Million Dollar Outlines, page 6
The same skew toward the male audience can be seen in the videogame industry. If you go to E3, you’ll see thousands of games that are being developed by various companies―almost all of which are targeted toward the young male audience. Why? Because the guys who run the videogame companies are young men! But if you look at the games that really succeed hugely you’ll note that the games are aimed at a much wider audience―male and female―and are skewed particularly to younger players.
So one has to wonder just how valid the observations I made about the films are. The answer is that they’re perfectly valid If you want to make a blockbuster movie. The studios are still run by men. The producers are mostly men. Most of the biggest directors are men, and the truth is that these guys in Hollywood tend to be very superstitious about films. If something has worked before, they think it will work again. So if they’re going to back a film, it had better fit into the parameters of set by other blockbusters.
But the observations aren’t all necessarily valid for other mediums―such as books and television.
Given this, let’s go to another medium and see if we can learn something from it. Here is a list of the current top 10 shows (at the time of my writing this).
Big Bang Theory
Person of Interest
Two and a Half Men
NCIS
Revolution
Voice
Chicago Fire
The Following
Carrie Diaries
Vegas
In this list, we see something interesting. The amazing thing to me is how this list of last week’s top shows differs in content from our movies. In short, we don’t have any alternate world science fiction television shows among the top 20, whereas the movie results would predict that we should have them.
Television tends to be cheap. The special effects needed to create an alternate world show are too costly to use. So the closest that we get in our list is a near-future science fiction piece. In the past few years, television shows like Heroes, Buffy, and The Sarah Conner Chronicles have been high in the top ten, but they also used minimal effects. But on this week reality crime dramas seemed to be the big ticket. It makes me wonder if I should be writing murder mysteries.
But the answer is no. I just gave you the results for last week, not for the entire year. The results for each week are skewed because we have more than one television “season” per year.
In short, if you study television, you’ll notice that shows that get a lot of hype during the week tend to come out near the top of the polls at the week’s end. Crime dramas, comedy, and reality television all top our charts.
As in the movies, advertising proves its worth.
Now, you can get lots of television ratings information over the web. You can get it sorted by viewers in various regions, by color, and so on. You can get lists of the best soap operas, the top crime dramas, or favorite game shows. You can even get lists that show the most popular science fiction and fantasy tales. Luckily, you can even get actual numbers that show how many viewers watch a particular show.
But beware: television seasons are short nowadays, running only for a few months. So American Idol will be at the top one week and off the charts the next simply because there is no new episode coming out.
So what good does it do you to understand that the vice presidential debate pulled in 30 million viewers? Well, it’s great news if you’re releasing a book on Mitt Romney that week. It means that you’ll have 30 million people who might be curious to learn a little more about him. As a writer it can give you a hint at how large your potential audience might be and it can determine the date for when your book should be released. If you knew six weeks in advance when the debate was coming, you’d make sure to do some huge promotions at that time―speaking on Rush Limbaugh and whatnot.
More than that, knowing that a television show is huge can let you see if you have a ready-made audience. So in 2011 Game of Thrones had the number one spot in fictive television if I recall, with 40 million viewers watching the opening episode.
So imagine that you wrote a book that would appeal to that audience. We know that only about 50 percent of the people in this country will read any book this year. Given that information you can estimate that your book has a potential audience of 20 million people. That’s a huge audience. With enough advertising, you could make millions on that book. But of course you won’t be able to reach all of your prospective buyers. After all, you don’t own your own television network. You can’t advertise to them in a manner that is cost-effective. But an audience that size does give you something to build on.
Let’s go back to one of our bestselling authors in the U.S., Stephanie Meyer. She built her audience this way, whether she knows it or not.
You see, the final episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer aired on May 20 of 2003. Buffy usually held a viewership of 4 to 6 million people per week, sometimes spiking much higher than that, and it ran for six years. What does that have to do with Stephanie Meyer?
Well, its departure created a void for fans of the show. But less than two weeks later, on June 2 of 2003, Stephanie Meyers records that she had a vivid dream that led her to begin writing Twilight. In her dream, a young woman was having an engrossing conversation with a vampire that loved her.
Stephanie’s timing was excellent. Other marketing factors were also in play. A popular movie series based upon Anne Rice’s tales had just finished with Queen of the Damned (2002), and so vampires were hot. Meanwhile, the movie Underworld―with the vampire versus werewolf conflict used by Meyer―was just beginning to advertise in the theaters for its September release. So when Stephenie sent her book in, it was precisely the kind of thing that plenty of readers were looking for.
In fact, when Stephenie took my writing class at BYU in 2001, we talked a bit about how she should approach the markets, and we discussed how the timing for this kind of novel would work well.
From time to time, we see a television series that has wide appeal and which gets canceled anyway (think Touched by an Angel, Heroes, or Buffy). When that happens, it leaves audiences wanting.
If you’re an enterprising writer, you can step in and fill the void in the lives of the shows’ fans.
Audience Analysis: Novels
In considering how to approach this topic, it seemed to me that there are some things that I could teach you, or there are things that you can teach yourself. In other words, I sometimes believe that you learn better by doing. So instead of analyzing some bestsellers, I’m going to give you a list of books and show you how I would approach those books to see what kinds of things they have in common. But you should do your own analysis. In other words, I’d like you to learn how to think.
So here is a list of the 20 bestselling novels of all time. This is a list that covers books read by both young adults and adults. So there aren’t any picture books in it for example. The books and the numbers are taken from Wikipedia, and the list is obviously wrong in at least one instance. The list shows Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows high on the list but doesn’t show the first book in the series, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone anywhere at all. Since the first books in a series will always outpace the last books in sales (because there is always some falloff), it is obvious that we’ve got a problem. Furthermore, sales of the Harry Potter books hit over 400 million for the series as a whole several years ago. With seven books in the series, that means we have average sales of near 60 million copies, not the 44 million listed as top sales here. In short, all seven books in the series should be on this list, not just the last book, and the numbers should range higher.
In any case, the list should still be instructive:
1—A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
2—The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien
3—And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie
4—The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien
5—She by H. Rider Haggard
6—The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
7—The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
8—The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
9—The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
10—Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling
11—Jonathon Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach
12—To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
13—Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann
14—Gone with the Winde by Margaret Mitchell
15—One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
16—The Godfather by Mario Puzo
17—Jaws by Peter Benchley
18—Shogun by James Clavell
19—The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett
20—Perfume by Patrick Suskind
Now, given the list above, look for the similarities, for patterns, in order to determine the elements that make a bestseller.
Settings
Let’s start with the settings. How many of the books distance the reader from current time and space?
You’ll notice that the first book on our list take place six decades before the readers of the 1860s were around. Most of the readers wouldn’t have been alive. It would be like me writing about World War II. Also, the book is set in two countries―England and France. In other words, no matter where you were living, the book offered some escape from the contemporary setting.
As you scroll through the list, you’ll notice that about 35 percent of the novels are set in complete fantasy worlds. Most of the rest had historical ties. In each case where the novel doesn’t distance the reader from the modern world, nearly all of the novels take you someplace that you would like to go―a seaside resort, an island retreat, and so on.
So offering your reader escape seems to be something that most bestsellers have in common. In fact, if you read Writing the Blockbuster Novel, Al Zuckerman will tell you that you should look to set your tale in places where the reader might want to go—exotic destinations like Paris, New York, and Saint Petersburg.
But what if you don’t want to set your book in one of those places? That’s all right, too. You can still entice your reader into your setting. For example, if I were setting a novel in Rigby, Idaho I might consider talking about the things that make Rigby one of the great destinations in the world―clear sunny skies, neighbors with high values, wild elk bedding down on the banks of the Snake River, and so on. In other words, make sure that the setting is a place you want to visit.
This is a key even in my genre of fantasy. Tolkien sold a lot of books, but one of the real reasons why is that Middle-earth is a great place to visit. The Shire with its gentle Hobbits, its bounteous gardens, and its innocence is an alluring place to go if you want to get away from real-world stress, and as the real-world civil unrest of the 1960s became unbearable, many readers found refuge in Middle-earth.
Beyond just the initial setting though, there are other questions to study. For example, does the setting move about? Or does the novel span dozens or even thousands of years? It’s an easy thing for an author to talk about how glacial ice sculpted a present-day valley, or to throw in a story told by a grandmother to help set a scene. All of these techniques can expand the world that you’re creating.
Characters
Well, given this list, take a look at the characters in bestsellers. What is the age and sex of each protagonist? Ninety percent of these novels seem to be aimed primarily at men. Some of this may be a throwback to the time when most books were bought by men.
Does the book have more than one major protagonist (usually defined by viewpoint character)?
Does the age of the protagonist change throughout the book? For example, in Harry Potter we first meet young Harry shortly after birth, but most of the book takes place later in life.
Beyond age and sex, you might study the characters closely. What is their social status? What about their physical appearances? What kinds of personality traits do they have in common?
Conflicts
After you study the characters, move on to conflicts. I like to take each major character in turn and study each of his or her conflicts. I label them as primary, secondary, tertiary, and so on.
So the next question is a bit tougher. How important to the reader will that conflict be? For example, when A Tale of Two Cities was written, the entire world was still reeling from the after-effects of the French Revolution. British nobility―indeed leaders around the entire world―were afraid of losing their heads, and so they began to vie to for the title of “most virtuous leader alive today.” Nobles began giving money to charity and making sure that the press was present to see them do it, and so on. The reform movement swept across the oceans to America, where in the 1830s through the 1850s tens of thousands of Christian communes rose up. (I’ll bet that you thought communes were a modern thing, something that happened just during the reform of the 1970s, but they go back thousands of years, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see them rise up again in the coming decade in response to the global recession.) So the global reform movement swept throughout Europe and Russia, and thus we can see that for a reader in the mid-1800s, this kind of novel struck the reader deeply. In short, it carried information vital to the reader’s survival.
We can see that trend toward valuable information throughout the list. Is Lord of the Rings really just escapism? I don’t think so. As a teenager I clearly believed that the ring of power was a metaphor for the nuclear bomb. Tolkien denies it, but the bulk of the novel was written in the post-war era after WWII. If nothing else, I found myself identifying strongly with the inconsequential hobbits who were trying to rid the world of an item that could destroy them.
How important is it to you to know how the mob works today? When The Godfather was released, most people were totally ignorant at how powerful organized crime was. Today we’re better educated, but I think that most people would be shocked at just how corrupt politics has become.
So study the conflicts. One screenwriting doctor claims that in every great story, there is a question about the character’s identity at its heart. Who am I? Who do others think that I am? This might seem like a tertiary conflict in many of these stories, but I think that you’ll find that it is a common thread. In short, pay attention to even the smallest conflicts in the tale.
Very often, a powerful novel doesn’t just challenge the protagonist’s identity, it challenges the reader’s identity, too.
Emotional Beats
In order to sell to any audience, you need to understand what drives that audience. A child may be looking for stories of wonder, tales that have comforting endings. A teen will be more likely to be looking for romance. An older male might be interested in figuring out how to best take care of his family, and so tales that have a strong tie to obtaining wealth become attractive, while older women in particular are interested in stories about belonging.
I worked with a greenlighting company in Hollywood for a few years that used to study how the emotional beats generated in an advertisement campaign would translate into filled seats at the box office. Depending upon the age and sex of the viewer, we could tell what they wanted to see.
So we broke those emotional beats down into certain categories: mystery, drama, romance, adventure, wonder, horror, humor, and lust.
Using this system, we could look at a commercial and say: okay, your primary audience is teen girls. We know that 92 percent of that audience will be driven to the theater to view a movie that has romance in it, while 89 percent are looking for comedy. If the movie hits those emotions, then it will have a large potential audience. On the other hand, what if it hits the wrong emotional markers for the audience? Teenage girls don’t generally look for drama; they get enough of it in their lives. Nor do they respond well to pornography. So what if you give them a movie that deals with things that the audience doesn’t like? Well, you will probably drive viewers away. Instead of appealing to 90 percent of your audience, if you make a pornographic movie for girls you’ll be advertising to less than five percent of them. So your sales will drop dramatically.
Themes
Emotional markers are big in Hollywood, but the list of markers isn’t as helpful as it could be. There are commonalities in stories that go beyond the emotional tags, and I’m going to label them as “themes.”
I’ve noticed that tales about character growth tend to be more satisfying than those that are not. So I add that into my mix of things to look for.
Similarly, many readers respond well to novels about friendship―gaining and keeping friends. If you look at the “top television shows of all time” you’ll see that many of them―shows like Cheers, M.A.S.H., Seinfeld, I Love Lucy, Happy Days, and so on all revolved around a small cluster of friends and cohorts.
As I mentioned above, as a man I’ve noticed that tales about “making it rich” are attractive to me. Interestingly, before I got married I was far more interested in romance―how to find and wed the right girl. Now my fantasies tend to revolve around, “How am I going to support my family―not just for the rest of my life, but even after I die?”
So look at the bestselling novels of all time. How many of them deal with themes appropriate to their audience?
Miscellaneous
Look at the books above and ask yourself what length has to do with becoming a bestseller. I suspect that when Lord of the Rings came out, it was perhaps the longest fantasy novel ever published. But most of the books on the list above are big, honking novels of a quarter of a million words or more. Most of them are among the longest books of their kind.
Why is that? Orson Scott Card has pointed out that when you write a novel of transport―one that takes the reader into another time, place, or culture―it naturally takes longer to tell the story.
