How To Write a More Marketable Book That Sells Itself
Foolproof strategies for making sure your book aligns with buyers.
Did you hear? I have a Kickstarter happening right now to give a light refresh to two of my favorite books from my backlist, Story Symmetry and Editing for Marketability!
You can back the campaign RIGHT HERE.
Today I wanted to talk about my book Editing for Marketability (originally named Supercharge Your Story) and the idea behind it.
One of the most frustrating things I’ve ever experienced is spending over $7000 on editing and not seeing a return on investment in terms of book sales.
It was my first book and my greatest fear was that it wasn’t good enough—that I wasn’t good enough. I assuaged this fear by throwing money at the problem in the form of editing. Not surprisingly, it didn’t work out the way I expected!
This was my first hard lesson around writing a good book. Hiring an editor cannot fix all the problems with a book, nor guarantee that the book will sell enough copies to pay for the editing.
Although I appreciated the feedback I received through editing, I also realized that there was a type of editing I really wanted that didn’t seem to exist in the marketplace. I wanted someone who could help me sell more books. I wanted editing that didn’t just correct my mistakes, but that also helped me reach more readers.
Over the years, I became much more careful with who I hired to edit my work. I watched first-time authors make the same mistake I had so many years earlier, spending a ton of money on editing because it felt like a bulletproof vest to the many fears of publishing.
I watched authors who had published several books struggle to figure out where their books weren’t meeting the mark with readers. I was bothered by the lack of knowledge offered around how to really write books that people loved and that would sell, without the author having to sell out or sell their soul. It wasn’t story craft I was looking for—at least not exclusively.
It was marketability. How could I take the idea I already wanted to write and simply spruce it up to help it sell better? For a long time in my career, I struggled with finding answers to this.
Now that I’m twelve years into this career (at the time of this writing) and now that I have an extensive catalog, I’m once again searching for the thing that doesn’t really exist. Like many other authors who make their living through books, I want to know how to create that breakout book that can take my career to the next level and bring a ton of new readers to my backlist. But the training or the book or the blueprint for how to do this doesn’t exist.
At least, it didn’t exist until now, in Editing for Marketability.
Editing for Marketability contains a combination of things that are actually the same thing.
How to edit your book when you are starting out
Advanced strategies to write-to-market if you have several books out and are solidly low to mid-list
How to design a book from the ground up to be a breakout book so you can move from part-time independent author to full-time independent author and beyond
At the core of the book is the Book Virality Stack framework, which is six “Wow!” factors pulled from other marketing disciplines. But before we get into the six Book Virality Stack factors, I want to get all the obvious stuff out of the way. After all, this is meant to be a diagnostic to help you figure out what is making your books less marketable, as well as a diagnostic to determine where you can make your books more marketable so you can sell more.
In this post, we’ll cover all the common advice that people tell you to do and make sure you’re doing it already.
If you are a seasoned author with 30+ solidly selling books under your belt, then you likely don’t need this post. It’s included for completeness and as a disclaimer, as marketing requires a good product and story is the foundation of the Book Virality Stack. You can’t do much with this framework without having nailed your story first, so I recommend reading Story Symmetry and hiring professionals to help you with your covers, blurbs, and more as you embark on your fiction publishing journey.
What is Write-To-Market?
Writing-to-market means that you are making sure your book aligns with what people are buying. You are creating a product, your book, that fits the current marketplaces you are trying to gain an audience. Typically, you’ll have a cross-section of several categories that help you narrow in on specific targets:
#1 - A Specific Genre
You are likely writing in a specific genre or more likely, subgenre, like romance or, getting narrower, the contemporary sports romance subgenre. Each genre and subgenre has its own set of conventions and tropes to follow so that you can meet reader expectations.
#2 - A Specific Audience
You might be writing enemies-to-lovers office romance, for example, but you’re specifically aiming at female seniors who prefer their romances clean. That’s going to be a very different audience than aiming at twenty-something females who want their romances steamy. The former book might feature a woman in her fifties who is trying to hold onto her company when a seasoned corporate executive love interest buys her out, while the latter might feature a woman in her twenties who is trying to accelerate her career when the sexy billionaire CEO starts to pick on her and hold her back. These two stories have different emotional beats, and as you can imagine, target two very different women, despite both being in the same drilled down subgenre.
#3 - A Specific Retailer, Publisher, or Traffic Channel
The romance publisher Harlequin has a very specific set of reader expectations listed on their website for each of their product lines, as well as an extensive style guide for how to get accepted to their roster.
Similarly, Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited Program has voracious readers who also read very specific trends, such as prison academy reverse-harem paranormal romance. The US Kindle Unlimited pool of readers is always looking for the next big cross of tropes, which leads to very specific books getting created.
And finally, selling books at a table at a conference is wildly different from selling online. Online book sales are driven by search engine terms and very specific tastes, while in-person sales are driven by visuals, attention, and creating something that appeals to a large group of people (as you never know who will walk by).
#4- A Specific Format
Some content, like serials, is ideal for audio or podcast format, while it’s less ideal for print unless it’s packaged together in an omnibus. Likewise, image-heavy content might work better as a print book rather than an ebook, and translated material may work better when packaged differently.
Successful Writing-To-Market
To write-to-market successfully, you want to meet readers’ expectations across elements of your product like:
Your cover
Your book description
Your characters (especially your main one)
Your theme
Your emotional beats (usually tied up in the main character and fatal flaw)
Your tropes
Most of the advice around this is to read in the genre so you can intuitively know what all of these things are. This is great if you consider yourself a pantser or have time to read widely in your genre. It may also be appropriate if you are trying to have solid sales in a new genre, or if you are just hitting the market and want to guarantee sales.
At the same time, it can make you think that all readers want a specific thing that maybe they don’t need after all.
For example, let’s consider the superhero genre. If you were to look at past Marvel movies to decide what future heroes to create movies for, you would have to note that most of the superheroes that had had successful movies already were men. If you wanted to write-to-market, you would also make your superhero a man, because it’s tried and true.
But could you succeed with a woman? And could that be a greater breakout hit in today’s environment?
Captain Marvel is a great example of how what is currently available doesn’t predict the market. There was a lot of question over whether this type of hero and this type of story could succeed (it was a more emotional character arc which is more common in stories marketed to women), but as it turned out, 61% of viewers were men as opposed to Wonder Woman, which was watched by women more than men. There was also major backlash from a minority of male viewers, though this backlash fueled movie ticket sales. The movie ultimately came in at $1.1 billion globally.
Why? Outside of the gender swap and a slightly stronger internal character arc (that many core fans didn’t particularly like—more on this later), it was basically the same Marvel formula for origin stories. The emotional beats of the story were the same. In fact, they were looking for male actors to play the hero before the character’s gender was swapped.
The emotional beats (which include the theme and fatal flaw) are the most important things to satisfy your core readers, too. If you get the internal character’s arc correct, the surface-level traits matter far less.
Likewise, if you just make the character a man or a woman, but swap their personality and move away from the emotional beats, you will lose your core readers too.
Ask any romance writer who produces alpha male romances—will their readers enjoy a man who doesn’t have an alpha personality? The answer is an easy “no.” It’s not to say you can’t write that man (for example, a cinnamon bun), but you will likely be attracting a different set of romance readers with a small crossover from your current audience.
Tropes are ultimately just shorthand for what’s contained in the emotional beats. For example, let’s look at the typical alpha male trope in romance:
You expect them to be a jerk to the woman and everyone else around them at first. You expect them to be lewd, crass, and a total player.
But then, the woman is special and the alpha experiences her as interesting and different.
She gets him to open up, and we learn that the alpha has a dark secret past that makes all of his behavior make sense.
They come together, and then just when it seems like things will work out, the alpha runs away in some form.
At the last second, he comes back to be with the heroine.
The term “alpha male” is really just a shorthand for this particular set of emotional beats. It hits on the learned female desire to change a man. It plays into the danger of loving someone unpredictable, who could hurt you at any moment. It hits on humanity’s innate wounding around being “special” or the chosen one.
All of these emotions matter. The reader is not coming to this book for a jerk guy. They are coming to feel special and to see that the bad boy is really “one of the good ones” but just hiding it away.
The emotional beats (which ultimately tie to the theme, the fatal flaw, and the character arc) are what matter to the core reader. And even then, the core readers are only one factor of the Book Virality Stack. There are five others that are worth exploring beyond what most people would call writing-to-market.
This is what successful writing-to-market looks like right now. But now we can go deeper.
The Book Virality Stack
The Book Virality Stack has six factors of marketability:
Factor #1: Hooks to appeal to die-hard expert readers who read (and rate) everything in their favorite genre
Factor #2: Hooks to appeal to casual readers who read 10-20 books a year in their favorite genres
Factor #3: Hooks to appeal to a broad audience
Factor #4: Hooks to appeal to current + predicted trends
Factor #5: Hooks to appeal to our basal needs through marketing psychology
Factor #6: Hooks to appeal to Hollywood producers + readers who are true fans & evangelists
To explain how this stack works, let’s first start with your readers. Who are they and why do they want to read your book? If I asked most authors this question, their answers would probably be something like:
“My readers are [insert genre information here] and they want to read my book because it delivers on [insert genre expectation/trope here].”
I’ll give you some examples:
“My readers are young adult urban fantasy readers and they want to read my book because it is a lot like Twilight and they love vampires and ordinary human girls who fall in love with supernatural guys.”
“My readers are romance readers and they want to read my book because it’s a guy and a girl who are friends turned roommates turned lovers.”
“My readers are sci-fi fans and they want to read my book because it’s basically Star Trek with more women, bigger explosions, and funnier lines.”
All of this is well and good, but one thing to note is that each of these target audiences is extremely limiting.
How many people, for example, are sci-fi fans who want to read a book that is Star Trek with more women, bigger explosions, and funnier lines?
10,000? 100,000? The specific number doesn’t matter. Even if it’s a million, it’s still a tiny, tiny fraction of the potential audience for the book.
There are billions of people on this planet and that number is growing at an alarming rate. Additionally, there are dozens of governments and companies that are working on moving humanity into space and populating other planets, so who knows what the world is going to look like 20, 50, even 100 years from now.
Because of current copyright laws in English-language territories, your book rights remain with your estate up to 150 years into the future (your work doesn’t transfer to the public domain until your death plus 70 years, so if you are 20 years old now and you live to 100, you could have up to 150 years of holding onto copyright ahead of you).
Do you think you could sell 10,000 books in the next ten years? How about 100,000? Most successful authors have *already* sold 100,000 of the same book or series in just 2 or 3 years. And if you think about it, 100,000 books in one series at $3.99 is only about $270,000—enough to replace an average person’s salary for 3-5 years.
Much of writing-to-market talks about targeting only the die-hard fans of your niche subgenre. But if you actually do this, the math adds up to only about a mid-five-figure salary for about 3-5 years.
You can do the calculations for yourself… for your situation… for your genre...
The numbers are roughly the same for everyone. If you write to a small set of subgenre fans only, you are paying your bills for no more than seven years with that series. That doesn’t count saving for important things like retirement and down years either. This kind of thinking could unfortunately leave you on the hamster wheel of writing for the rest of your life.
And that’s the big secret—that the independent authors who have succeeded year after year and been in the business sustainably are not writing to just the die-hard fans of their genre.
When taught how to write-to-market, independent authors are told to be specific and go after just the die-hard fans. It’s not bad advice, as you can quickly build a profitable independent author business that way. The only problem is, over the long-term your backlist catalog will not be worth nearly as much as if you incorporated all six of the Book Virality Stack factors.
The real answer to the question, “Who are your readers and why do they want to read your book?” is that you have dozens upon dozens of verticals of readers (multiple target audiences)—if and only if you write your book in a way that you can attract those different verticals.
How can you discover these verticals? First, you need to know the three different types of audiences (and how to get what they want into your book or series). Then, you can come up with a list of verticals in each of the different types of audiences and market to their specific problems!
The three types of audiences are:
The die-hard readers of your (sub)genre (who most authors write to when writing to market)
The casual readers of your genre who only read 10-20 books a year total
The infrequent readers who don’t know much about genres and only read the top few books of the year (think Gone Girl, Big Little Lies, The Martian, Ready Player One, Bridgerton)
These correspond with the first three factors in the Book Virality Stack.
In the last three, we’re stealing storytelling principles from storytelling-adjacent disciplines—specifically news reporting and public relations, branding and promotion, and copywriting and sales. I’ve been studying and working in these three fields for the better part of the last ten years and have learned so much about storytelling as a result.
I also learned the principles behind all three of these fields when I was studying for my MBA at Chicago Booth. People in these jobs are working with big budgets (millions of $$$) and have to understand storytelling because they need to get it right on the first try (or lose big money and embarrass their company).
Not everything from these three disciplines applies to fiction or even to marketing fiction, but plenty of it does—and that’s the part that I’ve incorporated into my system.
My system merges what we know about storytelling and craft + the psychology and marketing best practices behind many of the biggest companies today.
In other words, we’re blending a ton of different disciplines into your book.
And it works. Really well, actually.
Hi! I want to back the campaign, but it says it’s still ‘coming soon’. When approximately is it going to launch?
Yeah I'm a bit late on launch. Tentatively (and subject to change) I'm hoping to launch on Tuesday 4/23