Letting the bandwagon pass by…
Girl with the Dragon Tatoo leads to many Girl Somethings, Gone Girl leads to a plethora of Gone Somethings, Harry leads to Percy, Twilight leads to more sparkling vampires, King and Koontz try to outdo each other in Horrorsville, Lord of the Rings leads to more fantasies, Jack Reacher leads to John Puller, Lincoln Rhyme leads to many CSI stories, Grisham creates a new subgenre filled with copycat legal thrillers, and so forth. These are all examples of jumping on the bandwagon. It’s not just in the titles. Take John Puller. Change his name to Jack Reacher everywhere in the David Baldacci book Zero Hour and you have a Lee Child novel. It’s not just a phenomenon of indie writers trying to copy the novels produced by the old horses in the Big Five’s large formulaic stables either. It’s more general than that. It’s jumping on a bandwagon by an author hoping for publishing success.
I smile at this phenomenon and try to be tolerant. I often tell people that I write the kind of novel I like to read. But that doesn’t mean I jump on somebody else’s bandwagon—I tell original stories. I have four series, but each novel in a series is a stand-alone story. Maybe that’s why I had 1000+ rejections when I started out in this business! In my query letters, I don’t remember ever saying that a novel was like someone else’s. How could I? It wasn’t. I do remember telling some agents that my YA sci-fi mystery The Secret Lab was NOT Harry Potter in space. That’s legit. An author can tell an agent s/he’s not jumping on a bandwagon! But all those rejections I had could mean that most agents, generally the gatekeepers for the traditional publishers, are afraid of betting on the new horse—they want authors to say their books are like something else so they can make the connection and pitch it to the editors that way.
I recognize that sometimes titles are similar but the stories are different. That’s because an author can’t copyright a title, so if it’s catchy, it can be copied, even word for word. Titles and covers are attention grabbers, but I don’t go along with the excuse that copying is a form of flattery. Writers can take the easy way out, or they can apply some original thinking to the title. I sweat over titles; you should too.
Some of my titles are abject failures. Full Medical was once reviewed as a treatise on Obamacare. In Sing a Samba Galactica, Samba should have been Zamba (maybe you didn’t know the difference, but I did, and shouldn’t have made the mistake—I recognized it when I wrote the short story “Zamba Argentina,” archived in the blog category “Steve’s Shorts”). Some of my titles are damn good, modesty aside. The Midas Bomb describes the two themes of the novel perfectly, for example; Pasodobles in a Quantum Stringscape aptly describes a short story collection of speculative fiction. Whether good or bad, I own my titles—I didn’t steal them from anyone. (Yeah, I know—after the book was published, I realized The Collector and its variants are titles for thousands of books; that’s another failure, but it does describe the book.)
The novel’s content is an entirely different question, though. The nearer the story elements are to another book’s, the nearer it is to plagiarism. The more original an author is, the more I like it. Traditional publishing might not like it, but I do—and I tend to find more original material penned by indie authors. There are many one-book wonders. That’s also OK by me. I wish Harper Lee and her handlers had left well enough alone, for example. Even something as badly written as The Martian shines like a beacon in the book world because it was original (it also started life in indie-land). Same goes for the Fifty Shades trilogy. I expect many copycats to release books now claiming their books are like The Martian or Fifty Shades. Diamond-encrusted bandwagons are hard to pass up.
As an avid reader, I hope authors can resist the temptation of jumping on a bandwagon. Taken by itself, a similar book might even be an improvement on the original, but kudos should go to the person that came up with the original idea first and raspberries to the copycats. Yeah, that’s harsh, but I’m selective in what I read. I’ll follow an author as long as s/he’s original. When Sue Grafton got to B, she was already copying herself. I don’t even like that. If you’re a one-book wonder, so be it. Leave it alone. Don’t copy anyone, not even yourself.
PR and marketing pundits and gurus tell authors to know their market. “Danger, danger, Will Robinson!” Zeroing in on a market means focusing on the different bandwagons. I’d rather create my own bandwagon (hasn’t happened yet) and read authors who do so. Deaver’s best book, for example, is NOT a Lincoln Rhyme book. The first one was OK—from there on, he was just copying himself. His best was Garden of Beasts—it was his most original. I could junk all his other books, but I’d keep that one. That’s the kind of success an author should aim for, not an inherited success from jumping on a bandwagon.
[Do you enjoy these articles on reading and writing? They’re part of this blog, along with book and movie reviews, interviews, and op-ed posts. I maintain this website and cover the its costs, as well as the costs associated with my books, with my book sales—surprise, surprise!—so help a poor author out and check out my catalog of twenty-one books. A good start would be the second edition of The Midas Bomb, #1 in the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco Series,” now available in all ebook formats and paper.]
In libris libertas….
