PJ asked this: “There must be a good amount of narrative driven, family friendly books published every year that are reasonably entertaining. A good deal more than two dozen I would hope that you don't find necessary to ‘throw aside with great force.’ So what other factors generally come into play?”
When I originally started writing that post, the whole first part was criteria. But as I do fairly often, I dropped the opening and cut to the chase, as what I really wanted to talk about was how I processed a seemingly large number of books. But that is the other half of the story, so why not explain it?
At the DJ I read for an audience that we have, over the years, been able to define fairly well, although only in broad terms as far as prediction is concerned. We are talking about book judgments, after all. Still, we have always had some sort of rating system in place to determine how much each of our selections was enjoyed, and while a statistical approach to something like books is often dicey, it’s telling enough. So I have a set of parameters within which to work when I’m selecting titles.
First of all, keep in mind that these books will be edited down to a lesser length by us. This is an odd thing, needless to say, that no one else does much except some magazine staffs (excluding, these days, our own!). While some may argue that an author’s words are canonical and that they want to savor every original one of them, there are others who argue that some judicial slimming down seldom hurts anyone. In the 70s, when paper prices were through the roof and hardcover novels were first going over that $20 barrier, trade publishers pushed their authors to write longer books to provide more value for the money, and most commercial authors obliged, and the habit stuck. This does not necessarily make for better books. Sometimes a book needs to be snappy and fast, and if it’s 460 pages long, snappy and fast it isn't. Many a 460 page long book harbors a 200 page book dying to break out. As a matter of fact, one of our old slogans was that we would find the book within the book. The point is, it’s easier than you think to find surplus words in commercial fiction, even good commercial fiction.
That said, some books, at great length, refuse nevertheless to be trimmed down. If a book has an extremely complex plot, where every scene is linked to every other scene as we reveal a thriller or mystery narrative, or if there are multiple narrators each supplying a different piece of the puzzle (even if the puzzle is a soap opera and not a shoot-em-up), it’s probably not a candidate for us. Some books simply cannot be edited down. We exclude those off the top. If a book is too long in the original, it is unlikely to work for us. So, right off the bat, we can eliminate the bricks.
Our readers like straightforward narrative, books with beginnings and middles and endings where things happen. They like stories. A lot of books, even a lot of good books, don’t necessarily have strong narrative drive. (The opposite is also true: a lot of bad books do have strong narrative drive.) Stories that are primarily interior, thoughtful, literary, etc., are not for us. If I read 50 pages of a book and, as far as I can tell, nothing has happened yet, that’s that.
I like the paradigm of old-fashioned Hollywood movies to describe what works for us. Good story, good characters, inherent moral values, happy endings. Story pulls you along in a novel, obviously. Characters are the company you keep, and they need depth and interest. Usually good guys need to be good and bad guys need to be bad, but we can handle the odd antihero if handled right. I maintain that in really good books, we are more likely to remember the characters than the plot. Humans respond well to narrative, but they respond even more to people. We’re hard-wired that way. As for the inherent moral values, well, look at the sign over the DJ door. We do not reward evil, and we do not want stories awash with sex and violence. As we used to say at my first job, where I occasionally edited Westerns, we could have our characters go into the barn but not into the hay. So if a book is inherently about sex and violence, it’s a non-starter for us, and if it’s too heavy with those elements, and they can’t be moderated with editing (we don’t change stuff, we just delete things), we can’t use it. (For that matter, the only words we’ll literally change in an edit are vulgarities, trading an F-word for a “Hell,” for instance, and not too much of that, since as often as not a simple deletion will suffice and still maintain the original effect.)
So, straightforward narrative and good characters with underlying family values. But not ostensive religious values: we don’t mind being occasionally inspirational, but we’re always non-denominational. Honestly, there are few books where religion is even mentioned that work for us; I just want to make that clear.
Reader favorite genres are mystery/thrillers, family stories, romances, general (whatever that is). SFF and horror are out (although we’ve used the occasional magical tale): our readers tend to be realists who want nothing to do with vampires, zombies, fairies, elves, robots, aliens or spaceships. And, unfortunately, you can eliminate most mysteries and thrillers nowadays, because they’re all series and if you don’t know what happened in the last installment, you’re lost in this one. We look for either standalones or first entries. (Exceptions to this are, e.g., Lee Child and Michael Connelly, who write series so well you that you can start with any one of the entries; this is rare.) Family stories are just that, but today the genre is overflowing with books where something horrible happens to a family and everyone spends the next mournful 300 pages coping and moping—not our cup of tea. I don’t mind a soap opera, but don’t completely bum me out. By romances, I don’t mean sexy and I don’t mean genre; think romantic comedy. You know how good romantic comedy is rare in movies? It’s just as rare in books. Sophie Kinsella rules in this genre. She’s funny and writes great sympathetic characters and her books are fun; that’s as rare as can be. General? Well, just stories that work that are sort of hard to categorize. Like a book about a dog that keeps getting reincarnated (a real tearjerker, that one, and a big hit). Medical stories: it’s okay for the hero or heroine to die at the end if they must, although not as good as a solid recovery. Nicholas Sparks is popular with our folks, in fact paradigmatic to some extent: average folks solving problems, usually with a nice romance but a driving narrative pushing conflict, and even though sometimes the good guy dies in the end or doesn’t get the girl, it all seems right.
Since we provide our readers with a single volume experience, and not all readers like all kinds of books, we must provide variety. Can’t do 4 mysteries at once, in other words, or we lose the romance fans, etc. We’ll almost inevitably get any book we really liked into some volume or other sooner or later, but sometimes we have to put it on the back burner for a while. Since most of our customers read the whole volume from start to finish and judge it by what they read rather than what they were supposed to have read, whether or not a book is a bestseller is incidental for us. We like bestsellers for the name value in our marketing, but the reader, actually reading the story, only wants it to be good. There’s at least one new author in each of our volumes, as a rule, just to keep things roiling. And sometimes we go off the beaten path because we don’t want to be too predictable.
If you look at the bestseller list today, you will find few books that fit for us. More than half are series or supernatural. So as often as not, any book I pick up to read is a possibility because it’s by someone I don’t know. Hope springs eternal, or at least for a chapter or two.
As I said last time, there is also a big unquantifiable, to wit, that it’s a good book, judged by whatever inchoate criteria I use to make that decision. When all is said and done, where you can throw out an awful lot of books on face because of genre or unusable content, there really aren’t a lot of family-friendly books left that will satisfy a grown-up market. If there were, my job would be a whole lot easier.
