Nicholas Sparks and Stuart Harrison

Advertising is an expensive nightmare. Nevertheless, the other day I was designing an ad for The Flyer to trial on Goodreads. As part of the process I had to target my ad to be seen by readers of authors to whom I might compare my style of storytelling. The logic being if a reader liked the books of X, that person might also like The Flyer. It was much harder than I thought. I wanted to be honest with my targeting, because it wouldn’t benefit either the reader or me to claim that my style is comparable to say, a bestselling crime novelist, horror writer, chick lit. author or writer of romances. I had to be confident that if a reader saw my ad and decided to check out the book on my website, then it was likely to actually appeal to them. In the end, after considerable research I came up with a list of authors, all of whom I’d read at some time or another, though in some cases I had to refresh my memory. It was an interesting list.

There were twenty-two names in all, for no particular reason except that I thought that was enough. A couple of things struck me right away. The split between male and female writers was exactly 50/50. I was surprised by that, because without thinking about it I expected the result to be weighted towards women authors simply because, although The Flyer is one of those stories that crosses genres, it is more than anything else a story of love and loyalty, themes I expected women to write about more than men. By the same logic, I’ve always assumed The Flyer, like The Snow Falcon and some of my other books, would appeal more to female readers than men. I see from my list that both those assumptions were probably wrong.

The first name on the list is Nicholas Sparks, author of Message In A Bottle and The Notebook, among others. The order in which the names appear is random, by the way, and was simply a result of the search terms I was using. At first glance, I wasn’t going to include Nicholas Sparks on the list, but it turned out I could say the same for every single author that I ended up using, though for a variety of reasons. In the case of Nicholas Sparks, I wanted to use him because he’s a phenomenally popular and successful author, so if I could claim that his fans would probably like my work too, I knew I couldn’t be doing too bad a job. my reservations were based on my perception of Nicholas Sparks as a writer of stories that were close to being what I would term Romances, which I don’t think is a term that applies to The Flyer.

To solve the dilemma, I re-read part of Message In A Bottle, which I first read around the time in came out. I found that Nicholas Sparks writes about relationships and love, and he crafts his stories well, none of which was a surprise given his popularity. I can’t say they are the kind of books I normally read myself, but I read a huge variety of material across all genres. What I can say, however, is that Nicholas Sparks’ stories are character and emotionally based, as are my own. In terms of writing skill, however you define that, I asked myself if I honestly thought fans of Nicholas Sparks would enjoy The Flyer, and the answer was a definite yes.

If anyone reading this has a view, I’d love to hear it.