On the one hand, I’m delighted to see the term “Partnership Publishing” in greater circulation these days; that implies that the approach is becoming more popular.

On the other hand, I get concerned when I find the label used inappropriately; that can cause confusion among authors and may put a crimp in an alternative publishing approach that’s particularly promising for late-blooming novelists.

The basic idea is simple: an author “partners” with a publisher to shoulder some of the risk of publishing a new novel (translation: pay some of the front-end costs). In exchange, the publishing agreement calls for royalties that are much larger than paid by a traditional publisher.

For example, the author may take on the burden of professionally editing his/her manuscript (probably at a cost of $1,500-3,500) and then contribute another $1,000 toward production costs. Clearly, the publisher doesn’t pay an advance against royalties and (this a biggie) the author is wholly responsible for book promotion from the get-go. (This isn’t much of a sacrifice for a partnering author. As I’ve noted in other posts, most traditional publishers silently impose the marketing duty on authors simply by refusing to spend their own money on adequate book promotion. )

The publisher exercises traditional quality control and assures that the manuscript meets publishability standards before agreeing to publish the novel. Once the project is underway, the publisher is responsible for the work of “publishing,” which includes a host of activities from book design (including cover development) to coordinating the production of paper and eBooks. Everything takes time — which ultimately translates into the money needed to pay people (either in-house or freelance). At the end of the day, a partnership publisher who does things right is likely to invest more money than the author.

When authors make front-end investments in their own books, they are putting their skin in the game — betting their money that all those dreams of success will come true. The principal payoff, as I noted, is a stream of larger royalty checks. I’ve seen partnership publishing agreements that give authors 50 percent of the publisher’s net revenues, rather than the traditional 10-18 percent (a number that’s typically cut in half when the publisher sells books at significant discount to book clubs and big-box booksellers.) The author can usually also buy copies of paper books — for sale at speaking engagements, local book fairs, and writer’s conferences — at close to publisher’s cost.

Alas, if you Google “partnership publishing,” you’ll find more than one so-called partnership publisher that invites the author to pay 100 percent of the publishing costs in exchange for 100 percent of the royalties. I don’t see any “partnership” in those numbers; it’s clearly self-publishing under a different label.

This is a pity, because true partnership publishing can produce a win-win situation for everyone involved. For starters, by investing a reasonable sum to partnership-publish our novels, a debut author escapes the uncertainty and long time delays of traditional publishing without moving all the way to self publishing — an approach that many people still see (rightly or wrongly) as akin to “vanity publishing.”

A partnering author also gains the advantage of being one of several other novelists published by the company — which is especially beneficial if the publisher has a stable of well-respected writers in the debut author’s genre.

A partnering author may also have a greater say in the cover design, and the look and feel of the book. To many debut novelists, the greatest advantage is that the publishing cycle is typically much faster than in traditional publishing (the new book is published in months rather than years)

IMO one of the most exciting aspects of true partnership publishing is the return of “small big-book publishers.” There was a time when the houses that published bestsellers by big-name authors were relatively small organizations who didn’t need to support vast corporate infrastructures. Contemporary novelists will be much better served by a large number of small, agile, publishers — many of them partnership publishers — who can quickly transform a manuscript into high-quality eBooks and paper books.

Whenever I say this, someone comments: “Small is agile, but the big, well established publishers have brand names that readers respect.”

My response: There was a time when particular houses were known for certain kinds of fiction. Publishers may think this is still true, but it’s been years since any of my well-read friends have talked about the latest release from a specific publisher. Readers care about authors and genres; there doesn’t seem to be much “brand loyalty” for specific publishers. In fact, a reader has to look diligently to find the publisher’s name when shopping at Amazon and other online retailers. (About the only exceptions are specialty publishers who focus on a narrow genre — for example, the handful of houses who publish category romance.)

To summarize: Partnership publishing offers genuine advantages to late-blooming novelists. If you look, you can find “real” partnership publishers out there. But watch out for self-publishing service providers operating in disguise.

This is a topic of immediate interest to Janet and me because six of our older novels have recently been repubbed as eBooks. They are now available on Amazon and Nook and are priced at $2.99. Is that too high? Too low? Or just right?

Pricing was something wholly out of a novelist’s control in traditional publishing. But in the brave new worlds of digital publishing and partnership publishing, authors get to set the price (or at least participate in the pricing decision).

Janet and I have discovered that finding the perfect price can be an especially thorny challenge for late-blooming novelists because our internal book-pricing model is solidly “hard wired” around paper books. We know what “trade paper books” like our novels sell for, so we feel a bit queasy when we see the eBook versions offered for a quarter the price. Curiously, traditional publishers seem to be suffering from the same malaise.

Our eBooks are priced at $2.99 today chiefly because of herd instinct. Everybody KNOWS that $2.99 is the sweet spot for eBook pricing. Consequently, we went along with the crowd. However, we’ve recently read so many lively debates about eBook pricing on blogs, writers loops, and in magazines like Publishers Weekly that we’ve become thoroughly bewildered.

Some gurus say drop the price to $.99! Others claim that readers don’t mind spending $5.99 (and more) for an eBook, although most readers won’t push the “Buy Now” button if the price exceeds $9.99. And of course, there’s endless squabbling about the Agency Selling Model vs. the Wholesale Selling Model (I’ll talk about them below.)

One of the items I remember from my marketing course at business school is that the “economic value” of somethingl is simply what a customer is willing to pay for it. The customer exchanges his/her cash for two other kinds of value:

1. Functional Value — the ability of a purchased product or service to do what it’s supposed to do. The functional value of a typical novel is:

• Source of entertainment
• An aid to sleep
• Killer of time for 6-8 hours
• Potential doorstop.

2. Emotional Value (sometimes called psychological value)—the degree to which buyers feel better about themselves (or the world) after purchasing a product or service. The emotional value provided by a novel depends to a large extent on personal likes/dislikes, and includes such factors as:

• The enjoyment, satisfaction, and/or inspiration the customer expects to receive
• The reader’s anticipated ability to participate in book-group discussions

Emotional value is more important than functional value to most readers — unless they are trapped on an 18-hour flight to Australia (in that situation, even an enjoyable novel will provide several hours of escape).

So what are a few hours of enjoyment/entertainment worth to a reader? After thinking about it a while, Janet and I began to look for “substitute” sources of similar enjoyment/entertainment that might provide useful analogies:

• Rental DVD — three to five bucks
• Purchased soft-cover novel — nine to eleven bucks
• Library book — cost of a few round trips to the library (two or three bucks, for us)
• First-run movie ticket — upwards of nine bucks (more in big cities).

At first, we couldn’t understand who someone willing to spending eighteen dollars for two movie tickets would recoil at spending 10 bucks on an eBook. After all, a movie is a one-time event, whereas an eBook can be read again and again (and, with some eReaders, lent to other people).

We then we thought some more …

1. We paid for our eBook readers (which makes an eBook more like renting a DVD than going to a first-run movie).
2. Even more important, we know that eBooks (unlike movies, library books, or paper-back books) are cheap to produce. We think it’s unfair for a publisher to charge the same price for an eBook as for a paper book.

All at once, the penny dropped (as the Brits say). We began to understand why customers might perceive three to four bucks as a fair price for an eBook. They are doing an instinctive cost analysis and realizing that an eBook selling at $2.99 and a trade paper book selling for $14.99 can net a publisher the same profits. (This is eerily close to the truth when you consider the cost of printing, transportation, distribution, warehousing, and returns.)

Simply put … there’s no reason for a publisher to charge 15, 20, even 25 dollars for an eBook — other than a seriously overdeveloped profit motive.

And speaking of profit motive — you can’t read about eBook pricing these days without running into the debate about the Wholesale vs Agency model.

To picture the wholesale model, think Wal-Mart. They buy paper books at a substantial discount off the cover price (possibly upwards of 60 percent) and then sell them for any price they choose — possibly for less than their cost (say, as a “loss leader” designed to get customers used to shopping in Wal-Mart’s book “department”).

To picture the agency model, think Kindle (these days). The publisher sets the price for an eBook and Amazon collects a “commission” for each book it sells.

Major publishers that routinely sell paper books via the wholesale model seem to prefer the agency model for their eBooks. Why? Because they worry that Kindle and other eBook sites might price eBooks so low that it would cut into sales of paper books, especially hardcover . (After all, Amazon can afford to designate a few loss leaders to entice paper-book readers to purchase Kindle.) This explains those $15 (and up) eBooks from major publishers — the books that Janet and I refuse to buy for our Kindle and iPad.

So where does that leave our $2.99 books? In fact, we’ve decided they are right where they should be.

We’re curious. How do you digital pubbers out there set the prices for the eBooks you’ve got on sale in the Kindle Shop?

“Tipping point” is an increasingly popular term that was borrowed from sociology. It means the point at which a previously rare phenomenon becomes explosively common — it abruptly spreads like a virus. During the past two decades, there were tipping points when “every writer started using word processors,” and “every teenager began to text,” and “everyone you know stood up a FaceBook page.”

eBooks will offer another fine example in near future — if not this year, then next.

The eBook has actually been on the sidelines for more than ten years. eReader applications of one kind or another have long been available for computers and PDAs (personal digital assistants like Palm Pilots). Today’s Kindle eBook files are virtually the same as the venerable Palm book files. The eBook’s lurker status is about to metamorphose into marketplace dominance.

The world of eBooks will actually experience two tipping points:

1. When the vast majority of readers switch from paper books to eBooks.
2. When authors and publishers think of eBooks as their chief products — and paper
   books as add-ons to their primary business (the tails at the end of the eBook dog body).

Clearly the arrival of the first tipping point will drive the second. That’s the upheaval that will dramatically impact late-blooming novelists.

Tipping point #1 is on the horizon. Amazon made news last July when it announced that it had crossed an eBook Rubicon: During the previous a three months, it had sold 143 Kindle eBooks for every 100 paper books — and the pace of change was accelerating. Amazon also noted that several authors had sold more than a half-million eBooks.

The other day, Sourcebook, a major publisher announced that it’s eBook sales were booming, that they now represented 35 percent of its book revenues, and that the proportion was climbing.

Another interesting bit of evidence: the next generation of eBook readers will calculate equivalent page numbers. Prior eReader devices didn’t bother because the number of “pages” depends on screen size of the reader the display type size chosen by users. The change was apparently made in response to demands from readers in book clubs, who want to be able to reference specific parts of a book during discussions. (We can imagine discussion leaders saying, “Ladies — let’s synchronize our eBook readers. The official type size this evening is “4.”)

Does all this mean that the paper book is dead? Not quite. The emergence of a radical new technology often triggers impressive improvement of the older technology that’s being displaced. For example, the fastest sailing vessels were built after the development of steamships … the most powerful piston aircraft engines after the development of the first jet engines … the best vacuum tubes after the early application of transistors … the best typewriters after the arrival of the first stand-alone word processors.

These improvements slowed down — but clearly didn’t stop — the adoption of the new technologies. Looking back, we realize that these “innovative changes” were made by industries who were, metaphorically, terminally ill patients going for face lifts.

The same thing is happening in the world of paper books.

Thanks to Print on Demand technology, it’s now possible to create paper-book novels and put them into “traditional distribution” without investing thousands of dollars in a so-called “economical print run” of several thousand copies. Today, there’s no reason for an eBook publisher to not also produce POD paper books, for the dwindling cadre of readers who still insist on them. Paper books can even be published at the same time as eBooks. The chief costs are:

1. Cost of adapting eBook graphics and desktop-publishing the paper version.
2. Cost of another ISBN.
3. Relatively modest distribution fee (mostly to validate POD files and pay for inclusion in electronic catalogs).

“Traditional distribution: means that paper books are available through storefront and online booksellers — you won’t find them stocked on bookstore shelves.

Given these market forces, can Tipping point #2 be far behind? The most compelling evidence that publishing companies are beginning to see a change in their “core business” is that publishers are are getting sticky about returning rights to out of print (OOP) books to authors — who are increasingly asking for them. Publishers realize they can reissue OOP books as eBooks and enjoy second a bite at the apple (a bite that might goes on forever). To paraphrase a recent observation by one publishing-company executive: OOP books are new books to readers who haven’t read them.

Alas … most publishers haven’t:

• Realized that they have to lower the price of eBooks.
• Increased eBook royalties to authors in light of the much lower costs of digital publishing .

Speaking of price and cost. Publishers can enjoy reasonable profits on eBooks that sell at 3 to 6 dollars. (Some gurus say that the maximum successful eBook price is $9.95. Above that, readers begin to balk.)
But the higher production costs of paper books drives their selling price into double digits. (Many are priced from $15 to $25.) This cost differential is certainly one of the factors that’s driving readers to eBooks.

One final observation: as many readers of FictionAfter50 have discovered. An author really doesn’t need a traditional publisher to create and market eBooks. And so, look for a third tipping point — when we abruptly realize that “publishing” (and “publishing process”) have been redefined around eBooks.

There are three complaints that novelists — especially late-blooming novelists — make repeatedly:

1. Agents and editors take too bloody long to respond to queries!
2. My new novel — which no publisher will buy — is better than most of the junk being published today.
3. Writers shouldn’t be expected to market/promote their novels — that’s the publisher’s job.

I’ve voiced these sentiments more times than I can count — and hoisted many a cup, glass, goblet, and/or stein while engaged in mutual gripe sessions with fellow authors.

After some thought, most novelists agree that Grouse #1 may reflect a problem caused by simple busy-ness and that Grouse #2 is ultimately a matter of opinion and difficult to prove.

However, Grouse #3 is a complaint that goes to the very heart of the novel-writing biz. Traditional publishing is built atop a straightforward division of labor: Writers write books and publishers market, sell, and promote books.

That’s more or less what I said the first time a publisher invited us to “participate in the post-publication marketing” of our novel. It’s still a valid response — but there are others. One of our friends said to his publisher: “You have professional book promoters in-house, but you want to turn the job over to amateurs who don’t want to do it.”
Which brings me to the title of this post: Why don’t novelists want to promote their novels?

Over the years I’ve heard several answers beyond “I don’t want to do the publisher’s job”:

• I absolutely, positively hate selling of any kind!
• My genes make me a writer — not a “press agent.”
• I don’t know how to promote books.
• I’m an introvert — I’m uncomfortable “out there” hustling my novel.
• I feel awkward bragging about my work. (Inspirational authors sometimes add: “After striving to cultivate humility, how can I write prideful words about my novels?”)
• Promoting takes too much time away from my writing.
• I can’t afford to invest money to hire a professional book promoter.
• I couldn’t care less about “book videos” and posts on social media — I don’t buy books that way, which means that lots of other readers don’t either.

Most novelists I know — including me — will nod affirmatively at some (or all) of these statements. Unhappily, our reluctance to be part-time book promoters has to yield to today’s bookselling realities: If we don’t promote/market our own novels, no one will. And, most unpromoted novels will never find an audience of readers. This alas is true both of traditionally published and self-published novels.
Sure—the will buzz start for a few novels even though their lucky authors do nothing in the way of book promotion. But don’t bet on it happening to you.

Like it or not, novelists have to take responsibility for marking their novels. We have to think about book promotion as an integral part of the “novel-building process.” I’m reluctant to say, “Suck it up!” in FA50, but that’s precisely what I said to myself recently.

I’m pleased to report that book promotion is not as miserable a chore as I thought it would be. That’s because “Book Promotion” is an enormous “Chinese menu” of activities. You get to pick and choose — one activity from Social Networking, two activities from Media Relations, another from Loop Participation, another from Arranging for Book Reviews, and so it goes.

The more you do, the more you increase sales — at least in theory. I sincerely hope this is true!

We can take it as a given that lots of readers do judge a novel by its cover — and also its internal design, typography, print quality, and the many other factors that make a book look like it was published by a “real” publisher.

Alas, many (most?) self-published books often lack these physical indicators of publishing professionalism — and so they come across as less worthy than the books produced by traditional publishing houses.

There are exceptions. For example, the self-pubbed books I’ve seen from Winepress Publishing — they bill themselves as a “custom publisher” — often have a better look and feel than traditionally published volumes. I haven’t compared prices, but I suspect that Winepress is not the lowest-cost option for novelists.

An all-too obvious problem is that many self-pubbed books are “designed” by the author and have covers done by low-cost artists and illustrators. Ironically, the same self-pubbers who a reluctant to spring for a pricy cover artist will often choose an expensive acid-free paper. Going the other way around makes more sense; that’s the way traditional publishers work.

To be fair to the starving cover artists out there, cover design is an art — but you have to begin with a good concept. Novelists are not necessarily good at conceiving a creative cover design and/or working with artists to refine an initial idea into an attractive cover.

Incidentally, it takes more than a skilled artist to create a “real” book cover. Look at the traditionally published books on your shelves. You’ll see lots of what’s called cover decoration: embossings, applications of “spot varnish” to create different textures at different points on the cover, possibly a die cut opening or two, and rarely a dab of metal foil as a highlight.

Some of these simpler effects can be emulated (or even duplicated) by the high-speed electronic printers and “finishing machines” used to produce Print-on-Demand paper books (and increasingly books for by traditional printers), but few POD printers offer them, because they raise costs.

Covers for POD and small-print-run books are usually laminated with a thin layer of protective plastic — which seems to introduce another self-published-book problem. The lion’s share of the POD/small-run books I’ve seen suffer from cover curling syndrome: the edges lift and roll toward the center. I’ve been told that this is a symptom of lack of humidity control during book production.

When you lift the curled cover of a typical self-pubbed book, you’ll probably find mediocre internal book design, including horsey margins, klutzy typography, and pages that look more like typed documents than parts of books. Despite what many self-pubbers believe, you can’t create a “real” book with Microsoft Word. It takes a true desktop publishing program (such as QuarkXpress or Adobe InDesign) to actually set type with the aesthetically pleasing results you see in a professionally produced book.

The rapid introduction of self-published eBooks has multiplied the number of poorly produced novels. I have a growing collection of “bad example” eBooks that are badly paginated, have broken tables of contents, and are hard to read because of the lack of appropriate line/paragraph spacing. Just because an eBook file will pass “validation” and will open on an eBook reader without crashing the device doesn’t mean that it’s properly done.

Actually, it’s useful to think of an eBook as a modified website — either with the “homepage” containing all the text OR (preferably) with each chapter a separate page. An eBook reader is a kind of web browser. It chooses the typeface (at least Kindle and some other readers do) and automatically flows text to accommodate screen width and different character size.

If you peek inside a eBook file, you’ll discover the same kind of coding used in web site technology. This means that a knowledgeable eBook designer can do lots to give an eBook a truly professional look and feel. This includes good pagination (e.g. beginning each chapter at the top of a “page”), appropriate cross-references, proper “styling” of indented text blocks (say for newspaper articles, poems, and lyrics), and the use of graphic “bugs” (those little icons used to separate the scenes in a well-made paper book). Alas, the bargain-priced eBook “converters” rarely include these things.

At first blush you might not think that eBooks need classy covers. In fact, they do — in order to attract attention on a Kindle or Nook web page. One major difference is that eBook covers need to look good — and be legible — at small sizes. Think thumbnails! Consequently, a good paper book cover doesn’t necessarily make a good eBook cover.

All of this brings up two obvious questions: Does professional-caliber book production contribute to greater sales? Do readers even notice? My take is that the lack of these things do make a difference. What do you say?

We’ve all been given the guidelines: A novella ranges from 20-40,000 words long … a category romance is 55-70,000 words … a typical mystery is perhaps 70,000 words … a full-size novel clocks in at 85-95,000 words … few publishers are willing to buy novels longer than 110,000 words (because they are too expensive to print).

Are these numbers still significant? Does anyone still care about length?

I ask those questions because eBook publishing dramatically changes the rules of the game. In the paper-book world, word count translates into page count — a factor that:

1. Impacts the cost of producing a book (more pages = higher production costs)
2. Impacts the selling price of a book (thick books are generally priced higher than thin books.

But page count is meaningless for an eBook. Because eBook readers “flow” text in response to screen size and the type size chosen by the user, an eBook read on an iPhone will have many more “pages” than the same book read on an iPad. The same eBook on a Kindle will have an intermediate number of “pages.”

As for production costs — well it does take more effort to edit and create a eBook file for a 100,000-word manuscript than for a 50,000 word manuscript, but the cost difference is measured in days more work at a desk rather than barrels of extra ink, tons of additional paper, additional run-time on a million-dollar printing press, and significantly greater transportation and warehousing costs.

If you visit the Kindle store, you’ll see that some eBook listings give a “print page” number, but most only specify the file length in kilobytes. The latter is a potentially misleading number, because it’s possible to “pad” an eBook file so it gets “weightier” — should file size ever become a measure of perceived value.

While I’ve seen many people — most of them college students — heft paper books to evaluate the fairness of their price tags, I’ve never seen another eBook buyer make a buy/don’t buy decision on the basis of file size. (I once did exactly that, because the tiny file size of a book about website design signaled me that the book contained only 10,000 words — too few, I thought at the time, for an eBook costing $9.)

If my observation reflects the way people buy eBooks, length may become something that only the novelist worries about. Wouldn’t it be grand to be able to tell a story in as many (or few) words as appropriate?

We late bloomers can remember the days when most mystery novels were short enough to read in one or two sittings. They were fun reads that didn’t demand a huge investment in time. Kurt Vonnegut, acknowledged as one of the great 20th century novelists, kept his novels short. His first rule of fiction (originally promulgated for short stories) was: Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

When I sit down to plan a novel, my own rule of thumb is to “budget” 15-25,000 words per plot. A total of 90-95,000 words is just about right for a novel with a main plot and four subplots. By contrast, three subplots can easily fit into 45-60,000 words. A tighter word count tends to cramp one or more of the stories; a looser count invites me to add superfluous words.

Oops … I seem to have padded the end of the last sentence, which probably means this post is just the right length. Ta-da!

The other day I had the fun opportunity to brutally reject a dozen different novels. I based my decisions chiefly on a brief description of each book, on the various titles, and on a few opening lines on the novels’ first pages. I didn’t worry a jot about offending the authors; my entire focus was on me — specifically what I liked or (more to the point) what I didn’t like.

I did my rejecting in a room conveniently provided by … the Borders Airport bookstore, at Raleigh Durham International Airport. I rarely browse traditional bookstores any more, but Janet and I had an hour to kill before boarding a flight — and there the shop was. So we browsed, giving me the chance to rebuff a stack of recently published novels.

I often told this story when I wrote (or spoke) about being rejected by agents and editors. My point back then was: we all reject novels by the dozens, so don’t take a rejection letter personally. Getting told “no” is part of the publishing process.

These days my focus has changed. I tell the story as a preface to presentations on selling books to readers. It seems an appropriate introduction to a pair of obvious questions: How do we catch a browsing reader’s interest? How do we transform a browser into a buyer?

Good answers to these questions will become even more essential as the new publishing paradigm takes hold. When readers browse through the Kindle Store, for example, they have access to good novels written decades ago — because their well-established authors have put them back into “print.” The present — in the form of a novel you’ve just written — must compete with the past (all those compelling stories, written by great authors, that probably inspired you to write fiction).

Many late-blooming writers have what has been called the “Field of Dreams” mindset: “Write it … and readers will come.” That’s because, I think, writers of a certain age remember the days when publishers had midlists and bookstores would “introduce” new authors to their customers. Today, unfortunately, thousands of well-written novels languish on shelves (or more likely in warehouses).

Countless novelists — we included — have proved that merely publishing a novel doesn’t mean that readers will buy it.

I know that some late-blooming writers don’t care how well their novels sell. Their shared goal is to complete a novel, put it on paper, and have it read small circle of friends and family. The rest of us though, consider it important that our work be widely read — and wouldn’t it be nice to earn a reasonable wage for the hours we spent staring a computer monitor?

So … what does it take for a novel to start a word-of-mouth buzz? Or garner great reviews from Amazon readers? Or become favorites in those newfangled book clubs that are springing up across America?

Good writing is necessary, but not sufficient. These days, novels that become bestsellers almost always have high-concept stories. And therein lies a tale.

Janet (the literary agent) has a drawer full (and a directory full) of rejection letters from editors who said something like: “Good voice, well written—but I wish the author had told a high-concept story. His (or her) story is merely okay. I didn’t get excited by what I read.”

High concept is an idea born in Hollywood. A common “official” definition (there are lots around) is: A story has high concept when it’s central idea can be summarized in a few interesting words.

High concept is not an exercise in writing compelling story summaries. It’s the other way around: a high-concept story has a premise that can lead to a compelling summary. Most stories do not!
Here, for example, are three familiar high-concept story premises:

• A boorish, chauvinist jerk is forced to live the same day again and again.
• A theme park full of live dinosaurs becomes a deathtrap.
• A crafty lawyer suddenly discovers he’s incapable of telling a lie.

Those are my after-the-fact high-concept premise statements for “Groundhog Day,” “Jurassic Park,” and “Liar, Liar.”

When he was story editor of The New Yorker, Bill Buford wrote: “Of the many definitions of story, the simplest may be this: It is a piece of writing that makes the reader want to find out what happens next.” (From, “The Seductions of Storytelling,” The New Yorker, 1996)

As I see it, the simplest definition of high concept may be this: It is a story premise that makes the reader want to start reading in the first place.

With some work, Janet and I were able to assemble high-concept summaries for our published novels (okay, some were only medium-high). But the workout convinced us to never again begin writing a novel until we have a high-concept story premise to use as its foundation.

For starters, it’s no more difficult to write a high-concept novel than one with a routine story. On the other hand, it’s much easier to sell high concept novels to publishers (if you’re so inclined) or readers (if you decide to self- or partnership-publish). If you can’t come up with a 25 word (preferably fewer) summary that intrigues potential readers, your storyline may not be the basis of a truly publishable novel. Why waste time and effort fleshing out a lesser story premise?