Getting Your Readers' Attention: Here's the Thing (1 of 5)

Ever wondered how you can get you’re your readers’ attention? Though not specifically addressing that question, in his March 2009 pod cast Andy Stanley talks about five questions that can help. He was speaking to a group of pastors on the subject of how leaders would effectively communicate their vision to an audience, but it occurred to me that these five questions apply to writers as well. Their application in the non-fiction realm is obvious. Most of what he says in his pod cast applies directly, so I want to focus on the fiction realm instead, with the assumption that you will go listen to his pod cast.


What do they need to know?


Novels provide information. You might think of a historical novel and some historical tidbit that you gleaned from its pages, but that isn’t what we’re talking about. What people need to know is the events of the story. Our readers need to know the problems our protagonist faces, how he tries to solve them and the result of his actions.


But which problems and actions? Our protagonists have many irons in the fire. Which events in their lives should we cover in detail and which should fade into the background? Andy Stanley talks about boiling a speech down to the one thing. “Here’s the thing,” we might say to someone. The on thing is that one thing that we want our readers to get, if they get nothing else. This is what we would normally call the theme of a novel. When you listen to the pod cast, you will notice that he mentions several examples that could just as easily be the theme for a Christian novel as the one thing in a sermon. “Your friends will determine the direction and quality of your life.” Doesn’t that sound a little like the theme of a Young Adult novel?


When we discover our theme or the one thing, we need to remove everything that isn’t focused on arguing that theme. That may mean we have to cut some of our favorite scenes, but if they don’t support the one thing then they shouldn’t be in there. Maybe they’ll fit in another novel, but for now, we need to get it down to that one thing that our readers need to glean from the pages of our book.


Next time, I’ll talk about Why do they need to know it?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Review: WestBow Press

Image
T oday, I’m writing a book review unlike any I have written before. Actually, I’m going to I’m reviewing two books and I haven’t read either one. As you may recall, some time ago, Thomas Nelson announced that they were entering the vanity press market, using the imprint WestBow Press. The first books out of that arrangement are making their way down the pipeline, two of which you can see here. The first thing I noticed when they arrived was the size of the box. I arrived home and saw the box sitting on my front step. My first thought was that they had only shipped on of them. The box is the same sized box Amazon.com uses to ship individual copies of my novels. I opened it up and found both novels stacked neatly, one on top of the other. Both books have the dimensions 6” x 9”, a fairly standard size for non-traditionally published books. Publishing a book with that dimension simplifies the process when a book will be published both as a paperback and a hardback. One of the books is p...
Read more

Review: Raider Publishing

Image
A few weeks ago, I received a request from someone who had come across the popular Review: Westbow Press post. This reader requested that I look at Raider Publishing . After asking this reader a few questions via e-mail, I learned that she had used them to publish a book and was disgruntled with them. One of her complaints was that Adam Salviani was not responding to her e-mail and he was “unavailable” when she called his office in New York. This was brought on by her concern because she had not received an advance copy of her book and found that it had been published without her being informed. In her e-mail, she stated that she had been in contact with other customers and they had received the same treatment. I did what I normally do when I receive a request like this concerning a company I don’t recognize. I looked for as much third-party information as I could find on the web. Interestingly, I did that search before I realized she was disgruntled and I found relatively little to...
Read more

Is Tate Publishing a Scam?

Image
T oday, I want to take one more look at Tate Publishing and Enterprises LLC. In case you missed Tuesday’s post, Tate Publishing is a subsidy press that focuses on unpublished authors. They charge a $3,990 publicist setup fee, but they do appear to have sufficient staff to justify their claim that they have allocated $27,000 for each book. Today, I want to look less at promises and more at results. In the interest of showing rather than telling, take a look at the video below: One of the services that Tate Publishing provides is that they create fifteen second spots like the one above and run them on cable networks. They promise 80,000 impressions. Or to state it another way, they promise that 80,000 people will see that commercial. Someone from Tate Publishing is welcome to correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe they charge an additional fee for these commercials. The way I would expect this to play out is that each commercial will air one time with about 80,000 people watching. T...
Read more