Finding (and selling) the heart of your book

No, that’s not a typo. I know everyone out there talks about writing the book of your heart. This is about something different. This is about finding the heart of your book–and using that heart to strengthen, deepen, and ultimately sell the book.

Thanks to NaNo, many of you out there have just finished writing a book. Maybe your first. Maybe your 10th. In either case, you probably didn’t write that book just for yourself. You probably wrote it because you wanted to share it with readers. Which probably has you thinking, what do I have to do now to get this thing published?

Good question. There are lots of steps along the way (revising, getting an agent, submitting, making the decision about the type of publishing you want to do). This isn’t about those steps. This is about the step before that. This is about figuring out the heart of your story.

What is the heart of a story? For me, it’s the emotional core. It’s the essential idea or concept that readers will connect with as they read the story. This isn’t a big, generic theme, like redemption or happily ever after. It isn’t a trope or a plot. As a romance writer, it is personal and vulnerable to your characters. It’s the thing they most fear, or most desire. And the crazy thing is, you may not know what it is until you finish writing the story.

Let me give you an example. I started writing my most recent release, The Boss’s Fake Fiancee, in early 2012, knowing only that the trope would be a fake engagement and that it would feature characters from Rules of Negotiation. I came up with a plot, some conflict, and a story arc. I knew that my hero was a recluse, and that my heroine would have trust issues after being cheated on by her boyfriend. I got half-way through a first draft before I realized that my hero’s secrecy was motivated by more than a bad relationship or the death of his parents when he was young.

I realized that my hero was different than any other hero I’d written before.

I realized that he was…SPOILER ALERT!!!…on the autism spectrum. It was mild, but it was there.

This was a big deal.

This changed everything.

Still, I actually sort of ignored this revelation. I continued writing my draft. I downplayed my discovery. I didn’t think readers would connect with a hero with Asperger Syndrome. I didn’t want to say it outloud. I knew it, the hero knew it, and even the heroine figured it out. But I was reluctant to trust readers with this information.

So I sent the book to my editor, Libby, who is a goddess. She (and the other goddesses at Entangled who read the first draft) loved the book. They loved Garth. But they thought I needed to be clear about his autism. It’s mild enough that readers who aren’t familiar with spectrum disorders might not understand him, they said. I needed to give it a name. I needed to own it.

To say I fretted about this is a HUGE understatement. I really, really feared that readers wouldn’t enjoy the book if I did this. I feared that they wouldn’t be comfortable rooting for a hero who wasn’t like everyone else. Who had a different sort of reason for his inability to navigate social situations and his fear of relationships.

Libby was confident. She knew what I didn’t: that this was the heart of the book, and hiding it would do the book, and its hero, a disservice.

So back to the topic of this blog. Finding the heart of the book. Garth, and his autism, was the heart of The Boss’s Fake Fiancee. But until I recognized that fact, and more importantly, before I revised the book around that heart, the story was only half told. It lacked the core to guide it. The spark to set it apart.

So, with Libby’s support, and the support of the amazing team at Entangled Publishing, I revised the book (twice) to focus more on the heart of Garth’s struggle. And you want to know the really amazing thing? The Boss’s Fake Fiancee sold over 6,000 copies in its first month. This book exceeded my expectations on a grand scale. I have been overwhelmed by the love people have shown it, and Garth.

So, as you pull out that NaNo book, or whatever you’re working on, I have this advice. Find the heart of the book. Find the emotional, driving core that sets this book apart from every other book out there and celebrate it. Trust your readers and trust the story.

You owe it to your characters–and yourself.