Where Book Ideas Come From, and Why Good Books Don’t Sell | The Exceptional Scribble Show, January 2019

This is the complete interview hour from Richard Lowe’s third-Tuesday appearance on The Exceptional Scribble Show with host Sage the Poet, joined by callers from the Virgin Islands and Philadelphia, broadcast live on January 15, 2019, lightly edited for readability. Segments outside Richard’s hour are omitted.

The introduction

Sage the Poet: Welcome to The Exceptional Scribble Show, live on another terrific Tuesday, January the 15th, 2019. Tonight’s theme: writer’s block, and how to develop ideas for writing, with our monthly panelist, best-selling published author Richard G. Lowe Jr., The Writing King. And Richard, the reviews from the Yeadon library webinar are very high. A lot of people tuned in, some caught the replay after work, and everyone said they learned a lot. You hit a grand slam.

Richard Lowe: Excellent. Hello, this is Richard Lowe. I am The Writing King. Tonight I’m going to talk about how to get the idea for a book, how to write a book, and how to overcome blocks to writing. We’ve got about an hour, so let’s jump right in.

Where do book ideas come from?

Richard Lowe: The first thing when you want to write a book is the idea, and ideas are just about everywhere. There are prompt books, including mine, where you just choose an idea and write a story around it. Or come up with your own: go hiking. I used to be a Renaissance Faire reenactor, and I’d go to the Faire and just look around. Go to Civil War reenactments, masquerade balls, out into the woods. Ideas spring into your head when you do those things; at least mine do.

Don’t stress the idea too much. It should be a sentence or two, maybe three. A society of intelligent unicorns is being attacked by ogres, and a hero unicorn rises. A teenager finds a device that lets her travel between universes. Keep it simple like that, then expand it, and discard it if it doesn’t work, because you haven’t invested much. Come up with ten, fifteen, thirty ideas as fast as you can, bang bang bang, and throw out the ones that don’t work for you.

Why doesn’t a good book sell?

Richard Lowe: Once you have the idea comes the tougher part, because here’s the sad thing that happens: you write a book, pour in sweat, blood, tears, and money, and it doesn’t sell. The first reason a book doesn’t sell is that nobody wants to buy it: wrong genre, wrong kind of book. If you’re writing about intelligent unicorns, there may not be a market for that.

So do the research. Use a product like KDP Rocket or KDSpy, or Amazon itself, to look at the sales statistics for a category and determine whether it’s selling. Take my coloring books: I’ve made 20 of them. The first couple sold really well, because they were in a very specialized niche for a specialized group of people. Once those sold, I expanded out and did no research at all, and the rest sell one or two copies a month, about 30 bucks total, which is nothing, because I paid an artist to draw them. If I had researched first, I’d have seen hundreds of thousands of coloring books out there, the top ones selling for less than I could afford to charge, drawn by better artists than I was hiring, and selling 70,000 copies a month each. Those people are making a substantial living, and precisely because they’re selling that much, you cannot crack that top page without the backing of a major publisher and serious marketing dollars.

The other extreme is the dead category, where the number one seller moves one copy a month. You want the middle: a category that’s selling, but not so hot that you have no prayer of reaching the top. Look for categories where the top book sells maybe a hundred copies, and by the thirteenth or fourteenth book on the page, it’s five or ten. There, you have a good chance of reaching the first page, which is where you want to be.

And here’s a trick, because Amazon lets you place a book in multiple categories: pick two categories that are “just right,” winnable, and one tougher category. The two easy categories will sell copies, and since sales don’t care which category they came from, those sales pull the book up the rankings in the tough category too. Two easy, one hard, and the easy ones lift the hard one.

Write short, publish fast, test the market

Richard Lowe: Once you’ve researched, publish short books in that genre to test the idea. You need to write and publish as fast as you can. That doesn’t mean exhaust yourself; it means don’t start with a 150,000-word novel unless you’re writing it for love. Start with a ten- or twenty-thousand-word book. Publish five or six of those, and if they’re any good, you’ll start building a following, and you’ll have gotten the experience, and you’ll have gotten through the bad Amazon reviews on your first couple of books, because you’re always going to get those; you’ve still got kinks to work out. Get the kinks out on the small books.

And keep the money coming in. If you take a six-month or two-year hiatus to write one book, nothing new is generating income the whole time.

Test genres this way: young adult vampire romance? Check the category. Selling well? Good. Write a short one, a few weeks or a month of work. Publish it. Didn’t sell? Great: now figure out why, and that’s a whole show of its own. If the reasons are valid, slow category or unbeatable category, move to the next test: maybe vampires with werewolves, romance, some paranormal mixed in. Writing fast and short gives you the opportunity to test markets before you commit your major sweat to the big book. Once you find that paranormal romance sells hundreds of copies for you: second one, third one, now it’s a series, now there’s a following, now write the larger book. Then sell the movie rights. Kidding. That would be cool, though.

Caller (Virgin Islands): So if you’re finally going full blast as a writer: you still write the novel in your mind, but start with something similar and smaller? Introduce yourself to the public first?

Richard Lowe: Exactly, and I’ll give you my own example. I’ve been working on a novel that will probably be 120,000 words: a space opera, lots of battles. Several people have read the finished pieces and love them. But before I finish it, I’m writing a prequel of only 15,000 words, maybe a couple of prequels, and some other stories in the same universe, and putting them out to see what happens. That fine-tunes the idea, shows me the reaction, and builds a following. By the second prequel, the 50 followers might be a couple hundred. Then: the big novel is coming out any day. I’ve built excitement, I haven’t burned time, and if it flops, I stop and move on. Now, that’s self-publishing. Traditional publishing is a whole different ball of wax: agent, pitch, book proposal, and you’ll be proving to them the book will sell, because they won’t research it for you.

Caller (Virgin Islands): It’s surprising that the delivery has more priority than what’s inside. That’s a little bit against the art.

Richard Lowe: It’s not always true; there are garbage books that will never sell because they’re garbage. But flip through half the books on the airport bookstand: from a writing standpoint, most are mediocre at best, and they’ll sell a lot of copies, because they’re on the stand. Money kind of rules this industry. Is that unfortunate? It just is, like the moon: it just is, even when it blocks the view of some planets.

And that cuts the other way too: if your book isn’t selling, don’t conclude the book is garbage, because quality has very little to do with it. If you’ve read Twilight or Fifty Shades, and I couldn’t stomach the second, garbage books sell really well, and I’m sure those authors don’t care, because somebody made hundreds of millions. What determines sales is how well it’s marketed, what category it’s in, how good the cover is, who’s pushing it. Eighty percent of the time, a stalled book is the cover. Then the title, the description, the look-inside that readers browse like a bookstore, even sharing a name with another author who’s collected bad reviews. Quality matters; make the best book you can. But it is not the defining factor in whether you make money.

Lisa’s first call: a poet with notebooks everywhere

Lisa McDowell: Good evening. I’m Lisa McDowell, and this is my first time calling in. I write what I call “just writings”; other people call them poems. They’re all over the place in different notebooks, whatever scrap I can find. I read them in church and different venues. I don’t know anything about putting a book together, and I don’t know if there’s a market for things like that.

Richard Lowe: Very good. What you want to do is research on Amazon and then theme the collection. A random book of poems is hard to sell, but a book of poems related to a subject has some bite to it. And self-publishing is easy, by the way. I offer a coaching service if you run into trouble.

Sage the Poet: Lisa, it sounds to me like you’re an inspirational writer, and you share your faith in your writing. So you have Christian literature, inspirational writing, and poetry.

Richard Lowe: Those combine really well. Christian inspirational poetry is something you can definitely build a book around, and Christian books are a huge market; they sell really well. What I’d be tempted to do is theme the books: Christian messages aimed at young men, Christian messages aimed at young women, keep them relatively short, maybe with some art on the pages, black and white, with the rights secured.

And here’s another idea: journals. Journals sell really, really well. Make a journal that’s mostly blank pages, with a poem on the facing page, a message of the week. A friend of mine goes into churches and sells journals: the pastor distributes them to the congregation, everybody buys one to keep their notes in, and it sells very, very well. He’s got a little side business doing exactly that. You just have to be bold enough to walk into a church and show them, and ministers are always looking for things to engage their parishioners. And if you send your contact information through Francine, the friend I mentioned sells an inexpensive product that teaches exactly how to do this, and I’ll forward it to you.

Lisa McDowell: All of this is new to me. I just write this stuff down. Here’s a short one, called “Where Will Your Expected End Begin”: You only live once is an incredible lie. It simply brings the expected end beginning. For God has no end. For God has an end expected for you, for me, for all mankind to see: the end that never ends, the end that begins the beginning of forever. Will your expected end begin in eternity with Thee, or will your expected end begin in terror, everlasting and forever?

Most of them are longer. They started when my mom passed away; there was a dark period, a mourning period, but there was still inspiration. I have one called The Hammer, the Nail, and the Tree, where all three speak their experience of the crucifixion. I have one about being in blue, about police officers watching victims suffer. I’m all over the place, which is why I never considered putting them together.

Richard Lowe: Like I said, I offer a coaching service. We can talk offline, Francine will give you my contact information, and we might come out of it with something.

Sage the Poet: Lisa, you have a ready pen, and these need to be published. Do you have a LinkedIn account?

Lisa McDowell: No.

Richard Lowe: I’d encourage you to. I’m a ghostwriter and professional writer, and I get probably 40 percent of my business off LinkedIn; the other 60 is mostly referrals. I have a LinkedIn service too. Come to thewritingking.com/, fill out the contact form, and we’ll have a talk. There’s no charge for the talk, and then you decide what you want to do.

Mama Oladeji: stuck in the grid for ten years

Mama Oladeji: Thank you for coming on the show and helping us. That’s how stuck I’ve been: I call myself stuck in the grid for ten years. I don’t know how to build a spine for the book, or the table of contents. I have five chapbooks out; they’re not copyrighted, not properly published, just put together for me, and I’ve been in a few anthologies. I’m working my behind off and getting nowhere. My series is called Oladeji Undercover, which means I’m finally under the cover of a book: five volumes, one political, one spiritual, one about life, one classic or epic, and one humorous. And the two main books I want to sell are Beauty Mark and one whose title means “I am responsible for what I say, not for what you understand.”

Richard Lowe: I can help you with all of that. Head over to my website, jump on the contact form, and send me a message. I’d need to have a conversation with you to recommend the way to go: whether an editor first, a publisher, or another route entirely. I need to find out what you need and want. I’ll be happy to help.

Rapid fire: dissertations and what’s next

Sage the Poet: A question from Mr. Winborn in the chat room: what do you think about turning a dissertation into a book?

Richard Lowe: Dissertations tend to be a little dry, so I’m not sure how it would sell. But you’ve already got it written, and putting a cover on it and publishing to Amazon is not an expensive process, so I’d say: why not? You might want to rewrite it a bit for the general public, but why not?

Caller (Virgin Islands): I’m just impressed at the fact that you could take off on your own. I guess it’s much easier now.

Richard Lowe: Much easier, and worldwide: the market’s bigger, because you’re selling all over the world.

Lisa McDowell: One more: I heard something about having to convince a publisher your book will sell. Even on a smaller scale, how do you go about that? Word of mouth?

Richard Lowe: Convincing a publisher applies to traditional publishing: they want to sell 50,000 copies, and they won’t publish unless they believe they’ll profit, and you can’t blame them. But promoting a book yourself is a whole different ball game, and it’s different for fiction, nonfiction, and I’m sure poetry. That takes an hour or more of its own, so let’s make it the next show.

Sage the Poet: And in reference to webinars: when do you expect the next one at the Yeadon Public Library?

Richard Lowe: They haven’t contacted me yet, but I’d be happy to do it in February.

Closing

Richard Lowe: Go to thewritingking.com/, and you’ll find all my information. Fiction Masterclass has the training courses, inexpensive: how to write a mystery, a romance, how to promote with video, with a smartphone, 13 or 14 courses now. And right now, at one heck of a website dot com, that’s the number one, heck of a website dot com, I’m offering all of my courses in one package, normally around $600, cut down to about $67, plus the replay of the Yeadon library webinar. It won’t last much longer, and I’m probably stupid for offering everything at that price, but I like everybody at Yeadon. You can also write me at rich@richardlowe.com.

Sage the Poet: Ladies and gentlemen, run and grab that bundle. Thank you, Richard; it was a wonderful show.

Richard Lowe: Thank you, Francine. It was a nice show. I enjoyed it.

Find Richard Lowe at thewritingking.com/.

Quotable moments

Frequently Asked Questions

Part of Richard Lowe on Air, his complete run of podcast, radio, and video guest appearances.