February 19, 2006
Business 101 says you need to find a need and fill it. For instance, if you notice that nobody is manufacturing widgets that help your car save 6 miles per gallon and you can design one, you've filled a need.

Notice, for example, that malls aren't placed everywhere, but wait for a specific volume of potential customers before the developers shell out the money.

Which begs the question, what is it about fiction writing that fills a need?

You can argue, I think, that with millions of novels already published and 195,000 books a year currently being published and readership supposedly decreasing all the time, that the writer of novels is a fool.

Of course, that's art. Art is rarely a necessary thing. It makes our life better, but we rarely will starve to death if we don't have a pretty picture on the wall. There is a problem, though, when art meets commerce. The business model is different, somewhat, than it is for widgets. At least a little bit.

So, if we, as writers, can't necessarily find a need and fill it, what can we do?

Fiction publishing works a little differently, partly because it's the entertainment business. The U.S. public--and probably humans in general--have an insatiable need for diversion and entertainment. Some argue that the more free time we have, the more time we spend on diversion, but I'm not convinced that people swamped with work aren't in serious need of diversion and seek it out, as well. But we as fiction writers definitely have a problem with a crowded entertainment field--TV, movies, videos, iPods, radio, the Internet, videogames, etc.

One solution is to try and find a need and fill it. You could, for instance, write something that's not ever been done before. Good luck. I have to say, though, that Eric Mayer and Mary Reed have probably done a good job by writing mysteries taking place in 4th or 5th Century Constantinople with a main character who is the chief advisor to the Emperor, and he's also, oh by the way, a eunuch. Nope, in all the genres (mystery) and subgenres (historicals), I would be reasonably confident in saying they are the only ones writing historical fiction about an Egyptian? eunuch in Constantinople who solves mysteries.

Still, that seems like a pretty narrow niche. J.A. Konrath writes about a female homicide detective in Chicago. Nothing particularly unique about her from a global perspective. Joe's hook, if you will, is the humor, which I find often clashes with the grimness of the novels, and the fact her name is Jacquelyn "Jack" Daniels and the novels are named after cocktails. It at least gives the product a brand, in a similar way to Sue Grafton's alphabet mysteries. I note that Barry Eisler, who writes novels featuring half-Japanese, half-American John Rain, who is a hired assassin, and his novels all have "Rain" in the title. It's a nice hook.

Still, I'm not sure the hook is enough to draw all readers in and it's sure as hell not enough to keep them coming back. I think the key here is to provide the reader with what they come to the product for--entertainment and some version of emotional resolution. If somebody's buying a book that's supposed to be funny, well, by god, they'd better laugh or at least be amused. If it's supposed to be an edge-of-your-seat suspense thriller, the reader doesn't have to be reading while sitting on the edge of their seat, but they sure as hell had better continue flipping pages when they should be doing chores, coming to the dinner table or turning off the lights. And if it's a novel about a Eunuch in Constantinople, you had better be damned certain there's cool stuff about Constantinople and the culture and era that isn't standard knowledge.

Ultimately, for a business, it's not very business-like. In fact, it's pretty weird.

Best,
Mark Terry