Can Originality Sell a Book?
I am currently occupied with the all-too-familiar pursuit of banging my head against a brick wall. In this case, I am attempting to make my novel original. Here's why:
I've been developing the theory that originality is one of the main things that can turn a book into a bestseller in the short term. Harry Potter combined magic with contemporary school systems in something that had never been seen before. The Hunger Games hit upon the Dystopian setting, which spawned such things as Divergent and The Maze Runner. The Twilight books threw romance and vampires together.
Harry Potter obviously has excellent writing, but the writing of The Hunger Games went downhill, particularly in the last book. Twilight has been denounced as having terrible writing. If the writing was so bad, why did these books sell the way they did? To me, the answer is that they were original.
Is this a plausible theory? Can originality sell a book?
Note: I am speaking in the short term here. I highly doubt that originality could create a classic; only good writing can do that.
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Originality tends to be judged retrospectively, it is at the best of times debatable and most people would agree that it its not something you can manufacture on demand.
Similarly it is entirely possible for an author to have a very distinctive style without necessarily being highly original in terms of the concepts underlying a book.
Indeed many commercially successful works, in any field, are often not truly original in concept. Often what successful work do is to bring together various elements which are appropriate for their time.
The Harry Potter series was a long way from being original, the magic is a bit vague and underdeveloped by the standards of serious fantasy and the school setting is a very, very well trodden path in English literature. In fact the idealised English public school setting is nostalgic rather than contemporary. However what JK Rowling did was to write very well, although the technical mechanics of the books don't necessarily hold up to very careful scrutiny and there are plenty of plot holes the actual writing in the books is very engaging and compelling.
The key to this is that her writing style allows the reader to forget that they are reading the book and get absorbed in the immediate events and she creates a world which readers want to inhabit.
I would suggest that the real enduring appeal of the Harry Potter book for readers is that they can actually imagine being in the Griffindor common room sitting in front of the fire, watching a quidditch match buying exotic sweets or potion ingredients in Hogsmead or Diagon Alley.
We can perhaps guess that part of the reason that this worked well is that she really cared about the settings and characters. This is a very different thing to trying to work out what the market wants or constructing an high concept based on academic ideas.
Trying had to be original is a fools errand, if you create something that you personally cares about and are invested in then you will automatically want to try to make it as good as it can be to the best of your ability and there is a fair chance that there will other people who feel the same way about it.
Originality comes from putting your own individual personality into something, not from an active effort to be different from what has gone before.
'Ideas' are cheap, everybody has them and you can just pick worlds out of a hat to construct something 'original', the value is in refining, developing and communicating your ideas and having the self-critical faculties to determine what works and what doesn't...this is also related to being able to see your ideas from another persons point of view.
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Originality is almost impossible to achieve. All modern works of fiction have predecessors who have worked in similar settings, showing similar themes. Rowling may be the best-known example of the magic-in-a-boarding-school setting, but there are many well-known (and perhaps not-so-well-known but still worthy) predecessors. Hunger Games may be the most popular example of its kind, but there were certainly predecessors of that too (e.g. Among the Hidden and its sequels). And as pointed out in the comments, have been a thing just about forever, and the romance between Buffy and Angel in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV series was arguably even more popular than Twilight was (at least in terms of sales of the book before the movie was released -- movies are great marketing).
The important thing is to do what you do well, which all of these books did, and to be original enough for the reader -- but possibly not too original as the conventions of a comfortable, familiar genre often provide the best marketing of all (and is probably at least part of why genres with strong conventions -- romance and crime fiction, for example -- sell particularly well).
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Originality won't sell a book, it's a nice pretty buzzword that helps sell a book. Engaging the reader, crafting a wonderful tale, finding that emotional connection, these are what help sell a book. I would suggest forgetting about writing something original.
the Hunger Games is far from original. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gladiators_(film) And, Vampires and romance have been married before Twilight inception. Urban fantasy has been a thing since the 90s, I think. Sexy, brooding, male vampires are a staple in the genre.
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Harry Potter was not original. Anyone who grew up reading English Children's books would recognize that it is a pastiche of virtually the whole canon of 20th century English Kid Lit, in which trains and boarding schools and magic all play a role. Everything I read growing up is in there.
If Rowling has a virtue in this regard it is not that she is original but that she successfully repackaged that whole canon for today's child.
And that, I would suggest, is where the real secret of literary success lies, not in originality but in repackaging old stories and old tropes for a new generation. Stories have a very specific emotional structure that you really can't mess with much and still expect to engage the reader. The world keeps changing, but the emotional core of story does not. The task of the writer, therefore, it not to reinvent stories but to retell them for an every changing world.
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