April/May 2001

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There is a certain degree of cleverness in being able to write a book that is suitable for more than one market or publisher. By this I mean – can you quickly convert you book for a different market (Publishers B and C) if your work does not progress past initial submission with Publisher A? Can you do a re-write that makes your work look “tailored to the guidelines of Publisher B?” If you let your marketing self have some input into the creative process right from the start of your project, this shouldn’t be too hard to achieve. If you don’t, your job could be much harder and more time-consuming.

The key to being able to write a book that can cross over various lines within a genre is “originality”.

Try to invent a story that has more than one possibility even though it appears to exactly fit what a particular publisher wants. There are many ways to inject originality into a story. A combination of your creative imagination and your marketing savvy will allow you to stretch the boundaries and achieve this outcome.

Most publishers only want to see a one-page submission letter and a two page synopsis. Some Agents ask you to “sell your story idea in 100 words”.

Whatever the publisher or agent wants to see is what you get to submit. This mean, no matter how well written your novel is, if you can’t write a synopsis that catches the Editor’s attention, or a catchy logline, your project may not get off the ground.

As an Editor, I’d rather see one superbly written page that has something unique to attract my attention than a four page discourse about every event in a story … and that’s “marketing”.