He got up and sat on the edge of the bedstead with his back to the window. “It’s better not to sleep at all,” he decided. There was a cold damp draught from the window, however; without getting up he drew the blanket over him and wrapped himself in it. He was not thinking of anything and did not want to think. But one image rose after another, incoherent scraps of thought without beginning or end passed through his mind. He sank into drowsiness. Perhaps the cold, or the dampness, or the dark, or the wind that howled under the window and tossed the trees roused a sort of persistent craving for the fantastic. He kept dwelling on images of flowers, he fancied a charming flower garden, a bright, warm, almost hot day, a holiday—Trinity day. A fine, sumptuous country cottage in the English taste overgrown with fragrant flowers, with flower beds going round the house; the porch, wreathed in climbers, was surrounded with beds of roses. A light, cool staircase, carpeted with rich rugs, was decorated with rare plants in china pots. He noticed particularly in the windows nosegays of tender, white, heavily fragrant narcissus bending over their bright, green, thick long stalks. He was reluctant to move away from them, but he went up the stairs and came into a large, high drawing-room and again everywhere—at the windows, the doors on to the balcony, and on the balcony itself—were flowers. The floors were strewn with freshly-cut fragrant hay, the windows were open, a fresh, cool, light air came into the room. The birds were chirruping under the window, and in the middle of the room, on a table covered with a white satin shroud, stood a coffin. The coffin was covered with white silk and edged with a thick white frill; wreaths of flowers surrounded it on all sides. Among the flowers lay a girl in a white muslin dress, with her arms crossed and pressed on her bosom, as though carved out of marble. But her loose fair hair was wet; there was a wreath of roses on her head. The stern and already rigid profile of her face looked as though chiselled of marble too, and the smile on her pale lips was full of an immense unchildish misery and sorrowful appeal. Svidrigaïlov knew that girl; there was no holy image, no burning candle beside the coffin; no sound of prayers: the girl had drowned herself. She was only fourteen, but her heart was broken. And she had destroyed herself, crushed by an insult that had appalled and amazed that childish soul, had smirched that angel purity with unmerited disgrace and torn from her a last scream of despair, unheeded and brutally disregarded, on a dark night in the cold and wet while the wind howled

I Read 1,000 Book Concepts to Help You Create the Perfect One

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I spent nearly 4 months scouring Publisher’s Marketplace looking for all the books that had just sold. Most of these books won’t be published until 2025. Some won’t even be published till 2026. In the end, I read more than 1,000 book descriptions. It was truly eye-opening, and it forever changed the way that I think about book concepts and marketability and how to get a book published.

I wanna pass on 6 super helpful tips for writers that I learned during this process because I think it will massively help you in your writing career.

1. Brand Yourself

The author is usually the first thing listed in the Publisher’s Marketplace. That’s because agents and publishers wanna know who this author is and why they deserve to have a book published. What that means is you need to work on making yourself sound like a somebody rather than a nobody.

So here are some common ways that authors were pitched as being the type of person who deserves to have a book out:

  1. Author of a previous book. Obviously, this doesn’t help you if you haven’t written one yet, but once you do have a book out, it really helps to stand on that platform.
  2. Expertise in another field. Podcaster, YouTuber, standup comedian, environmentalist, TikToker, historian, chef, singer. Any experience that you have in a different field ends up making you seem like the type of person who has the expertise to publish a book.
  3. Any award or residency that you’ve had. These are often used as justification for, hey, this person deserves to publish a book.
  4. Attended an MFA program. If you have, you can list that.

Now, if you don’t have any marketable identity, that’s fine. You’ll just go into the debut authors category, and people don’t expect debut authors to have a long track record, so it’s perfectly fine.

2. Perfect Your Pitch

I cannot emphasize enough that this is the most important thing for your book. The pitch is the most important way to get an agent, the most important way to get a publisher, and the most important way to get readers. If you cannot make me want to read your book in a single sentence, then either you’ve written a bad book or you don’t know how to pitch.

My advice would be to take your pitch and to practice it on dozens of strangers and friends, and pay very close attention to their reaction. Do their eyes light up? Are they like, “Oh, I really wanna read that,” or do they politely say, “Oh, that’s interesting”? Wah-wah. You wanna practice that pitch again and again and again until you get it to the point where every single person is giving you positive feedback.

Here’s the basic formula for a pitch: premise plus promise of conflict.

For an example, let’s look at The Three Lives of Kate Kane. Here’s the premise: an elusive mega bestselling author has kept her real identity a closely guarded secret. And now here’s the promise of conflict: until she receives a letter that upends everything she thought she knew about her past. This is wonderful. We have mega fame, we have secrets, and we also have an inciting incident — a mysterious letter that arrives and destroys her life as she knows it.

For a second example, let’s look at The Last Gladiatrix (and yes, gladiatrix is like a female gladiator). Here’s the premise: a female warrior is taken captive by the Roman Empire and sold to a gladiator school in Rome. Okay, I’m interested. We got a strong female lead, we have an interesting historical event. And here’s the promise of conflict: with a band of warrior rebels and a monk, she must perform mortal combat in the arena that brings an end to Rome’s gladiator games. So here we have the promise of violence, here we have some supporting characters, and we get to see what’s the end result of this — she ends up succeeding and changing gladiatorial combat in Rome.

Look, you can write the most perfect book in the world, but it’s not gonna get published if you can’t pitch it well. Just try 50 variations of your pitch until you finally get one that has the desired effect on your listeners.

3. Add a Mashup

A ton of books listed in Publisher’s Marketplace, and usually the ones that had the biggest advances, ended up comparing their book to other media. So here are the 4 most common ways that I noticed authors were comparing their books:

  1. TV shows. Parks and Recreation meets Only Murders in the Building. I think this works really well for commercial fiction. It might not work so well for literary fiction.
  2. Compare to other authors. “For fans of Fredrik Backman and Matt Haig.” This works really well because if the agent or the reader knows one of those authors and likes one of those authors, they’re immediately interested in your book.
  3. Characters. “What if Jack Reacher had a baby with Johnny Rotten?” There’s a little bad boy element there. There’s a little bit of promise of violence. I mean, that book sounds fun.
  4. Famous references. “A contemporary retelling of Korea’s Romeo and Juliet.” Immediately gives you a sense that this is romance, and there’s gonna be star-crossed lovers.

And a mashup like this — it doesn’t even matter if it doesn’t get into the Publisher’s Marketplace listing. If you list it on the back of the book, it’s going to help readers get interested in the book.

But my recommendation is to be as specific as possible and don’t choose books that are too popular. “Harry Potter meets Divergent” is probably something that agents sort of have heard a thousand times, and they’re gonna roll their eyes. You’re trying to find a new mashup that feels fresh and original.

4. Highlight the Tie-In

In the thousand books that I looked at, more than 100 of them rode to publication on the coattails of other famous people or events. Think about it — it’s really smart to link your book to something that the publisher or the agent or the reader already knows. More readers are gonna buy your book because they feel like they already have knowledge about that person or event.

Here are 5 good ways to do it:

  1. A famous historical person. If you link your book to Thomas Edison or Augustine or Houdini, it’s gonna be easier to sell, and you don’t have to have them as a major character. You might have them as a minor character, and then their spouse is narrating the story.
  2. A connection to a historical event. Set in the days before Krakatoa exploded, during the Qin dynasty in China, or during the 1992 LA riots.
  3. Holidays. Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving, Ramadan, Hanukkah. It gives this emotional touchpoint for the reader or the agent to sort of latch onto your book.
  4. Sporting events. World Cup, a championship cricket match, Grand Slam in tennis, or you could go super rare and dorky, like bowling or darts.
  5. Popular stories. For instance, if you’re reinterpreting a famous myth like Madeline Miller’s Circe (which is excellent, by the way), or if you’re retelling a well-known story from a different perspective.

A quick quiz

Okay, so now it’s time for a quiz. I’m gonna give you 3 pitches for actual romance books. One of them is a book that actually sold, 2 of them are real pitches on Twitter that, to my knowledge, I don’t think they sold. Your goal is to guess which one is the winning pitch.

  1. Zaire is secretly in love with his sister’s best friend, and now there are 2 of them locked up on a train while the winter storm is raging outside.
  2. A professional rower has a single summer to win back her spot on the national team, but her new coach’s unusual training strategies, and their growing attraction, threaten to derail her Olympic dreams.
  3. Ahiga’s story is just the beginning. When war rages through centuries of magic born and gods, only the blessed will survive, and they will need the damned to save them.

Got your answer?

If you guessed number 2, you’re correct. We were just talking about tie-ins, right? And that has a very clear tie-in to the Olympic Games. That famous event made it so much easier to sell that book to agents and to publishers. The first one has a train and the third one has magic and gods, but it’s not clear to me what those books are about.

What the middle one does so well is it presents the 2 areas of conflict: 1) there’s a problematic romance — she’s in love with her coach, and 2) there’s an unusual training strategy, which is a bit mysterious. It’s also key that that middle one is a single sentence. If you can’t get your pitch into a single sentence, keep on working on it.

5. Go High Concept

When I was reading those 1,000 book descriptions, there were an awful lot of them that sort of made me stand up and be like, “I want to read that.” They were crazy, they were wild, they were memorable. In the film world, this sort of story is called a high concept film. It’s a big, ambitious concept that you can hang all these minor stories on, and it’s immediately memorable.

We’re gonna look at 3 examples and we’re gonna take them apart piece by piece so we can figure out how they wrote a pitch that was so mesmerizing.

1. Kelsea Cox’s Party of Liars, centered around a lavish sweet 16 party thrown deep in the Texas Hill Country at a mysterious estate where everyone is invited in, but not everyone will get out alive. For starters, there’s a great tie-in — sweet 16 birthday party. That is an event. Then we also have wealth — it’s a lavish party. We have a mysterious estate, which makes us wonder what’s going on there. And the stakes are super high — people are gonna die.

2. Meg Serena’s Annapurna, in which a woman returns to mountainous Nepal 20 years after her best friend fell to her death there on a post-college trek, both to honor her friend’s memory and confront long-buried secrets and the mysterious circumstances of the death. What makes this high concept? 1) It’s adventurous — we have traveling to Nepal, that’s exciting. 2) We have a mysterious death of her best friend, and there’s 2 very key words in this pitch: it’s secret and mysterious, both very loaded terms.

3. Isabel J. Kim’s debut Sublimation, a literary speculative thriller set in a version of our world where instancing splits a person into 2 distinct copies when they cross a country’s border — one who moves and one who remains. This is tapping into a very trendy, popular theme talking about immigration, and it’s such a magical, otherworldly concept of people splitting: one who stays in the original country and one who goes on to this new life in the new country.

Even though we’ve only been talking about it for 10 or 15 seconds, I would wager that you would remember this probably for years. High concept ideas have a way of worming themselves into your brain.

It would be a fantastic idea for you to read hundreds of books’ descriptions so you can train your author instincts. You want to be able to tell when you hear an idea: is it a high concept idea, or is it a sort of forgettable idea? And if you train your instincts like that, you will be better at writing a pitch for your own book.

6. Find the Trends

If you read the amount of book summaries that I did, which was a lot, you start to see certain themes pop up again and again. Now, if you describe your book using one of these keywords or buzzwords, I think it has an easier chance for the agent to say, “All right, this is trending, I think I’m gonna have an easier time selling this to publishers.”

So here are 5 buzzworthy topics that I noticed:

  1. Trans or queer — currently anything to do with this is extremely popular. Your book has an automatic edge.
  2. Artificial intelligence — pretty hot right now, as you can imagine. It used to be AI was just for sci-fi, but, you know, ChatGPT is in all of our lives now.
  3. Climate fiction — hot, hot, hot right now, pun intended. Anything environmental or climate related has a fantastic chance. There’s even a genre called cli-fi, which refers to climate fiction.
  4. Foreign settings, immigration, or minority communities — books about these are reliably popular.
  5. Race or racism — anything to do with this has an edge. There was a ton of “me too” books sold a couple years ago, but I find that trend has really ebbed away.

Now, it’s usually a bad idea to try to follow a trend, because by the time that you’re done writing the book, the trend could be finished. But sometimes you just need to unearth what’s already inside your book so you can frame it in a way that makes it easier for the agent to sell.

Okay, so now I need to take a break from Publisher’s Marketplace because my eyes are glazing over and I’ve just gone through too many book descriptions. Still, if you want to get a subscription for $25 a month, it’s well worth it to get an education in what’s currently selling.

And of course, none of this actually works if your writing isn’t actually good. A good concept and a good pitch is necessary, but it’s not enough to get you over the victory line of publication. But if you have a good book, then it is worth your time getting a good pitch and a tie-in and comparisons to help you land a contract with the Big 5.

Good luck.

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