Hype Your Story, Not Quotas
Figure out your best selling points, minus any potential spoilers
I’m in a number of writers’ forums, and having sold fiction (and sometimes non-fiction) pieces to publishers since the 1980s, I’m noticing a trend that I’d advise against embracing. When hyping your book, especially in your cover copy, tell people about your story, not the boxes you filled in a checklist.
Look around, though, and I’m sure, if you’re a writer or trying to become one, you’re seeing it, too. Doesn’t matter the genre, horror, fantasy, romance, YA, and even in the screenwriters’ groups — it’s as if story details have been pushed aside in favor of quota-filling. Imagine being in a bookstore, picking up a paperback with snazzy cover art, and finding this on the back:
Aniwaya, a bi-racial girl from a single-parent household is transported to another dimension, where she and her new friends, a transgender science ace, an AI droid with human DNA who discovers previous generations of his model were used as slaves, a bulimic, activist nerd who rebels against the stereotype, and an unwanted doglike creature named Wuff, abandoned due to being a mutt, embark on a journey.
That’s the kind of teaser-text I’m seeing. And, you know what? I might throw a buck at that book…if there was anything about the story, and not just which niche groups the author managed to cram in.
Know what the Hardy Boys series never needed to do? Ignore the book itself:
Fun-loving Frank and Joe go on a Summer trip with Greg, a competitive track star from a rival school. When they arrive, however, all the gym socks begin to disappear. Suspecting ghosts from the local cemetery, Frank, Joe and Greg join forces to brave the haunted graveyard to solve The Mystery Of… Sockit Tuya Island.
Boom — I got it all. Three guys on the opposite side of a conflict and some personal info, the terror of camping barefoot, odd disappearances, ghosts, plenty to entice me should I be looking for a YA mystery with some supernatural elements. In the first description, all I’m getting is hammered over the head.
Aniwaya might be great as a protagonist. Unlike Frank and Joe, though, who I know are fun-loving guys thrown in with an adversary who must overcome their differences to tackle an easy-to-identify problem, I’m given jack s#!t. Is it a gov’t conspiracy hurting this other planet? Is it that one of the multiple groups described is targeted by someone/something/a creature of interplanetary hunger? No, I’m just told how many diverse subgroups I can expect to get some ink.
And, you know what? There’s nothing wrong with that — if you can also give a reader (in all likelihood a stranger to your work) some reason to be compelled by the tale.
Just throwing a character into another group of people isn’t compelling, it’s a plot device. That’s not enough to carry a whole story, and certainly not a novel. Harry Potter does not sell, much less become a juggernaut, if Harry simply shows up at Hogwarts, hangs out with fellow young wizards, studies, takes tests, gets his grades, and goes home for the Summer. No, you need conflict and adversaries he must overcome and interpersonal relationships and mistakes and…
A story. A reason to open the cover or load up the ebook and get sucked in.
I’m a minority, I understand the appeal of using that to leverage readers into identifying with characters. But including heritage and culture, while necessary to give your characters depth, is like casting great actors for a film with no script.
You can’t just shoot a day of diverse actors making breakfast and going to work and coming home and tossing a frisbee to the dog and then going to bed and expect people to pay for tickets.
So, my advice? Figure out your best selling points, minus any potential spoilers. Hint at your conflict. By all means, include some character details that people can lock on to and make them want to know how it all fits together.
You don’t need a full synopsis, this is teaser hype. Keep that in mind. You’re painting a picture with a couple of well-crafted lines to draw people in. Do that well, and you probably won’t have to put your ebook up on Kindle for free every couple of weeks just to score some reviews.
Joseph M. Monks has been writing professionally since the mid-’80s (but please, try not to rub that in). His latest release, The Thirteen, concerning a young woman’s search for an apartment in New York, and the horrors she’s desperate to escape, is currently available on Kindle here.
