Batman With Swords and Magic

Batman with swords and magic; sounds like an interesting idea for a book. It's not my idea, but one proposed by fantasy author Mike Shackle on Mike's Book Review YouTube channel. When Shackle was asked what he was working on next, and he listed two story idea, one of which was "a modern retelling of Legend, with Vikings. i.e, What it would be like if Vikings were standing on the walls of Helmsley." and the other, "Batman with swords and magic." Care to take a guess as to what idea resonated with the host? If you said "Vikings on the walls of Helmsley," you've another guess coming.

Whether an author is trying to sell a book to an agent, or an agent to an editor, or an author selling books to readers as an author/publisher, they need to quickly spark their potential readers' interest using images that they can immediately translate into a vision of the story. When querying manuscripts to agents, authors are told to compare their book (i.e. "comps") to one or more recent best selling books, as in "so-and-so book but with this twist," or "it's a mash up of this book and that book." The reason given for this is that it illustrates the author's knowledge of the current market, thus giving agents some measure of confidence in the author's professionalism. This, in turn, might lead the agent or editor to actually read the sample work at the bottom of the email. The same dynamics  applies to self published books as well, except that authors are using the comparisons to address readers directly, hopefully encouraging them to buy their book. So no matter what type of author one is, if an author can imagine (and write) a book with a simple, but catchy premise, they are halfway to success.

But it's more than a concept, its also a matter of how the concept is phrased. Let's take a deeper look at the "Batman with swords and magic" premise, and how the phrasing works to sell the idea. Shackle when on to mention that he had set the story in a fantasy world based somewhat on revolutionary France, to the point were people were losing their head at the guillotine in chapter one. 

It occurred to me sometime later that, well, isn't there already a book like that, though without the magic? The title that struck me was "The Scarlet Pimpernel" (actually it was "The Scarlet Pumpernickle" that occurred to me, but a quick Google search lead me to the correct spelling.) So what is Baroness Orczy's The Scarlet Pimpernel about? Wikipedia says:

The novel is set during the Reign of Terror following the start of the French Revolution. The title is the nom de guerre of its hero and protagonist, a chivalrous Englishman who rescues aristocrats before they are sent to the guillotine. Sir Percy Blakeney leads a double life: apparently nothing more than a wealthy fop, but in reality a formidable swordsman and a quick-thinking master of disguise and escape artist. The band of gentlemen who assist him are the only ones who know of his secret identity. He is known by his symbol, a simple flower, the scarlet pimpernel.

Isn't that, sans the magic, pretty much "Batman with a sword", and indeed, pretty much plain old Batman? Now I'm certain that the story Shackle would write, if given the green light, would be significantly different from The Scarlet Pimpernel, even before adding a fantasy element to it, but the story idea could've been phrased as "A fantasy retelling of The Scarlet Pimpernel" just as accurately. But would that have resonated the way "Batman with a sword and magic" did? I doubt it, because The Scarlet Pimpernel is not part of today's popular culture, and any reference to it would have fallen flat, i.e. " isn't Pimpernel, some sort of rye bread?" if anything at all occurred to the listener. To appeal to readers authors have to know them and know what they are familiar with. And if they can intrigue them with their story using a minimum of words, so much the better. Readers, agents and editors, have too many options to spend more than a couple of seconds considering and author's book, be it a proposal, manuscript, or an Amazon listing.

I've never read Baroness Orczy's story, (still, Batman with swords... I downloaded a copy from the Gutenberg Project, so look for my thoughts on it some future Saturday) so I can't tell you how I became aware of its central theme, but I suspect that being 73 years old has something to do with it. I doubt very much that a whole lot of people younger than me would've been aware of The Scarlet Pimpernel except as an old movie or TV show, since the last presentation of it was a six part BBC tv series in 1999-2000. 

UPDATE I now have read The Scarlet Pimpernel, and can say that it is nothing like Batman with swords, but maybe the other 18 books in this series get there. Who knows? Full review to come.

The bottom line is that if an author wishes to produce a commercially viable story, they need to write one that presents an interesting new twist on the popular premise. And this premise should be able to be expressed in a short, snappy line or two. 

This, however is one of those things to do as I say, not as I do. I was unaware of comps until a few of years ago, and it never seemed to apply to me as an author/publisher. More significantly, my books are "passion projects," i.e. books I wanted to write rather than books written to sell. One of the reasons why I wrote them was that I couldn't find many contemporary books that I actually wanted to read, so I had to write my own. This means, however, that I'm not familiar with any recent books to compare mine to, even if  there are recent books that I could use to compare them to. I tried. When I was writing The Girl on the Kerb, the only thing I could come up to use as a "comp" was the Hope and Crosby "Road Pictures." One of its working titles was The Road to EuraEast for that reason. However, I didn't think anyone who'd be looking at my query letter would have ever heard of those old movies, so I didn't include comps in my query letter, and changed the title of the story to something more contemporary, though with a wink of sarcasm as well.

Still, when all is said and done, success can still be found by thinking out of the box, by trusting your talent and making something unique. I wouldn't do anything different if I could do it over.