Almost any writer, editor, or reviewer can recognize why a book isn’t selling. Sure, it could be due to poor placement; self-publishers seldom realize the promotional power a carefully researched BISAC spread can give their title. But sometimes the answer is even simpler. Sometimes those writers, editors, and reviewers just can’t suss out what’s great about a book.???
It’s easier to pitch a manuscript or sell a published title when you can succinctly articulate its “gold.” What makes it great? What makes it stand out against all the other similar titles? Why should a buy—be it a literary agent, publisher, or reader—buy your book rather than someone else’s?
It’s not easy to figure out your own. You’re too close to the work to distance yourself emotionally from your own creation. But if you want to give it a try, here’s the Creative Analysis process I use to recognize a book’s strongest and supporting sales points.
- Critical objectivity. I start by divorcing myself from my own knee-jerk reaction to the material, good or bad. That lets me focus on the author’s sentimentality, and the emotional response they want to elicit in their reader—in other words, their perspective.
- Debate protocol. Once I recognize what the author’s trying to accomplish, I can reverse engineer why they wrote the piece. Most nonfiction titles are created in response to something or someone. Memoirists typically put fingers to keyboard because something happened that compels them to explain themselves or their decisions at this particular point in their life. Even novelists usually create because they want to answer or contrast or illustrate a particular something. When I figure that out, I’ve got their motive.
- Abstract reasoning. Authors tend to create in one of three ways: 1) they share every thought, experience, and nuance of an idea (which makes for laborious reading), 2) they share the high points or scenes or definitive information that encapsulates what they want to get across, leaving the reader to catch up with them as best they can, or 3) they find ways to repeat the same ideas, character traits, or concepts over and over, so the reader gets their message. Sorting through all that gives me their agenda.
- Focused ingenuity. This step wraps up the deconstruction process with two questions: “What if?” and “So What?” By applying a broad-stroke view to the manuscript or book, I can spot possibilities and value the author may not have thought of. And bingo—I now have the work’s potential.
Once I’ve isolated the work’s perspective, motive, agenda, and potential, it’s almost impossible to not see its strengths, weaknesses, easy fixes, and hard decisions.
As I said, this is not an easy process to apply on your own manuscript or book, but being able to articulate its value and obstacles will afford you an amazing boost in the marketplace. Give it a try. If you want some help, give me a call.
