Thursday, March 06, 2008

Amanda Bostic (Advice for Novelists, Part 24)

And here's another entry in our "Advice for Novelists" series. Lend your ear to Amanda Bostic...

"If you could say one thing to aspiring novelists, what would you say?"

There’s so much good advice already posted here, but the one thing I would add is to make sure you know what your hook is. If you can’t distill your story into one or two sentences that immediately pique someone’s curiosity, the idea probably needs to stew in your creative juices for awhile longer. What makes your story stand out from everything else that is coming across an editor’s desk? And from all the other books on the shelves? Keep finessing and dreaming until you hit on that element that makes your novel fresh, unique, and so compelling that it can’t be passed by.

--Amanda Bostic, Associate Acquisitions Editor, Fiction, Thomas Nelson.

1 comment:

Author Sue Dent said...

Just like I asked Jan, is your advice intended for authors submitting to the CBA or ECPA market or the general market. I only ask because clearly Thomas Nelson is the biggest CBA affiliated publisher out there, serving a niche market of conservative evangelicals, not the genral market.

For the general market this is typical and grand advice for a niche market it hardly matters. An author will have to write to meet the niches conventions. :)