Heide Goody & Iain Grant on the Bestseller Experiment: How to Appeal to as Many Readers as Possible…

I had a bit of revelation while recording this week’s podcast. As is traditional, me and Mr D discuss the interview with our guests — this week it’s the brilliant duo of Heide Goody and Iain Grant — and at one point Heide brings up Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a theory of human motivation and is often represented as a pyramid, with our most essential needs at the bottom, rising up to self-actualisation and transcendence…

Heide told me how she and Iain would use this in their writing to help develop their characters’ needs and wants. My little revelation came in my post-interview chat with Mr D when it occurred to me that the bottom layers of the pyramid — the basics of survival: food, water, health, security, safety — are the stakes that we find in good genre fiction. Then a little further up we find belonging, love and esteem, which is what we love about romance novels and contemporary fiction. Then above that are the things that we associate with finding meaning in life: cognitive needs and higher planes of existence and all the kind of self-indulgent stuff that bores us in literary fiction (insert smiley face)… So my tip for you writers is if you want to appeal to as many readers as possible, then go for that lower half of the pyramid.

Of course we discuss much more, including the essential elements of cozy crime and how being a writer opens doors that are usually shut. In the extended version for our Patrons Mr and Mr D offer tips for co-writing. If you want to support the podcast and get loads of extra material like this you can do so by clicking here.