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Do You Really Need a Book Proposal?

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in Proposals

Successful Fiction Writing = Creating + Organizing + Marketing

I blog weekly on one of the above three topics, alternating between them. This week, I’m blogging on Marketing. Specifically, do you always need to write a book proposal for your novel? Let’s start with the obvious question…

What is a Book Proposal?

A book proposal is a document you use to sell your novel to a traditional royalty-paying publisher. It spells out in detail the following:

  • What kind of novel you’re writing. 
  • Why this novel would be a good business deal for the publisher. 
  • Why you are the right author to write this book.

If that sounds intimidating, good. If you feel intimidated, you won’t underestimate the task, so you’ll do a better job at it. And this is one thing you want to nail. Learning to write a great proposal is an essential skill for anyone trying to sell a novel to a publisher. Essential. It’s not enough to write a good proposal. You need a great one. The market is extremely competitive, and the proposal shows a publisher that you’ve got the professional skills you must have in order to write a successful book. 

It also gives the publisher the information it needs to know where your book would fit in the marketplace, and how much of an advance your novel would be worth. 

But What If You’re an Indie Author?

You may be an “indie author”—meaning that you intend to act as your own publisher. Do you still need to write a book proposal?

You don’t have to, of course. You can just upload your manuscript to Amazon and the other online retailers. They won’t ask for a proposal. 

But if you’re not an experienced novelist, I still recommend that indie authors write a proposal. Pretend you’re trying to sell your book to a publisher, a corporation that needs to earn money on the books it publishes. This will force you to think like a publisher. It will make you think about the marketability of your novel. Small changes in a book can make a big difference in its marketability. Which may very well earn you a lot more money when you self-publish your book. 

How Do You Write a Book Proposal?

This is a large subject. Whole books have been written on how to write a proposal. So I can’t say everything here. But I can tell you the parts of a proposal and give you some tips on how to write each section. Most agents will tell you on their website what they want in a proposal. I strongly recommend that you read any agent’s guidelines very carefully and follow them. Ignoring an agent’s guidelines is a good way to get an instant rejection. 

Here are the main parts of proposals that I’ve written in the past:

  1. Cover page—one page with the following elements:
    • Title of the novel
    • Name of the author
    • Mailing Address of the author
    • Phone Number of the author
    • Email Address of the author
  2. Executive Summary—one or two pages with the following elements:
    • Working Title (Call it “Working Title” because editors all think they are smarter than you, and they’ll want to change your title. Sometimes they’re right.)
    • Target Audience (Define your audience by their “psychographics”—how they think and what they want. Defining a target audience by their “demographics”—age, sex, etc.—is rarely as relevant.)
    • Category (For example, Romance, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Historical, Horror, etc. You will probably want to specify a subcategory also, because each of these main categories is very broad.)
    • Word Count (Round this to the nearest 10,000 words. If you haven’t finished the manuscript, estimate the word count. Word count matters to a publisher, because it translates into page count, and every page costs money. The publisher will hold you to the word count you give in your proposal, so get this right.)
    • Completion Time (The time in months that you estimate it will take to finish the manuscript after you sign the contract. If you are previously unpublished, this is probably irrelevant, because you usually have to have the manuscript already completed before your proposal will even be considered.)
    • Story Summary (Write a one-paragraph summary of your story. This should reflect the 3-Act Structure of your novel. You can take this straight from Step 2 of the Snowflake Method, if you’re a Snowflaker.)
    • Similar Books (Name some books that are “similar” to your novel in some way. One paragraph on each is enough. Don’t assume that the person reading your proposal has read any of these books. Tell how your book is like each book, and how it’s different. Resist the urge to put down the other books. It’s enough to show how your book is “different”; you don’t have to show that it’s “better.” Resist the urge to compare your novel to books that have sold millions of copies. Yours probably won’t, so it’s best not to make yourself look delusional.)
    • Platform (Describe your channels for reaching your Target Audience, with hard numbers. Maybe you are a public speaker and speak to 5000 people per year. Maybe you have a blog or email list with 5000 subscribers. Maybe you have a Substack with 300 paid subscribers and 12,000 free subscribers. Maybe you have 100,000 followers on Facebook, or 300,000 on TikTok, or 5,000,000 on X, and hopefully some of these are not bots. Publishers know that social media follower count is not very meaningful and rarely translates into sales, so highlight the communications channels that work best—speaking, email, blogs, Substack—if you have them.)
    • Research (An optional paragraph or two spelling out any research you might have done for this novel, or any unusual qualifications you might have. If you are writing a hard science fiction novel and you have a PhD in physics, this is a nice place to say so. If you are writing a historical novel and you have a degree in history, that’s relevant. Resist the urge to brag. If your novel doesn’t require any research, skip this section.)
    • Endorsements: (An optional list of people you’ve lined up to endorse your novel. If you’re a beginning novelist, you may not know anybody who could endorse it; in that case, leave this section out. Never say that you will get an endorsement from a certain person unless you have already asked them and they have written the endorsement or have promised to write one. Endorsers should be relevant to your novel.)
  3. About the Author—one page with a long paragraph or two of relevant information about the author. If you have published any similar book, that’s relevant. If you have any degrees in creative writing, that’s relevant. If you have credentials that relate to your book, that’s relevant. If you have been reading since the age of four and “love reading,” that’s not relevant; most authors began reading early and they all love reading. If your mother loves your novel, that’s not relevant, unless your mother is a well-known author or a celebrity. 
  4. Synopsis—typically one or two pages summarizing the plot of your story. This is the most boring thing you will ever write in your entire life, but all agents and editors insist that you include it, so grit your teeth and do it. If you’re having trouble grinding out your synopsis, here is a blog post I wrote a few years ago on Writing the Perfect Synopsis for Beginners. 
  5. Character Sketches—this is optional, and very few authors write these, but they are the secret sauce that I’ve put in all of my proposals. Editors and agents love these. Love, love, love. A strong set of character sketches can turn a good proposal into a great one. I did a blog post on Your Secret Weapon—Character Synopses not too long ago that has a nice example of how to do this. 

For those of you who use my software, Snowflake Pro, I’ll note that it generates a book proposal with most of the sections filled in. You have to work through the Snowflake Method process first, and then the software creates an RTF document that you can import into your word processor and finish. I don’t sell Snowflake Pro anymore, nor do I support it, but it still works just fine. If you need a running start on your proposal, it will get your rolling. 

If you mail in your proposal on actual paper, you will also need a cover letter—a one-page letter of about four paragraphs that does the following:

  • Introduces you to the editor or agent (or else reminds them of how and where you previously met them, usually at a writing conference). 
  • Describes your story in two or three sentences. This includes the category of your novel, sets the backdrop for the story, and then tells enough of the Three-Act Structure (up to about the First Disaster) to hook the editor or agent’s interest. If you’re unclear on what the First Disaster is, you can review it in my blog post Writing That Pesky Three-Act Structure. 
  • Optionally mentions any special qualifications you have for writing the story. Also tells whether you are previously published and gives a few details on your most recent book or your most successful book, if any. If you are unpublished, say you are a debut author and mention any degrees in creative writing you might have. Avoid puffery here. Just keep to the facts, like any professional would. 
  • Closes with a paragraph saying that you’re enclosing a proposal and three sample chapters. (If the editor’s or agent’s website specifies more or fewer sample chapters, then do what they request.)

It’s much more common these days to email your proposal. If you do that, the body of your email should contain the above information, so you don’t need to attach a cover letter. You should attach the proposal and sample chapters as Microsoft Word documents. Word is the standard in publishing. Whether you love it or hate it is irrelevant. Don’t make an editor or agent do extra work to read your proposal. 

How Do You Know if Your Proposal is Any Good?

The first proposal you write will probably be awful. That’s OK. Every author who ever lived has written an awful first proposal. My first three were awful. I don’t think anyone ever died of writing an awful proposal. However, many novels have died of this disease, so you really do need to get beyond this stage. An awful proposal is the necessary first stepping-stone to a great one.

You can’t cure a problem you can’t see, so you need an honest diagnosis of what’s wrong with your proposal. The only people who can tell you are publishing professionals with experience in writing or reading proposals. 

And who are these mysterious “publishing professionals?” It’s a small group: 

  • Editors
  • Agents
  • Authors who have written numerous proposals and have used them to sell a novel to a traditional, royalty-paying publisher. 

If you already have an agent, send the proposal to your agent. They will almost always have suggestions to improve it. A good agent will make good suggestions. That’s one way to know you have a good agent. 

If you’re good friends with an author who’s been published by a traditional royalty-paying publisher, that’s ideal. Most authors are happy to help a beginner whom they know well. 

If you don’t know any publishing professionals who could critique your book proposal, then you need to find one. You might take a class at a local community college, as long as it’s taught by a published author. Once you get to know your teacher, you can ask them to have a look at your proposal and tell you what’s wrong with it. 

An alternative is to go to a writing conference that offers appointments with publishing professionals. Conferences are expensive, so if you take this route, make sure the conference offers one-on-one appointments with faculty members. When you get to the conference, make appointments with one or more people who seem to be the best fit for your novel. Appointments are usually 15 minutes, so you won’t have a lot of time. Say right away that you are a novice writer learning to write a proposal and you would like a critique on your current best effort. If you’ve made an appointment with an author, they will empathize and will be amazingly helpful. If you’ve made an appointment with an editor or agent, make it clear that you are not pitching the book to them. Tell them you are trying to learn how to write a proposal and this is the best you’ve come up with so far, and ask them to critique it. This takes the pressure off them. Editors and agents have to reject a lot of pitches at a conference, and this wears them down. Asking them for a critique instantly changes an adversarial relationship into a cooperative one. Now they’re on your team. They are no longer looking for a reason to say “no.” Now they’re looking for how to get you to “yes” with somebody else, someday. If they spot a gaping flaw in your proposal, they may also suggest how to fix it. 

What Do You Do With a Book Proposal?

The purpose of a book proposal is to provide written information on a proposed business partnership between you and a publisher. A proposal is the tool you use to sell your novel to a publisher. It’s the only tool most writers will ever have. 

Most publishers require you to submit your proposal through an agent. (Not all publishers do, but most of them do.)

If you don’t have an agent and need one, your proposal is your ticket to getting one. Look for suitable agents online, read their guidelines, and follow them to the letter in making contact. It is better to do a carefully targeted submission to one agent than a scattershot submission to a thousand. Yes, really. A targeted submission has a low probability of success. Scattershot submissions have zero probability. Don’t use AI to write your submission. Use your own personality. Humans can tell the difference. 

If you have an agent, send your final, polished proposal and sample chapters to your agent. You will probably have been through several rounds of revisions with them, as I mentioned earlier. They’ll create their own cover letter and submit your proposal and chapters to suitable publishers. 

If you’re submitting your proposal to publishers who don’t require an agent, review their guidelines carefully and follow them to the letter. Just as with an agent, it’s better to carefully  target a few publishers than to shotgun out hundreds of submissions. 

If you’re an indie author and have a proposal, you don’t need to do anything with it. The act of writing the proposal forced you to “think marketability.” Which changed the way you wrote your novel. And changed the way you designed your cover. And changed the way you wrote the sales copy for the online retailers. And made your book better in a thousand ways. Upload your novel and reap the rewards. 

Homework:

  • Do you need to write a proposal? If so, what do you hope to gain by writing it? If not, why do you not need one? 
  • In case you need to write one, give yourself 5 hours to write a first cut. This may take several days of calendar time, but 5 hours of clock time is just enough. Don’t overthink this. Sit down and drill it out. The first cut is just a first cut; it doesn’t have to be pretty. 
  • Once you have a first cut at your proposal, make a plan for how you’ll polish it. You have a lot of options. You can read through it yourself, pretending you’re the marketing director of a major publisher. You can show it to your critique group. You can show it to a published author. You can show it to your agent, if you have one. You can take it to a writing conference and get it critiqued. Make your plan. Then execute it. 

How Long Does it Take to Get Published?

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in Career Management

Successful Fiction Writing = Creating + Organizing + Marketing

I blog weekly on one of the above three topics, alternating between them. This week, I’m blogging on Organizing. Today I’m writing about how to map out your writing career—what can you expect and how can you optimize things?

What’s Normal in the Publishing World?

I know a writer who signed her first publishing contract after working on her novel for 26 years. She went on to write a number of award-winning novels. 

I know another writer who was a novice writer when I met her at a conference, and she signed her first publishing contract less than a year later. She went on to write a number of other novels and has done well with them.

I know another writer who uploaded her first novel to Amazon as a self-published work, and it sold pretty well. Then it sold very well. She went on to write a number of other novels that have also done very well. 

I worked about 11 years learning the craft of writing before I sold my first novel to a publisher. I went on to write several more award-winning novels and 3 best-selling books on how to write fiction. 

If you’re looking for a pattern here, there isn’t one. There is no “normal.” Other than persistence. Some writers have to persist longer than others, but persistence is what gets you there—if you do actually end up getting there. 

But I also know many writers who have persisted for a long time and never got published. Or they self-published and got no sales. 

So how do you plan your writing career, when you don’t know whether it’s going to go anywhere? Let’s talk about the stages of a writer’s career, and how to know which one you’re in, and how to move on to the next level…

The Four Stages of a Writer’s Career

Your life before you get published is a lot like high school. It can be a miserable experience or a fantastic experience, or both, or neither. But your success after graduation has no correlation with how much you enjoyed high school. Your success in life has all kinds of correlation with the amount of work you put into getting a good solid high school education. 

I see four stages in a writer’s pre-published life, much like the four years of high school—freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior. And yes, I know some people go to middle school from 7th to 9th grade, and then high school only takes up three years. So the metaphor’s not perfect. But let’s run with the four-year analogy, because it has a lot to tell you about where you stand and what you can do to graduate.

The Freshman Writer

A freshman writer typically has been writing for less than a year. The freshman has an idea for a novel. Maybe she’s been mulling it for a long time, but one day she decides to actually write the thing. So she sits down and starts typing. 

Some freshman are amazingly energetic. They can drill out several hundred pages in a few weeks or months. Others are agonizingly slow. They may take years to get the first ten chapters written. 

What is common to most freshmen is that they don’t start out getting any feedback on their work. They just type words. They may think the words are amazing. They may think the words are hopeless drivel. They are generally wrong on both counts. Freshmen typically don’t have the skills to assess their own work. And (in most cases) they will continue to be freshman forever unless they get some help. 

What kind of help? There are all kinds of help. The right critique group can move you along very quickly. (The wrong critique group can crush your will to live.) A good coach can tell you what you’re doing wrong and show you how to do it right. Sometimes, a community college class on writing is all it takes to get a freshman moving in the right direction. Or a few good books on writing. Or a writing conference. Some writers choose to get an MFA in creative writing. 

A personal note: I was a freshman for a couple of years. What kicked up my game was going to a good writing conference, getting hooked into a quite decent critique group, meeting some writing buddies, and reading a couple of spectacularly great books on how to write fiction. 

Every writer is different. What worked for me won’t necessarily work for you. But every writer needs some kind of help. Once you get the right kind of help and use it to improve your writing, you will rapidly advance over the next year or so to the next stage… 

The Sophomore Writer

A sophomore writer is starting to write pretty good fiction. If she’s in a critique group, she is the best or second-best writer in the group. If she’s working with a coach, the coach has taught her most of what they have to teach. If she’s taking a class at a community college, she’s getting an A or an A+ in the class. If she’s reading books on craft, all the books are starting to sound the same. 

It’s easy for the sophomore writer to think she has arrived. She is now publishable, because she’s getting As, right? No, wrong. Getting an A in your local community college writing class is not enough. It’s a start, but it’s not going to get you a writing contract. Yes, you write better than 99% of all humans. But there are still hundreds of thousands of writers who write better than you. This is a hard truth to hear, but it’s still truth. 

There is a big difference between “good fiction” and “marketable fiction.” What is common to all sophomores is that they don’t understand what makes a novel marketable. Sophomores (in most cases) are going to remain sophomores forever until they get help.

What kind of help? For the most part, reading more books is not going to have much value. You’re going to have to interact with real humans, people in the publishing world. You can go to writing conferences and make appointments with editors or agents. (If this sounds terrifying, then I have been unclear. This is utterly traumatic.) You can join a group of online writers that includes actual published authors. You can hire a high-priced editor with experience in the publishing world. 

One way or another, you’re going to need to learn how to write a book proposal. I recommend doing this, even if you intend to self-publish. Writing a book proposal will expose all the gaps in your understanding of marketability. If you show your proposal to anyone with experience in publishing, they’ll point out all the things you don’t understand about the realities of modern publishing. And that will be good for you, if you let it. 

A personal note: The first book proposal I wrote was spectacularly awful. It ran on for about 200 pages, which is ten times too long, but I didn’t know any better. I lugged a couple of copies to a writing conference and made appointments with two real, live editors. Both were far, far, far kinder than I deserved, and I learned something from them. My second proposal was better; it was merely awful. My tenth proposal was quite good. 

Every writer is different. One way or another, you must find some way to learn how to make your novel marketable. Because an unmarketable book is not going anywhere. Once you’ve figured out the marketability thing, you’ll wake up one happy day to discover that you’ve advanced to the next stage…

The Junior Writer

A writer in her junior year is writing very good fiction. She’s writing very good proposals. But she is not yet writing at the professional level. “Very good” is fine if you want to impress people in your writing class or your critique group or your fellow writers at a writing conference. It’s not enough if you want to impress an editor or an agent. 

You need to get better, if you want to advance. You get better by writing more pages of your manuscript. And by writing more proposals. And by showing your work to publishing professionals. And by learning how to tell good advice from bad advice. You will get both kinds. From very intelligent, well-meaning people. It’s on you to know which advice is right for you and which is wrong. The same advice can be perfect for one writer and awful for another. 

A personal note: I spent several years at the junior level. That was longer than it should have taken, but I was very busy with other things in my life—young children, new house, demanding job. I worked on my novel most days. I went to a local conference once a year. What I needed was to go to larger conferences with more editors. Once I started doing that, I quickly broke through to the next level. (“Quickly” means it only took two years.)

Every writer is different. You will need to find your own path to advancing your skills. You will need to work hard. You will need to find your writing voice, so that no AI on the planet can copy you. You will need to understand the psychology of your Target Audience, so that you can write exactly what they’re dying to read. If you do that long enough, you’ll realize one day that you’ve moved on…

The Senior Writer

A writer in her senior year is in the zone and in perfect misery, both at the same time. She is writing the best fiction she’s ever written. She is writing amazing, powerful proposals. She is showing her work to editors or agents on a regular schedule. She is getting back all kinds of warm, glowy feedback, all of which ends with, “…but it’s not quite right for us.”

What’s wrong here? The senior writer who is committed to selling her work to a traditional publisher spends a lot of time angsting about this. Why is she getting all kinds of bites, but never pulling in a fish?

The answer is time. It just takes time. You need to connect with the right editor or agent, at the right time in their life, at the right time in the publishing world. That can happen fast or it can happen slow. It may never happen. That’s the risk you take. 

A personal note: After writing for nine years and creating many proposals and going to many conferences and meeting with many editors, I sat down across the table from an editor at a conference. We made small talk for a few minutes, and that went badly. We talked about my novel idea for a few more minutes, and that went catastrophically. The editor, in complete exasperation, asked if I had a writing sample. I pushed five pages across the table. Two minutes later, he pushed them back and said, “Send me a proposal.” A year later, he called to ask for the full manuscript. Nine months after that, he called to make me an offer. My first novel appeared on the shelves about 12 years after I started writing. A year later, it won a major award in its category. 

Every author who has ever gotten published traditionally has been through this hellish senior year. It’s a horrible time, because you know in your heart you deserve to be published. And it’s not happening, not happening, not happening. Until one day it does. One day, you get a call and you have an offer. Without any warning at all, you have graduated. You’re about to move on to a whole new realm of existence, which may not be all you expected, but it will be different. 

One way around the brutal senior year is to simply self-publish your work. Why bother with a traditional publisher who takes forever, when you can just upload to Amazon and click Publish? That’s a question for another day. I will say only that self-publishing works wonderfully well for some authors (it has done very well for me), while traditional publishing with a big corporate publisher works fantastically for other authors (I did OK with traditional publishers). 

If you want to self-publish, go to it and have fun! You’ll be very glad you learned how to write a book proposal, because that knowledge will guide you in your marketing efforts. If instead you work with a traditional publisher, you’ll be even more glad you learned to write a proposal, because that’s how you make it happen, if it’s going to happen. 

Is All This Struggle Worth It?

Yes. Any published author will tell you the same thing. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes! The-diner-scene-in-When-Harry-Met-Sally yes. 

The writing life is hard. It’s hard, whether you’re published or unpublished. It’s hard whether you work with a traditional publisher or you act as your own publisher. You’re going to sweat blood to learn how to write. You’ll sweat more to learn how to make your work marketable. You’ll sweat more to achieve mastery. You’ll sweat more to find exactly the right publishing opportunity. You’ll sweat blood until the day you hang up your spurs, or the day you die in the saddle, whichever comes first.

You will hate very minute of it. You will love every minute of it. I wish you the very best of luck. 

Homework:

  • If you are not yet published, what stage are you currently in—Freshman, Sophomore, Junior, or Senior? What actions can you take today and this week and this month and this year to advance to the next stage? 
  • If you are currently published, are there writers you know that you could help move forward in their writing career? What actions could you take to help them advance?

What “Show, Don’t Tell” Actually Means

by 1 Comment

in Craft

Successful Fiction Writing = Creating + Organizing + Marketing

I blog weekly on one of the above three topics, alternating between them. This week, I’m blogging on Creating. Today I’m blogging about the completely useless advice that every novelist has been given: “Show, Don’t Tell.” What does that mean? What are you supposed to do with it?

The World’s Worst Advice

Lazy editors since the beginning of time have scribbled “Show, Don’t Tell” on novel manuscripts and handed them back to novice writers without any explanation. If you’ve ever been infuriated by this advice, you’re not alone. It’s bad advice. 

The reason it’s bad advice is that it tells you to “Show, Don’t Tell,” when you need to be shown how to “Show, Don’t Tell.” It’s very meta, in the worst possible way. 

I’m thinking that the next book I write in my Advanced Fiction Writing series should probably cover this topic. But I haven’t written that book yet. I did spend a couple of chapters on the subject in my best-selling book Writing Fiction for Dummies (see chapters 10 and 15, if you have the book). In this blog post, I’ll lay out the basics. 

The 7 Tools of a Novelist

Novelists typically use 7 tools to write their stories. Here they are (and I’ll define them, with examples, a bit further down in this article):

  1. Action
  2. Dialogue 
  3. Interior Monologue
  4. Interior Emotion
  5. Sensory Description
  6. Narrative Summary
  7. Exposition

The first 5 of these (Action, Dialogue, Interior Monologue, Interior Emotion, and Sensory Description) are what editors mean by “Showing”. The last 2 (Narrative Summary and Exposition) are what editors mean by “Telling.” 

None of these are “always right” or “always wrong” to use. Each of them has a place, and part of the art of fiction writing is knowing which tools to use for any given paragraph. When an editor scrawls “Show, Don’t Tell” in your manuscript, they mean that the particular section they marked should use the “Showing” tools, rather than the “Telling” tools. 

But you can see the problem. Just saying “Show, Don’t Tell” doesn’t give you any guidance on which of the 5 “Showing” tools to use. Nor does it give you any insight into why Narrative Summary or Exposition was the wrong choice for the offending paragraph. 

This is a large subject, so the best I can do in this article is to give you definitions of each of the tools, along with examples.

What Action Means

Action means that you show your characters doing something. Here is an example:

Hermione swung her heavy sword at the werewolf’s neck. 

The werewolf ducked and lunged straight at her.

Hermione twisted hard to the right and kept spinning clockwise. She brought her sword up to chest level and threw all her weight into the swing. 

The sword bit into the werewolf’s throat. 

The above snippet is pure action. Nouns and verbs. If you do your Action right, you create a video in your reader’s brain.

What Dialogue Means

Dialogue means that you show your characters saying something. Here is an example:

“Are you going to answer my question?” Mr. Darcy said. 

Lizzie scowled at him. “You are the last man on earth I should ever be prevailed upon to marry.”

The above snippet is mostly dialogue. Words within quote marks. The first sentence ends with a dialogue tag that tells us who the speaker is—Mr. Darcy. The second sentence begins with an action tag for Lizzie. When writing dialogue, you can use either kind of tag, or you can leave the tag off completely, if you’re certain the reader will know who’s speaking. If you can’t be sure, it’s best to include a tag. If you do your Dialogue right, you create an audiobook in your reader’s brain.

What Interior Monologue Means

Interior Monologue means that you show one of your characters thinking something. You often put this into a paragraph that also includes Action or Dialogue. There are two flavors of Interior Monologue, direct and indirect. Direct Interior Monologue shows the thought in exactly the words the character thinks them. Indirect Interior Monologue summarizes the thought. Here are examples of each, paired with Action:

Katniss fired an arrow at the Gamesmakers’ table. Have a nice day, bozos.

Katniss fired an arrow at the Gamesmakers’ table. She didn’t care if it hit any of them, as long as they got the message. She was not somebody to ignore.  

The first snippet is direct Interior Monologue; the second is indirect. Direct Interior Monologue is often italicized, but not always. It is never necessary to add a tag, such as “Katniss thought.” Most novelists choose to get inside the head of only a single character (the “viewpoint character”) in any given scene, so the reader will always know who is doing the thinking.

If you do your Interior Monologue right, you create an audio voiceover in your reader’s brain.

What Interior Emotion Means

Interior Emotion means that you show your viewpoint character feeling some emotion. This is not as simple as telling the reader what the emotion is. That is considered “telling.” Instead, you typically do this by showing a physiological reaction that implies an emotion. A little Interior Emotion goes a very long way, so you almost always team it up with Action, Dialogue, and/or Interior Monologue. Here is an example:

“Just give me your wallet and everything’s going to be fine.” The knife point pressed lightly into Reacher’s back. All his body suddenly felt cold. He knew that voice. He’d heard it on six different tapes. This was the RSB killer—Rob, Stab, Burn. Everything was not going to be fine.

This paragraph begins with Dialogue, followed by Sensory Description—the knife point in the back. The  only Interior Emotion is the short sentence in which Reacher’s body goes cold, a feeling that is commonly associated with fear (although fans of Jack Reacher know that he’s rarely scared). Then there’s some indirect Interior Monologue. 

It is not necessary to get fancy with your Interior Emotion. Tell the physical sensation that your viewpoint character feels. If you do it right, your reader feels the same emotion as your character, even though your reader probably doesn’t feel the physical sensation associated with the emotion.

What Sensory Description Means

Sensory Description means that you show what your viewpoint sees, hears, smells, tastes, or touches. This can stand alone, or you can mix it with any of your other tools. Here is an example:

The moon’s surface was blindingly white, pocked by a thousand craters. The black sky touched the horizon absurdly close. Dust rooster-tailed behind the rover that was racing away at six kilometers per hour—faster than a human in an EVA suit could run. Jazz looked at her arm readout. She had 18 minutes of oxygen left, and civilization was three kilometers away. Her comm link continued to crackle useless static. She took a sip from her water supply. It was lukewarm and tasted like dirty gym socks. 

This paragraph is mostly Sensory Description, with a little Action (Jazz looking at her watch) and a little indirect Interior Monologue. You might wonder if the rover racing away is Sensory Description or Action. My view is that it’s a little of both. I tend to reserve the term Action for people who have agency, and I use the term Sensory Description for inanimate objects. The rover might be driven by a person with agency, and it might be an AI with some level of agency. Or it might be just out of control. We don’t really know, so my call is that it could go either way and it’s not worth arguing about. 

Remember that you are not painting a picture, you are telling a story. Sensory Description works best when it serves the story. In the example above, all the details described highlight the predicament Jazz finds herself in. 

If you do your Sensory Description right, your reader sees and hears and smells and tastes and feels exactly what your viewpoint character does. You have put your reader inside your character’s skin, and that’s a win.  

What Narrative Summary Means

Narrative Summary means that you are summarizing a story without using much Action, Dialogue, Interior Monologue, Interior Emotion, or Sensory Description. That can be very efficient at moving through time to get to the interesting stuff. But it should never be used on the actual interesting stuff. 

Here’s an example of Narrative Summary that does the job it’s intended to do:

When I got on the plane at LAX, I was trying desperately to figure out what I’d tell Corleone about where his investment had gone. My flight attendant read my situation from the get-go and kept bringing me courage in a bottle at about three times the recommended weekly allowance. Somewhere over Indiana, I briefly considered becoming a priest. Or a pirate. Or a peony. About the time we settled onto the runway at JFK, I made the decision to tell Corleone the truth. He wouldn’t like it, and maybe he’d have one of his guys work me over, or maybe I’d wind up in the wood-chipper. But I didn’t care anymore. Like my first girlfriend told me, “No brain, no pain.” 

The paragraph moves our character from LA to New York. More importantly, the lad is making what can only be described as a Poor Life Decision. We don’t see any of the logic, which is probably for the best, because no amount of logic will get him to this decision. But copious amounts of the demon drink will do the trick. Note that this is a summary of many unseen events. We don’t see a single bottle. We don’t hear a word of Dialogue, nor Interior Monologue. It’s all just summary. But this paragraphs gets our boy where the author wants him to go in 122 words, which is a lot less than a scene would take. So this is a serviceable bit of Narrative Summary. Even though it’s Telling, not Showing.

Now let’s see where Narrative Summary goes wrong. And this is where an editor is going to hit you with a big red “Show, Don’t Tell” sticker. Let’s show the scene where Corleone sics his thugs onto our hapless protagonist.

When I was done talking, Corleone yelled a bunch of insults at me and told his thugs to beat me up. They took me outside and hit me thirty or forty times. It hurt bad in several places. I begged for mercy. Then one of them shot me.

This 48-word paragraph is way too little. It summarizes a terrifying and violent scene and the reader feels pretty much nothing. The right way to write this requires all the Showing tools you’ve got—Action, Dialogue, Interior Monologue, Interior Emotion, and Sensory Description. To do this well, you’d need anywhere from 500 to 1500 words. I don’t have the word count allowance for that here, but here’s how it might start.

“…so I lost it all on blackjack in Vegas,” I said.

Corleone just stared at me. A vein throbbed in his neck. I thought he was going to have an aneurysm for sure. He leaned back in his chair, and said…

OK, I’m going to stop right there, because what Corleone said can’t be printed in a family newspaper. But feel free to write the rest of the scene yourself. It’s not going to be pretty. It is going to take a bunch of words. Because Showing is inefficient. It burns word-count like crazy.

Narrative Summary is efficient, but it’s usually boring, so it’s your job to make it as unboring as possible while keeping the word-count low. Narrative Summary works best when there’s a bit of story to be told, but it unfolds over a long stretch of time. It works worst when it blurs over the exciting parts of the story that your reader really wants to see, hear, smell, taste, touch.

What Exposition Means

Exposition means that you explain some set of facts that your reader needs to know. Maybe it explains the physics of zero-gravity. Or the history of mockinjays. Or a complicated bit of politics in your storyworld.

There are many places where you need to inject some facts into your reader’s brain. You can do it economically with Exposition, and that’s not bad. 

Book 1 in the Harry Potter series begins with a full page of Exposition, describing the Dursley family. Charles Dickens begins his novel, A Tale of Two Cities, with a famous bit of Exposition—“It was the best of times; it was the worst of times…” These are both examples where Exposition works very well. 

If Exposition goes on too long, or if it doesn’t really serve the story, the reader will get bored, and that’s a major problem. 

You can juice up Exposition by having one character explain it to another in Dialogue. When an editor writes “Show, Don’t Tell” on a bit of Exposition in your novel, they may be urging you to do just that. The problem is that Dialogue used as a smokescreen for Exposition can be just as boring as the original Exposition, while chewing up twice the word-count. So this is not always a great strategy. 

My advice on Exposition is to think three times about how much you really must have. Use the minimum amount of Exposition to get the job done. And then go back to Showing your story. 

There is much more I could say on all of the above. I’ll say more in future blog posts. For now, I leave you with…

Homework:

  • Look at the most recent scene you wrote. Analyze every single sentence in the scene. Is it Action? Dialogue? Interior Monologue? Interior Emotion? Sensory Description? Narrative Summary? Exposition? Some mixture?
  • Are you doing too much Telling? (This is common.)
  • Are you doing too much Showing? (This is less common, but equally lethal.) 
  • Do you like the balance you strike between the 5 different kinds of Showing? 

The Three Pillars of Marketing

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Successful Fiction Writing = Creating + Organizing + Marketing

I blog weekly on one of the above three topics, alternating between them. This week, I’m blogging on Marketing. My topic today is what I call the Three Pillars of Marketing. Everything you will ever do to market your novel falls under one of these three pillars. But let’s deal with the elephant in the room first…

All Novelists Hate Marketing

Yes, all novelists. At least those with a conscience, and all the novelists I know are good people who have a conscience. None of us wants to be a marketing weasel. And all of us have run into marketing weasels. 

For the last few months, a robo-caller has been calling my house many times every week, claiming to be from “The Home Improvement Group.” I’m not interested. I have talked to a couple of the actual humans behind the robo-caller and asked them to put me on their Do Not Call List. But they keep calling. Over and over. And they fake their Caller ID, so it’s not always obvious that it’s them again. 

Let’s define a marketing weasel. A marketing weasel is somebody trying to sell you something under one of the following three conditions:

  • You don’t need it. 
  • You don’t want it. 
  • You can’t afford it.

So how do you avoid being a marketing weasel? It’s really pretty simple. You aim your marketing ONLY at your Target Audience. Let’s review the meaning of that term.  

Your Target Audience

Your Target Audience is the set of all the people in the world who would love your fiction, if only they knew you existed. Let’s be clear that some fraction of your Target Audience actually does know you exist. But not all of them. Most of them never heard of you.

It doesn’t make sense to market your novel to people outside your Target Audience. They’re just not that into the kind of fiction you write. Some of them might like your novel, sorta-kinda. Most of them just won’t see the point. Some will actively hate your novel. 

It makes all kinds of sense to market your novel to people inside your Target Audience. By definition, they want your novel—or they would if they knew it existed. 

And if someone wants your novel, then they also need it, because all humans need Story. Story is how we make sense of the world. Story is what keeps us alive and helps us thrive. Story is the rocket fuel humanity runs on. 

And books are pretty cheap, as compared to most other stuff. If somebody wants your book and needs it, they can almost certainly afford it. 

I strongly recommend that you market your work ONLY to people in your Target Audience. They want it; they need it; they can afford it. If you tell them about it, you’re not being a weasel. You’re doing them a favor.  

But then how do you actually do your marketing? There are three things you need to do, and only three things. But you have to do them in the right order. I call these the Three Pillars of Marketing. Here they are:

  1. Attract your Target Audience—let them know you exist.
  2. Engage your Target Audience—earn their trust by being trustworthy.
  3. Convert your Target Audience—ask for the sale.

The First Pillar—Attracting Your Target Audience

Most people in your Target Audience don’t know you exist. They don’t know you wrote a novel. They don’t know what your novel is about. 

Attracting your Target Audience just means that you somehow make that connection so they know those basic facts about you and your novel. There are thousands of marketing tactics to make that connection. We can talk about those later. I’ve talked about some of them in previous posts on this blog and in the Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine that I used to publish. I’ll continue to teach specific marketing tactics in future blog posts, because tactics come and tactics go. But the principle is forever—do what it takes to Attract your Target Audience and ONLY your Target Audience.

The crucial thing is that any marketing tactics you use to make the connection should be honest. They should make it crystal clear to each person that one of two things is true:

  • They are in your Target Audience. 
  • They are not in your Target Audience.

When choosing marketing tactics to Attract people in your Target Audience, give enough information to repel people who are not in your Target Audience. That’s right, repel them. You want to drive them away. You only want people who are in your Target Audience. If somebody is dying of thirst and you don’t have water, don’t try to sell them pretzels. Point them to somebody who sells water. 

As a side note, one reason for writing a One-Sentence Summary of your novel is that it Attracts people in your Target Audience and repels people who are not in it. Both sides of this coin are important. 

The Second Pillar—Engaging With Your Target Audience

Assume somebody knows you exist and that you wrote a novel that would interest them. It’s way too early to try to sell them your novel. 

That’s like asking somebody you just met to marry you. They may be attracted to you. But they don’t KNOW you. They don’t trust you. Yet.

Engaging with your Target Audience means that you spend time earning their trust. You earn trust by being trust-worthy. This may take a long time or it may happen quickly. If you were selling them a big-ticket item, like a life-insurance policy or a ticket to the moon, you would need to spend quite a lot of time. Big-ticket items require a lot of trust. 

A novel is a smaller-ticket item. The money is probably not the main issue. If your book is priced in the $5 to $25 range, that’s usually not a big deal to a reader. Readers pay that kind of money all the time. 

The main issue is the reader’s time. It may take 5 or 10 hours to read your novel. Your reader can never get back those hours, if you waste them. So you need to show that you can be trusted to give 5 or 10 hours worth of value. 

You have many possible tactics to Engage with people in your Target Audience. I’ve talked about some of them in the past and I’ll talk about many of them in the future. But the principle is the same for all these tactics—you must show that your potential reader can trust you with several hours of their precious time. 

The Third Pillar—Converting Your Target Audience

Assume you’ve Attracted someone in your Target Audience and you’ve Engaged with them enough that they know they can trust you. Now what? 

Ask for the sale! Don’t make it complicated. Give them a way to buy. 

Converting your Target Audience means that you make it easy for them to buy your novel. There are a number of ways to do this. The principle is always the same. Make it obvious how to buy your novel, and make it as simple as possible.

Three Marketing Rules To Live By

Let me summarize with three rules to live by:

  • Don’t try to Convert somebody you haven’t Engaged with. 
  • Don’t try to Engage with somebody you haven’t Attracted. 
  • Don’t try to Attract somebody who’s not in your Target Audience.

Homework:

  • Think about the last novel you bought. How and when were you Attracted? How were you Engaged and how long did it take? How were you Converted? 
  • Have you ever bought a novel, and then it turned out you were not in the Target Audience? What went wrong that led you to buy a novel that wasn’t right for you?

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