In the past 6 months I reworked Saint Justice, No Mercy and Make Them Pay to make them the best they could be for audio re-records with WF Howes (narrated by Jeff Harding), with the major goal of increasing read and listen-through. If I can increase readthrough, I both entertain more readers with more books, improve my own storytelling skills and also increase profitability, which takes me closer to making writing these books my full-time gig.

So now I just finished the rewrite of False Flag. Here’s the changelog of everything I altered, followed by the latest Readthrough report.

Reduce Hacker Magic

• This is proving to be one of the bigger issues across all the reworks so far. For Wren to be able to call his hackers and have them just figure things out for him, as if by magic, really stretches believability. At first, as I did these reworks, I didn’t get it fully – it was kind of a guess. But now I read the arrival of Hellion and B4cksl4cker, and I kind of groan internally. The story starts to wobble on its axis. Like, things just got too easy. There’s no firm ground anymore. They’re too powerful as they are. So I cut them entirely.
• I’ve already reworked this book back in 2023. I didn’t write it up then, but I made major changes, mostly around the hackers. Their role was cut by maybe 50% – no more drone swarms, no more ‘ghost-tech’ reverse engineering a CCTV record by the absences, no more magical discovery of Sally Rogers as she escaped. Now they are wholly gone. I feel a bit sad about that, but it opens up a world of procedural ‘reality’ (quotes because I don’t know if it’s really realistic, but it’s certainly more realistic than before) where Wren has to work with more characters all embedded in their own hierarchies. It feels good. It feels grounded.
• So – no hackers tracking down the Ghost – both who and where he is. Wren has to do all this himself now, via additional investigative steps and clever clues he picks out. Yes, he uses some FBI agents to help with the techy stuff, but the role of that is limited. Wren does that hard critical thinking, they crunch numbers. This allows for cool revelations.
• No hackers tracking down Sally Rogers. She doesn’t really play a role in this book now, other than as a threat – though we’re honestly more worried about Gruber. It was odd she was here at all, and required knowing her from previous books to make it work. We didn’t ‘meet’ her in this book, so didn’t get to care about her here. Not great. But we did meet Gruber, so his role gets stepped up too.
• No hackers ‘ordering’ Wren a bike, or a monster wheels truck, or anything like that. At best, Wren can just steal vehicles now.
• No hackers putting together global simultaneous strikes for him (Belarus, Vietnam, somewhere else too) using Foundation assets who’ve never been in a combat role in their lives, like Teddy. That was always quite mad. All that stuff is gone – no international strikes remain. 
• With the hackers gone, Wren has to use available resources in the CIA or FBI to help him with analysis. He meets several new characters and has good chats with them that cut to the core of the story’s theme as well as what Wren’s undergoing. Much better.

Reduce Silly Humor

• I didn’t write this in the other reports, but it’s been a factor all along. I guess this relates to the hackers, and my subconscious idea of ‘fun’, but I realize now I’ve been removing it all along. Sometimes it’s authorial stuff like my metaphors and phrasing. The timeless classic example is ‘Wren hit the compound and it crumbled like a wet Graham cracker’. I still think that’s fun, but I can also see it’s silly. I see those phrasings now, and it feels like authorial intrusion. It’s not honest to the story or the current stakes, so it has to go.
• This kind of silly humor was there with the Monster Truck and the drone swarm and jumping the Sepulveda dam too. Writing those sections (4 years ago now?) felt like a kid smashing toys together and having great fun. Even as I wrote them, I wasn’t sure they were OK. Now I see they’re not, so they’re gone. It’s more realistic now.
• It often came up with the hackers. They were always so removed from the stakes of whatever Wren was involved in that they’d make silly jokes about poop or sewers or something, and Wren would somewhat join in. but his friend just got killed and he’s hunting a murderer – I don’t think he’d do that. Humor has a place. Black humor is one thing. But silly humor doesn’t really work. Especially if Wren sometimes instigates it. He might be talking to Humphreys and makes an odd comment. I try to cut these. Humor is good but it’s gotta be the right kind at the right time.

   Add Investigative Steps

• I added lots of these. In the 2023 edit I added a whole series of efforts by Wren to track Steven Gruber’s route off the bus to the Jeddah Mill. In the original cut, Wren got into a fight with an FBI agent and filmed it with a drone (with another magic hacker!) in order to get more eyeballs on his mission and have those people,e post comments of seeing Steven Gruber somewhere in LA. These comments, after processing by his real hackers (via hacker magic) allowed them to tell him to go to the Jeddah Mill. It’s pretty weak. The new process is great, lots of little interactions with different people, some battles, some hoodwinking, some fast talk and car chases.
• In the recent edit I added a lot more later on. I still relied on hackers and Sally Rogers to find who and where the Ghost is. Now Wren hits a dead-end and chases a historical lead (dating back to their days together in Afghanistan), analyzes multiple instances from real-life (research! Grounding!) to stack a map with pins, then uses his brain to narrow that down to a pattern. From there they analyze some footage, narrow it more, hit on the next lead over, narrow it further in a different way, then finally find the Ghost. It’s a lot more steps. Writing some of these, I felt genuine excitement that we were getting closer. Way better than just the hackers saying – ‘OK Chris, we’re about 50% done with the analysis, get in a helo and we’ll figure it out by the time you get close.’ Sigh.

Build Up the Villain

• I’ve done this with all the books in the rework so far. Previously, they pretty much all crumbled like Graham crackers at the denouement, and this got explained by them being agents for the Apex. I think this got tiresome. We fight our way to the end, and the villain basically folds, because they’re on orders to fold, often burning themselves alive. That’s how Saint Justice ended (it still is, Acker burns, but not until after a decent fight with Wren), Make Them Pay ended (Harkness burned herself alive), AND False Flag (the method of death was burning alive, ending with Gruber burning himself alive). I changed this for Harkness and the Ghost. They’re not just agents for the Apex. They took his money but have their own goals. They don’t want to die and fight to win until the last moment.
• As a result, each villain gets their own method of death, which freshens things up. In Make Them Pay, the additional method was hanging, which related to Harkness’ backstory. In False Flag, it becomes a series of jihadi-style decapitation. The Ghost was out there with jihadis for years, so it makes sense. It’s visceral and more real too. We are no longer ‘burned out’ (lol) on burning people alive – which should make book 5 Firestorm feel fresher. 
• Also as a result, each villain has a clearer motivation, because they’re no longer just following the Apex’s drive. The Ghost is all about corruption, so that’s the theme of the book, and it comes through a lot more. We deal with a lot of instances of corruption, and we see it in Wren’s actions and morality. It’s a different book from the other books because of this. This also gives us a clearer uber-villain, the villain behind the villain, which allows that reveal to punch as well.

 Increased Realism

• A lot of the above achieved this already. It’s always been a major critique of these books. Just recently I got a review from someone who’d read the first 3 and must’ve liked them enough to get to this one, but then said this one was so unrealistic they had to abandon it. One of the most unrealistic they’d ever read. Ouch. So, there are more ways I worked on this.
• One small thing was altering ‘aortal flutter’ to ‘atrial flutter’. I recognize now that this is still a big stretch. But at least if someone googles atrial flutter, they will find an existing medical condition. Aortal flutter is something I just made up. But Wren relies on it for his escape, so that’s a big problem out of the gate.
• At one point Wren rappelled out of a helicopter and tried to grab Sally Rogers on a racing ATV. Kind of nonsensical. He hit pistachio trees and bounced around but still managed to get her. It’s really unlikely so I cut all of it – and then with that cut, I realized there really was no need for Sally Rogers at all.
• Wren had the Foundation wage multiple international strikes, as well as back him on his strike on the Ghost. Now that team has been replaced by a Marine squad headed up by Miller, who appeared in a previous rewrite. It makes sense. Use highly trained operators for these advanced raids. 

Reduce Repetition

• This is another one I do often and have been fixing in an ongoing way across all the books. It often happens with Humphreys in an argument. Humphreys will say Wren can’t do something, or Wren will berate Humphreys about something, and it’ll just go round and round several times. The same things get said in different ways. I’m trying to cut all these when I see them.

Improve Humphreys

• People have been getting sick of Humphreys for several books, mainly because he’s always standing in Wren’s way for kind of silly reasons. He just seems like a jerk. Early in this book he’s threatening to kill Wren and his Foundation, then barely relents by the end. Now he does all that less. He’s still a stuffed shirt, but the threat proves empty and he didn’t know about the torture. He apologizes and gets right. He’s not so one-note.  

Reduce PVE

• I define PVE as Player Versus Environment, and it happens when Wren spends multiple chapters dealing with an obstacle that is non-plot relevant and not really very hard to overcome. It happened here mostly when he escaped the black site then jumped out of the Chinook he’d captured. He jumps out, gets knocked out, escapes a night dragnet in the desert, survives for a day by foraging, finds a solar plant and steals a car and a phone, then calls Hector Gutierrez to get him across the US border. That’s like 5 chapters of messing around just to escape. I realized as I was reading it – this is boring. It’s also silly. Wren’s in a helicopter. He can go anywhere he wants. Why jump out? So now he doesn’t. We skip all that nonsense and just go straight in the helicopter to a rendezvous with Gutierrez. It moves things right along to something meaningful and plot-relevant.
• The chase scene had elements of this as well. It took multiple efforts to escape the people chasing him, including vehicle switchouts and a drone swarm. I cut a few of those so the slog to get free doesn’t become boring. 

As ever, that’s a lot of stuff. There are other things too. You’ll have to read the book to find out ;). I cut probably 15,000 words, but ended up adding in more than that back with all the investigation. 65,000 words, now. I’m pleased. I really hope this book will no longer be a kind of log jam turning people off the series.

Now, onto the Readthrough calculator!! Have a look:

Red is bad. Green is good. Figures show readthrough % from the previous book to that book. As we can see, figures for the most recent period, Mar 1-May 30, show either a decrease in readthrough (for orders) at 32%, or the exact same number for KENP page reads at 58.3%. Oh my. 

That’s remarkably consistent. It looks statistically significant and unassailable, untouched by any of the changes I made to Saint Justice. Readthrough from 2 to 3 is virtually the same, with a tiny uptick to 64% in orders and a downturn to 61% for KENP. Not a significant change – basically exactly the same, signaling that no changes I made to No Mercy had any effect on readthrough – at least not yet. I’ve heard it can take up to 6 months to notice an impact, and this has just been 3 months.

On order 3 to 4 we’re down slightly to 57%, but up a decent amount for KENP to 74%, which is nice. After that it continues much as before.

Looking at the long term trend seems disturbing but is probably not really. Lifetime figures up until 2023 showed readthrough 1 to 2 of above 40%. Everything since has been around a third. So despite (or perhaps because of) all my changes over that period, readthrough 1 to 2 (the most important number) has decreased. There’s reasons for that, but it’s certainly not an improvement.

In summary, the story here is of an unchanging, relatively low readthrough. The key readthroughs of 1 to 2 to 3 have either remained consistent or dropped over the last couple of years. Once people get through book 4, though, they consistently stick around. It’s only about 7% of the initial readers that go that far, which is of course disappointing. It explains clearly though why latter books in the series sell fewer books. They may be better books, but nobody’s left to try them out.

I also analyzed my readthrough value – how much I can expect to make on average from a sale of book 1, taking into account readthrough percentages. It varies a little, but across the years is pretty consistent around $14. So as long as I spend less than $14 to make a sale of book 1, I’ll make money.

I ran a quick comparison of how that would look if I had much-improved (similar to decent-selling fellow authors) readthrough. Let’s say 50% to book 2, 90% to 3, then 95% from then on. With my current readthrough, I had total orders of 3300 in the 3 months from March to May. If I had the improved readthrough, but the same number of book 1s sold, that would have been more like 7250 total. Double the total sales. Extrapolate that to the readthrough value and it easily doubles, maybe more than that, because latter books in a series usually cost more than earlier books. At least $30 per book 1 sold.   

So, what to make of all this?

I have some theories to explain it. Regarding the historical reductions in early readthrough, I put that down to people one-clicking the series to buy a lot more back then. When there were only 4 or 5 books, I used to get lots of one-clicks like that. It made readthrough look very good, because people didn’t often return the books for refunds. It inflated my readthrough, while at the same time I got hit with many bad reviews.

These days, I don’t get negative reviews. Hardly any at all. The reviews frequently say they read right through, fast pace, can’t wait for more. Exactly what I want to see :). So that’s one thing the rewrites have definitely addressed. They’re better stories for all the changes I made.

So why isn’t readthrough higher?

One answer is that this is too soon to know for sure. It’s only been 3 months, so maybe we need longer.

Another answer may be thematic. I used to believe it was the stuff people mentioned in their negative reviews, of which there used to be many – things like lacking realism or too violent or something – but since I’ve fixed all those, maybe it’s something else.

My current theory is about the underlying theme of all these books, which is civil strife. It’s there in every book. They’re about domestic terror attacks fracturing America society, and perhaps at best only a third of people want to read more about that. As long as that’s there in the background, maybe I will never get a better readthrough. And across the series, only 7% of people want to read about that enough to reach book 10. Once they get there, they want more, but there’s not very many of them.

It’s interesting. It’s a theory that’s tough to test, but time will tell.

I don’t feel too bad about this data, surprisingly. I have learned a huge amount from these rewrites. I’ve learned what theme not to repeat. I may even be able to repackage the latter Wren books, which are not about civil strife, into their own series with a new starting point, and see if I can get more people reading those books that way.

Another alternative course, and less drastic, is what I’m doing right now:

• Streamline and maximize my book backmatter to point directly at the next book in the series.
• Reduce the price of books 2-4 to 99c/p to see if I can increase readthrough and get readers to the later books. We’ll also find out if readers are price-conscious. Thus far, sales of these books are up.

More generally, I’ll also be looking at new series characters. I’ll continue Girl Zero. But with any subsequent series, I’ll be looking closely at readthrough all along. If you shed too many readers after one or two books, that’s something I need to address earlier.

On Amazon as authors we’re afforded a series page for our books – for years I’ve been sending my FB ad clicks to the series page for Wren, and on that page I had a series blurb that was identical to the blurb for book 1 – https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07TFBG5XD

‘They stole his truck. Big mistake yadda yadda…’

In the earliest days of March 2021, this new blurb combined with new covers, new opening chapters and altered body text, led people to one-click buy the whole series (then about 4 books long). That led to a lovely influx of sudden cash, as if I’d just released 4 books at once.

Ever since, I’ve left the ads going to the series page, and the series page has had that truck blurb, and the ads had that truck blurb too, and book one had the truck blurb, and that was all any casual observer could know about the series.

Well. As ever, I’m experimenting, and after talking with the movie guys, and thinking about the arc of the first 7 books in the series, something shook loose and combined with the general advice to keep your product marketing copy fresh – and I came up with a new angle to use in my marketing.

I’ve already pretty much exhausted the FB audience and the truck blurb is wrung dry. I had the idea to focus the ad blurb, and then the series page, around his father. Here’s what I came up with:

His father tried to kill him. Now he’s coming to try again…

When he was only 12 years old, Chris Wren’s father slaughtered their family and left him for dead – but Wren survived.

That’s a mistake his father now aims to correct.

But Wren’s not a little boy anymore – he’s a black-ops legend for the CIA, infamous for putting evil men like his father into the ground. He won”t be easy to kill.

Yet his father never did anything ‘easy’. His attacks have grown in line with his madness, propelling Wren, the past and all of America toward a terrifying storm.

Wren failed to save his family when he was a little boy. Can he save his wife, kids and the America he loves now that he’s a man?

The sins of the father will be visited upon the son…

Normally blurbs and ad copy are really hard to write – but this one just kind of flowed. As a series blurb, it covers books 1-7 perfectly. And does it work?

Well, I started some new ads on FB yesterday using this as the ad copy, plus some fresh-ish images I’ve had in my back pocket and rolled out once or twice before. Now, the previous truck ads were down to 3.6% (US) and 2.6% (UK) clickthrough, getting clicks for 16p and 19p respectively, with a frequency of 2.7 and 3.6 – pretty high repetition to the same scrollers.

The new ad, which was dynamic and had other options focusing on Wren’s CIA training, pretty much immediately kicked into gear, immediately favoring the father blurb, and is currently getting 7% (US) and 3.2% (UK) clickthrough, substantially more and almost double in the US, with clicks at 9p and 13p, again almost half in the US, and obviously a frequency of around 1.

It’s early days, but this bodes very well – paired with sales of the series being 30% up yesterday, even though the ad spend was only £40 total, well down from previous numbers around £70.

Pretty exciting stuff. One other fascinating demographic shift is along gender lines – the previous truck blurb was appealing primarily to male readers, something like a 70/30% split in favor of men. Perhaps that makes sense – men like trucks and stories about men fighting for their trucks. The new ad however splits (so far) 70/30% in favor of women!!

I hadn’t expected that. It’s about sons and fathers, and briefly mentions a wife and kids, but I suppose women relate to family dynamics more than men, and more than they care about trucks. If this bears out, it could be big second lease of life for the Wren books, bringing in women who were turned off by the truck focus in previous iterations.

Maybe I should change the book 1 blurb too, to take that into account more. Move it away from the truck, which is a very minor part of the story anyway, and make it more about white-knighting and his kids and such…

This raises another thought I’ve had, which is to split the series after book 7 – since that’s largely the father arc – and essentially start a new series at book 8. There’s an easy way to do this – books 1-7 are all focused on his father and domestic terror threats, so they can be the CHRIS WREN DOMESTIC THRILLERS. Books 8 onwards are all international and deal with global terror threats – this wasn’t exactly on purpose at first, but it shakes out nicely and would be easy to continue, so this series can be the CHRIS WREN INTERNATIONAL THRILLERS.

The goal would be to have 2 series, readable in either order, offering two entry points to the series. It risks confusing readers a little, as they won’t know where to start, but it could be a whole other lease of life and draw a clear line under the father storyline. It’ll be easy to try. I’ll report back.

Anyone who reads this blog knows I take on board reader feedback and use it to improve my writing. I have no qualms about changing books that have already been published, and have written about this plenty before – I changed the Wren series in many ways both small and large: taking out political elements, removing swearing, reducing the graphic horror, removing the time spent in the heads of creepy people, speeding up slow sections and adding more descriptive parts at times.

I’ve done all that. The Wren books started to sell because I did it – but for a long time there’s been one comment that I just couldn’t grasp – one that recurs constantly: the books are not realistic.

Ouch.

Well, on occasion someone would point out something specific – like Wren couldn’t be shot in the thigh and walk at all, or Wren couldn’t survive a ‘hail of bullets’ without a scratch – so I would change those, without really being able to expand the lesson outward to the broader point.

Now, maybe, I get it.

When people say the books are unrealistic, I always thought, ‘well, everything in the books is possible. It could happen. So how is that unrealistic?’

Now I’m thinking that what they mean when they say unrealistic is not that its impossible, but that it’s improbable. And that I can work with.

Are the Wren books improbable? Massively so, on multiple occasions. They are big action movie-style stories. But that begs the question, does big action-movie style spectacle work in a novel? Maybe it doesn’t, at least not in quite the same way. In the John Wick movies, there are long sections of balletic fighting. Would that work in print the same waty? Probably not.

I’m happy to adapt. If it strengthens the story, I want to.

So recently I’ve been reviewing all the Wren books with a new barometer – plausibility. I still want some big set pieces. I still want the big action – but perhaps I can reduce those big moments, and build up to them more, and thereby earn more suspension of disbelief from my readers due to a greater sense of realism throughout.

In particular, this lesson came home to me when watching the new Luther movie, The Fallen Sun. Luther was always an inspiration for Wren – it takes Black Mirror style tech issues and clashes them with a murder mystery/detective angle, in much the same way Wren does for 24-style terrorist attacks.

In Luther: The Fallen Sun, there’s multiple things that really stretch belief to breaking point, with two in particular:

• Luther, played by the big strong actor Idris Elba, finds himself getting his butt kicked multiole times by the loser old guy played by dimunitive actor Andy Serkis. It just does not compute. It looks silly and utterly implausible.
• Luther engineers a prison break for himself by first orchestrating a prison riot. This requires the cooperation of both prisoners and guards, all of whom are risking their lives and livelihoods just to break him out, just so he can chase Andy Serkis. There is no explanation offered for why anyone would go to these extreme lengths for such a modest reason. They wouldn’t.

Seeing these factors really made me think. It is, of course, possible that Elba could be beaten by Serkis, and that he ciould orchestrate a prison break in this way, but it’s wildly implausible and improbable. Watching that happen really took me out of the story, because it was silly.

I really don’t want Wren to seem silly like that. I don’t want to lose people for the same reason, because I believe the core of the books is really strong. So, I am working to make the whole series more realistic. There will still be plenty of wild action, but I’ll build to it.

Could this transform the performance of the books, just like previous changes has done? I believe it will. It’ll be fascinating to find out if it does. Wish me luck! 🙂

The last two years have been transformational in my author career. For the first time I actually made decent money from my books – after learning some important lessons about writing to market and giving the audience more of what they want.

Both years I comfortably earned ‘replacement’ money – enough to trade out my job and go full time as an author. I held back, since my job’s pretty good about allowing me time to write anyway, and because I expected it was better to save and get some runway.

Boy, am I glad I did. In this last year we moved house, and ended up not only maxing our mortgage capacity, but also spent a substantial amount more on refurbishing everything. We really hadn’t intended to spend all our savings on DIY, nor did we mean to do so much all in one mad rush:

• opening up the kitchen-diner with installation of 3 beams
• new French doors and new bifold doors
• plastering and painting every room
• rewire, replumb and whole new kitchen
• whole new conservatory, new tiled floor
• new appliances, new furniture
• new bathroom

It’s been wild – and was expedited hugely by the unexpected but joyful news that Su was expecting! Our little baby boy has now been born, and we managed to get everything done just in time for his arrival.

So, what of writing?

My goal is to make substantially more than replacement money this year. It’s the only way to ‘escape’ the black hole of wanting to keep my job while also writing on the side. That full-time salary is to tempting. But if the writing jumps tot he next tier, it’s possible – and there are signs that can happen.

Girl Zero, the new spin-off series from Chris Wren, has had a phenomenal launch. Pre-orders for book 2, Zero Day, are at the highest I’ve ever had. I have the audiobook in production now with the highly talented and well-known narrator Brittany Pressley (she also narrates David Baldacci books!). I was approached by Podium audio production because they wanted the rights, but I figured I’m better off continuing to produce and market it myself.

There are other irons in the fire this year too – including potential movie/TV talks. Super exciting, also super preliminary. Cross your fingers for me 🙂

In terms of writing, I think (we’ll see) I can write:

• Wren book 10 – Hammer of God
• Girl Zero book 2 – Zero Day
• and start a second spin-off series, featuring a beloved character from the Wren-verse.

It’s very exciting. All at the same time as raising my little son.

Oh, I also started a new bodyweight exercise regimen, which has in a couple of weeks of daily 10-20 min exercise sculpted my frame like no 2-3 times a week gym habit ever has before. Here’s the routine:

• 50 fast clap pushups
• 50 fast jump squats
• 10 one-arm pushups on each side
• 20 one-leg squats on each side

The burn from this workout is incredible. One set is plenty. I like it fast and every day. I have now ordered a weighted vest which goes up to 30kg, so I can up the difficulty without spending more time. I’d love to get a pull-up bar and some dip bars as well, but we’ll see – they’re pretty bulky, and much of the house is spoken for now :D.

That’s my news. Here’s to a breakthrough 2023!!

I’ve been reading and analyzing a lot of thrillers recently – mostly Michael Connelly but also Jeffery Deaver, and that includes looking at their covers. Here’s a few:

Granted, this selection is limited, but reasonably representative. Let’s compare to the Saint Justice cover:

Let’s break down a quick analysis by area.

Author name & Title – The other books all have the author name first, mostly at the top and above the title, taking up approx a quarter to a third of the cover. They largely seem to use the same font for the title. Saint Justice by contrast has the title first, different fonts, and author name take up maybe one sixth of the cover. Hmmm…

Contrast/legibility – It’s hard to read text against a complex background. You don’t want a lot of detail behind your text. The other books follow this rule nicely – they either have block color or misty skies behind their text. Saint Justice has some misty sky, and some blurry blacktop, but it also has those buildings either side, chopping through the words, and the smoke rising up. This doubtless makes it harder to read. There’s also more overall contrast in the other books. there’s dark and then there’s light. Saint Justice is a bit fuzzy.

So.

I spent some time making alternate covers. It’s quite likely none of these is an improvement, but it’s been an interesting exercise. I come to the conclusion that the cover image, as in, the little guy running, is perhaps less important than the text atop it. He’s a signal to genre and quality. The rest should be big and bold, as per the genre.

What do you think?

Same but darker

Title on one line

Title on two lines

‘Write from the heart.’

This may be one of the most misguided pieces of advice out there for authors. It’s everywhere, and I believe it’s wrong.

Let me qualify that – it’s wrong to do it more than once, if what you’re looking to do is sell books (unless that first time is an epic success, which it won’t be).

Writing from the heart is a lottery ticket with incredibly long odds. There is a near-infinitesimal chance that a book born from the virgin writer’s heart is going to sell. It’s like walking into a university and saying your first research paper will revolutionize particle physics, or like walking onto a basketball court and expecting to dunk on LeBron James.

It’s not going to happen. You may have thought a lot about particles. You may have watched a lot of NBA. But you’re nothing yet, not until you get your particle physics PhD or work your way up on the courts.

But we all want to win the lottery. We want to believe that the perfect book resides in our heart, and if we can just write it out, it’ll soar.

Most likely it won’t. Just like you won’t win the lottery.

And if it does soar? Then you won the lottery. It’s amazing. We hear about this happening all the time – because it’s the better story than the truth, and people want to read about the fantasy. The truth is that most authors barely sell a handful of copies of their books.

We all dream of winning the lottery, but you can’t plan on it. Play that game once, for sure, by writing one book purely from the heart. Maybe your heart has the winning lottery ticket. Get that book out. See if it flies.

Most likely it won’t. And that’s OK. It’s far from over. It’s time to roll up your sleeves. Start working toward your PhD, hit the courts. For us writers, that means moving toward the reader.

Move out of your heart. Writing from the heart is an act of invitation. You’re inviting the reader into your heart, 100% on your terms. You want them to come all the way over to you, validate you, and we all know how wonderful that’s going to feel.

But, again, it will only happen for an infinitesimally small number of us.

Far better is you quit inviting and start going out to meet. Build a bridge from your heart to the reader’s. This means you validating them, by figuring out what they want and giving it to them. This goes for your cover, your title, your blurb and your book’s body text itself. It covers genre, sub-genre, tropes, motifs, themes, settings, plot, character.

It’s everything.

You go to them. They come to you. It’s beautiful, because they get their expectations met and validated. You get someone on the road to your heart, engaged in an act of true communication. They give. You give. Everybody gets.

Do this well, and often enough, and you can win the lottery of book sales through hard work. Not luck. Not random chance. Like a particle physicist. Like an NBA baller. Like a bestseller.

All the time I see people in FB groups asking why their books don’t sell. I’ve been there. With some of my books, I’m still there. So I can recognize a fellow traveler of that road, influenced by this terrible advice.

Write from the heart once? It’s a sensible gamble. You really may have what it takes to dunk on LeBron the first time. But again and again, to the same poor result? That’s the definition of madness.

We see it in covers that don’t draw in the right kind of readers. Blurbs that don’t match expectation. Books themselves that are off-genre, left unwanted on the shelf. And many writers have dozens of these books. Still they keep on writing more, because they’re writers, and they think that writing from the heart is the right thing to do, when all they’re doing is chasing bad bets.

It’s cruel.

Why don’t we retire the advice to write from the heart? An infinitesimal number of us are going to win the book-from-the-heart lottery. All the rest need to quit buying lottery tickets and start listening to our readers.

Don’t insist the reader comes to your heart. Build a bridge and meet them halfway.

#YMMV