Just lately, I've been listening properly to what readers are saying about the books they love, and matching those remarks to the books themselves, and to the success of those books. Because the success of a book at market is a geometric assessment of its saleability, yes? Yes. By looking at YouTube, and reading Goodreads, and then actually buying and reading the books (!), I can say, without hesitation or fear of contradiction, that the quality of the writing -- the prose, the structure of the narrative -- has nothing to do with the success of a book these days. Perhaps it mattered in the past, but not now. Today, it's all about the story, plus how and why the central characters strike a chord with the reader, and also how easy the book is to read. Ease of reading is more important, apparently, than good grammar. Characters with whom readers identify or empathize are more important than a well-written, well-structured book.
O...kay. Like it or not, this is how the market shakes down in today's reading world. Publishers only exist to sell books, and they have to be able to sell them -- which means a writer has to be able to supply what readers will actually pay for (and this in a world where you could read forever without buying anything, because billions of words are archived online). And this, of course, kicks back through the whole machine, the train of reader - bookseller - publisher - agent - writer. It comes down to the inescapable bottom line: it's the reader, the end-user, who is driving the market. Publishers know this. They tell agents what to show them. The agents select from a never-ending Niagara Falls of submitted material, choosing just what they think (guess; judge; hope) will woo the reader to spend money on this book in a year or two. So --
Just what is it that this hypothetical end-user wants, and will spend a few bucks on? To answer that, you have to know who your end-user actually is. It might be a middle-aged man who wants a non-stop supply of Tom Clancy and Clive Cussler. It could be a septuagenarian lady who wishes there were a hundred novels on Colleen McCullough's backlist. But if you want the real money, today -- the kind of royalties that come from millions of copies sold, well...
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| The Gift of Prometheus ought to look more like this... |
Any one writer can't write to all of those marketplaces. A twenty-something woman who writes romantic fantasy (a cross between any Harlequin Romance and Game of Thrones) probably can't write to Tom Clancy's readership with any hope of seeing the royalties we all need to pay the rent, and vice versa. A writer is pretty much compelled to pick a marketplace and write to it. There's an old saying: "A writer must write of what she knows." (Yes, I know the original saying was "he," but I'm not a guy, and in today's world, everything is trending female.) So, being a female, I started to look at what women are reading, and which women are reading, and how much they're reading. Hmm. This is where it gets interesting.
It turns out that the big-success sellers among female readers are aimed at the New Adult market, or the late-late YA range, where kids are so close to grown that it's difficult to draw a line. I chased down three recent, real successes: the Leviathan trilogy (not so much this one, actually) the Hunger Games trilogy (this was big), and the ACOTAR series. A Court of Thorns and Roses ... the one that's being banned left and right in school and college libraries in the US. Yes, that one.
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| ...but will probably end up looking more like this! |
Hunger Games, meanwhile, is the kind of novel that gives parents nightmares while mid-teens revel in it. Dark, dismal, cruel, violent, with a thread of awkward, dawning romance, hints of sensuality, though there's nothing overt in the first one, where the central character is 16. The violence and cruelty are deliberate, often heavy-handed. Suzanne Collins was definitely writing for mid-late teens, and knew her target audience. Really, seriously knew those readers. She was older than them at the time when these books were written -- I believe she'd have been 45-ish, whereas her readers would have been 16-23, either the same age as the female hunter/warrior who is central to the story, or just a little older and easily able to look back and remember being that age. Hunger Games was also filmed as a major movie trilogy, so, whereas Leviathan was on the right track, it's safe to say, Hunger Games nailed it. For a start, the first HG book ran to a five, possibly six book series that has, to date, sold 100,000,000 copies, which is off the charts. The lastest volume, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, sold half a million copies in its first week of release, and a film was in production at the git-go. Who could have predicted all this? I doubt Suzanne Collins herself could have dreamed of such a result coming from a book that is, in reality, "children killing children." The subject matter is not to everyone's taste; nor this model the only fiction experiment that can be, and has been done, by other writers in a similar vein...
Take it to the next level (meaning, 'as close to full-throttle mature as you can get and still be 'New Adult'). A Court of Thorns and Roses has several things in common with these other two projects. It's aimed at young and very young readers (Hunger Games scored a bull's eye; Leviathan missed the target by a whisker but skewered the parents and grandparents instead, meaning it would be gifted at Christmas and birthdays ... not enough to drive a monstrous bestseller, but not too bad at all). It's dark. It's violent. It's cruel. It's written in a prose style that is so stripped and bare, it's often gauche, clumsy, amateurish (indeed, in ACOTAR, one finds a blizzard of grammatical errors, wrong-word errors, non sequiturs, incorrect word orders ... the kind of mistakes any good editor should pick up and correct. This was not done, and one speculates that the sheer clumsiness of the narrative line is some kind of "youth speak." This is the language in which one speaks to, and with, readers aged 16 to 23 -- i.e.., the work's target marketplace). And a young girl is the central character. In ACOTAR, the action pivots on Feyre Archeron, who is about 18, and who tells the whole saga, first person, past tense.
A pattern emerges.
Highly successful fiction these days tends to have female heroes. Young female heroes. Very young. They're hunters and warriors, fighting against the odds. They're mostly impoverished, borderline starving, underdogs, struggling against the current in a male world. And it's a dark world, brutal, cruel, dystopian. War is either looming, is happening, or has happened. These teenage girls are without exception strong, athletic, also probably stunningly beautiful into the bargain, though they themselves don't (yet) know it. They're indomitable; they also appear to be indestructible -- which is a direct holdover from generations of movies and television, a trend that began with Leia Organa, continued through Ellen Ripley, Xena, Sydney Fox, Sidney Bristow, Peggy Carter, Natasha Romanov and even Rose Tyler, forged ahead through Daenerys Targaryen, Arya Stark and Tauriel, and the pedigree culminates in our own decade with the aforesaid Feyre Archeron and Katniss Everdeen. Young. Stunning. Indomitable. Indestructible.
There is one more level that this archetype can be taken to, and Sarah J. Maas was the writer with the foresight and the guts to do it. Oh, it's been tried before, but the marketplace had to be juuust right before it was going to work like magic. You take the above formula, as explored by Leviathan (characters written too young, by a Dad figure who slightly misread his readers) and Hunger Games (the narrative explores romance; the writer pulls up short of crossing the line into more adventurous territory that might get the book(s) banned in school and college libraries), and yep -- you add sex. The explicit variety, which has been what teens have always really wanted, irrespective of what parents, teachers and priests have preferred to believe. Hey, I was a teen once myself. It was many, many years ago, and even then, my peer group was smuggling porn to school, albeit books and magazines whereas nowadays it's all about phone-driven images and videos, served by websites that may not even be legally available to younger kids. Legal or not, the stuff is circulating, and over the last decade, kids have lapped it up, with the result that teens are maturing faster and faster -- fast enough, in fact, for parents and teachers to be left behind and choking on their dust. Their kneejerk, in the US, is to ban the books. No surprise there
(I'm not here to debate the merits of growing up fast, or at what age curious, hormone-driven teens should be legally entitled to access adult entertainment. I'm too old to intuitively know where teenage heads and hearts are today. Neither am I an educator, parent or even grandparent who has contact with them to learn where those hearts and minds are, and what they might want and need. All I would do is offer up an outmoded opinion, sound like the dinosaur I probably am (chuckles), while adding nothing useful to a debate that belongs to other, better suited individuals.)
What Ms Maas did was to read her marketplace with genuinely awe-inspiring precision. Your readers are female, 16 and hormonal; they love Game of Thrones, Witcher, Carnival Row, Lord of the Rings; they're steeped in fanfiction, reading millions of words of largely-unedited amateur writing; this is their main source of sexy romance. Unpolished prose speaks their language ... either that, or they honestly can't see the grammatical gaffes, the errors in the writer's craft. (ZTF Zero Tolerance for Punctuation, remember?) Your reader is in the bookstore, looking for something that speaks their language, tells a vast, windmilling, fantasy or SF saga about an 18 year old girl who's (!) indomitable, indestructible, impoverished, starved, barely educated -- and whose feet are on the path that leads to tearing down empires.
A pattern emerges. And it sells -- ooooh, a lot of copies. ACOTAR is five books long, and each volume has sold about two million, in 38 languages. Okay, so that's the formula. It's the formula devised from actually listening to readers, respecting what they say, and reading the books with an open mind. Sure, I can see every single grammatical and writing gaffe, but I'm not going to criticize, because Ms Maas is the one who has sold 38,000,000 copies while I'm still wondering if I can score an agent. No, I have no taste for sour grapes, and I'm not afraid of hard work, and I'm both adaptable and open minded.
But I do wonder how The Gift of Prometheus should be crafted. Oh, yes, I do wonder. Craft it for me, or for the real, genuine readers out there in the bookstore? Because if I write it for me, it'll sound like Greg Bear and probably not even score agency representation -- and this is worth nutting this out before I settle down to turn a 25,000 word treatment into a 125,000 novel!
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