Wright’s Writing Corner — On Endings — And Writing the Breakout Novel

For those of you who find a week without the words of Mrs. Wright to be a tedium or torment akin to purgatory, fear not! For she has written a book review on WRITING THE BREAKOUT NOVEL, which is the only book on writing I have ever found to be of even the slightest interest or use.

My favorite book on how to write is Writing the Breakout Novel, by Donald Maass. Before encountering it, I was a non-believer. Writing books did nothing for me. Most seemed to be filled with an endless list of what not to do.

But something impelled me pick this book up . . . and everything changed!

Donald Maass is a top New York agent. He reads hundreds of manuscripts a year, maybe thousands. One day—perhaps dazed by the endless mountain of manuscripts he had to scale to reach his desk every day—he began thinking about the phenomena of the breakout novel.

A breakout novel is not the same thing as a bestseller. A bestseller is a book that sells enough to make it onto the New York Times Bestseller’s list. A breakout novel is a novel that sells far more than anticipated. It might be a bestseller, or it might just be a book that was expected to sell five thousand that sold twenty thousand.

The significant thing about breakout novels, however, is that most of them do not get a lot of time or money put into promotion. Which makes sense. No one expected them to do well. But it means that their popularity came almost entirely from word of mouth.

And that is the ultimate compliment a book can have—that it sold well just because people who liked it told other people.

Read her article here: http://jordanmccollum.com/2010/03/craft-books-writing-breakout/