Book Review: How to Write Commercial Fiction That Sells

Title: How to Write Commercial Fiction That Sells

Author: Josh Coker

Date: 2023

Quote: "This doesn't work every single time, for every single person. If you don't work hard and take ownership of your story, it is very likely to fail."

This is a very short, simple summary of what many writers and critics have observed about memorable stories: Characters have motives. Protagonists have to do something they don't usually do in order to get what they want, and if the story's not very short they encounter obstacles and make mistakes. Antagonists have reasons for what they do. Something or someone the protagonist cares about may be lost or sacrificed; there's some real danger that everything the protagonist wants may be lost; protagonists in fiction don't usually die, at least not before the last chapter, but sometimes...

This book will not actually teach you anything that longer (and more carefully written) books weren't teaching people in the 1930s. You might prefer the way Stephen King, Jerry Jenkins, or Anne Lamott explains the key ideas. This mini-book may, however, make the "homework" more interesting because the author chooses examples from current bestselling books, blockbuster movies, TV series and video games. You may not have thought of the Jungian psychology and echoes of literary classics in the game called Mortal Kombat; Coker shows that they're in there. 

If you want a very short, simple, intuitive reminder of components a story needs to have before you go to the trouble of writing it, this book is for you. What's to love is that, while Jenkins, King, Lamott, and their predecessors give examples of good writing, and talk about other things as well as the essential components of a good story, and inform and entertain you while you read their book  Coker gives an outline with just enough explication to ensure that people who've not read the ideas before know what he's talking about. Each point is covered in a page or two so you can scan the whole book during the time it takes to sit down to write a story.

Does this guarantee that your good story will sell? It does not. There are a lot of good people trying to sell good stories in this world. Good stories might have been overlooked twenty years ago because publishers assumed that people who buy books in English are of English or maybe Irish descent and are most interested in books by and about people of English or Irish descent; they might be overlooked this year because publishers are scrambling madly to "diversify" their lists and aren't interested in any more books by or about people of English or Irish descent. However, if your story meets the criteria Coker lists in this mini-book, and if it's written with reasonable clarity and good grammar, it will be a good story that has the potential to sell well enough to pay for the writer's time. Most stories still don't sell that well. Good stories have a chance.