flip things around in a crime story (What if that robber had been a woman instead of a man?) or elevate something in an innocuous item (What if the president of the local PTA was on the run from the mafia?)

Most of the ideas would never go further, but sometimes I’d come up with a promising nugget. Like the news item that begins Try Dying and which landed me a three-book contract.

Exercise your head! Ask “What if?” all the time.

He must be gifted with the imagination that will enable him to create a full-bodied story—a plot—from this germ.

Anyone who wants to write full-length fiction needs to have “story sense.” This comes only through reading. Successful writers were readers as kids, or at least adolescents. So you have to have a certain acquired ability to know what a sentence is and how to string them together in some kind of coherent fashion. If you have that, you can learn and apply craft. As Welsh says:

Lastly, he must possess…the knowledge of dramatic principles necessary to relate his story in such a manner that the interest of his audience mounts steadily and is held to the end.

Boom! Can storyteller disagree with that? What’s the alternative? Not knowing or not caring about these principles? Writing merrily along with no thought about craft, then throwing up (and I use that term advisedly) untested, unedited books to befoul the marketplace and not sell?

What is plot? … It is a story woven around a central theme, which is usually a crisis in the lives of the characters. It has a definite beginning, which is at the time when the causes are born which gradually increase in strength and at the last give rise to the events which produce the climax, the height of the suspense and interest. It has a definite ending, which should come as soon as it has been determined whether the crisis overwhelms the characters or whether they pass through it successfully. The ideal plot is the plot of struggle, whether physical or mental.

Yes. I define plot as a life and death struggle met by a character exercising strength of will. Death can be physical, professional, or psychological. Think about the most popular novels of all time, and you’ll see a death struggle, an increase of “suspense and interest” leading to a climax followed shortly by THE END, thus avoiding anticlimax.

You do not have to follow your characters to the grave; the interest of the audience is over when the crisis is past. You may spoil the effect of a good story by trifling with its interest after that. That is part of the story-teller’s art that we spoke of as the third essential—the ability to know where to begin the story, so that no time is lost in useless detail, while at the same time making the necessary points clear, a knowledge of what incidents to introduce and how to group them so that they merge smoothly into the climax and the gift of stopping when the story is done.

Did you catch that? [T]he ability to know where to begin the story, so that no time is lost in useless detail. He would have loved our first-page critiques!

Make certain that your story is good by all the tests you can devise…

I have a great first editor (and wife), and excellent beta readers who see things I’ve missed. I know if I don’t fix them, readers will pick them up and experience “speed bumps” in the fictive dream. That increases the odds they’ll pass on my next book. No thanks. It’s worth the extra effort to polish the book.

Finally:

Typewrite your manuscript. Here are other rules of the game which the beginner often disregards: Write on only one side of the paper; use white paper about eight and a half by eleven; put your name and address on the first page of the manuscript; and, most important of all, enclose a stamped and addressed envelope for the return of the story should it be unavailable. Make carbon copies of all your stories.

Remember that! Stock up on carbon paper and don’t forget that SASE!

Ahem.

And there you have some timeless truths about storytelling. Ignore them at your peril.

by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

So we’re off and running into 2025. We’ve had some discussions of goals and resolutions, as is to be expected. Today I want to talk about something else—New Year’s diminutions. The things you should resolve to do less of in your fiction. Here are three.

1. Ditch Marshmallow Dialogue

Check this exchange:

“Hello, Becky.”

“Hi, Kelly.”

“So, how is everything at home?”

“Oh, you know, the same.”

“I do! I totally know about that. It’s like that at my house, too!”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“It’s good to know I’m not alone.”

“Yes it is. Awfully good.”

“Well, listen, I’ve got something to tell you.”

“Really? I’m all ears.”

Unfortunately, at this point readers are not all ears. If they’re not asleep, they are wondering why they are bothering with this story.

Dialogue without conflict or tension is squishy and sweet.

Like a marshmallow.

Marshmallows are for hot chocolate and S’Mores, not fiction.

There is no sign of trouble anywhere in these lines. This is the kind of talk that goes on every day in countless coffee houses and kitchens, bus benches and laundromats. It’s the talk that comes out of people without any care or worry at the moment of speaking.

Or, if they are worried, are good at hiding it.

Which is precisely the kind of talk we don’t want in our stories.

We want care. And worry. And we want to see it, or at least sense it.

Make sure all the characters in your book, from the majors to the minors, have both an agenda, even if it’s as simple as (as Vonnegut suggested) getting a glass of water. Put agendas in conflict. Boom. No more marshmallow dialogue.

2. Avoid the Expected

What makes a novel boring? I think the answer is easy: the reader expects something to happen, and it does. There is no surprise, no intriguing turn of events. And the characters are all out of the stereotype casting office. We’ve seen these people and this story before!

So try this:

Pause every now and then and think about your plot. Ask yourself what the average reader would expect to happen next. What are the stereotypical story tropes that immediately spring to your mind?

Take your time. Then ponder the list. All you have to do now is take the most obvious turns and do something different, maybe even the opposite of what’s expected.

When writing a scene, I always try to put in something unexpected. This can be as big as a new character or as small as a line of dialogue that is makes a reader think, Why on earth did she say that?

3. Fumbled Flashbacks

The first question to ask about a flashback scene is, Is it necessary? Be firm about this. Does the story information have to come to us in this fashion?

A flashback is almost always used to explain why characters act a certain way in the present story. If such information can be dropped in during a present moment scene, that’s usually the better choice.

Be very wary of starting your novel in the present and going too soon to flashback. If the flashback is important, you should consider starting with that scene as a prologue or first chapter.

These are guidelines. In the hands of a good writer, a gripping first chapter, followed by a compelling flashback, can work—see the first two chapters of Lee Child’s Persuader for an example.

If you’ve decided that a flashback is necessary, make sure it works as a scene––immediate, confrontational. Write it as a unit of dramatic action, and not as an information dump. Not:

Jack remembered when he was a child, and he spilled the gasoline on the ground. His father got so angry at him it scared Jack. His father hit him, and yelled at him. It was something Jack would never forget . . . [and more of the same]

Instead:

Jack couldn’t help remembering the gas can. He was eight, and all he wanted to do was play with it.

The garage was his theater. No one was home. He held the can aloft, like the hammer of Thor. “I am the king of gas!” he said. “I will set you all on fire!”

Jack stared down at the imaginary humans below his feet

The gas can slipped from his hand.

Unable to catch it, Jack watched as the can made a horrible thunking sound. Its contents poured out on the new concrete.

Jack quickly righted the can, but it was too late. A big, smelly puddle was right in the middle of the garage.

Dad is going to kill me!

Jack looked around for a rag, anything to clean up the mess.

He heard the garage door open.

And saw his dad’s car pull into the driveway.

A well written flashback scene will not detract from your story. Readers are used to novels cutting away from one scene to another. They will accept a cut to a flashback if it is written with dramatic flair.

My “rule” of thumb is: One flashback scene in a novel is enough.

Over to you. What do you want to avoid in your own writing?

Carpe Typem in 2025!

(This post adapted from 27 Fiction Writing Blunders—And How Not to Make Them!)