It's Not The Trope - It's About The Voice

Over the weekend, I was working with my Developmental Editing Class with the UCLA Extension program. The assignment was to research a single publisher and really get to know who that publisher was. Repeatedly, I found myself saying the same thing about the assignments that came it. It was not about the type of the story the publisher represented, it was all about the voice. What the class was struggling to understand is that every single publisher sounds different.

Your job, as an author, is to learn the sound of the publisher. And authors are simply not doing that.

When I see query letters come in and they speak of the comps for their books, they always talk about the tropes and plot devices. "My character is similar to Katniss Everdeen because..." What they are not seeing is that there are a lot of female characters out there similar to Ms. Everdeen.

To accomplish this requires reading countless books by the publishers. No, you do not need to read every publisher out there. Just the publishers that you feel your writing is potentially similar to, or those where you want to be published.

This is where the developmental class was also making the mistake. They were picking and choosing books and then making huge fallacies by applying what they know about those books to ALL of the books in that line. 

The easiest thing to do is to go to your own bookshelf. Who do you read "the most." And no, you do not get to say you read everything because you really don't. Who do you read? Who are they published by? The odds are, these are all limited to a very small group of publishers. Now, as a side note, if you are noting that you have established authors, but they are self-publishing, go back to their original books. You may be shocked that you are finding the same publishers.

As you read, ignore the plots and characters. LISTEN to the writing. LISTEN to the pacing. Pay attention to the speed you can read the books. LOOK at paragraph construction. LOOK at word usage. Yes, you can even get down to a grammatical/sentence level structure. 

Some may say, it is the author that creates the voice, and, while that is true, the publisher still shapes it into a similar voice. 

Getting your book published is not just about someone liking your story, it is about you demonstrating why your book fits into THEIR FAMILY.