Have Sales Chase You: Select Writing Projects with Passion and Potential

To ensure long-term success and manuscript completion, novelists should select projects based exclusively on passion (emotional/intellectual connection to the story elements) and potential (the idea’s ability to sustain a 100,000-word narrative). Avoid the "Genre Trap" and market research, which lead to pale imitations; instead, evaluate at least five ideas using the five story elements—character, world, plot, conflict, and theme—to find the one with the most creative "meat."

Perhaps nothing affects a novelist's long-term prospects more than the projects they pick. Ideas often come fast and furious, yet turning one into a polished manuscript may take years. The need to make this choice also doesn't arise very often, underlining its importance. In following our recommendations, you'll be actively working on three novels: writing one while marketing the most recent and developing the next. The need for choice arises only when you finish writing your current project. As you start writing your next novel, a space opens at the head of this conveyor belt. You don't have to be hasty in filling that slot. You have between six months and two years, depending on your speed, before committing to an idea. So, how do you choose the right one?

The answer is deceptively simple. Evaluate your ideas according to, first, your passion for them and, second, their story potential. Be aware that, like most things at Bardsy, we define passion and potential very precisely. It's equally important to notice that these criteria are sufficient; don't let anything beyond passion and potential influence your selections. Paying attention to the wrong things puts the proverbial cart before the horse.

In particular, don't let bestseller lists or genre trends dictate your choice. Similarly, don't kowtow to readers' demands when creating your next book, even when these desires take the form of market research. Genre and reader preferences matter, but they should not affect your choice. Emphasizing demand over supply risks devoting yourself to a project without the steam to carry through. Maximizing passion and potential, in contrast, delivers the motivation as well as enough raw story to power through the 100,000 or so words your novel will need.

It's important to examine what's selling and why, when doing your genre research for instance. Amazon and others continuously update sales rankings, bestseller lists, and other popularity data. Avoid, however, the temptation to jump on the bandwagon. Romantasy is hot and crime thrillers are selling well; isn't that an easy path to success? Of course, the answer is no. Beyond the fact that fads attract clutter, enslaving yourself to genre can damage your psyche, not to mention your work.

When you pick a project based on what's selling, you cede ownership. In addition, the more closely you follow the market dictates, the worse the problem becomes. At the extreme, your work turns into a pale imitation. You're a human auteur not an AI. The best work emerges from executing your vision and not from writing to fulfill a brief. The market wants to supply your character, world, plot, and so on, leaving nothing for you to create. That path may pay off for authors with an established fanbase; otherwise, it's draining. Passion is the antidote. Only if a genre truly captures your heart can you compete with the mercenaries writing to spec.

More broadly, you rest assured that every Amazon node has an audience. Indeed, genre exists largely to match readers and books. Think of genre as a marketing category instead of using it as a creative compass. In other words, let genre help you find your readers. So long as your novel accurately fits an identifiable genre and meets those readers' expectations, you'll be fine.

A more sophisticated version of the same mistake is trying to "validate" your project before you write it, essentially applying startup logic to authorship. The idea is that if you can get a good read on what readers want, you can't help but succeed. Beyond the issues raised with genre, another problem with this approach is that market research is frequently wrong, even in industries with far more data than publishing. History is full of products that tested beautifully and bombed on release. People don't know what they want until you show it to them, to paraphrase Steve Jobs. This is especially true in creative writing; readers want surprise and originality, which market research can't provide.

Practically speaking, genuine validation calls for product testing. We discuss this a lot under the heading of retelling. Product testing, in turn, requires something close to a finished product. Using actual drafts of chapters allows volunteer readers to react naturally to the work. By this time, obviously, the project selection window closed. So what should guide your project selection? Two things: passion and potential.

Passion means choosing a story you genuinely care about, not strategically or cynically but emotionally and intellectually. Further, think about passion in a very specific way, in terms of five story elements: character, world, plot, conflict, and theme. At a minimum, one of these should light a fire within you. Maybe it's a character you can't stop thinking about, a world you want to explore, an event whose consequences you must see unfold, a conflict that feels very personal or a message you have to urgently deliver. Any of the five will do. Remember, you will be working with this idea for a while, and it will be with you for the rest of your life.

This case for passion is practical, too. Writers who experience the work as something they endure rather than something they're drawn to tend not to finish. Meanwhile, writing produced with passion, which stems from vision, provides the needed words and tells a better story. Put simply, passion turns into quality. Producing resonant novels takes more than craft; it requires care. Though hard to imagine, revising the fifth draft or the fiftieth can be a joy not a slog. In our experience, readers also sense this quality within the words. Again, this separates us from ChatGPT.

Story potential doesn't address the size of the readership or any other demand factor; rather it covers the ability to turn your idea into a novel-length work. Does this idea lead to enough story to sustain your output? The answer has to be yes, hopefully the vision has enough meat to leap way over this hurdle. It is surprisingly common for ideas to fail at this task. Some ideas seem great, but they peter out, usually around 30,000 words. The thought was compelling but too thin, and it's important to find this out before you commit.

Choose a fruitful idea, one that leads to expansive thoughts as opposed to cycling back on itself. Our Minimal Complete Story (MCS) will help explore an idea's possibilities. When you tell the story aloud, go through each of the five story elements and see how easy they are to articulate. A writer's passion typically flows from one of the five elements, so examine how easily the other four elements come to mind. With that accomplished, start filling them in. With character, for example, assess how easy it is to imagine them as a fully-formed being and come up with possible arcs. Your goal, at this point, isn't to develop the story but to evaluate how easy it is to spin out options. Every project inevitably has issues, and the availability of these options will help address those going forward.

Speaking of choices, it's vital to consider more than one story idea. Often we fall in love with the first thing that comes to mind. Force yourself not to do that. You should fully consider at least five ideas before settling on one. Comparison is the best way to determine your true passion as well as an idea's fruitfulness. Then, when one rises to the top, you can proceed with confidence.