What I've Learned About Marketing (A List)
You can have a good book and it is possible for it to not be marketable, and that's okay.
What genre you market your novel as is VERY HARD. I'm currently struggling with this. I recently joined a writing group and learned from a more experienced author that the genre I had been querying one of my novels as was the incorrect genre. She's a historical romance writer, and she said that all romances have to have happy endings. I did not know this. Teenage-obsessed me who read Nicholas Sparks and John Green novels as a pastime thought their novels were marketed as romances. But I was very wrong. It turns out there is a category for best YA novels about death and dying, according to Amazon, which I had never known. As it turns out, all the tragic romances like The Fault in Our Stars and Me Before You are YA works but they aren't romance. Some of my coming-of-age novels, I've realized could be marketed as women's fiction. So right now I'm trying to figure out where all of my work fits.
Comp titles are oh so important! You need to show that your book shares aspects with best-selling books within recent years.
A high concept idea is everything. So the writer's group I'm a part of, the author of the Bromance Book Club by Lyssa Kay Adams, she used to be a part of the group. And she did one of the pitch contests on Twitter and had a simple pitch of a book club attended by men who would learn about women. And she got a book deal before she even wrote the books! So I've been trying to take my books and try to come up with high concept ideas. I've been looking at Netflix blurbs as well to see how I can show agents that my book can sell.
Conclusion: For the longest time, I've wanted to stand out from other writers and write things that haven't been done before. But in order to make it into the market, I need to compare it first. A book club idea is something that has been done, but having men learn about women and attend a book club, that's new! So it's still possible to come up with new ideas that haven't been done, but from what I've learned, I feel they should be rooted or at least take something from a best-seller. It isn't copying by any means. People take aspects of what they read with them subconsciously. In my class on Middle Eastern women writers, Sahar Khalifeh said she has aspects of Beauvoir's Second Sex in her works, as she read a lot of it. Now I finally understand what they mean by reading being essential for writers.
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