Hello and welcome to the Storygrid podcast. This is a show dedicated to helping you become a better writer.

I'm your host Tim Graal and I am a struggling writer trying to figure out how to tell a story that works.

Joining me shortly is Sean Coyne. He is the creator of Story Grid, the author of the book Story Grid,

and an editor with over 25 years experience.

In this episode, we start talking through creating the contender guide for my book, The Threshing.

So one of the things we're trying to do inside of Story Grid publishing is, one, be really clear about why we publish the books that we

publish and then also make sure that the books that we're publishing the novels we're publishing

become a way that you can become a better writer and learn more about story grid and how to

evaluate novels as well. So the way that we're doing that is we're

creating these contender guides for each of the novels that we release. So you'll learn more about

what those are in this episode. So I'm just going to stop talking and jump in and get started.

So Sean, with the threshing coming out in a couple months here, it's screaming at me really quickly.

We're working on the contender guide for the threshing, which is first, just talk about, because whenever we talk about contender guides, we always get questions about what they are and why we're doing them.

So could you talk a little bit about what a contender guide is for the threshing and why we would spend all this time doing a whole other book around a book that we're publishing?

Sure.

One of the things that I always, it's sort of like my own white whale in my career, was it's very difficult to publish fiction well.

And that's because every novel is different. So if you're working at a major publishing house like Random House or something, it's difficult because

you need to essentially come up with a brand new, unique selling proposition to get people

who might be interested in the novel within that genre. And you have to position it. You have to do

a whole slew of very complex and difficult

marketing. You got to do the right cover. You got to do all these kinds of things. And that's why

publishing fiction is risky because you need to have professionals who have, you know,

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