Shortest Distance Between You and a Published Book Paperback - 1997

Step 3--Establish Your Book's Unique Identity

Time required: Sixty to ninety minutes now; thirty minutes periodically to revise.  (Possibly the most important sixty minutes of your writing career.)

For your book to succeed, it must make an original contribution.  Agents and editors will not consider one more legal thriller, one more serial killer novel, one more book on what's wrong with American business, or one more low-fat cookbook--unless it truly contains a new angle.

If you have an unusual personal experience that will interest others, new information about a historical figure, an innovative plot for a mystery, or you can fill a genuine gap in the existing literature, this is ideal.

For example, my second book, Eight Essential Traits of Couples Who Thrive, was motivated by my observation that most books about couples are written by therapists who worked almost exclusively with couples who are unhappy or dysfunctional.  I felt the need for a book that looked at healthy, happy marriages to see what we could learn from them about how to make love work.  My new angle was to write a book about healthy rather than dysfunctional relationships.

Another author, Azriela Jaffe, started a new business with her husband, encountered difficulties, searched for a book that might help, and discovered that all of the books about how to start a new business contained absolutely nothing about the enormous personal and family issues surrounding entrepreneurship.  A gap in the literature!  She rushed to fill it with her highly successful Honey, I Want to Start My Own Business.

But not every new book contains brand-new ideas.  Your book may be based on known material and can still be distinctive in its presentation, its vocabulary, or its imagery.  Instead of writing one more software manual, IDG Books capitalized on people's fondness for playing dumb about computers and called its series The Internet for Dummies, Windows for Dummies, and so on.  Jay Conrad Levinson used the idea of non-establishment, underground approaches with his book, Guerrilla Marketing.  Now there is a whole series of Guerrilla books on many aspects of business.  Or instead of How to Negotiate, Joel Edelman wrote The Tao of Negotiation, a title that conjures up a scene of calm, spiritually mature people in a room together, working things out.  These are all examples of creative imagery and vocabulary.

There is no end to the novel ideas (!) that can give your work of fiction a distinctive twist.  Can you put your thriller plot idea in a historical setting? The Alienist isn't one more serial killer novel, but is set in historical New York City.  Lilian Jackson Braun's innovative twist is that the character who solves the crime is a cat.  The Celestine Prophecy, rather than presenting New Age philosophy in a standard nonfiction format used an Indiana Jones-type plot to introduce his ideas, blurring the line between fiction and nonfiction.

Perhaps your original contribution is that you organize information in a novel way, or make it more accessible to the reader than any previous book has.  The more dramatically innovative you can be, the easier it will be for you to gain the attention of agents and editors--and ultimately the attention of booksellers and book buyers.

So, whatever stage your book is in now, stop everything else and answer the questions below.  Be sure to review and revise them periodically.  You may find as you get into your writing that the distinctive angle will actually change or become more obvious, or that you have found far more compelling words with which to convey it.

If you aren't sure how your book is distinctive, this exercise will motivate you to begin thinking along these lines.  Spend a little time with the exercise now to prime the pump.  As you work, if you are on the lookout for them, distinctive angles will occur to you and may even alter the direction of your work.


Exercise: Defining Your Book's Distinctive Angle

Important Note: You will actually use all of the material in this exercise in the writing of your proposal.  When you get to that step, you will be grateful to have completed this homework now.  Complete all four steps, even though they may seem similar.

1.  Pretend a potential literary agent has just asked you, "How is your book different from all the other books on this topic?" Write down one or two sentences that give a succinct, dazzling answer to the question.  (Keep returning to these sentences as you write until you hone them to perfection.)

2.  Pretend you are about to appear on a national TV show to talk about your book.  Prepare both a five-second and a fifteen-second promotional spot, designed to run the day before, that will make your show irresistible to viewers.  You know, the kind that ends with, ".  .  .  Tomorrow on Oprah."

3.  Pretend you are the sales rep for your publisher.  You are trying to persuade a bookstore to carry your book, but because you represent so many other books also, you have only thirty seconds to convince a bookseller.  Write out your thirty-second sales pitch.

4.  Write a paragraph with the following outline:

A.  Why is there a need for your book?  For example, what pain are readers experiencing in their lives?  What information do they lack?  What predicament exists in society?  What vacuum is longing to be filled?  In what new way could readers be entertained?  What's the problem? Where's the void?

B.  How will your book fill this need, resolve this pain, supply this information, explain this predicament, fill this vacuum, provide this entertainment, or solve this problem?

C.  Why are you the person who should write this book?  What experiences in your life qualify you? How did you gain your expertise or your special knowledge?

Again, make one attempt to answer these questions now, and keep returning to them as your ideas become sharper.



Excerpted from The Shortest Distance Between You and a Published Book: 20 Steps to Success by Susan Page. Copyright (c) 1997 by Susan Page. Excerpted by permission of Broadway Books, a division of the Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.  All rights reserved.  No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Susan Page is the author of three previous books, "How One of You Can Bring the Two of You Together, Eight Essential Traits of Couples Who Thrive, " and "If I'm So Wonderful, Why Am I Still Single?" Her work has been translated into 14 languages and sold in 28 countries. She lectures widely, is a past chapter president of the National Speakers Association, and has been helping authors to successful publication for years.