Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book?
It took me years to write, will you take a look?
It’s based on a novel by a man named Lear
And I need a job, so I want to be a paperback writer,
Paperback writer.

“Paperback Writer”

The Beatles

“SO YOU WANT TO BE A WRITER….”

As a reasonably successful new author, I frequently find myself speaking to writers’ groups, civic clubs and library patrons.  One of the most common questions I’m asked is “How do you go about getting a book published?”  I usually respond by asking the audience to raise their hands if they’ve ever wanted to write a book and have it published.  Inevitably, about half the audience admits that they have, and I have a strong suspicion that there would be more if everyone were entirely truthful. 

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard an aspiring author say after reading a book from the best seller lists, “I can write better than that!”  In turn, one of the most frustrating things for a new and unpublished author is to receive one rejection letter after another when he or she knows deep down that his or her work is at least as good as anything on the market.  It’s not easy, and the odds against success are formidable.  Much of this has to do with changes that have taken place in the publishing and marketing of books over the past two decades. 

In the 1980’s roughly 60,000 new books were published annually.  By the early 1990’s this figure had grown to over 100,000.  Last year approximately 175,000 new titles were published by mainstream publishers, an increase of 19% from 2002, and up nearly 300% from two decades earlier.  Add on to this figure an additional 80,000 self-published books, a figure that has grown by approximately 1600% in less than ten years!   It has become a crowded marketplace, to say the least. 

As if these figures are not enough to discourage any potential writer, a June 2004 report from the National Endowment for the Arts documents that over the ten year period between 1992 and 2002 the percentage of the U.S. adult population that reads any book declined by 7%.  Even worse, the percentage of those who read literature fell by an astounding 14%.

What do these figures mean?  Answered simply, it means that very few authors, even published ones, are “successful” in terms of sales.  It has been estimated that there are perhaps only a couple of hundred authors in the U.S. who actually make a decent income from their work.  The rest of us keep trying.

Complicating the huge number of titles flooding the market are equally dramatic changes in how books are sold.  At one time, most books were purchased from bookstores.   Today, mass market retailers such as Barnes & Noble, The Borders Group, Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. and others account for between 80 to 85% of adult fiction and non-fiction book sales.  The American Booksellers Association, traditional representative of the independent bookseller, has seen its membership decline by 60 % over the last decade.  This change may make it harder for an author to get his book “noticed.”

What about Self-Publishing, you ask?  It does seem to be the fastest growing segment of publishing, and if so many people are doing it, there must be something to it.  Historically, many well known authors from Benjamin Franklin to Edgar Allen Poe to Nathaniel Hawthorne published and sold their own works.   In recent years, originally self-published books that later hit the mainstream such as The Celestine Prophecy are cited as successful examples.  It seems a logical choice.  It’s all done electronically.  Books are marketed over the Internet and are printed only as orders come in.  But take a look at a few hard numbers.  According to Xlibris, a Philadelphia-based self-publishing firm quoted in an April 2004 article in The Wall Street Journal, only 3.4% of their published titles had sold more than 500 copies and only 14.3% had sold more than 200 copies.  Bookstores won’t stock self-published books because they can’t be returned if they don’t sell.  As a rule, newspapers won’t even review them. Teresa Weaver, book editor for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution states flatly that her paper “doesn’t review any books that are self-published.”  When asked, I recommend self-publishing only for cookbooks, family histories and for those would-be authors who are willing to pay to see their name on a book jacket.

Enough bad news!  If you really want to write, you should do it.  Success may not be quick or easy.  Steve Berry, successful Georgia coast writer and author of The Amber Room, had a manuscript accepted for publication only after receiving 85 rejection letters over a five year period. 

I am a fiction writer.  It is perhaps the hardest genre in which to produce a commercially successful novel.  Fiction writing is a craft, being neither a science nor an art but an amorphous combination of the two.  Quilt making, for example, is a craft.  There are certain conventions that one must follow as to size, shape, sewing, etc.  But there are other attributes that make each quilt unique—the pattern, the color, the stitching and so forth.    Following a few simple rules won’t make you an award-winning writer of fiction, but they will go a long way toward starting you in the right direction.  This is the “science” part; the art is up to you.  Here is my top ten list of informal rules for writing good fiction:

1.      Fiction is meant primarily to entertain.  As a corollary, the reading of fiction in today’s world is done as an alternative to something else.  You can watch TV, play golf, mow the lawn, or…you can read a book.  Works that ignore this primary rule are rarely, if ever successful.

2.      The most important single element is the plot.  This may sound terribly trite, but it’s true.  Ask a friend to tell you about a good book he or she has read recently.  Inevitably, the response will be, “It’s a story about….”  The key word here is story, meaning plot.  Even an average writer can make up for many shortcomings if the plot/story is riveting enough to hold the reader’s attention.

3.      The work should fall more or less in a particular genre.  In my experience, most readers will tell you that they like biographies, or mysteries, or romances, etc., and buy them for that reason.  A spy novel wandering off into a discussion of the international ramifications of what the politicians might have done to avoid the current situation distracts the reader.  A writer must not lose focus and must write for his chosen audience.

4.      The plot subject should be one that fascinates readers. Look, for example, at the recent success of Dan Brown’s The DiVinci Code.  Here you’ve got secret societies, clandestine religious sects, conspiracy, and occult codes whose solution may change the history of the world as we know it.  What more could you ask for?  There are lots of equally riveting topics out there.  As a writer, you must find one and made it an integral part of your work.

5.      The plot will likely be formulaic, but must be presented in such a way that the reader doesn’t feel that he or she knows the outcome.  If you will allow me to cite a movie, my favorite example is Titanic.  On one level we all know that the boat will sink by the time the final credits are rolling, but it’s what happens on the way there that makes for a great plot.  As another example, take Ian Fleming’s great series of James Bond novels.  We are horrified when 007 is captured and abused by the bad guys, but deep down we know that he’ll win in the end. 

6.      The plot and the characters in it must be ones that the reader can follow.  I personally can’t stand novels where I get about halfway thorough and have to go back and reread the first several chapters to figure out who everyone is.  Haven’t you read novels that leave you totally confused as to which direction things are taking, or which of the multiple subplots the author is in at the moment?  When I get into a novel like that I’ve been known to shut the book and toss it aside.  Plots and characters can and must be to a degree complicated, but not so much so as to confuse the reader. 

7.      A plot has to be interesting, but it is all the better if it is both interesting and educational.  In writing fiction, an author creates a world which by definition if not real, and through his plot helps the reader explore it.  To keep the reader’s attention, he must present the reader with interesting facts about this world, but it better if the reader learns something about the real world in the process.  Look at the success of historical fiction.  In my latest novel, The Rutherford Cipher, there is lots of interesting—and I hope accurate—information on Civil War history, codes and ciphers, book binding, Savannah, south Georgia and nuclear physics.  These little plot elements alone are one of the major reason that folks have told me they enjoyed the book.

8.      The reader must feel that he or she has become a part of the story.  This harks back to the first point I made, that the reading of fiction is a diversion.  I believe that to enjoy a novel, on some level one must become part of the artificial world that the author has created.  In my writing I try to achieve this by adding little snippets of reality, little asides that give a sense of verisimilitude to what otherwise might be routine prose.  I often hear from readers, “I could just see myself right there in the situation….”

9.      Most successful works of fiction have a central character who, sometimes in spite of and sometimes as a result of the action in the book, survives and is forever changed.  As a rule, you want your readers to become involved with your central character.  If the plot has been sufficiently interesting, you’re rooting for his or her success.  You just can’t kill them off or have them fail miserably.   In the real world things may not happen like this but, hey, this is fiction!

10.  Although the plot may have strayed thither and yon, in the end, it must be morally traditional.  The good guys should win.  Justice should be served.  The world should be saved.  Maybe things don’t really turn out this way in reality, but that’s why we read fiction.

So now you know my secrets.  Can adhering to these ten simple rules make you  successful?  Absolutely not!  But they may help, and maybe, just maybe, give you a little bit of an edge when it comes down to you versus the other would be authors in that stack by the editor’s desk.

If I had to limit myself to one simple bit of advice to a future author it would be this:  If you really want to write, then write.  It’s a mean, cruel world out there and you’ll probably be able to paper a small room with rejection letters if you’re serious about it.  And then one day, you’ll open that publisher’s letter and start reading, “We are pleased to inform you….”