Make you story accessible to all

I don't know how many times I have heard the comment from a writer, "but my critique group loves my writing." Well of course they do. These are your friends and, in many cases, they think just like you. But here is the challenge. Can you give it to people outside of your reading group and have them like it as well? The key to marketing is to insure the book is accessible to all. Expand where the story can go to.

When I first entered teaching I chose a path that many questioned. My other teacher friends, new to the profession, moved immediately on to earning that Masters degree. "This will move me up the pay scale," they would say. I took a different route. I started taking classes to increase the number of teaching endorsements that I had. At the end of that year, I was sitting with 4 endorsements and they had just their one and a Masters degree. Now here is where the marketing comes into play. With my 4 endorsements (English, Language Arts, Earth Science and History) I had the ability to pretty much teach anything within the school. I later went on to earn a Reading Endorsement which also increased my flexibility. The end result. I became extremely employable due to this depth. One administrator commented that I was "their utility player, able to fill any hole in the schedule and do it well."

I bring this up because too often, writers, in an attempt to target an audience, do so in such an extreme that their writing only fits with that audience. Sci fi writers only write for that select group of people and so forth. The key is to find an ability to target the publishers you are interested in, but make the writing strong enough to bridge those gaps into other genres. Diana Gabaldon did that with Outlander (Sept. 22nd, woo hoo). History buffs like it. Romance readers dig Claire and Jaime, and the paranormal readers loved figuring out the time travel logistics of Claire's travels. This makes it marketable, or at least one of the elements.

Now, I know this is hard to do, but it is well worth it.

Scott