Only a purple cow

I recently listened to an excellent presentation on idea diffusion given by the American entrepreneur Seth Godin.  In it, Godin asserts that mass marketing is dead and, as he puts it, if you continue to attempt to market average ideas to average people then you are unlikely to achieve the success you crave.
 
He espouses the notion that promoting ideas, products, music or books to the broad, average middle of society will see your work lose beneath the tidal wave of marketing information, opportunities and choices most of which none of these people want and will ignore. It’s hard to argue with him.
 
Most tellingly, though, Godin says producing something merely very good may no longer be enough. The challenge for all of us is to produce something remarkable, not only in its quality but also in its literal meaning, worthy of remark. He likens it to driving past a cow on a roadside. Everyone, he says, will pay little attention to the cow because we all know what a cow looks like. But if the cow was purple - now that would be worthy of remark. The key is to make our work stand out and to identify groups of people, however niche, who will share a passion for what we are saying, selling or writing, enough to not only try it for themselves but also to spread the word to those they know.
 
As writers, this presents both a challenge and an opportunity. It is difficult to be remarkable in an industry that wants you, for sound and obvious reasons, to conform to certain genres. But how to be remarkable in an over-crowded genre like crime? Aren't you far more likely, however competent your work to just become wallpaper in a genre like that? Perhaps that's why I keep on being told to write fantasy or erotica - not that I know anything about either!
 
Taking Godin's thoughts on board, I am convinced that the starting point must still be the quality of the writing, the depth of the plot and the quality of the characters. Thereafter it must be about identifying and finding a community of people who may be interested in enough in what has been written. I need to create a piece that is sufficiently mainstream that it is not too much of a challenge for people to consider, but stand-out enough to be worthy of remark. More importantly, Godin assets, once you have found your community, don’t bother targeting those who aren’t going to be advocates. Then I just have to hope that my community feels passionate enough to become ambassadors for my work. For this to happen, there has to be something in it for them - not financially, but emotionally. It has to be work that holds a mirror up to their world and the world of those with whom they interact.
Godin's right. For an author who isn't or isn't yet well known, chasing the mainstream may be a fool's game. Better to build our own communities so that our work can be discovered and enjoyed and the word spread organically or, at best, virally. Well, a boy can hope!
 
To see if you want to be in my community you can read my new short story, "A Time To Mourn & A Time To Dance" for just £1 by clicking here http://amzn.to/16gOODN or $1.50 by clicking here http://amzn.to/Zihh55 . All author's download royalties are being donated to cancer charities.

Alternatively, you could treat yourself to my first novel "The Bitterest Pill" for download by clicking here or in paperback by clicking here http://amzn.to/10pdWjp .

If you want to hear Seth Godin for yourself, click here:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBIVlM435Zg
 
And finally you can find me on Twitter @howardprobinson, on Pinterest and online at www.howard-robinson.com

The best characters, like their creators, are flawed

What do we strive to achieve when we write? Some may want to convey excitement, others tension, others emotion. The key to getting those right, I suggest, is plausibility. And that means creating characters that are flawed; not in a black and white, cartoon kind of manner but in the shades of grey that mark out us all.

Character development for me is usually done on the train. I will go into a journey with one particular character and their broad involvement with the plot in my mind. I will know their gender, their approximate age and their general build, whether they are short or tall, athletic or stocky, clean shaven or bearded. And then I will look for somebody on the carriage who comes close to my mental picture. Once I've found them, the task is then all about creating their personality. This can be from the mundane but important -what newspaper they read, what car they might drive, what music they are listening to on their iPod - to more specific information: what is going through their mind? What is exciting them at the moment? What is worrying them? Where are the tensions in their relationships? What happens when they get home in the evening and they shut their door on the world? And how might these factors influence the way they react to a given set of circumstances. By now I'm beginning to feel as if I know them. I will know in my mind how they will take their coffee, what snack they will grab on their way into work and, most importantly, how they might react to the circumstances in which I intend to place them. There may be specifics relevant to the plot - their politics or issues in their private life - that also need to be explored, though the extent of these will differ from character to character.

Building this picture is essential for me; it's the only way I have found that works for me. It helps me develop characters I believe  are as recognisable as anyone you might come across in your everyday life. It's the only way i have found to create characters that hold up a mirror to the readers' own lives. Nobody is wholly good and nobody wholly evil. Nobody is totally devoid of emotion or untouched by fear or regret. Revealing these frailties, slowly and subtly, is what makes both their character and the situation in which they are operating things with which most readers should be able to identify.

Ultimately, of course, the proof is in the reading. Other writers will work in different ways and I'm always looking for new directions in which to travel. But next time you find yourself reading a book and then looking at your fellow commuters in the context of its characters, spare a thought for how well the author has done his job.

To read the first few chapters of my new book "Micah Seven Five" click here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/123464996/Micah-Seven-Five

Creating audience participation in the writing process

There's nothing better than happening upon a novel that so thoroughly absorbs you that you feel part and parcel of the world that the writer has created. Not only do you empthasise with the characters he has created but your senses work overtime as you can almost see, smell, touch, hear and even taste the environment which they inhabit.

How more involving would it be if you, as the putative reader, could have input into the lives of those characters at an earlier stage in their development; a chance to work with the writer to shape the way they act and feel. Of course, writing will always be a largely solitary process and the plot and characterisation could not become the work of a committee, but if a writer is able to involve his readers at an earlier stage then the ability to create a community for his work could become a real possibility as well as delivering a finished piece that already tapped into the interests of a reading group.

I have just pressed the button on a crowd funding project for the publication of my new novel, Micah Seven Five. The process intrigues me; not just for the obvious reason of helping to support the costs of bringing the novel to publication and, therefore, a wider audience but because, hopefully, it will make anyone who becomes involved feel they have a sense of stake in its success. But there's more to it than that. My hope is that anyone interested enough to pledge to this project could form part of a community to feed into and feedback on future projects. I don't anticipate a stage where we have "writing on demand" - where the community suggests plot ideas and I merely get on with them because as a writer there needs to be an emotional attachment to the subject if the end piece is going to be authentic. But there has to be a way of utilising this digital world to bring writer and reader closer together. 

If you would like to take a look at the crowd funding page for my new novel, click here: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2051400933/micah-seven-five-a-new-novel

Let the reader be the arbiter of quality

Most writers, if the truth be told, continue to pursue acceptance of their work by the world's literary agents because being published in the traditional way continues to infer some suggestion of quality and legitimacy upon the work. The reality, of course, having read as many disappointing books as I have inspiring ones - all published conventionally- is that there is little that guarantees quality purely because of the way the novel has been brought to market.

Indeed so diverse are our collective tastes for art, culture, music and literature, it is an odd notion that we should leave those decisions in the hands of a comparative few, albeit very well qualified individuals, around the world. Not only that, it stifles creativity which, by any measure, we should be encouraging to flourish. As many an agent's email or letter has said to me, their decisions are subjective. This being the case, surely the only arbiter of quality must be the reader and our work, as writers, should live or die according to how well we please, thrill, amuse, inspire or otherwise engage our readers.

Terri Giuliani recently wrote a really interesting piece in The Huffington Post on the explosion in self-publishing and the rise of the ebook, sales of which most expect to overtake the printed form this year. She speaks, rightly, of how self publishing has come of age,of how independent authors take more seriously their responsibility to deliver work of a certain standard and quality. She speaks also of how the infrastructure of the self-publishing sector has developed at a faster pace than traditional publishing and threatens its position of hegemony. In what is becoming in all aspects of life a rapidly changing, digitally-led world, the notion of working through the agent process, the majority of whom still won't accept submissions by email, suggests that publishing could go the way of roll-film cameras that didn't see, or didn't want to see, the advent of digital cameras staring them in the face. Too many authors have now established themselves through the independent sector to believe that its rise will continue to be relentless. 

Traditional publishing needs to find a way of embracing and encouraging the many very talented independent authors across many many genres if it is to remain relevant. As soon as the marketing infrastructure available to independent authors has greater reach and becomes more accessible, it will be difficult to see the appeal of the traditional route.

And to those who would argue that the market would be flooded with sub-standard work, I say this: at the end of the day, the reader will be the arbiter of quality. If we produce work that appeals and entertains and deserves to be read - however it has been published - it will be so, and if it doesn't then the market will quickly find it out and it will fade quietly away. All we need is for the stigma of self publishing - which is propagated by a minority in the conventional sector seeking to preserve a vested interest and retain a sense of superiority - to be lifted and the opportunities open to both writers and readers would be truly transformed.