The Breakout Book: 5 archetypes
Why certain books break through in a competitive marketplace and why
Hello, whatever day and month it is—my daughter has been home sick with the flu for a week so time has lost its meaning. I haven’t sent a post since my personal essay about the bombshell diagnosis that an Ear, Nose and Throat doctor dropped on me last week. I was not only moved and heartened but also educated by how many of you wrote to share your own experiences with an ENT— or lack thereof. It was both illuminating and maddening to hear how many of us have been silenced or even condescended to for decades about medical conditions we know to be physical and debilitating, but are told exist only in our heads. Thank you for reading and sharing and wishing me well—I went back for a full exam and they are recommending surgery in April. I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, absolutely, I’m going to do the surgery in hopes that it will improve the quality of my life, but finding a month in my calendar where I can be “off” to recuperate post-op is tricky and…stressful. We’ll see how it goes! I’ll most likely be teaching my May classes with a nose stint and black eyes but we will make it work. Thank you again for your well wishes—your notes made me even more grateful for the community we’re growing.
This week, I want to talk about the magical creature known as “the breakout book.” When I was coming up in the publishing world and starting to publish books myself, I assumed that a “breakout book” was a bestseller, because, it, like broke away from the pack? Later, when I learned to use my words and ask brave questions, I learned that the “breakout book” descriptor is indeed tied to sales, but books don’t have to hit an actual bestseller list to be considered a “breakout.” Basically, a breakout book is a title that performs beyond the expectations of its publisher. The problem is that most authors don’t know what expectations their publishers have for them or their book, because sales expectations are one of the things that publishers rarely discuss with authors, thus ensuring that most authors will spend their lives wondering if their publisher is happy with them and how their book performed.
One way to know whether you are on a breakout book path is from the size of your print run—another topic that publishers feel squeamish disclosing to authors. Basically, anytime a subject touches money, publishers prefer to interface with the writer’s agent rather than the writer which I can appreciate if we are dealing with a publisher who wants their authors to make art. But most publishers want their authors to build platforms around our art, so it’s rather silly and counterproductive to shield us from sales info. In a world of sales portals and click metrics and mailing lists, I think we can all put our big kid pants on and learn about our print runs.
But I digress. If you have a big print run from the jump, your publisher probably thinks/hopes you’ve got a breakout book. If you have a modest print run, but you quickly run through it, and then your second print run turns quickly into a third, you might be breaking out.
What’s considered a big print run? Great question—but good luck figuring that out! The impact of a print run varies from house to house and from year to year—we’re in a shit economy right now so a big print run might be 10K copies for a Big Five publisher and 2,500 copies for an indie, whereas—if you’re my age—back in the 90s, you would see advertisements in major papers boasting that Big Name Author has an initial print run of 100K. The problem with analyzing the meaning of a print run is that publishers often lie about the amount of books they’re actually going to print. Print runs are a convoluted and mind-bending topic, so I’m grateful that
of “Publishing Confidential” has done the hard work of writing in depth about what a print run is and signifies so that I don’t have to ;) You might want to give that post a read before continuing on, or you might want nothing more to do with the insanity of print runs, in which case, let’s keep going.The five types of breakout books I’ve met
I’ve been fortunate to have some breakout books so I think a lot about them, and of course, when I have a new book coming out, I wonder whether it will break out or not. I’m the kind of person who likes things to make sense, and publishing is not a business that makes a lot of sense, so I’ve organized the “breakout book” into 5 archetypes to try and encapsulate why a book (nonfiction or fiction) ends up moving more units than a publisher expected.
These five archetypes aren’t exhaustive—they’re my personal take on book types that continually out perform and break out regardless of market trends. My hope is that if you are a writing a book that you’re nervous will be turned down on the query circuit because the agent “doesn’t see a path to market” for it, or if you have a book coming out but lack metrics by which to judge how it will perform, perhaps this list of archetypes will help you. You’ll see both mega bestsellers and indie breakouts on this list—remember, a book doesn’t have to sell millions of copies to “breakout,” it just has to perform better than its publisher expected. (Consider the breakout book as an underdog racehorse that nobody thought would win the Derby but did—Seabiscuit, I’m looking at you.)
Here are the five types of books that tend to breakout regardless of what’s going on with trends or in the wider marketplace. This post is a long one so be sure to hit “view entire message” if it gets truncated in your email reader! And stick with us until the end, I have a special free opportunity for authors who have a book coming out this year or next.