Getting your voice out there: Writing nonfiction about your fiction
Introducing the mapping strategy that will help you craft nonfiction pitches for your fiction and boost your discoverability when your book finally gets published.
The literary agent Carly Watters had a super useful carrousel of thoughts about “discoverability” on her Instagram this past Monday. Her argument is that while gatekeepers are in fact becoming choosier about what they publish, the main challenge for us writers is getting discovered once we’ve published. How do we make our stories heard and rise above the noise?
I highly suggest looking through the slides that Carly supplied around this topic on her Instagram and you should follow her there, too—she shares a lot of information about publishing and book buying statistics that many gatekeepers would charge for. Her post on discoverability is a great place to springboard toward the topic I want to discuss today, which is the writing of nonfiction to publicize your fiction.
Traditionally, to prove your credentials as a writer and reach your publication goals, you published short stories if you were trying to sell a novel, and you published personal essays and other pieces of creative nonfiction to build buzz around your memoir or nonfiction book.
These days, while it’s still valuable to place short stories in literary magazines and journals, writing nonfiction about our fiction has become a popular (and often easier) way to build hype for our novels and—in some cases—to get the agents and editors to come to us, instead of the reverse. As much as I love writing short stories, I’m out of practice crafting and submitting them—I have more experience placing personal essays as of late. Accordingly, I thought I’d share some tips on finding nonfiction angles for your fiction, regardless of the genre you are writing in.
First things first. If you’ve been here a while, you know that one of my favorite writing tools is a massive piece of paper and a sharpened pencil. Grab thee one of each.
Ready? Let’s go.