Yesterday I made a presentation to the UK sales reps who will (I hope) be trying to convince booksellers that they should stock my new book, "Your Writing Coach" when it comes out in April. I had about ten minutes, which sounds like a pretty long time but zips by. The publisher feels that my background as a writer in Hollywood is a good hook, so I came up with a few anecdotes. The reps seemed to enjoy them and I hope they'll remember the book when the time comes.
The US sales reps are having their meeting this week as well, in Boston. I can't go, so I made a video on the beach in Santa Monica when I was there a couple of weeks ago, and emailed it to the publisher to play for them. The idea is to somehow stand out in their minds when they decide how much time to spend pushing each of the books on their lists.
This brought home to me the fact that all writers have several audiences. Master scriptwriter William Goldman made the point in one of his books that the first script you write has to captivate the money people and therefore it should read beautifully and should create vivid pictures in their minds. Later, the shooting script can be a much more stripped-down version.
With the book, my first audience was the publisher, now it is the sales reps, next year it will the producers of radio & TV shows that we hope might be interested in having me on to talk about the book, and journalists and editors who we hope will review it, and the managers of bookshops where I might give a talk.
The reader--the person for whom we think we are writing all along--is actually at the end of the line. Writing for the audiences that precede the reader requires a different mindset. The publisher's concern is whether the book will make money, the sales reps want books (and/or authors) that will stand out from the offerings of their competitors, the journalists and editors want an entertaining story, and the bookstore managers want something that will pull people into their establishments.
One size does not fit all.