How I Sell So Many Books

Let's get real. We're entertainers, we authors. We're part of the entertainment industry. I don't consider myself an artist. I consider myself a standup storyteller who has taken to the page instead of the microphone. It is extremely important that I keep this in mind if I want to sell books.

How does it play out, that I'm an entertainer who wants to sell books/entertainment to you? For one, I need to think of juggling--the constant movement and craft of keeping your eyes on what I'm doing. I do this with plot. Next, I need to engage your eyes in my craft: I do this with characterizations, drawing up real characters that you care about. Whether it's the fourteen year old victim of white slavery or the lawyer or cop who's in something way over their prior experience level, I need to give  you a viewpoint or a playoff character that you want to follow. You must want to know what happens to him or her or my story won't move you.

Next, I must clothe myself in the garb you want someone to wear onstage. I do this by dressing up my descriptions and narrative in language that captures your eye. This is done by giving you the view of the world that through my eye or my character's eye gives a unique view and an enchanting view. Even hard-boiled detectives can enchant with their world view when viewing a decomposing body. ("The twisted smile suggested he actually enjoyed his death. Or maybe it was just muscle contracture brought on by rigor mortis. I couldn't tell, and such is the ambiguity of death without a witness nearby.") (Yes, I just made this up as an example and you may use it in your own story with my blessing, should it fit.)

Finally I, a thriller-writer, need to scare the hell out of you if I want you--and I do--to keep turning pages. So there must be something or someone important to you at risk. This is about craft and it's akin to making you like someone, getting you invested in someone and then setting their bed on fire.

Having done all this, I'm going to entertain you. If I do it well enough you might tell someone else about the experience. Which is how the big sellers get sold.

Word of mouth.

There is no substitute.

Novel Length

Whatever you term the length of my more recents books--whether novel or novella--I am finding more and more that my readers appreciate less description of rooms, countryside, cities, clothing, entrees and drinks, and such standbys that many of us believe(d) we need for verisimilitude or filler or because we were good at details or all three. I've heard it in my thousands of reviews repeatedly that "the story moved along at a fast pace without all the descriptions [that readers typically encounter and skip over.]" I'm thinking that today's reader is greatly accustomed to the quick TV/movie pan of the city/building/interior that just a quick word or two in my writing accomplishes the same thing that twenty years ago might have required a paragraph. The upshot is that my stories are getting shorter and thus "seem" more action-driven without all the other stuff.

It's not uncommon for me to go for several chapters without ever describing what anyone is wearing, eating, drinking etc. My readers just seem to be happier without all that stuff. My work easily shrinks from 80K 70K accordingly. It's a win-win for me and my readers, the way I see it.

And as far as pricing, none of my readers complain about prices (typically 3.99 or 4.99) whether the book is 65K or 80K. It's a non-issue.

Unless a sentence is moving the story forward its utility is always questionable.

Panes of Clarity In Your Writing

Two things: narrative and dialogue. If it's narrative, all my people, including first and third, sound alike. Who cares? It's me telling the story even in the first person. I'm not cool enough to develop a language and style of delivery for a character. Just hints of it. Dropping g's on ing's, that kind of thing, but not even that so much anymore. Message to self: readers read you because they like your vision of the world. Everyone is looking to an appropriate vision of the world for themselves. If they like yours you gonna sell lots and lots of books. If your view is mundane, uninventive, apoetic, they're going to dismiss you as...boring. Writing is boring because it doesn't shock the reader with panes of clarity. Keep them turning pages with panes of clarity, a way of seeing the world that is all yours. FOR ME, that's the entire insight I need.

Dialogue-- I don't overdo differentiation so much. I used to, when I was J.D. Salinger. I used to, when I was Ernest Hemingway. I used to, when I was John Irving. But when I stopped being everyone else and just became myself, I have my little simple speech tricks (e.g., less educated people speak in shorter phrases. It's an observable fact. They don't expand on ideas because they don't talk about ideas. They talk about things and they do it in about 3-4 iambs a phrase. More educated people speak (not narrate, dialogue), as Anni so eloquently put it, through the filter of their personalities, yes, but also through the filters of their formal education. Lawyers sound like lawyers; nurses sound like nurses; librarians sound like librarians, and everyone's world view--as a character, not as the storyteller--better be through the lens the reader expects. Truckers better sound like truckers. Etc. But the main narrative, the storyteller's voice, is a whole other animal. That's where I get to be me. This is the definition of literary fiction: the ability to create characters with worldviews that light up the page. And these will be incredible world views and lenses for seeing that play against the narrator's equally incredible world view and lenses. That's what literary fiction does so well. An entire book is spent on pretense in literary fiction: the story of a burned-out college professor over one crazy weekend where he romances the chancellor of his college, gets her pregnant and at the same time saves a defeated student from annihilation. Michael Chabon's treatment in The Wonder Boys. The key is that when writers write literarily they're not really writing just the story, they're also imparting their world view because others have found/will find it interesting and shocking at times with its clarity.