Get a Book Deal® Tip: Adding Depth to Your Manuscript

There is a trend in self-publishing toward speed of writing and brevity. How fast is too fast? How short is too short? What makes either approach appropriate or successful?

Years ago, when I was an in-house acquisitions editor at a major publishing house, we had a weekly editorial meeting where editors from the level of associate editor up to editorial director would gather in a conference room around a large table and talk about the submissions we'd each had that week: both the projects we were and weren't interested in acquiring. 

One of the benefits of those editorial meetings was watching trends in subject matter: We could see how similar ideas proposed by different writers would gain and lose momentum in the culture. Another was learning how our colleagues at the company were making their decisions. I loved hearing the questions and standards that each person used to assess content.

"This feels like a magazine article."

"Why do I need this? The promise is not clear to me."

"It's a good idea, but something is missing."

Back then, we were in the "stone age" of computers. I remember how my boss actually refused to give me access to the Internet when I requested it, even though our building was wired for it, because she wanted only her own assistant to be able to surf the web. (She was a bit of a control freak and clearly shortsighted.) I had one of the first laptops in the office, weighing 14 pounds, which I carried back and forth from home to office on one shoulder, with a tote bag containing about 50 pounds of hard-copy submissions on the other, every morning and night. The concept of a digital submission was not on the radar screen. 

When I left that company and built a website to serve as my resume, people were shocked that I could be so "unprofessional."

Are you chuckling along with me? It seems funny and enthralling when you consider how much our cultural expectations have changed in the last couple of decades--and if you believed publishers would be at the forefront of change, or even that they should be, you'd be half right-half wrong. 

A publisher without the content created by writers is a non-entity. However, as readers we require publishers to exercise quality control over the products we buy from them. From day 1, that's been the role of the acquisitions editor. In-house editors have to weed the manuscripts in their in-boxes to find the ones that merit strong consideration for publication.

Flash forward to the digital era, in which writers can bypass corporate publishing operations. Do-it-yourself (DIY) is alive and well, and we writers have been served all the technology we need to adjudicate our own standards on a golden platter. As our own publishers we have to learn to ask ourselves those great editorial questions--or do what my clients do, which is hire an editor who knows some good questions to ask and answer. Most writers need good editors.

Back to this article's leading questions: speed and brevity. 

Rapid writing, in general, comes from using formulas or templates to establish the framework for your content (ideas/words) or from adapting spoken/recorded material to the page. This is most appropriate for books where the aim is not to push the envelope of the author's knowledge and expertise very far. What the writer knows on the day the idea comes is basically what ends up on the printed page or screen.  

Fast is too fast if the idea would be improved by doing additional research, getting feedback from focus groups, or conducting a series of interviews with relevant individuals. Those are three excellent ways to add depth and originality to a manuscript that do slow down the writing process.

The beauty of digital publishing and DIY publishing is that you can set the purchase price of your offering low. A relatively narrow idea--one that would be too long for a magazine article, brochure, or blog post and is too short to sustain or flesh out over the course of many chapters--can be distributed on a device that doesn't change shape no matter what word count you reach. Let's say your book is a "short" or a "single" that's intended to be 10,000-15,000 words. That's okay because you can do full justice to the idea and then put it on sale for $2.99 or $4.99. Your manuscript preparation period is shortened; nonetheless you can still go deeply into the concept.

Adding depth to a manuscript makes it more valuable. By "depth" I mean layers and facets. I've been re-reading Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihaly, a book with tremendous depth. The source for his masterpiece was a research study of many years, investigating individuals over the age of 60 who were recognized by peers in their own fields as high achievers and innovators. He wanted to find out what made them so innovative and respected. He defines Creativity with a capital "C" as culture-transforming (as opposed to brilliance, which is creative on a personal level): before creation, things are done/thought one way; after it, another. He discovered that an interchange with the culture is necessary for Creativity. Conditions engender it.

Editorially, I believe what I look for in the depth of manuscripts is that creative edge of innovation. Here are three questions that could lead to more depth in your own work.

"Do I have/am I expressing fresh insights? What sparked them?"

"Where could more interactivity happen?"

"What conditions called for this innovation?"

Every book is born from the desire to express and connect. Few are masterpieces. Rightly so, few books are celebrated as culturally transformative. This does not mean that other books fail to deliver on their promises. They do deliver, just not at the same level. Understanding the proper scope and depth of our work is an assessment we writers must make when we write.