Publishers: What tips you off that a book is well written or publishable?

Really this is two completely different questions.

“Well written” does not equal publishable. Not even close. I mean, in fact, “well written” has nothing whatsoever to do with publishable.

Confused?

That’s because publish-ability is all about market-ability.

As an Acquisitions Editor you look for clues as to whether a book could be marketable, but actually, what do we know about it? Not much. Just a little bit more than everyone else. So we go on instinct, on whatever sales data we can get, on what we read ourselves, or past experience, or whatever.

If something is well written it has a better chance of pleasing the Acquisitions Editor, and that’s a good start. But let’s not confuse this with marketability. Write well in order to get the attention of the AE or Agent, but don’t expect good writing to get you anywhere in the market place.

Why is that? Because people read books to get a kick. No-one ever recommended a book to me as a reader because “it was well written”. If they did I’d probably avoid it thinking it meant the book was written in poetic language without real substance. Good writing is nothing special. It’s the baseline we expect.

What sells books is the ability of the book to give the reader some kicks. In non-fiction that might be to satisfy some burning desire or need. If it’s fiction, it may be to thrill them or show them something that makes them smile or look inside or feel some new emotion. Really, successful books are fairground rides. You choose which one to go on because of which one gets the most screams of fear or delight. Remember that, it’s rule #1.

Secondly, a book isn’t publishable when you submit it to a Publisher. You may need to rewrite the whole thing, or you may need to do some re-drafts. Certainly it will get picked apart by reviewers who will suggest changes. Then it will get several rounds of edits, copy-edits, and proofs. Only then is it publishable, in the traditional sense.

So getting to what I believe is the crux of your question, you should step outside of the text of your book for a while and look at it in outline. Perhaps write a table of contents, scene by scene. What is it about this TOC that provides those fairground screams and whoops of delight? What is calling out of that TOC, waiting to pull the reader in and shake them around before letting them go at the end completely satisfied? If there’s precious few of those, then put them in now, right there in the TOC, and get to work writing / rewriting those scenes.

Only when you have a crowd-pleaser are you finally ready to write a killer book proposal to send to AEs and Agents.