Wondering How To Make Your Writing More Marketable?
This is one of my favorite topics around story craft.
I’ve been independently publishing books for about 15 years, and one of my favorite topics is combining storytelling and marketing. There is something so fun about writing content that is sticky and resonant with a large group of people. I have enjoyed doing it since my blogging days in 2007, and enjoyed doing it as I told stories about myself and my inner world, too. I’ve enjoyed it across poetry, fiction, and art. It’s been a passion of mine to unpack all the ways in which words and stories can be layered and played with.
For a while now, I’ve been taking my background in marketing (I have an MBA in marketing, strategy, and entrepreneurship and was a marketing executive in a past life) and combining it with my love of storytelling. But it has been a while since I pointed people to the place where my core philosophies and frameworks on writing stories started: two books I wrote in 2015 called Story Symmetry and Editing For Marketability.
How the Story Symmetry Framework from Story Symmetry Came About
After publishing my first novel back in 2011, I received some interesting feedback in the reviews of the book. The gist was that readers liked the story, but...
They were unsure of where things were going
It was a little boring at parts
The beginning was slow
The ending was a bit confusing
It didn’t feel like a whole story
The pacing was off in places
The world seemed cool but it was tough to understand
There were parts that felt like an info dump
Parts of the world weren’t explored very well
The characters were understated in parts
The characters didn’t quite come alive
The plot was a little crazy and winded all around, but thankfully it mostly came together in the end
The author left a lot of questions unanswered
It ended on a cliffhanger with no solid resolution to the story
There Are So Many Ways To Misstep in a Book
It turned out that there were a lot of things that I was doing well in my story, and I had the bones of the book in place. The creativity and depth was there.
Yet, to the trained reader who knew the genre, there was something…Off about the story. It wasn’t quite coalescing correctly. There wasn’t a clear, “Wow! This book was amazing,” type of a reaction. The author (me) didn’t quite achieve what she set out to do.
In reading my reviews, it became clear to me that I had the story, but I didn’t have the finesse to tell it as ambitiously as I was trying to. This didn’t have anything to do with line editing or making sentences flow more smoothly. Rather, it was entirely about the characters and the plot getting into alignment.
I had written the story through the “pantsing” method (writing by the seat of my pants, or with no outline), which wasn’t quite working for me because I didn’t have a clear idea of where all the parts of my story actually fit. I didn’t know how to tighten my character’s motivation or tie the cast of characters together under one umbrella theme. I didn’t know how to move the plot forward at a swift pace while still writing in the underlying emotional impact the events had on the characters. I didn’t fully understand what made great character arcs or theme or pacing or plot arcs or worldbuilding, and I definitely didn’t know how to get all of those elements together in alignment.
Story Structure Was Only One Piece of the Craft Puzzle For Me
I knew I needed to learn story structure—which I did—but I also wanted to go much deeper with the work of story structure. I wanted to connect the dots between various concepts for myself and for others. I wanted to write not just a passable book, or even a good book. I wanted to write an amazing book that read as smoothly as the gears of a clock turn to tell time.
As I read more and more story structure books, I began to see the Story Symmetry Framework in my mind. I saw story structure in layers and saw many of the large concepts mirrored in ways that surprised me. As a visual learner, it helped me greatly to see things like “character arcs” and “plot arcs” as buckets where I could put ideas or dive deeper if needed. For example, in the “character arcs” bucket, I could go deeper by picking up a book on fatal flaws, or picking up a book on character archetypes.
The end result was a framework through which writers could discover their stories at whatever starting point they preferred. Additionally, they could identify weak areas of their stories easily and go deeper in those areas by studying story structure specific to those areas or fleshing out a deeper outline in those areas.
How To Use Story Symmetry To Realign Your Book as You Discover Your Story
As I mentioned earlier, you can discover parts of your story at all points in your writing—outlining, drafting, and editing. What’s most important, though, is that you can recognize a misstep and realign your book, no matter which writing phase you’re in.
Think about it:
Editing is just rewriting or redrafting
Drafting is just expanding on an outline
Outlining is just editing your ideas before you write them
All that matters is that you start and keep going until you’re done. I’ll explain to you how to get started and how you’ll know you’re finished, so you have everything you need!
I also wrote Story Symmetry assuming that readers will come to it at very different phases in their book writing process.
Some of you will have nothing but the idea that you want to write a book
Some of you will have stopped and started your book draft a dozen times and have scraps and notes scattered across dozens of notebooks and folders
Some of you will have a few chapters or maybe even a partial draft and have no idea if you’re on the right track
Some of you will actually have a book draft in hand—but you really want to improve it and get things right before you move to the next step in the publishing process
Some of you will have a published book that didn’t turn out the way you wanted, that you’d like to revise into something amazing to increase sales (especially true for a first in a series!)
And some of you will have been writing stories for years, but just want to go deeper into storytelling craft and improve your book sales
This book will work for each of these situations!
What’s New in Story Symmetry
In the next iteration of the book, I’m adding more goodness to an already extensive book that is ideal for anyone wanting to tell a good story or up their story craft.
Since psychological triggers have been a big part of my success in nonfiction, I wanted to share my take on using them in fiction, too. Across Story Symmetry and Editing For Marketability, I call these Story Uplevels.
There are a few key areas where Story Uplevels are highly relevant to Story Symmetry:
Character Arcs - The original book does not cover multiple viewpoints or character arcs, but a newer framework I developed around connected and grounded energies works well for a romantic couple or a close friends on a journey together.
Fatal Flaw and Key Motivation - These internal and external symmetrical journeys are best understood and related to through six core wounds—abandonment, betrayal, control, injustice, rejection, and shame.
Thematic Elements - Since the book first came out as Nail Your Story, people have asked me to say more about Layer 4 - Thematic Elements. I will do that in this next edition!
Beyond the Layers - I’m also adding a section on systematically designing and writing scenes that hook readers. How do you find things that readers want to visualize, and how do you inject your story with them? We will talk about the breakdown of a scene in this section!
Why I’m Launching the Next Version of Story Symmetry on Kickstarter
One of my favorite things right now is a huge, chonky paperback full of knowledge. I love the thick, heavy pages that can handle highlights, annotations, folded corners, and writing in the margins. These paperbacks can’t really be made through regular print-on-demand with retailer distribution, so I’m taking the books to one of our printing partners who can make thicker, chonkier books for everyone in the campaign.
If you are not interested in paperbacks, that’s okay! The content overall is getting upgraded, which is always exciting. This book is already a reader favorite, but there are spots where we can go even deeper.
You can follow and back the campaign here:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/monicaleonelle/storymarketability/
The campaign runs from April 9th - May 3rd. I’d love to see you behind the backer wall!
The Story Symmetry Framework is hardly the only thing included in these two books. There are two other major frameworks that I want to share with you through this campaign!