Selling Stories Successfully
Stephen Brown
Selling Stories Successfully
Stephen Brown
© 2011 by Stephen Brown
Copyright for digital edition for all languages
© Digitpub srl 2011
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ISBN 978-88-6586-047-2
Cover by Roberto Grassilli
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This title is also available in italiano
Converted in ebook format in January 2011
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Selling Stories Successfully
Stephen Brown
Call Me Phishmael
Picture the scene. You’re a struggling writer. You’ve written the most incredible story. You’ve come up with a yarn that’s Twilight times ten, a novel that makes Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy look so last century. There’s only one problem. It’s a major problem, however. You’ve got to sell the thing. You have to persuade people to buy it, both literally and metaphorically. You’ve woken up to the fact that storytelling and story selling are two completely different things. As J.G. Ballard once ruefully observed: “any fool can write a novel but it takes real genius to sell it”.
So, what do you do? How do you ensure that your Twilight times ten gets selected ahead of every other Twilight times ten on the publisher’s slush pile? You read up on selling and marketing. Holding your nose, you enter the Business & Management aisles of your local bookstore and are taken aback by the sheer number of basic textbooks on sale. They’re big books. They’re expensive books. They’re comprehensive books, though. You decide to splash out, even though you can’t afford it. You convince yourself that it’s an investment, that once you absorb the secrets of selling your story is sure to make millions. Billions even.
You’ve just bought your first book about marketing. The horror, the horror.
You rush home. You start reading. You fall asleep. You try again. You doze off again. You dose up on caffeine, determined to crack the marketing code. You are defeated by the tedium, the platitudes, the irrelevance of what you’re reading. You give up. You buy another textbook. You try again. You give up. You realise you’re in what Jim Collins, a famous management guru, calls the “doom loop”. Now you’ll never be able to sell that story. The secret of selling will remain a secret, known only to insiders and initiates. The marketing textbooks, you angrily conclude, are designed to mystify not clarify. There’s a bookselling conspiracy, you decide. They’re all in it together. You might even write a story on the subject. Maybe that one will sell…
Fortunately, there is a simple solution to the textbook doom loop. Instead of turning into the Business & Management aisles of your friendly neighbourhood mega-bookstore, or online emporium, head straight for the fiction section. Yes, the fiction section. The best insights into buying and selling and marketing and branding, and all that other awful stuff, are found in works of fiction, not in big boring anthologies or dry-as-dust academic articles. When it comes to sales & marketing, one learned commentator makes clear, “you can learn more from a reasonably good novel than a solid piece of social science research”. Or, as the late great Norman Mailer once noted, “fiction can serve as our reconnaissance into all those jungles and up those precipices of human behaviour that psychiatry, history, theology and sociology are too intellectually encumbered to try”. Stormin’ Norman forgot to mention sales & marketing, admittedly, which is surprising for someone who once wrote a novel called Advertisements for Myself. But the principle’s the same. If you want to know about selling stories, start with stories about selling.
Last Night I Dreamt I Went to Matalan Again
Consider, for example, the wonderful scene in Joshua Ferris’s fantastic debut novel, Then We Came to the End. Carl Garbedian, a stressed out advertising executive whose job is under threat at a time of company-wide layoffs, spots a panhandler outside the agency’s offices in Chicago. The bum is always there, come rain or shine or snowstorm, and Carl’s sympathy for the beggar has long since evaporated. Five years previously, he’d have emptied his pockets into the mendicant’s plastic cup. But nowadays, his very presence is offensive. He’d become an omen, a harbinger, a semiotic signifier of the fate that awaits burnt-out middle-aged advertising executives in the depths of an economic recession, when clients are slashing their budgets and agencies are shedding staff from stem to stern and then some. Unable to stand the sight of the cup-shaking schmuck, Carl loses the rag: