The Proper Care and Feeding of a Trunk Novel

There’s an important follow-up to my posts about retiring a novel/book to the trunk.  If you didn’t read those, they are here and here. We’ll wait.

Okay, are we all on the same page?  Great!

There are two kinds of trunk novels:

1) the kind that should never, ever see the light of day again

2) the kind that could be salvaged down the road and the only reason it didn’t sell this time is because it just wasn’t quite right for the current market

I have a great example of the 1st kind.  It’s locked away in my parents’ basement and it will never be read by anyone ever again.  If I decide to explore some of the ideas again, it’ll be in the form of a totally brand new, written from scratch novel.  There is nothing to be saved.  I wrote the manuscript in high school, after all, when I was still just beginning to learn the craft.  It’s full of neat ideas and bad writing.

But I also have several examples of the 2nd kind, including the novel my agent couldn’t quite sell this year.  There is nothing inherently wrong with these manuscripts.  Yes, a year from now, if I read them again I’ll find little things to tweak here and there, but two of them got editors excited enough to take the manuscript to the people higher up the food chain, who eventually said no.

I haven’t sold a book like this yet, and the market is as tough to break into now as it has ever been, so while the manuscripts were really good, they weren’t quite exciting enough to open a publisher’s wallet.

It happens all the time in this business.

So where does that leave me?

Well, my new book is in the same vein as those other two, only I’ve definitely learned from the experiences of the last couple of years.  This one is a little more steamlined, for example, and it has a great logline.  These days that seems to be the key to selling anything in this new “no attention span” era.

(A logline is the cheap, easy, and lazy way to summarize your book.  It’s used all of the time in the movie business.  I addressed this topic back in The Perfect Title and the Perfect Sales Pitch.)

So if my agent sells this new book, the first thing she’ll do is say, “You should check out these other two manuscripts he already has completed.”

There’s no guarantee the editor will read them and say, “These are great!  Let’s make it a three book deal and get cracking!” but if the editor loves the new one, I think he or she is really going to be quite pleased with the other two.  The three of them kind of feel like brothers, which is the right way to grow a readership.  Give the reader something he likes, and then follow it up with something similar but a little different.  Familiar but new enough to be interesting.

It’s also possible that an opportunity will arise before then to take one of these manuscripts out of the trunk, give it the old spit and shine treatment, and submit it to a new and exciting market.  As long as it’s actually a good trunk novel and not the other kind, the kind that makes you wonder what you were thinking when you were 14 (or 24 or 34 or 44…) and writing it.

Ultimately, as much as rejection sucks (especially when you know it’s a good book, just not the right book for the current market), it doesn’t hurt to have a couple of GOOD trunk novels sitting around.  You never know when they might come in handy!

So how do you properly care and feed for a trunk novel? It’s easy!  The three simple steps are:

1) Determine if it’s a GOOD trunk novel or the bad kind

1a) If it’s the bad kind, lock it in a box and never look at it again.  Maybe sprinkle some holy water on the cover page to be safe.

1b) if it’s the GOOD kind, proceed to step number 2

2) Leave your good trunk novel in a safe, dark place for at least six months.  Trunk novels require this cooling off time to settle into their new environment and properly age like a fine wine.  Some trunk novels can be consumed after just the six months, but some take years.  A few years ago, Stephen King published a trunk novel called Blaze that he originally wrote in 1973.  It was a really good one, too.

3) Continue to watch for new opportunities to sell the book, and when the time is right, take the manuscript out of the trunk and give it a good read with fresh eyes, changing whatever needs changed to make it an even better novel.

If you reach step #3 and discover the manuscript has spoiled in the dark (or maybe it wasn’t really a good trunk novel in the first place), return to step #1 and act accordingly.

Best of luck in all of your writing.  Rejection is a frustrating part of the business, but you always want to be publishing your best work and who knows where you might find it.