How Do I Know if My Book Idea is Good?
If you're going to invest the time in writing a book, and you're not just writing it for yourself—which is fine, by the way, if you are—but you want it to be a publishable book, how do you make that happen?
Here's a horror story:
A man believes his life to be remarkable. He knows it's remarkable. Everyone tells him that he's lived a crazy life.
So he writes down his entire life story, but to his dismay, no one wants to publish his life story. He's crushed.
Here's the thing—if he’d known the principles I'm about to tell you, he'd have known this would happen and he would've known how to write his book differently so that it was publishable.
So here are three key tips to keep this from happening to you.
Tip #1: Do your research
The first tip is to do your research. Is there a book out there like yours; like the one you want to write? The answer should be both yes and no.
First, yes, you probably don't want to invent a whole new genre, so there should be some book out there that is similar to yours in nature.
Maybe you are writing a memoir about growing up Mormon. I'm not saying there needs to be a memoir out there about growing up Mormon, but is there a memoir out there that's telling a story that's similar to yours in some way, even if it's set in a different place and is about a different sort of path?
You want to choose a genre that exists. Your book fits into this category, but the answer should also be no, we don't want to reinvent the wheel.
You're going to have to pitch this book, and it can't be just like another book that someone else already wrote.
Tip #2: Was it published in the last ten years?
The second thing to think about is whether these books that are similar to yours--or book if there's just one of them--were published in the last 10 years.
This is pretty important because the market fluctuates and in publishing, particularly when it comes to memoir, there are certain years where certain memoirs are popular. Certain styles of memoir are popular.
If the book that you found that's similar to yours came out 25 years ago, that's not necessarily a good indication of what the market is like right now. So try to find a book similar to yours that has come out in the last 10 years.
When I was first trying to become a published author, I had a memoir idea that I wrote up a proposal for and was pitching to literary agents. When I sent it to one agent, he wrote back and said “I could have sold the hell out of this in the nineties, but I can't now.” At that point it was 2011.
He was basically telling me I had a good idea, but for 15 years earlier, and at that point in time there wasn't a market for the thing I was writing.
No one is going to be a perfect arbiter of this just like none of us know what the stock market's going to do. But you live in the world and you have common sense and you have the ability to look around and assess: what are people talking about?
What kind of books are people buying? What are people interested in? What's the culture right now? That does change, and you want to be able to slide into that with your book pitch.
Tip #3: Are you excited and compelled by your idea?
The third thing I want you to think about is are you excited and compelled by your idea? Because you are the one who has to write this.
A typical book draft is about 70,000 words minimum, or longer. 70,000 words is a lot of words and takes a while to write.
You have to be excited enough to get to the end of that draft.
I work with a writer who every week pitches me a new book idea and every single book idea I'm like, “Joe, you should write this one, I love this book idea.” But he always discards it.
He goes on to the next one because he's not excited enough about it. I think he's right about that. It doesn't matter if I think all of his ideas are good. If he's not excited about it, he's not going to let it carry him all the way to 70,000 words. He's going to peter out.
That's one reason being excited about your idea is so important: you want to finish. The other reason to make sure you're excited about it is that the energy you bring to your writing is actually the most important thing. That energy is going to translate to your reader.
So if you're not interested in what you're writing, it's going to be really difficult to create a story that a reader is interested in reading.
Want to know how much you’ll actually make?
So now you know how to assess if your book idea is good, but how much can you actually make on a book?
I get this question a lot, and it's a good question because there's very little data out there unless you're a publishing industry insider. It's actually a really hard answer to find, so I made it my mission to find out.
I compiled data from over 1400 published authors, and I found an average in median book advances based on all kinds of metrics, including genre, whether it was their first book or not, whether they had an agent or not, and who their publisher was. I'm talking graphs, pie charts, everything!
This free workshop is no joke. I spent weeks on it. I put all this information into a free workshop which you can watch right now.
In this workshop, you’ll find out everything you want to know about current book advances and what you can realistically expect to make on your book.
If you're serious about becoming a professional author, this really is a must watch. You won't find this data laid out this way anywhere else. So click below and you can watch this free workshop right now.
