CLARENDON HOUSE PUBLICATIONS

To sell your books, you need to make maximum use of the idea of incompleteness .   Firstly, you need to reduce your story or novel down to one sentence.   Try to craft a sentence which contains a contrast between a settled, ordered state and a messy, disordered alternative. You need to begin with familiarity and then swiftly introduce obstacles or threats to that familiarity.   A very basic one sentence pitch is:   ‘When a big threat of incompleteness happens to a particular

Marketing based on shouting is operating on the principle that success is based on the number of people who hear you.   It’s also based on the idea that, if you shout loudly enough, people will stop what they are doing and ‘obey’ you.   You can probably see how this could be called ‘force marketing’: the concept that, given enough energy and volume, a message can overwhelm the listener and compel him or her to do as the message suggests - a kind of mass hypnosis, in other wor

From earlier articles, you’re probably starting to get the idea of concentrated incompleteness .   In my book How Stories Really Work  I use the term ‘vacuum’ to describe this, as it implies a mental and emotional pulling power like that of a real, physical vacuum.   Incompleteness on whatever level and in whatever field creates in us the need or tendency or desire to have completeness . You can immediately see a thousand examples in fiction, and, as I have said, incompletene

In an earlier article, we learned that Bluma Wulfovna Zeigarnik discovered the Zeigarnik effect by studying memory in relation to incomplete and complete tasks. Incomplete tasks, she found, are easier to remember than successful ones.   We learned that, related to this, if you want your reader to be attracted to a character in your fiction, you want that character’s life to be full of holes, gaps, threats, missing people or things. Characters, to be attractive, need to be inc

Bluma Wulfovna Zeigarnik was a Soviet psychologist and psychiatrist who discovered the Zeigarnik effect after a study she completed in the 1920s in which she compared memory in relation to incomplete and complete tasks. Incomplete tasks, she found, are easier to remember than successful ones.   What has this got to do with marketing?   Almost everything.   It also has quite a bit to do with writing stories.   What are you doing when you create an effective character in fictio

Learning how to be a better writer can be a little overwhelming.   Perhaps your ideas are not clear enough. You have something to say, but you’re not sure quite what that is. Master authors seem to build their tales around strong themes - do you have some? Or are you simply writing one word after another and hoping for the best?   Is it your characters that are failing you? Have you not developed a powerful leading figure who captures readers’ hearts and makes them want to re

As a writer, you probably thought that you only needed a limited range of skills to survive, right?   If you were to list out those skills, you might put ‘typing’ at the top, as most writers these days use keyboards to write with. Perhaps, thinking ahead, you might also put ‘social media skills’ on the list: it seems as though today you need to be able to operate the basics of Facebook and the like to get your name out there, even if you have a traditional publisher behind yo

In this series so far we have explored the parallels between writing fiction and putting together a marketing campaign. Hopefully, you will have realised that there are actually quite a lot of things in common between telling a story and getting someone to buy that story.   One of the problems you face, though, is that there is an awful lot of people (as opposed to a lot of awful people!) trying to do exactly the same as you, i.e. grab enough attention in the marketplace and