Episode Thirteen: You’re Making Promises to Readers, Are You Keeping Them?

This week’s episode is all about promises. The promises you make to readers, specifically. I’m covering four promises that we make to our readers - whether we’re consciously aware of it or not. Your genre is a promise, the places you direct your readers’ attention is a promise, your marketing makes a promise, and your beginning is a promise. Listen in and make sure you’re making promises intentionally, not accidentally, and setting yourself up for success by giving readers exactly what they want from your book!

You can listen to the full epsiode here. Or, watch here.

You’ll Hear: 

• The four promises you’re making to readers

• Strategies for ensuring you keep those promises

• Why genre matters so much

• Why pushing people away with your marketing is just as important as drawing them in

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Transcript

Please Note: This is an automatically generated transcript that has not been edited.

Olivia Bedford (00:00)

Welcome to episode number 13 of the Better Writer podcast. Today, I'm talking all about promises. And timing-wise, I'm recording this just one day after Valentine's Day, so it was the perfect time to talk about promises and why they're important.

We all know that keeping promises is important in relationships, at work, etc. But it is also important to keep promises to your readers. And the tricky thing about writing fiction is that not all of those promises are ones that you made consciously. Some of those promises are implicit, they are there in your writing and you don't even know. So today I want to talk about four promises that you are making to your readers and how to make sure that you actually keep them so that you don't lose readers, get one-star reviews and all the other horrible things that we try to avoid as writers.

Alright, and let's start with number one, your genre is a promise. We all know that genre is key. Genre is how you market your book, it's how you find your readers, but your genre also comes with a certain set of expectations that you need to meet in order to actually satisfy those readers. So once you pick a genre label for your book, you are making a promise about the content, about what readers are going to find in that story, and it is so important that you actually meet it throughout your story. 

So, what do I mean by that?

Every genre comes with a certain set of expectations. Not all of those genres are going to have the same intensity of expectations though, so we do need to be careful. For example, fantasy is super broad. Anything with magic or supernatural elements or an alternate world or an alternate history, all of those things can be categorized as fantasy. It is super broad. When you say that your book is just fantasy by itself, you are making zero promises about the plot, about the content, about the type of characters that we're going to see, you are making no promises besides there will be something in this book that could not exist in the real world. That's it. That is super broad and super easy to hit. Of course, if you are writing a certain sub-genre of fantasy, then we start to get into more specific promise territory. 

For example, if you tell me that something is epic fantasy, I'm going to be expecting an epic scope. And that could be a conflict that touches many parts of the world. It could be a multi-point of view story or any combination of those things. And there are obviously other ways to make a story epic as well.

Instead, if you tell me urban fantasy, I'm no longer expecting a broad worldwide conflict. Now I'm expecting a setting that is close to our real world. And usually I'm going to be expecting a more limited scope where we're following one character and their experiences. Obviously, that is not 100 % true. But again, just by adding one word, epic fantasy versus urban fantasy, my expectations have completely changed. The promise that that writer is making has completely changed, So that, again, is an example of a category where fantasy, super broad, the expectations are pretty much non-existent as long as there is some type of magic you have written fantasy. In contrast, I think romance is probably the genre that is most known for its expectations and for fans who are going to be super, super angry if you break them.

Most notably, if you are writing capital R romance, you have to have a happy ending. It doesn't have to be a happy forever ending, but it definitely needs to be at least a happy for now. We need some evidence that this relationship is going to carry on long past the final page of your story. If there is no happy ending, you have not written romance. Now, of course, you could try to subvert the genre, but in this case,

You cannot subvert romance to the extent that there is no happy ending. If you do, you've written something else. And I honestly will get so angry when people want to talk down to readers or shame readers for wanting a certain type of story, and they decide that they are going to write some tragic masterpiece call it a romance. And for what? Why ruin something that people love? If you don't want to write a happy ending, don't. Then it's not romance. Go play in a different sandbox. Don't mess up ours.

Again, when you label your book in a certain way, you are making a promise. If you break that promise, it's going to be a problem. And just because you thought you were writing a certain type of book at the beginning doesn't mean that that needs to be your genre forever. You might discover in the revision process or in the drafting process that what you thought was a romance is actually something else because you don't want the characters to end up together, and that is totally fine. Then we just change the genre, we find something else, we find a different way to talk about your book without breaking our promise to readers.

And the other thing that you need to do as a writer is make sure that you are deeply, deeply knowledgeable about your genre, that you know how it works, what's expected, and how to make sure you're meeting readers' expectations every step of the way. If you only take one action step from this podcast, from this episode, this is the one. Go research your genre. Go get to know your genre so super well that you know exactly what readers are expecting of you when you choose that genre, subgenre label for your book.

I think it is essential and is one of the most important steps if you are currently revising to check in on your genre on its expectations and that is why it is one of the first things that I have people do in my revision course because it really is that important. Your genre should be guiding every decision you make when you are drafting and revising your book.

That brings us to promise number two. Attention is a promise. And this one is so hard because especially if you are a pantser or someone who makes up a lot of content as you're drafting, you probably slipped in things that weren't actually important but felt important at the time. Maybe you describe a walk-on character in a lot of detail, maybe you describe a place setting in a lot of detail. Maybe you include a scene that is setting up a certain sequence of events that never actually ends up happening. And all of those things made sense to you when you were first drafting. All of those things seem to have a place in your story at the beginning, and then all of a sudden they no longer have a place in the story by the end because things have shifted and, you know, this subplot that you introduced at the beginning is no longer important, no longer there on the page, you've essentially planted a seed that is never going to grow into anything. The problem here is that when a reader comes to your book, if you are drawing their attention to something or someone or some plot event, they are going to expect that thing to pay off in some way by the end. So anything that you are drawing our attention to needs to be purposeful. It needs to have some impact on the story, whether that impact is going to be felt in that scene or later on in the story.

Fiction is held to a higher bar than real life. Fiction doesn't get to be random. You don't get to have you know things magically drop from the sky, and you don't get to have random coincidental things occur, at least not to the same extent that you do in real life, because readers are going to hold you to a higher standard of plausibility, and you don't want to lose them by incorporating something that feels totally random, totally unsupported.

Or you don't want to direct their attention to something that is just going to drop off the page because they're going to be wondering what happened to that thing. We spent a whole chapter focusing on this minor walk-on character. Where did they go? I will say you can purposefully misdirect people. You could have a MacGuffin or a Distractor keeping readers from seeing the real twist coming. But again, it needs to be purposeful. And generally speaking, I see a lot of people doing this accidentally.

They over-describe something, they introduce something that never gets picked up later on, and it's an accident. It's a matter of pantsing a draft and not paying attention to what you were planting along the way. That is totally fine. But that's why we revise. We need to find those things in revision, and then we have options. We can either remove those things from the story so that we are never planting the seed, we have nothing to grow, or we need to take that seed, nourish it, figure out how to incorporate it into the rest of the story so it feels purposeful.

So if you are currently revising, go back to your story. Where are you spending time drawing attention to an aspect of your story that doesn't actually have a purpose later on? And then are you going to keep those things or are you going to cut them? Either option is fine as long as you are being purposeful and intentional and directing your reader's attention exactly where you want it to go.

Alright, and then promise number three, your marketing is a promise. And this one may sound strange for a podcast by a developmental editor. Marketing is definitely outside my scope, but I often have writers come to me who are in the process of revising, they're preparing for publication, and they're already thinking about how they're going to market their book. And I, as an add-on to my developmental editing services, I will look at your blurb or your query letter, whichever one you want me to take a look at. And I often see a pretty significant mismatch between the blurb and the actual book. And again, this is not something that people are doing intentionally. It is not something that they are trying to mislead readers with, but it just happens because we had an idea of our story in our heads and then something else basically ended up on the page. But we just need to be careful and make sure that we are bringing those things into alignment by the time we go to press or by the time you actually start querying your manuscript because you don't want to promise one type of story and then end up, you know, totally shifting the focus and giving readers something different that they didn't actually want. And, you know, I have seen this happen in pretty extreme ways where the blurb is promising a love story that never happens on the page or the blurb is promising an adventure story. And then we end up in a small town setting that feels actually pretty cozy.

These are real things that I have seen in manuscripts and these aren't bad writers.

These are just writers who started drafting, got pulled into a subplot along the way, and basically ended up forgetting what the main thing was supposed to be. And it is so easy to do. ⁓ Again, I'm a pantser. I love pantsers. I love working with pantsers. This is just one of those things that we need to be on the lookout for. And again, it is what we tackle in revision, where maybe draft one went down a rabbit hole. In draft two, we can correct it.

And again, you have options here. You might decide that you're actually more interested in the rabbit hole. That's really fine. Keep going down the rabbit hole. Make that your whole story. Or you might decide that you actually need to get things back on track and that is going to require a rewrite. Again, it's okay. It doesn't matter. That's why we revise. I am a big fan of robust revisions. I really think that anything is on the table when we revise and it just depends on who you are as a writer. Do you do more of that planning thinking ahead of time before the raw material is created or are you a writer who does more of that thinking and creative work on the back end after you have a draft to play with? I am the latter and that is who I love to work with as well. The key thing here is that you just want to make sure that however you are marketing your book, whatever your blurb says, whatever you are promising to readers is actually there on the page and is actually the focus of what's on the page. 

The other thing that I think is very important to mention here is content warnings. I prefer the term content warnings over trigger warnings. I feel like the term trigger warning has become triggering. So content warnings, very simply. Give people a heads up of what is in your book. Let them opt in or opt out based on their own comfort level, things like that. I do want to be clear. When I'm talking about content warnings, I think violence requires content warnings. I think if you are going to have explicit scenes, you should probably give people a heads up either in the way you label your book by calling it a spicy romance or whatever. I think if there's anything non-consensual, dubious consent, that should absolutely be in a content warning. You know, on the flip side of that, people's identities never need to be content warnings. You do not need to warn people that there is LGBTQ content because that's just life. Those things exist in real life. Those are not things that we should be trying to avoid in real life.

Hopefully you're not the type of person who avoids people based on their identity. And if you are, then this show probably isn't for you because that's just not how we roll here. But the key thing is we are being honest with people about content that could be harmful to them. And...

Some people get really angry when you talk about content warnings, but I think that they are actually something that works in your favor when done right because for every person who is pushed away by your content warning, there is someone else who is being called like it is a siren song. ⁓ You know, there are those readers out there who see the list of content warnings and that is a signal that this book has everything that they want and more. So yes, you are going to push away readers, but you want to because anyone who does not like the things in your content warning is not your reader. That is the person who's going to DNF your book, as in they're going to not finish. That is the person who's going to leave you a one-star review. That is a person who's going to hate your books and will never come back and read another one. So you're really not losing anything by pushing those people away. What you're gaining instead is A, the readers who are drawn in and you're also preserving your ratings. You are not going to have a bunch of one-star reviews from people who didn't know what they were giving themselves into. You are going to call in the people who want that. You are going to find your readers because you have that content warning. And you're not going to lose anything because the people who are pushed away by that content warning were never your readers to begin with. So I am all about being as honest as possible in marketing because the purpose of marketing is not just to pull people in, it is also to push people away. We want to repel the people who are not for us.

So be honest in your marketing because then you are making a promise. And I also say here, some people have tried to pad their content warnings with things that are not actually really present on the page. Again, we don't want to do that. If your book is not spicy and violent, don't lie and say it is. Find your readers who want that tamer story because they're out there. And there are people who want the wildest version you can imagine. so you will find your people because there is such a range of what people are looking for, what people want, what people are expecting, what people are looking for when they pick up a book to read. So focus on finding your people. Don't try to camouflage what you're doing because you're just going find the wrong people and that's not what we want.

All right, and finally, promise number four, your beginning is a promise. I think there is a bit of overlap here with the attention promise, but your beginning is even more important in that regard. And it's not just about where you're directing readers' attention. The beginning sets the stage for everything that's going to come next. So the conflicts you introduce in the beginning, the characters you introduce in the beginning, the settings you introduce in the beginning, all of those things should be important and they should all be really intentional because when you introduce a question at the beginning of your story, you are making an implicit promise to readers that you are going to answer it by the end. So for example, if a body drops on page one and you introduce the question, who killed this person, we are going to expect that question to be answered by the end of the story.

So like I said earlier, the things you're drawing attention to have to be important. And the questions that you're introducing in the beginning have to have answers by the end of the story

If you think about the way that plot structures are often set up, we have a main conflict introduced in the beginning and then the whole story is about how that conflict is addressed and resolved by the end. So whatever you are introducing in your beginning is setting that plot structure into motion. That is then determining where the rest of the story is going to go. If your story goes in a completely different direction, then that needs to be either set up in the beginning or you need to go back and make a different promise in the beginning. So there are definitely ways for a story to take a left turn and go in a completely different direction. We just want to make sure that it still feels like it is rooted in the world that we've created. It's rooted in the conflict that we've set up initially. That there is some little element that is going to carry us through from beginning to end. And that could be the character's arc. It could be a character goal. There are many ways to do it. ⁓ The unfortunate thing about writing a novel is that there are so many ways to do it, and there are so many ways to do it wrong.

So there is room for creativity. Your beginning does not need to lock you into one very simple, very linear plot. There are ways for things to go wrong from there or go left from there or whatever it may be. But we just want to make sure that we are setting the right expectations for the type of story that you're going to get. That you are introducing conflicts and characters in the beginning that allow for that branching or twist to happen later in a way that feels logical and inevitable. It should feel logical, inevitable, and surprising all at the same time, which is a tall order, but it is possible. So we just want to make sure that whatever you're doing in the beginning, it feels like it is setting up what comes next, and that might not be something that happens in your first draft. In fact, it is unlikely to happen in your first draft. So those beginning chapters are definitely going to need to be revised once you get to the end and you actually know where you're going.

And it could be the smallest of hints, the smallest moments of foreshadowing, but those need to be there to set up whatever is going to happen later. And again, you don't need to do that in your first draft. You don't need to have all that planned in advance. But in revision, we need to go back and make sure that those seeds are there so that it makes sense when we get to the end and we see where we've ended up. All right, to recap, in your book you are making four promises to readers, whether explicitly or implicitly, your genre is a promise, where you direct readers' attention is a promise, your marketing is a promise, and your beginning is a promise. We want to keep our promises. We want to make readers happy because ultimately we don't get to write and publish books without readers who are going to buy them and enjoy them. So we want to satisfy those expectations. We want to exceed expectations and that all starts with knowing what you want to do and being really intentional about how you market, label, and write your books so that they are compelling and engaging and make readers want to follow you on the next journey when you publish another book. All right, that was episode number 13 of the Better Writer podcast. Thank you so much for listening and sticking around to hear me rant about writing. If you found this episode helpful, please consider leaving a review or sharing it with a friend. I would love to reach as many writers as possible, and you can help me do that just by sharing this show. All right, thank you again for listening. Have a wonderful week. Keep writing and keep getting better one word at a time. See ya.