To Market, To Market, to Buy a Fat Killer Unicorn…

So today was supposed to be a new episode of the Tap & Gown show, but YouTube is giving me fits. Le sigh.

We had a big spring cleaning weekend Chez Diana. We beat the rugs and everything. (Rio is shedding, and if one knows a sure-fire way to get dog hair out of throw rugs, please let me know.) We also rearranged the furniture. We like it. Rio is…. less pleased. It means she can’t sit in her favorite spot and watch every denizen of the house at the same time anymore. Poor control-freak puppy.

Some interesting topics of conversation. First off, Courtney Milan responds to my earlier post about chasing the market. (Hi, Courtney!)

But the other thing you hear is the frustratingly vague answer you get from agents and editors when they are asked what they’re looking for.  Because while sometimes they will say, “Gosh, I’d really love to find a great story about a werestag,” most of the time, the answers they give look something like this:  I’m looking for compelling books.  Books you can’t put down.  Good books.  Books with a strong voice.  And of course, that seems like it’s no help, because nobody sets out to spend a year of their life writing a bad book that is not compelling, written in a grating, painful style, which readers must set down every other page just to prevent eye-bleed.  Nobody sits down and says, “yes, I am going to produce a book that cannot be saved.”

The market for compelling books is always strong, but it’s harder to talk about than the market for the former, and so when people talk about “market” it tends to focus on the stuff that’s easy.  Vampires.  Weredeer.  That kind of thing.  So the portion of the market that is easy to prognosticate over will overshadow the “compelling” part in discourse.  Which is why I was shocked to discover that “compelling” trumps market prognostication.

Which is interesting, because when Marley Gibson originally pitched Secret Society Girl for me at a conference (ain’t she sweet?), it was in response to an editor saying pretty much that whole werestag thing. She was looking for a book about a girl at Yale. Now, we didn’t end up selling the book to that editor, which means that other editors were interested without knowing, or that what really compelled them about Amy’s tale was something other than the fact that it was at  “Eli.” (In fact,  knew my editor was the one for me when she told me very early on that her favorite scene in the proposal is the one where Amy talks to herself in the mirror while brushing her teeth.)

But I digress. Point is, Courtney is right on. I think in some ways, writing to market is like gimme points (or, since we just finished that whole March Madness thing, it’s like being seeded higher in your bracket.) You’re automatically going to have a leg up if you’re writing soemthing in the clearly definable box of “we know we want more vampire boyfriend stories.” But vampire boyfriend stories are a dime a dozen, so from there, your story still has to be a super-compelling one to rise above the pack. If you don’t have vampire boyfriends, you might have a harder time getting your foot in the door, but once its there, and you’ve got a really compelling story on your hands, you can still push it through.

There were a fair share of editors who were like, WTH killer unicorns? They didn’t even want to give it a chance. Or they thought no one could get behind the idea. (And, to be honest, on my bad days, I worry they may be right. I’m still kinda baffled about how people feel the need to send me emails telling me the idea for my unreleased book that they’ve never read doesn’t appeal to them. Um, thanks for sharing?) But there were other editors who were like, “hmmm, you know, this is a bit like Buffy, and I love Buffy.” Or just, “killer unicorns: an idea whose time has come!”

(I feel it only fair to note, that unless your name is Sarah Rees Brennan, there are no killer unicorn boyfriends in this book. No, SRB, I don’t want to hear it. Sarah Cross can back me up on this one.)

So what you need is one editor to convince her acquisition team that they’re totally Team Unicorn and then you’re on your way.

(Well, you also need a cover. We’re working on that. Haven’t you seen how hard I’ve been working?)

I’m a big fan of the hot premise (otherwise known as high concept), but I do not under any circumstances believe that should trump storytelling. Premise is not your story. And premise is not what people who’ve read your story remember. Premise, I’ve discovered, is merely promise. If I tell you I’ve written a book about killer unicorns and the virgin warriors who hunt them, well, I’ve basically promised you lots of big unicorn battle sequences. If I tell you I’ve written a book about Ivy League secret societies, I’ve promised you scintillating secrets about the whole secret society world. If I tell you I’ve written a romance about an uptight marquess and the fortune teller he’s debunking, I’ve promised you frocks and nice houses and class struggles. But everything else is a surprise, and it’s probably the part you’ll end up remembering long after the book is closed.