Million Dollar Outlines, page 7
But I think that there is more to it. I think that a longer novel invites greater depth. It allows the author to put more characters into deeper conflict, bringing in wider themes, weaving a tapestry that becomes more engrossing to the readers than a shorter work can produce.
Beyond novel length, look at things like: length of chapters and length of scenes.
You could easily go into the mechanics of a bestseller. How much dialog does the author use compared to, say, narration?
Is the book written in first person, second, third? How deeply does the author penetrate into the character’s viewpoint? How well is voice used?
You might even get down to smaller elements. In bestselling novels, there is a tendency for authors to dwell upon things such as: what it’s like to eat at a restaurant that only the very wealthy can afford. You might study things such as: how does the author handle a dining scene?
Summary
I’d like you to become a student of what sells, and I think that the only way to do it is to do as I have suggested here: create a list of the bestsellers in your genre and medium, then begin to study the commonalities.
As you do this, you’ll gain a tremendous advantage over not just the new authors that you meet but even some authors who are widely published. I know dozens of authors who’ve never given an hour’s thought to audience analysis―even authors who have written 30 novels or more.
Some authors have an inner sense of style that allows them to naturally drift toward writing for a wide audience. But most of us have to work a little harder to get a grip on such things.
Using Emotional Draws
In Hollywood, while studying greenlighting for films, I learned that we can predict how well a screenplay will perform based upon its emotional appeal.
The movie studios found that by creating short trailers and testing how well they drew in an audience in the first two weeks of release, we could eventually predict how well a film will do.
Of course, every viewer is an individual, and their tastes will vary.
Overall, we can predict how well an audience will respond to a film based upon several criteria—the view’s age, the viewer’s sex, and the type of emotional appeals that the trailer creates.
To give you an idea of what I mean, let’s analyze an audience by age.
When you’re a child—between the ages of 0 and 11—you’re in what I will call the “discovery” phase of life, a time when much of the world seems strange and new to you. In some ways, the world seems boundless, because every time that you turn around you learn about some new wonder or some new region of the world that you have never heard about. So children in that age are predisposed to what I, and a few others, call “wonder literature.”
In wonder literature, the main emotional draw (outside of the essential story itself) is typically that it arouses a sense of wonder. Hence, stories set in fantastic settings are extremely interesting to children. But when you encounter something new—say a new animal—there is more than one possible outcome to the encounter.
Wonder—The encounter can in some way be more satisfying than you had imagined. (In which case a sense of wonder is aroused.)
Humor—The encounter can twist away from your expectations in a way that is neither wondrous nor terrible. (In which case a laugh is usually evoked.)
Horror—The encounter can be more painful or traumatizing than you had imagined possible. (In which case terror or horror are aroused.)
Because of this, young readers, by virtue of age alone, are biologically predisposed to be drawn to works of wonder (fantasy or science fiction), humor, and horror. Those are the largest draws for them.
Statistically, those are the strongest draws. How strong are they? Ninety-eight percent of children are drawn to wonder. Ninety-six percent are drawn to humor. Ninety-two percent to horror.
As a child reaches puberty, testosterone leads boys to become more combative and competitive than the girls. Hence, young men begin becoming attracted to adventure by the age of five or six, and by the late teens it becomes a primary draw. Sexual interest (pornographic element) also become a powerful emotional draw, reaching the height of its power during the middle- and late teens.
Young women on the other hand begin to develop a strong interest in romance just before puberty, at the age of eleven through thirteen. Sure, the young women may be interested in having their romances placed in fantastic settings—witness the popularity of Pirates of the Caribbean—but the romance and sexual angles are as important as the fantasy.
By the mid-20s, the draw for fantastic literature is no longer overwhelming, and people in that age range may quit reading fantastic literature and watching fantasy films altogether. Men may begin picking up thrillers instead of science fiction, while women lean toward straight contemporary romances.
As your audience ages, the sexual draws gradually stop interesting the readers at all. In part, it’s because of the failing hormone levels in adults. A woman at 40 is nearing menopause, and the male at 50 is reaching a hormonal crisis of his own. They lose interest in sex to a great degree. Instead, adults who are raising their own children are confronted with myriad problems—how do I teach my child to get along with others? Why doesn’t my husband ask for directions when he gets lost? And so on. Older readers tend to be more thoughtful, more grounded in reality, and more interested in stories that have practical applications to their own lives.
Older women tend to become more interested in mysteries and dramas as they reach their 40s, and men’s taste in fiction soon follows.
Thus, as you begin to try to categorize your audience, you can see that the emotional draws to your story—wonder, humor, horror, adventure, romance, mystery, suspense, and drama—need to appeal to your target audience.
You want to write a story that doesn’t have a hope of success? Try aiming a contemporary family drama at six-year-olds. From an audience analysis it sounds silly. Yet it happens all of the time. A 50-year-old grandmother decides that she wants to write a children’s book, and what does she write: a story about a kid who has to try to save the farm from ruin during the Great Depression. She loves drama, so she writes drama—completely unaware as to why children stay away from her book in droves.
Less than 10% of children respond to drama as a draw.
In the same way, wonder literature for the over-60 crowd tends to win few fans, too.
Some emotional appeals can even drive an audience away. For example, let’s say that you try to create a pornographic movie aimed at young women. About 85% of them will report that they react negatively to your story, while a very few might respond positively.
If you want to succeed, pay attention to what the most powerful emotional draws are for your audience age, and cater to their tastes.
Here are some of the emotional draws that are important to you:
Very young children—ages 0-5: Like wonder and humor in that order. Note that spooky stories may attract them, but can easily terrify a toddler. Mysteries can also attract a little one.
Children—ages 6-11: Wonder, humor and horror are the top three attractions, with adventure beginning to draw young men. A great example of what you’re trying to accomplish can be seen in R.L. Stine’s Goosebump series.
Girls—Age 11-19: Wonder, humor, and horror are still important, but by age 13-16 romance becomes the primary draw. Also, note that this is the time when girls will become more interested in coming of age stories. They’re trying to understand the world and cope with their own growing powers, and they’re trying to understand their place in society.
Boys—Age 11-19: Wonder, humor, and horror are still important, but by age 11 adventure becomes a primary draw for young men, so they may find themselves enticed by stories set in football camps or on road trips. By age 16, young men also will be more drawn to sexual content.
Women—Age 20-40: By age 20, women are drawn primarily to romance, but they also enjoy humor, and horror, mystery and some drama. As they age, the interest in romance declines, and drama and mystery become much stronger draws.
Men—Age 20-50: By age 20, men are drawn primarily to adventure, and this remains the strongest draw until about age 50. As men age, they too become more engaged by dramas and mysteries, leaving behind the wonder literature that they enjoyed in their youth.
So human predilections toward certain emotional draws at given ages are a valuable indicator of how well stories will perform in the market. In Hollywood, advertising firms can predict how well a film will do simply by taking a look at a commercial, counting the number and types of each emotional beat (an emotional beat is a scene or sound effect that promises to play upon a certain emotion), multiplying that number by the percentage of audience members who are drawn to each of the given types of emotional beats, and multiplying that by the “reach” of the film (a measurement of how many times a given commercial is likely to be viewed by potential audience members). When all is said, a raw score is used as a comparative to other movies, and based on such comparisons, marketing firms are able to guess within about five percentage points how well a film will do during its first two opening weeks.
Now, here is something important. In Hollywood, we studied a number of emotional tags—wonder, humor, horror, drama, mystery, romance, pornography—but we didn’t study all of the emotions. For example, a story that creates a strong sense of nostalgia can be very popular, but we never measured that. A story that creates a strong sense of hope is also powerful, but we never measured that. In Lord of the Rings, Tolkien played upon a strong sense of loss to good effect. In other words, as you consider imbuing your work with an emotional tone, feel free to use emotions that haven’t been used in our examples.
With novels, we don’t do marketing research to the same degree that we do with film. We don’t have the kind of money that it takes to run a Hollywood-style “greenlight analysis” on a novel in order to figure out whether our books will draw a huge audience. But as novelists, we really should know how to greenlight our own stories.
Taking Steps to Expand Your Audience
I took a lot of writing classes in college, and I think that in just about every one I took, the professor pointed out that the world is made up of both men and women, but beginning writers typically only write stories for people of their own sex. That’s because they are used to reading stories primarily about people of their own sex.
But think about it: why would you want write to a small audience?
So let’s say that you’re a male, writing a story aimed primarily at men. Currently the earth has some 7,000,000,000 people in it. Of those people, over half are women.
It only makes economic sense that if you could capture readers of both sexes, you would more than double your income.
Of course, not all authors want to capture readers of both sexes. There are men who are only interested in writing for other men. Women are too hard to understand, they think, and as a male author you may be afraid that you won’t be able to write about them convincingly.
Similarly, some women don’t feel that they can write stories that will engage men.
So we tend to write stories about people who are of our same sex, and roughly our same age.
Some authors take it much further. I happen to be a Mormon. I know lots of Mormons who are so deeply rooted in their own culture, that they couldn’t write authentically about someone who was an atheist, a Catholic, or a Muslim. So these authors tend to write for the 15 million people who belong to their church. But with such a small audience to draw from, very few of them can make a living.
And that’s the crux of the problem: the smaller the audience you write for, the tougher it is to support your writing habit. If you want to write a novel that could only really be appreciated by Texans, you’ve got a fairly small audience. You want to narrow it further and say it’s just for men. The audience gets smaller still. You want to decide that it’s only for men who like polyester, and it shrinks further.
So I suggest that you look for ways to expand your audience rather than minimize it. Here are a couple of authors who did just that. Let’s take J. K. Rowling first.
In chapter one of Harry Potter, three people gather together to leave a child on the doorstep of a muggle family. One is the aging headmaster of a school for wizards. The second is a woman of similar age, and the third is middle-aged giant. Though young Harry Potter himself is only a babe, he takes the center stage not because he’s the viewpoint character, but because:
—He’s the one that the others are talking about
—He is so powerful even as a baby, that he has just killed a Dark Lord.
Do you see what Rowling has done? She has inhabited her scene with people of diverse backgrounds, from newborn babes to graybeards, both male and female. The group is small enough to be intimate, large enough to give us diversity.
She then continues with this throughout the books. Harry grows up in a nasty household, is rescued by wizards, and soon meets a nice cast of friends and enemies—once again of varying ages and sexes.
The reason for this should be obvious, but in case it is not, here it goes: the easiest way to engage a member of a particular demographic is to write about a character in that demographic so that the reader can develop a rooting interest in that character. Of course, the easiest way to gain rooting interest is to show that this person is somehow like the reader.
In short, we almost always grow attached to people who are like us. Women tend to feel more strongly for other women—women who are their age or slightly younger. It’s easier to empathize with such characters. And of course men tend to empathize with other men.
In fact, some 30 percent of men say that they can’t enjoy books about women. Not that they “don’t” enjoy them, they can’t empathize with the protagonists at all. Similarly, about ten percent of women can’t empathize with men.
Young readers not only can’t empathize with the very old, some studies show that the lines and creases on an old person’s face can easily be misread to the point that an old woman smiling at a child can be seen, from the point of view of the child, as an old person interested in devouring the child.
Not only that, we tend to empathize with people of our own nationality. Once again, Rowling populates her story with people from diverse cultures, having tournaments where the English people interact with those from other nations. You’ll meet people from Ireland, France, Soviet Bloc countries, Asia, and India in her stories.
In short, as an author she learned early on to try to capture wide demographics—both male and female, old and young.
Here’s another writer who learned to maximize his audience: James Cameron. I recall back in 1993 watching the movie Titanic for the first time. Cameron doesn’t cater particularly to children, but he did do something interesting. In populating his ship, he shows immigrants crossing the oceans from dozens of nations—France, Spain, Germany, Italy, India, China, and so on. He makes it a massive multicultural event. As an English speaker, you might not notice what he did. After all, each of these families that are shown get only a few seconds of screen time. Sometimes, they are simply heard and seen in passing. Yet we see them, we hear them, and their stories get woven into the fabric of a greater tale.
As I watched what Cameron did, I was impressed at how gracefully he braided these stories together. I recall thinking, “He’s going to set international sales records with this. I wonder if the studios know it?” Of course, he did know it. In fact, he did something unprecedented with the movie: he released it all across the world, translated into dozens of languages, all on the same day.
The result was that Titanic doubled the sales of the next bestselling movie of all time.
It didn’t take much work on Cameron’s part. He simply populated his story with people from dozens of countries. In fact, if you will sit down and watch it, you’ll note something interesting. The largest sales territories for selling movies at the time were: the United States, England, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Japan, and Australia—pretty much in that order. If you watch the movie and count, you’ll notice that actors from all of those nations are present in the movie. In short, Cameron wove them into the film in order to guarantee good distribution in those countries.
Now, I have to admit, that I’ve sometimes done the same. I do it subtly sometimes, but I do it. If you read The Runelords, you’ll note that I have characters with English and Scottish names, mostly, but among the royalty we have people like Gaborn Val Orden—a German name—which is very important. I also use Iome, a French name, or Ahten, an Egyptian name. If you pay attention to accents and sentence structures, you’ll see that characters’ voices often hark back to their roots.
But I don’t just weave multiculturalism into a few names, I weave it into the very fabric of the story. For example, I have one powerful subplot dealing with Sir Borenson, a man whose honor is tested to the core in a very oriental way. I wrote it hoping to appeal to a Japanese and Chinese audience. Ten years ago, I was invited to China to see about making the book into a movie. In that visit, I was introduced to one of China’s foremost producers—their Steven Spielberg, so to speak. He had my screenplay translated into Chinese before my visit, and so he had a chance to read the story. When we met that morning, he politely bowed – a custom that is not commonly practiced in China since the Cultural Revolution. As he bowed, dozens of businessmen fell back in astonishment and gasped. You see, he had a reputation for being a very proud man. When receiving China’s highest honors for artistic achievement, he refused to bow to the premiere on national television. So the notion that this man who would bow to no one would bow to me … well, it dropped a few jaws.
So I asked him why he bowed. His answer was simple. “No Western writer has ever understood the heart of the Asian as you do. This movie will be the most popular American film ever to hit China—far bigger than Star Wars, far bigger than Jurassic Park.” I was delighted to hear it. I’d spent months studying the concepts of honor—giri and gimu—as taught by the Japanese. I quite frankly find myself very much attracted to their code. So I was happy to see how deeply the story had touched him.
