How's
your USP?
Don't
know what I'm talking about?
I'm
talking about your – Unique Selling
Point.
How
come – Fifty Shades of Grey made so much money for the author when
a better title would have been Fifty shades of Crap?
Simple.
E L James, hit it right with a unique selling point. Porn
you could read on the tube without feeling dirty.
So
how easy is it to find this magical thing?
It's
not. If it were, us writers would all be multi-millionaires making
regular trips to checkout our piles of money sitting in Swiss bank
accounts.
That's
the thing about a USP. It's unique.
Finding
one, is like finding the holy grail.
I've
written two Paranormal books, published through a respectable
publisher in the USA. My alien vampire novel, Half
Blood has won awards, one for Best Adventure Novel, 2013,
and another for Best Paranormal Novel, 2013.
As
books go, they have done reasonably well. Not Swiss bank account
well.
Quoting,
Ed Wood, 'The next one will be better.'
I've
certainly changed the type of genre I usually write to something
quite different, and hopefully – unique.
I
took a long look at past best selling books, and why they were
successful.
Whilst
it's true, in a lot of cases success came purely because of the
author was a talented writer.
That
can't be said, for Fifth Shades of Grey, and a few other best sellers
I've read.
E
L James, is not a great writer, certainly not in the same league as,
Harper Lee, Virginia Woolf and the more contemporary writers, such as
Myra Angelou, and Danielle Steel.
That
hasn't stopped her from becoming seriously wealthy from Fifty Shades.
How much money the sequels have made her, I don't know – probably
not as much as the first unique book. The one that
everybody became obsessed with reading.
I've
actually seen her books in the, buy one get one free sections of
books stores – why?
The
books are no longer unique.
Now's
the time for all you writers out there in wonder-world to take the
challenge, and write that uniquely desirable best seller.
So
how do you find this holy grail?
What
do you write about? World events. Predicted catastrophes, the
supernatural. There's always climate change, that's usually pretty
good for a dramatic story.
It's
not the topic, after all there is nothing new about S & M and
bondage sex. What was new about Fifty Shades of Grey was that it
brought into the open, what is quite frankly perverted sex, in an
acceptable way to read pornography by stylising it into a romance.
The
story had a twist, or was twisted, depending on your point of view.
No matter whether the book was universally slammed by many of the
literary critics as badly written, which I think it is, the sales of
the book made it's author too rich to give a damn what anyone says
about it.
The
point I'm trying to make, is not that E L James, is a good writer and
had something new or that her story hit a certain mood at the right
moment in time.
It
was that she approached her subject in a unique way. She took a
rather seedy subject line, and gave it a Mills and Boon angle.
Young
impressionable girl meets wealthy guy, becomes obsessive about their
relationship. He's a basic nut job with lots of issues, and sex with
him is like nothing she's had before.
The
Unique Selling Point, is that coupling the two, no pun intended, gave
the story a new edge. The public, whether reading or film buffs, are
always looking for something they have not seen or read before.
It
can be argued that she hit lucky, which up to a point, she did. All
success stories have to have a slice of luck in them somewhere. It
wasn't luck though that made the book a sell out success, it was that
it was different to the normal sexually explicit novels.
That
was her USP.
Search
for a difference to your story, take a new approach to your subject,
and maybe you will be the next E L James.
I
wish you that slice of luck ---
thanks
for reading this post...
The
Riotous Writer
background by 'Stuart Miles' courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos,net
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