Show them a good time
Always remember your fiction needs to reward your reader, says novelist Margaret James
FICTION FOCUS
A new novel must be one of the best-value treats ever devised by mortal man, but nowadays a few readers seem to feel it’s fine to complain online – sometimes at great length – if they decide their free or 99p download didn’t give them a good time.
What can we novelists do to make it more likely our readers will have a good time?
I believe we need to think about balance. A novelist should write what he or she wants to write, of course, but we must consider our readers, too. We should do our best to meet reader-expectations.
Most readers of genre fiction always seem to want more of the same (so they can be sure they’ll be warmly welcomed into their own specific comfort zones), but different (so they won’t have seen it all before). Lovers of heroic fantasies want a story that isn’t merely a Tolkien rip-off, even if the author is consciously and deliberately writing Tolkien tribute fiction. Publishers of crime and domestic noir appear to feel that these days nothing can ever be noir enough, and most readers seem to agree. But I suspect many fans of this genre might have had more than enough of teenage girls being kidnapped, tied up and tortured in basements and that a few new scenarios are well overdue.