Blogger: Janet Kobobel Grant
Location: Mount Hermon Writers Conference
Weather: Bloomin’ beautiful
I’m co-teaching the Career Track at the Mount Hermon Writers Conference for the next few days, and as I’m hearing tons of book ideas from the conferees, I’m reminded of some of the aspects of a manuscript that make it salable–or not.
One of those items is the importance of hitting readers’ hot buttons. If a book doesn’t shout out to the potential reader, “You need me!” that reader is going to bypass the book and snatch up the one sitting on the shelf next to it.
What do I mean by hot buttons?
For fiction, a hot button usually is an idea that tickles the reader’s fancy. I’m reading The Help by Kathryn Stockett. Why did I pick that novel out of the plethora available? First because Wendy Lawton couldn’t stop raving about it, and Wendy and I tend to like the same sort of novels. So the book had “buzz” goin’ for me. But second, the concept of the book piqued my imagination. What would it be like to see the South in the ’60s through the eyes of the maids who travel in their starched white uniforms from their poor homes to work for the rich? Oooh, now the book really had my attention.
For nonfiction, hot buttons are more felt needs rather than intellectual curiosity. We want certain things in our lives–health, peace, money, more friends, less fat. We want to be smarter, fitter, “in the know.” Whatever people want fits into the hot button category.
But hot buttons are more complex than that. I might want to grow closer to God, but that doesn’t mean I’d buy a book entitled Grow Closer to God. Been there, read the book, it’s on my shelf. I want a book that has a unique twist to a perennial topic. So if you wrote a book entitled, All I Need Is Jesus and a Good Pair Jeans, I’m more prone to pick up that book. The title tells me it’s clever, the author understands that Jesus and jeans are important parts of my life (for very different reasons), and I just plain like its spunk. You’ve hit my hot button. (By the way, that title has already been taken by Suzanna Aughtmon. The subtitle is The Tired Supergirl’s Search for Grace–oh, yeah, you’re singin’ my song.)
What hot buttons do you think exist today that might not have been “hot” last year? So much has changed for our culture in one short year.
But even more important than asking what is hot now is the question, What will be hot two years from now? Because, if you contracted to write a book today, it would likely release in 2011.
What are you writing, and what hot buttons does it hit?
Great topic for brainstorming. I write fiction so I’ll stick to that. Romance never seems to fade away, but as you say, it needs a new twist. How about a biker girl, member of a biker gang, whose first encounter with a single pastor at an outdoor Christian concert ends up with the friendly reach-the-world-for-Christ pastor on the ground and the biker girl’s girl’s boot on his chest? “Stop stalking me, preacher.”
This is my most recent Work in Progress.
Enjoy the California blooms! I so wanted to go.
I want to read that book about the biker chick and the preacher!!
Teri, I gotta say you came up with wild twist to a tried-and-true genre. The story idea made me laugh. With the right kind of sassy tone, it just might work.
Yep, contracted for 2011, and you make me rethink the working title, the over-arching metaphor.
How to make a contemplative nonfiction work still sizzle? Hmmm…
With thanks…
Janet, Thanks for the comment. I’m still working on the biker girl story, but if you think it might work, I’ll try to catch up with you at a conference sometime! Will Books & Such be represented at the ACFW conference in September?
Teri, plans are being laid for Books & Such to be represented at the ACFW conference. I think the faculty will be announced soon. Each agent’s travel schedule also is posted on our web site in the “Our Schedule” section.
Currently, I am working on two books, but focusing on one which is important to me. It’s a series which follows in the footsteps of writers like Tolkien. He used historical aspects in some of his scenes and biblical aspects. I am trying to incorporate real historical and Biblical events in the storyline to make the reader think and recall and add interest to my fantasy-romance work.
My other book is a contemporay fiction romance called, “Broken Compass.” I got stuck on chapter 3 and decided to go back and outline. The series I am writing I’ve got the first book outlined, the second book summarized, and now must work on the first book called, “The Rose Door.”
The hot buttons for most people who read romance is the spunky heroine who doesn’t fall into stereotypes in looks or actions. The relationship between the hero and heroine isn’t a love/hate. I like to build my characters in the same way Grace Livingstone Hill builds her characters.
Her books always had the couple become friends first. She builds the relationship and in the end when they fall in love you know it’s forever without the writer having to tell us.
Other hot buttons I am trying to include in my stories is plots in which all of us can relate to in order to draw in the reader page by page.
Nikki
Forgive the grammar errors in that last post. :O)